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Wallets

October 25, 2010 - View Single Entry

This got dropped from "The Spy I'll Never Be" (see entry for October 24), but it helped me get to where I was going. Maybe it'll eventually stand on its own, or become part of something else.

Belief, absolute belief, unquestioning belief.  Letting someone else pull your strings, giving yourself into the control of a puppeteer -- maybe not a fate worse than death but it still seems very scary and Not a Good Idea.

Like getting married if you're a woman and marriage is the traditional man + woman = man kind. Putting your wallet in someone else's pocket. Putting your wallet in a total stranger's pocket isn't a good idea, but putting your wallet in the pocket of someone you trust often isn't either. What philosopher said that the one thing we aren't free to do is sell ourselves into slavery? In other words: to abdicate responsibility for our actions. If slavery of one kind or another is the only alternative to starvation or some other form of death, then you're not really free to choose, are you?

Being the person who's got other people's wallets in her/his pocket -- that has consequences too. You start to think you deserve it, that it's because of your self-evident superiority that everyone's entrusting you with their wallets. And there's something wrong with anyone who wants to keep hold of her own wallet.

Aha. Now I'm beginning to get it. Part of me envies anyone who believes so deeply that she will sacrifice whatever self-determination she's got in order to put her wallet in the pocket of a person, a country, a religion, a cause. Part of me thinks such people are gullible, self-deluding, or not too bright. Or scared. Scared is an odd word to use about a guy who day after day after day risked exposure, disgrace, and long imprisonment to spy for the Soviet Union. Or about people whose belief is so steadfast that they'll strap explosives to their bodies to win a skirmish for the cause, or refuse to give in or shut up when the likely price is gruesome death or mutilation.

My mind boggles trying to understand this, yet at the same time I know people think I'm brave for things that don't seem unusual to me. My hunch is that at the moment we do something brave, or foolhardy, that thing seems normal, inevitable, not brave at all. Everyone around us expects us to do it. We've done it every day for a year and nothing bad has happened. Whatever, our choices have led us to this particular hurdle so we take a flying leap. Even if the leap is off a precipice, and the ground is far below and strewn with jagged rocks. Or the leap off the precipice seems preferable to one more tedious day of putting one foot in front of the other. If the leap lands you in an afterlife of milk, honey, and whatever your heart desires, so much the better.

Is this about living in the real world, and making your own meaning one day at a time?

The Spy I'll Never Be

October 24, 2010 - View Single Entry

Often I don't know what I'm writing about till I've finished a first draft. Fine. I can live with that. I better be able to live with that, because it happens all the time. With this piece I thought I knew what I was writing about, but I was wrong. I thrashed around for weeks before I figured that out -- the thrashing was mostly subconscious, and its external manifestation looked like writer's block. First I thought I was writing about spies. When the digression into my religious upbringing appeared, I thought I was writing about belief. Separate piece, I thought, and took it out. Then I put it back. For days the thing was such a muddle I couldn't bear to look at it.

For several weeks I had nothing to show my Sunday night writers' group. I even thought of dropping out. This was ridiculous. I set myself a deadline -- you will finish the Philby piece in time for tonight's meeting -- and spent most of the day working on it. The thing jelled. Now I see that I'm writing about the writer as spy and double agent. Wow. The title hasn't quite caught up with the piece -- or maybe it's just evidence of my own double-agentry? Time will tell. Yes, this is part of To Be Rather Than to Seem.

"Kim Philby, hero extraordinaire" it says on my high school yearbook page; the comment was contributed by a tongue-in-cheeky classmate who knew how intrigued I was with the Philby case. Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union in early 1963, after a long and successful career as a Soviet spy in the upper levels of British intelligence (MI6). My self-directed study of the Arab world spawned bilious contempt for the British Empire, and respect for anyone who thumbed his nose at it, but Kim Philby was never my hero. Thumbing your nose at the Brits was one thing, but going over to the USSR? The bloom was off the Soviet rose long before I was born. The main attraction of the Soviet Union was the loathing it inspired in people I couldn't stand.

