Year: 2012

Posted on

Hurricane Diaries, part 4: This is getting ridiculous . . .

Counting Monday, even though we lost power only at 9 p.m., this is Day 6 of The Big Mess. This morning, the electric co. revised its estimate for when we’ll have power back. It’s now end of Nov. 9, rather than Nov. 11. I’m hoping we gain two days each morning, which would get us all square by Monday.

We decided to pay a visit to my dad, who lives about 10 miles from us. He lost power from early Monday afternoon until Wednesday morning, but has been cruising along since. We figured we’d take care of a week’s worth of laundry, charge up our devices, visit his local supermarket (which never lost power and has stayed in stock with a lot of stuff) and generally take a little break from the house. I love my home and the new library, but I’m going kinda nuts hanging out in the same room or two day after day.

Since the wood-burning stove has been going non-stop since Monday night, I figured it would die out while we were gone, giving me the opportunity to clean out all the ashes and start over with a new fire. I never had a fireplace or a stove growing up, so I have no idea about how one manages these things.

Amy drove us to Dad’s around 11 a.m., since we’re conserving gas in the Subaru for when we have to make The Big Escape. On the way, we passed a Lukoil that had dozens of cars lined up to get gas. Today’s the first day of NJ’s even/odd gas rationing system, but it didn’t look like it made much of a difference. I can’t report on much of the scene, since I’m not wasting gas waiting on line for hours to gas up my car. Funny how that works.

Anyway, Dad was doing fine. He had a EPL match to watch on his giant TV, a huge computer for me to move down to his car, so he could deliver it to a client, and all sorts of things that I could only consider The Luxuries of Electricity, like working lights and a microwave. We plugged our chargers in, started the laundry and showered. Amy pointed out that it’s great to not walk out of a hot shower into a 58° house. I concurred.

I talked with Dad while Amy got in touch with her folks in Louisiana and then read in another room. Dad mentioned that the lights had flickered right before we arrived, but laughed it off. We hadn’t talked during the week, so it was good to catch up. He was amazed that we had no phone or data at all for that 40-hour stretch Tuesday/Wednesday. I told him, “If you’d had a heart attack or something, there’s literally no way you could have gotten a message to me during that time.” I suppose it could just have easily been Verizon’s tower as AT&T’s, but grrr.

Once the first load of wash was in the dryer, we hit the supermarket and picked up some ingredients for Amy’s beef stew, as well as a “red velvet muffin” because why the hell not? On the way back to Dad’s, we noticed that the Lukoil line had diminished, probably because of a police officer at the end telling newbies that they were too late to get on line. The weather turned colder today (around 48°) and I felt bad for the people standing on line carrying gas tanks. On balance, still happy not to have bought a generator.

In Dad’s dining room, I took out my Air and started working on the last article for the November/December ish of my magazine, so I can get that out the door once we set up our new office Monday morning. I have almost enough material in, but it would be a much better piece if I’d been able to hit up more people for quotes. I’m just glad I got some requests out on the Friday before the storm.

And that’s when the power went out at my dad’s house.

Seriously. This is now two days in a row that power has gone down in the place where I’m working on the magazine. Either it’s me, or it’s a sign that I’m not meant to finish this ish.

We helped Dad hook up his critical electric stuff to the line that his neighbor strung over earlier in the week. He lives in an upscale neighborhood, and his wealthy next-door neighbor apparently has an immense generator.

I was bummed to find out that the first load of wash hadn’t finished drying. The second, of course, was all wet. We hauled all that to the car, along with our electronics and some large water bottles that we refilled during our visit. On the way home, we noticed that the power was still on by that Lukoil and the supermarket, so we hoped that Dad’s outage was a passing, local blip.

Once we got home, Amy got started on the stew while I got to work on the laundry, figuring out what had dried and what needed to be hung up by the stove. Speaking of which, the stove managed not to die out completely, so I cleared a ton of ashes, soaked ’em in the backyard, and got the fire restarted pretty quickly.

Half an hour later, Dad texted to let me know that the power had come back on, and that we should come back over. I told him we’re saving gas, but that we’ll come by and kill his power again in the next few days.

(But seriously, we’ll move into his guest room with the dogs if this outage keeps up for a few more days.)

