Marcus' World

Fandom

Being a sports fan is to realize, at some level, just how silly it all is. You are watching people: bat a ball with a wooden stick; hit a puck while wearing ice skates; try to deposit a small dimple-shaped ball into a hole several hundred yards away; injure each other's brains in a tableau of masculine aggression; slice a ball over a net into an impossible corner for their opponent to reach; use their feet to move a (soccer) ball down a field; or shoot a ball through a hoop attached to a net.

Stepping back, the emotional investment in all of this is amazing. But that's the point -- in the moment there's no stepping back. Perspective is for losers. Let the emotions fly, high five your friends when things go well, hang your head when they do not.

I experienced all of this last weekend, as the Northwestern Wildcats made their first ever trip to the NCAA basketball tournament. The bracket I filled out in advance had Northwestern winning it all -- a ridiculous claim, of course, but it felt good to assert it. They squeaked through in the first round, against Vanderbilt. Then the mighty test, against # 1 seed Gonzaga, awaited.

During the first half the Cats looked terrible, and were down 38-20 at intermission. (For a long time they had only scored 6 points). There were a lot of hanging heads in dismay at the Northwestern alumni watch party.

But then the Cats awakened in the second half, clawing back to within 5 points: 63-58. Here the crucial sequence occurred. Gonzaga goaltended against NU, in what should have been 2 points for Northwestern. (This is not just an admittedly biased fan talking; the NCAA confirmed this after the game). So it should have been 63-60, with momentum clearly on the Cats side.

Goaltending was not called. In response Northwestern coach Chris Collins stormed the court while the ball was in play, causing a (deserved) technical foul. Collins's actions were justified in the moment, I say; sports is about emotion, not logic. But they were costly too. Gonzaga made both free throws on that technical foul. Instead of 63-60, the score was 65-58. The Cats could not surmount that deficit, losing 79-73.

Counterfactuals are the glory of sports. Had goaltending been called, say Cats fans, Northwestern would have been won. Well. Maybe Gonzaga would have responded with a flurry of 3 point shots and won the game that way. We'll never know. This is why Cats fans will say forever that the refs blew their chance at their first ever Sweet Sixteen spot. I'll join the chorus sometimes, while knowing that the real story is more complicated.

Muse of Fire Production of "Hamlet" at the Evanston Public Library

My knowledge of Shakespeare is sadly sparse. Until yesterday I had never seen the entire production of Hamlet.  This changed thanks to the efforts of the Muse of Fire theater company.

For the last seven years, Evanston-based Muse of Fire has offered free productions of Shakespeare's works in the City. Usually these productions are outdoors, in a park behind the Civic Center. For the last two years, Muse of Fire has also offered productions inside the Main branch of the Evanston Public Library. These productions occur during hours when the library would normally be closed.

Last night I attended the final library production of Hamlet for this season. The acting was strong and engaging, and I am sure the outdoor production is marvelous. But I am so happy that I attended the library production, as it made full and effective use of the second and third floors of the building.

A party scene took place in a large conference room. Polonius's speech to Laertes and Ophelia was adjacent to the Information Desk. Hamlet's confrontation with Queen Gertrude took place among the CDs. And the final climactic confrontation occurred in the entrance of the library, with the audience looking down from the flights of stairs above.

Amazing.

This took some work, requiring audience movement; on Facebook I called it a mixture of "drama and calisthenics."  The effort was very much worth it, though, as the locations for each different segment perfectly fit the scale and import of that scene.  It was a demonstration that any space can be turned into a stage, with enough effort, brio and ingenuity. Or, if you like, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."

This line, of course, comes from Hamlet. And that's why we now say, "There's a madness to my method." I knew the origin, I think, but had never seen it uttered in context. It's when Polonius first realizes that Hamlet is being deliberately difficult for reasons only Hamlet knows.

Same goes for, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Here is Hamlet admonishing his old friend Horatio for his rigid rationality, right after Horatio has observed Hamlet conversing with his dead father's ghost. Here's another phrase that has entered common parlance, as a reminder to be open to the supernatural.