Kim Philby fascinated me, though, and I wasn't alone. In the wake of his defection, while I was in high school, plenty of people were writing about his secret life and times. How could such a highly placed and deeply trusted insider have turned out to be so duplicitous for so long and with such success? I read all the books and articles about him that I could get my hands on.

As a teenage Arabist, I had already made the acquaintance of Kim's father, Harry St. John Bridger Philby. Like his only son, the senior Philby was an intelligence officer, in the British Colonial Office. He was stationed in India, and that's where Kim was born and how he came to be nicknamed after the eponymous protagonist of Rudyard Kipling's novel. (Kim's given name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby.) A longtime adviser to Ibn Saud and only the second Westerner ever to cross the Rub al-Khali desert, St. John Philby wrote several books about Arabia. Like his son after him, the senior Philby was highly critical of his own government, but unlike his son he never made a secret of it. Thus he left the Crown's service and threw in his lot with Ibn Saud, who by then had created and made himself king of Saudi Arabia, then a very poor country of dubious prospects. St. John played a key role in making sure that the coveted Saudi oil concession went to Standard Oil of California instead of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Nyah, nyah, I thought; it served the British right for all their double dealing during World War I and at the Versailles peace conference, which (I was convinced at the time) was responsible for 85% of the mess the Middle East was in -- most of the rest I blamed on the French.

But Wahhabism, the ultra-fundamentalist Islam of the Saudis, was no more attractive to me than the Soviet Communism of Stalin and his successors. Neither Philby held my interest much past high school. The Englishman who did, and does to this day, was T. E. Lawrence, whose activity in the Middle East overlapped St. John Philby's for several years. Finding his own country wanting, each Philby embraced another. Lawrence found himself immersed in another world before he was estranged from his own. By his own account the experience left him unfit for either one, and he retired from the world stage to the nuts-and-bolts life of an airman in the Royal Air Force. His life and mine could hardly be more different, but in his dilemma I find echoes of, and insights into, my own.

On my yearbook page, having achieved the lofty status of a high school senior, I gave my advice to posterity: "Get your facts right, then always go through to the end with whatever you think is right, no matter what it is." The words were from St. John Philby. Looking back, I can't help noticing that the more facts I gather, the less sure I am of what is right and the more reasons I can come up with for not committing myself to any particular side. The Philbys, father and son, apparently did not have that problem. Lawrence quite probably did.

In high school, though, I longed for certainties. I wanted to believe in something enough to devote my life to it or risk my life for it. But what? My father was a Democrat, my mother a Republican. This did mean that sweeping anti-parental rebellion was out of the question and I had to think at least a little bit for myself; furthermore, if I wanted to get into political discussions with my father -- which of course I did -- I'd better damn well get my facts right or he'd make hash of my arguments. But though I took electoral politics seriously, I didn't get involved in any campaigns. At sixteen, I was a little too young to "come clean for Gene" McCarthy, and tumultuous 1968 felled hero after hero, hope after hope. I'm wary by nature, and that year didn't make me bolder.

Religion didn't offer much promise either. My family belonged to St. Peter's Episcopal Church in my hometown, and we went to church every Sunday, but I can't say I was ever a believer, or wanted to be a believer, or even knew what a believer was. Religion was what we did on Sundays. I loved singing in the junior choir, but it only went through eighth grade. In eighth grade young people in my church went to confirmation class. I had to attend confirmation class, said my parents, and after that I could decide for myself whether I wanted to go to church or not.

So at the end of my eighth-grade year I got confirmed, meaning I was now an adult member of the Episcopal Church. What that meant I didn't know. I loved the language of the King James Bible, but I didn't believe what I thought I was supposed to believe. About what I've come to call spirituality I had no inkling at all. I knew many Episcopalians, but I didn't know what was Episcopalian about them. What I did know was that I was now too old for the junior choir, and that had been hands-down what I liked most about church. I stopped going.

Studying the Arab world, I learned a lot about Islam, of course, and was even drawn to it, in large part because its expectations, unlike those of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, seemed clear: this was what you were supposed to believe, this was how you were supposed to pray, and this was when you were supposed to fast. You knew when you were doing it right. The only Muslims I met were the foreign students and the occasional professor or journalist, all men, who joined us at Grandma's Sunday dinner table. I didn't know any of them well enough to wonder how being Muslim affected their day-to-day lives, or whether they actually did all those things they were supposed to do. At Grandma's, the Episcopalians and the Muslims acted pretty much alike.

