Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 26
January 27, 2013
Sunday school -- without the rock opera
There are a lot of reasons why I respect my 19-year-old daughter’s moral compass and one of them is her years at the United Church of Lincoln Sunday School, here in Lincoln, Vermot. It was that hour she spent after church week after week over the course of a decade with such teachers as Lorraine and Linda and Nancy and Russ and Curt – to name just a few of the volunteer parents who were there for her over the course of a decade and change.
So, when I was asked to teach Sunday school for seven weeks this winter, I said yes. Seven weeks? Easy.
Nope. Not so fast. I am halfway through that seven weeks and I have discovered two things: The Bible is way more complicated than I realized. And between now and my next class I have got to find a TV station that focuses on crafts. I am seriously craft-challenged and kids, even the Xbox generation, really love crafts. Glitter, paste, and Magic Markers are catnip to an artistic eight-year-old.
But let’s start with that first issue: The fact that most of what I know about the Bible comes from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. If all I had to teach were the stories of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” I’d be all set. I can do Pharaoh’s voice. I can do Herod’s. I’ve seen the episode of “Seinfeld” where Kramer wears the Dreamcoat from the Broadway production.
Unfortunately, my first two classes began with two of the more serious head-scratchers in the Old Testament. What was the very first story I had to explain to the kids? Abraham’s plan to obey God and kill his son Isaac. What was the second? Jacob lies to his father by pretending to be his brother Esau, and thus inherits his father’s fortune.
The craft for the first class was way beyond my middle-aged skill set: It involved tin cans and cotton balls and half the craft closet in my church. The end result was supposed to be the ram that God provided Abraham in recognition of his obedience, so he didn’t have to sacrifice his son. The day before class I tried to make the ram. I failed. The end product looked like a pencil holder with cotton balls stuck to it, and not merely because I was building it while watching NFL playoff games – you know, multitasking. I am just really bad with a glue gun.
Knowing that absolutely no good was going to come from leading my class in a craft, I decided instead to bring in copies of the classic Caravaggio painting from the Renaissance, the “Sacrifice of Isaac.” It’s terrifying because Isaac knows what’s coming and looks plenty scared. The painting was not a great decision on my part, but not because it gave anyone nightmares. It takes way more than a Caravaggio painting to give a 21st-century boy or girl a bad dream. No, this was a bad idea because our discussion of the painting took about five minutes, which meant I had 55 minutes left when we were done. . .and I didn’t have any tin cans to transform into rams. I thought it was going to be a fiasco.
What saved me? The kids themselves. My lesson plan was a train wreck, but their energy and their questions were limitless. Abraham, Isaac, the nature of obedience and, yes, snacks got us through the hour.
The same was true the following week when we were discussing Jacob and Esau. I had no idea how to teach this story when I began, but they all had brothers and sisters and cousins. I was able to trust them to explain to me the Freudian meaning of a Biblical story where one brother gets away with lying and stealing.
Woody Allen once said, “Showing up is eighty percent of life.” I think that may be true in Sunday school, too – although snacks and a craft help. But you don’t have to be a Biblical scholar or Martha Stewart. You simply have to be a grownup willing to pay attention and take an eight-year-old’s questions seriously. I’m really glad I showed up.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on January 27, 2013. The paperback of Chris’s novel, The Sandcastle Girls, arrives on April 15.)
So, when I was asked to teach Sunday school for seven weeks this winter, I said yes. Seven weeks? Easy.
Nope. Not so fast. I am halfway through that seven weeks and I have discovered two things: The Bible is way more complicated than I realized. And between now and my next class I have got to find a TV station that focuses on crafts. I am seriously craft-challenged and kids, even the Xbox generation, really love crafts. Glitter, paste, and Magic Markers are catnip to an artistic eight-year-old.
But let’s start with that first issue: The fact that most of what I know about the Bible comes from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. If all I had to teach were the stories of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” I’d be all set. I can do Pharaoh’s voice. I can do Herod’s. I’ve seen the episode of “Seinfeld” where Kramer wears the Dreamcoat from the Broadway production.
