Writing Life

A periodic record of thoughts and life as these happen via the various roles I play: individual, husband, father, grandfather, son, brother (brother-in-law), writer, university professor and others.

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Location: Tennessee, United States

I was born on Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina, then lived a while in Fayetteville, North Carolina, before moving, at the age of 5, to Walnut, NC. I graduated from Madison High School in 1977. After a brief time in college, I spent the most of the 1980s in Nashville, Tennessee, working as a songwriter and playing in a band. I spent most of the 1990s in school and now teach at a university in Tennessee. My household includes wife and son and cat. In South Carolina I have a son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

This Time of Year

Well, I'm sitting here dressed for an evening of pushing the lawn mower around the yard and listening to music. But as often happens this time of year, we just had a sudden downpour. The rain came hard and fast and just enough to make it too wet to mow. Then it stopped as suddenly as it started. Now the sun is shining on the wall beside my computer, and I guess I have to get up and change out of my mowing clothes.

Maybe tomorrow.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Remember This One?

1, 2... 1, 2, 3, 4, Ow!

Eddie: People moving out, people moving in. Why, because of the color of their skin. Run, run, run but you sure can't hide. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Vote for me and I'll set you free. Rap on, brother, rap on.

Dennis: Well, the only person talking about love thy brother is the...(preacher.) And it seems nobody's interested in learning but the...(teacher.) Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, Aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation. Ball of confusion. Oh yeah, that's what the world is today. Woo, hey, hey.

Paul: The sale of pills are at an all time high. Young folks walking round with their heads in the sky. The cities ablaze in the summer time. And oh, the beat goes on.

Dennis: Evolution, revolution, gun control, sound of soul. Shooting rockets to the moon, kids growing up too soon. Politicians say more taxes will solve everything.

Melvin: And the band played on.

So, round and around and around we go. Where the world's headed, nobody knows. Oh, great googalooga, can't you hear me talking to you. Just a ball of confusion. Oh yeah, that's what the world is today. Woo, hey, hey.

Eddie: Fear in the air, tension everywhere. Unemployment rising fast, the Beatles new record's a gas.

Dennis: And the only safe place to live is on an Indian reservation.

Melvin: And the band played on.

Eve of destruction, tax deduction, city inspectors, bill collectors, Mod clothes in demand, population out of hand, suicide, too many bills, Hippies moving to the hills. People all over the world are shouting, 'End the war.'

Melvin: And the band played on.

Great googalooga, can't you hear me talking to you. Sayin'... ball of confusion. That's what the world is today, hey, hey. Let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya. Sayin'... ball of confusion. That's what the world is today, hey, hey. Let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya. Sayin'... ball of confusion.

"Ball of Confusion" by The Temptations (1970)

Writers: Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong

Friday, May 22, 2009

Who Are These White People?

The following is from Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions by Christian Lander. It's a New York Times Bestseller. I don't own the book, but a friend of mine let me borrow it.

The book describes 150 examples of stuff white people like. Here's a random sample: Coffee (#1), Asian Girls, Having Black Friends, Writer's Workshops, Microbreweries, '80s Night, Snowboarding, Brunch, Indie Music, Living by the Water, Kitchen Gadgets, Knowing What's Best for Poor People, Standing Still at Concerts, The Idea of Soccer, Graduate School, Having Gay Friends, San Francisco, The Boston Red Sox, Native Wisdom, Reusable Shopping Bags, Acoustic Covers, Not Having Cash, Singer-Songwriters, Eating Outside, Public Transportation That Is Not a Bus, Dive Bars.

Here's an example of the kinds of sarcastic descriptions the book offers. This is the second entry, right behind Coffee: Religions Their Parents Don't Belong To.

White people will often say they are "spiritual" but not religious. This usually means that they will believe in any religion that doesn't involve Jesus. The most popular choices include Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, and, to a lesser extent, Scientology. A few even dip into Islam, but that's much rarer, since you have to make real sacrifices and actually go to a mosque.

For the most part, white people prefer religions that produce artifacts and furniture that fit into their home or wardrobe. They are also particularly drawn to religions that do not require a lot of commitment or donations.

When a white person tells you "I'm a Buddhist/Hindu/Kabbalahist," the best thing to do is ask how they arrived at their religious decision. The story will likely involve a trip to Thailand or a college class on religion.

So, I'm interested in who these white people are. My guess is that they're not the people I saw at Wal-Mart this morning or the guys who changed the oil in my CRV. I'm also interested in who the audience is for this book. My guess is that they're the very white people the book is written about.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The post "Christianity & Shakespeare" is taken from today's Writer's Almanac.

Christianity & Shakespeare

This was probably the date in 325 A.D. on which the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea was called to order. The conference lasted 47 days, until July 25th, and it was held in the city of Nicaea, which is now known as İznik, in northwestern Turkey.

It was 325 years since Jesus had been crucified, but Christianity was still a small and relatively unorganized religion. People had very different beliefs about what Christianity was. Some thought that Jesus was a great man but not a divine figure. Some believed that Jesus was a supernatural being but not really God himself. And then there were the Gnostics, who believed that the God of the Old Testament was an evil God, and that Jesus had come to save humanity from that evil God. Along with the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there was a Gospel of Thomas, a Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a Gospel of Judas. 