While growing up I didn't see many people being passionately committed to anything, religious, political, or artistic. They -- we -- had religious, political, and artistic activities, and even convictions, which we might discuss with considerable heat, but this wasn't a world where people ran off to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Freedom Riders, the bohemians in Greenwich Village, the hippies in San Francisco, or even the circus. If they did, they fell off the edge of the world and were never heard from again.

When I ran off to join the antiwar movement, I thought I was just leaving for college. Finally, almost in spite of myself, I was caught up in great events, not just reading about them in books or watching them on TV. I worked alongside men and women who nearly always went through to the end with what they thought was right, including some from the Old Left who'd been doing it since long before I was born. Gradually I discovered that my pick-and-choose mind wasn't comfortable with doctrine, any doctrine. As an antiwar and student government activist, I was flattered when colleagues told me they weren't 100% sure they could count on my vote; I was "too independent," they said.

I liked being "too independent." I also knew it would get me shot if the revolution ever came, so I was less than gung-ho for any ideology that promised, or threatened, apocalyptic change. Kim Philby and his fellow Cambridge University students had been singled out and courted by Soviet agents. I still thought that was cool, but I knew that no one recruiting spies for a foreign power, or agents for the FBI, or even employees for a domestic corporation, would ever recruit me.

Now that I was living in two different worlds, however, I often felt like a secret agent. In D.C. most people I saw on the streets were black; in my hometown they were nearly all white. In D.C. I got around easily on foot and by bus; at home I had to borrow a car. At home, people knew me or at least recognized my name and knew some of my relatives; at college most of us hadn't met even our close friends' siblings and parents. The more deeply involved I became in the antiwar movement and student activism more generally, the more jarring grew the dissonance. People at home got their information about the movement from TV and the newspapers; I got mine from day-to-day experience. What they knew and what I knew weren't the same things. Sometimes the versions were complementary -- they had the overview, I had the particulars -- but other times they were mutually exclusive. Interpreting one world to the other required patience and care that I often couldn't muster.

Leading a double life no longer seemed so exotic, or even all that difficult.

Frost

October 21, 2010 - View Single Entry

Yesterday morning the thermometer read about 37 degrees F when I stepped out on the deck. It was just before 7 a.m.; the sky was light, but the sun wasn't quite up. Our morning walk took us by the West Tisbury School. The ground around the sandy volleyball pit, between the tennis courts and the teachers' parking lot, has been plowed up -- and there was frost, real frost, on the brown earth.

In the afternoon I picked all the cherry tomatoes that were at least half ripe. They're ripening in two cereal bowls near my front window.

This morning it was again under 40 when I looked out the door, but I didn't see any frost on the ground. Travvy and I can see our breath, though.

Time for warmer clothes and heartier meals. I just made Sonora Chicken Casserole for the first time since early May. It's hearty. Chicken, cheese, torn-up corn tortillas, and a mélange of salsa, chili, cream of chicken soup, cream of mushroom soup, milk, and onion. The recipe is writer Pat Murphy's. I learned it from Her Smoke Rose Up from Supper, the second of two cookbooks published almost 20 years ago to raise money for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. The first was The Bakery Men Don't See. Both titles are riffs on Tiptree story titles, "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" and "The Women Men Don't See," respectively. I think it was Terry Garey who said that there's no such thing as a bakery men don't see.

Travvy likes Sonora Chicken Casserole because it involves lots of pots, bowls, and plates, and he gets to pre-wash all of them. I like it because I can eat it five days out of seven and not get sick of it. It's good by itself, and it's good on rice.

When the casserole runs low, then I'll make sausage chili. I never get sick of that either, and it freezes well.

If serious frost holds off a few more days, I may get some more tomatoes. There are still plenty of green ones out there.