Posted on

Hurricane Diaries, part 3: Searching for Satellites

The day started off with bad news, but took a turn for the goofy.

This morning, after I got the kettle going for our coffee (have I told you about my Emergency Coffee Management System yet? If not, I’ll do so tomorrow), I checked out the outage map for our electric company on my iPad. Since the power first went down, all the “hot-spots” had a status of “Assessing damage,” along with a little take on what was causing the outage: wire problem, pole down, etc.

This morning, we finally had an estimated time for restoring power (yay!): Nov. 11 at 11:30 p.m. (boooo…)

I closed the browser window and got back to making our coffee. I brought it downstairs and gave my wife the bad news. I was mentally juggling the amount of firewood remaining, the gas in my Subaru, and other factors that would have to hold up for the next 9 days, including my fraying sanity.

Half an hour later, I thought to check out the status for other zones on the map. All of them had the same estimated time for repair, so I felt less hopeless and more reassured that Rockland Electric was merely trying to cover its ass and make sure that all repairs were “in less than 2 weeks”.

But I had other things on my mind.

Last night, I got news that my company found some satellite space for us in the town of Glen Rock, so those of us who had issues of our magazines to put out had to come in and get pages going. At that point, I went into crazy triage mode, trying to figure out which features were closest to finished, what writing I still had to do, how I was going to accommodate a Q&A that came in 500 words longer than anticipated, and a million other factors. On top of that, my associate editor’s pages were still on her iMac in our office, making them essentially inaccessible for today’s work session.

Most important, I was trying to figure out how I was going to get to the satellite office. See, there’s one main road in and out of our town: Skyline Drive, colloquially known as “the mountain.” Because of fallen trees and power lines, it was closed after the storm came in on Monday afternoon. When Amy & I wanted to drive out to civilization on Wednesday, we had to take the secondary road out, Ringwood Ave., and that was a bumper-to-bumper mess. I was considering whether it would use less gas to take that route or to go all the way up to New York state via Sloatsburg Rd., which would likely have no traffic, but would be a bunch longer.

Gas is still more valuable than gold right now, and I want to keep consumption to a minimum.

I decided I’d try to go via Skyline Dr., and if it was still closed, I’d decide on a dime which of the other routes to try. I cruised up the lower parts of the road, heading toward the last turn-off, Cannonball Rd., where the sawhorses would be situated if the road was closed. Skyline curves slightly on that approach, so I couldn’t see whether the mountain was blocked or not as I closed in. But there was a car a bit ahead of me, so I kept looking to see if it was braking or turning off for Cannonball. When I saw it cruise ahead without the slightest flash of its taillights, I let out a cheer and was more enthused than I’ve been by anything else this week. I zoomed over Skyline with 3 or 4 other cars, probably the lightest rush hour traffic the mountain has ever seen.

From there, it was a quick trip to the satellite office. I got lots done on the issue in the next few hours, ironing out page after page with my art director. They were hoping to get our mag out today, but there was no chance of that happening, as I still needed to write a shortish article that would need at least a few phone calls and some online research. I promised we’d have the last pages done by Monday at noon.

While we worked, we traded stories from the past few days. Most of the coworkers at the office hadn’t lost power during the storm, or had it restored within a day. They all had awful tales about the behavior at the gas stations near their homes or on the highways. I’m still glad we went without a generator.

And during the morning, Amy texted me to let me know that our neighbors’ Tree of Damocles was being cut down!

I guarded against the excessive hope that they’d also replace the split power line and get our neighborhood back on the grid. I figure this is a matter of baby steps. First, get the tree down. Then, replace the transformer that blew out. (Rumor has it one of our neighbors who still had power on Tuesday decided to “test” his whole-house generator. In so doing, he fed too much power into the line and knocked out his part of the street.) Then replace that split line and hook us up!

So I persevered on the issue, and was just finishing my editorial, “Operation Blackout,” when the power died in our satellite office.

No, seriously. It just shut off. The building — and, we assume, the neighborhood — lost power.

We were all working on laptops, so no files were lost, but we couldn’t move anything to the servers and thus our day was done. I gave my art director a few files on a thumb drive, and we all helped move the servers and other equipment back down to the IT director’s car.

We figured out a place to convene on Monday morning, and all headed our separate ways. On the trip home, I marveled at more tree-on-house violence, and remained thankful that we got off easy, all things considered.

