While the Olympic Winter Games monopolize our television screens I try hard to understand what all the fuss is about. Each year I fail, and put on a DVD showing people having a pleasant time in a warm climate.

Let me admit that I’m one of those people, and I imagine our name is Legion, who only have to see a sheet of ice in order to feel uneasy, unsteady, and unsafe. I find it hard to believe in the sanity of anyone who deliberately seeks out slippery spots with the intention of doing acrobatics on them.

Most sports leave me colder than a whole mountain of ice. Somehow, I was born without the sporting gene. I’m sure it does exist and, when the human genetic code is fully understood there it will be, a large, football-shaped gene somewhere in the region of the solar plexus. But a few defective people like me just don’t have it. I’ve learned to hide my disability by making sporting comments, like “How about those Mets?” The last time was in the middle of the Super Bowl, and it didn’t seem to go down too well with the guys who were watching the game. But I expect that was just my British accent.

The phrase “winter games” therefore combines two of my least favorite things, and seeing them on television has done nothing to change my opinion. It astonishes me how many peculiar things they can think of to do on snow and ice. It baffles me that so many people can tolerate and even enjoy the boredom of watching an endless succession people sliding downhill on skis, or snowboarders going up and over and back, up and over and back, again and again, or speed skaters going round and round and round, all of them trying and ultimately failing to defy the laws of physics. The surrealism of the whole process is heightened by the obsession with statistics and the ludicrously tiny differences, often down to tenths or hundredths of a second, between the winners and the losers.

The athletes are very talented, and sometimes extraordinarily graceful. But what a narrow skill it is. Personally, with global warming coming on, I wouldn’t want to invest so much in an activity that must necessarily depend on sub-zero temperatures.

Theirs is specialization taken to an extraordinary level: they have learned to do one thing superlatively well, but the thing itself is useless. The only purpose seems to be competition for its own sake, to win, and to attract sponsors. There must surely be easier, to say nothing of warmer and safer ways to earn a living.

After such a tremendous expenditure of money and skill and energy, it’s a pity that the games are so boring. The athletes must get bored too. Ice dancers surely long to be sociology professors sometimes. So I would suggest introducing extra dimensions, extra challenges in the style of a triathlon, but testing a broader range of skills.

“Ok, that was a pretty good ski jump: now, for extra points, three questions of Shakespeare’s early sonnets.”
Or the Olympic organizers might introduce a cooking competition, some tricky problems in car repair, or a confrontation with Windows Vista in one of its more baffling modes. This would allow athletes to display a much wider range of talents, and develop skills that would be useful after their physical abilities have faded.

Of course it would be counter-productive to extend this principle of diversification into all forms of specialized activity. We don’t want surgeons interrupted in mid cut to throw out baseballs, for example, and I certainly wouldn’t want to stop my writing in order to slide down an icy hill on a couple of planks. Writing is serious business.

We were in Washington DC for a couple of days last week. It was personal business. The President hasn’t called me in to be a special adviser yet, although I live in hope.

I’ve been to Washington many times over the years, but I never feel comfortable there. The architecture is too monumental, too reminiscent of the Roman Empire at its unsteady peak. Nothing is human scale. Even cultural institutions, like the superb National Gallery of Art, force us to climb a giant marble staircase to the entrance. We are made to feel like peasants approaching a medieval cathedral, where we will be privileged to worship the really important gods.

It doesn’t really surprise me that so many Americans find the Federal government alien and remote. When people work in big, fancy office buildings – especially ones as overpowering as these – they suffer from what I call “Edifice Complex.” The offices look so monumental, so important that the people in them must be important. Those of us who work in modest offices, spare bedrooms or converted garages don’t necessarily have this elevated feeling. Folks who don’t work in offices at all, but do real things with their hands, may be even more skeptical. Indeed, you only have to drive a few blocks from Pennsylvania Avenue to see slum building covered in subversive and even revolutionary graffiti. The further outside the Beltway you travel, the more disconnected Washington seems. The IRS and the Department of Justice routinely deal with cases of people who would prefer to opt out of the whole federal thing. They fervently believe that Montana or Idaho, or even California, have nothing at all to do with Washington DC. I have it on good authority that these claims do not usually result in the refund of federal taxes; so don’t bother to try it.