Scootering

October 17, 2010 - View Single Entry

Travvy and I have been taking scootering lessons with our friend Carole. You know that scooter that you maybe had as a kid? Dog-powered scooters look like that, but they're sturdier and they have front-pull brakes on front and rear wheels, like a bicycle. Carole has one, and she offered to let us try it out. "Trying it out" has turned into a multi-lesson course. This is good, because no way could I have done this alone, even if I had my own scooter.

This past summer I bought Travvy a pulling harness. Travvy wants you to know that he was not consulted about this. First he knew of it was when a parcel arrived from Black Ice Dog Sledding in Minnesota, then Susanna was standing over him with this tangle of black webbing and gray fleece, trying to get part of it over his head and his forelegs through the right straps. The standard size was too short stem to stern, or neck to tail, so I returned it for a custom-made model with the same neck size but about two inches longer. That one arrived promptly and fit perfectly, but since we were in the midst of a summer of hot-and-humid days, that was as far as we got till September.

After dealing with horse stuff for so long, everything to do with dogs seems cheap. The standard-size, good-quality harness I ordered for Trav cost less than $25. Custom-made is $10 extra. The one-dog tow line was $19.

So cooler weather finally arrived, and Trav and I started practicing two or three times a week with a wheelbarrow tire that currently lacks a wheelbarrow. First Trav needed a lot of coaxing, aka treats, then we went for short walks (10 or 15 minutes) with him pulling his tire. I didn't think he was really getting the hang of pulling, though, of leaning into the harness. Malamutes have been bred to pull for centuries, but I've heard that obedience training can confuse matters: Hey, first you reward me for not pulling, and now I'm supposed to pull? People who do both sledding and obedience with their dogs advise against doing obedience exercises with the dog's harness on: harness means pull, collar means don't pull.

Not to mention, pulling a tire down the driveway and up the dirt road is not exactly thrilling for either Travvy or me.

So yesterday Travvy and I went over to Carole's and met the scooter. Travvy and the scooter got along fine, but the idea that he was supposed to run in front of it and pull was not coming naturally. He would walk alongside me, pulling the scooter with Carole riding on it, but he kept turning around to look at what was following him.

Carole hit on the idea of hitching Walter with Travvy. Walter is her younger Springer spaniel, whose need for vigorous exercise led her to get the scooter in the first place. Jake, her other Springer, and Pip, the 10-pound terrier mix, get their exercise following Carole and Helga, her Fjord pony, through the woods in their carriage. Walter is less trustworthy on such expeditions: he takes his own trail and comes back when he feels like it. So the opportunity to run had to be combined with some kind of restraint. Travvy is similarly unreliable on the loose, which is why I got the Springer attachment for my bike and why I want to scooter.

We turned all the dogs out in the big fenced-in yard to make sure they all got along; Travvy already knew Jake and Pip, but he hadn't met Walter. They had a great time chasing each other around, so we took the two of them down the driveway to the short side road and hitched them up together. This didn't work as well as we'd hoped, because Travvy was more interested in sniffing the bushes and Walter was having to pull him as well as the scooter.

Walter went back to join his buddies, and Carole returned with a bicycle. Aha, brilliant! Put Travvy's prey drive to work! Following me on the bicycle wasn't quite as exciting as chasing the UPS truck down Halcyon Way, but it worked. We went up the side road to where it dead-ends at the woods, then back to where we started, then we made another round-trip. Travvy was finally beginning to get what was expected, so we decided to quit for the day and have another lesson in the morning.

This time we used Trav's Springering harness, which has a "girth" around the belly to keep it in place; the x-back doesn't, and until Travvy learns to keep the tow line tight, the harness tends to bunch up or slip sideways, and he could conceivably figure out how to back out of it. I also brought along his Kong Wubba, his favorite tug toy, which has a full-bodied squeak. I rode the bicycle, squeaking the Kong Wubba, and Travvy trotted after me. He was pulling the scooter -- the line was tight!

After a few rounds of that, it was time to see if he'd follow someone else, so Carole rode the bicycle and I rode the scooter. Travvy kept pulling. It was so cool! With that we quit for the day, unhitched Travvy, and let the dogs run around in the yard. Our next lesson is tomorrow afternoon. Our goal is to get to the point where Travvy and I can do it alone without a helper.