And now, back to The Manticore (and that article I have to write over the weekend)!

Posted on

Hurricane Diaries, part 2: Don’t Drink the Water

Almost 72 hours since the Tree of Damocles fell against the overhead wires, cutting off our power. There was a little progress today; a van from an electrical contractor drove in, coiled up the two lengths of wire that had split on Tuesday, hung them from their respective poles, and put red “caution” tape around them. I stopped the van on its way out, but the two employees within couldn’t tell me anything about when they expect the tree itself to be cut down, which I assume is a prerequisite to restoring our power.

It’s a bit fraught, looking out one’s window and seeing a tree hanging at a 45-degree angle to the ground, supported by the cables and wires that bring this fair city light. (Okay, it’s a “town” not a “city”, and “blah” not “fair”.) At some point, the wires have to give, right?

Still, today was much better than yesterday. After suffering bouts of nausea and blinding headaches on Wednesday, we concluded the tap water has gone bad (or that the CO detector had crapped out and that we were gonna die soon), so we moved over to the bottled stuff, as well as the water we bottled before the storm hit. No symptoms today, so yay.

Internet service has been up and down, but that’s better than yesterday’s total outage. Lines at the gas stations are hours long, as people are desperate to fuel their home generators, so we’re not making any more “let’s get out of the house” treks, except for the 2.5-mile round-trip to the public library, where they have charging stations set up.

I’ve gone down there the past two days for an hour or so at a time to charge the iPads, laptops, and an external battery that charges the phones up pretty quickly. I also, of course, sit around and read while I wait.

I knocked off Fifth Business this afternoon, took a break with Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo collection, then took up The Manticore. At this point, I don’t know how I won’t finish Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy by Monday. Especially if our internet coverage stays spotty.

I cannot begin to explain the allure of these novels, but they’re a blast. Davies’ narrators and his cast of characters are utterly enchanting.

And now, back to stoking the wood-burning stove. (I put a fresh 9-volt battery in the CO detector, btw.)

Posted on

Hurricane Diaries, part 1: Blackout Masquerade

Welcome to the Hurricane Party! We’re getting on 48 hours since we lost power during Hurricane Sandy, so, to alleviate my boredom, I thought I’d start rambling and see if it makes for a good post.

Today’s Halloween, 2012. We lost power in my suburban New Jersey home at 9 pm on the 29th, after a neighbor’s tree was uprooted by the wind and fell against the overhead wires. It’s still there, resting comfortably against power lines, cable, phone lines, and whatever else gets strung along those poles.

Last night, one of the power lines snapped. It began arcing all around our next-door neighbor’s mailbox. Some cops arrived, didn’t do much but put up cones to warn cars away, announced by loudspeaker that we should all stay inside because of the live wire, and left.

At some point, the electric company must have turned off the current to that one. It stopped arcing, but the insulation of the wire had caught fire, and began slowly creeping up the line, like a fuse of a bundle of dynamite in an old western. I stood outside with another neighbor and tried to figure out how to put out the flame. He’d called the fire dept. earlier and they told him there was nothing they could do. We’re clearly heading toward Walking Dead territory here.

So my neighbor and I figured that if it was an electrical fire, we’d cause more harm by spraying it with a fire extinguisher or hitting it with sand. And the possibility that it was still live kept us from trying to do anything to smother it.

The fire climbed on, about 10 inches in length, burning its way up the cable. Lucky for us, when it reached the stretch of line that was enmeshed in a tree’s branches, it died out. My neighbor and I waited a full minute before celebrating our reverse pyrokinesis. In truth, it was just that the wire was no longer hanging perpendicular to the ground, so the flame couldn’t feed up into it. Still, it was a big bag of not good.

As is the fact that AT&T’s cell tower in our area went kablooey about 12 hours after power wen down. So we have no phone and no data, except for my wife’s iPad, which uses Verizon to grab data. We go on that to grab e-mail and look for updates on our situation, but try not to stay on too long, to preserve the battery. We’ve got chargers in the car and a Trent battery that’ll work on pads and phones, don’t worry. (Update: woke up at 3:00 a.m. on Nov. 1 and AT&T service seems to be working again, after about 40 hours down.)