Unfortunately, my first two classes began with two of the more serious head-scratchers in the Old Testament. What was the very first story I had to explain to the kids? Abraham’s plan to obey God and kill his son Isaac. What was the second? Jacob lies to his father by pretending to be his brother Esau, and thus inherits his father’s fortune.
The craft for the first class was way beyond my middle-aged skill set: It involved tin cans and cotton balls and half the craft closet in my church. The end result was supposed to be the ram that God provided Abraham in recognition of his obedience, so he didn’t have to sacrifice his son. The day before class I tried to make the ram. I failed. The end product looked like a pencil holder with cotton balls stuck to it, and not merely because I was building it while watching NFL playoff games – you know, multitasking. I am just really bad with a glue gun.
Knowing that absolutely no good was going to come from leading my class in a craft, I decided instead to bring in copies of the classic Caravaggio painting from the Renaissance, the “Sacrifice of Isaac.” It’s terrifying because Isaac knows what’s coming and looks plenty scared. The painting was not a great decision on my part, but not because it gave anyone nightmares. It takes way more than a Caravaggio painting to give a 21st-century boy or girl a bad dream. No, this was a bad idea because our discussion of the painting took about five minutes, which meant I had 55 minutes left when we were done. . .and I didn’t have any tin cans to transform into rams. I thought it was going to be a fiasco.
What saved me? The kids themselves. My lesson plan was a train wreck, but their energy and their questions were limitless. Abraham, Isaac, the nature of obedience and, yes, snacks got us through the hour.
The same was true the following week when we were discussing Jacob and Esau. I had no idea how to teach this story when I began, but they all had brothers and sisters and cousins. I was able to trust them to explain to me the Freudian meaning of a Biblical story where one brother gets away with lying and stealing.
Woody Allen once said, “Showing up is eighty percent of life.” I think that may be true in Sunday school, too – although snacks and a craft help. But you don’t have to be a Biblical scholar or Martha Stewart. You simply have to be a grownup willing to pay attention and take an eight-year-old’s questions seriously. I’m really glad I showed up.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on January 27, 2013. The paperback of Chris’s novel, The Sandcastle Girls, arrives on April 15.)
January 23, 2013
The Light in the Ruins -- what it's about
Many of you have messaged me here on Goodreads to ask what "The Light in the Ruins" is about.
So, hot off the presses (so to speak), here is the flap copy.
Happy reading!
PS: If you have not yet added the novel to your "Want to Read" list, here is the link. Remember, the novel arrives on July 16.
* * *
From the New York Times bestselling author of "Midwives" and "The Sandcastle Girls" comes a spellbinding novel of love, despair, and revenge -- set in war-ravaged Tuscany.
1943: Tucked away in the idyllic hills south of Florence, the Rosatis, an Italian family of noble lineage, believe that the walls of their ancient villa will keep them safe from the war raging across Europe. Eighteen-year-old Cristina spends her days swimming in the pool, playing with her young niece and nephew, and wandering aimlessly amid the estate’s gardens and olive groves. But when two soldiers, a German and an Italian, arrive at the villa asking to see an ancient Etruscan burial site, the Rosatis' bucolic tranquility is shattered. A young German lieutenant begins to court Cristina, the Nazis descend upon the estate demanding hospitality, and what once was their sanctuary becomes their prison.
1955: Serafina Bettini, an investigator with the Florence police department, has her own demons. A beautiful woman, Serafina carefully hides her scars along with her haunting memories of the war. But when she is assigned to a gruesome new case –- a serial killer targeting the Rosatis, murdering the remnants of the family one-by-one in cold blood –- Serafina finds herself digging into a past that involves both the victims and her own tragic history.
So, hot off the presses (so to speak), here is the flap copy.
Happy reading!
PS: If you have not yet added the novel to your "Want to Read" list, here is the link. Remember, the novel arrives on July 16.
* * *
From the New York Times bestselling author of "Midwives" and "The Sandcastle Girls" comes a spellbinding novel of love, despair, and revenge -- set in war-ravaged Tuscany.