Click On!

October 13, 2010 - View Single Entry

A funny thing happened when I went to Amazon.com late last night to order a copy of Morgan Spector's Clicker Training for Obedience. Actually that's pretty funny by itself: until this fall I had zero interest in what dog people call "traditional obedience," to distinguish it from Rally obedience, which is what Travvy and I are having such a good time with. Traditional obedience is more exacting and more persnickety. It frowns at comedy, which is what most malamutes excel at. (Like Travvy demonstrating his athletic ability by jumping the ring gate in search of a stuffie.) Obedience people dress better than I do. And so on.

In addition, at one of the Cape Cod shows last month, I watched a Dalmatian break a sit-stay during a Novice class (when handlers remain in the ring within sight of their dogs but about a dozen feet away from them) and go after a Weimaraner. Thanks to instantaneous action by a steward, no physical harm was done, but I've heard plenty of stories about similar incidents that ended with a dog injured and/or afraid to go into the ring. At Open and Utility levels, the stays are as long as five minutes, with the handlers out of the dogs' sight. Five minutes sitting or lying still in a ring with three or four other dogs and only the judge for human company? My imagination boggles and shuts down at the prospect.

If another dog went after Travvy, he would most likely rise to the challenge. He might go after another dog, which in my book would be worse. Traditional obedience? Not for us, thanks.

As we develop our Rally skills, though, and begin to think about moving on to Excellent level -- at which dog and handler do the course off-leash with another dog, leashed, and handler in the ring -- precision and predictability assume an ever larger importance. Techniques from Morgan Spector's book, which came out in the late 1990s, are quoted in two of my favorite books, Pam Dennison's Click Your Way to Rally Success and Jane Killion's When Pigs Fly: Training Success with Impossible Dogs. They've worked for me. The whole book might be just as useful. I went online to buy myself a copy.

Clicker Training for Obedience was safely stowed in my virtual cart when it occurred to me that I still hadn't acquired a copy of the brand-new 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. I started using Chicago when it was A Manual of Style, 12th edition, and along with the dictionary and Words into Type it's one of my most-used reference books. I've been putting off buying it, however, because it brings out the worst in many copyeditors: they treat it like the arrival of the Ten Commandments and obsess about rinky-dink changes like whether the possessive of Xerxes should have an s after the apostrophe: Xerxes' or Xerxes's?

This is where copyeditors and writers tend to part company, and when the pack of us comes to the crossroads I'll go with the writers 95% of the time.

But Amazon.com has a good price ($40 and change for a hardcover that lists for $65), and of course I was going to buy Chicago 16 in time to get it on my Schedule C for 2010, so why not now? Into the cart it went.

When shopping online, I barely notice the friendly suggestions that retailers provide: Customers who bought XXX also bought YYY and If you like AAA, you might be interested in BBB. But one of the friendly suggestions was for Carol Saller's The Subversive Copyeditor, which I've heard enthusiastically recommended and was already thinking of buying. (A big attraction was the title. Too many copyeditors are rules-following drones who see no connection between their mindless obedience to Chicago and sundry other authorities and the just-following-orders mentality that is still wreaking terrible havoc in the world. Copyeditordom could use a lot more subversives.) With one click I added it to my cart. My cursor hovered over "Go to Checkout."

But what to my wandering eye should appear? Another friendly suggestion, this time for Scott Norton's Developmental Editing. This book, too, had been heartily recommended. I'm working on a developmental edit right now, and there are times when I'm so thoroughly sick of copyediting and copyeditors that I'd apply for work at a McDonald's if only there were one on Martha's Vineyard. Click! Into the cart with you!

Who am I to be teaching Travvy about impulse control? My ability to "leave it!" and "on by" does not inspire confidence.

But I made it to checkout, where I learned that in the process of buying a $20 book on dog training I had managed to drop an additional $86 on books about editing. The good news was that the total qualified me for free shipping, so I got out of there for $100.

Now I'm thinking that what the world really needs is a book called Clicker Training for Copyeditors, and I'm just the one to write it. Trouble is, it'll need illustrations and I can't draw for shit. If you can and you want to play, click here.