From the point of view of location and climate, Washington DC is a terrible place for the capital. It made political sense in the 1790s, but not now. The nation is so vast that a government in any single place will be far away from most of its citizens, and therefore an object of suspicion.

This set me thinking about the European monarchies of the late middle ages and the renaissance. Those kings and queens didn’t rule such huge territories but transportation was so slow that their problem was essentially the same as Washington’s. The far-flung territories were hard to govern. Monarchs solved the problem by moving around. Queen Elizabeth I of England or Henry IV of France, for example, would go walkabout with their entire court, and inflict themselves on citizens who lived far away from the official capital. They might stay for months, eating the locals out of house and home, and governing from there. This “Progress” from place to place established the monarch’s authority all over the realm, and reminded his or her more distant subjects who was in charge.

This is surely an idea whose time has come again. A mobile government that would be at the same time closer to the people, less expensive to run, and more secure from the threat of terrorism. The modern federal bureaucracy, with its almost three million employees, would be frankly impossible to move. So they would have to be slimmed down to a nice, tight, manageable team that could work and be accommodated in small towns all over the country. In Thomas Jefferson’s time the government employed about sixty people. That should still be enough, now that they have computers to do the work.

Just to start things off, I would like to see the federal government come to Long Island. Our local professional buildings have many vacant spaces. A few weeks crammed into some shoebox-sized offices behind a strip mall might give our leaders a different perspective on themselves. Then they could move on, perhaps to Topeka, Kansas. It would be a liberal education for the Washington elite. Of course they would soon want to stop and settle somewhere out of sheer exhaustion, just as the royal courts did in the 17th century. Probably, they would settle in Texas, or in Florida, close to Orlando. But that’s ok. At least they would be out of downtown Washington DC, and all those imposing buildings would be empty. What a fantastic place for an outlet center.

The following was composed for a collection of writings from the Iowa Summer Writing Festival 2009.

It was hard to say a final farewell to Iowa City. Each summer for at least a dozen years I have packed my carry-on and laptop and come here for a week or two to teach at the Summer Writing Festival. The exact location of Iowa City always remained a mystery to me because I flew from New York. But I did learn that somewhere out here in the middle of the corn fields, was the University of Iowa, with its famous writing program. My task was to contribute my one cent’s worth of East Coast wisdom to the students in the summer workshops.

Over the years Iowa City came to feel like a second home. There must be more to the city than the few blocks between the river and Gilbert Street but, without a car, I never saw any of it. I became a habitué of such gourmet destinations as Givanni’s, the Brown Bottle, and the Linn Street Café, and almost learned their menus by heart. There are some downtown bars I dimly remember too.

The students were always more memorable than the catering. A whole lot of really bright, creative people come to these summer sessions. But the continuing popularity of writing programs like this is a bit of a puzzle. It mirrors the paradox that, as reading habits are in decline, the number of books published continues to increase. Obviously I am on the side of writers, but I couldn’t help thinking sometimes that teaching creative writing was a bit like teaching people how to drive steam engines, or build houses out of mud and sticks. It’s not exactly on the cutting edge of twenty-first century culture. But there’s comfort in the knowledge that I am not alone. We’re all dinosaurs in the writing business, lovers of words on paper, literary King Canutes trying to hold back the tide of change, getting our feet wet, and having a wonderful time doing it.

The desire to write is a mystery in itself. On the one hand it is a pursuit that, unlike golf or sailing, requires a low initial investment. A piece of paper and a pen puts us on a level playing field with every writer who ever lived, up to and including Mr. Shakespeare whoever he was. On the other hand writing is hard. Writer’s block is universal and painful. The market for our work is not exactly red hot.

We persist, I think, because writing is an egotistical activity. We want to be heard, to have our say, to make our point, to share our opinions, dreams, and fantasies. Words on paper still have special power, which is why we have sacred texts and not (yet) sacred Tweets, and why the laws of the land are enshrined in law books instead of simply being posted on FaceBook. There’s nothing more satisfying for those of us born in the age of reading than getting our thoughts printed paper, and having other people share them. As a bonus we might even become successful, and therefore admired and envied. This is almost as good as being heard. Every writer has that lottery ticket and, as the lottery promoters say, you’ve got to be in it to win it.

