“All have signed. All Totally Approve of my Border Area Improvement Initiative. Although Freeda? Too bad you didn’t sign it with your eyes closed while facing away from it. Not that I mind! You signed it, which is what matters, basically, I guess.”

I don’t read an entire book in a single setting everyday, but then again George Saunders isn’t your everyday kind of author. While I have read Saunders Shouts & Murmurs columns in the New Yorker, I didn’t really know who he was. My first conscious encounter with Saunders was at the behest of a writing instructor who suggested Pastoralia after reading one of my stories. In that collection of short stories, Saunders satire and wit is somewhat sublimated to the demands of a tightly crafted narrative. In The Brief and Frightening Regin of Phil, Saunders has figured out how to maintain a tightly focused narrative without abating the satire one jot.

The Brief and Frightening Regin of Phil is the story of two countries: Inner Horner and Outer Horner. Inner Horner is so tiny that only one citizen at a time can occupy its space, which is something of a problem since there are six citizens. While waiting their turn, the other Inner Hornerites must stand in the Short Term Residency Zone, which unhappily resides in Outer Horner. However, the residents of Outer Horner have long allowed this arrangement, and everything has gone smoothly until one day Inner Horner inexplicably shrinks. The Outer Hornerites, led by the bully Phil, expulse the “invaders” and begin taxing them to death. Saunders satire obviously skewers the current administration, anit-intellectualism, nationalism, and the general “you think you’re better than me?” attitude pervading our country.

Suddenly Phil didn’t seem like quite so much of a nobody to the Outer Hornerites. What kind of nobody was so vehement, and used so many confusing phrases with so much certainty, and was so completely accurate about how wonderful and generous and underappreciated they were?

In the end, the citizens of Greater Keller, whose country is a six-inch band around Outer Horner and whose citizens continuously walk around drinking coffee and measuring their Enjoyment Levels, hear of what’s going on in Outer Horner and decide to intervene after realizing that if they don’t help their enjoyment levels could plummet into negative numbers; they could suffer. Had Saunders ended the story here, with the Canadians rescuing the Americans, the book would still be an entertaining commentary on contemporary life, but not much more. However, Saunders doesn’t end there. As Phil is defeated, the arms of The Creator come down from heaven, re-create the world into New Horner, and whisper these words:

This time, be kind to one another. Remember: Each of you wants to be happy. And I want you to. Each of you wants to live free from fear. And I want you to. Each of you are secretly afraid you are not good enough. But you are, trust me, you are.

As the new residents of New Horner figure out their lives, they generally heed the whispered advice of the Creator. Generally, that is, except for Leona and Sally who “for reasons she can’t quite explain” dream of a world, “a better world, run by humble, compressed, ball-shaped people, like her and Sally, who speak, when they speak at all, in short sentences.”

It is in the last few pages that Saunders takes a time-bound satire and ups the ante to make a comment about our natures. Yes, life may make little sense now, but Phil’s reign is brief. What is not brief is the innate seeds of Phil-ness that seem to be irremovable portion of what it means to be us. So, then, is Saunders a pessimist, who presents a story in which even though God Himself re-creates life on earth, He can’t remove the seeds of our undoing? Is Saunders an optimist, who presents a story in which no matter how awful we are, we see that God will save us and does want what’s best for us? Or is Saunders neither, presenting a story that may be a fairly accurate representation of how we, that is Christians, believe the world to work–God creates us, gives us instructions on how to be happy, leaves it to us to make it work despite our innate inability to do so, and who then saves us?

The first time I saw Over the Rhine perform was in the casual, intimate confines of the Great Room at St. John’s College in Santa Fe during one of Image Journal’s Glenn Workshops. A few weeks later I caught Karin and Linford performing outdoors at the Black Swamp Art Festival in Bowling Green, OH. Since then, I’ve seen them in a dive bar and a quaint old city hall. I’ve seen them perform as an acoustic duo with nothing more than a piano and acoustic guitar; I’ve seen them rock out as a bar band combo. What I hadn’t seen was Over the Rhine in full out glitz mode in an opulent theater complete with symphonic violinist and a horn section.

The Taft Theater is one of those grand old theaters built, I’m guessing, around the turn of the (20th) century. While the seating is rather tight by contemporary standards, the surroundings more than make up for the discomfort. As the stage crew cleared away opening act Mary Gauthier’s equipment and readied OTR’s, roadies began lining the front of the stage with pots of white roses. The roses played the dual roles of metaphoric snowcover and footlights. In a playful mood, strings of large multi-colored Christmas lights draped Linford’s piano and the drum kit. The backdrop of the stage was lit in blue with large white snowflakes. Soon, a guy who could have been the model for WKRP’s Johnny Fever stepped up to announce the band. Turns out he’s the Morning Guy from 89.7 WNKU. As the lights dimmed, onto the stage came the band all decked out in tuxes, even Linford. Karin was sporting a red satin strapless dress with a large bow. The formal wear would serve to emphasize the “American songbook” feel of many of the new tunes, and certainly added to the sensuousness of their torchy appeal.
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Last night we had a delightful event here at the corner of Circular and Walker streets. A small band of players braved the elements, illness, and piles of grading to convene in our living room to put on a dramatic reading of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor.