And we cannot possibly forget, "To thine own self be true." This maxim, one I have used often, speaks to the need for authenticity. Or does it? As the culmination of Polonius's long list of bromides in his speech to Laertes and Ophelia, perhaps this is mere grand-standing.  Or even a nudge toward complacency and shallowness, as Nicholas Clairmont argues in the BigThink. Make of the phrase what you will, it is now part of a shared frame of reference. For that matter every phrase I've quoted could be understood in multiple ways.

This endless mutability of interpretation is why Harold Bloom calls Hamlet the "poem unlimited." (His book by that title was helpfully displayed mere feet from where Polonius gives his speech.) It is why we care about literature in the first place. In the case of the theater, this innovative production is a reminder that the world is a "stage unlimited" too. As we know, all's the world a stage (that comes from As You Like It).

A (Brief) Tribute to the Novel

For the last several months I've been reading George Eliot's masterpiece Middlemarch, as part of the year long "Mission Impossible" project sponsored by the Evanston Public Library. I wrote about Middlemarch last fall, and since then have almost finished but not quite yet. It is so engrossing that I am no longer sticking to the assigned readings, as it is more rewarding to race ahead.

One author I've always meant to read but never have is Anthony Trollope. That finally changed after absorbing Adam Gopnik's tribute to Trollope a few weeks ago. Gopnik's enthusiasm prompted the purchase of Trollope's Phineas Finn, the coming-of-age story of a rural young man who assumes a seat in Parliament. (A purchase which occurred at the Seminary Coop, one of the most glorious of Chicago's bookstores.)

This particular Gopnik sentence sings: "What makes Trollope a novelist rather than a polemicist is that, although he is on the side of reform, he is capable of empathetic engagement with its victims." Trollope's quest for reform is very specific to the political conditions of Britain in his lifetime. But the writer's imperative for empathy is universal.

The novel is the art form best suited to plumbing the depths of the human psyche, as it allows for a degree of interiority and exposition that is harder to achieve in other art forms. We are indeed living in a golden age of television, and I will miss Mad Men greatly. Nonetheless we will always need novels.

Ten Years of Blogging

This blog began ten years ago today, with a short post about how living in New York City had spurred too many visits to the movies.  Ten years later, less frequently but still at least once a week, I'm still at it.

Here are some reflections on ten years of blogging.

1. The Original Motivation

In 2004 blogs became central to political discourse, during the Bush vs. Kerry election. This was before the birth of Twitter and when Facebook was in its infancy. "Social media" had not begun its ascendancy, and the smart phones that enabled rapid posting to social media sites did not yet exist. But blogs did exist, and they were hot. This anointing occured in the New York Times Magazine in Sep. 2004, with a feature story about the rise of political blogs. I read that piece intensively. Since I enjoyed writing, blogs (I was always fine with calling them "blogs," preferring that to the fussiness of "web logs") seemed like a natural outlet.

As the second Bush administration was taking shape I decided the least I could do was blog to express my dismay. I landed on Typepad because this is what Scott was already using. And so the blog began.

2. The Early Years

Given the political origin of my blog, at first I aimed to frequently inject my views onto the political scene. This led to some cringeworthy posts, such as my take on the efforts to resuscitate Terri Schiavo (remember her?) from a vegetative state. Today I avoid writing about the meshugas of the moment, but back then I loved to dive in.

This is because the blog, in my eyes, was a new type of newspaper column. At this time there was much fervor about how blogs would end the tyranny of the "mainstream media" (or MSM). With the power of the Web at anyone's fingertips, the news would be democratized. Today I am less current on the state of traditional journalism vis-a-vis newer platforms than I used to be. For a long time I followed this closely, and offered posts about blogs and the future of news (from Oct 2005) and the state of journalism (from Sep 2008).

