Thoughts while driving from Dallas to Austin:

Texans aren’t used to driving in snow or on ice and are dangerous when they try to do so. They drive either too fast or too slow. They don’t clear their cars of snow. They don’t turn their lights on in the dark or fog.

Half the AM radio stations broadcast Rush Limbaugh. A quarter of the other are religious talk. And the last quarter are sports talk.

Two anti-Obama billboards, one of a smiling George W. Bush with the tag, “Do You Miss Me Yet?”, and the other of Obama with the tag, “Socialist By Conduct.” Two other billboards simply American flags, though in context the implication seems clear.

The only NPR FM station is classical music.

Wherever you are, you don’t have to go very far to get liquor or beer. Maybe a bit further to get wine.

Texans consider 40° to be “cold.” They don’t seem to be much concerned about the wind chill factor.

There are only two rest areas (restrooms and picnic tables), but there are four picnic areas (no restrooms).

There are very few in the media who speak with a Texas accent. There are very few in restaurants or gas stations who don’t.

Bone Daddy's

I suppose the restaurant’s name – Bone Daddy’s – should have been a clue. But I didn’t think anything about it when the clerk at the north Dallas hotel recommended it after I asked him if there was a nearby barbecue place. What he didn’t tell me was that Bone Daddy’s is a local chain (there are apparently three in Texas) that’s essentially a Hooters with a Texas roadhouse theme. The twenty-something all-female staff are dressed in what look to be painfully tight short-shorts and equally tight tank tops that zip down the front to provide ample cleavage for the viewing pleasure of the all-male clientele. I guess I’m supposed to be titillated (so to speak) by such garb. But I’ve reached an age where my response is less arousal and more do their parents (or grandparents) know where they’re working. Exploitation and quasi-prostitution are not things that sit easily with me. Yet my discomfort was complicated when I got my food – beef brisket, baked beans, mac and cheese – and it turned out to be good, almost very good. Good enough that if I had the chance to eat there again, I just might have to do it. It’s difficult when principle conflicts with barbecue.

Art and Teaching

Here’s a piece of advice (and it’s free!) for want-to-be artists (plastic, literary, music, theater, all): Don’t go into teaching. If possible, don’t go to school. You might be able to get by going to school, depending on the school, but if you do, you run the risk of being lured into teaching. And teaching will kill you as an artist. I speak from experience, personal and observational. You go to school. You express an interest in an art. You’re encouraged and praised, based on your modest efforts (“Oh, how witty . . .” or provocative, or challenging, or beguiling, or what-the-shit); your teachers have little reason to squelch your creative urges and every reason to push you further into the academic gyre – graduate school and then teaching. But you can’t make a living from your art, can you? What about teaching? After all, you have the experience from your teaching as a graduate student. So . . . And then you become a teacher. And you can’t be a teacher and an artist at the same time. I’ve seen it a few times. But for every one time I’ve seen a teacher who has become a successful artist, I’ve seen a hundred want-to-be-artist teachers who are not artists. Teaching diverts. Particularly good teaching. If you aspire to art, focus on art. And if you need to make a living, avoid teaching. Wait tables. Or collect trash. (I’m not being flip.)

Chatting With Ellie

One of the great pleasures of computer technologies for the past three years for us has been video conferencing through Skype. Our granddaughter, Ellie, lives 1000 miles away, and we’ve been lucky to visit her at least once a year there, and she’s visited us twice in three years. But we’ve also been able to visit her almost weekly via video conferencing.

For the first year, it was mostly just us watching her sit in her chair or on her mother’s lap, with her occasionally acknowledging some visual movement or color or sound, though mostly just bobbing around and squirming. But over the past couple of years, she’s acquired speech, she recognizes us by name, we sing with her (“Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Twinkle Twinkle,” “ABC,” and the like (I’m looking forward soon to teaching her “Born To Run”)), and read along with her.

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Of course, it would be so much better to live just down the street or around the corner, as we did with our grandparents. But that not being an option when there isn’t a home not to go home to, these technological visits are a poor but welcomed and pleasurable substitute.

Top photo: 5 months, intrigued with grandpa waving with his bandaged hand (surgery).

Bottom photo: 38 months, in one of her princess dresses (Jasmine), reading with her mother, applying lip-balm.

