Dragons - Chapter 32 (DRAFT)

After hanging up I realized that my original reason for calling—to get advice on the kind of puzzle book to get for Jacob—had gone unanswered. I thought about calling back, but saw how late it was getting, and decided instead to get myself over to the registration desk. I left the bookstore without picking something up for my son.

The walk back to our conference hotel was a short one, the warm night air mixing pleasantly with a cool sea breeze and making me think of places I’d rather be. When I got to the hotel I marched right through the marble-pillared lobby and up a wide staircase, an immense sea mural of playful dolphins and ethereal jellyfish wrapping around the curving wall to my left, and into the hotel’s dedicated convention space. Two ballrooms, fifteen breakout rooms, a grand concourse for receptions overlooking the ocean, and two dedicated registration desks—everything decorated with the same seashell-shaped wall sconces, pearl-drop and oyster-shell chandeliers, and acres of teal and peach convention carpet, repeating the same interlocking design of starfish and coral to infinity. A group of our staff people were clustered in one of the registration spaces, their fingers combing through thousands of registration envelopes, alphabetized in a long buffet line of much-abused copy paper boxes. Standing off to one side, speaking softly to each other, like prison bosses worried about trouble on the chain gang, were Gerald and Bethany.

“How goes it here?” I asked, nodding a hello to each of them.

“Well, we’re getting there,” Bethany said, smiling like I had brought her an award for maintaining a positive attitude in the face of adversity. “It was a little dicey there for a while, but things are getting put straight now.”

“What?” I asked. “What happened?”

“The freight was late,” Gerald said. “The hotel had everything set for us this morning, but the boxes we shipped from the office weren’t here.”

I looked at the long line of cardboard boxes, dirty and battered from their long trip across the country. “When did they arrive?”

Gerald looked at his watch. “A little over two hours ago.”

“What?!” I cried, looking at my own watch. It was twenty minutes to nine. “What time did everyone get here this morning?”

“A little after eight,” Gerald said. He was smiling, too, but not in the way Bethany was. Bethany looked satisfied, as if pleased for finally getting a chaotic situation under control. But Gerald looked sardonically amused, like a professional auditor, whose job was to find the errors but not fix any of them.

I did the math in my head. “What did everyone do for ten hours?”

Gerald shrugged. “We drank a lot of coffee and took turns going to the can.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Bethany said quickly, obviously trying to soften the blow. “The computers were working, so we were able to make most of the changes and print all the corrected tickets. We’re just putting them all in the right packets now.”

I looked back at the row of people hunched over the row of boxes. They were all junior staff—Caroline Abernathy and people like her—and they were all combing through the misshapen envelopes into which we had stuffed each attendee’s name badge, ribbons, and session tickets. It was a system designed with the convenience of the attendee in mind. Stroll up to the registration desk, give us your name, and we’ll hand you a catalog-sized envelope with everything you need for the conference inside. It kept lines at the on-site registration desk to a minimum, but it required weeks worth of effort back in the office, weeks when hundreds if not thousands of changes to the registration records were coming in. Given the lead time necessary to create the envelopes—or “reg packets,” as we called them—there was never a time when we could just print the materials, stuff the envelopes, and be done with them. No, for the last few weeks before the conference we were running daily batches of corrected tickets and badges, and constantly going into the packets, loosely alphabetized in discarded copy paper boxes on long tables set up in our multi-purpose room, to remove old materials and insert new ones. The junior staff assigned to such thankless work usually developed a condition we called “packet finger,” nails and cuticles torn and sometimes bloodied by brushing repetitively by all the envelope flaps. Indeed, nearly every staff person now working feverishly to stuff the last remaining items before tomorrow’s grand opening had band-aids on at least one of their fingertips.

“Has anybody eaten anything?” I asked, trying not to calculate all the wasted staff hours.

“We had the hotel bring down some lunch around one o’clock,” Gerald said. “But no one’s had dinner yet.”

“Should we go get some?” I asked quietly, remembering Mary’s lie to Eleanor about me taking the staff out for a celebratory dinner. I knew such a thing would never fly, that unless I took everybody to Burger King I could never get away with expensing such an extravagance. But it felt like I should do something.

“I think everybody here would just prefer to finish the job,” Bethany said. “I heard Caroline and a few of the others talking about going out afterwards, but I think most will want to get a quiet bite and then go to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.”

Going out meant going to the bars and clubs—probably a foolish thing to do on the night before the start of the convention, but I kept my mouth shut. I looked over at Caroline and her eyes flipped up momentarily, her fingers still walking through the ‘H’s below. Our eyes met briefly and she gave me a look I could only describe as equal parts apprehension and mistrust. I tried to silently reassure her, but she turned back down to her bandaged fingers.