1943: Tucked away in the idyllic hills south of Florence, the Rosatis, an Italian family of noble lineage, believe that the walls of their ancient villa will keep them safe from the war raging across Europe. Eighteen-year-old Cristina spends her days swimming in the pool, playing with her young niece and nephew, and wandering aimlessly amid the estate’s gardens and olive groves. But when two soldiers, a German and an Italian, arrive at the villa asking to see an ancient Etruscan burial site, the Rosatis' bucolic tranquility is shattered. A young German lieutenant begins to court Cristina, the Nazis descend upon the estate demanding hospitality, and what once was their sanctuary becomes their prison.
1955: Serafina Bettini, an investigator with the Florence police department, has her own demons. A beautiful woman, Serafina carefully hides her scars along with her haunting memories of the war. But when she is assigned to a gruesome new case –- a serial killer targeting the Rosatis, murdering the remnants of the family one-by-one in cold blood –- Serafina finds herself digging into a past that involves both the victims and her own tragic history.
January 20, 2013
Snowmen are the sandcastles of winter
When my daughter was a little girl, she would occasionally ask me to build her a fairy house: A home for tiny, winged creatures – not cluster flies – constructed of moss, a couple of twigs, and architecturally precise, large-scale post-and-beam framing. This was always stressful for me as a dad, since I can barely follow the directions and fold together a cardboard file box. Give me a saw and a couple of two-by-fours, and I am likely to make nothing but sawdust.
The same was true when, this time of year, she would ask me to help her build a snowman. Sure, a snowman didn’t demand blueprints, but it was still a quasi-construction project. Worse, it was a quasi-construction and art project. The only thing I was worse at as a dad than building fairy houses was building anything with Play-Doh. One time, my daughter suggested we make a fairy house out of Play-Doh. The result was the World’s Ugliest Building – and a whole lot of dried-out Play-Doh with moss and twigs stuck to it. There was no way any self-respecting fairies were ever going to alight there, even if (like me) they really liked the smell of Play-Doh.
In any case, there was something I could do when it came to learning how to build a snowman. I could surf the web for tips. So, as a public service for moms and dads wherever there’s snow – which, given the speed with which our climate is changing, may soon mean northernmost Greenland – here is what I learned. Here, in short, is how to build a snowman.
First, make a snowball. Make a big snowball. Think grapefruit. Then kickball. Pack it as tight as you can, and if it doesn’t pack tight, then perhaps this isn’t the right sort of snow to make a snowman. But let’s hope it does pack tight, because the last thing you want to do is bundle your three-year-old into a hermetically sealed snowsuit and facemask suitable for a moonwalk, and then murmur, “Hmmmmm. I don’t think this is the right kind of snow to make a snowman.”
Roll your kickball-sized snowball along the ground so snow gathers around it, and it grows and grows into an appropriate sized base for your snowman. I usually imagined I was creating a Hippity-Hop, minus the handle.
Repeat this process twice more, first creating a snow torso and then a snow head. Pack a little snow where the snow globes meet.
Now, here’s the trick: Take a long metal rod or wooden dowel and spear the snowman from his head straight down through his feet. Once I used one of the detachable rods for my snow rake. Another time I used the handle to a push broom.
When you have completed the basics, you can decorate. And here we come to the fundamental sexism of the term “snowman.” It is equally as wonderful, of course, to make a “snowwoman.” But – and this is a seriously important “but” – don’t presume that anatomically accurate above-the-waist sculpting of your front yard snowperson is going to make you look like a snowbound Michelangelo. Do this, and you risk looking like a snowbound pervert. My advice? Use clothes and props to give your snowperson a snow gender. And, along those lines, stick to Norman Rockwell-esque cloths and props. Trust me, an apron on a snowperson works a whole lot better than your or your wife’s slutty French maid Halloween costume.
When you’re done, you can begin that age-old tradition of watching it melt. Snowmen are the sandcastles of winter. They will – even in Greenland – eventually go the way of the Wicked Witch of the West.
But that’s a part of their charm. Besides, it’s only January. Even this year there will be more snow and more chances to build that perfect snowman.
(The column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on January 20, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 16.)
