Books Read in 2015, Part 1

I’m one of those people who is never without a book.  It’s what I do.  And for the last few years I have been keeping track of the things I read and writing little reviews of them, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. 

You will note that most stories that include that description also include phrases such as “as police later reconstructed the evening,” so I figure I’m ahead of the game here.

My reading was a bit less than it has been over the last few years, oddly enough.  Some of that I attribute just to being busy and having less time.  Some of it is the nature of the books I’ve read this year – there were more serious history books last year than in some previous years, and they tend to take longer.

But it’s not a contest.  It’s a record of places written down and visited.

Here it is.

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The Amulet of Samarkand (Jonathan Stroud)

Bartimaeus is a demon, a trickster spirit from the Other Place, and a snarkily irreverent creature of great power.  Nathaniel is a boy in a version of London where the two great powers are London and Prague, where magic is just another skilled trade, and where the corridors of power are just as infested with betrayal and trickery as they are in any universe.  Nathaniel is a magician’s apprentice, and when he is humiliated by Simon Lovelace – a powerful magician and government minister – he eventually summons Bartimaeus to have his revenge.  And, of course, all sorts of things go wrong.  By the end of the book little is as it was, but it is a fascinating ride while it happens.  This is the first of a trilogy, one I have read before, but it was new to Lauren and we read it together.  She moved on to other things, though, and we never did get to the rest of the books.

Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (David Christian)

One of the classes I teach is called “World History to 1500,” and it is the most useless class in the catalogue.  It stretches from the Big Bang to Columbus, and it is thus impossible to give it any sort of narrative coherence or overarching story.  Or so I thought.  Big History is the idea that if you pull back from the details and look at the broad sweep of history – and by broad it means literally from the beginning of time to the present – you can see the Big Patterns that would otherwise get lost in the details of the rise and fall of empires.  This book does exactly that.  It starts with the Big Bang and the subsequent creation of matter, stars, and planets.  It moves on to the early formation of the earth and its lands and seas.  Life appears, then human life, then societies and only then civilizations.  It takes a vast overview of human civilizations, one that links things across regions and times to show new patterns and connections.  Not only is this densely written book both readable and entertaining – it is not a fast or light read, but it is one that entices you forward with ideas and revelations well said – but it is also exactly the approach my World History to 1500 class needs.  I wrote to the author to find out more and he graciously directed me to a wealth of sources and information designed to translate the concept of Big History into the college course.  I fully intend to revise that class along these lines, when next I have time to do so.  That was supposed to be autumn 2015, but I could only revise one class from scratch at a time and Colonial America won the coin toss.  Next time.

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (Cary Elwes)

The Princess Bride is one of the most generally beloved films of recent memory and ranks high on my own list of personal favorites – it’s got a cheerful little plot hiding underneath the drama, and contains within its script a list of life lessons summed up in memorable quotes that no other movie can match.  Indeed, I find myself quoting it even without meaning to do so, something I learned from this book.  The performances were winning, the editing apt, and frankly if you don’t like this film I’m not really sure what to make of you.  Elwes, of course, played Westley – the male lead in the film – and this is a light-hearted memoir of his time making the film, from the time he was cast through the actual production and ultimately to a 25th Anniversary Reunion event for the remaining cast.  Along the way Elwes shares a great many stories and – in little greyed-in sidebars – allows many other actors and crew to contribute their own memories as well.  If you’re looking for a tell-all, this is not the place.  Elwes is a relentlessly, aggressively upbeat writer and if his version of events is to be believed the filming of The Princess Bride constituted the finest assortment of human beings ever gathered together for any purpose at any time in human history, a time of nonstop friendship, laughter and good times unsullied by conflict or argument.  But if you just want something quick and interesting that has a few good stories about a favorite movie, this will do nicely.

Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)

Cal Stephanides started out his life as Calliope, daughter of Milton and Tessie, granddaughter of Lefty and Desdemona.  Now grown, he sets out the story of how he was born twice – once as a girl, and again, some years later, as a boy – and the long family history that brought him to those points.  It’s a story of the 20th century, as Lefty and Desdemona flee from the Greek enclave in what is now western Turkey in the tumult that followed World War I and end up in America.  It is the story of the American immigrant experience, as three generations of the Stephanides family make their way through life in Detroit as that city prospers in the post-WWII years and then collapses in the 1970s.  It is the story of Calliope and her awakening and transformation into Cal, told as a memoir even as Cal is drawn toward love in Europe.  It is most of all a story of things betwixt and between, and what it means to be neither here nor there.  This was a birthday present from a close friend – she asked me what I wanted and I said, “a book that has meant something to you,” and this came in the mail not long afterward.  I’m glad she sent it.

