Dear Readers,
Please accept my sincere apologies for more-or-less disappearing from the blogosphere. It’s been hard for me to be absent, but I know that it’s been harder for you. You’re too kind.
It’s hard to believe that on Friday morning, we will wrangle the cat into his carrier, take him to the kitty hotel, and head out for our Midwestern baseball adventure. We haven’t even had a chance to pack yet, and I haven’t done a proper job shopping for Lisa’s birthday. There were so many things I meant to write about before leaving: Iowa geology, voyages of exploration to the upper Midwest in America’s early national period, class, farming, why baseball is the king of sports, etc. But for a variety of reasons, these never came to pass.
So where have I been? Well, I have been a little busy at work. For a couple of years now, we’ve been doing two releases per year; as a result we have big deadlines on a regular basis, which always seem to come right before vacation or major holidays. Lisa was sweet enough to come out to Natick on Saturday and kidnap me for ice cream. And — although things are winding down now — yesterday afternoon I was really looking forward to going home to mow the lawn.
What else? Tonight I went to the MFA to hear Laura McPhee talk about her new work. I saw her exhibit River of No Return there about a month ago but sadly never got ’round to writing about it. The 40-or-so very large scale (4-by-6 foot!) photographs of Idaho are fabulous. As she said tonight, they are about “place above all else.” She acknowledges another set of recurring themes in her work: time, loss, and mortality. I like hearing artists talk about their influences. For McPhee these are Arbus, Emmet Gowin, and her Nietzschean, Westerner grandmother. For a little while I felt my conflicted Westerner feelings awkwardly stir again. An essential part of being from the West is living in and reacting to the various mythologies that construct and constrain the Western experience. It’s also about being vaguely annoyed by non-Westerners who attempt to tell us who we are and what should be important to us. So I smiled with benign (but condescending) amusement when the rugby-shirted 40-something at the front of the auditorium said that we were allowing Westerners to “destroy the West.” . . . Anyway, the show runs through September 17. Go see it!
If all goes well, you’ll soon hear about another thing that has been taking up my free time. But I’m feeling mysterious, so you’ll just have to wait.
So keep reading for secrets to be revealed and to see how we survive the most misunderstood and understated part of the U.S. If all goes well I’ll get around to fleshing out my theory that America — the most powerful nation in the world — has a persistent “last stand” complex in which we see ourselves as the underdog in the world community; I suspect it’s rooted in our evangelical and frontier experiences and helps to bolster our sense of moral superiority.
And on enjoyable days like today, I begin to suspect that there’s some kind of Richter scale of happiness. Count up your favorite things that you did in one day to get the magic number: be with good friends + have a prodcutive, mostly stress-free day at work + eat a fantastic burrito at the Qdoba + spend time with the sweetie (but only a little) = 3.5. If the weather had been nice instead of torrential rains, it might have been 4.5, which of course would have been ten times better (à la Richter’s scale). Being logarithmic, it’s hard (but emminently possible) to get much higher than 7. . . .
Sincerely,
Jeff Mather, International Playboy
CFB, esq
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