A New Toilet Seat

I wish I’d invited an audience this afternoon into our upstairs bathroom to watch me install a new toilet seat. I actually was able to do it, and with only a minimum amount of hassle, pain, and cursing (almost none). There was a sense of pride afterward, standing above my work, taking a pee. Truth be told – though this is widely known in the narrow circles I travel – I am not a “handyman” (a sexist term, I realize, but not being one, I don’t know what the accepted alternative is). Changing a light bulb – particularly those new, green, squiggly “energy smart” light bulbs – is about the limit of my contribution to home improvement projects. And even then, I’ve burnt out at least two of those bulbs (which are supposed to last five years) in less than three months. So you might imagine my sense of accomplishment in actually wielding a wrench such that the new toilet seat was installed apparently correctly and without breakage. The removal of the aged seat was the most difficult part, if only because I had to get down on the floor, with the handicap of a bad knee, and try to hunch over enough to see up to the bolts under the toilet to loosen them. But after not really that much effort (a surprise of no small degree), they were indeed freed. And the genius engineers who designed the new seat had replaced the old metal bolts with plastic ribbed bolts that I could tighten with my fingers from above, not a wrench, and so didn’t have to struggle back down to the floor and the pain of my bad knee. I’m thinking now of maybe an addition onto the kitchen. . . .

Football: TV's Pastime

I was watching two NFL games this afternoon on TV, the Vikings-Lions on FOX Sports and the Chiefs-Raiders on CBS. As is my wont (I’m a casual fan, with no particular allegiance to any team) I would click the Recall button on the remote whenever the game I was watching went to commercial. It didn’t take me long to experience something I’ve noticed more this season than I have in the past: At least half the time, when I left one game that had gone to commercial, I found that the other game was also in commercial. This struck me as odd, assuming a random pattern of commercial breaks, supposedly determined by the natural stoppage of action. But on reflection, football is, perhaps more so than any other sport, ideally suited for commercial interruption. The plays are brief. There are regular changes of possession. And there are in the rules allowance for “official” (originally “TV”) time outs and the “two-minute warning.” Several times during any one game, it’s not uncommon to go to a commercial following a score, come back for the kick-off, and then go immediately to another commercial following the kick return. Truth is, the commercial breaks are indeed random, but that roughly half of the time of any football game is taken up with advertising, which is why you get the roughly 50% clicking from commercial to commercial, rather than commercial to game.

Common thinking over the past twenty or thirty years is that football overcame baseball as our national pastime because there is more “action,” or more continuous action in football, and therefore more suited to our contemporary fast-paced, short-attention-span culture.* But the truth is that that’s not true. According to two studies done by The Wall Street Journal last year, one about football, the second about baseball, baseball actually has a bit more action (pitch to end of play) than football (snap to end of play):

What football broadcasts do is analyze over replays rather than analyze over “standing around” between the action, thereby creating an illusion of “continuous action,” further enhanced by the many commercials interspersed between brief series of play. If you’re sitting in a stadium at a football game, you certainly don’t get the same sense of continuous action that those watching on TV get (although in recent years, most stadiums have added instant replays and commercial breaks on their JumboTrons in order to provide that in-home TV experience for those who spend hundreds of dollars per game on tickets, parking, and food).

No, football didn’t overtake baseball as America’s pastime because of action. If that were the criterion, the most popular sports would be soccer (by rule, continuous action) and golf (always several people making shots). Football became the most popular American sport because sport is primarily TV programming, and broadcasters have made it the sport most amenable to commercial TV. Football first became TV’s pastime, then America’s.

*An argument could be made, though isn’t loudly by many, that football’s popularity is due to its violent nature being suited to our violent culture, and I wouldn’t argue against that being a factor in the phenomenon. It certainly helps explain the rise in popularity of NASCAR and mixed martial arts (though both of these are also well-made for commercial TV).

Retirement Reading List

The most positive part of my retirement has been the freedom to read what I will beyond the demands of the classroom. Since mid-May, the effective beginning of my semi-retirement, I’ve read the following books (plus a few more that I can’t recall right now), roughly in the order I read them (which is random):

Terry Eachout, Pops
Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. . . .
John Heilemann and Mark Helperin, Game Change
Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Eula Bliss, Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays
Dave Barry, I’ll Mature When I’m Dead
Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking
Simon Winchester, ed., The Best American Travel Writing 2009
Stefan Klein, Leonardo’s Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw
Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life
Christopher Hitchens, ed., The Best American Essays 2010
Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates
Tom Grimes, Mentor: A Memoir
Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good For You
Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing
Keith Richards, Life
Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne
Holly Hughes, The Best Food Writing 2010

It’s no surprise that all of these books are nonfiction. That’s been my primary professional interest for 30 years. Plus I have a hard time getting into the imagined characters and worlds of fiction when there are just as engaging and enlightening characters and worlds in nonfiction. I suppose I’d be a more rounded reader if I were to spend at least a little time with fiction (not to mention poetry or drama), and perhaps I should make a New Year’s resolution to do so. But I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what happens. And that’s another positive of retirement, the freedom to go where whim demands.