Slices of life pieces--about New York at first, then the Bay Area, and now Chicagoland--were interspersed with the political screeds and journalistic think pieces. These could be movie or book reviews, or perhaps an account of an interesting day on the town. The other major category was posts about librarianship, which I'll cover in a later section. By now, ten years on, the slices of life are the bread and butter of this blog.

2. Audience Engagement and Comments

The early years--again, before Facebook and Twitter--featured several posts that generated extensive comment and debate. Here is one example. Once Facebook became a distribution platform, the blog posts would feed into Facebook as notes and sometimes generated comments there. Once Facebook added the like feature, and Twitter introduced the concept of tweeting or microblogging, the comments basically dried up. I used to feature the most recent comments in the right panel of the blog, but at this point there are less than 10 comments per year. The blog has become a labor of love more than a spark of conversation.

3. Librarianship

One thread that has remained constant is a concern with the future of librarianship. This has risen and fallen over the years, but has always been present. I was determined not to make this a library-focused blog. But I've periodically contributed to the conversation, and these posts are collected in the "Librarianship" category. Most recently I've expressed my strong support for the Association of College and Research Libraries's new Information Literacy Framework, in a rare contemporary instance of taking sides.

For a while I was very interested in whether blogs could supplant professional journals as the library literature. To wit, I wrote "Why Professional Librarian Journals Should Evolve into Blogs" in Feb 2008. I still agree with these arguments-that blogs would allow faster dissemination of ideas and immediate engagement. But unless there are strong vetting mechanisms within a blog it might become hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. This does not mean that our current peer review practices are perfect. Far from it--they can be bureaucratic and overly conservative. But these implementation defects do not sully peer review as a concept, which is to offer a signal of "what's worth reading" for busy readers. I now think that librarianship-oriented blogs will be continue to supplement the formal literature, but will not replace that literature. After all, something similar has happened with news. Far from watching the MSM tumble, these days very established brands like the Times offer some of the best blogs going.

4. The Sarah Lacy Controversy

In spring 2008, a few months after arguing that librarian journals should evolve into blogs, the one and only controversy to ever erupt on this blog occurred. I published a review of Sarah Lacy's "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" in the San Francisco Chronicle. Lacy deemed the review snarky and sexist, leading to these responses: mine, Lacy's.

It was the kind of thing that felt momentous at the time, and for a while afterwards. Now it feels like ancient history, but if nothing else the blog did get its moment in the spotlight.

5. 2009: Divorce Year

In 2009 Helen and I filed for divorce, something I chronicled extensively here. The blog was my lifeline that year, the venue for personal essays about the most tumultuous time in my life. A central part of my healing process was writing it all out.

6. 2010-Present: Looking Outward

Pi Wen and I met in early 2010, when the divorce was still new but the most intense feelings had passed. We met on Valentine's weekend and immediately learned of how much we had in common. One thing in common was that we had both lived in Evanston, the town we now call home once again. We've made, and are making, a new life together.

The blog no longer serves as a record for all of that. Today you'll see a more mellow person's periodic musings. It's still important to contribute to professional debates, but I'll do that in professional association work or (indeed) in journal articles. As to the political discourse which this blog once aspired to join, I am glad not to take any part in it.

7. The Purpose of the Blog Today

So what's the point now? Perhaps my blog would get more comments if I jazzed it up with videos or used the recommended links that Typepad provides. One of my former colleagues at Samuel Merritt landed a new job by skillfully using his blog in just this way. Meanwhile I march along as though nothing has changed in online norms, relying on my words and very few images.

Clearly, then, my blog is mostly for me--an ongoing diary which I hope others find interesting. This would not have been such a bad motivation from the start.

 

At the Movies: "Birdman" and the Value of Criticism

Last night we saw Birdman, the new Michael Keaton film. Keaton plays Riggan Thompson, a film actor grown famous by playing the "Birdman." The Birdman flies above all of us and moves things with his mind. He's just another in our long litany of superheroes, and Thompson is tired of playing a stock character. So he decides to burnish his artistic credentials staging a play--an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story--on Broadway.