The Rapture of the Nerds: A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Moments (Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross)

Many years ago I watched Roger Ebert and a colleague (might have been Gene Siskal, might have been someone else) discuss a movie that they had co-written and managed to get made.  It was, they cheerfully admitted, a terrible movie, but they had had a hell of a good time writing it.  Every day they would get together and toss off increasingly weirder ideas that made no sense given what had come before in the story, and run with them – why not THIS?  how about THAT? – as if it were a contest.  The resulting mess was borderline incoherent but entertaining in a way, and for most of this book that interview was playing through my mind.  Doctorow and Stross are both accomplished writers and they clearly had a hell of a good time writing this, but every few pages something new, increasingly weirder, and not altogether consistent appeared.  I wonder which one of them won the contest.  For all that, it was an entertaining book.  Huw Jones is a Welshman, at least at the beginning of the book.  He lives in a late-21st-century world where most people have gone off to join the Cloud – a collection of uploaded memories and personalities stored in vast arrays across the solar system – and where both gender and sex are as mutable as picking a day’s outfit and just as easy to change.  The plot mostly involves getting Huw into deeper and deeper conspiracies and then letting him rant and rave while he bulls his way through them.  Along the way he (or she, at times) gets trapped in a kangaroo court in Libya, visits a backward and insanely theocratic United States (clearly neither Stross nor Doctorow care for much of what makes up the modern US and they are happy to extrapolate further madness from it), and ends up lost in the cloud trying to secure the future of humanity by arguing with his parents.  If that sounds disjointed, it’s because it is.  It’s also heavily laden with the kind of cyberjargon that appeals to technophiles and the political snark that identifies itself as being part of a left that has sadly disappeared in the US.  It was an interesting book, though I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to.

Dear Committee Members (Julie Schumacher)

Oh how I needed this book, given the vicious assault on Wisconsin by our illustrious Sock Puppet Governor in his biennial budget.  Jay Fitzger is an English professor at Payne University, and as such he is constantly plagued by requests from students, former students, colleagues and others for letters of recommendation for scholarships, residencies, jobs, and the like.  This slim book is presented as a chronological catalogue of an academic year’s worth of those letters, and for anyone facing the indignities of modern academia – the bored and entitled students, the slash-and-burn attitudes of political leaders and administrators, the increasingly unlikely possibility of tenure or even respect – it will provoke a wholly disproportionate number of laugh-out-loud moments no matter how painful those moments may be.  Fitzger is a crank, a deservedly dumped husband and boyfriend, and a man whose own writing career has completely tanked, and those themes run as a story arc through many of the letters, particularly to those addressed to his former colleagues, ex-wife, and ex-girlfriend in their various professional capacities.  Other letters are one-offs, written on behalf of students to employers, filling out more of Fitzger’s character but otherwise just stand-alone funny.  It ends on a somewhat reflective note for all that, though Fitzger’s nature remains true to the end. 

What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (Kristin Newman)

I like reading memoirs because people are interesting.  I also like travel memoirs because I like to think that I could have done those things or that someday I may yet just up and go somewhere and do them, even though I know very well that I wouldn’t and probably wouldn’t enjoy them even if I did.  It’s a strange little genre for me that way.  Newman is a television writer, which means she has both a fairly high income and a lot of free time, and she loves to travel, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone.  She loves to go places she’s never been, stay for weeks or months at a time, and “do the thing you’re supposed to do in the place you’re supposed to do it,” which is a more imperative way of expressing the old adage, “When in Rome…”  For Newman, the things you are supposed to do include visiting beautiful and scenic places, eating local food, engaging in a phenomenal amount of drinking and socializing, and hooking up with a wide variety of local men.  She frames her story around growing up, living a full life (she seems to know a lot of wealthy and welcoming people who are happy to bring her along to places most of us will never gain admission to), friends, and finding love or at least sex (there’s a lot of both), and she seems to have had a grand time doing it – and good for her, I say.  On the other hand, she comes across as whiny, privileged, shallow, and not a little unlikeable, flaws that are only partially mitigated by her willingness to admit them and invite the reader to judge her accordingly.  Eventually she does find someone to love for real, perhaps where she least expected it, and the story ends on a happy note.  She’s a good writer, as you would expect from someone who makes a living doing that, and I liked following along on her travels secondhand, though I’m not sure it would have been nearly as enjoyable if I had been there with her.

