Tag Archives: Essay

Probing for the Empathy Bone

This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on August 9, 2018.

One of the questions famous authors are often asked is, “Why do you write?” I’m not a famous author, so no one has ever asked me that, but I’ve thought about it for myself. I write to think things through, to find a new perspective, to discover a way of seeing that I hadn’t considered before.

And though I write primarily for myself, I also want to share my writing in the hope of touching readers in a way that stays with them — that, in some tiny way, perhaps, changes them.

But can it? Will it? Lately, I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing far more than I’ve been writing.

If you follow this column at all, you may know that, in January, I labeled this my Year of Writing, and I anticipated relating a year’s worth of the ups and downs of drafting a novel.

My novel-in-progress is about another fraught era in American history, this one at the turn of the 20th century, told through the experiences of one family in Washington, DC. It highlights a series of historical events that, in my view, offers a chillingly on-point parallel to some of the havoc of our current times.

But I find myself in the classic writing low spot of wondering, “What’s the point?”

Instead of writing during these last six weeks since my friend, journalist John McNamara, was murdered in Annapolis, MD, I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy — or, for fans of Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, an alternative that he calls “rational compassion.”

Certainly, as a writer, I feel that an enhanced sense of empathy is crucial to developing believable characters, or, in nonfiction, to representing other people in a humane, nuanced way.

On January 20, 2017 — perhaps you remember that day — I posted a blog entry, “Toward Compassion,” which was all about the relative value of empathy. As I said there, “I’m one of those people who believes that a lack of empathy leads us to parochial and isolationist views of the world, an us-against-them mentality that rarely leads to positive outcomes.”

But my recent meditation is whether people who seem to lack empathy can actually learn to feel it. Is there an empathy bone that some people have and others don’t? Or is it more like a muscle that just needs to be isolated and exercised to get into shape?

Is there anything I could ever write that would lead someone to begin to feel a sense of empathy, especially for a character — or a real person — who doesn’t look, act, and think exactly as they do?

Along with many others, I spent much of last month considering, for example, the contrast in empathy exhibited around two recent events that unfolded in parallel, one in a flooded cave in Thailand and the other at the U.S.-Mexico border. Much ink has been spilled in that comparison; was anyone swayed?

So I continue to wonder, particularly in our entrenched us-against-them political moment: Can an author’s words really change anything?

Writer Joyce Winslow, for one, is giving it a shot. She was, for two years, commentary editor for the nonpartisan, nonprofit Rand Corporation, and currently works with private clients, having helped 60 in the past two years achieve publication in top-tier papers.

Winslow teaches a popular class at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, called “Writing OP-EDs to Make a Political Difference,” in which she guides her students in understanding what it takes to write successful opinion pieces for local and national news outlets.

Much like classic debate prep, she urges her students to consider the opposing viewpoint, underpin their work with credible research, use tools of persuasion rather than passion, and dismantle opposing arguments without rancor.

Winslow teaches that true persuasion — the possibility of influencing or changing another’s position — demands fully understanding the opposing viewpoints and exercising a level of tolerance and respect that disarms a defensive reaction.

Speaking of disarming: I was thinking about empathy very specifically this Saturday, as I watched Marjory Stoneman Douglas parent Manuel Oliver create a beautiful mural in honor of his son Joaquin’s 18th birthday, while a small but vocal group shouted bullhorn-amplified slogans at him from across the barricades.

I wondered at the impulse of armed individuals to taunt, hector, and shout invective at a man whose son was murdered in a hail of gunfire at school just six months ago.

Is the empathy bone missing, or has the muscle simply atrophied?

At the time, I was wearing a picture of my murdered friend, John, pinned to my shirt and standing with his widow — that word alone delivers a fresh gut-punch each time — and the endless taunting felt like its own physical assault.

Maybe that was the point. Perhaps they weren’t out to change our minds, just to torture us a little more.