Still . . . Walking Dead territory. Several of our neighbors have generators, but the lines at the few remaining gas stations are a mile long, so who knows how long those will hold out? Meanwhile, we’ve got the wood-burning stove going down in the library, and moved down here to sleep. The upstairs of the house reads 59 degrees, according to the thermostat.

But you guys don’t want to hear about all that doom and gloom! You wanna know about books, right?

Well, a few days before the hurricane hit, I finished reading 7 Pleasures, essays about ordinary happiness, by Willard Spiegelman. I’m supposed to have him on the podcast this January, so I gave it an early read and took a bunch of notes. I enjoyed it quite a bit; he reminds me of myself, in terms of finding joy in certain aspects of the day-to-day. I hope we have a good conversation for you guys.

Once the storm hit, I took up The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald. I may be interviewing a pal of mine about Sebald next week, depending on how this situation works out, so I thought I’d give that one a read to pair it up with this year’s earlier reading of Sebald’s book Austerlitz. He’s a remarkable and weird writer. That first-person but not really first-person style of his, along with the fake documentary stuff like photos and documents, make for a very strange atmosphere.

This one’s like a proto-Austerlitz, with a little too self-conscious artifice, but some amazing and arresting segments about people who were uprooted by the 20th century. I’m sure I’ll get to his other two novels in the next few months.

The thing is, since I finished The Emigrants in one day, I had to decide on something else to read last night. This is no easy task. I didn’t want to start anything huge, because of the uncertainty about when we’ll have power, and where we’ll be staying if things get worse. For a minute, I flipped through my copy of The Recognitions, thinking maybe …

Nah. I’ll reread that someday, but not while I’m ekeing out the few daylight hours and having my brain numbed by the constant thrum of the generators.

I picked up Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, which I last read around 20 years ago, but couldn’t get into it. I didn’t need that much meta just then.

My wife & I hung out with out neighbors for a little while, and then I came back, walked the dogs, and made a concerted effort to find something on the shelves that would be quick, and easily digestible. I wound up with 800 pages of Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy.

I think I read the first volume, Fifth Business, also around 20 years ago, but don’t recall much of it. I’ve read about half of that one today; if this power outage keeps up, I may knock out the whole shebang by next week. I’ll keep you informed.

Posted on

Podcast: The Correction of Taste

The original version of this episode had terrible audio quality, so I went back and remastered it! Enjoy!

(And go listen to the followup episode we recorded in July 2014: Bookman’s Holiday!)

Michael Dirda

Season 2 episode 13 – Michael Dirda – The Correction of Taste

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

“My personal crusade has been to urge people to read books they might otherwise not think of reading. . . . There are a lot better books that have been forgotten than are being published today.”

Are you ready for a new beautifully remastered episode of The Virtual Memories Show?

“Some very self-confident writers feel they are among the chosen, the ones that will last forever, but they’re like deluded Calvinists.'”

This time, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda talks about his lifetime of reading and career in writing, the essence of book reviewing and the role of negative reviews, breaking free of genre ghettoes and the pretense of literary immortality, how the internet has changed the reviewing ecosystem, and why Mao would have loved the collective wisdom of the internet.

“I think of it all as ‘literary fiction,’ if it’s well written.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

We also get in some literary kibitzing, touching on John Crowley, Neil Gaiman, Marilynne Robinson and a host of other writers and books.

“One of the things I’ve lamented in the course of my lifetime is the changeover in the English curriculum in the universities. English majors will really only know the literature of their time. They will know the same 40 or 50 authors and books. Anyone off the obvious track of the times, they won’t know. They’ll know Gary Shteyngart, but they won’t know Mikhail Bulgakhov, or Gogol. It’s that narrowness, that feeling that anything not of the moment is irrelevant. That worries me.”

Listen to the conversation: Virtual Memories – season 2 episode 13 – The Correction of Taste  

(BONUS: Go listen to the followup episode we recorded in July 2014: Bookman’s Holiday!)

About Our Guest

Michael Dirda, a weekly book columnist for The Washington Post, received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and Classics for Pleasure. His most recent book, On Conan Doyle, received a 2012 Edgar Award for best critical/biographical work of the year.Mr. Dirda graduated with Highest Honors in English from Oberlin College and earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature (medieval studies and European romanticism) from Cornell University. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the online Barnes & Noble Review, and several other periodicals, as well as a frequent lecturer and an occasional college teacher.  