“This is seriously fucked up, Alan.”

It was Gerald. He wasn’t angry, but his tone sought to make a point.

“I know,” I said, not taking my eyes off Caroline and remembering the way Don had humiliated her and made her cry.

“There are better ways to do this,” he went on, speaking softly but insistently. “There are vendors that handle this kind of thing—registration for large conferences. Making our people do this is a waste of their talent and the client’s money.”

“I know,” I said again. He was right. This was stupid. Anyone standing here could see that. I had just arrived, but Gerald had been watching the madness for ten hours.

“Are you going to do something about it?”

It was a good question. I knew something certainly should be done about it, but I didn’t know what. I had talked to Mary about it before, and it seemed like this was the way she wanted things. A vendor couldn’t be trusted to get everything right. For some members this was the one interaction they had with staff all year. It was an essential part of the client service pledge we have made to the organization. Sitting in her palatial office surrounded by her stolen treasures these bogus reasons were persuasive, delivered, as they were, by all the force of her authority and with the veneer of character. They were obvious, incontrovertible, the very foundation of the business model that drove our success. But standing there looking at the human misery they caused, those reasons were empty, baseless, and cruel.

I didn’t immediately understand it—this incongruity of thought that manifested with changes in time and place—and wondered naively how I could explain it to Gerald when I couldn’t even explain it to myself. Too bad I hadn’t yet learned the simple rule that a boss was under no obligation to answer every question asked of him.

“I don’t know if I can.”

It was the truth, but sometimes the truth should keep its damn mouth shut. Gerald looked at me dismissively, his eyebrows lifting and his nose turning down so he could peer at me over the top of his designer eyewear.

“I see,” he said with a tone of profound disappointment, as if I had just failed some colossal test.

“What would you have me do, Gerald? You know where Mary stands on this.”

“Maybe you should bring her down here? Let her see for herself how ridiculous this all is.”

“She’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow will be too late,” he said bitterly. “By tomorrow everything she sees will convince her she is right.”

“Then what should I do?”

Gerald stood silently for a moment, an idea clearly creasing the corners of his eyes, but his lips wrestling with some unwillingness to share it.

“Tell them to stop,” he said eventually.

“What?”

“Tell them to stop. Let’s call it a night. Whatever still needs doing they can finish in the morning.”

I traded a look with Bethany, wanting confirmation that I had heard Gerald correctly and her assessment of how feasible such a suggestion was. Her doubtful look told me everything I needed to know.

“How much is there left to do?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” Gerald snapped.

“Of course it matters. If they’re almost done, they might as well finish.”

“They’re not almost done,” Gerald said quickly, as if he was making it up on the spot. “There are hours of work left to do. They could work all night and they wouldn’t finish it.”

I looked at Bethany again for the same kind of confirmation, and she gave me the same doubtful look.

“Does that change anything, Alan?” Gerald said. “Come on, call it a night. They’ve worked long enough.”

At the time I didn’t know what Gerald was trying to do. The nearest I could figure, he was worried about staff morale, that he thought working people all night long on such a menial task degraded them, and that maybe they would work better and harder in the morning if we showed them a little bit of our humanity tonight. But if so, then Gerald was clearly overplaying his hand, pretending there was an impossible amount of work left for them to do. Even I could see that there wasn’t, and at my side was Bethany, wordlessly and dutifully reinforcing my perspective. Muscling on through and getting it done seemed like the wiser course of action.

It was another rookie mistake. By that time I should have known not to take people like Gerald at their word.

“They’re almost finished,” I said. “Let’s pitch in and help them get it done.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Gerald said, throwing up his hands. “You do whatever you want. I’m out of here.”

He stormed away, making a huff loud enough for all the junior staff to hear. I looked over and saw a few brave heads peek up, but most of them kept their noses down in their work.

“What’s up his ass?” I asked Bethany under my breath.

She shook her head. “He’s been grumpy all day.”

“Well, whatever,” I said, dismissing Gerald from my mind. It had been a long day, and I figured I could give him till the morning to apologize. “Let’s go help them finish.”

“Okay, boss.”

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub

I don’t remember much about this one. No dogeared pages and nothing scribbled in any of the margins -- so I guess I didn’t find much either remarkable or objectionable.

I do remember trying to figure out which parts were written by Stephen King and which parts were written by Peter Straub. And although I’ve read plenty of King, I don’t think I’ve read any other Straub; so eventually, I think I gave up the quest. Whatever didn’t seem King-like, was probably Straubian.

