Tanglewood

In the center of the idea of civilization, is the sanctuary of the imagination and what it makes.
Perhaps there really is no sanctuary, but a place for the making, the practice and its pain.
Nothing safe in art, but without it we are nothing. Not human anymore. The truth of the brain and it's non-stop question-thirst, formula-finding, math-mechanism is coincident with the boiling point of creativity. After twisting wires, cranking tight the circuitry, there is a point at which we flip the switch and come alive.
I'm not arguing that a creative life is as important as a career in designing and problem-solving, because that argument is a waste of time. Civilization is here to make sure the people are fed, the worst of our fears are held back by the dam of our best efforts, and that we have a critical mass of intelligence to produce the best things we cannot yet see. What we make, and make of this, is our only measure.
It's summer still, though barely.
We planned the trip to Tanglewood, weighing it against the trip to the latest country fair, because if we don't go now, we will have missed it.
The fairs pile on quick, weekend after weekend. Barn yards, beloved food, prize-winning rabbits and elaborately frocked chickens. The cows, brushed and bathed, stand in their stalls waiting for a pat. The colossal horses pull stone boats. We will get to one of the fairs.
I look into the kaleidoscope of the near future.
My Twitter feed flashes with lightning messages from Egypt, rolling in faster than I can read. It looks to me as though the army is prompting chaos to capitalize on it. The attack on the Morsi supporters was calculated, but toward what end, other than the Joker's love of busting apart civilization?
It was the ringing bell that quieted me.
We had gotten out of bed early and made it to the point where we were standing in line for cheap tickets for a rehearsal, less than a movie would cost us.
At Tanglewood, the ringing bell means the concert will begin in a few minutes. The musicians have been warming up; it is time to take your seats.

The day is sunny, the lawn green, the sky blue. The old trees are so, so tall. 

Do these trees grow more or better because of the music? 

This natural laboratory of notes, the breeze coming up the hill, the brains at work all day to find the right time, the right frequency, the vibration that somehow turns the language of sound into a new water we can breathe: how do we make something explosive and beautiful out of silence?

We reached the lawn and found a spot.
"This place was a good idea," I said to myself, thanking Koussevitzky and his co-conspirators.
It was my last thought as the relief of the quiet of my own mind came on strong.
Then they began to play.

Dear Mr. Henry and Mr. Bezos

It's a cool night in August. Lovely and totally unlike what we expect.
Local news lately is violations of the Open Meeting Law and how towns plan to pay for emergency services, like ambulance rides and paramedics. Big news this week everywhere is rich men buying big newspapers: the sales of The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

The Boston Globe is really my first daily. As a horse-crazed kid living in the city, I dutifully spread it out on the floor to study the racing line-up and memorize the names of the jockeys working at Suffolk Downs. I read about the horses first and then turned the pages over, always surprised that anyone would write about anything else.
The Washington Post brings a different kind of affection, for journalism's history, an example to all in the necessity of news coverage to a democracy. The simple things, like finding out the truth.

So I say this to the new owners: my dear sirs, covering local news in a big city requires a lot of reporters.
That's what we've all been watching slide away for the last decade. The Globe started to weaken when it stopped covering Boston's local news. You can't be a daily news magazine and still call yourself a newspaper. You need reporters on the ground covering neighborhoods, local government, local crime, small businesses, schools. Without enough reporters, the corners of the city blur out as the news focus pans back. We take in the wide view of the beautiful city. With luck, this migrates into careful feature and long-form writing. But the loss is never more acute than to the daily readers who live there. When you stop covering their world, they will leave you, and they'll hate to do it because you were their paper.

The thing about rich - seriously rich - people buying these papers is: newspapers need cash to become good again. I firmly believe that we need reporters on the ground, covering meetings that are boring only so long as local governments are functioning well, but immediately become interesting when things go wrong, and not surprisingly, when the reporter stops watching. You have to pay people to cover these properly. Maybe the new owners with the deep pockets will give this some thought. We keep talking about the new paradigm and the fickle web audience -- we need a commitment to news coverage.

By all means, entertain. But if we only give people what they want, what they think they want, we will have to rely completely on our whistle-blowers sacrificing themselves to let us know when our government is betraying our trust. But we shouldn't really trust so much to begin with - we should be watching and reporting, nonstop.  