On our side of the barrier, the overarching message was simple and direct: Vote. That is the drumbeat sounded by both the March for Our Lives/Road to Change that sprang from the MSD massacre, and the March on the NRA that sprang from many others. It’s the same take-away I had when I wrote about the way to honor the victims of the Capital Gazette massacre. Participating in a protest is great for messaging, but voting is what makes the change.

There are many things that I will remember from Saturday’s march, but here are two: There were hundreds of sunflowers, as many as the organizers could find, because sunflowers were the last thing that “Guac” Oliver bought before he was murdered, to give to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day.

And, though the MSD march veterans chanted “Don’t engage” for us newbies as the counter-demonstrators started to get under our skin, they themselves have made an art of engaging. As the rally wound down, several of the kids took bouquets of sunflowers to the other side of the barricades and began to speak quietly with some of the NRA participants, respectfully engaging them in conversation and attempting to find common ground.

I don’t know whether it will make a difference, but it is certainly worth the effort to try. And to keep trying.

I guess I have my answer.

Requiem

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on July 5, 2018.

I have no memory of a time when I didn’t know John McNamara. I was eighteen months old to his two and half years when my family moved into our little Cape Cod whose backyard touched catty-corner with his. He and his siblings went to Catholic school while my brother and I went to the public school across the street, but we spent virtually every day of our summers together as we grew up.

In about 1971, which would make me nine and John ten, a handful of us — including my brother Chris, John’s brother Tom, and our friend Thomas — decided to put out a newspaper. Hanging out on our screened porch, we wrote copy by hand and typed it up on an old manual typewriter; copies were made using carbon paper. We put out a few issues by the end of the summer. So John started in journalism even earlier than you may have heard.

Of John, I can truly say that we have been lifelong friends.

(The photo above shows him at an early 90s Halloween party dressed as Fred Flintstone, something for his young colleagues he would term an OCR: “obscure cultural reference.”)

He and his wife, Andrea, celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary in May, and I don’t know another two people who are a better match for each other. As Andrea recently said, their biggest argument was about which of them was the luckier to have the other. He was set to celebrate his 57th birthday at the end of this month.

Though John was unabashedly a sports guy, I can’t think of a single subject we ever talked about on which he didn’t have an informed perspective. He was a citizen of the world: knowledgeable, engaged, intellectually curious.

The last time I talked to him — Saturday, a week ago practically to the minute as I write this, at my nephew’s engagement party — we were discussing the upcoming Tuesday primaries and the endorsements his paper’s editorial staff had made. I live in Anne Arundel County, and the Annapolis paper that John wrote for, the Capital Gazette, addressed local races and candidates that matter to me.

In attempting to hold up my end of the democratic bargain of being part of an informed citizenry, I fully appreciate how lucky I am to still have a functioning local newspaper that actually covers those races.

The last time I talked to John was also five days before he and four of his colleagues were shot to death while simply trying to do their job to get that daily local paper out.

In the scant 48 hours since we learned the worst, when I manage to drag myself away from obsessively searching for and reading or watching everything I can find that mentions John, I wonder at how he and his colleagues arrived — through these most horrific circumstances — at the confluence of so many of the hot-button issues of our current moment in the American story.

I will set aside for this moment the hottest of the hot-button issues — gun violence, the one category in which the United States can claim unrivaled, zero-competition primacy — though I have always wondered at the insistence we have on calling each new mass shooting a “tragedy,” when the correct word is “massacre.”

I will even leave aside the president’s savagery of the mainstream news media, and the increasing threats of physical violence that many journalists report receiving, though I will point you to Katy Tur’s descriptions in her book Unbelieveable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History of the then-candidate whipping his crowds into “cheering about the idea of killing journalists,” a la Vladimir Putin.

Instead, in tribute to John, my focus is on the crucial, unique role that local newspapers play in maintaining our democratic process.

In his latest book, Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News, Bob Schieffer notes in alarm the dwindling number of small city papers, the ones we have traditionally counted on to keep an eye on our state and local elected officials. Perhaps even more concerning are the papers being bought up by wealthy patrons with the intent of driving a specific agenda on and off the editorial page.

