Nathan's Notebook
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Nathan Bierma
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Tuesday, December 30, 2003
This week in my B&C blog: December news and obituaries in review, with links to each of my monthly news roundups throughout 2003. Plus a look back at some of the most intriguing articles I found this year, including why chemical and biological weapons should not be considered "weapons of mass destruction," the mysterious disappearance of a Boeing 727 in Angola, the building of China's Three Gorges Dam, the science of itching, how often "the butler did it," and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE A look back at the year is never complete without reading the annual review essays by George Will and Dave Barry. Also, saw this today in the Wash. Post's year-in-magazines column: Redbook published a cover photo of actress Julia Roberts that USA Today revealed to be a composite created by sticking the head of a year-old photo of Roberts atop the body from a four-year-old photo. The cover line read: "The Real Julia." May next year again be a time for pursuit of truth. Happy New Year! Tuesday, December 23, 2003
Wishes of holiday peace and health to all readers! Here's some of my column from the Tribune one year ago on Christmas Web sites: In a pickle over Christmas? Get your mouse a stirring Here's the NY times on a mall Santa in culturally diverse Richmond, Calif., who speaks eight languages. And here's a clever op-ed contribution from Sunday's Tribune: The flack in the hat Monday, December 15, 2003
Latest Tribune article: My first story in the Sunday Q section, on Alica Magal, daughter of Holocaust survivors, former tour guide in Israel, and recently installed rabbi at a small downtown synagogue http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/q/chi-0312140497dec14,1,6404117.story This week in my B&C blog: A mini-essay on O'Hare Airport on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight. Plus, Stephen King on the function of fear, analyzing brain waves of spiritual experiences, the legacy of astrology, what's going on at Guantanamo Bay, the state of the essay, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE Speaking of the Wright Brothers, here's the Washington Post on the bumpy flight of a Wright replica, and on the first father-daughter cockpit team in a 737. Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Latest published article: My first op-ed for the Baltimore Sun, on college grads who live with their parents: http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.grads07dec07,1,859094.story This week in my B&C blog: Roundup of the news of November. Plus, a postcard from Megan Feenstra in New York City, a primer on the Nobel Prizes, David Brooks on gay marriage, how to save Mount Kilimanjaro's ice cap, the short shelf life of scholarly references to Web pages, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE • Number of the Day: 5 million People infected by HIV this year, including 700,000 children. 3 million people died of AIDS this year. -Wash.Post -Previous Number • Thought of the Day: obligatory Christmas cheer My Metra train slowed to a halt not 50 yards from the Ravenswood Station right about this time last year. Eventually, a conductor appeared in the front of our car. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have had a suicide. The train will be delayed." Everyone gasped, but, detestably, it was half-saddened, half-annoyed reaction. We pitied the poor soul, but we were also late (amazing how stubbornly petty people can be). Later, I asked the conductor how rare these incidents were. I think he said they happened a few times a year. "But," he said, "they're more common this time of year." This is the first Christmas in several years that hasn't snuck up on me. Usually December ambushes me; this year I wanted to put the tree up on November 1 and start singing carols. The sole reason, of course, was that this was the year I spent mostly at home, writing, lonely as anything, and I longed for the sense of hearth and togetherness that is embedded in the holidays. But I've been wondering about how we experience these feelings and about the holidays. We use--as I have--this aura of goodwill and cheer as a stimulant, an opiate to stave off the rest of the year, when we carry on our "lives of quiet desperation," as Thoreau said. But we also dread that aura, or at least the sense of obligation that comes with it--an unwanted mandate to be happy. I was talking with a friend a week or two ago who was on the verge of tears as she talked about how the holidays make her depressed after getting married a couple years ago and adjusting to different family dynamics. For her, the incessant chipper Christmas soundtracks oozing through department store speakers must be especially grating (most of all, the constant "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year"). And I remembered one of my favorite episodes of West Wing, Excelsis Deo, in which Charlie asks Mrs. Landingham why she has been feeling down. Turns out her sons were killed in Vietnam on Christmas Day. This time of year, more than any other, she says, "I miss my boys." The man who stepped in front of my Metra train might have been feeling much the same way. This obligatory giddyness and persistent glumness--what to make of it? For these people, would it not do more for cheeriness on earth to forego the whole season, to just call it off? And yet, for others, like me this year, don't we need the rhythms of tradition and warmth of reunion with loved ones to anchor the end of our year? The least we can do, I guess, is keep our sugary salutations and holiday platitudes in check, mindful of those for whom the holidays and their "cheer" have the opposite effect. Footnote: It's worth noting that "Christmas cheer" has little to do with the first Christmas, and is largely a contrivance of our nostalgia and our department stores. Christ's arrival, as profound an invasion of hope as it was in a world of despair, was not the kind of material of which carols are easily made. His unmarried parents had hassled with traveling to register for a census by an oppressive Roman regime, no doubt unnerved by the whispers surrounding their pregnancy. Their baby was born in a nondescript house (most likely--the Bible says nothing about a stable) and cradled in a trough, bound for a lifetime of misunderstandings, especially in a Jewish society starved for a heroic political revolutionary after a series of thwarted wannabes. It was a day of victory, but of delayed victory--almost as much of a reminder of the misery that lay ahead as the eventual end of that misery. Walking through a mall today, Mary and Joseph would wonder how the heck we turned the birthday of their firstborn into this extravaganza. • Previous Thought: Why does nature evoke childhood? I'd never actually seen Christmas Vacation start to finish, so I taped it last weekend and watched it last night (it is set in Chicago, more or less, so I watched for civic pride purposes). I nearly shut it off halfway through. Nothing but a thrown-together series of pyrotechnic electricity stunts and one-liners as old and tired as Chevy Chase himself. How horrifying to discover this at IMDB.com this morning: "Frank Capra III, the grandson of It's A Wonderful Life director, Frank Capra, was the Assistant Director of Christmas Vacation." One small step for product placement: I cracked open one of the fortune cookies left in the lunchroom at my new part-time job, and was advised--by my local energy company, it turns out: He who signs up for the Automatic Payment Plan worries less about the monthly payments. I can't tell you how endeared to the company that made me. • Etymology Today from M-W: bathetic \buh-THEH-tik 1 : extremely commonplace or trite 2 : characterized by insincere or overdone pathos : excessively sentimental When English speakers turned "apathy" into "apathetic" in the 1700s, using the suffix "-etic" to turn the noun into the adjective, they modeled it on "pathetic," the adjectival form of "pathos" from Greek "pathçtikos." People also applied that bit of linguistic transformation to coin "bathetic." In the mid-19th century, English speakers added the suffix "-etic" to "bathos," the Greek word for "depth," which has been used in English since the early 1700s and means "triteness" or "excessive sentimentalism." The result: the ideal adjective for the incredibly commonplace or the overly sentimental. • Previous E.T. |