But what parts didn’t feel King-like? Well, the opening two paragraphs, for one.

Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here: about two hundred feet, the height of a gliding eagle, above Wisconsin’s far western edge, where the vagaries of the Mississippi River declare a natural border. Now: an early Friday morning in mid-July a few years into both a new century and a new millennium, their wayward courses so hidden that a blind man had a better chance of seeing what lies ahead than you or I. Right here and now, the hour is just past six A.M., and the sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the future and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkness as it recedes, making blind men of us all.

Below, the early sun touches the river’s wide, soft ripples with molten highlights. Sunlight glints from the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad running between the riverbank and the backs of the shabby two-story houses along County Road Oo, known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the comfortable-looking little town extending uphill and eastward beneath us. At this moment in the Coulee County, life seems to be holding its breath. The motionless air around us carries such remarkable purity and sweetness that you might imagine a man could smell a radish pulled out of the ground a mile away.

That ain’t any kind of Stephen King I ever read. Ayuh.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 31 (DRAFT)

Five minutes later I was leaving the hotel and turning back onto the main drag. All the talk about dinner had reminded me of how hungry I was, so I looked up and down the street to see if there were any nearby options. The burger joint or taco place I saw—their lighted signs glowing brightly in the warm night air—was all I probably had time for, but something else caught my eye. It was a bookstore; one of those national chains with a coffee shop and lots of comfy chairs inside. It seemed out of place among the surf and souvenir shops, and maybe that’s why it struck me. It made me think of the one back home at the neighborhood mall. I took Jacob there sometimes. It had an extensive children’s section on the second floor, and a wooden train table for the kids to play with while their parents picked out books they felt were age-appropriate and supportive of whatever brand of spiritual or ethical beliefs they ascribed to.

The thoughts occurred to me in a chain, one linked to the next like the magnetic couplings between the wooden train cars I knew I’d find inside. I had to bring something home for Jacob, and instead of sifting through mountains of plastic junk at the souvenir shops, I could get him a book—maybe something like the picture search book we had looked at the night before I left, or something filled with other kinds of puzzles. It was such a compelling idea that I forgot momentarily about the burrito dinner calling my name, as well as the supervisory chore at the conference registration desk that wasn’t. I turned and starting walking towards the bookstore with happy thoughts of Jacob and I working together on puzzles dancing in my head.

Inside the aroma of sand and surf gave way to coffee beans and bindery glue, a familiar scent that seemed to transport me, as if the sliding glass doors were a magical portal capable of transcending time and space. The decor was identical to the store back home, identical, I knew, to hundreds of other stores across the United States. Caricatures of famous authors were framed on the walls—mostly nineteenth and early twentieth century, names everyone knows but no one reads—looking down on a labyrinth of wooden tables and laminate shelves, each with a tasteful sign bearing some generic category of books—subjects like history, fiction and poetry squared off against weight loss, sports and gardening, as if it was reasonable to put such topics on equal footing. It was filled with quiet people, shuffling between the rows and stealing a few paragraphs out of random tomes they had pulled off the shelves. In our modern world I suppose it was what passed for a temple, a cookie-cutter one, dedicated not to the sum of human knowledge but to the information people will pay $8.95 a title for, and only then if it’s on sale.

The children’s section was identical to the one I took Jacob to—the train table surrounded by the same display of wooden toys, and the books organized both by subject and by age. I found the shelf stuffed with puzzle books and was overwhelmed by their sheer number. There were picture search books like Jacob’s on every subject imaginable, and hundreds of other options, from sticker books and coloring books to word searches and crossword puzzles.

It was bewildering. Maybe it was the drinks I had poured on my empty stomach, or the disorientation that always came with travel and lack of sleep, but I just couldn’t decide what to get. I wanted something challenging, something Jacob and I could do together, but not too challenging, something he wouldn’t shrink from, something that would nurture that inner genius I so desperately wanted him to reveal. Pulling out my cell phone, I decided to call back home and see what Jenny thought. The phone rang six times before it picked up.

“Yes? Hello? Who is it?” Jenny sounded breathless, as if she had run for the phone.

“Jenny?”

“Yes?” she said into the phone, and then, with her mouth away from the receiver, she barked at someone like a drill sergeant. “Put it down, mister! Right now!”

“Jenny?”

“Yes! Who is it?”

“It’s me, Alan. What’s going on?”

“Alan! It’s your goddamn son. He’s driving me out of my mind.”

“What is he—”

“Jacob! No! Oh my god!”