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)

On a stage in Toronto, Arthur Leander – once famous, now getting old – dies of a heart attack while performing Shakespeare.  In a sense, he’s fortunate, because that night the Georgia Flu spreads to Canada and within days nearly all of the city – indeed, nearly all of humanity – has been wiped out.  Two decades later, Kirsten Raymonde, who was onstage that night, continues to perform Shakespeare as part of the Traveling Symphony, an itinerant band of musicians and thespians plying their trade in the remnants of civilization surrounding the Great Lakes.  But to frame this as a post-apocalyptic story is to miss the main point of the novel.  This is a post-apocalyptic story the way Groucho Marx’s old show “You Bet Your Life” was a quiz show – yes, the quiz (and in this book the apocalypse) is there and it defines the parameters of the action, but really it’s just backdrop for the important stuff.  And in this case the important stuff is the life of Arthur Leander, whose loves, friendships, and decisions flow through the characters of the novel in tightly-spun eddies, knocking them off balance and righting them again before shifting them off in new directions.  This is a bittersweet character study more than an adventure novel – indeed, what in most post-apocalyptic novels would be the apex of the drama is handled surprisingly anticlimactically – one that is told in flashbacks and foreshadowings, long asides and introspective meanderings that loop back onto themselves and reveal the connections a single life can have even when all else seems to have collapsed around it.  It’s a crystalline novel that way, and a haunting one.

Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

Piscine Molitor Patel – Pi for short, a nickname he cultivates assiduously because otherwise he gets called Pissing – spends most of this book adrift in a lifeboat in the Pacific with only a 450lb Bengal tiger named Richard Parker for company, which means that his days are filled with speculation, animal husbandry, and a fair bit of misery.  It doesn’t start out this way.  In the brief initial section of the book he is a boy in Pondicherry, India, learning the ins and outs of zookeeping with his family and applying for membership in as many different religions as he can.  He is a deeply spiritual boy and he says that his story will make you believe in God, though mostly it makes me believe in the virtues of land travel.  It’s a lyrically written book and the last little bit does throw in a surprising number of questions to make you consider reframing the story – how reliable of a narrator is Pi, after all – but when you’re done you come to the realization that it is effectively three different books with little to make them a unified whole.  Lauren and I enjoyed it though.

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure – The “Good Parts” Version (William Goldman)

This is the book upon which one of my favorite movies is based, and even as I read through the story I could hear many of the lines being spoken by the actors in the film – Andre the Giant as Fezzik, Mandy Patankin as Inigo Montoya, Wallace Shawn as Vezzini, Cary Elwes as Westley, Robin Wright as Buttercup, and so on.  It made the book that much better.   It is, as Goldman promises, a story of “Fencing.  Fighting.  Torture.  Poison.  True love.  Hate.  Revenge.  Giants.  Hunters.  Bad men.  Good men.  Beautiful ladies.  Snakes.  Spiders.  Beasts of all natures and descriptions.  Pain.  Death.  Brave men.  Coward men.  Strongest men.  Chases.  Escapes.  Lies.  Truths.  Passion.  Miracles.”  Westley and his true love Buttercup face off against Prince Humperdink and Count Rugen, aided by Fezzik and Inigo.  It’s a great story, particularly when Goldman gets out of his own way and tells it.  This happens haltingly, as he frames the story as an abridgment of an earlier “original” work, mostly forgotten and both long and dull, from which Goldman has extracted the good parts the way his father did for him when he read it out loud to a young Goldman recovering from pneumonia.  The long digressions – particularly in the two forwards (the 30th Anniversary forward and the 25th Anniversary forward) get a bit grating at times.  But when Goldman stops with the artifice and gets on with the story, it is a glorious tale.  This version also has what purports to be the first chapter of the sequel, Buttercup’s Baby, where we get to see some of what happens after the story (though again, salted with Goldman’s counter-narrative).  Having read this and Cary Elwes’ memoir this year, it was pretty much inevitable that I would watch the movie again.  This was not a chore, really.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Rick Perlstein)