The same was true when, this time of year, she would ask me to help her build a snowman. Sure, a snowman didn’t demand blueprints, but it was still a quasi-construction project. Worse, it was a quasi-construction and art project. The only thing I was worse at as a dad than building fairy houses was building anything with Play-Doh. One time, my daughter suggested we make a fairy house out of Play-Doh. The result was the World’s Ugliest Building – and a whole lot of dried-out Play-Doh with moss and twigs stuck to it. There was no way any self-respecting fairies were ever going to alight there, even if (like me) they really liked the smell of Play-Doh.
In any case, there was something I could do when it came to learning how to build a snowman. I could surf the web for tips. So, as a public service for moms and dads wherever there’s snow – which, given the speed with which our climate is changing, may soon mean northernmost Greenland – here is what I learned. Here, in short, is how to build a snowman.
First, make a snowball. Make a big snowball. Think grapefruit. Then kickball. Pack it as tight as you can, and if it doesn’t pack tight, then perhaps this isn’t the right sort of snow to make a snowman. But let’s hope it does pack tight, because the last thing you want to do is bundle your three-year-old into a hermetically sealed snowsuit and facemask suitable for a moonwalk, and then murmur, “Hmmmmm. I don’t think this is the right kind of snow to make a snowman.”
Roll your kickball-sized snowball along the ground so snow gathers around it, and it grows and grows into an appropriate sized base for your snowman. I usually imagined I was creating a Hippity-Hop, minus the handle.
Repeat this process twice more, first creating a snow torso and then a snow head. Pack a little snow where the snow globes meet.
Now, here’s the trick: Take a long metal rod or wooden dowel and spear the snowman from his head straight down through his feet. Once I used one of the detachable rods for my snow rake. Another time I used the handle to a push broom.
When you have completed the basics, you can decorate. And here we come to the fundamental sexism of the term “snowman.” It is equally as wonderful, of course, to make a “snowwoman.” But – and this is a seriously important “but” – don’t presume that anatomically accurate above-the-waist sculpting of your front yard snowperson is going to make you look like a snowbound Michelangelo. Do this, and you risk looking like a snowbound pervert. My advice? Use clothes and props to give your snowperson a snow gender. And, along those lines, stick to Norman Rockwell-esque cloths and props. Trust me, an apron on a snowperson works a whole lot better than your or your wife’s slutty French maid Halloween costume.
When you’re done, you can begin that age-old tradition of watching it melt. Snowmen are the sandcastles of winter. They will – even in Greenland – eventually go the way of the Wicked Witch of the West.
But that’s a part of their charm. Besides, it’s only January. Even this year there will be more snow and more chances to build that perfect snowman.
(The column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on January 20, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 16.)
January 13, 2013
To find the meaning of baseball, roll the dice
It wasn’t one of those pitching duels for the ages — the final score was 4-2 — but it was two hurlers facing off who between them have an astonishing 615 Major League wins. It was likely Hall of Famer and Yankees ace C.C. Sabathia against Walter Johnson. Yup, that Walter Johnson: the Washington Senators pitcher who won a mindboggling 417 games.
Just for the record, Johnson died in 1946. Sabathia was born in 1980.
But that’s the beauty of the dice baseball league conceived by Burlington, Vermont lawyer Tom Simon. It’s the best against the best from throughout baseball’s long history.
No, that’s not the beauty. This is: It’s a dice baseball league for kids who love the game. The official name is the Buster Olney SABR Junior Club. SABR stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. Buster Olney is an ESPN baseball analyst and former New York Times sports reporter who was born in Randolph, Vermont. The kids named it after Olney as a small homage.
The group meets Sunday afternoons on the third floor of Simon’s Burlington home, but only during the off-season. “The kids want to be outside playing baseball during the regular season,” Simon told me.
Simon, 47, is a baseball historian and, like me, a serious baseball geek. “Almost everything I learned came through baseball: history, geography, how to pronounce people’s names,” he admitted.