It seems less and less that all politics is local, when the politics coming out of the White House and Congress consumes so much of our limited attention span, and as it becomes increasingly difficult for well-intentioned citizens to find non-partisan, fact-based information about the entire slate of candidates we vote for.

And yet, it’s our local officials who typically have the greatest immediate impact on our daily lives, from choices on local policing tactics to the manner in which to enforce federal statutes. We need local papers for their ability to focus our attention on our immediate communities, on which the rest of our world is built.

I joked with John that I subscribed to the Capital primarily to do my part to keep him employed. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a joke. In the 20 years I’ve lived in Anne Arundel County, I’ve watched in alarm as the paper continues to shrink in every figurative and literal way; it’s even printed on smaller sheets of newsprint now.

Through John, I heard the blow-by-blow of the paper’s acquisition by the larger but also struggling Baltimore Sun, and winced at the realization that the acquiring newsroom now got first dibs on the plum assignments, including the sports desk. Still, on his new beat, John continued to tell human stories, as he always had, elegantly and eloquently.

One was of a Crownsville man who, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, crushed his assault rifles with heavy construction equipment and posted the ceremony on YouTube. Another recent story remembered the crowds that gathered in Bowie and elsewhere in Maryland 50 years ago to witness Robert Kennedy’s funeral train as it traveled from New York to Washington, DC.

But John also did his share of reporting on the local political races, his final printed story being on the projected outcome of the Prince George’s County Executive race.

For those of you who have been following the story out of Annapolis of five people who died because they worked for a newspaper, and want to know what you can do to help, here is my best advice on how to honor these people:

Subscribe to the local paper closest to you. Call them on it — in something better than four-letter words — if you find opinion leeching into their news stories, but support them in getting it right.
Do your very best to be an informed, involved, engaged citizen. It is not an easy task, but make a concerted attempt to understand who is running for which offices — county council, sheriff, board of education, judiciary — and what positions they hold on the issues they will be involved in and that you care most about.
Vote. In a democracy, choosing not to vote is never the right choice.

I will always remember John in his element, telling a story with that twinkle in his eyes, gesticulating with an open hand or a pointing finger to further the tale, getting his whole body into the telling of it. As many of his friends have noted, we could count on his dry, observant wit to cut to the heart of any issue with surgical precision. He always made me laugh.

I leave you with this thought, which comes directly from John. In one of his last Facebook posts, on June 10th, he offered this:

To anyone reading this: I cannot urge you strongly enough to see the two documentaries now out featuring Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Mr. Rogers. Seeing these two films will do you some serious good. Both are marvelous and moving. And, in these troubled times, when the forces of darkness seem to have gained the upper hand, it’s nice to be reminded that there is still justice and kindness in the world. You can thank me later…

John, I thank you now, later, and always. Godspeed.

(Read more of John’s most recent stories here. And find out more about the fund has been set up to help the victims’ families here.)

Book Review: The Complete Ballet

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This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on 8 October 2017.

Chances are good that you’ve never read a book quite like The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in FIve Acts, a genre-bending mix of dance criticism and novel/fictional memoir that is unique in concept and execution. It is by turns engaging, illuminating, ridiculous, funny, heart-wrenching, and educational.

Each of the five acts of the subtitle is focused on a famous ballet, the themes of which author John Haskell ties into his running story. The ballets are La Sylphide, Giselle, La Bayadère, Swan Lake, and Petrushka. Not only does Haskell describe the stories the ballets relate, he discusses the history of their creation and famous productions, as well as the outsized personalities who brought them to life.

All the big names are illuminated here: Nureyev, Fonteyn, Baryshnikov, and Sergei Diaghilev, the latter of whom “brought ballet into the twentieth century with the Ballets Russes, which he founded in 1909. Pavlova danced for him and Coco Chanel designed for him and Balanchine choreographed for him.” And he was paired for many years with the legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Where did the author’s own interest in ballet originate? Page one introduces the writing of Arnold Haskell, the renowned ballet critic and force behind the Royal Ballet School. Coincidence? If there’s any relationship, it remains unacknowledged, though it would be interesting to know whether something about the shared last name prompted the idea for this intriguing project.