Rick Perlstein is three volumes into his majestic series of histories of the modern American right wing, patiently exploring the roots of the batshit insanity that has claimed a once-proud Republican Party and stands ready to destroy the American republic.  In Nixonland, Perlstein focused on the late 1960s and the Republican Party of the Southern Strategy.  His most recent book, The Invisible Bridge, tells the story of the emergence of Ronald Reagan as a viable savior of the right wing in the mid-1970s.  Before the Storm tells of the genesis of it all, the quixotic presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964.  Beginning his story in the deceptive tranquility of the Eisenhower years Perlstein is nothing if not exhaustive, filling his story with a wealth of facts, events, and well-researched ideas.  Yet he writes well and entertainingly so that you get carried along with the story.  Perlstein delights in the behind-the-scenes players, the kingmakers, the fundraisers, the crackpot true believers whose tireless work created the New Right and unleashed it like a virus into the unsuspecting body of American politics.  The sheer savagery of their views – notably the racism, the Machiavellian tactics borrowed directly (and explicitly) from Trotsky, and the cold callousness – can get bleakly depressing, but if you want a clear narrative of how American politics has become so dysfunctional, so radically extreme, and so utterly heartless over the last half century, this book is a good place to start, while the others in his series – I’ve read Nixonland and on the basis of these two books I eagerly look forward to The Invisible Bridge – are required follow-ups.  Few figures emerge from Perlstein’s narrative with dignity intact, even those on the left (Kennedy in particular is treated fairly harshly).  Oddly enough, the one person who does come off sympathetically is Goldwater himself – an honorable crank well suited for the Senate, where his uncompromising beliefs on the outer edges of American politics could serve as a counterpoint without being asked to form the basis of an actual competent government responsible for the safety or welfare of American citizens.  Not personally racist, yet willing to work with open racists and use them for his own ends, Goldwater never seems to have figured out how easily his views gave aid and comfort to racists.  A man who treated his employees well, paid them highly, and hated unions, he never seems to have foreseen where the open anti-worker bias of his backers would lead.  A man whose family fortune and home state were critically dependent on government largesse, he never seems to have figured out why his libertarian stand was simple hypocrisy.  Indeed, he spends most of the book not really foreseeing or figuring out much of anything – how he would be drafted into the campaign, how he would become a pawn of so many other people’s vicious plans, or even how anyone with a hope of victory should actually run a presidential campaign (the slipshod and shockingly incompetent nature of the 1964 Goldwater campaign is a running theme).  One ends up glad that he lost, yet oddly sorry for the toll it took on him.

Dragons at Crumbling Castle (Terry Pratchett)

Terry Pratchett wrote for most of his life, and this collection of short stories is from his earlier work as a newspaper columnist in his teens, when he contributed stories for a feature named “Children’s Corner.”  These stories have been lightly edited, but retain the feel of early Pratchett.  They are all aimed squarely at an audience of 10-year-olds, and they all have a whimsical air to them.  There are some precursor stories to his Carpet People series, as well as more than a few fantastic elements.  The book itself is clearly geared to the same audience, as it has a brightly colored cover and is filled throughout with exuberant drawings reinforcing the whimsical nature of the stories and typographical tricks to reinforce it even further.  It’s a pleasant if extraordinarily lightweight collection, and it was a nice change of pace after five hundred pages of Barry Goldwater.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

I reread this every couple of years just to remind myself how much fun it is to read, and this time I got to share it with Lauren, who still enjoyed reading stories with Dad at the time.  There’s nothing much to say about the book that I haven’t already said in this space, other than the fact that sharing it with my daughter was a real treat.

Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (Cynthia Stokes Brown)

This is a much slimmer volume than David Christian’s, but not as well written.  It covers much the same material and provides a slightly different framework for it, which I found useful for my planned revisions to my world history class.  There are some odd historical errors as you creep up to the present, which made me question the reliability of the work as a whole, but by and large it was an entertaining journey through a lot of history using a long-focus method of trying to make sense of it all.