Vince brought along an intriguing Clam-Chowder Lasagna, while Dan and Mathilda added to the comestibles with nuts and a fascinating rolled hors dourve made of a tortilla and some delicious filling. We were expecting four other people, but events conspired against them. Nonetheless, the five of us dove into the play, each taking multiple parts.

Most of us, including myself, had never read nor seen Merry Wives before, so in addition to the fun of reading, we had the joy of discovery. I was assigned the roles of Falstaff and Dr. Caius. Falstaff was a breeze, but Caius gave me some difficulty: although supposed to be butchering the King’s English with a distinctly French accent, the text was written in such a way that I found myself often slipping into a comic German accent. So, Dr. Caius became a French German slaugtering the fine language.

At any rate, the proverbial good time was had by all. Good enough at any rate for us to fix our next Shakespeare reading for January 6, 12th Night when we will be reading…Twelfth Night.

Just finished up bottling my second batch of homebrew. This time I went with an ale more in line with what I enjoy drinking the most. (I’ve enjoyed the Dortmunder–and will make it again–but darker brews are where my heart is.)

I started off with an English Special Bitter kit from Grape and Granary. Taking a hint from the batch Brad and I made this summer, I tossed in an extra pound of dark malt. Then, feeling rather experimental in this my second batch, I decided to add some spices to make it a nice holiday ale.

When I first brewed the wort, it had a nice cinnamon aroma, and I could sense a slight cinnamon heat. The orange peel seemed to be coming through only as a faint undercolor, and the nutmeg didn’t seem to make any difference. After fermentation, the sample I sipped last night from the hydrometer tube showed no evidence of any spices at all. Mind, it tasted good, but I could make out no discernible spice flavor.

So, we’ll see. According to various instructions and advices, it should be ready to drink on 12 night–Jan 6. So, we’ll be sampling 12th Night Bitter with the Shakespeare troup as we read the Bard’s play of the same name.

I’ll post details of the tasting and of the ingredients at that time.

Before my sophmore year of high school, I was set a list of books that I had to read over the summer. I was pretty excited when I read the dust jacket of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki. I had already been bitten by the sea story bug, and what better adventure could there be than some guys floating across the Pacific ocean on a balsa wood raft? I was not disappointed. Heyerdahl’s voyage may have been conceived as a proof to Heyerdahl’s theory that ancient peoples from South American had sailed to Polynesia, but it was also an epic struggle between humanity and nature. On the face of it, the idea was ludicris: how could anyone possibly just float 5,000 miles across the barren sea?

As part of the expedition, Heyerdahl and his crew lugged along still and movie cameras to document their adventures. The footage was then made into a film, which won Norway’s only Oscar. (To be fair, there was only one other nominee in the feature-length documentary category, I Was a Communist for the FBI.)

When I saw Kon Tiki was available through Netflix, I knew I was have to see it sometime. And I’m glad I did. On the one hand, the film is very much not like any of the high-quality documentaries being produced today. Heyerdahl is very upfront about the fact that no one on the crew was a cinematographer, and their main goal was just to get some shots of everyday life on the raft and possibly some of the extraordinary events that transpired. Given that there were only six guys on the raft in the middle of the ocean, one can forgive them if in the middle of a storm they had more pressing matters than pulling out the movie camera. Further, the script, editing, and narration of the film don’t call to mind a serious documentary as much as they do a typical high-school instructional film, including a poorly lit globe that spins about to show us where in the world they were.

However, despite its shortcomings, Kon Tiki is compelling. The content of the journey carry the load here. Watching men doing their daily chores while water laps over their feet and thinking that they lived this way for 101 days is stunning. The scenes of the men clubbing fish to death so they could eat them would probably not make the cut today. Neither would the way the men dispatched sharks by hauling them up onto the raft, tying them down, and basically letting them drown in the air. Yet, how else would ancient crews have fed themselves and protected themselves from marine predators? The morning rounds of gathering flying fish from the deck made me think of manna. All of this happens on a raft that is barely steerable with a deck that sits just inches off the sea. A motif throughout the film is that if anyone had fallen overboard there would have been no way to turn the raft around and pick him up. While the scenes of the men playing guitar seem like a wonderful vacation, they were always moments away from death.

Another recurring theme throughout the film is just how wrong all of the “experts” were in just about every area of the venture. Heyerdahl almost seems more happy to point out the failings of the experts than he is that his theory was proven. We hear how the experts were wrong about how to treat the logs, how to bind them, what the men would eat, how they would navigate. Apparantly there wasn’t a single aspect of the voyage that the experts were correct about, and, of course, our stalwart Norwegians were right on every score. I fear to show this film to students in case they start thinking the same about their professor.

All in all, Kon Tiki is an interesting and informative look at someone putting his life on the line to prove a point. The movie was clearly meant to play up the adventure of the journey rather than the anthropology, but as we move into an age of privately funded space exploration, I look forward to seeing Kon Tiki on the Moon.

Kon Tiki
Directed by Thor Heyerdahl
1950 B&W