'I'm Yours'

I learned about this Jason Mraz song from my young daughter.

Say what you want, but I think it's just about the catchiest, most infectious happy-go-lucky song to appear in a long time. Appear? Did it just appear? Or did Mr. Mraz create it?

Enjoy.

Enjoy (an imperative one-word grammatically correct and complete sentence with "you" as the understood subject, as we learned to diagram sentences, at the chalkboard, instructed imperatively and imperially (albeit thoroughly) by the inestimable Mrs. Helen Clarke Rivers in English class in seventh grade, at Burdick Junior High School, in Stamford, Connecticut, circa 1961.

I'm yours.



Merry Christmas, I Say

I wish you a Merry Christmas, and notice that I did not append the word "belated" to the greeting. Why not? It's not late. Despite the mercantile manifestations to the contrary, it is still the Christmas season, liturgically and actually. What do you think those Twelve Days of Christmas are all about? In my palace, the tree (always live) is not permitted to go out to the curb for recycling until Epiphany, traditional Epiphany, January 6. So there.

It Is Written (or is it?)

Scene: Downtown, Montgomery Street, near the Y. About 12:25 p.m. I feed the coins into the solar-powered parking kiosk-thingy. It spits out the parking permit, a little receipt, a ticket, if you will, with the expiration time of 1:10 p.m. This little piece of paper is to be placed on the dashboard. I do so. Driver's side. I close the door. The paper wedges up against the window, in a crevice, making it unreadable, or virtually (why don't we say vicely?) unreadable, hence the danger of a parking ticket, but not the good kind of ticket. I open the door. I fish out the wedged paper and place it again on the dashboard, in a readable position. Take 2. I try to close the door, playing cat and mouse, waiting to see if the wind will swoop it, as if I were a bit player in a Charlie Chaplin movie, oh what the heck, as if I were the befuddled Chaplin himself. Or Harold Lloyd. The small piece of paper goes flying, orbiting above the dash. I pick it up and retrieve it. Is it written by the gods that I cannot or should not park here? Take 3. It not only goes flying but whips around and hides under the passenger seat, as if it has a personality or as if this is a cinematic special effect. I smile, even chuckle. Why get pissed? This is life! Is anything wackier than this? Take 4. I gingerly place it again on the driver's dashboard, pause, stand in front of the door, balancing, shieldng my precious receipt from the wind, waiting, and close the door gently, very softly. It works. Presto.

Book List, Executive Branch Version

Speaking of book lists (see post of a few days ago), Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal column reveals that he and President Bush have had a yearly book-reading contest since New Year's Eve 2005.

And if Rove is to be believed (one would have healthy reason to be skeptical of anything these guys assert) their reading habits are if not prodigious at least substantial. Rove says he outdid the president each year, with Bush logging 95 books to Rove's 110 in the first year.

You can carp and quibble about their choices (more fiction, please; and some potent poetry, too; but, hey, The Stranger, by Albert Camus?!), and you can argue vehemently with their existential conclusions and lament loudly their decisions, but... but.... you've got to applaud the fact of reading.

Why do I say more fiction and more poetry? It's hard to explain, but true literature reveals, illuminates, pierces, shreds, unravels, sanctifies, enlightens, and translates reality in more and deeper ways that nonfiction never can.

Think King Lear. Or Hamlet. Or Julius Caesar. Or Macbeth. Or Richard III.

I stand by my list of 22, though.

A Spy in the House of Ah!