Then the phone must have fallen out of her hand because I heard the shuffling of fabric against the ear piece and a loud thump as it hit the floor. Jenny’s frantic shouting and Jacob’s screaming echoed in my ear as if from a great distance.

“Jenny!” I called into the phone, knowing she had left and couldn’t hear, but needing to say something all the same. Looking around to assess what kind of scene I would create if I started shouting, I lowered my voice only slightly. “Jenny, what the hell is going on?”

No response. I waited, the phone pressed hotly against my ear and a finger stuck in the opposite organ, straining hard to pick up every auditory clue. I was angry, viscerally so, but held it in check out of courtesy for the bookstore patrons surrounding me. Jenny’s final intelligible comment—oh my god—seemed to fill my world. It had been desperate, as if something not just frustrating but tragic had happened. My thoughts ran wild. Jacob was hurt, he had cut himself and was bleeding all over the floor. Or he had found some matches and had set the house on fire. Or he had hurt Jenny or the baby in some way, striking out in blind fury and hitting her in some tender spot. I couldn’t tell. The thumps, shrieks and footfalls I heard weren’t enough to piece anything together, and here I was, two thousand miles away in a bookstore in Miami Beach.

What the fuck am I doing here? I thought absently, staring blankly at the puzzle books arrayed before me. Entertaining a pack of influentials while my real life was destroying itself back home. And for what? A paycheck? A career? A chance to do something important? Did any of that stuff even matter?

It was a long and frustrating wait for Jenny to come back on the line. I almost hung up twice, figuring she could call me back when the crisis had passed, but both times decided not to, afraid I would involuntarily hurl the phone against the wall. Instead, I closed my eyes and started counting the slow and measured breaths I forced myself to take.

“Alan? Are you still there?”

“Yes,” I said, with renewed calmness. “What happened?”

“It’s Jacob.”

“I know it’s Jacob.” I was a stone. At the bottom of a forgotten well. “What’s he done?”

“He’s wild, Alan. He’s out of control. He doesn’t listen to me when you’re not here.”

“Jenny,” I said measuredly. “What just happened? You dropped the phone and said, ‘oh my god.’ Is Jacob all right?”

“You need to talk to him, Alan. You need to make him listen to me.”

It was like she wasn’t even hearing me, like I was just the buzzing of an annoying insect in her ear. Every time I said something, she just spoke more loudly.

“Put him on.”

“He’s always like this when you travel. Something happens to him when you leave. It’s like he turns into a monster.”

“Okay. Let me talk to him.”

“Christ, he makes me so angry! It’s like he’s looking to cause trouble. He won’t do anything I tell him to do.”

“Jenny! Put him on and let me talk to him.”

“Here, just a minute.” And then with the phone away from her mouth, “Jacob! Come here and talk to your father!”

“No!” I heard Jacob say, as if curled up in the corner, a voice like the yip of a wild dog, raised on the streets and alleyways, subservient to nothing but its own need for dominance.

“You get over here right now, young man. You need to talk to your father.”

“I don’t want to!”

“I don’t care what you want, mister! You’re going to talk to him.”

Then I heard Jenny’s heavy tread across the room and when Jacob began to scream, I imagined her grabbing him by the arm and twisting it.

“Take this phone, Jacob! Take this phone and talk to him!”

“Jenny,” I said, a sickness creeping into my stomach. “Forget it, honey. I’ll call back later when he’s calmed down.”

She couldn’t hear me. The phone wasn’t even next to her ear. The way Jacob’s cries suddenly amplified, she must have been pushing the receiver against his face.

“Jenny,” I said helplessly, wanting to shout but knowing it wouldn’t do any good. Nothing I could do from that distance would have any positive effect. “Jenny, it’s all right.”

“Talk to him, goddammit! Or so help me, I’m throwing all your trains in the garbage!”

That must have got Jacob’s attention. Threatening his treasured possessions usually did.

“Hello, Daddy,” he said feebly, as if defeated.

“Hi, buddy,” I said as pleasantly as I could. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Why is Mommy upset?”

“What?”

“Why is Mommy upset?” I repeated, more loudly.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you do something to make her angry?”

“What?”

“I said, did you do something to make her angry?” Could he not hear me?

“No.”

He must have, I knew, but he wasn’t likely to tell me. He may not even know, I realized. Sometimes it seemed like cause and effect didn’t work in Jacob’s world, or at least like he had a faulty understanding as to how they were connected. The way he faced life, it was as if the good and bad things that happened were the capricious acts of a trickster god, wholly unconnected from his behavior in any way.