Birdman offers familiar themes of what's popular compared to what's good, and some familiar show biz types like the high strung producer (Zach Galifianakis) and the preening actor (Edward Norton). The reviews have been almost universally positive, which is why Rex Reed stands out for his dyspeptic dissent. Many reviewers note the amazing cinematography of the film, which appears to be one long, glorious take.

I agree with the positive critiques, because I really enjoyed "Birdman." But there is one false note. Lindsay Duncan plays Tabitha Dickinson, the chief theater critic for the New York Times. In the theater district bar where she drafts her reviews (in longhand), Dickinson tells Thompson that she will "destroy his play." She says this before she even sees it; her beef with Thompson is that he is a Hollywood hack now pretending to be a real artist. Near the end of the film, the two--beleaguered actor, villainous critic--engage in a spiteful war of words.

Clearly we are supposed to side with Thompson. Even if it's not a supreme work of art at least he's putting his soul into this play. All Dickinson does is opine from her corner seat at the bar.

That's too easy, almost like cops and robbers. This is why many critics--but not all--have raised their hackles about the exchange between Thompson and Dickinson.

Of course, vituperative and mean-spirited criticism is without value. But anyone who has become the chief critic at the Times would have more perspective. Criticism is about discernment and judgment. Case in point--Rex Reed's harshness about Birdman has a basis, even if I don't agree with it.

When I was growing up Frank Gabrenya was the film critic for the Columbus Dispatch. He was tough, and people found him annoying. But he had his reasons, and he liked what he liked. Critics like Tabitha Dickinson should not exist, and they almost never do.

The Sympathetic Understanding of "Middlemarch"

For this year's "Mission Impossible" book club the Evanston Public Library has selected George Eliot's Middlemarch. "Mission Impossible" books are read over the course of an entire year, with book club meetings  occuring every other month. This approach allows people to read substantial works at a steady but not breakneck pace. I am grateful for this year's selection, as it finally spurred me to read Middlemarch.

Eliot published Middlemarch in 1872. As Arthur Sedgwick observed in his contemporary review, "It would be a mere waste of time to go into a minute criticism of Middlemarch. The plots are too numerous, the characters too multitudinous, and the whole too complicated." This year Rebecca Mead published a book about the effect of Middlemarch on her life, titled My Life in Middlemarch. That's another testament to the scope of the novel, which in the final analysis is about the wonder and disappointments of life itself.

I'll follow Sedgwick's lead and not recount the plot, which is available elsewhere anyway. (And at this point I am only 1/3 of the way finished!) Suffice it to say that the fictional town of Middlemarch, circa 1830, represents small town England on the cusp of major change. In 1832 the Reform Act passed, which changed England's electoral process to reduce the influence of towns like Middlemarch. Medicine, politics and the relations between the sexes were all in flux. Against this social backdrop she creates numerous indelible characters: Dorothea Burke, Tertius Lydgate, Edward Casaubon, Celia Brooke, Fred Vincy, Mary Garth, Will Ladislaw. That's just getting started.

All of these people are particular and universal at the same time. Of course the daily life in 1830 Middlemarch is much different than a typical day in 2014 Evanston. Middlemarch upholds customs and concerns that seem puzzling from this remove. But all of the characters are like people we meet today, and like our very selves. Some are too careless with other people's money, others are too cavalier with their own. Some have more talent than ambition, others more ambition than talent. Religion is a salve but also a vice.

This is us, even though this is them.

The satirist has it easy--it's not hard to skewer human follies without any compassion. Eliot is more than a satirist, she is a perceptive and kind observer of the human comedy. As Rebecca Mead observed in a New Yorker piece about Middlemarch, "She is inveterately magnanimous, even when it comes to her most flawed characters; her default authorial position is one of pity."

This is as it should be. We all deserve, and should offer, sympathetic understanding.