Actually, Simon is way more of a geek than I am. He makes me look like my wife when it comes to baseball knowledge, and my wife once asked me how come all the players don’t dress like the catcher for safety. Although the dozen kids who gather at Simon’s home play a lot of dice baseball, they also learn about the game. The Sunday I visited them earlier this month and watched that Sabathia-Johnson match-up, a Boston Red Sox scout also joined them. Simon has been a member of SABR since 1993. He has edited two books about Vermont baseball and written a third, “The Wonder Team in the White City.” He designed this three-dice version of dice baseball and the hundreds of individual player cards the kids use. Each card is based on the player’s statistical record. As a result, in Simon’s game Babe Ruth is more likely to homer than anyone on the New York Mets’ current roster.
Of course, even I’m more likely to homer than anyone on the Mets’ current roster. I have cats more likely to homer than anyone on the Mets.
Simon’s love for the game dates back to when he was eight and got a phone call from Willie Mays. Yes, that Willie Mays. Mays was a pal of one of his father’s friends and as a birthday present invited Tom into the Mets’ dugout, where Mets reliever Tug McGraw lifted him up and blew a giant bubble gum bubble in his face. Years later, Tom invented his game as a way of sharing his love for the sport with a boy he was mentoring in the King Street Youth Center’s “Big Brother” program.
Today his league has eight teams, each roster filled with players the boys in the club drafted themselves. One team is managed by brothers Alexandre and Sam Silberman. Alexandre is 14 and Sam is 10. Alexandre told me that he enjoys baseball because it’s a game that “can be fast or slow. You can do other things while watching or listening to it.” He often follows games on the computer or listens to them at night.
Alexandre’s observation brought me back to my own childhood and the myriad Mets games I listened to on the radio. I grew up on the East Coast and loved it when the Mets were playing Chicago or St. Louis in the central time zone, because the games dovetailed perfectly with my bedtime.
In fact, everything about Simon’s — and I say this without hyperbole — incredibly wonderful baseball club reminded me of being a boy and something Donald Hall once wrote in “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons,” his essay about the meaning of the sport: “For baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.”
And so who is the youngest member of the group? Simon’s own son, Nolan, now eight.
* * *
If you’re interested in learning more about the club, email Tom Simon at tps@mc-fitz.com.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on January 13, 2013. Chris's new novel, "The Light in the Ruins," arrives on July 16, 2013. To add it to your Goodreads "Want to Read" list, click here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
Just for the record, Johnson died in 1946. Sabathia was born in 1980.
But that’s the beauty of the dice baseball league conceived by Burlington, Vermont lawyer Tom Simon. It’s the best against the best from throughout baseball’s long history.
No, that’s not the beauty. This is: It’s a dice baseball league for kids who love the game. The official name is the Buster Olney SABR Junior Club. SABR stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. Buster Olney is an ESPN baseball analyst and former New York Times sports reporter who was born in Randolph, Vermont. The kids named it after Olney as a small homage.
The group meets Sunday afternoons on the third floor of Simon’s Burlington home, but only during the off-season. “The kids want to be outside playing baseball during the regular season,” Simon told me.
Simon, 47, is a baseball historian and, like me, a serious baseball geek. “Almost everything I learned came through baseball: history, geography, how to pronounce people’s names,” he admitted.
Actually, Simon is way more of a geek than I am. He makes me look like my wife when it comes to baseball knowledge, and my wife once asked me how come all the players don’t dress like the catcher for safety. Although the dozen kids who gather at Simon’s home play a lot of dice baseball, they also learn about the game. The Sunday I visited them earlier this month and watched that Sabathia-Johnson match-up, a Boston Red Sox scout also joined them. Simon has been a member of SABR since 1993. He has edited two books about Vermont baseball and written a third, “The Wonder Team in the White City.” He designed this three-dice version of dice baseball and the hundreds of individual player cards the kids use. Each card is based on the player’s statistical record. As a result, in Simon’s game Babe Ruth is more likely to homer than anyone on the New York Mets’ current roster.
Of course, even I’m more likely to homer than anyone on the Mets’ current roster. I have cats more likely to homer than anyone on the Mets.
Simon’s love for the game dates back to when he was eight and got a phone call from Willie Mays. Yes, that Willie Mays. Mays was a pal of one of his father’s friends and as a birthday present invited Tom into the Mets’ dugout, where Mets reliever Tug McGraw lifted him up and blew a giant bubble gum bubble in his face. Years later, Tom invented his game as a way of sharing his love for the sport with a boy he was mentoring in the King Street Youth Center’s “Big Brother” program.