About Our Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Out of Print Clothing! Visit their site and check out their great selection of T-shirts, fleeces, bags and other gear featuring gorgeous and iconic book cover designs.

The Virtual Memories Show is on iTunes! If you’d like to subscribe, visit our iTunes page! If you’d like to check out past episodes, you can find us on iTunes or visit the Podcast page for all our back episodes, as well as e-mail signup and tip jar! And why don’t you friend the Virtual Memories Show at our Facebook page? It’d make my mom happy.

Credits: This episode’s music is Desert Prayer by John Sheehan. I recorded the intro on a Blue Yeti mic into Audacity, and the conversation with was recorded in Mr. Dirda’s home in Silver Spring, MD on a pair of Blue Encore 100 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4N recorder. All editing was done in Garage Band, with some post-processing in Audacity. This is a remastered version of the October 2012 episode, with better sound quality. Photo by Amy Roth.

Posted on

The musicalized, heat-filled dream of possessing his beloved

I went to Homecoming at St. John’s College this weekend. I got my master’s degree there, but I consider it my alma mater much more than I do my undergrad institution. I had a good time; it wasn’t as transformative as the Piraeus seminar I attended this past May/June, but it was a great opportunity to reconnect with other students, tutors, and an old pal who came to visit on Saturday. I didn’t get to record any podcast conversations during the trip, but did reach out to a few potential guests.

It’s been a busy few weeks for me. Two weekends ago was the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD. The next weekend we had a wedding in Dawson, PA, about 375 miles from home. This weekend was Annapolis. Next weekend I leave to Madrid and hope that the riots settle down enough for me to get to my conference safely.

I took a half-day from work on Friday, after pounding out pages and sending PDFs to the contributors of the new ish, so they can send me their corrections in time for me to get the new issue out by Wednesday. I left for Annapolis around 2 in the afternoon and had to deal with a little traffic on the ride down, but got in safe and sound, albeit unfed.

I checked in at my hotel, then drove to campus, got my registration packet, picked up a powerbar-sorta thing for dinner, and headed over to the Homecoming lecture, The Musical Universe and Mozart’s Magic Flute, by Peter Kalkavage. Peter was the tutor for my preceptorial on Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. His 1991 essay on the role of Ulysses in The Divine Comedy was one of the things that convinced me to attend St. John’s. (It’s in this PDF.)

The lecture was way over my head, breaking down Tamino’s aria in technical ways to reveal its beauty. I’m not an opera guy and have no musical training to speak of, but I still enjoyed Peter’s exploration of the structure of the music and the effects Mozart achieved from his notes, tones, etc.

I seriously don’t have a vocabulary for this. In the Graduate Institute (the GI), we don’t receive a lot of the instruction that the undergrads do. They have music, languages (ancient Greek & French), and laboratory science. Because of our truncated schedules, we make do with a lot less. (Not that I’m complaining.) I sat with another GI during the lecture. We laughed when everyone in our section flipped the page of their sheet-music handout at the right moment, while we kept looking at the first bar. It’s always fun to be the uneducated one.

Early on, Peter put on a recording of the aria, which he would later play selections of on a piano (and sing particular segments to demonstrate certain progressions). While the recording played, he swayed a little at the lectern. That’s when my reverie began.

I thought of everything that I’ve experienced in the past few weeks. First, I thought about Jaime Hernandez, the cartooning genius, choking up while telling an SPX audience about a scene from a Tyrone Power movie, The Eddie Duchin Story.

I started recalling moments from SPX: meeting people in autograph lines, arguing (gently) with Chris Ware over how “Gill Sans” is spelled, buying art from Jaime and his brother Beto, sitting at a barroom table with the Mt. Rushmore of modern cartooning (the Hernandezes, Ware, Dan Clowes, and Charles Burns were on hand), trying to talk Kevin Huizenga into recording a podcast next time I’m in St. Louis.

From there to Michael Dirda’s house on the way back to NJ. Looking over his bookshelves, noting the UK hardcover of A Frolic of His Own, discovering that third Nabokov collection of lectures on literature, spying the brick of Kingsley Amis’ letters on the shelf behind Dirda while I interviewed him.