The unnamed first-person narrator, on the other hand, explains almost immediately that his interest in ballet began when his young daughter fell in love with The Nutcracker, and the two began reading ballet stories together.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that we’re not hearing directly from the author. Repeated references to Arthur Haskell’s writing convey the sense that John Haskell and his narrator are alter-egos:

“Unlike Haskell, I’m not interested in writing a guide to dance. I’m trying to find for myself a version of life that expresses itself like dancing, like the moving body thinking itself into existence.”

In its barest outlines, Ballet’s “story,” set in the L.A. of the 1980s, relates, in bits and pieces, how our hero plunges deeply, desperately into debt to some truly dangerous characters, and where he goes from there. At the time, his life is shambles anyway, though he still seems hopeful enough to be seeking that version of himself and his life that might think or move or will itself into existence.

A case in point is the guy he thinks of as his best friend: Cosmo, a good-time schmoozer who owns a strip club. Though Cosmo is not a great role model, our hero keeps trying to act like him, hoping that it will stick and he’ll become that guy, but no luck. “Although his self-sufficient relaxation was worthy of emulation, when I tried to sit like he sat…I didn’t feel what sitting like him felt like.”

At the same time, the object of his hazy affection is one of the club’s dancers, Rachel, who also happens to be Cosmo’s girlfriend. It’s a classic ballet plot.

The narrator uses the stories of the ballets to echo his own, and to weave in details of his life, though it’s the story from an opera, Rigoletto (inspired by a Victor Hugo play, just as Giselle was inspired by a Hugo poem), of a father’s failed efforts to protect his beloved daughter, where he draws the closest parallel to his own life:

“And I don’t know if I ever had a curse laid on me but I remember watching my daughter, on her blue scooter, scooting along on the sidewalk in front of me, and she was a cautious person but don’t take your eyes off her for an instant, that’s what I told my wife and she told me but all it took was that one time she didn’t stop at the corner, and it was like a curse.”

The entire narrative has that breathless, stream-of-consciousness quality to it, helped along by the fact that, though there are section breaks, there are no paragraph breaks. In relating his story, our hero approaches and then backs away from various subjects, then returns to them later from another oblique angle. You can almost see the corps de ballet advancing, retreating, advancing, like waves on the shore.

In virtually every ballet, someone dies tragically. Often it’s the heroine, and very often she dies through the obtuse blundering or fickle-heartedness of her beloved. Sometimes both lovers die, but sometimes there’s a happiness to it, a transformation that allows them finally to be together on some other plane. It may not be as satisfying to the audience as a corporeal happy ending, but finding a measure of fulfillment at the ragged end of tragedy is hardly the worst outcome.

When, in The Complete Ballet, our hero finally achieves his own transformation, paradoxically willing himself into existence by disappearing into a different character, it’s more satisfaction than he or we might reasonably have hoped for.

A Lesson in Every Object

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This column originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on 28 September 2017.

In June 2013, author/philosopher/videogame-designer Ian Bogost and Loyola University New Orleans associate English professor Chris Schaberg introduced a series of books and essays called Object Lessons, described as “a series on the hidden lives of ordinary objects.”

Bogost and Schaberg serve as the series’ editors, while the 2,000-word essays are published in no less a venue than the Atlantic (in their online Technology section), and the 25,000-word books are published by Bloomsbury.

Bogost explained the origin of the idea as having grown out of the concepts he explored in his book Alien Phenomenology; in particular, “a call for more frequent and more sustained attention to specific things.”

As he described it in the announcement of the series, “Each Object Lessons project will start from a specific prompt: an anthropological query, archeological discovery, historical event, literary passage, personal narrative, philosophical speculation, technological innovation, anything really — and from there develop original insights around and novel lessons about the object in question.”

Since then, 31 installments have been published, with at least 15 more in the offing, and the team continues to solicit proposals for additional projects. Besides being beautiful little hand-sized objects themselves, showcasing exceptional writing, the wonder of these books is that they exist at all. A couple guys champion the idea of establishing an open-ended essay project to a pair of big-name publishers, and they say yes! To essays!