“You must have done something,” I coaxed, knowing that unless I figured out what he had done, there wasn’t any remote parenting I could do. “Why else would she be so angry?”

“Daddy?” A new tone in his voice, like he hadn’t heard me again and was starting his own line of inquiry.

I sighed. “Yeah, buddy?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Miami. I told you that yesterday.” Yesterday, right? It already felt like a month.

“When are you coming home?”

Now he was hard to hear. I closed my eyes and plugged a finger back into my free ear. “Not for a while, buddy. Not for a while. Can you be a good boy for Mommy while I’m gone?”

“What?”

I heard the static this time. “Can you be a good boy for Mommy?!”

“Uh huh.”

What that a yes or a no? I wasn’t sure. “I really need you to. I need you to do what Mommy says. Can you do that for me, buddy?”

“Uh huh.”

It was the best I was going to get. I was just a tinny little voice in his ear. Ten minutes from now, would he even remember anything I said?

“I love you, buddy.”

“Okay. Bye!”

His farewell was said with the receiver falling away from his mouth, as if now that the obligatory conversation with Dad was over he could get back to the more serious business of tormenting his mother. The way his voice faded away I wondered if the ten-minute estimation I had just made wasn’t optimistic.

“What did you tell him?” It was Jenny, back on the phone and insistent.

“What?”

“Jacob,” she clarified. “What did you tell him?”

“What do you mean? I told him to behave.”

“That’s it? What about the way he’s treating me?”

“Jenny, I don’t know how he’s treating you. I’m in Miami, remember?”

“Go!” Jenny said suddenly, obviously to Jacob and not me. “Go play!”

“Jenny?”

“Jacob! Stop climbing on me! Go in the other room and play!”

Another rustle of fabric and a thump like the phone fell to the ground again. I heard Jacob cry and then launch into full-throated wails that faded as he either ran or was carried away. Then Jenny was hollering from far away, telling Jacob to stay put until Mommy was done, and then a door slamming as if the house was empty, and angry footfalls coming back to the phone.

“Alan? Alan! Are you still there?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, I am.”

“I really need you to talk to your son. Get him to stop acting this way.”

“Jenny,” I said with forced serenity, conscious again of the bookstore patrons around me. “I did just talk to him. I don’t know what you think I can accomplish from here.”

“Well, you have to do something. He won’t listen to me.”

And then the farcical enormity of it all struck me, pushed me over the edge, and I flew into a rage. “Goddammit, Jenny! What the fuck do you expect me to do? I’m two thousand miles away in the children’s section of a goddamn Barnes and Noble, trying to mediate a dispute between a grown woman and a four-year-old boy.” My eye caught a teenage girl with orange hair on the other side of the bookshelf wrinkling her diamond-studded nose at me. I gave her a look like she was the one acting crazy. “And my cell phone keeps losing its goddamn signal. Can you even hear what I’m saying? You sure as fuck don’t act like it.”

“What did you say?”

I'd heard the static on the line during my tirade, but I had pushed right on through anyway. Now, I didn’t have the energy to repeat it.

“You’re just going to have to deal with him. There’s only so much I can do from here.”

“But I don’t know what I’m doing, Alan,” she said, a note a desperation coming into her voice. “He just won’t listen! Am I doing something wrong?”

“Lower your expectations,” I said glibly, like a radio show psychologist used to diagnosing problems over the air. “You’re both perfectionists and are bound to butt heads. When I’m not there, seek compromise instead of obedience. You may find what you’re fighting over has an easy solution if you each just give a little. You’re the adult. Take the high road.”

There was silence on the line. At first I thought the call had been dropped, but then I could hear Jacob’s muffled wailing echoing in the background and something else, much closer, like the coughing of an old carburetor.

“Jenny? Are you crying?”

Breath hitching in. “Y-y-yes...”

Oh, sweet Jesus, she’s crying. “Honey, don’t cry. What are you crying about?”

“I don’t know how to do this, Alan,” she confessed angrily. “I don’t know how to be his mother and now we’ve got a second one on the way.”

She sounded lost. At her wit’s end. Ready to give up. Part of me was angry, convinced that she had the far easier job between the two of us, but her misery touched me and I could feel my heart fluttering in my chest. I didn’t know what to say.

“Jenny… I’m sorry… but you’ve got to hold it together. I just got here. I can’t come home and help you with this.”

“I know.”

“Stop trying so hard. You’re his mother. He loves you—more than me, anyway.”

“Oh, is it a contest now?”

It was a barb, meant to set us off into an argument, but I didn’t take the bait. “That’s not how I meant it. Just go easy with him. What are you two fighting about anyway?”