Today his league has eight teams, each roster filled with players the boys in the club drafted themselves. One team is managed by brothers Alexandre and Sam Silberman. Alexandre is 14 and Sam is 10. Alexandre told me that he enjoys baseball because it’s a game that “can be fast or slow. You can do other things while watching or listening to it.” He often follows games on the computer or listens to them at night.
Alexandre’s observation brought me back to my own childhood and the myriad Mets games I listened to on the radio. I grew up on the East Coast and loved it when the Mets were playing Chicago or St. Louis in the central time zone, because the games dovetailed perfectly with my bedtime.
In fact, everything about Simon’s — and I say this without hyperbole — incredibly wonderful baseball club reminded me of being a boy and something Donald Hall once wrote in “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons,” his essay about the meaning of the sport: “For baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.”
And so who is the youngest member of the group? Simon’s own son, Nolan, now eight.
* * *
If you’re interested in learning more about the club, email Tom Simon at tps@mc-fitz.com.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on January 13, 2013. Chris's new novel, "The Light in the Ruins," arrives on July 16, 2013. To add it to your Goodreads "Want to Read" list, click here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
January 6, 2013
And the Oscar for Best Preview goes to. . .
I went to the movies four times between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Here, as a public service, is all you need to know about “Les Miserables,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “The Silver Linings Playbook” and “Hyde Park on Hudson.”
I saw “Zero Dark Thirty” with my wife and daughter, and you must see this film with the two of them. It’s tense and those two women really get into stressful movies. Also, my wife is a stress eater, like me, so the two of us consumed enough popcorn to fill a Mini Cooper. Of course, our popcorn consumption was fueled in part by the fact we had to watch seven previews before the movie. Yup, seven. Not an exaggeration. And most of the trailers involved car chases and shootouts. I like a car chase and shootout as much as the next guy, but the theater’s speakers were set at jet engine and I am pretty sure I left with a noise-induced hearing loss.
“Zero Dark Thirty” also features an actor named Jason Clarke, who deserves way more Oscar buzz than he has been getting. Listen for his line about a dog collar: It is intellectually challenging, morally disturbing, and very, very memorable.
My daughter and I saw “Hyde Park on Hudson,” which stars Bill Murray as President Franklin Roosevelt. I like Murray a lot as a performer, but Daniel Day Lewis has nothing to fear when they dole out the award for “Best Presidential Impersonation.” Just for the record, this movie has both the single most uncomfortable presidential sex-in-a-car scene ever and the single worst line of dialogue an Oscar nominee has ever had to utter. That line? It belongs to Laura Linney and involves sharing a president. It suggests either Hyde Park was a pioneering sexual commune or FDR was a Mormon. Also, the movie has way too many actresses named Olivia.
“The Silver Linings Playbook” has the “Best Hemingway Joke” of the four films, but “Les Miserables” has the “Best Singing.” You would think “Best Singing” would be a slam dunk for “Les Mis,” but it’s not. Exhibit A? Russell Crowe. A lot of people have thrown Crowe under the bus because he has nowhere near the singing voice of everyone else in the cast, but it didn’t matter to me. I thought Crowe was terrific. Also, his character’s body makes what might be the most incredible sound in the whole movie when it cracks into the stones in his (spoiler alert) suicide. Big props to the foley artist for that little moment. Awesome.
Most people who see “Les Mis” have seen the musical on stage somewhere, so I was really pleased that no one around me was mistaking the movie for a French Revolution story and asking where and when the guillotine would show up. I wasn’t able to sit near my daughter because the theater was packed, and so I had strangers on either side of me. They were both sobbing through the final hour. I wanted to reassure them that I had seen Anne Hathaway host “Saturday Night Live” and it was clear she was eating again, but I didn’t. I’m a stickler about not talking during movies.