A week in NJ followed, with Rosh Hashanah and then the annual conference I help host. Six or seven hundred people come to a hotel to participate in the show, and it always leaves me exhausted, but at least it didn’t leave me in the emergency room like last year’s anxiety-sleeplessness-caffeine feedback loop did.

Right after the conference finished, I drove home, unpacked, then repacked, and Amy & I drove out to Dawson for a wedding: Six-plus hours in the car on 78 and 76, culminating in a dirt road (Lucky Lane) in the dark before arriving at the hotel. Touchscreen cheesesteak at a truck-stop Wawa; a little local bookstore daring enough to have William S. Burroughs’ Queer and Junky on end-cap display (picked up a used copy of The Two Cultures by CP Snow); meeting gin freaks and elderly computer bazillionaires at the wedding; finishing The Good Soldier, on Dirda’s recommendation; watching eight or nine of the male wedding guests gathering in the middle of the dance floor for a bizarre choreographed haka-polka hybrid set to Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business”; passing on karaoke.

Sunday morning, we drove out to Fallingwater, about 40 minutes away, before heading back to NJ. It was impossible and gorgeous and everything I hoped it would be, and it made me feel a little sad to be returning to the standard nine-room bi-level of our neighborhood. I thought about the engineer in Local Hero telling Peter Riegert and Peter Capaldi, “Dream large.” I got another touchscreen cheesesteak on the drive home.

Worked frantically through the next week, punctuated with a 25-hour break for Yom Kippur. In addition to the standard fast (no food or drink), I decided I’d really get out of myself and not look at a screen for that span: no iPhone, no computer, no TV. It was as liberating as I expected. By the time I checked my e-mail after breaking my fast Wednesday night (at Greek City in Ramsey), I had 35 messages on my personal e-mails, only a few of which I wanted to respond to, and none of which were imperative.

I prayed Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon with the Chabad that I visited in past years. They’ve always been accommodating, no matter how slack of a Jew I am. Some of the older gents in the congregation either recognized me from past years or just wanted to introduce themselves and make new acquaintances, which was nice. I’m so bad about joining community; I’m much better with afflicting myself.

At the end of mid-day prayers, we received a blessing from a kohen. I’d never been present for that before. We were instructed to look in his direction, but not to make eye contact during the blessing. It’s customary to cover one’s eyes with one’s tallis during this. The man in front of me set a good screen, however, so I was able to look forward without looking on the kohen’s face.

When I wasn’t at Chabad, I passed the time by re-reading King Lear, since I’d signed up for a 90-minute seminar in it for Homecoming. I hadn’t read it in years, and this reading may have been skewed a bit by the fast, since I was going without caffeine for this stretch.

After mid-day, I drove out to Nyack, NY to walk around and pass sometime. I discovered my favorite bookstore there was gone, replaced by a dry cleaner. I visited another store, the fiction department of which was filled with stacks of trade paperbacks. I tried looking at some back Paris Reviews in a stack, but it started to tip, then bumped another tower of books. I caught both of them and struggled to get them stable again without anyone at the front of the store noticing. A day of affliction can always use a little levity.

And then it was back to work, and then on to Homecoming, where this reverie began. I scrawled these reminiscences all over the backs of the sheet-music handouts. I also wrote down some details of a wonderful dream I had the night before, where I read the profile of an author who wrote a book that, according to a hybrid of Chip Delany, Michael Dirda and Junot Diaz, I would love. The book and the author don’t exist, but I retained the title of the novel, and woke up and wrote it down. I used to dream a lot more about fully-formed works of art, but it hasn’t happened in a while. I’m afraid of what that means.

Among all these notes Friday night, I wrote, “Made PDFs for contributors; put on conference.” Then I wrote, “It’s funny how unimportant those things are, and how necessary for me to live this beauty. How little of work will I remember as I grow old, and how much will I hold onto from everything else?”

Thanks for sticking around. Here are the books I bought at the college store on Saturday:

St. John's College bookstore run

Posted on

On sobriety

Today’s my 100th day without a drink. I got off the sauce because I wanted to see how much it was affecting my reading. Feel free to laugh at that notion.

I wasn’t drinking heavily — just 2 to 2.5 oz. of gin in a 6-oz. G&T — but I was drinking often: four or five nights a week (always at home, with my wife). At the time, I was doing most of my reading in bed before turning in, and wondered if I was short-changing my books and myself by dulling my brain beforehand.