Mr. Henry, Mr. Bezos bless you for taking an interest and paying for it. But remember, these papers belong first to the people who live in Boston and Washington, D.C., and to everyone who counts on them to get the story. Do them justice.

Breaking

On the night Wendy Davis stood up in the Texas Legislature, I happened to check Twitter just as I was about to try to sleep for a couple hours.
I had been helping my daughter pack for camp and we had to leave before the sun came up.
I never did sleep that night. I watched the last couple hours of the Texas session, switching between the live video feed and Twitter. I periodically checked major news sites to see what they had. It was stunning. I continue to be amazed at the growing spread between who is covering live news and who is not. It almost hurts.
I understand that we are in the midst of a shift.
Used to be, commercials paid for TV, which you could pick up with a set of rabbit ears perched on your TV set in your living room.
Now, I have a TV in a box in the cellar.
I won't pay for cable and I won't live without an Internet connection.
But newspapers and news wire services are supposed to cover news. I work at a newspaper.
I keep my eye on Twitter all night because it will tell me what I need to know.
You can't trust most of what you see, but if something happens, Twitter will set you off asking the right questions in real time.
You can click on those news sites to see what they've got.
Click again.
That happened earlier today when there was an explosion in NYC and my partner was in Manhattan.
Nothing on the news sites. Twitter gave me what I needed to know.
At least one thing social media has taught us is that many humans want to communicate.
A paid news staff is essential to knowing what is going on in government and to putting things in context. Democracy depends on that information.
Some of the major news sites are clearly putting their money into writing. I love that. I also want drop-dead fast coverage. It's what we can have and, to be clear, it's what we want.
Used to be, newspapers would print a special edition just to get the news out fast.
This week a letter came in the mail from my daughter at camp.
"Send me news updates," she said. "I can't be cut off from the world."

On error and risking everything

I have been stuck at home for days with a fierce cold.

Hot & sour soup from the local Chinese restaurant was the best medicine, and a steady stream of episodes of The West Wing. Then, when I could read a little (coffee suddenly brings back the focus), Malcolm Gladwell's new bit in The New Yorker about Albert O. Hirschman and how errors in planning lead to innovation - and the first example: the stunning miscalculations that preceded work on the Hoosac Tunnel. 

Gladwell does a great job of pitching Jeremy Adelman's recent biography of Hirschman, but more than that, he reinvigorated for me the notion of a true thinker. Hirschman was an economist who wrote unashamedly about unpredictable outcomes, and the role of creativity in problem solving. Interdisciplinary thinking is what we call it now, but all great thinkers have been able to draw on a broad body of knowledge and a good gut instinct.  

The other current in Gladwell's piece is his characterization of Hirschman as a man of action - and summing up Hirschman's opinion on the choices of exit or voice in responding to problems within an organization. Leaving, being the choice of exit and voice, staying and contributing your opinion, trying to fix something broken from within. The example given in the essay is school vouchers. Quoting Hirschman 'Those who hold power in the lazy monopoly may actually have an interest in creating some limited opportunities for exit on the part of those whose voice might be uncomfortable." Gladwell's argument is that Hirschman wasn't always afraid of the losing battle, or at least of not knowing whether success would be clear.  

This, from a man who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and in World War II brokered deals with gangsters in brothels to sneak Jews out of Nazi territory. An economist who routinely got his hands dirty, one of his enduring lessons must be: You can't always know if it will be worth the fight, but perhaps it is better to fight. 

 

 

 

The simple answer

Troubles come like the toy surprise in the cereal box. You aren't sure what it is until you pull it out and get a look at it. The car and whatever's inside it. The fridge has lost its luster. The rabbit - what the hell is wrong with the rabbit?
Nothing is wrong with the rabbit tonight - but he gave us a scare. Who knew a bunny could sleep so soundly, or be so pissed off when we woke him?

Every news story feels like an attempt to just get a grip on things. Predictability offers a high rate of return - but it isn't real. The economy is going up and down. Joblessness holds its knife to your throat. The election looming in the dictator state - why do they even have an election there when it's so rigged?
Sensible questions often hang in front of a news story with no place to dock - the dirigible of reason incongruent in the political landscape.