I am sitting at a coffeehouse on the east side. I live on the west side. I grew up in a housing project on the west side (of another city), went to college on the east side (of this city, its environs, actually), lived a short time in an urban east-side neighborhood here. This place is sumptuous, with Craftsman (or is it Arts & Crafts style? is there a difference?) furniture and furnishings. I (typically) go to church on the east side. My spiritual mentors meet weekly on the west side; in fact, West End is emblazoned in their name. I do not speak the east side language, though I can. I do not dress the east side style, though I can fake it (but they would know). I once owned an Audi (used); still, they knew then and would know now. If I were to quote Kierkegaard and Goethe, hum Bach and Berlioz, all while attired from head to toe in Ralph Lauren, underwear too, still they'd know. They'd know I was a west sider; they'd know I was a spy in the House of Ah! (All apologies and kudos to Anais Nin, for one of the best titles ever dreamed, which I have borrowed and adapted.)

p.s. Is it always the same cultural-class split vis-a-vis East and West? Someone once claimed to me it was based on the inconvenience of sun in the eyes of commuters. A cute theory, but not likely. Let's see. Manhattan. Upper East Side, definitely more high-brow. Berlin. West is definitely more upper-crust. So, not much of a theory to go on because I do not have much empirical, or any other kind of, data.

Book 'em: We Are Listing, But Not Listless

In what has become an annual rite, here is my list of books read in 2008, in the order of my having read them. I know the year is not over, but I won't finish Netherland by Joseph O'Neill until sometime in 2009. You are invited to share lists of your own, publicly or privately.

1. The Lay of the Land. Richard Ford. Fiction. I place it in the top ranks of any year. A journey through the modern American landscape, especially the interior landscape of the older American white male. Yes, he has a soul.

2. The Quick of It. Eamon Grennan. Poetry.

3. Born Standing Up. Steve Martin. Autobiography.

4. Returning to Earth. Jim Harrison. Fiction.

5. A Three Dog Life. Abigail Thomas. Memoir. (Yes, Mark Murphy, I would have added a hyphen to the title.)

6. What the Gospels Meant. Garry Wills. Nonfiction. Erudite and excellent. Readable.

7. Three Days to Never. Tim Powers. Fiction. (Powers is one of son's favorites.)

8. Then We Came to the End. Joshua Ferris. Fiction. Bought in paperback at a fine bookstore in Potsdam, Germany. Catch-22 goes to the office. A book about people losing their jobs, the right book at the right time, for me.

9. God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Adam Nicolson. Nonfiction. Scholarly and hugely entertaining.

10. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Kate Di Camillo. Fiction. It can be rewarding to share reading with your children (which is also true for numbers 7 and 3; or with one's spouse, number 5).

11. The Unknown Terrorist. Richard Flanagan. Fiction.

12. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Roddy Doyle. Fiction. Touching, and unbearably sad.

13. The Hidden Assassins. Robert Wilson. Fiction.

14. Once Upon a Fastball. Bob Mitchell. Fiction. Rewarding.

15. After Dark. Haruki Murakami. Fiction. Murakami. What else to say? (Read first by my daughter, who has become a fan.)

16. Skin Deep. E.M. Crane. Fiction.

17. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini. Nonfiction.

18. A Step From Death. Larry Woiwode. Memoir.

19. One Good Turn. Kate Atkinson. Fiction.

20. Supreme Courtship. Christopher Buckley. Fiction. I met his dad, William F. Buckley Jr., when "Christo" was around 12, at his home. He surely does not remember.

21. What Jesus Meant. Garry Wills. Again, Wills is so great. Unconventional and intelligent.

22. Holidays on Ice. David Sedaris. Fiction (some say nonfiction, but depends on the piece). Fresh after seeing him and meeting him at the Landmark Theatre, Syracuse. My kind of humor, for the most part.

Vision Fission Fusion

The other day, my Zen Calendar had this quotation:

"As a man is, so he sees." -- William Blake

I dare say, au contraire:

As a man sees, so he is.

It's odd that a zen calendar wouldn't see things that way, the latter way. After all, see the whole universe in one drop of dew on a blade of grass. That sort of thing. I remember a line in one of John Updike's Rabbit books, Rabbit Is Rich, I believe, something like, "When you feel better you see better." That too. Or vice versa. It might all sound counterintuitive, but it's the same thing as: "You can act yourself into a new way of thinking." When I first heard that, I thought they were crazy, but it has turned out to be empirically true for me and many others.