“It’s time for him to brush his teeth,” she said through her sniffles and tears.

I waited for more. “And?”

“And he doesn’t want to do it.”

“So? Skip it tonight.”

“Alan!” she said, as if I had suggested she cut off one of his fingers. “He has to brush his teeth!”

“Fine,” I said, switching gears and knowing the idea of not brushing your teeth before going to bed was as wild to Jenny as the idea of climbing into bed with muddy boots. “Then ask him when he wants to brush his teeth.”

“What?”

“Give him a choice. Brush your teeth before or after you put your pajamas on.”

“He’s already got his pajamas on.”

“Oh Christ, Jenny, I’m not going to playbook this one for you. Make him a deal. Let him decide when he brushes his teeth. Or sweeten the pot. Tell him after he brushes you’ll read him one of his favorite books. Just don’t order him to do something and expect immediate compliance. Nobody likes that. Especially not children with genes from you and me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I felt like I was talking to a member of my staff. “Has he stopped crying yet?”

She paused, as if holding the phone away from her ear to listen. “I think so.”

“Good. Give him a few more minutes to calm down and then go in there a talk to him.” I paused, consciously softening my tone. “What about you? Are you all right?”

“I’ve stopped crying if that’s what you mean.”

I expected as much. Her acerbic tone had returned in full force. When she spoke I imagined her wiping a finger under each eye and looking up at the ceiling like she did when she was done crying and ready to move onto the next thing. “I love you, honey.”

“I love you, too.”

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art by Arthur C. Danto

This is a collection of nine essays. And like most collections of essays, some of them cohere better than others. Danto talks about “art” in all of them, but is he building the same case and driving to the same point in each successive one? It was frankly hard for me to tell.

Here are some parts of some of the essays, however, that I found thought-provoking.

Does Art Create or Reflect Reality?

Did jazz in any sense cause or only emblemize the moral transformations of the Jazz Age? Did the Beatles cause or only prefigure the political perturbations of the sixties -- or had politics simply become a form of art in that period, at least the politics responsive to music, the real political history of the world taking place on a different level of causation?

This seems like one of Danto’s central questions about art. Is it a force the society reacts to, or is it a result acted on by the force we call society. I’m not sure where Danto lands on the question, but my gut says that the choice is a false dichotomy. Art is and can be both -- it is one of the ways society comes to understand its force -- as exemplified in this amusing vignette:

In any case, as we know, even works intended to prick consciousness to political concern have tended by and large to provoke at best an admiration for themselves and a moral self-admiration for those who admired them. The cynical bombing of the Basque village of Guernica on April 26, 1937, made Guernica happen -- so it was not merely wit when Picasso responded to the German officer’s question, having handed him a postcard of the painting, “Did you do that?” with “No, you did.” Everyone knew who did what and why: it was an atrocity meant to be perceived as an atrocity by perpetrators who meant to be perceived as prepared to stop at nothing. The painting was used as a fundraiser for Spanish war relief, but those who paid money for the privilege of filing past it only used it as a mirror to reflect attitudes already in place, and in later years it required art-historical knowledge to know what was going on: it stood as a handsome backdrop for pickups at the Museum of Modern Art, or a place to meet a date, like the clock at the Biltmore Hotel, and it was sufficiently handsome in its grey and black harmonies to have ornamented the kitchen cupboard in a sophisticated apartment I once saw written up, where souffles were concocted for bright and brittle guests who, no more than the hostess, realized that gutted animals and screaming mothers agonized above the formica: it was painted at about the same time as Night Fishing at Antibes, after all, as Anita Silvers has observed, and uses the same sorts of forms as that lyrical work. So in the end it did about as much for the ravaged villagers as Auden’s poem did for dead Yeats or as Yeats’ poem did for his slaughtered patriots, making nothing relevant happen, simply memorializing, enshrining, spiritualizing, constituting a kind of cenotaph to house the fading memories, about at the level of a religious ceremony whose function is to confess the extreme limitation of our powers to make anything happen.

He ends on a rather dark note, but I think he makes my essential point. The bombing Guernica made the painting Guernica happen, but, for a time, the painting Guernica helped expose the bombing Guernica for the propaganda it was intended to be. Art helping society understand the mechanisms and outcomes of its own force.

Danto is a philosopher, so he has a philosopher’s understanding of art and is well schooled in the ways past philosophers have dealt with the subject. Plato, it seems, strongly felt that art was powerless, a reflection of power but not a power of itself. So, evidently, did Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer had a considerably higher regard for art than any Plato shows in his philosophy, but in an important sense he agrees with his great predecessors in agreeing that art makes nothing happen in the causal order of the world. Its importance rather consists in its power to life us out of that order and to put us in a state of contemplation of eternal things.