There is a simple answer. For everything.
The Taliban thrives in a power vacuum.
Iran prides itself on the farce of democracy. The American economy rides the rails of a broken growth equation.
Real life is not a policy. You don't have a stake in it.
Getting a grip on things - really - requires that you claw your way through, or swim. Context itself becomes our hope, our music.

Free expression in the age of no privacy

There's rain tonight and a wish. Cool air blows in. Midnight beer. The government violating our privacy is all in the news. To be honest, this was, at one time, more of an outrage. Since the PATRIOT Act, it seems we've lost our taste for protecting our privacy. More than a decade ago, I wrote an op-ed defending librarians as they tried to keep patrons' records from being violated. Now, well, it seems like we don't care so much, as long as our government is catching bad guys.

A government is only as good as the standard to which its citizens hold it.
It seems fairly simple to me. Also, Internet privacy is an oxymoron. I use my private phone to say goodnight to my daughter when I am working two blocks up the street. I use oh-so-insecure-Skype every day to talk to my student in Kabul. We discuss the weather, literature, our families, religion, culture, the Taliban, climate change, and sometimes - poetry.

There are plenty of security threats, foreign and domestic.
We pay for a government to protect us. If we do not keep track of what they are doing, they will abuse their power.

Perhaps most important: If freedom of expression is sacrificed by a creeping self-censorship in the name of some ill-conceived unified feeling of security, we've completely lost at our own game.
If we have no privacy, then please, keep the conversation lively and honest.

Night bloom in the first heatwave

Heat has arrived in the little town and everything keeps it.
Brick, concrete, paved streets - even silence is warm as I step out onto the sidewalk just before midnight.

Something in this town is blooming. Some tree or flowering bush has been triggered by the heat, because suddenly the town is swimming in a sweet perfume.

There is nothing special about this town except for its absolute town-ness. The definition of an American town can be found in the crossword of the streets here. The trees mark the sidewalks with authority. Each building speaks with its own beautiful, old voice. Every molecule of the night air is frosted with the sugar from that unknown flower.

The summer night-town promises a boundless intimacy: everything here is yours.

Late-breaking story

After the newspaper has been put to bed, I go home to a child not yet asleep. Or perhaps she woke up when she heard me come in.
I'm starving. I want a couple of cheese sticks and a glass of cheap wine.
"Read to me," she says. The kid is almost old enough to start going to community college.
"Ok," I say. I bring the wine, the cheese sticks and she hands me a self-help book for women, a 200-page pep talk on how to be smart and happy. The BBC's fast chatter on blood-soaked coups and soccer scores bubbles nonstop from her radio.
"Get in my bed and read to me."
The kid is as tall as I am.
I'll read to her until the world ends and we fall asleep.

The news editor apologizes

It’s late, you know, and I can’t tell any more what they think. The readers.

 Because I’ve been staring all night at the horror-pitch of the tornado’s sweep.
 All that is left implying what is gone.

I look, tweak, present the flesh of the page and the raw of it to the readers with their breakfast.
Here is your news. A terrible thing has happened.

The truth of it is: the twisted metal in the tree and the child in the woman’s arms – they were all I could see all night. The weight of that big child and the simple pleasure: this one is alive.

Wind bent the metal around the giant branches of the only tree standing — the way an artist would — duplicating the massive curve of the trunk; the tree’s inertia meeting and matching the wind’s blind force.
I love the tree for this defiance.

The truth of it is: we never know the whole story; we should always try.
And, I am sorry – for wanting them to see it all,
because I truly think that if we are human, we must at least witness this life.

The rabbit and the Arduino

The man returned to the city to make robots tonight, and I’m left with the rabbit and the Arduino. The rabbit is a live rabbit and unpredictable. The electronics do exactly what you tell them to do. The best education encourages invention, in every discipline. My own education follows this impulse and this thirst.  Language is key; now I want to learn to talk to machines. It is likely, however, that I will never be able to communicate with the rabbit. I know he likes to be scratched gently and chased from room to room, but he will never do what I tell him to do, and I am grateful for that.

Rabbits are good for being rabbits, and nothing less.

Pepper in the suit

Daughter grabbed my hand when Pepper had the suit on. It mattered. Like Bubblegum Crisis. It's why she wants to be a biomechanical engineer. It's why she goes to her geometry teacher for extra time after school.