The list of existing and forthcoming books is a random walk through a heap of objects, from the large-scale and encompassing (Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton) to the small and specific (Sock by Kim Adrian); things of which we have too much (Waste by Brian Thill) and too little (Silence by John Biguenet); things whose time has come (Drone by Adam Rothstein; Pixel by Ian Epstein) and gone (Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly; Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton); things that are a phenomenon of modern life (Jet Lag by Christopher J. Lee); and the things modern life is excising (Whale Song by Margret Grebowicz).

I wonder what object lesson lies in realizing that the two most politically charged objects in the series are head coverings: Veil (by Rafia Zakaria) and Hood (by Alison Kinney).

To read a few of these books is to understand generally what you will find in any of them. That’s in no way dismissive. The writing is uniformly excellent, engaging, thought-provoking, and informative. Each one uses its base object as a jumping-off point to range widely through a surprising collection of interrelated topics.

So, if a book called Sock makes you think, “Twenty-five-thousand words on socks? Uh, no,” then you’re unclear on the concept. You’re also missing out on a thoroughly delightful discussion of, among other things:

Why humans no longer have fur, but instead have many sweat glands and a layer of fat.
Georges Bataille’s essay fragment “The Big Toe,” which posits the subject body part as the true evolutionary launch point for humanity, because its forward orientation enabled bipedalism, which in turn allowed us to develop and exploit the opposable thumb.
How tracing the evolution of clothing lice (a.k.a. body lice) as a distinct species from both head lice and pubic lice, allows us to date the emergence of the use of clothing by humans.
The many delicate, nuanced adjustments needed throughout the body to keep humans from pitching forward onto our faces with every step.
Foot odor, which is not caused by the quarter-million sweat glands in our feet, but rather the poop from the bacteria that flourishes in our laced-up shoes and feasts on dead skin.
The distinction between a partialist — one whose sexual obsession is aimed at a part of the body — and a fetishist — one whose obsession is focused on an object — so that it’s no longer considered entirely correct to speak of a “foot fetish.” (Author Adrian addresses many facets of our complicated sexual relationship with feet, though one imagines that Sock serves as the hors d’oeuvre for this subject ahead of Summer Brennan’s forthcoming Object Lesson, High Heel.)

Imagine, then, that the less-prosaic of the Object Lessons are at least as wide-ranging as Sock. For me, it’s illuminating to understand the reason each author chose the subject she or he wrote about. The whimsical Eye Chart arose from author William Germano’s lifelong issues with myopia, while Anna Leahy’s project, Tumor, is informed by her intensely personal experiences of her father’s death from liver cancer and her mother’s from pancreatic cancer.

After digesting several of the OLs, I began to consider what mine should be. It didn’t take long to decide: Paper Route. True, it’s not an object quite like Remote Control (by Caetlin Benson-Allott) or Personal Stereo (by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow), but I’d argue it’s as much an object as Jet Lag or Traffic (by Paul Josephson).

Like many of the OLs, the launch point here is from my own personal narrative. I’ve had a job since I was 9, and that first one was delivering the now-defunct weekly Montgomery County Journal. Later, I progressed to delivering the now-defunct daily Washington Star.

It was never my idea to get the paper route, and I was not always a willing or gracious participant, but I had to save for college since, in my household, it was a given that 1) we kids were going to college, and 2) we kids needed to find a way to pay for it.

Thus, Paper Route, should it ever exist as an OL, will address certain obvious topics, though I would hope to make it more than just a misty-eyed elegy on the disappearance of both paper and news, or a grumpy lecture on the value of hard work and saving money (and walking barefoot uphill both ways in the snow).

Some of the less-obvious paths I’d like to explore include debt, higher education, the plummeting participation of able-bodied men in the workforce, and the need to recognize licensed trades as being of equivalent value to college degrees in a healthy, functioning economy and society.

I’ll let you know how it goes.