Altogether, I saw three actresses crying in close-up: the aforementioned Hathaway in “Les Mis;” Jennifer Lawrence in “The Silver Linings Playbook;” and Jessica Chastain in “Zero Dark Thirty.” A lot of folks want to hand “Best Tears” to Hathaway for the rawness of her sobbing in “I Dreamed a Dream,” and it is a great performance. I loved every tear. But I’m going to present “Best Tears” to Lawrence. Hers were the sort of rom-com tears that are authentic and honest — and, thus, rare.
“Best Audience Texting” during a film — or, I guess, least audience texting — was during “Hyde Park on Hudson.” But I believe that’s only because the average age in the theater was somewhere between 75 and embalmed. I’m not sure anyone other than my family even knew how to text.
So, there you have it, my thoughts after 10 hours in the dark. Happy viewing.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on January 6, 2013. His new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 16, 2013. You can add it to your Goodreads "Want to Read" queue by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
I saw “Zero Dark Thirty” with my wife and daughter, and you must see this film with the two of them. It’s tense and those two women really get into stressful movies. Also, my wife is a stress eater, like me, so the two of us consumed enough popcorn to fill a Mini Cooper. Of course, our popcorn consumption was fueled in part by the fact we had to watch seven previews before the movie. Yup, seven. Not an exaggeration. And most of the trailers involved car chases and shootouts. I like a car chase and shootout as much as the next guy, but the theater’s speakers were set at jet engine and I am pretty sure I left with a noise-induced hearing loss.
“Zero Dark Thirty” also features an actor named Jason Clarke, who deserves way more Oscar buzz than he has been getting. Listen for his line about a dog collar: It is intellectually challenging, morally disturbing, and very, very memorable.
My daughter and I saw “Hyde Park on Hudson,” which stars Bill Murray as President Franklin Roosevelt. I like Murray a lot as a performer, but Daniel Day Lewis has nothing to fear when they dole out the award for “Best Presidential Impersonation.” Just for the record, this movie has both the single most uncomfortable presidential sex-in-a-car scene ever and the single worst line of dialogue an Oscar nominee has ever had to utter. That line? It belongs to Laura Linney and involves sharing a president. It suggests either Hyde Park was a pioneering sexual commune or FDR was a Mormon. Also, the movie has way too many actresses named Olivia.
“The Silver Linings Playbook” has the “Best Hemingway Joke” of the four films, but “Les Miserables” has the “Best Singing.” You would think “Best Singing” would be a slam dunk for “Les Mis,” but it’s not. Exhibit A? Russell Crowe. A lot of people have thrown Crowe under the bus because he has nowhere near the singing voice of everyone else in the cast, but it didn’t matter to me. I thought Crowe was terrific. Also, his character’s body makes what might be the most incredible sound in the whole movie when it cracks into the stones in his (spoiler alert) suicide. Big props to the foley artist for that little moment. Awesome.
Most people who see “Les Mis” have seen the musical on stage somewhere, so I was really pleased that no one around me was mistaking the movie for a French Revolution story and asking where and when the guillotine would show up. I wasn’t able to sit near my daughter because the theater was packed, and so I had strangers on either side of me. They were both sobbing through the final hour. I wanted to reassure them that I had seen Anne Hathaway host “Saturday Night Live” and it was clear she was eating again, but I didn’t. I’m a stickler about not talking during movies.
Altogether, I saw three actresses crying in close-up: the aforementioned Hathaway in “Les Mis;” Jennifer Lawrence in “The Silver Linings Playbook;” and Jessica Chastain in “Zero Dark Thirty.” A lot of folks want to hand “Best Tears” to Hathaway for the rawness of her sobbing in “I Dreamed a Dream,” and it is a great performance. I loved every tear. But I’m going to present “Best Tears” to Lawrence. Hers were the sort of rom-com tears that are authentic and honest — and, thus, rare.
“Best Audience Texting” during a film — or, I guess, least audience texting — was during “Hyde Park on Hudson.” But I believe that’s only because the average age in the theater was somewhere between 75 and embalmed. I’m not sure anyone other than my family even knew how to text.
So, there you have it, my thoughts after 10 hours in the dark. Happy viewing.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on January 6, 2013. His new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 16, 2013. You can add it to your Goodreads "Want to Read" queue by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
December 30, 2012
The resilient heart? It's also the open heart.