But Schopenhauer raises an important point nonetheless -- at least in my mind. This power that art does have, this power not to cause things to happen but to lift us into a state of transcendental contemplation, is exactly why it has been oppressed by tyrants throughout the ages.

Art Is In the Mind of the Beholder

Schopenhauer also seems to support one of my own pet theories about art.

Genius, according to Schopenhauer, is the capacity for knowing the Ideas of things -- in the platonic sense of Ideas -- and for revealing these Ideas in works of art for the benefit of the remainder of mankind who, borrowing as it were the eyes of genius, may behold through these works what the genius beholds directly. “The work of art is only a means for facilitating this knowledge,” Schopenhauer writes, treating art as a cognitive prosthetic, a metaphysical window through which we may view the deeper realities, but which in no further sense has any cognitive contribution of its own to make at all: it is to be seen through, but not itself to be seen -- so the more transparent the better.

This, to me, is a pretty clear statement that art, contrary to a lot of the remaining discussion in Danto’s work, is neither a collection of physical media (paint on canvas, clay shaped and formed, etc.), nor a social construct that relies on cultural cues and taboos to be made manifest. Art, in its purest sense, is revealed knowledge in the mind of the observer. It happens neither in the gallery nor in the social conversation that surrounds it, but always and only in the space between the ears of the spectator.

But even Schopenhauer is not quite there. His apparent insistence on the “genius” intent of the artist, that there is an Idea that is being communicated through his work, is only part of the story. Yes, that can happen. The artist can have an Idea and the observer can recreate that Idea when viewing the artist’s work, but that isn’t required in order for art to occur. The revealed knowledge, whatever it is and whether or not it conforms to the intent of the artist, is what art is. This is why, in the anecdote related above, the painting Guernica continues to be art even after people forget the bombing Guernica that inspired it.

This is what I think. But I don’t think Danto agrees -- or at least doesn’t traditionally think about art in this context.

I believe we cannot be deeply wrong if we suppose that the correct interpretation of object-as-artwork is the one which coincides most closely with the artist’s own interpretation. Coinciding interpretations put us in different posture with regard to artists than undertaking to discover what their intentions may have been, nor is it as a thesis subject to the sorts of objections Susan Sontag raises against interpretation generally. For the interpretations she impugns only begin or can begin when the work of art is in place, established as such, and the interpreter begins to ponder what the artist is “really” doing or what the work “really” means. Hers is against a notion of interpretation which makes the artwork as an explanandum -- as a symptom, for example. My theory of interpretation is instead constitutive, for an object is an artwork at all only in relation to an interpretation.

From this excerpt it appears that Danto and Sontag have two different understandings about a “correct” interpretation of a work of art and, at least for Danto, that interpretation is necessary for an object (a painting, a sculpture, etc.) to be considered a work of art.

I say they’re both wrong. An object doesn’t need an interpretation to be art. Objects aren’t art. Art is the interpretation itself.

And speaking of philosophers, here’s at least one that seems to agree with me:

By displaying what is subjective, the work, in its whole presentation, reveals its purpose as existing for the subject, for the spectator, and not on its own account. The spectator is, as it were, in it from the beginning, is counted in with it, and the work exists only for this point, i.e., for the individual apprehending it.
-- G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 30 (DRAFT)

“Stay,” Eleanor said. “Where are you going at this hour?”

It was a little after eight o’clock. I’d already had two drinks at the board’s reception, and they were just about to be seated in the private dining room of the hotel’s five-star restaurant. The chef had a special menu prepared. I had gone back and forth with Eleanor six times on the phone making sure the sommelier had the wine pairings just right. But Mary and I had agreed that I would not stay to enjoy it. I had duties elsewhere. Now I turned to her for help, not knowing how to respond when the board chair put up a fuss.

“Eleanor, they’re setting up the registration desk tonight,” Mary explained. “Alan needs to check-in and make sure everything is going smoothly. It opens first thing in the morning.”

“Oh, poo,” Eleanor said petulantly, swirling her wine and pouting like a little girl. “Aren’t there other people who can do that?”

No, I thought immediately. We didn’t send any extra staff, remember? And the cost of my meal has already bought you another two hours in that suite of yours.

“There are other people working on it,” Mary said reassuringly. “But Alan needs to make sure things are on schedule.”

Eleanor looked unsatisfied with the explanation, but Mary rapidly switched gears.

“Besides, once the crew is finished setting up, Alan is taking them all out to dinner. Kind of a celebration for a job well done getting us ready for this conference.”