Ties That Bind: Stories of Love & Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps (Dave Isay, ed.)

StoryCorps works on the principle that people are interesting – that they have stories worth sharing, worth preserving, worth hearing.  These are ordinary people, nobody you’ve ever heard of, with stories of ordinary life, and they are moving, captivating, heart-wrenching stories of love, friendship, and humanity.  It is when you read these stories that you realize how extraordinary even the ordinary is.  If you can read this book without tearing up, you have a harder heart than I.

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (Carol F. Karlsen) 

Back in the fall of 2014 I learned that a friend of mine was going to teach a class on witchcraft and I felt he needed to hear the story of the Witch of Riddley Creek, a story that is often unjustly forgotten.  Somehow this spiraled into me giving a guest lecture in the class in the spring.  This was the book I used to get most of the background material for that lecture.  It’s an older book, but well worth the time.  Clearly written and full of both fascinating stories and statistical evidence, this is perhaps the best place to start for someone interested in the subject.

Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior (Kate Fox)

This book fits into any number of the little slots in my world.  It is a book about people-watching – Kate Fox has spent her life observing people and working out the rules that govern their behavior in ordinary situations, something I’ve always found fascinating and have done on my own in a scattershot sort of way since I was old enough to understand the concept.  It’s a book about the English, a group of people I more and more feel an affinity toward and, having read this book, do so even more now.  I’m clearly not English – even an American as introverted as myself would be considered rudely outgoing by most English people if this book is to be believed, and the rules governing food and eating struck me as absurd – but there are a lot of things that resonated very well with me.  I’ve got the English attitude toward religion pretty much down pat, for example.  And this is a funny book.  Fox has a dry sense of humor that works its way into every aspect of the book – something that she insists is also a hallmark of pretty much all English social interaction.  For a 500+pp book of sociology, it was a very entertaining read.

New Year's In New York

We rang in the New Year in New York, which is one of those things that you should do in your life if you can. 

We didn’t go to Times Square, however. We’re not stupid.  Hanging out with several hundred thousand people in a confined space with vast quantities of alcohol and rather more limited quantities of available facilities with indoor plumbing, all while being serenaded by b-list celebrities and monitored by more security than con man in a Vegas casino is really not our style.  But we had a good time nonetheless.  We're canny that way.

We left Philadelphia on the 30th and drove up through New Jersey, which is even more of a throughway than Ohio.  Even their state quarter design depicts someone leaving the place, after all.  The traffic was surprisingly easy until we got through the Lincoln Tunnel and into Manhattan, whereupon it turned into the usual Darwinian slugfest complicated by the Escheresque maneuverings of the delivery trucks with their New Year's loads.  But we found my brother’s apartment with no real troubles, unloaded our stuff, deposited the car in the handy adjacent garage that only cost one limb per parking day, and then headed out.

Because there were people to meet!

One of the nice things about being the Performing Arts Guy down at Home Campus is that I meet a lot of interesting people.  I’ve signed Joshua to perform there twice, two different shows, and both times we had good crowds and vastly entertaining evenings (so hire him if you’re looking for a great act!  Ask me how!).  Somehow in the process we became real friends and not just coworkers.  He lives in New York and he invited us to come visit the next time we were there. 

So we did.

Joshua and his lovely family live in an apartment that has more arts-related objects per square foot than anyplace I’ve ever been, including actual theaters, and we had a grand time looking at them and sharing a tasty home-cooked meal with his family.

And then we went downtown to see an off-Broadway show.  Because it’s New York, and you should see a show in New York, especially if you can do so with good people.  That’s what New York is there for.  Well, that and reminding us that yes people actually can live full lives in apartments that small - it forces you out into the community, which is good.  We made a stop at the science fiction store before the show, because it turns out we all have that nerdhood in common – Tabitha came out with more D&D dice, which pleased her no end – and that is just one more reason we’re friends.

If you’ve never seen The 39 Steps, you should.  It’s one of those old-fashioned rapid-fire farces that reward good comic acting, and the cast we saw was just spot on.  After the show one of the actors even came outside and let us take a picture with him, which was very gracious.

Joshua and his family went home after the show, and we met up with my cousin Chris, who lives near that particular theater.  There was food!  There were drinks!  There was conversation!

It was a very nice night all around.

