The day starts with Ollie (my dog), ends with Spot (GWB’s dog)

A touching story on NBC news about the death today of 15 year old Spot, GWB’s spotted canine. It may be the one moment where us dog people genuinely feel for the guy currently occupying the White House. Of course, the pooch had a privileged life, and one could write much about health care and affordability etc, but I’ll let that slide for the moment. The news report on dogs in the White House (and there have always been dogs in the White House) mentioned one tiny but important fact: dogs attach unconditionally, no matter how you perform your job. Must be a comfort to so many who have inhabited the White House.

Neighborhood update

Woah, what a beautiful afternoon, with the happy sound of melting snow and a dizzying array of puddles to jump over when walking the hills of this neighborhood. A pair of girls three houses up the block built a snow pig – a remarkable achievement, down to its curly tail. I almost felt the competitive urge to maybe sculpt a goat in our front yard, thinking if this caught on, we would have a block of farm animals and people would drive up just to admire our multivarious (isn’t this a word?) talents. I held back because I worried that neighbors would come out and ask if perhaps I had toppled my feather or otherwise fallen precipitously into some state of mental decline (not in so many words, of course). Besides, it all looks so WET out there in the snow. Still, it was a gorgeous late afternoon.

I am concerned, though, about the family across the street – the one with the flamingos (see post, February 8). Or rather, the now you see them, now you don’t flamingos. Because the birds are all gone. And this is not the type of clan that picks up their decorations when they are done with them – the adorable Christmas trees are still standing, tilted, but standing on the porch, and the lawn chair, last used I believe in October of 2003, sits where it did then, on that warmish fall day. Did we have a flamingo heist in the neighborhood? Bad enough that mailboxes get batted down every now and then, and swatches of toilet paper still cling to tree tops from brazen teen ‘decorating’ efforts of years back (such a quaint American custom, why ever hasn’t it caught on elsewhere?), but stealing plastic birds crosses the line. Next thing you know they’ll be toting away my rusty upside-down wheelbarrow which I forgot to put away in the garage for the winter, and from there it’s only a matter of days before they start digging up the climbing rose bushes. Young people have no manners.

Blogattack

Fortune magazine claims that there are 10,000 new blogs recorded on the Net each day. Are some of us multiple blogging? Keeping up different personalities maybe? Like, how do you know that the blog on the ‘SmileZone’ isn’t really mine as well? Okay, sure, I don’t have the technological acumen to put together something so visually appealing (one reader wrote just the other day suggesting that I might consider finally eliminating the ads at the top of my blog, though he admitted that commercials for Dean buttons aren’t necessarily a mismatch to the content of my blog, by which I am hoping he did not mean “losers all”). True, once you use your name in the blog, it is incumbent upon you to keep it honest. But if you don’t – oh the lives you could bloglive!

Of course, the statistic is a demographic fallacy for it says nothing about replacement levels. Maybe 20,000 other blogs self-destruct and 40,000 die a slow death, never to be heard from again (all this leading to negative replacement levels).

This point about blog disappearance is worth a worry. It could well be that at some moment you became blogaddicted to someone’s blog, reading it daily, enjoying the progression of events, the births, the marriages (maybe I should flip the order here), the social commentary, the humor. And then the writing stops. Now what? What a cruel hoax! The author manages to tantalize, entertain, amuse, engage, and then, without explanation, the blogging STOPS. What’s left for the reader? Maybe simply the four stages of blog withdrawal: denial (I’ll check again in an hour, maybe she’s just pausing to shower..), panic (how will I live without knowing if her dog learned to read?), anger (what a socially irresponsible act of hedonistic cowardice!), RELIEF (good bye blog, hello Fyodor Dostoevsky).

A very serious aside on war: skip it if you’re feeling light and airy

The writing of an important chapter of World War II history has yet to be completed. The NYT notes this in today’s story on how deeply preoccupied we’ve been with analyzing battles between German and the Allied forces on the Western Front, and how little attention has been given to the battles on the Eastern Front, where the Wehrmacht suffered as much as 80% of its total war casualties. It is in the course of battles with the Red Army that the Germans experienced their most stunning defeat.

Apart from the military issues, there are other harrowing aspects of war between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Any Pole will tell you that a key preoccupation for Poland has been why Stalin chose to let Warsaw fall to the final destructive onslaught of the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising. Given the inevitable and devastating outcome, many Poles believe that the Uprising wasn’t heroic, it was suicidal – an unnecessary loss of life. Speculation rather than fact fuels the debate as to the reasons behind Stalin’s passive role in the ultimate leveling of the city.

And there are the issues surrounding Red Army tactics: the retaliatory rape of 2 million German women, the pilferage and assault on Polish homes and families that lay in the path of the Russians – all this is shrouded in mystery, noted only in the limited stories told by survivors.

Why this empty slate? Because few historians have had access to Russian military documents from this period. Now, as the doors are opening for academic research, there still aren’t enough scholars, nor is there money to scrutinize the voluminous materials. The writer Eva Hoffman said recently that it is the obligation of the second generation to record and preserve, from its position of both distance and proximity to the events of war, the memory of those events. A burden? Maybe, but a critical one. Starting each day fresh, without the imprint of a history carefully drawn, seems to me at the very least heartless, and at worst, dangerously irresponsible.