The council established that Jesus was the son of God and that he was also of one being with God. Anyone who refused to accept the decision of the council about Jesus' divinity was exiled, and it led to infighting and persecution among Christians. But within 50 years, about 34 million people had converted to Christianity.

_____

It was on this day exactly 400 years ago — May 20, 1609 — that the publisher Thomas Thorpe made an entry in the Stationer's Register that said: Entred for his copie under the handes of master Wilson and master Lownes Wardenes a booke called Shakespeares sonnettes, and soon after (we don't know the exact date) Shakespeare's sonnets were published. Many people think that Thorpe published them without Shakespeare's consent.

The 1609 collection contained 154 sonnets, only two of which had been published before. Shakespeare addresses some to a beautiful young man whom he calls "fair youth," and others to "a dark lady."

Shakespeare's sonnets are considered some of the greatest love poems ever written, with such lines as, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate," and, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments; love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to remove," and, "For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings/That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

Saturday, May 09, 2009

Life's a Strange Ride

This morning I went to ETSU's 10:00 graduation ceremony. (I also have to go to the 2:00 ceremony . . . yuck.) Anyway, I came out of the celebration, walked back to the English building with my colleagues, walked to Wendy's for lunch and came back.

As I walked along the sidewalk near my building, I noticed an ambulance pull up to a group standing on the sidewalk. They were surrounding a figure lying at the foot of a small set of concrete stairs (maybe three stairs). Kneeling by the downed figure was a woman still in her graduation robe. The EMTs quickly loaded the figure onto a gurney and carried him away. He seemed to have some significant headgear on; I'm guessing that the injury is there and not in the heart.

So, I imagined, there they were in the midst of a celebration (a wife and mom's graduation), reliving the moment, planning where to eat lunch, deciding who would go in whose car. And then one misstep brings the joy to a stop, and emotions swing wildly from one side to another.

What a strange ride life is!

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Dream

Try your hand at dream interpretation:

I saw a former friend of mine sitting in what appeared to be a hotel room. A large man, he sat in a brown wooden chair with black faux leather cushion and back. The chair was beside a neatly made bed covered with a brown bedspread. On the other side of the bed was what appeared to be a balcony or patio, but the dark curtains were drawn.

My old friend's hands were empty, but he had one of those bluetooth devices in his ear. He was neatly dressed in browns--shirt, dress pants, dress shoes. His clothes appeared clammy with sweat.

My point of view was from in front of him and slightly to his right, but far back, as if I were standing with my back against the wall or standing in another room and looking at him through a wide doorway.

As with most dreams, I've forgotten if anything was said. But I've not forgotten the look on his face--fearful, anxious, desperate.

Then I woke up.

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By the way, today is the birthday of philosopher David Hume (1711), poet Robert Browning (1812) and composers Johannes Brahms (1833) and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840).

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Henry David Thoreau

I probably posted this blurb from The Writer's Almanac last year, but I think it bears repeating:
On this day in 1862, Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis. He was 44. His aunt asked him if he was at peace with God. Thoreau said, "I was not aware that we had quarreled." The last clear thing he said was, "Now comes good sailing," and then two words: "moose" and "Indian."

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Paleo Diet

I found this on MSN Health: http://health.msn.com/nutrition/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100237691&page=2

Paleo Diet: Can Our Caveman Ancestors Teach Us the Best Modern Diet?

Our eating patterns should perhaps be modeled on what Paleolithic hunter-gatherers ate.

By Katherine Hobson, U.S. News & World Report

Should we look backward for clues to the perfect human diet? And not just back a few generations—to a world before french fries were a major source of vegetables and the Super Big Gulp encouraged the downing of 64 ounces of soda in one sitting—but waaaaaay back? Some people think so, arguing that we ought to turn to a "caveman diet" or "paleo diet" based on what they think early humans and human ancestors ate for millions of years, from the Paleolithic era until the agricultural revolution began about 10,000 years ago. "Seventy percent of our calories come from foods these folks never would have consumed," says Loren Cordain, an exercise scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and author of The Paleo Diet.

There's certainly broad agreement that in the past few generations we have strayed far from an eating pattern that supports maximum health. Whatever our ancestors ate, it sure wasn't the current Western diet, which is heavy in saturated fat, salt, and processed foods based heavily on soybeans and on corn. That style of eating has been associated with a variety of health problems and is, by all accounts, a mess.

Cordain suggests we mimic the diet of our hunter-gatherer forebears and eat lean meats (especially grass-fed beef, wild game, and free-range birds, rather than farm-raised animals), fish, plants, fruit, and nuts. Milk is not on his list; he says there are no evolutionary roots for it in the hunter-gatherer society, where milking wild animals wasn't possible. And contrary to most nutritional advice, he disdains grains, even whole ones, because he says our bodies aren't well adapted to eating them, especially in mass quantities.

