In Praise of Bureaucrats

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Some years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I asked Marianne, "Before I start writing, is there anything you'd like me to include in this book?"

"Yes," she said.  "I'd like to see a bureaucrat who was honest and efficient and doing a job that needed doing."

"Okay," I said, and that's where Stations of the Tide came from.

 Yesterday, Marianne (who, you'll remember, is the retired Director of the Division of Laboratory Improvement at the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Health Bureau of Laboratories)  had a visit from Stanley and Evelyn Reynolds.  Stan is the Director of the Division of Clinical Microbiology at the Bureau, so he and Marianne had a lot of shop talk to work through.

Listening to them . . .

But wait.  What is a bureaucrat?  Somebody who's paid to ensure that legislation is honestly applied.  Let's say that you pass a law that all lab tests be competently performed.  You could go with the libertarian model that if the lab sink-tests everything (i.e., dumps all specimens in the sink and reports results within the normal range, whatever that might be), eventually their surviving customers will give their business to somebody else.  (You've had blood or whatever drawn at your doctor's office, right?  Quick!  What's the name of the lab that processed it?)

Or you could presume that the government makes sure that the labs have a certain minimal level of competence.  And if you do, who actually ensures this?

Bureaucrats, that's who.

So Stanley and Marianne, the current and retired second-highest-ranking guys in the Bureau were talking about what's going on back in the Labs and guess what?  They were passionate!  They raised the roof.  They could not possibly have cared more about making Pennsylvania as safe as it can possibly be for people who might sometime in their life be sick.

Yeah, some bureaucrats are exactly as pointless as you think they are.  But there are a lot of 'em out there who are giving it their all to make the world a better place.

And I for one am grateful



And this week . . .

I'll be on the road this week, from Tuesday through Thursday.  I'll do my best to blog, but if I don't . . . well, it'll only be due to lack of access.

Be well.

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Old Hundredth

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My old friend George R.R. Martin to the contrary, Spring Is Coming!

As if to mark this event, I passed a milestone yesterday.  The Darger and Surplus novel just crossed the hundred-thousand-word mark.  And how close is that to completion?  Well . . . normally, my novels are made up of twenty chapters of five thousand words each.  It used to spook Marianne how tidily that came out.  But this one's coming out a little longer than usual.

How much longer?  Not much.  Maybe five thousand, maybe ten thousand words.  Which means that I am close as close to finished.

And keeping my nose to the grindstone, staying at home working, foregoing adventures of all sorts in order to get this thing written and done with.  Which is why today the only news I have at all is that:


Above:  The first flowers of the year have bloomed in our back yard.  And, mirabile dictu,  they weren't crocuses.  They were snowdrops.  This has been a strange winter.

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The Eternal Search for the Perfect Manhattan Continues

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Y'all know about the search for the perfect martini, right?  It consists of minimizing the vermouth until you reach the point of homeopathy where, statistically, the odds of there being a single molecule of vermouth in the gin are a zillion to one.  Really, it's a chest-pounding guy thing.

But what about the perfect Manhattan?  This is not about perfect steely fascist purity.  No!  It's about taste and mellow sinfulness.  A Manhattan is the kind of drink your sophisticated and scandalous aunt would drink.  It's is the most flavorful cocktail that you'd ever seriously consider putting into your mouth, this side of a grasshopper.

"Rye?  I've never heard of it," said the bartendroid at the otherwise-admirable Chestnut Hill Grill.  So perhaps I need to explain.  A Manhattan is made up of three shots rye, one shot sweet vermouth, and a dash of bitters.  Drop in a maraschino cherry.  Serve in a chilled glass.  Sounds good, doesn't it?  Sweet as a sunset over New York City.

But it can be improved.

Let's start with the rye.  Instead of Jim Beam, which is a superior product sold at an insanely reasonable price, Marianne and I used Rittenhouse Rye.  A Pennsylvania whiskey (obviously, if you're a Philadelphia local) which is NOT available in the state store system and which has a darker amber color and a rich flavor reminiscent of caramel .  Who could wonder why I bought a bottle illegally in Delaware?  We added the sweet vermouth.  Then we shot in a dash or two per drink of Fee Brothers cherry bitters.

The piece de resistance?   Hand-made brandied cherries with various spices.  (The full recipe will be posted after Marianne decides her recipe is just-so.  Now, it's merely exquisite.)

And the result?  Oh, dear God.  A Manhattan is the drink you'd be holding in your hand while listening to Dorothy Parker trash reputations.  Marianne's improved Manhattan is the drink you'd be holding while you one-upped her.  With Duke Ellington playing the piano in the same room.

I will provide further updates as the search for perfection continues.  Those of you who have recipe suggestions are encouraged to post them here.