The next morning we were back on the subway (we got to be pretty good at the subway, which is another thing you should do in New York – it’s certainly an experience you’re not going to get in Wisconsin, anyway) and went to visit Ellen and Rob up in Yonkers. 

There was food, conversation, and general good times, which is a lovely way to spend time, really.

Meanwhile back at my brother’s apartment, there were videogames and snacks awaiting us. 

I’ve never been much of a videogame person, really.  Not sure why – they’re interesting, and people seem to enjoy them – but I tend to leave them to others.  This is why, not long after we got back, I was just about the only one not digitally careening after Mario, trying to take him out with a well-placed boot to the head while he ran around a multi-colored island of some kind.  It made more sense when I was watching it than my description of it, I assure you.  Most things do.

This continued until it was time to go to dinner.

We got back on the subway and headed down to Little Italy.  The subway doesn’t stop there – at least the one we took didn’t – but that was part of the plan, since it meant we could walk through the neighborhood (and adjacent Chinatown) and see the place.

I think everyone should be required to live in a big city like New York for a year, just to understand how many people there are in this world who don’t think or look exactly like them.  It would be healthy for the nation’s politics, really.  We strolled through the crowded blocks, gaping like the tourists we were (well, my family did – my brother’s family live there, so they’re used to it) and taking it all in.

It’s really nice.

As was dinner.

For our New Year’s celebration we went back to the apartment and watched Doctor Who, because that’s how we roll.  Eventually it got close to midnight and we switched over to watching the Times Square celebrations (secure in the fact that we had our own plumbing right there in the apartment with us) until the ball dropped, whereupon we listened to the pounding rumble of the fireworks and tried to grasp the fact that it was now 2016 and we’d be writing that incorrectly until at least March.

Happy 2016, everyone.

Christmas In Philadelphia

We left Wisconsin shortly before dinnertime, because that’s what you do when you can’t leave before school ends and if you wait until the next day you might not get there before the holiday starts.  Not that the holiday would start without us, really – my family has a “Moveable Feast” tradition wherein holidays happen whenever you have time for them, so they start whenever all of the principals show up and continue until we all get tired of it – but still.  Christmas Eve is a big deal for us, and not having to be on the road for it was nice.

We got to Ohio before we decided that was enough for one day.  Ohio is the nation’s waystation, being neither here nor there but pleasant enough in between.  Our hotel was new – one of those places that you get to by driving down a road lined with things that haven’t quite been finished yet – and we checked in late enough that they gave us the extra wide room.  Seriously – it was a yard wider than any hotel room I’d ever been in, and for a while I was convinced that this was just how things went in new hotels until Kim enlightened me as to the concept of a “handicapped access room.”  I guess showing up around midnight qualifies you as at least kind of odd, which is close enough for hostelry if nobody else has reserved the room already.

The next day was a long drive though what appeared at times to be a monsoon rain but which – we kept repeating to ourselves – was not snow.  How could it be snow?  It was 60F out there, and getting warmer.

It was nearly 70F on Christmas Day in Philadelphia.  It’s a good thing that the climate isn’t changing, because otherwise?  I’d be worried.

What?

This was our year to head east for Christmas, and we had a grand time.  It was a low-key sort of holiday, but a happy one.

There was much celebrating and eating of good food.

There were also the traditional card games.  Lauren beat us all at Phase 10.  I need to send that kid to Vegas, truly I do.

And, since this is the 21st century, there were a plethora of screens to look at. 

We ate and hung out and generally had a good time just being together as a family.  And then on Christmas Day we did it again.  Rolane and Steve came over to add to our festivities, and my friend Jenny brought her two boys over as well.  Holidays are meant to be spent with family and friends, and we enjoyed both.  It’s still kind of odd that my uncle’s side of the family now gathers in Tennessee due to logistical concerns – we’ve grown into too unwieldy a group to put all in one place for anything less than a wedding these days – and we missed them.  But a good time was had.

We spent the next couple of days together as well.

Our big excursion was to head into Center City to see some of the Christmas displays and have lunch at Reading Terminal Market, because food.

We took the commuter rail into town and got off near City Hall, which was open to the public.  They had even set up a little ice rink outside, and since it had cooled down to “Autumn” rather than “June” it actually was skatable.