There are plenty of fine writers waiting to be discovered, and I was almost afraid that one day, in a writers’ workshop, I would find in our group a real Mute, Inglorious Milton, a full-scale creative genius: a new T.C.Boyle or Kurt Vonnegut or Margaret Atwood or Toni Morrison, someone who really was way above the average and capable of great things. I hoped I would have the wit to recognize her, or him. But what should I do then? I like to think I would have had the courage to say, “Go with your gift, whatever the cost.” If I stood by my belief that creativity is good I wouldn’t have any choice but to push him or her towards the unpredictable life of the creative artist. It might mean a lawsuit from the impoverished genius sometime in the future, but it would be worth the risk. We need all the creative people we can get: it would be an intolerably dull world without them. But, even without hidden genius, many of the talented people who come to Iowa will go on to do more interesting things and lead more satisfying lives because they have used these summer days for something more demanding than lying on the beach.

The summer of 2009 was my last at the Iowa Summer Writing Workshops. According to at least one of my students I had become too deaf to hear what people were saying in the group. This is true enough (I wear two hearing aids, both useless), although what seems to be deafness may simply be mental distraction, for which no electronic aids are available. More important is the fact that I am too old and altogether too old-fashioned to be of much use to writers who must pursue their careers in the twenty-first century. The language is changing, the definitions of literature and entertainment are changing, and communication technologies are evolving faster that I can (or want to) follow them. It’s all happening on the web, and we can’t even imagine yet what will come after the web. The literature of the future will probably arrive in glorious multimedia 3D, with quintaphonic sound, added taste sensations and neurological enhancements delivered directly into the brain by microwaves. Meanwhile people of my generation will still be wondering how to pick up their e-mail, and what FaceBook is good for.

Teaching at Iowa has been an inspiring and enriching experience, although I suspect that I learned much more from my students than I ever managed to teach them. If you were ever in one of my workshops and you read this I thank you, and also the team that made it all run so well: Amy, Caryl, Jeanne, Kate, and the rest. But it seems time for my generation of teachers to move along and make way for these so-talented contemporary writers: Iowa, The Next Generation. I can’t wait to read what they will imagine and create.

We got back from France last week and, in my habitual pointless pursuit of useless knowledge, I spent Saturday at a session of the One Day University. This admirable institution has grown very quickly, and obviously appeals to a lot of people like me (older, college educated, inquisitive people with time to spare). One Day U may even be getting too big. This session was held in the spacious halls of the New York Hilton, and the place was uncomfortably packed. But the lectures are generally worth a bit of claustrophobia.
This time I had chosen to hear about Darwin’s theory of evolution, ancient religions, new forms of electronic deception, the future of classical music, and the modern film industry. It’s a daunting list of topics for a single day, and probably too much for my aging brain.

I can empathize with the professors who give these lectures. It’s not like an audience of undergraduates, and I get the feeling that the speakers are sometimes intimidated. On this day I heard two lectures that were excellent, two that were workmanlike, and one that was so disorganized and incoherent that I could have done it better myself.

The best lecture – the best I have heard for a long time – was by Leon Botstein on classical music. He was erudite, funny, clever, and opinionated, which is a winning combination for a speaker. The audience was utterly captivated. One lecture like this is worth the price of admission, and even the price of parking in midtown.

Saint Quentin la Poterie.

One of the many myths about the south of France is that the weather is warm and sunny all year round. It isn’t. We are just a few miles from the Mediterranean coast and, as I write this, I’m looking out the window at a steady, heavy fall of snow that has been going on for hours. This kind of weather always surprises the locals, who seem to believe in their own myth of a sub-tropical paradise. They are completely unprepared for cold weather, although it happens every year. Domestic heating is pathetically inadequate (I have learned to type while wearing gloves), and snow clearance is non-existent. The village snow removal team consists of a man with a bucket of salt that he spreads by hand, and another man on a quad bike with a small shovel. Everyone else is indoors, wearing several layers of clothing, watching the lights flicker on and off. The hardware store in town long ago sold out of kerosene heaters, candles and batteries, as it does every January.