What Diane Keaton meant to me…

The story in the Times (here) on DK’s idiosyncratic style of dress suggests that all those layers of buttoned blouses, blazers, turtle-necks, the wire-rimmed glasses, and always – the gloves, were emblematic of the confused (is that what “gracefully puzzled” means?), outgoing, emboldened modern woman. The suggestion is that women both imitated and were dazzled by DK’s style:

“Her throwaway verbal style and her thrown-together dress style became symbols of the free, friendly, gracefully puzzled young women who were busy creating identities out of the epic miscellany of materials swirling in the American cultural centrifuge," rhapsodized Jack Kroll, Newsweek's film critic at the time.
Her fashion influence in those days should not be underestimated, Mr. Talley [of Vogue magazine] said last week. "What Sarah Jessica Parker is to young women today, Diane Keaton was in that day," he said.

I wont waste time explaining why I think these statements are ludicrous, but let me just say that I wont ever admit to having had Keaton as a symbol of anything except a mildly crazed, sometimes quirky and amusing, most often not, character in movies that may have caused a ripple of chuckles, but only if you were in a room full of people who were under the influence of controlled substances.

The article does punch her out a bit for the glove thing (note suggestive comparison to creepy Michael Jackson):

Then there are the gloves, sheathing Ms. Keaton's slender hands wherever she goes (reminding fans with a more twisted turn of mind a bit of Michael Jackson). She wore gloves with her Woodyesque sport coat, and once again in Beverly Hills at the Oscar nominees' luncheon on Feb. 9. Leather gloves covered her wrists at the International Film Festival in Berlin a few days before that, a counterpoint to the black-and-white-checkered coat she wore. White leather gloves provided the creamy finish to the ivory-colored suit Ms. Keaton wore two weeks ago on "The Tonight Show." And white satin gloves accented her Richard Tyler coat at the Golden Globes Awards in January.
Her near fetishistic devotion to those gloves has inevitably prompted queries. Is she making a style statement, or is she simply hiding a pair of hands she deems too unsightly for a close-up?
Ms. Keaton, who declined to be interviewed for this article — because she is talked out, a publicist said — did nothing herself to clear up the mystery.

Well now, maybe we should leave her alone with her mittens. Whatever her reasons, they can’t be anything but sad. Warped, gnarled knuckles, scaly spotted skin, or a perennial nail biting problem – let’s not let our curiosity force some prankster to rip off her armor and zero in the camera. As I once wrote, the presence of some mystery is a good thing and, often as not, the fact of mystery is more interesting than the undisclosed reality.

Not amusing February musing

This morning my dog and I had a morning cup of coffee together, just him and me, as everyone else in the household is away in distant places, and I thought, how wonderful is the relationship between person and beast! – so perfect, sitting there, reading the paper, clipping Klinke’s coupons together, reading about the success of Olbrich Gardens (Horticulture included them on a list of ten gardens in the country that inspire us), not even noticing that I was actually thumbing through yesterday’s paper (local headlines are much the same from day to day), such a peaceful beginning to a Saturday.

Then I remembered that the exertion and strain of this morning activity for the dog (of sharing a breakfast Kodak moment with me) is going to require that he take the rest of the day to sleep it off: it is not unusual for him to take his morning nap from 8 am ‘til 5 pm. Luckily he has not yet learned to keep up with my blog (water spaniels are reading-challenged: he still can’t tell an A from a B and he’s almost 5), so he wont know how deeply disturbed, perhaps even resentful I am becoming over the inequities in our week-ends. Consider this. Dog’s Saturday: Kodak moments with owner, rest, eat, steal a few pieces of garbage, more rest. Owner’s Saturday: Kodak moment with dog, walk the beast, feed him, do a corrective read of today’s (as opposed to yesterday’s) paper, read 30 Admissions files and reject most of the applicants knowing that my flick of the pen will instill misery and gloom for the recipient of this largess, blog to bolster the spirit, pay bills due January 31st, think about which week to start gathering papers for taxes, think about going to the gym, rearrange contents of briefcase so that “urgent work” papers, crammed in some afternoon in 2002 finally get to see the light of day, feed dog again, yell at him for eating garbage, think about taking him for long walk, blog, by which time it will be evening.

The sad thing is, there is no writer’s hyperbole in that paragraph. It may be that a surprise will pop up – perhaps a call from my mother (much overdue as she is ‘processing’ my last weekend’s absence), or a note/call from a reader who will have read this and decided it’s best to check in, just to make sure we’re not all witnessing the disintegration and last desperate acts of a blogger, but otherwise, the course of this day is set.

The month of February is just too long. The framers of the calendar should have chopped off another 11 days and spread them among the remaining months. That thoughtful gesture would have put us on March 2nd today (leap year).

For everything else, there’s MasterCard

Drinking Steve’s wine with the dinner roast: $20+ (per bottle: see post below).
Spending the evening with your once-students-now-friends: priceless.
Shoveling heavy, wet snow from your sidewalk and from that of your neighbor at 1 o’clock at night: ridiculous.

[Tonight I heard that the city of Madison has officially closed its outdoor skating rinks and ski trails for the season. So why am I out there clearing snow and moving a car due to alternate street parking? Though I have to say, the night is so iridescent right now that you could read the newspaper without any trouble, just by the light of the winter sky.]