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This Glitteratti Life (Part 5,284)

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I'm still working hard on the Darger and Surplus novel, which is going like gangbusters and should be finished any day now.  As a result, I'm not engaged in a whole lot of exciting extra-curricular activity nowadays.  But last night Marianne and I had Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger (who, when they're not being our friends, are the mainstays of the Walters & Kissinger Studio -- click here to view some very cool dinosaur reconstruction art) over for dinner.  Much good conversation, and I won five bucks betting on the best-picture Oscar.

So I am content.


And a linguistics note . . . 

I was reading an article about Joanna Newsom in the NYTimes and (no coincidence) listening to one of her songs on YouTube yesterday.  Midway through the ensuing conversation, Marianne said, "Did you just use the term 'elfy-welfy'?"

"Yes," I said, surprised.  "Didn't you know it already?"

As it turned out, she didn't.  And if she didn't, perhaps it will be new to some of you.  So here's the definition:

Elfy-welfy:  adj.  Sentimentally fey; light and wifty; overfond of unicorns, rainbows, and sparkly gauze wings you can strap onto your back at an age when it's no longer cute.

Tolkien was never elf-welfy, though C.S. Lewis came close once or twice.  The phenomenon is not rare, however.  I've read (or, rather, begun) more elfy-welfy fantasy books than I care to think about.   Fortunately, time and trauma have mercifully blotted their names and those of their perpetrators from my memory.

Above:  Bob and Tess.  I swiped this picture from a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting notice I found online.  I hope that's okay.

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No Exit

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Yes, yes, yes, Hell is other people.  We all get that.  But what does it look like?   Well, last night I went to see No Exit at the Curio Theatre Company.   Even though I read J. P. Sartre's harrowing little posthumous fantasy, Good Lord!, it must be forty years ago, this is the first time I've seen it performed.  I enjoyed it immensely.

And the answer to my question?  It's triangular with a chessboard-patterned floor, a huge German expressionist door, and a gridwork of black strings separating it from the audience.  Much praise to Paul Kuhn for a great design for an intimate (a total of 62 seats, with chairs on all three sides of the action) evening of theater.


And elsewhere on the Intertubes . . . 

This comes straight from the streets of Babel.  All I can say is, Joshua Allen Harris must be reading my dreams.

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City Root Ten Months Later

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I'm on the road again!  This happens to me a lot these days.  But on Sunday, after visiting the Tract House, I took a quick run over to Twelfth and Callowhill, here in Philadelphia, to see how Keiko Miyamori's orphan sculpture City Root was doing.

And the eight and a half ton sculpture which I wrote about last April here, is doing just fine.  The cracks are maybe a little wider after a long winter's repeated freezing and thawing but it's still one gorgeous hunk of gigantic lucite, and it doesn't look likely to fall apart anytime soon.  I took dozens of photos.  The thing is mesmerizing.

The owner of the property (and maybe of the sculpture; he offered free storage of the sculpture while Miyamori tried to find a buyer with the understanding that after a certain length of time unsold, it would be his to keep) has clamped four lights onto the top of the sculpture.  Which means, I guess, that it lights up at night.  Next time I'm in the city after dark, I'm going to find out!


Above:  The artwork itself.  Right:  A graphic demonstration of the current size of one of the cracks.  

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The Tract House

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If you're like me, you go to a fair number of art exhibits.   How many of them let you take the art home with them?

There's the strange beauty of The Tract House - A Darwin Addition, an installation by Lisa Anne Auerbach.  It's made up of tracts riffing on Darwin.  The texts were penned by a variety of writers, poets, and ambitious volunteers and then attractively laid out and illustrated by a graphic designer.  Visitors are welcome to stop by the Tract House, browse through the offerings, and then take home copies of those they like.  I took home one of each and put them in an old cigar box I had lying around.

The exhibit is being done as part of Philagrafika 2010, a new annual festival of art prints.  You can find them here.  Why Darwin?  Because it's sponsored by the Philosophical Society.

The Tract House 'site is here.  And the vitals for those who'd like to visit are:

On view until April 11, 2010
Friday - Sunday, 11am - 5pm
First Fridays, 11am - 8pm (reception 6-8pm)
231 North Third Street
Philadelphia, PA




Oh, and did anybody else catch the big hockey game yesterday?


I'm not a jingoistic Olympics viewer.  It's nice when the home team wins, but mostly I just want to watch folks from all around the world being the absolute best at what they do.  Still, some sports simply belong to particular nations.  Like hockey does to Canada.

So when I discovered that the Canadian team were the underdogs in the final game against the U.S. team, my heart went right out to them.  And they won in overtime!

Is this a great continent or what?

Above:  Marianne Porter perusing tracts.  Art, (para)literature, and the woman I love, all in one snapshot!

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