And since Eliot achieved that understanding what more need be said but thank you? Here's Arthur Sedgwick with the close: "In the attempt to play the critic of such works as these, one cannot help feeling that to properly analyze and explain George Eliot, another George Eliot is needed, and that all suggestion can do is to indicate the impossibility of grasping, in even the most comprehensive terms, the variety of her powers. An author whose novels it has really been a liberal education to read, one is more tempted to admire silently than to criticise at all."

Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In

This week I read Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg's influential and controversial 2013 book subtitled "Women, Work, and the Will to Lead."

I'd been wondering if I should blog about it, assuming that my insoluble maleness disqualified me from the right (or perceived right) to comment. So I was casting about for less loaded topics, all the while wanting to write about this one.

Then, on pg. 149, Sandberg recounts a time in which a male executive utilized Sandberg's TED Talk as evidence that women sometimes hold themselves back. Sandberg notes, "If a man had delievered the same message or even gently pointed out that women might be taking actions that limited their options, he would have been pilloried."

Aha, that's what I was worried about! Reading that sentence emboldened me to craft this post.

Sandberg's arguement is that women are caught in a double bind, in which professional success comes at the cost of their likeability at work and their connections with their children and partners. Since women are much more likely than men to work the "second shift" at home as well as their full time jobs, they are caught between competing and impossible imperatives.

Because of their concern about likeability at work, women are less likely to compete for stretch assignments than men. They end up holding back rather than leaning in.

As a manager in libraries almost all of my direct reports have been women. I've observed this holding back in many meetings over many years. On countless occasions people would claim that they will "defer to the will of the group," even though no such will was readily apparent. So then I--the lone man, usually---would try to marshal a consensus, while worrying that I was re-enacting a gender dynamic that was supposedly passe.

I did have a few male direct reports, who would boldly champion their ideas. Sometimes those ideas were good, sometimes they were not. But they were certainly well asserted. I found--on the whole--that I had to rein in the men and encourage the women. Sandberg's numerous anecdotes square very well with my experience.

Is this nature, nurture, or both? (And does the root cause even matter?) Recently Slate has posted some studies by Kieran Synder, demonstrating that men in tech interrupt more than women, and that boys on the playground interrupt more than girls.

Looks like it starts young. When I was a boy being called a girl was an intense playground slur. I thought this was lame, which is why I spoke about independent films with my art teacher (a woman) rather than running around the playground with those sexist boys. I supposed I could have leaned in to more boldly protest their misogyny, but at least I quietly opted out.

For it seemed to me that being a girl had a lot to offer. Boys grew up to go to war, or to die in motorcycle crashes because they refused to wear helmets. Men die earlier than women, although the gap has narrowed. And when a woman dies first her male partner often perishes soon after, a pattern not observed the other way around. Men commit suicide much more than women. Men chomp cigars and belch loudly. This was maleness as I perceived it all those years ago.

In college I learned that men who perform a discrete action, like rescuing people from a burning building, are properly honored. But the caretakers who then tend to the wounded over a period of months or years, who are usually women, receive little or no acknowledgment. The "male way" is flashy and flamboyant, demanding attention. The "female way" is subdued and understated, just getting the job done. I valued the second way more even as I exhibited evidence of the first.

Of course, in most work environments the "male way" is valued. So Sandberg's advice to women is on point. But we cannot forget the larger point. We should build a world in which "masculine" and "feminine" traits--whether they are exhibited by men or women, and in whatever proportion they do so--are equally valued.

Settling In

After 8 days, and countless photo postings to Facebook, we arrived in Evanston late Tuesday night. We live in southeast Evanston, close to Lake Michigan and convenient to public transit.

We beat our furniture and dishes here, so for the next week or so we'll be living in a no-frills apartment. Our wifi/cable will be installed this Saturday, without a TV to connect it with.

These are very minor inconveniences in the grand scheme. We love our neighborhood and it feels great to be back. And thanks to our numerous means of digital connectivity, we're just a keystroke away from our Bay Area friends now and forever. That feels great too.