Cold weather doesn’t suit my temperament. Any amount of heat is fine but I feel cold as a threat, especially when it doesn’t let up. An ice age would kill me and, judging by the weather in North America and Europe this past two weeks, we are entering an ice age right now. France and Britain have come virtually to a standstill, and places like North Dakota have felt wind chills of fifty below zero. These are not reasonable conditions for human beings, or even for penguins. We need global warming, and we need it now.

Saint Quentin la Poterie, France

A Happy New Decade to both my readers. Let’s hope it is better than the last one.

Today is a national holiday here, and much more important than Christmas. The French celebrate the New Year (as they do almost everything) with food, and we are in recovery after a celebratory dinner at the village restaurant ,Le Délice des Anges. It began at 9 p.m. with champagne and three kinds of foie gras, and wound its way through a fish course, a meat course, and a cheese course, before ending at midnight with more champagne and an assortment of five desserts on the same plate. It’s a miracle that I can type at all.

This business of living in two places (France and America) is new to me, and it has some curious side-effects. There is a perpetual sense of expectation, a permanent state of “Are we there yet?” It always feels like the day before leaving, because we are always thinking about packing, travel arrangements, cat care, and so on. At the same time we are always arriving, unpacking, and opening up a new house. There have to be two of everything, from toothbrushes to internet connections. My life is consumed by lists.
But that’s fine, because every list is an optimistic statement, a talisman of the future. If I have a list then I must be around to complete it, in spite of the hazards of travel and foie gras. A good, long list of things to do confers the illusion of immortality.

On the other hand some stability is important, so my working space in a three hundred year old French village house is arranged in exactly the same way as it is in our modern house in New York. There are limits to my adaptability: change the culture, the language, the food and the politics, but please don’t change the arrangement of papers on my desk.

I suppose we all have tastes that we are slightly ashamed of: Australian Chardonnay, or disco music, or old James Bond movies, or some ghastly combination of all three. Whatever our embarrassing tastes may be we tend to keep them hidden from all but our nearest and dearest, and sometimes even from them.
However, in a confessional spirit, I will tell you that I really enjoy the books of Jasper Fforde. If the two f’s in his name immediately make you wary, you would be right. Mr. Fforde is a very odd duck indeed, or perhaps I should say an odd dodo. If this tiny joke leaves you baffled, you should know that dodos and other extinct creatures wander through Jasper Fforde’s books as casually as domestic cats.

Fforde is English, as you might expect, and lives in Wales, as you might not. He comes from a distinguished family and enjoyed a progressive education, but is nevertheless responsible for the literary/time travel/mystery series generally known as the “Thursday Next” novels, and also for the Nursery Crime Series. In the latter books detective Jack Spratt investigates such mysteries as the fate of Humpty Dumpty (The Big Over Easy) and the real story behind Red Riding Hood (The Fourth Bear).

If you know your Shakespeare and your nursery rhymes (and your Monty Python sketches) these novels and endlessly entertaining, although also extremely silly. When reading them on the train it is a good idea to hide them inside a newspaper, or you are likely to be pestered by other Fforde fans, all of whom tend to be mentally deranged.

I feel better now that I’ve revealed my embarrassing enthusiasm. I like Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana novels too. Now all my secrets are out in the open.

This is a strange day, here in the suburbs of Long Island. Everything seems to have stopped. The roads are almost empty, many houses are left dark and silent as families make the compulsory pilgrimage to grandmother’s house, and even the obsessive leaf-blowing husbands have put away their dreadful machines for the day. It’s almost spooky, like the set for a disaster movie, and I like it. We could use more quiet days like this, more days with no shopping, and no mail.

We won’t get them, of course. It is un-American to be quiet and relaxed, and almost unpatriotic to stop shopping. The friendly American salutation “Take it easy” is wonderfully inappropriate. Nobody takes it easy except when a special holiday makes it compulsory.

I’m not forgetting that Thanksgiving is very hard work for whoever gets stuck with preparing the big dinner – usually mother or grandma. But I’m in charge of Thanksgiving food in this house, and I have my pre-prepared turkey product with cranberry stuffing ready to go. Once it is in the oven I will follow my own advice, and take it easy.

Last week we were at University of Massachusetts, Amherst for a conference. My own role was limited to being the driver and detail man, but during my teaching career I appeared at many conferences. So I know the drill.