Philadelphia’s City Hall is a great granite pile of a building, ornate in that excessive Victorian way, plunked down squarely in the middle of an intersection.  It probably sounded better at the pitch meeting.  But after over a century of renovations – some of them going back to before the building was completed – the place was humming along brightly with folks going in an out of the central courtyard, where the city had put up a huge tree.

Our first stop was Wanamaker’s.  Yes, I know it’s Macy’s now, but I just can’t bring myself to call it that. 

Wanamaker’s was one of the original department stores, built in an age when people dressed up to go shopping.  It’s a strange combination of soaring architecture and crowded floors, and right in the middle of it is The Eagle, a giant bronze statue of a rather incongruously fierce-looking predator staring menacingly out over the coat racks.  If you grew up in Philadelphia in the mid-20th century or know people who did, “meet me at the eagle” is a phrase indelibly etched into your consciousness.

So we met there.

We went back there after lunch, actually, since they have the Christmas lights display in the main atrium.  It’s set to a soundtrack and was probably impressive in 1955 but really hasn’t been updated since.  We didn’t get to hear the organ, which was a shame.  The Wanamaker organ is one of the largest pipe organs on the east coast, and it is a thing made of pure awesome in the hands of someone who knows how to play it.

Reading Terminal Market was more crowded than usual, which is saying something.  There was no way the eight of us could stick together for a meal, so we split up into small groups to forage.  It is strange, in a way, that my daughters are now old enough that I can tell them to meet me somewhere in a crowded urban setting, but that’s what is supposed to happen as they grow up.  I have no idea what anyone else had, as by the time I found a place to eat I was on my own, but I had a burrito as big as my head and it was fabulous.

On the way out Lauren went shopping for thank you gifts for the friends taking care of her animals.  There’s a lot to choose from.  The chocolate rats on a stick and the chocolate noses were a big hit, though we later agreed that the noses should have been jelly-filled.

While we were in Philadelphia we also went to see the new Star Wars movie (told you I’d see it, didn’t I?).  And, as predicted, I enjoyed it.  It was fun, in a whiz-bang “entertain me” kind of way, unburdened by the heavy mythos that George Lucas seemed to feel was the interesting part.  We all gasped when it was revealed that the new Emperor was actually Prince Humperdink in a blacklit bathrobe (hey, evil overlords have warm fuzzies to relax in too!), but really the fact that Kylo Ren had six fingers should have tipped us off.

Spoilers!

It was a good trip.  And then we left for New York.

Back in Wisconsin

The trick to getting out of New York City without fighting traffic is to be on the road before noon on New Year’s Day.  We’ve done it twice now.  Works like a charm.

You pretty much have the whole city to yourself at that point.  George Washington Bridge?  Pick a level!  They’re both yours for the asking!  Everyone else in the city is either hungover, asleep, dead, or some unholy combination of the three.  Or possibly waving goodbye to you.  You never know.

Of course, the problem with this plan is that – unless you happen to live in the city anyway, in which case you wouldn’t need to leave it in the first place – it requires you to drive into the city shortly before New Year’s.  And that is a Mad Max sort of experience that brings the whole thing about even, really.  On top of the hordes of tourists (of which, remember, you are one pretty much by definition), there is the simple fact that every delivery truck in the North American continent is fighting to get into your lane because they need to drop off a shipment of tacky hats, gourmet edibles, or some other New-Year’s-related merchandise to that business just ahead of you.  No, not that one – that would be too easy.  The other one, where there are already six or eight delivery trucks double-parked in ways that physicists insist with straight faces are not possible in this plane of reality.  That one.  Pack a lunch, this will take a while.

So it’s kind of a wash.

We just got back from a lovely holiday spent out in the Correct Time Zone, visiting friends and family for the holidays.  We got to see my parents, and my brother and his family, as well as my cousin Chris and a number of friends, which was to my mind the main point of the trip, seeing all those people who have places in my heart but who live lamentably far away.  I didn’t get to see everyone I wanted to see – some because people have, you know, lives, and the scheduling didn’t work out, and some because I looked at the list of people we’d already thought to try to catch up to and didn’t see how any more people could be added to the list without violating physical laws and only New York delivery trucks are allowed to do that at this time of year, so we didn’t even try to contact them.  It would only have led to disappointment.

This is, of course, a high class problem to have, having more friends and family than you can see in a given trip.

