Three Beautiful Things 05/22-23/08: Chilean Rocks, Human Centered, Camel Centered

1. In WR 122, one of my students, from Chile, told a story about a river not far from Santiago where peope gathered little rocks because they all had, by nature, had the symbol of the cross on them. She gave me one of these rocks. It's remarkable.

2. In ENG 257/WR 123, Margaret and I showed the movie "Into the Wild". It was the fourth time I've seen it and I was once again enthralled by it. I marveled again at what a beautifully made movie it is, how perfectly cast, and what a puzzling story Jon Krakauer and Sean Penn wrote. Once again, I loved Catherine Keener, laughed at and enjoyed Vince Vaughn, and was deeply moved by Hal Holbrook. For what I enjoy in a movie, "Into the Wild" is nearly perfect.

3. In ENG 109, where I'm trying to expose my students to as much literature around the world as I can, I showed the Mongolian masterpiece, "The Story of the Weeping Camel". Thursday, my students discussed what they learned from the movie. We focused much of our discussion on the place of human beings in the story. Humans are a small part of the story. They are not central. They are in a harsh environment, in the Gobi Desert, and live in the company of natural and supernatural forces much larger than they are and have a humble relationship with the animals they live with. I thought it was fascinating to watch a film whose pace and rhythms were very slow, as if the movie was set to the time of nature, not dictated so much by human activity.

Three Beautiful Things 11/15/07: Starts, Taxes, Conversaton

1. My evening WR 121 students wrote wonderful introductions to their next essay, and going around the room and hearing them all was uplifting.

2. Property tax bill paid. Well two thirds of it. More later.

3. A wonderful discussion with Kendall about Into the Wild.

Three Beautiful Things 11/13/07: Denali, Pictures, A-Rod

1. Today's Media Commission meeting hashed out the future of the college's literary publication, Denali. I enjoyed the discussion. I enjoyed the give and take about several issues surrounding the magazine. I enjoyed that we came to a reasonable and workable conclusion in our work. I admired the others I was working with and could say something I rarely do: "That was a good meeting."

2. I went to Into the Wild for the third time tonight. I'm ready to go again. This movie is growing on me. I love the movie's pictures and how they are framed. Again and again, this movie presents pictures of a variety of American places and presents them in a variety of styles that enlarge the story and work beautifully with the music soundtrack, which I absorbed more deeply tonight. That's all I can say for now.

3. I'm unusually and unpredictably happy that Alex Rodriquez is negotiating on his own to try to rejoin the New York Yankees. I actually thought this might happen. To me, the good news is that he must have found out that other teams he's interested in were not willing to shell out the millions of dollars he and his agent were asking for, and without that kind of money available elsewhere, he's back knocking on the Yankees' door. I wouldn't be surprised if he works out a deal with the Yanks. It would add relish to the already weird world of Major League Baseball in the 21st century.

American Dream (Part 1)

Stamped deep in the character of the American sense of identity is the idea of the rugged individualist. Put another way, a deep feature of the American Dream is the idea of going one's own way, against all odds. Oddly, though, it's these very individualists who draw the most criticism for being the very thing that is so very deeply American.

The American Dream is on my mind because of two books I've read and two movies I've watched over the last week. On the face of it, the two movies are eerily similar.

Timothy Treadwell, the man featured in Werner Herzog's documentary"Grizzly Man", struck out on his own for thirteen consecutive summers, with occasional company, to commune with the brown bears at Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula, south of Anchorage.

He lives among the bears, talks to them, even gets close enough to touch them. In the end, he and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, are mauled and eaten by a bear. This incident was not filmed, but recorded in audio. The audio is not played in the movie.

Herzog crafted the movie by selecting scenes from the one hundred hours of video tape Treadwell took of himself and the bears, interspersing these scenes with interviews of people who knew Treadwell and with Alaska officials who try to figure Treadwell out.

In the spirit of the American Dream, Treadwell had a vision of what he wanted his life to be and went after it. It was not a dream of material gain. Far from it. It was a dream of finding his own true soul by being in communion with the brown bears and their habitat, a dream of striking out in the wilderness and being free of all societal constraints. It was a dream fashioned around protecting the bears, of living out a connection with a life force deeper and more powerful than any found in civilized society.

In the end, Treadwell's dream was the source of his own demise. The dream had a dark side. That dark side was hubris. Treadwell believed he had become so at one with the bears that he could tell them what to do, could protect himself with out electric fencing, without pepper spray, without a rifle.

It takes a certain amount of hubris to enter unknown territory, whether charting unknown waters or launching astronauts into space. It's the American way to hunger for exploring the unknown, but that hunger has to be tempered with caution and respect for the unknown.

Egotistical, immature, self-aggrandizing, Treadwell scoffed at caution and disguised his disrespect for the brown bears behind his rhetoric of doing what was best for the bears, and it killled him.

The American Dream can be fatal.

Chris McCandless found this out in his death.

Similar to Timothy Treadwell, Chris McCandless had become entirely disillusion with the hypocrsies and lies of civilized society. He dreamed of stripping his life down to the barest of essentials as a way of living truth, truth uncluttered by any material things or societal constructs that would come between him and the purity of his soul.

Chris' dream was to live absolute authenticity.