When I was 13 years old, my parents moved from a suburb of New York City to Miami, Fla., and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day Weekend. I started school the following Tuesday at Palm Springs Junior High and the first thing we did at gym was take a physical fitness test.
There must have been 150 of us, and after the test the phys ed teachers graded our performance. The terrific athletes were awarded gold shirts to wear to gym; the very good athletes were given blue; the mediocre or average ones were handed red; and the train wrecks — the nerds, the losers, the freaks and the geeks — were given white. The school clearly wanted to make sure that the Middle School Lepers were easy to spot. The Palm Springs Junior High motto — and here I am guessing — must have been something along the lines of, “We will shame you into greatness.”
In the end, there were a dozen kids with gold shirts. The vast majority had blue and red. Two were presented white, the fabric passed from gym teacher to student as if it were road kill: Me and one other boy.
In the locker room, as the two of us were standing ostracized and alone beside our lockers with our white shirts, I said to him, “I guess it’s you and me.”
He pulled up his shirt and revealed a massive pink scar running down the front of his chest. “I had open heart surgery last spring,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
Now I would love to tell you that we had both been reclassified as gold shirts by the end of the school year. Certainly if this were an Emersonian tale of spine and pluck, we would have been. We made blue. Not bad.
This was in a period in my life in which I went to four different schools in four years, and five schools in six.
I’m not sharing this middle school memory because, in the end, it was a study in resilience — though it was. Or even, perhaps, an exercise in stubbornness — though it was that, too.
I have now lived here in Lincoln, a village partway up Vermont’s third highest mountain, for more than a quarter century. Tomorrow marks my 25th New Year’s Eve in Vermont. My wife and I moved to Lincoln from a co-op in Brooklyn the size of a walk-in closet when we were very young, and among the first things I learned was this: The sort of mind-numbing focus that had served me well as a 13 year old at Palm Springs Junior High was going to be of little help here. I knew … nothing. Not how to stack my wood so that it would dry in time for the burning season. Not how to butter a brick to build a hearth for my woodstove. Not how to break an ice jam on my roof, as melting snow was running like cave water down the inside walls of my kitchen.
I was an almost archetypal idiot flatlander — a white shirt in the truest sense of the word — and my wife and I wouldn’t have made it through even our first winter were it not for the kindness of people named (among others) Rudy and Rosemary, Reed and Lisa, Fletcher and Hattie, David and Donna, Jim and Judy, and Jack and Betty. All that mental toughness I had nursed years earlier? Completely useless.
This, too, was a lesson in resilience. And gratitude.
Make no mistake: Everyone in this world is humbled. Humiliated. Hurt. The key? Never lose sight of the reality that resilience is not a synonym for hardness. For obstinacy only.
The resilient heart? It is also the open heart. As another New Year’s Eve nears — and another winter continues — this white shirt sends his thanks once again to a lot of the gold shirts here in the Green Mountains.
Happy New Year.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on December 30, 2012. Chris’s new novel, "The Light in the Ruins," arrives on July 16, 2013. You can add it to your Goodreads queue by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
There must have been 150 of us, and after the test the phys ed teachers graded our performance. The terrific athletes were awarded gold shirts to wear to gym; the very good athletes were given blue; the mediocre or average ones were handed red; and the train wrecks — the nerds, the losers, the freaks and the geeks — were given white. The school clearly wanted to make sure that the Middle School Lepers were easy to spot. The Palm Springs Junior High motto — and here I am guessing — must have been something along the lines of, “We will shame you into greatness.”
In the end, there were a dozen kids with gold shirts. The vast majority had blue and red. Two were presented white, the fabric passed from gym teacher to student as if it were road kill: Me and one other boy.
In the locker room, as the two of us were standing ostracized and alone beside our lockers with our white shirts, I said to him, “I guess it’s you and me.”
He pulled up his shirt and revealed a massive pink scar running down the front of his chest. “I had open heart surgery last spring,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
Now I would love to tell you that we had both been reclassified as gold shirts by the end of the school year. