text:
|Marilynne Robinson
Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas
Marilynne Robinson
The Art of Fiction
No. 198
Fall 2008
The Paris Revies No. 186
When Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, in 1980, she was unknown in the literary world. But an early review in The New York Timesensured that the book would be noticed. "It's as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration," wrote Anatole Broyard, with an enthusiasm and awe that was shared by many critics and readers. The book became a classic, and Robinson was hailed as one of the defining American writers of our time. Yet it would be more than twenty years before she wrote another novel.
In the interval, Robinson devoted herself to writing nonfiction. Her essays and book reviews appeared in Harper's and The New York Times Book Review, and in 1989 she published Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, a scathing examination of the environmental and public health dangers posed by the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in England—and the political and moral corruption that sustained it. In 1998, Robinson published a collection of her critical and theological writings, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, which featured reassessments of such figures as Charles Darwin, John Calvin, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Aside from a single short story—"Connie Bronson," published in The Paris Review in 1986—it wasn't until 2004 that she returned to fiction with the novel Gilead, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, Home, came out this fall.
In person, even when clad in her favorite writing attire—a pair of loose pants and a sweatshirt—Robinson carries herself with a regal elegance. While she is humble about her accomplishments and the acclaim they have brought her, the force of her intellect is apparent. In her nonfiction books, as well as in her recent novels, she passionately engages public policy as well as philosophical and theological scholarship. Her experience in academia—she wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II at the University of Washington—made her a devout reader of primary texts, which remain the touchstones of her thought and conversation. Such intellectual pursuits clearly delight her. Her extemporizing on, say, Karl Marx's Capital is often punctuated with laughter and blithe phrases such as "Oh, goody!" When a question gave her pause during our interview, she'd often shrug and say, "Calvin again," and then look away as if the sixteenth-century Frenchman were standing in the room waiting to give her advice.
Robinson is a Christian whose faith is not easily reduced to generalities. Calvin's thought has had a strong influence on her, and she depicts him in her essays as a misunderstood humanist, likening his "secularizing tendencies" to the "celebrations of the human one finds in Emerson and Whitman."
Her novels could also be described as celebrations of the human—the characters that inhabit them are indelible creations. Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her sister Lucille, who are cared for by their eccentric Aunt Sylvie after their mother commits suicide. Robinson dwells on how each of the three is changed by their new life together. Gilead is an even more intimate exploration of personality: the book is given over to John Ames, a seventy-seven-year-old pastor who is writing an account of his life and his family history to leave to his young son after he dies. Home borrows characters from Gilead but centers on Ames's friend Reverend Robert Boughton and his troubled son Jack. Robinson returned to the same territory as Gilead because, she said, "after I write a novel or a story, I miss the characters—I feel sort of bereaved."
Gilead and Home are both set in Iowa, where Robinson has lived for nearly twenty years, teaching at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. For this interview, we met on six occasions over a five-month period. During that time, Iowa City seemed to experience every extreme of weather: two blizzards, frigid temperatures, hail, fog, spring rains, and severe thunderstorms. Shortly after our final meeting, the Iowa River reached record-setting flood levels.
Robinson leads a relatively solitary life. She is divorced, and her two sons are grown with families of their own. Her intellectual and creative ambitions leave little time for socializing. "I have this sense of urgency about what I want to get done and I discipline myself by keeping to myself," she said. But she also has both a cell phone and a BlackBerry and during our conversations the world would occasionally intrude to interrupt her stream of thought. At one point her BlackBerry beeped to tell her she had an e-mail, and she said it was from a former student. "Blurbs," she said. "I owe the world blurbs."
Are there any unpublished Marilynne Robinson novels lying around that we don't know about?
In college, I was in a novel-writing class and I started a novel, which I loathed and detested the minute I graduated. It was as if worms had popped out of it or something. It was set in the Middle West, where I had never been—a little midwestern town with a river running through it. Isn't that odd?
What eventually drew you to Iowa City?
The Workshop. I didn't have any realistic conception of Iowa at all. I never expected to live in the Middle West because I had the same prejudices that other people have about the region. But when they invited me to teach here I thought it would be an interesting thing to do. So I came.
Were you told that it would compromise your creative energies to teach creative writing?
Yes, of course. But everything compromises your creative energies. Years ago I accepted a grant from the American Academy that was supposed to support me for five years without teaching. I lasted about a year and a half before I nearly went crazy. Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it's also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you're trying to work on something and it's not going anywhere, you can go to school and there's a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.
When you were little, what did you think you'd be when you grew up?
Oh, a hermit? My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work. There we were in this tiny town in Idaho, and he was like Alexander dividing up the world: I'll be the painter, you'll be the poet.
Is it true that Housekeeping started as a series of metaphors you wrote while you were getting your Ph.D. in English literature?
When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson. When I entered the Ph.D. program, I started writing these metaphors down just to get the feeling of writing in that voice. After I finished my dissertation, I read through the stack of metaphors and they cohered in a way that I hadn't expected. I could see that I had created something that implied much more. So I started writing Housekeeping, and the characters became important for me. I told a friend of mine, a writer named John Clayton, that I had been working on this thing, and he asked to see it. The next thing I knew, I got a letter from his agent saying that she would be happy to represent it.
Were you surprised?
I was, but these things always came with little caveats. She said, I'll be happy to represent it but it could be difficult to place. She gave it to an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who wrote to me and said, We'd be very happy to publish it but it probably won't be reviewed.
But then it was.
Anatole Broyard—God love him—reviewed it early because he thought no one would review it and he wanted to make sure it got attention.
How did you approach creating the characters of Ruthie and Sylvie inHousekeeping?
In the development of every character there's a kind of emotional entanglement that occurs. The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking. The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.
Was your family religious?
My family was pious and Presbyterian mainly because my grandfather was pious and Presbyterian, but that was more of an inherited intuition than an actual fact. We would talk more politics than anything else at the dinner table. And they were very Republican politics, I need hardly say. Or perhaps I do need to say.
What did your father do for a living?
He worked his way up in the lumber industry the old-fashioned way. The lumber industry was dominant in that part of Idaho. When you fly over the Rocky Mountains now, you see terrible clear-cutting, but back then there wasn't the level of exploitation that there is now.
How did your family come to settle in the West?
We have a family legend about homesteading relatives in the nineteenth century—coming in covered wagons—dark forests, wolves, American Indians coming to ask for pie. My great grandmother was one of the first white people in a certain part of eastern Washington, and supposedly she would see an Indian standing outside the door, and she would go out, and he would say, Pie. That's just a story, but the women in my family always bake pies. And they're vain about it.
Do you bake pies?
I used to bake pies, when I had people to eat them. But I don't any more.
What was your best pie?
Lemon meringue, which is a family tradition.
You've published only one short story, "Connie Bronson," which appeared a few years after Housekeeping. Have you written others since then?
I wrote that story in college. I had a sort of fondness for it because it seemed to me to anticipate Housekeeping, though I had written it more than a decade earlier. So when The Paris Review asked me for something, I sent it off. I am actually interested by the fact that I never feel any impulse to write a short story. It is such an attractive form. "Connie Bronson" has for me now the interest and charm of anyone's juvenilia—that is, almost none at all.
In your second novel, Gilead, the protagonist is a pastor, John Ames. Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?
I don't like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.
You said that Ames came to you as a voice. How did you know that it was your next novel?
I was at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown at Christmas time. Some students had asked me to come to do a reading. I reserved several rooms at an inn in the sunniest part of Provincetown, so that my sons, neither of whom was married at the time, could spend Christmas there with me. But they got delayed, so I had several days there by myself in an otherwise empty hotel, in a little room with Emily Dickinson light pouring in through the windows and the ocean roaring beyond. I had a spiral notebook, and I started thinking about this situation and the voice. And I started writing. Frankly, I was happy for the company.
I ended up writing that book like a serial novel. I would write thirty pages or so and then send it to the editor, and then write thirty more pages and send it to the editor.
Do you write longhand normally, or on a computer, or both?
On Gilead I went back and forth. Housekeeping I wrote longhand. I didn't have a computer, and I've always been distracted by the sound of a typewriter.
How long did it take you to write Gilead?
I wrote it in about eighteen months. I write novels quickly, which is not my reputation.
Ames says that in our everyday world there is "more beauty than our eyes can bear." He's living in America in the late 1950s. Would he say that today?
You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as "beauty." Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt's Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it's not Versailles. It's a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.
At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There's no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we're doing most of the time.
Ames believes that one of the benefits of religion is "it helps you concentrate. It gives you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore." Is this something that your faith and religious practice has done for you?
Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I've found fruitful to think about. Religion has been profoundly effective in enlarging human imagination and expression. It's only very recently that you couldn't see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion.
Is this frame of religion something we've lost?
There was a time when people felt as if structure in most forms were a constraint and they attacked it, which in a culture is like an autoimmune problem: the organism is not allowing itself the conditions of its own existence. We're cultural creatures and meaning doesn't simply generate itself out of thin air; it's sustained by a cultural framework. It's like deciding how much more interesting it would be if you had no skeleton: you could just slide under the door.
How does science fit into this framework?
I read as much as I can of contemporary cosmology because reality itself is profoundly mysterious. Quantum theory and classical physics, for instance, are both lovely within their own limits and yet at present they cannot be reconciled with each other. If different systems don't merge in a comprehensible way, that's a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.
Are religion and science simply two systems that don't merge?
The debate seems to be between a naive understanding of religion and a naive understanding of science. When people try to debunk religion, it seems to me they are referring to an eighteenth-century notion of what science is. I'm talking about Richard Dawkins here, who has a status that I can't quite understand. He acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively. On the other side, many of the people who articulate and form religious expression have not acted in good faith. The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.
You've written critically about Dawkins and the other New Atheists. Is it their disdain for religion and championing of pure science that troubles you?
No, I read as much pure science as I can take in. It's a fact that their thinking does not feel scientific. The whole excitement of science is that it's always pushing toward the discovery of something that it cannot account for or did not anticipate. The New Atheist types, like Dawkins, act as if science had revealed the world as a closed system. That simply is not what contemporary science is about. A lot of scientists are atheists, but they don't talk about reality in the same way that Dawkins does. And they would not assume that there is a simple-as-that kind of response to everything in question. Certainly not on the grounds of anything that science has discovered in the last hundred years.
The science that I prefer tends toward cosmology, theories of quantum reality, things that are finer-textured than classical physics in terms of their powers of description. Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.
But doesn't science address an objective notion of reality while religion addresses how we conceive of ourselves?
As an achievement, science is itself a spectacular argument for the singularity of human beings among all things that exist. It has a prestige that comes with unambiguous changes in people's experience—space travel, immunizations. It has an authority that's based on its demonstrable power. But in discussions of human beings it tends to compare downwards: we're intelligent because hyenas are intelligent and we just took a few more leaps.
The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves. But it is not in our nature to stop harming ourselves. We don't behave consistently with our own dignity or with the dignity of other people. The Bible reiterates this endlessly.
Did you ever have a religious awakening?
No, a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don't simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. This is the individualism that you find in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.
How would one learn to see ordinary things this way?
It's not an acquired skill. It's a skill that we're born with that we lose. We learn not to do it.
On occasion you give sermons at your church. How did that come about?
If we need someone to give a sermon because the pastor is ill or out of town then typically they ask someone from the congregation to give the sermon. Since I write about these things, often they ask me.
Do you ever get nervous being the sub?
Yes, I do. You're talking within a congregation. They know the genre. There are many things that the sermon has to resonate with besides the specific text that is the subject of the sermon. In my tradition, there's a certain posture of graciousness you have to answer to no matter what the main subject matter of the sermon is.
The idea that you draw a line and say, The righteous people are on this side and the bad people are on the other side—this is not gracious.
Your new novel Home is set in the same time and place as Gilead and incorporates many of the same characters. Why did you decide to return to their story?
After I write a novel or a story, I miss the characters—I feel sort of bereaved. So I was braced for the experience after Gilead. Then I thought, If these characters are so strongly in my mind, why not write them? With Jack and old Boughton especially, and with Glory also, I felt like there were whole characters that had not been fully realized in Ames's story. I couldn't really see the point in abandoning them.
Then I had to make sure that the chronology clicked and certain phrases that occur in the first book occur in the second. For example, the dinner party—Ames is there but doesn't say a word about it in Gilead. It's completely consistent with Ames as a character that he would not choose to report a situation that he found painful or that he thought would reinforce unfortunate memories. But I wanted Home to be a freestanding book. I didn't want it to be a sequel. I wanted it to be true that you could pick up either book first.
Whereas Gilead reads almost like a meditation—John Ames is writing it to his son—Home has a different personality.
So much of the novel is dialogue. I was really surprised. I kept thinking, I've got to stop doing this—it's just one dialogue scene after another.
Do you plot your novels?
I really don't. There was a frame, of course, for Home, because it had to be symbiotic with Gilead. Aside from that, no. I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. And I don't give anything a higher priority than character. The one consistent thing among my novels is that there's a character who stays in my mind. It's a character with complexity that I want to know better.
The focus of the novel is Jack, but it's told from Glory's point of view. Did you ever consider putting it in his point of view?
Jack is thinking all the time—thinking too much—but I would lose Jack if I tried to get too close to him as a narrator. He's alienated in a complicated way. Other people don't find him comprehensible and he doesn't find them comprehensible.
Is it hard to write a "bad" character?
Calvin says that God takes an aesthetic pleasure in people. There's no reason to imagine that God would choose to surround himself into infinite time with people whose only distinction is that they fail to transgress. King David, for example, was up to a lot of no good. To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can't believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.
How do you write historical figures in your novels?
My unvarying approach to anything is to read the most primary and proximate material that I can find. I try to be discreet in my use of historical figures. My John Brown is only a voice heard in the darkness.
Does your faith ever conflict with your "regular life"?
When I'm teaching, sometimes issues come up. I might read a scene in a student's story that seems—by my standards—pornographic. I don't believe in exploiting or treating with disrespect even an imagined person. But at the same time, I realize that I can't universalize my standards. In instances like that, I feel I have to hold my religious reaction at bay. It is important to let people live out their experience of the world without censorious interference, except in very extreme cases.
What is the most important thing you try to teach your students?
I try to make writers actually see what they have written, where the strength is. Usually in fiction there's something that leaps out—an image or a moment that is strong enough to center the story. If they can see it, they can exploit it, enhance it, and build a fiction that is subtle and new. I don't try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of a story lies. I don't see any reason in fine-tuning something that's essentially not going anywhere anyway. What they have to do first is interact in a serious way with what they're putting on a page. When people are fully engaged with what they're writing, a striking change occurs, a discipline of language and imagination.
Do you read contemporary fiction?
I'm not indifferent to contemporary literature; I just don't have any time for it. It's much easier for my contemporaries to keep up with me than it is for me to keep up with them. They've all written fifteen books.
What is your opinion of literary criticism?
I know this is less true than it has been, but the main interest of criticism seems to be criticism. It has less to do with what people actually write. In journalistic criticism, the posture is too often that writers are making a consumer product they hope to be able to clean up on. I don't think that living writers should be treated with the awe that is sometimes reserved for dead writers, but if a well-known writer whose work tends to garner respect takes ten years to write a novel and it's not the greatest novel in the world, dismissiveness is not an appropriate response. An unsuccessful work might not seem unsuccessful in another generation. It may be part of the writer's pilgrimage.
Do you have any writing rituals, habits, or peculiarities?
I dress like a bum. John Cheever would wear a suit and a hat and go down from his apartment to the basement of his building with an attaché case. But that's not me. I like to be as forgetful of my own physical being as I can be.
Do you write in your study or do you occupy every room of the house?
I do a lot in the study, but the couch also, and so on. It's nice to be able to move around and not be completely bound to one place or another, the way some people are. Although I do stay inside my own house. That's crucial.
Why is that crucial?
Because I can forget my surroundings. And I don't get distracted by thinking, Who chose that painting? I know who chose that painting.
Does writing come easily to you?
The difficulty of it cannot be overstated. But at its best, it involves a state of concentration that is a satisfying experience, no matter how difficult or frustrating. The sense of being focused like that is a marvelous feeling. It's one of the reasons I'm so willing to seclude myself and am a little bit grouchy when I have to deal with the reasonable expectations of the world.
Do you keep to a schedule?
I really am incapable of discipline. I write when something makes a strong claim on me. When I don't feel like writing, I absolutely don't feel like writing. I tried that work ethic thing a couple of times—I can't say I exhausted its possibilities—but if there's not something on my mind that I really want to write about, I tend to write something that I hate. And that depresses me. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to live through the time it takes for it to go up the chimney. Maybe it's a question of discipline, maybe temperament, who knows? I wish I could have made myself do more. I wouldn't mind having written fifteen books.
Even if many of them were mediocre?
Well, no.
Do you keep a journal or diary?
At various times in my life I've bought a little finely ornamented volume with a clasp, and written a couple of days' worth of reflections. And then I come back to it and I think, What an idiot.
What about revision? Is it an intensive process or do you let the first draft stand?
If I write something and don't like it, I basically toss it. And I try to write it again or I write something else that has the same movement. But as far as going back and working over something that I've already written—I really don't do that. I know there's a sentence that I need, and I just run it through my mind until it sounds right. Most of my revision occurs before I put words down on the paper.
Does that happen when you're sitting at your desk or on the couch or do you write in your head all day long?
If I'm writing, I write in my head all the time. But as far as inventing, I try to do that only when I'm physically writing. If I get an idea while I'm walking home on the bridge, I think, Close that down, because if I think through a scene, I'll wreck it by the time I get a pen in my hand.
Most people know you as a novelist, but you spend a lot of your time writing nonfiction. What led you to start writing essays?
To change my own mind. I try to create a new vocabulary or terrain for myself, so that I open out—I always think of the Dutch claiming land from the sea—or open up something that would have been closed to me before. That's the point and the pleasure of it. I continuously scrutinize my own thinking. I write something and think, How do I know that that's true? If I wrote what I thought I knew from the outset, then I wouldn't be learning anything new.
In this culture, essays are often written for the sake of writing the essay. Someone finds a quibble of potential interest and quibbles about it. This doesn't mean the writer isn't capable of doing something of greater interest, but we generate a lot of prose that's not vital. The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.
How do you decide on a topic for your essays?
It almost always comes as a surprise. I got to Marguerite de Navarre because I was reading a translation of Dante's Inferno and I started looking into the context in which it was written. The Albigensian Crusades, which killed an enormous number of people, occurred just before Dante wrote Inferno. Whether Dante was influenced by Albigensianism or not I don't know, but it was the Inferno that made me remember Albigensianism and made me start reading about the culture of southern France and discover Marguerite de Navarre, who was an older contemporary of Calvin.
Have you gotten to a point where you welcome that kind of indirectness?
I've learned to trust it. I worry about participating in the consensuses of opinion because frankly they don't bear out very well. When I notice something that seems like an anomaly to me, I try to sort it out. It's an impulse. I think, Gee, this might lead me to refurnish my mind in a certain way. I find the alternative undignified: you have your little life and live through it and trip along and fall into your grave.
In your essay "Facing Reality," from The Death of Adam, you point out that many Americans have a poor sense of American history—or history
in general.
We archaize Abraham Lincoln—he's somehow premodern—at the same time that we use Marx to epitomize modernity. Yet the two of them were engaged in the same conversation. The slave economy and the industrial economy were interlocked. Marx is considered modern because he describes an ongoing phenomenon, industrialism, which once again is starting to resemble slavery—child labor and so on. You take a course as a sophomore in college called Modern Western Civilization and you get Marx and Nietzsche, but you don't get Lincoln. The fact that they were all wearing frock coats and stovepipe hats doesn't register.
You've also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we're afraid of?
People are frightened of themselves. It's like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we're supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Do you suffer from anxiety?
I probably experience less anxiety than is normal. People who are literate and prosperous by world standards nevertheless choose anxiety. I consider that kind of anxiety to be unspent energy, energy that goes sour because it is not spent. Calvinism is supposed to induce emotional stoicism. One thing that comes with the tradition is the idea that you're always being posed a question: what does God want from this situation? It creates a kind of detachment, but it's a detachment that brings perception rather than the absence of perception. And at this point, my children are adults, established in life. They seem to know how to make themselves happy. When they were young I felt anxiety for them. It was a kind of animal alertness: what do I need to head off at the pass?
In your essay "Puritans and Prigs," you reevaluate the idea that a good diet enhances our quality of life. You point out that although fish is purported to be healthier, overfishing is destroying the equilibrium of the ocean: "The sea has been raided and ransacked to oblige our new scruple."
Europeans are one of the largest importers of fish and predatory fishing fleets are destroying the fish stock off of the west coast of Africa. As a result, the destruction of fishing villages has created a wave of migration from Africa into Europe. People say, Why do they go to France if they're not happy there? Well, it's better than starving.
Do you eat fish?
I'm generally a vegetarian of the ovo-lacto type, minus the ovo, yet I'm keenly aware of the fact that Hitler was a vegetarian. When he visited Mussolini in Italy he rejected the state dinner. He didn't drink or smoke. I hold him up as an example of how an aversion virtue can be a negative sign.
How did you decide to write about Sellafield nuclear plant in Mother Country?
I didn't really expect to write Mother Country—heaven knows. I was living in England, and it was all over the newspaper and all over television. I was surprised of course because it's a terrible thing. Sellafield extracts plutonium-239 and other salable isotopes of transuranic elements, very sloppily, and sends vast quantities of radioactive waste from the process into the sea. It's a real disaster. They've been doing this since 1956. It's amazing that people could have been up to this particular kind of mischief for fifty-two years, but they have.
When I came home from England, I didn't even unpack my bags, I just sat down and wrote the article and sent it to my agent. And I said, You don't have to deal with this if you don't want to. But she sent it to Harper's and they published it almost immediately. Then another publisher called and asked if I would write a book about it.
Mother Country was published in 1989. How do you view the book today?
If I could only have written one book, that would have been the book. It was a real education for me. It did as much as anything to undermine the education I brought with me when I started the project. It was as if I was writing a dissertation over again in my mind, trying to establish what would be the relevant thing to know and where to look next. Also, if I had not written that book, I would not have been able to live with myself. I would have felt that I was doing what we are all doing, which dooms the world.
Which is what?
Pretend we don't know what we're really up to. We know that plastic bags are killing animals in Africa at a terrific rate, but everybody still uses these things as if they just float away. We know that these new lightbulbs cut down on electricity, but where do they come from? China? Hungary? They have to be dealt with as toxic waste because they have mercury in them. So who's being exposed to these chemicals when they're manufactured and what are the environmental consequences in China or Hungary? What is the tradeoff in terms of shipping them long distances to save a little bit of electricity?
I'm also partial to the Sellafield book because I think it exposes the ways in which we're racist. We assume that Europeans are white and therefore more rational than other populations and to find something weird and unaccountable and inhumane we must go to a darker continent.
Did you ever worry about it coming across as a polemic?
Eh! Not among my worries. I was angry when I wrote that book. Nothing has happened to make me feel otherwise about the issues I raised in it. Sellafield is only larger now.
Mother Country appeared during the more than twenty-year gap betweenHousekeeping and Gilead. Why did it take you so long to return to writing fiction?
It was largely as a consequence of the experience of writing Mother Country that I began what amounted to an effort to reeducate myself. After all those years of school, I felt there was little I knew that I could trust, and I did not want my books to be one more tributary to the sea of nonsense that really is what most conventional wisdom amounts to. I am not so naive as to imagine that I have escaped that fate except in isolated cases and small particulars. But the research and criticism I have done have helped me to be of my own mind in some degree, and that was a feeling I had to achieve before I could enjoy writing fiction.
You once said that you "proceed from the assumption that the distinctions available to us in this world are not arrayed between good and bad but between bad and worse." Do you ever worry that you're too pessimistic?
I worry that I'm not pessimistic enough. My own life is full of profound satisfactions, and I'm distracted from the fact that the world is not in good shape. I cherish time, for instance, and for the most part I have control over my time, which is a marker of a very high standard of living as far as I'm
concerned. At some point I created an artificial tropic for myself, where I could do exactly what I wanted to do and be rewarded for it. There's a puritanical hedonism in my existence.
Puritanical hedonism?
I read books like The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine. Oh, terrific. I've almost never done anything that I didn't want to do. My life has been laid out to satisfy any aspiration of mine to the power of ten or a hundred. I can only make sense of my unaccountable good fortune by assuming that it means I am under special obligation to make good use of it.
As opposed to always wanting more or something else?
I don't think I could want something else. For instance, I'm kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone's hopes, but for me it's a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence than I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It's a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It's a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.
You were close with Frank Conroy before he passed away. Are you close with other writers?
The social life of the Iowa Workshop seems to have changed to a certain extent. It's the quietest among us who are left now. It's a wonderful faculty, a wonderful working environment, and I like the way that the students who come to me have been prepared by the people around me, but I have a sense of urgency about what I want to get done and I discipline myself by keeping to myself. It's a nice opportunity to be able to know these people, but I have to do other things, which take hours, days, weeks.
Have you always felt that urgency or is this something new?
It's a little new. Years ago, I was younger than I am now.
You've said that reading a footnote in Jonathan Edwards's "The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended" changed your consciousness. What was the footnote?
It's not an attractive title for an essay, but in it he talks about the arbitrariness of "being" itself. He uses the metaphor of the reflected light of the moon, which we see as continuous light. Yet it is not intrinsic; it is continuously renewed as light. No physicist can tell you why things persist as they are, why one moment follows another. The reality we inhabit and treat like an old shoe is amazingly arbitrary.
Does that arbitrariness include the supernatural?
I'm not terribly persuaded by the word supernatural. I don't like the idea of the world as an encapsulated reality with intrusions made upon it selectively. The reality that we experience is part of the whole fabric of reality. To pretend that the universe is somewhere else doing something is really not true. We're right in the middle of it. Utterly dependent on it, utterly defined by it. If you read somebody like Wallace Stevens, he's basically saying the same thing.
Do you believe in an afterlife?
I assume immortality, but religion doesn't teach me to assume immortality. I assume immortality and this reinforces religion. But there's a qualitative difference between actually confronting death and thinking about death in the abstract. By the grace of God, it has been an abstract concept to me up to this point.
It doesn't keep you up at night?
No, I have benevolent insomnia. I wake up, and my mind is preternaturally clear. The world is quiet. I can read or write. It seems like stolen time. It seems like I have a twenty-eight-hour day. When I do think about death, the idea that life will be going on without me makes me melancholy. There's so much to miss: history and architecture! But it won't miss me.
Is religion a way to feel comforted in the face of death?
Faith always sounds like an act of will. Frankly, I don't know what faith in God means. For me, the experience is much more a sense of God. Nothing could be more miraculous than the fact that we have a consciousness that makes the world intelligible to us and are moved by what is beautiful.
Someone once said that there has to be a problem with Christianity because four hundred denominations later they still can't get it right.
People in the churches worry about that, but would we be richer for the loss of Catholicism? Would we be richer for the loss of the Quakers? Isn't it true that every one of these traditions expresses Christianity in a way that the other traditions could not? It's prismatic.
Religion, however, has presented itself in some extremely unattractive forms. It has recruited people into excitements that don't look attractive to their neighbors. People seem to be profoundly disposed toward religion, yet they're not terribly good at it.
Do you ever censor yourself in order to try to live up to a religious standard?
It's not so much that I censor myself—I have to prod myself more often than not. I just get engulfed in whatever I'm thinking about, and I tend to forget that other people exist. I just don't do right by people in every circumstance. It's not that my religion inhibits me, it's that my religion is not always sufficient to overcome certain failings of mine, which tend toward solipsism.
Do you feel like there's something you've missed out on in life?
There's always something that I feel I've missed. I should travel more, for instance. I went to Paris last fall, which was a great departure for me. I flew Air India, which in itself was quite remarkable. I had a lovely time in France and I thought, I should do this more often. But then I come home and I think, I have all of this work to do. Look at all of these books I haven't read. Frankly, you get to a certain point in your life where you can do unusual things with your mind. So then, I think, do them.
Dragon / The Paris Review
The Art of Fiction No. 001 / E.M. Foster (1953)
The Art of Fiction No. 006 / Alberto Moravia (1954)
The Art of Fiction No. 009 / Georges Simenon (1955)
The Art of Fiction No. 014 / Isaac Dinesen ( )
The Art of Fiction No. 017 / Truman Capote (1957)
The Art of Fiction No. 037 / Saul Bellow (1996)
The Art of Fiction No. 040 / Vladimir Nabokov (1967)
The Art of Fiction No. 050 / Gore Vidal (1954)
The Art of Fiction No. 062 / John Cheever (1976)
The Art of Fiction No. 067 / Paul Bowles (1981)
The Art of Fiction No. 069 / Gabriel García Márquez (1981)
The Art of Fiction No. 071 / Joan Didion (1978)
The Art of Fiction No. 081 / Milan Kundera (1984)
The Art of Fiction No. 093 / Philip Roth (1984)
The Art of Fiction No. 111 / William Kennedy (1989)
The Art of Fiction No. 114 / Manuel Puig (1989)
The Art of Fiction No. 120 / Mario Vargas Llosa (1990)
The Art of Fiction No. 124 / Günter Grass (1991)
The Art of Fiction No. 133 / James Salter (1993)
The Art of Fiction No. 137 / Alice Munro (1994)
The Art of Fiction No. 141 / P.D. James (1995)
The Art of Fiction No. 147 / Richard Ford (1996)
The Art of Fiction No. 150 / Jeanette Winterson (1997)
The Art of Fiction No. 160 / Mavis Gallant (1999)
The Art of Fiction No. 170 / Luisa Valenzuela (2001)
The Art of Fiction No. 178 / Paul Auster (2003)
The Art of Fiction No. 182 / Haruki Murakami (2004)
The Art of Fiction No. 183 / Tobias Wolff (2004)
The Art of Fiction No. 190 / Javier Marías (2006)
The Art of Fiction No. 196 / Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
The Art of Fiction No. 197 / Umberto Eco (2008)
The Art of Fiction No. 198 / Marilynne Robinson (2008)
The Art of Fiction No. 203 / Ray Bradbury (2010)
The Art of Fiction No. 206 / Michell Houellebecq (2010)
The Art of Fiction No. 006 / Alberto Moravia (1954)
The Art of Fiction No. 009 / Georges Simenon (1955)
The Art of Fiction No. 014 / Isaac Dinesen ( )
The Art of Fiction No. 017 / Truman Capote (1957)
The Art of Fiction No. 037 / Saul Bellow (1996)
The Art of Fiction No. 040 / Vladimir Nabokov (1967)
The Art of Fiction No. 050 / Gore Vidal (1954)
The Art of Fiction No. 062 / John Cheever (1976)
The Art of Fiction No. 067 / Paul Bowles (1981)
The Art of Fiction No. 069 / Gabriel García Márquez (1981)
The Art of Fiction No. 071 / Joan Didion (1978)
The Art of Fiction No. 081 / Milan Kundera (1984)
The Art of Fiction No. 093 / Philip Roth (1984)
The Art of Fiction No. 111 / William Kennedy (1989)
The Art of Fiction No. 114 / Manuel Puig (1989)
The Art of Fiction No. 120 / Mario Vargas Llosa (1990)
The Art of Fiction No. 124 / Günter Grass (1991)
The Art of Fiction No. 133 / James Salter (1993)
The Art of Fiction No. 137 / Alice Munro (1994)
The Art of Fiction No. 141 / P.D. James (1995)
The Art of Fiction No. 147 / Richard Ford (1996)
The Art of Fiction No. 150 / Jeanette Winterson (1997)
The Art of Fiction No. 160 / Mavis Gallant (1999)
The Art of Fiction No. 170 / Luisa Valenzuela (2001)
The Art of Fiction No. 178 / Paul Auster (2003)
The Art of Fiction No. 182 / Haruki Murakami (2004)
The Art of Fiction No. 183 / Tobias Wolff (2004)
The Art of Fiction No. 190 / Javier Marías (2006)
The Art of Fiction No. 196 / Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
The Art of Fiction No. 197 / Umberto Eco (2008)
The Art of Fiction No. 198 / Marilynne Robinson (2008)
The Art of Fiction No. 203 / Ray Bradbury (2010)
The Art of Fiction No. 206 / Michell Houellebecq (2010)
The Art of Fiction No. 207 / Jonathan Frazen ( )
The Art of Fiction No. 218 / Deborah Eisenberg (2013)
The Art of Fiction No. 218 / Deborah Eisenberg (2013)
Dragon / The Paris Review
The Art of Screewriting No. 4 / Matthew Weiner (2014)
The Art of Screeenwriting No. 5 / Michael Haneke (2014)
Dragon / The Paris Review
Kiss / The Paris Review


text:
Born March 31st,1929, Easter Sunday on the cusp of April Fools Day in the year the stock market died. So much for karma!
Don, is the tall Shy Guy, spouse, creative force & phenomenal companion.
Three living middle-aged offspring who are neither children nor "mine," KT, Stan and Peter. When your "baby" is eligible for AARP you search for new descriptors.
Three outstanding grand "children." Jane and Anna Rose, college students, and Aaron a graphic designer, metal artist, gardener, creative force, all around good sport and friend.
Home is a modest place on the banks of Coast Range Oregon river, 28 miles from "town." I'm part of a mixed neo/retro hippie, artistic & staggeringly diverse forest community.
Identity at various times: daughter, wife, widow, mother, grieving parent, Aries, failed factory worker, potter, basket maker, sewin' fool, adequate organically-committed cook/food preserver, clinical social worker specializing in PTSD, loss, relationships & creative expression, hospice volunteer, tree hugging ecoappreciator, party girl, recluse, foolish risktaker, writer, computer graphics-photography neophyte, established writer & storyteller.

subset: commoncrawl


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On Friday, I went to the Pres4Lib conference organized by the bloggers of Library Garden. It was a conference for presenters and trainers and focused on ways to improve presentation skills and use of media aids. I generally don't do a lot of presentations in a month, but I do run programs and classes so any sort of help for talking in front of people is a boon to me.
After a good night's sleep and a glance at my notes, there is a theme that emerges for me: presentations are the product of a human and media symbiotic relationship. While it is true that a person can present without any outside aids (slides, handouts, and the like), the norm for presentations has shifted to a multimedia experience. At a minimum, there should be a visual aid to go along with the speaker's dialogue. This is the axis point that the relationship of person and technology revolves around, for one can dramatically impact (even overshadow) the other. This isn't something new to presenters, but it is more of a cautionary tale as presentation tools gain new features. In addition, each factor is radically different: the human is subjective, the media is objective.
In the Birds of a Feather groups that I attended, there was a lot of talk about the personal aspects of presenting. It felt more like an informal presentation support group in which people swapped stories and traded tips about what works for them. The psychological value of these sessions was innumerable as reminded me that (1) I'm not the only one who gets butterflies, "ums" and "ahs", and is trying to be comfortable in front of an audience and (2) that presentation style is unique to the person. As for the first, the conference has given me a network of fellow presenters that I can reach out to for advice, encouragement, and commiseration. A little confidence that can come from peer encouragement can go a long way. It also gave me additional ways to think of the audience that my presentation anxiety had not allowed me to previously consider: that the audience does not want the presenter to fail, that they want to get something out of it (even if it means not being uncomfortable during the whole duration of their disinterest in what you have to say), and that they should be treated as passengers in your presentation. To this last aspect, the mere mental image of being a driver giving a tour of a town to his passengers is an oddly soothing thought for me. It erases the notion of adversarial intent and puts me on the same side as those who are hearing me speak: a journey of sight and sound, if you will.
As for the second point, it is about becoming comfortable with your own personality as a presentation style. A soft spoken introverted nature can be as powerful as a boisterous energetic extrovert when the speaker appears (for lack of a better term) natural. It is the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" of presentation skills: working with your personality strengths while minimizing your "weaknesses". While not all personality types are equally suited for engaging an audience, it is through using your unique combination of traits that can make the presentation memorable. The comfort of being in your own skin combined with the appearance of confidence in rhetoric are distinguishing features that an audience can latch onto and appreciate. I don't want to break down into clichés such as "You are a beautiful little snowflake", but for each speaker, the presentation style is personal. Find your comfort zone, be confident in the expression of your concepts and ideas, and let that move your audience to follow you.
The role of media in a presentation is devilishly simple: it is to drive home the talking points of the speaker. And the Devil, as they say, is in the details. There are a number of potential aids in the speaker's toolbox these days: slides, movies, audio, pictures, whiteboards, and handouts are but a few items to be used. But which ones truly work to support the point you want to make?
Steven Bell's lightning talk about using video in presentations was my major eye opening experience for the conference. The incorporation of video into a presentation opens up fresh and bold avenues of supporting the presenter's dialogue. It's more than just something to keep the audience awake, it is an attention-grabber-and-never-let-go-er. With interview style videos, you can create co-presenters who repeat or reinforce your talking points. It's the ultimate in "But don't take my word for it!" type of persuasive speech. The weight and credibility that people lend to a third party is a powerful tool that should be utilized more often when telling a narrative. In addition, it is more exciting than a graph, figure, or other non-moving visual demonstration. Don't let a chart say it if you can have a real person proclaim it. The ability to use video to show people what you are talking about is an incredible tool in this increasingly visual society.
A close second was John DeMasney's talk about Picasa presentation slides. While PowerPoint is a standard to most speakers, the flexibility of Picasa in image generation was exciting to me. Static pictures can be used to suggest themes and ideas to get the audience thinking about something before you even say a work about it. With Creative Common images, there is a massive multitude of copyright safe images that can be used in slides. Let the pictures be the accompanying visual to your words. It's so simple yet so powerful for a speaker; for me, it was a reminder that even the most simple of visual materials can create the desired audience reaction and engagement.
(Note: Each of the Lightning Talks was excellent. I could talk about all of them but I wanted to pick the ones that got me all aflutter. Check out the video archive on the Pres4Lib wiki to see all of them. I highly recommend it.)
The lesson here is to marry the presentation media with your style in a way that compliments each aspect the most. In mentioning marriage, the rule of thumb attributed to bridal parties might actually explain it best: the bridesmaids (your accompanying media) should look good, but not as good as the bride (you). The right kind and amount of visual and auditory aids should intertwine and support your talking points. Every additional material should move the audience closer to the goal of your talk, whether it is to inform, train, or otherwise. It should also compliment the presenter's style and manner which is (as stated above) uniquely their own. It is the symbiotic relationship between person and media that makes the presentation a memorable full sensory experience.
I am very thankful to the Pres4Lib organizers for putting this together. And I am certainly looking forward to another shot at Battledecks next year. I plan on improving upon my previous effort.
As to the title of the this post, I offer you the following convoluted anecdote:
I have been reading the book "Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life" by Len Fisher. In one of the chapters, he talks about a game theory scenario called The Volunteer's Dilemma. This situation entails a group that is facing a problem in which an action needs to be taken but the person who volunteers to take the action opens themselves up to a greater risk of a negative effect. However, if no one takes the action, the entire group suffers. In the book, Len describes a herd of wildebeest crossing the plains of Africa. To reach new grazing lands to sustain the herd, they have to cross rivers. These rivers are the domain of very hungry and territorial crocodiles. If the herd doesn't cross the river, they will surely die of starvation from the lack of adequate food. So, the first arrivals stand on the edge of the river until the pressure behind them builds to a point where a wildebeest "volunteers" (pushed or of own volition) to start crossing the river. This brave beast risks being the crocodile's first meal, but the rest of herd can now cross at a (relatively) reduced risk.
I told that background story so I could tell you this story as it relates to Pres4Lib.
So, in the first Bird of a Feather session in the morning, the topic of discussion was called Getting Started. We've talked about "hooks" (grabbing the audience's attention), about introducing any elephants in the room as an icebreaker, and had turned the topic to transitions (moving between different talking points and formats). Amy Kearns had asked about what to do when you ask a question of the audience and no one answers. Someone said that you just leave the question out there till the audience actually answers when I rather "brightly" said to the group.
"Oh! That sounds just like The Volunteer's Dilemma!"
After explaining what this was, I related the presentation situation to the dilemma. The audience is the herd of wildebeest, the crocodiles represent the feeling of being self conscience, and the river is the question posed by the presenter. While it is true that the presenter can get the audience off the hook by answering the question, they have all lost a chance to open up a dialogue with the presenter. A fear of being wrong or awkward or other possible negative outcomes in answering in front of a group is "the self conscious crocodile", the thing preventing people from freely answering the question. No one wants to get eaten by that dinosaur throwback and so they stand at the proverbial river bank shifting in place. Even so, with a taciturn audience, you could even mention this scenario as a secondary icebreaker and a means to further elicit an answer.
So, there is no need to think of your audience naked. Unless, of course, the thought of a room full of naked wildebeests is somewhat soothing.


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This recipe is born of my Thanksgiving leftovers, though not in the typical turkey soup, casserole, or sandwich sense you may expect. Thanksgiving at my Grammy's always began with a giant platter of antipasto; all varieties of meat, cheese, and marinated yummies, drizzled with a dressing made from the oils and vinegars which preserved and flavored the veggies. And though I now host my own Thanksgiving feast, a smaller version of that antipasto platter still belongs at my table.
So, after our Thanksgiving feast, we were left with the expected turkey leftovers, as well as a tasty assortment of salami, provolone, sun-dried tomatoes, and olives. In search of an easy dinner which would put those leftovers to use, I threw them all together in a baking dish with a bit of tomato sauce and a few chicken breasts. It wasn't a planned blog post. No photos were taken or measurements made. It was just a lazy night's meal made with leftovers. But the result was so delicious, I had to make it again just to share with you.
The savory antipasto ingredients flavor the tomato base as the dish cooks, creating a rich full-flavored tomato sauce. Nestled in the sauce as it bakes, the chicken remains moist and tender. Super simple for the busy holiday season, yet incredibly flavorful and satisfying!
Today's Focus on Technique – Using an Instant Read Meat Thermometer
When cooking meat, it's important not to rely too heavily on the stated cooking times in any given recipe. Normal variations in actual oven temperatures, along with differences in the weight and dimensions of individual cuts of meat, mean that your meat may cook slower or faster than the stated time in a recipe. To avoid under- or over-cooking meat, your best bet is to use an instant read meat thermometer. It's one of the most useful kitchen tools you can have on hand. If you don't already have one, put an instant read meat thermometer on your Christmas list immediately! I use mine almost every day.
Here are a few tips for properly using an instant read meat thermometer:
- Begin checking the temperature as you approach the expected finish time for your meat (typically a few minutes before the recipe's stated time for smaller cuts; farther ahead for larger roasts).
- Remove the meat from the heat before measuring the temperature. Do not measure the temperature while the meat is still in the oven, as the oven heat may skew the results.
- Insert the thermometer into the center of the thickest part of the meat.
- Make sure that the thermometer is not poking out the other end or touching bone.
- Wait for the thermometer to register the temperature. Some thermometers will register the temperature immediately, while some will take a few seconds.
- According to the USDA, the following are the recommended minimum safe temperatures for various foods:
- Beef, Pork, Veal, and Lamb (steaks, roasts, and chops) – 145°F
- Ground meats (this includes hamburger) – 160°F
- Poultry – 165°F
- Fish and Shellfish – 145°F
- Keep your instant read meat thermometer pristinely clean and close at hand!
Antipasto Chicken
- 1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
- 1/4 cup tomato paste
- 1/8 cup parmesan cheese, grated
- 4 slices salami, chopped
- 1/2 small onion, finely diced
- 1 teaspoon garlic, minced
- 1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes
- 1/4 cup olives (any kind), sliced
- 3-4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
- Salt and pepper
- 3-4 slices provolone cheese, chopped
*Marinated mushrooms, spicy peppers, or marinated artichokes would all make delicious additions.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
In a baking dish, combine the tomato sauce, tomato paste, parmesan cheese, salami, onion, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, and olives. Sprinkle the chicken with salt and pepper, then press the chicken breasts into the tomato mixture. Turn once to coat on both sides. Bake for approximately 25-35 minutes*, until cooked through. Turn once, halfway through cooking. Once the chicken is cooked, sprinkle the provolone cheese over the top. Leave in the oven for just a few seconds to melt. *Cooking time will vary depending on the weight and dimensions of your chicken breasts. Use an instant read meat thermometer to determine doneness. Chicken is safely done at 165°F.
Slice and serve over pasta.
GIVEAWAY WINNER!! We have a winner! Using http://www.random.org to select a number at random, out of the 15 entries received for the yarn wreath gift bag giveaway, the winner is #2 , Jennifer. Congratulations, Jennifer!! I'm going to send you an email at the address provided with your comment to get the information necessary to send you out your prize!! Thank you to everyone who shared their holiday tips and traditions.


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Philadelphia (CNN) -- Anton Tanumihardja had his bags packed, anxious about his flight back to his home country, Indonesia. It was a trip he did not want to make after spending the past eight years in the United States.
He feared his absence would mean the end for his relationship with his boyfriend. In a bitter twist, he would be leaving on the night of Valentine's Day.
At the last minute came a temporary reprieve: Federal immigration officials issued a stay of deportation just three hours before his flight was to take off.
Tanumihardja, who is openly gay, has filed for political asylum, fearing persecution if he is forced to return to Indonesia. He says his homeland is not tolerant of homosexuals.
Although the order gives Tanumihardja more time in Philadelphia, it does not guarantee he can stay forever. It remains in effect until authorities decide whether to reopen his political asylum application.
Tanumihardja, 45, came to the United States in 2002 with a tourist visa from Jakarta, Indonesia. After his visa expired, he filed for political asylum and received a work permit while his case was being reviewed.
When his asylum application and subsequent appeals were denied, immigration authorities told him he had to leave on Monday.
"I got a lot of support from the people who love me and want me to stay," Tanumihardja said before breaking down into tears. "I do not expect anything in return from this country. I just want my status to be legal here."
In addition to his sexual orientation, Tanumihardja is ethnic Chinese and Catholic, making his return to Indonesia more daunting because he would be a triple minority in the predominantly Muslim country.
"Going back to my country means I have to be closed," he said, referring to his sexual orientation. "I cannot come out in my country and have to be hiding who I am."
The root issues of Tanumijardja's case are more complicated than simply deporting someone for an overstayed visa or denying a political asylum application, according to his attorney, Lavi Soloway.
The case sits at the intersection of gay rights and immigration reform, he says.
"Our whole immigration system, 80% of the cases are based on family unification, it's about keeping the family together," Soloway said. "But this just doesn't register with the LGBT community. It's a reflection of anti-gay discrimination."
Tanumihardja started dating Brian Andersen last fall, and they have been inseparable ever since.
Andersen, 28, is an American citizen. If they were heterosexual and planned to marry, Tanumihardja could possibly have been sponsored for residency, Soloway argues.
Under current U.S. law, the sponsorship option does not exist for same-sex couples.
Tanumihardja, who has a degree in accounting and marketing, works at Coventry Deli in downtown Philadelphia where he also doubles as the bookkeeper.
He will continue his fight to stay, he said.
"I do my best for this county, I love this country," he said.
Soloway says he fears for Tanumihardja if he is forced to return to Indonesia.
"He is a gay man who has had the opportunity to live openly as a gay man in Philadelphia. And now he's going back to live where in order to survive, you cannot be open," Soloway said. "We guard against taking for granted our freedom to be with those we love."
The last-minute stay of deportation has Tanumihardja and Andersen relieved, but cautious.
"This is the best we could of hoped for at this point," Andersen said after hearing the news. "It's something that is very real and happening."


text:
Fiscal cliff negotiators take aim at COLA adjustments, sources say
By STEPHEN LOSEY
Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said he hasn't heard about any proposals specifically targeting federal employees being discussed during President Obama's fiscal cliff negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner. (Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images)
Federal employee groups fear that a change in the way the government sets cost-of-living adjustments is growing increasingly likely to be part of a deal to avoid sequestration.