Every occupation, profession, interest group and cult in the nation, from grocery wholesalers to transcendental meditators, feels the urge to hold an annual conference. You can’t enter a large hotel anywhere at any time of year without encountering a boisterous group of dentists or domestic science teachers, over-excited at being away from home and wearing big labels saying things like “Hi I’m Randy – Vice President for Revolving Door Maintenance.”

In any large organization, your status depends on the number of meetings you attend. Really important people are “in meetings” from morning till night, leaving their less exalted colleagues to get on with the actual work.

Conferences are inflated meetings, where more time can be wasted more efficiently at much greater expense. Nobody is immune to their delights. Academics have refined the art of conferencing to its highest point, dividing their fields into so many disciplines, sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines that a clever professor can spend virtually the entire year in conferences, and never enter a classroom at all. Last week I found myself at an academic conference for the first time in years, and I had forgotten how mind-numbingly boring the proceedings can be. Those professors earn their salaries. Doctors and lawyers have the most luxurious conferences, in plush resorts in delightful countries at the best times of year. Small non-profit organizations end up holding their conferences in Phoenix in August, when hotel rooms are virtually free.

The origins of the annual conference are lost in history, but sociologists believe that conferences evolved from meetings. The theory is that, very early in our evolutionary development, some Neanderthal genius discovered the extraordinary benefits of holding meetings. Instead of going out and grubbing for roots or tangling with saber toothed tigers, it was much more pleasant and less dangerous to sit in the back of the cave with your pals and some coffee and an agenda, and discuss how other people should do these things. Thus, well before the invention of fire, our ancestors had figured out that meetings were powerful magic, allowing them to waste time with a clear conscience, to avoid personal responsibility for anything, and above all to escape from real work.

The conference flourishes as an institution, not because it is the slightest practical use, but because it offers escape without guilt. Recent research has revealed the awful truth about hard-working parents – namely that they really love to be away from their families. A conference far from home gives the perfect excuse to wave them goodbye for a few days. Nobody can argue with that, especially if you refer to it loftily as”professional development.” Nor does anybody expect any results from a conference, so you have no performance anxiety. And, unless it happens to be a Baptist Convention, nobody will censure your bad behavior. They will be too busy behaving badly themselves.

Not everyone who volunteers to present a paper at a conference is gifted with eloquence, and some don’t even have the basic ability to read from a script. To compensate for the inevitable periods of ghastly boredom, “keynote speakers” are engaged for the opening and closing sessions. They may be distinguished experts or (if funds are tight) they may have been hired from a cut-price speakers’ bureau at the last minute, and composed their inspirational thoughts on the train. I’ve done this more than once myself.

This particular conference produced one of the worst keynote speakers I have ever heard. This distinguished personage was brought in from abroad, and attracted a large audience. He spent a full forty minutes talking about himself and his wonderful achievements before moving on to the advertised topic, which he treated in such a chaotic and disconnected way that we knew no more at the end of the lecture than at the beginning. For this travesty, no doubt, he was paid a large fee. But academics are trained to endure boredom and nonsense. We all sat stiffly in our hard seats, and even applauded at the end (which the speaker announced seven separate times).

But intellectual exchange is not what conferences are about. They are about spending time with your tribe. If you spend most of your waking hours working (say) on muffler repair or Mayan architecture, your friends and family are sick and tired of hearing about them. At a conference, you can hope to have an audience for your obsessions. That’s why conference programs are incomprehensible to outsiders, with titles like “Managerial Discourse on Quality Circles as an Organizational Innovation” or “The Clinical Use of Spondaic Vulgarisms in the Assessment of Hearing Aids.”

Much conference time is spent in the intensive discussion of the secrets of the tribe, the sharing-out of power, money and status among its anointed leaders, and the rituals of tribal warfare. It’s all useful stuff, especially if you aspire to the tribal throne.

Everyone needs and deserves an annual conference, especially part-time workers and the unemployed, who don’t usually get such treats. There should be an organization dedicated to running conferences for all these disadvantaged people – conferences about nothing in particular with papers about anything. It’s one of those inalienable rights that comes under the general heading of “The Pursuit of Happiness”: a few nights in a good hotel, nice meals, lots of people to talk to, and a big label on your jacket to remind you and everyone else who you are.