Like an alcoholic, I started out with a “one day at a time” perspective, seeing if I could go a week without having a drink, then two weeks, then a month. Unlike an alcoholic, I had no history of blackouts, no increasing tolerance to booze, no craving for same, no desire to drink alone, no embarrassing behavior at parties, no boozehounds in my family history, and no pints hidden in the toilet cistern. I’ve never once thought, “Tough day at the office, time to have a drink.”

I should note that this isn’t the first stretch I’ve been on the wagon. In college I didn’t drink until my senior year. In the past, I ascribed that to my “being a drama queen,” but I recently came across a much better term for it in Michael Dirda’s memoir, An Open Book: moral vanity.

I didn’t drink back then so I could consider myself “pure” or unsullied or somesuch idiocy. It wasn’t enough not to drink; I had to be a martyr to the rest of the clear-thinkingly besotted population. I was not a joy to be around, as you can imagine.

I realize now that I’d have had a lot more fun during those years if I’d gotten tanked with my pals every so often. I might have managed to get some of my worst behavior out of my system if I’d bothered to drink and party like everybody else in college. Instead, I held onto some ugly traits for years after.

There’s very little vanity to my sobriety this time around. In fact, I’m a little embarrassed by my dry status. I’ve avoided talking about it unless someone offers me a drink. For years, I’ve (truthfully) told people — a la Ron Swanson — that the only things I drink are water, black coffee and gin. Cutting that down to water and black coffee loses some of its charm.

I’m sure I’ll get crap about this from work-related pals when we’re at trade shows. I haven’t really had to go on the trade show circuit since I got off the sauce, but I have three big shows in September and October. I’m interested to see how I’ll deal with that. Most of those people know me in the context of a casual drink after (and/or during) a trade show. Of course, they also know me as the weird thinky guy who writes editorials about the Talmud, so they likely won’t find my motivation that unfathomable.

But I’m sure you’re wondering, “How’s it treating you, old boy?”

Booze-free for a hundred days, I find that my reading has grown subtler and more intricate. I also find that I’m making much more time to read, since I’m no longer having a G&T and watching TV. I’ve finished 13 books of wildly varying lengths since I made that choice. I seem to remember them all pretty well, too. Overall, I’m sleeping better, but there are some non-booze factors that play into that, too.

Also, I’m healthier. Early this year, my urologist told me that I could reduce my susceptibility to flare-ups of prostatitis by quitting alcohol, caffeine and spicy food. I said, “That’s crazy talk! This isn’t the time for rash measures!” But I haven’t had any degree of prostatitis — which dear Lord is no fun — since going on the wagon. So let’s go eat Mexican and wash it down with coffee!

Besides getting more and better reading in and not feeling like I’ve been walloped in the nuts, the best part of this whole process is reassuring myself that I don’t have a drinking problem. After all, I was able to stop drinking cold turkey and never found myself regretting that choice. It seems that having 4-5 drinks a week was more about my tendency to build up habits and routines than it was about a drinking habit.

The worst part of this experience has been the realization that most people are even more boring than I thought.

Posted on

Podcast: Four Quartets and Other Pilgrimages

Virtual Memories – season 2 episode 10
Lyn Ballard – Four Quartets and Other Pilgrimages

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

Lyn Ballard

It’s time for a new episode of The Virtual Memories Show!

In this one, guest Lyn Ballard talks about her gateway books, the metaphysical poets, reading Huck Finn at the age of 5, an embarrassing Stanley Elkin anecdote, the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, the importance of making literary pilgrimages, and more!

This is part 1 of The Bat Mitzvah Tapes, recorded during our St. Louis trip in August for my niece’s bat mitzvah. Next week, I’ll post a pretty wide-ranging interview with her dad (my brother Boaz), in which I reveal the key to just about all of Quentin Tarantino’s movies.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

The Virtual Memories Show is now on iTunes! If you’d like to subscribe, visit our iTunes page!

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

Credits: This episode’s music is River of Bass by Underworld. I recorded the intro on a Blue Yeti mic into Audacity, and the conversation with was recorded on a pair of Blue Encore 100 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4N recorder. All editing was done in Garage Band. Have mics, will travel!