The new method of determining the Consumer Price Index, called the chained CPI, would lower the COLAs for federal retirees' pensions, as well as Social Security benefits, military pensions, and other indexed portions of the government's budget. The change would at first only mean a few hundred dollars less per year for federal retirees. But it would compound over the years and decades until eventually, retirees would likely earn tens of thousands of dollars less than they would under the current method of setting COLAs.
The chained CPI is usually 0.25 to 0.30 percentage points lower each year, on average, than the standard CPI measurements.
However, the switch could save the government more than $290 billion over the next decade, according to a paper released Tuesday by the Moment of Truth Project, which is co-chaired by former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson. Simpson and Bowles also pushed for a transition to the chained CPI in 2010 when they headed the White House's deficit reduction commission.
Jessica Klement, legislative representative for the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, told reporters during a conference call that there is more talk on Capitol Hill recently about adopting the chained CPI method of calculating inflation.
"This is getting a lot of traction in deficit reduction talks just because of the amount of money it saves," Klement said.
But Klement and other representatives of federal employees also noted that the chained CPI is somewhat confusing and hard to explain, which may mute protests from the public if the government adopts it.
"This is an arcane way to raise taxes and cut benefits and raise a lot of revenue," said Bruce Moyer, chair of the Federal-Postal Coalition, an organization of more than two dozen federal union, management and retiree groups. The chained CPI would also mean tax bracket thresholds would increase more slowly, which the Moment of Truth Project said would alone generate an extra $62 billion nationwide over a decade.
Federal employee groups object to the chained CPI, and note that federal employees have already contributed $103 billion to deficit reduction over the next decade. The current pay freeze has already cost feds $60 billion, the coalition said, and a reduced and delayed raise next year will cost them $28 billion more.
In addition, an increase to pension contributions for newly hired federal employees is set to take effect next year and will cost another $15 billion, the coalition said.
Feds are the only group of Americans that so far has been asked to sacrifice for deficit reduction, the group said, and the government should raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires before asking middle-class government employees to contribute more.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told reporters during the call that he hasn't heard about any proposals specifically targeting federal employees being discussed during President Obama's fiscal cliff negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner. But Van Hollen expects Republicans to push steep increases to current federal employees' pension contributions, which would likely amount to a 5 percent pay cut.


text: Good points, Art. In particular, quicker issuance of CVE identifiers would be great. As far as monitoring of twitter and blogs goes, we also need to consider monitoring: * pastebin, * smaller vendor bugtracking systems (I find vulns every week, in widely used software, that never makes it to BugTraq, Secunia, or CVE), * discussion forums (in a variety of languages, and many require registration), * reddit, * IRC, * and whatever other communication/dissemination mediums become popular (again) next month. When expanding monitoring of these types of sources, extensive automation is necessary. Thanks and regards, Ken -----Original Message----- From: email@example.com [mailto:email@example.com] On Behalf Of Art Manion Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2011 12:54 PM To: Mann, Dave Cc: cve-editorial-board-list Subject: Re: CVE Information Sources & Scope On 2011-10-04 10:39, Mann, Dave wrote: > The yard-stick by which to consider these is, does CVE need to capture vulnerabilities from this source in order to full-fill its charter? IMO, the bigger discussion is the future of CVE, and therefore the future (or revised, reviewed, refreshed) charter. Is CVE looking for original sources of vul information? Or broad coverage? Or efficient coverage of the "biggest" news in vuls? The list below is adequate if a bit dated, and duplicative (CIAC changed their name, CIAC and AusCERT only republish vul information IIRC). We (CERT/CC) have a similarly adequate, but dated list. We're also possibly more interested in the first hints of a new vul report instead of something more authoritative that is ready for a CVE ID. More new vul information comes out via twitter and blogs these days. Seems most of it probably reaches the sources below at some point. Exploit lists (metasploit, exploitdb) are other sources of new vul information, depending on what CVE is looking for. Back to the bigger picture, I'm on the side of issuing more CVE IDs faster for more vul reports, having reasonable ways to distribute assignment and manage duplicates and false alarms. Accurate analysis is great, but can come a few days after the ID is issued. So my opinion is that CVE should refocus on being *the* leading, fairly comprehensive source of IDs (enumeration) for vul reports. Some other capability can do analysis or add further value later. Goals, in time order (and as more information about a vul report becomes available): 1. Assign ID to vul report (More CNAs? More active CNAs?) 2. Manage duplicates, mistakes, etc. 3. Refine assignments (further duplicate resolution, merge/splits, final arbitration) 4. Accurate analysis Don't wait for #4 to issue a CVE ID. Users need to be able to talk about "the thing" (a vul report), even (unfortunately) if "the thing" turns out to be a duplicate or false alarm. > Government Information Sources > US-CERT Advisories (aka CERT-CC Advisories) > US-CERT Vulnerability Notes (CERT-CC) > US-CERT Bulletins (aka Cyber-Notes) > DoD IAVAs > NISCC > AUS-CERT > CIAC > > > CNA Published Information > CMU/CERT-CC > Microsoft > RedHat > Debian > Apache > Apple OSX > Oracle > > > Non-CNA Vendor Advisories > Solaris > Suse > Mandriva > HP-UX > SCO > AIX > Cisco IOS > Free BSD > Open BSD > Net BSD > Gentoo (Linux) > Ubuntu (Linux) > > > > Mailing Lists & VDBs > Bugtraq > Vuln-Watch > VulnDev > Full Disclosure > Security Focus > Security Tracker > OSVDB > ISS X-Force > FRSIRT > Secunia > Packet Storm > SecuriTeam > SANS Mailing List (Qualys) > Neohapsis (Security Threat Watch) - Art


text:
Those hoping for an answer by the end of the year on whether the busted Crystal River nuclear plant will be mothballed or repaired will just have to wait some more.
Duke Energy told the state Public Service Commission at a hearing Tuesday that it may not have a decision until summer 2013 because the company continues to evaluate risks of repairing the broken plant and continues to negotiate with the insurance company about its claim.
Under the terms of a previously negotiated agreement, the continued delays in deciding what to do about the plant mean customers will get a $100 million refund if Duke ultimately decides to repair it. The utility agreed earlier this year that it would provide the refund if it decided to fix the plant but did not begin work by Dec. 31.
"It is technically possible that construction could commence" by the end of the year, said John Burnett, a lawyer representing Duke's Florida subsidiary, Progress Energy Florida. "But it is unlikely. … It is very unlikely that construction would begin in December."
The Crystal River nuclear plant has sat idle for three years after a maintenance and upgrade project. During the work, which included replacing old steam generators, the 42-inch-thick concrete reactor containment building cracked. An attempt to repair the crack resulted in more cracks.
Duke estimates that it will cost $1.5 billion to $3.5 billion to repair the broken building, plus $300 million a year for replacement power. Some of Duke's estimates have the plant offline for as long as six years, or the equivalent of $1.8 billion in replacement power costs.
The utility's insurance company, the Nuclear Electric Insurance Ltd., has not paid for damage or the replacement power since spring 2011. It opened its own investigation into what caused the cracks in the building and is scheduled to enter nonbinding negotiations with Duke in the next few weeks.
"The NEIL issue has been the source of some frustration," said Jon Moyle, a lawyer who represents the Florida Industrial Power Users Group in matters before the PSC. "This plant has been offline for some time."
Duke likely would not make a final decision about repairing the plant until after it becomes clear what NEIL will pay toward Crystal River.
If the upcoming nonbinding negotiations fail, Burnett said discussions would move to "binding arbitration." It is unclear when that process would occur.
Ivan Penn can be reached at email@example.com or (727) 892-2332.


text:
The New York Times' Junket Ethics Firings: Futile, Embarrassing
The New York Times has travel writing issues; specifically, the accepting of junkets by their writers, and then having to fire them to the public in Clark Hoyt's ombudsman column. It's come to a peak. Special appearance by Mike Albo!
Last week, we learned about Mary Tripsas, the Harvard Professor who found herself exempt from being fired via the Times freelance rules, from the anonymous blog parsing the New York Times', the NYTPicker. She was pretty clearly in violation of the Times ethics guidelines regarding taking junkets, and they called her out on it.