“Excellent!” Eleanor suddenly beamed, grasping me firmly by the hand. “Give them my personal regards, Alan. Everyone has done such a fine job. They deserve a night out before all our plans start coming together tomorrow. You’re taking them somewhere special, I hope?”

I had no idea where I was taking them. Until that moment I had made no plans to take anyone anywhere. I was pretty sure Mary wasn’t serious, just using the staff dinner as a handy excuse—or a lie, another lie—to get out of having to buy me a hundred and fifty dollar dinner. I gave her a questioning look and she confirmed my suspicion with a stern face and a shake of her head.

“Wherever they want to go, Eleanor,” I said, smiling. “For them, the sky’s the limit!”

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

In the Dust of This Planet by Eugene Thacker

I’m sorry to say that this is a book without a single dogeared quote or comment from me.

Which is unexpected, given the author’s opening explanation in his preface. First, the stage on which the action will be set:

The world is increasingly unthinkable -- a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part. To confront this idea is to confront the absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all -- an idea that has been a central motif of the horror genre for some time.

And then, the authorial intent of what will be presented there:

The aim of this book is to explore the relationship between philosophy and horror, through this motif of the “unthinkable world.” More specifically, we will explore the relation between philosophy as it overlaps with a number of adjacent fields (demonology, occultism, and mysticism), and the genre of supernatural horror, as it is manifest in fiction, film, comics, music, and other media.

How great does that sound? But then, the academic philosopher shows up, with all his constructionist terminology that obscures more than it elucidates.

However, this relationship between philosophy and horror should not be taken to mean “the philosophy of horror,” in which horror as a literary or film genre is presented as a rigorous formal system. If anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: the isolation of those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitations and constraints, moments in which thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility -- the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language. The genre of supernatural horror is a privileged site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place. What an earlier era would have described through the language of darkness mysticism or negative theology, our contemporary era thinks in terms of supernatural horror.

Huh? I wish I could say that I enjoyed the relatively short text that followed. Despite the numerous references to Lovecraftian stories and films, there was just too much to the academic present for me to truly understand what was going on.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 29 (DRAFT)

When the board meeting was over Eleanor took me aside. There was a reception starting for them in twenty minutes, and then a dinner, and most everyone else was hustling out of there to freshen up beforehand.

“Do you have a minute, Alan? I want to show you something.”

“Of course,” I said hesitantly, noticing that Mary, too, had heard Eleanor’s request and was stopping her movement out of the room. We both closed in on Eleanor’s location at the head of the table.

Eleanor was rearranging the materials in the stack she had brought with her to the board meeting. Tucking her agenda packet under a three-ring binder, she pulled out a copy of our conference program and began flipping through it.

“I don’t want to make a big deal out of this,” she said as she zeroed in on a page and ran her finger along a line of text, “but I thought I should call it to your attention.”

I exchanged a worried glance with Mary and then looked down at what Eleanor was indicating. She was on page 173, and I read along as she spoke.

“This session is comprised of three distinct presentation segments.”

Eleanor looked up at me and for a moment I tried to feign ignorance, looking back at her like I didn’t understand what she was driving at. Her stare became even more severe, the way my mother’s often had when as a boy I tried to escape responsibility for some wrong I had done. Knowing there would be no use bluffing her, I changed my pose to one of supplication and asked her silently for forgiveness.

“Now, don’t worry,” Eleanor said reassuringly. “With everything else you’ve been dealing with, it’s not surprising that something like this should slip through. Let’s just hope no one else notices it.”

She said it with such seriousness that I almost laughed, as if she had just uncovered some state secret that had accidentally been leaked to the enemy regime. What, I wondered, did she think would happen if someone else did notice it? Would they report us to the grammar police?

But Mary didn’t see any levity in the situation. “Thank you,” she said with a gravity that equaled Eleanor’s. “I can assure you that something like this will not happen again.”

And then Eleanor nodded magnanimously, closing the program book below us as if to signify the end of an ugly chapter. “It’s done and behind us, now,” she said solemnly. “Let’s not speak of it anymore.”

She smiled at me, a self-important and victorious thing, offered to me the way a general offers terms of surrender to a defeated foe. She had actually done it. I couldn’t believe it, but there it was. At some point since receiving her conference program two days ago she had gone through it to verify that every one of her three thousand meaningless changes had been made—of course finding the one I had purposely ignored in my moment of feckless rebellion. When had she had the time? Was she some kind of cyborg or something that didn’t need to sleep?

I smiled back, but inside I was screaming.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/