But we’re back.  The house is still standing.  The cats have velcroed themselves to our laps in a pathetic display of affection that tells us how long we’d been gone and how little they care about impressing us anymore.  We’ve retrieved 67% of the rabbits from 50% of the friends who have been caring for them.  We’ve unpacked most of the things that need to be unpacked right now and a few things that probably could have waited.  We’ll see the chickens tomorrow and get the last rabbit home, and at that point I’ll probably go grocery shopping.

It’s nice to be back.  But it was good to be there.

The Short End of Star Wars

I don’t really get the whole Star Wars thing.

Oh, I’ve seen all the movies.  They were perfectly fine movies.  I enjoyed them, actually.  When the New Revised Standard versions came out in the 1990s I even went back and saw them again with Kim.  She and I made it through all of the prequels, which were not the towering powerballs of suckage that they are often made out to be but neither were they, well, much to write home about.  Yes, indeed, Jar-Jar was a disaster and no amount of ret-conning can change that.  But the 1977 original was great fun, the middle one managed to keep the story going without damage, and the third one wrapped it all up fairly nicely.

The originals even have relatively happy memories for me beyond the films.

I didn’t see the first one before it became a sensation, and back in those pre-internet days finding a time and theater that was playing it and where tickets were available was not easy.  My dad ended up taking me and my brother to a theater way out in some part of town, and we had a great time. 

My parents took us both to see The Empire Strikes Back as part of my eighth-grade graduation – at a time when the lines for evening shows were hours long, we went on a weekday afternoon and practically had the place to ourselves.  I did ruin it for my mom, however.  When Yoda came on screen, spouting timeless wisdom, I leaned over and whispered, “Listen!  It's Grover!”

I saw Return of the Jedi twice in high school, once with my girlfriend at the time and once with my family, both times within a week of each other. 

So I suppose I’m a fan.

But everywhere I go these days I am surrounded by Star Wars.  There are products with Star Wars logos on them that honestly should not have Star Wars logos on them, up to and including produce.  There are endless discussions of Star Wars everywhere I turn.  My social media feeds are in fact inundated with Star Wars, with any number of posts promising dire retribution to anyone who spills any of the plot ahead of time.

Honestly, the local newspaper even had – dead center on the front page – a photo of people lined up to see the new Star Wars installment, because in a week where Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) secretly signed legislation to make Wisconsin elections less transparent and less accountable, where the leading candidate for the GOP nomination openly advocated war crimes and saw his popularity rise because of it, where 30% of the GOP base went on record favoring the bombing of the fictional country of Agrabah (home of Disney’s Aladdin, and no I’m not making that up), where the US economy reached a point of recovery where the Fed now has to consider putting brakes on it, and where both Iran and the Taliban have openly called for the destruction of ISIS (making them, in effect, our allies, and what a strange world that is), what counts as news in Our Little Town is people standing in line to see a movie.  Because STAR WARS, duh.

I just don’t get it. 

I am clearly Out Of It.  Pathetic and Uncultured.  Destined for the Dustbin of History.  And I’m okay with that, I suppose.  I’m certainly used to it, anyway.

I’ll see the new Star Wars movie eventually.  Of course I will.  I’ve liked the others, so I’ll no doubt like this one too.  And I am a fan of science fiction (and fantasy) in general – it’s what I read when I’m not reading things with footnotes, it’s basically the only show I watch regularly on television that doesn’t involve a scorekeeper, and I appreciate that it is a genre that remains unafraid to ask its patrons to think rather than just passively absorb.

But the capital-P Phenomenon that is Star Wars?

I don’t get it.

Faces of Lauren, 2015

Every year I go through the digital stack of the year’s photographs, looking for things to put into our Christmas letter.  This happens whether or not we actually get out a Christmas letter, because it’s the thought that counts.

And since 2010, I have also posted the annual Faces of Lauren post commemorating the things that Lauren insists on doing when confronted with a camera lens.

If you are interested in previous versions, you can find them here:

2010
2011
2012
2013
2014

This was once my project, but over the years Lauren has taken on a bigger and more active role in selecting the photographs.  This year it was essentially all Lauren, with my role being reduced to lobbying for a few additions that I felt were too good to pass up.

So most of what you see here has been chosen for you by the star herself.

Enjoy!