Today, an editor's note in the paper says that, had The Times known that 3M paid Tripsas' expenses to Minnesota in November, the column would not have been published as it was written. Tripsas violated a policy against accepting travel or anything else of value from the subjects of coverage. She will no longer be writing for The Times.
But that's not all! Another young reporter, just two years into his Times writing career, is now banished from writing for the Times, too:
Last week, The Times parted company with Joshua Robinson, a prolific young freelancer who represented himself as a Times reporter while asking airline magazines for free tickets to cities around the world for an independent project he was proposing with a photographer.
This is the second column Hoyt's run about travel writing, which he already covered three weeks ago. He didn't cover the firing of the Times' Critical Shopper (and former Gawker Underminder) columnist Mike Albo (pictured!) previously, but he has now. Albo was fired because he took a junket on a JetBlue trip to Jamaica while he was at the Times. And the Times' draconian junket rules state:
In connection with their work for us, freelancers will not accept free transportation, free lodging, gifts, junkets, commissions or assignments from current or potential news sources.
But Albo's situation looks stranger by the day. For one thing, theTimes didn't fire anyone after Jeff Bercovici printed his initial column on Albo. It wasn't until Ryan Tate ran his post on the story later that day that the Times started their review of Albo's employment with an email to us and Bercovici. In it, he noted:
Albo is most definitely a travel contributor, filing at least half a dozen stories over the past two years, including two this past May.
Which, interestingly enough, the Times never bothered to correct us on: four of those stories were, in fact, travel stories, but two were Critical Shopper pieces. Albo already talked to the NYTPicker, back in October, about the incident, which ended for him in a letter from the Times:
""The letter also cited that a trip sponsor, H&M, was a direct conflict given my duties reporting on retail and consumer products," Albo said. "H&M's presence at this trip was a water bottle in the gift bag. I left it in the hotel room."
Didn't matter. The story had gotten out there, and not long after, Mike Albo was fired for a project he wasn't working on for the Times.
The lesson, of course, being that travel stories can only be written to the Times standards when the Times foots the entire bill. In order to do that, the writer has to pay for the story upfront, and after, has to be compensated for expenses. Some problems, here:
1. Do you really think broke freelance writers can afford to do this?
2. Do you think a newspaper that is experiencing buyout after buyout or layoff after layoff can really afford to cover both expenses and a writer's fee?
3. Is is really in the best interests of the Times to fire good writers because they're sticking by rules made when publications could afford to cover writers' travel journalism expenses?
The answer, for most freelancers in New York, and—going out on a limb, here—for the New York Times, in light of their recent money problems: no.
So what's the final word from the Times today when Hoyt reviews his employment and firing?
...Albo did not consult an editor responsible for enforcing the ethics policy, and his friends gave him the wrong answer. The paper's rules apply even for work done for others......To [Times Editors], the most important consideration is that everything in the newspaper, no matter who produces it, must be free of even the smallest hint of undue influence...The system is not working well: these cases keep coming up with dismaying frequency.
Not working well? Forget about undue influence. The Times' system as it stands is works to monopolize travel writers' talents. It creates a non-compete for someone who is a freelancer—i.e. free of contracts like non-competes, because they're not paid health insurance, benefits, etc—and tries to put a stranglehold on what they can and can't do with their personal time. It also bankrupts already broke writers. Meanwhile, the Times keeps on star columnists, like David Pogue, who's breaking that same set of ethics rules, who Hoyt has already recognized as having violated those rules once before, to no consequence.
What Albo didn't say is that his firing was so clearly a quick, shoddy attempt by the New York Times to save face. Which it, from some angles, very clearly appears to be. I asked Albo if he was embarrassed about any of this, and he noted by email:
I am not embarrassed. I am more in awe, and also sad and disappointed that I am no longer writing the Critical Shopper column. I really enjoyed it...I especially loved giving talented, struggling designers and independent retailers well deserved attention. Despite all this, I only have good things to say about the staff and the editors there. Also the Times pays very efficiently. I have always been simultaneously obsessed and grossed out by our commercial culture: how media infiltrates our lives, how we are all becoming part-product, how branding imprints on the brain, how actresses in hollywood are now required to have faces that look like smooth flounders, how Underminers thrive like cockroaches within this system. Pretty much everything I write - monologues, plays, novels, comedy sketches, freelance articles - deals with these themes in some way. This experience has clarified a lot of suspicions I had about the bizarre and blurred Commercial Industrial Complex in which we live. I don't expect to stop writing about these subjects... On the contrary, if anything good has come out of this, it's that my comedo-critical faculties have been given a electric jolt of energy. My knives are sharpened.
As for what he's up to now:
I am writing a zillion articles for whomever asks me and nervously waiting for them to mail me checks sometime within this decade. I am also doing a comedy show on Jan 8th, Friday evening, at Galapagos in Brooklyn, 8pm.
As for the future....I gotta say, this thing is making me reassess my life as a freelance writer. I am trying to be pretty Zen about this whole thing. I consider it a door opening....although I am still sort of wandering the halls a bit, looking for that door. Hopefully I will find it soon because right now I have $124 in my bank account.
Also, I am working on another book, which is, strangely enough, turning out to be about a writer on a very bizarre junket.
[Full Disclosure: I'm going on a junket tomorrow for BlackBook. And I'm going to enjoy it. A lot.]


text:
From CCRMA Wiki
DIA: Do It A Cappella and iDIA
Premise / Idea
- Very little objective feedback in a capella rehearsal
- Singers need a way to visualize their performance so they can reflect upon it
- Need a visual feedback system for a cappella singers that can be used alone or together as an ensemble
- Learning tool to train the voice and the ears are very helpful
- Want management tools which a director can use to better monitor performers
- A large population of amateur a cappella singers who lack the necessary ear training to effectively self-correct
- Need for an objective method of performance evaluation to eliminate confusion over "who's hearing it right"
- Desire to explore basic real-time audio information retrieval techniques
- The appeal of a game that can help you improve!
What is DIA?
- Above all, DIA is a real-time visualization tool for use by one or more vocal performers
- A network application allowing multiple singers to use laptops to see personalized visualizations provided by a host computer
- Vocal training application providing error and deviance visualization and post-performance statistics
- A music learning tool for people who can't read music
- Or, for those who just want to have fun!
- Multi-track MIDI file loaded on start-up, to which voices are to be compared
- Multiple inputs connect to one host computer (Server/Director)
- Networked client computers can connect to the Server
- Clients, however, do almost no processing, but instead display information sent from the server
- Clients will receive channel-specific data from the server, like pitch
- Pitch information will be determined by implementing a version of the YIN pitch detection algorithm
- Clients may also listenfor data from other users
- Performance error will be calculated with respect to deviation from MIDI arrangement
- Deviation from both the closest note and the 'correct' midi note are represented both numerically and visually
Testing / Usage
- The Harmonics, a Stanford a cappella group, will be able to put DIA through comprehensive, rigorous testing (hopefully starting this Winter)
- System allows for easy addition of features
- As the program becomes more comprehensive, it will have added value for the user
- Effectiveness of execution will be judged based on ability to provide accurate and useful visual feedback to the user
- the DIA Team
- Charlie Forkish - Jay Bhat
Milestones (Revised)
- DATE 1: 11/15 - accurate and robust implementation of YIN pitch detection algorithm with one input and playback of midi files
- DATE 2: 12/4 - support for multiple inputs and polished visual feedback
- DATE 3: 12/10 - distribution to multiple client computers over network and statistics report
Future Work / Addons
- Brightness Feedback
- Tonal/Vowel Information
- More 'musical' display (e.g. notes, accidentals)
- Playback of MIDI scores
- Pausing
- Starting Mid-way, Resuming, Jumping in
- Pitch Bend
- More extensive report card
- Extension of DIA planned as a more single-user oriented model
- Meant to be able to sing along with any track of any Midi file
- Ultimately meant for normal people to learn to sing their favorite songs better
- Performances are scored and stored for later playback
- Concept of being able to sing along with other people who did the same thing
- Being able to only hear other people in your own locality
- Still a work in progress!