Chris struck out on his own, drove west, abandoned his car in Arizona, and hitchhiked, hopped freights, and kayaked his way through much of the west before heading north to Alaska to venture into the wild and live off the land with a bag of rice, a rifle, some ammo, a machete, a fish net, and his books, including one on the flora and fauna of Alaska.

Chris strove to be as close to being an individualist as he could. He believed, in the depths of his American soul, that a person can determine what he wants and will himself to have it. He believed a person could do this on his own.

Chris was driven by his dream of going west, of living beyond all the limits that money and family and society tried to impose on him, to grow into as fully human a person as he could, to throw himself headlong and recklessly into every new experience that came his way.

Chris sought no publicity. Quite the opposite. He sought pure anonymity and autonomy, as best he could. His desire was not driven by a self-aggrandized dream, but was a spiritual quest for that most fundamental of American dreams: he wanted to be absolutely free.

Tragically, Chris' three months and several days in the Alaska wild left him little room for error. He underestimated and was ignorant of the cycles of nature, when game would be available, when rivers swell from glacial runoffs, and how fatal it is to eat the wrong root plucked from the land.

Chris died. He died soon after he realized, through his reading of Tolstoy, that true happiness is not found in isolation, but in communion with others. Learning this moved him to surrender his isolation and return to the society of others.

But he never got out. Chris lived as authentically as he could, but, in the end, he was no match for the rigors of nature.

He died as a young man as fully committed to the American Dream of asserting one's individual will and searching unfettered freedom as any American I have ever read about, let alone known.
Chris saw the light of a truth larger than he imagined. We need each other. Nothing spoke as clearly on behalf of this truth than his death.

Three Beautiful Things 11/11/07: Grizzly, Revisiting "Into the Wild", Anguish

1. I came away from viewing the remarkable documentary "Grizzly Man" with high regard for the film, but low regard for its subject, Timothy Treadwell. While Treadwell's video footage of the bears in the Alaska Peninsula were astonishing, his self-absorption, immaturity, and deceit left me cold. His death was awful, but his on-camera persona created little sympathy in me for his project.

2. I came away from seeing "Into the Wild" for the second time with a deeper understanding of the movie and an even higher regard for how beautifully made it is and for the way it portrays the life and death of Chris McCandless.

3. I found this video portraying Iraqi war veteran James Blake Miller astonishing. I wasn't that crazy about the epilogue, but the two parts focusing on Miller are riveting in their exploration of his anguish.

Three Beautiful Things 11/1-3: Sean Penn, Go Ducks!, Safety

1. The movie "Into the Wild" left me speechless. I went with friends and had to say, "I can't talk. I have to go home. Good-bye."



2. Oregon's speedy, gritty Ducks beat undefeated Arizona State, 35-23.

3. I learned at a division meeting safety presentation that when I come to LCC to work, I shouldn't be worried about getting shot.

*The Autzen Stadium photograph is from ESPN.com.

Three Beautiful Things 05/05/07: Uncle Bill, Jbelle, Essays

1. I know very little about Dad's older brother, Bill, killed in the Pacific theater during WWII. Walt Gaby sent me this tender and heart-warming story about my uncle today:

Your Uncle Bill also worked for the Kellogg Reminder. Among other things, he ran a printing press in the basement – the kind where one had to feed one paper at a time as the ink roller moved up and down over the type face. My father’s haberdashery and tailor shop was right next door. The wall between the two basements was nothing more than vertical slabs of wood – often with a one inch space in between. I had a small room on my side where I spent millions of hours building model airplanes – Bill and the printing press was right on the other side of the wall. The great pleasure for me was that I could hear Bill singing as he worked – most often a song entitled Maria Elena.

2. Jbelle and I chatted on gmail today and when the world awakens tomorrow it should find all of its problems solved. It wasn't that hard, really. Jbelle did most of the heavy lifting, I'll admit.

3. My students' papers on Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and the American Dream and the American Spirit were stellar, a pleasure to read and comment on.

Three Beautiful Things 04/16/07: Churches, Bose, Alex Supertramp

1. As much as anything, I enjoy having discussion with people about their churches and how things work in different churches, not only theologically, but also regarding how the place operates. Katrina and I have been having a wonderful email exchange on this very topic and it's been heartwarming and informative.

2. Nothing like a little bit of reasonable self-indulgence. I went to Best Buy and purchased some new speakers for my computer and XM satellite radio. Sweet.

3. I've just read short essays my WR 123 students wrote on Chris McCandless in the book Into the Wild. They are writing about Chris' feelings, thoughts, and understanding of himself in relation to class and his efforts, in that regard, to re-invent himself. I think highly of the students in this class. Their work in these papers surpassed what I thought they would do. How gratifying!

Three Beautiful Things 01/19/07: Back to Poetry, Othello Surgery, Into the Wild

1. Thanks to the blizzards and ice storms and quarter inches of snow that befell Eugene over the last ten days, my Intro to Poetry class met today for the first time since last Wednesday and I loved discussing poetry again with my students.

2. The play Othello needs some trimming and I helped Sparky and Will go through the play and make some judicious cuts here and there to further reduce the play's run time.

3. Kelly dropped me an email to say that she had picked up a copy of Into the Wild at Smith Family Bookstore and loved reading it. I was thrilled that she enjoyed this book. It has been one of my favorite books to teach and to reflect upon over the last five to six years.