The study of how human diets evolved is a rich field, with researchers approaching the problem from angles including examining dental microwear—the tiny pits and dents in teeth that suggest how they were used—and hypothesizing about how cooking affected our progress. It's also full of pitfalls, because trying to reverse-engineer what exactly early humans and prehumans ate is difficult, and fossils may actually lead us astray. For example, says Peter Ungar, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, conventional wisdom used to hold that because the skull of one ancestral close cousin who lived 2 million years ago—"Nutcracker Man"—featured big, flat teeth, he must have used them to feed primarily on nuts, seeds, and other hard sources of nutrition.

Not so, says Ungar. Now researchers believe that jaw and teeth structure can indicate only the capability to eat certain types of food, perhaps in times of shortage or scarcity, not that those foods were their most common or optimal choices. Just look at gorillas, our primate relatives: They have huge molars and chewing muscles for eating leaves and tough foods, yet 11 months of the year they eat softer things, like fruit and bugs, that don't require that kind of masticatory firepower.

So Ungar says it's not at all clear that we should eat foods X, Y, and Z simply because we suspect our ancestors did. "Most people who study the fossils of our human ancestors are very reticent about using what little we know about their diets to show what we should be eating today," he says. Instead, he points to variety as the real key to the evolution of the human diet. "Our success is pegged to the fact that we have been able to survive in so many places," he says. William Leonard, chair of the anthropology department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., agrees. "The hallmark of human nutrition for me is the flexibility and diversity," he says. "It's the ability to make a meal in any environment."

Ungar and Leonard don't blame our modern diet-related health problems on any specific food group. Rather, they're convinced that our major problems these days are the lack of that diversity in our diet—and a positive energy balance. In other words, unlike our Paleolithic forebears, we are taking in more calories than we burn off. "The difference is not simply in what we're eating but in what we're doing," says Leonard.

The greater availability of cheap, high-calorie, high-fat foods is contributing to high rates of obesity, he says, but so is the fact that we aren't moving anymore. "If you add even an extra 30 minutes to an hour of moderate exercise a day, it's going to get you to a point where it will make a difference in your long-term energy balance," he says. "Slow and steady is the mantra. You didn't see people in farming and herding societies sprinting around. They moved at a low to moderate level of intensity over the course of an entire day."

On its merits. History aside, the paleo diet has health merit. Except for the dairy and grain issues, it's pretty close to the tenets of the traditional eating patterns like the Mediterranean and Asian diets and other dietary patterns that focus on plants, fish, lean protein, "good" fats, and whole grains. (Cordain says Stone Age eating is closest to a Japanese-style diet.) It also fits into the small but growing movement turning away from factory-farmed meat and toward eating animals fed what they've evolved to eat, like grass, rather than grain.

Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, agrees with Cordain that dairy is by no means necessary; most of the world's population survives without it. But he doesn't believe in an all-out grain prohibition. Distinguishing between whole grains and refined grains is more important, he says. "Whole grains do convey a lot of nutrition" and "can be part of a high-quality diet," he says. Refined grains, which have had their nutrients stripped away and have been converted into fine, rapidly absorbable particles, are not. And of course, food choices should be made in the context of an appropriate caloric budget; you can get fat by eating too much of anything.

But the general gist of eating like a caveman—namely, focusing on foods in their whole, natural state, is not going to get much argument. "It comes down to the advice your mother gave you," says Leonard. "Eat a balanced diet and a diversity of foods."


Monday, May 04, 2009

James Lee Burke

In the summer, I like to do a lot of reading that I don't normally have time for in the course of the regular school year. I'm particularly fond of mysteries. But not all mysteries are equal. I find these days that a lot of published authors—whether writing in the mystery genre or some other—can tell a darn good story. And that's good. If they construct their stories well enough, I don't find it that difficult to overlook the fact that too few of them write well. Take John Grisham for example. I don't know what he's writing these days, but at the height of his popularity a few years ago, he was telling some of the most enthralling stories on the market. But I found him to be such a bland—at some level unskilled—writer that I couldn't read him. I tried. I really did. But I think I made it all the way through only one of his books. The movies made from them, however, were exciting because of the stories they told.

Not so with James Lee Burke. While he goes a little bit over the top from time to time, Burke can write well and tell great stories. His stuff is gritty, tough and violent, but he always pulls it off well. He has two main characters that he works with. The longest running of these is Dave Robicheaux, a lawman in New Iberia Parish, down Louisiana way, near New Orleans. Robicheaux is an alcoholic in recovery, and he works his way through tough crimes in a tough world. A lot of underbelly shows up in this character's life and milieu.

More recently, Burke created Billy Bob Holland, a former Texas Ranger, now a lawyer in Missoula, Montana, one of my favorite places. Although Billy Bob doesn't isn't haunted by the alcoholic self that Dave Robicheaux is, he has his own ghosts to deal with. Whereas Robicheaux's world seems old and corrupted, Holland's feels younger, dark and violent in a different way—the lawlessness of the Old West and its wide open spaces.

I've read several more Robicheaux novels that Holland novels. My favorites are In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead and Dixie City Jam (Robicheaux) and In the Moon of Red Ponies (Holland). I'm currently beginning my summer reading with another Holland novel, Bitterroot.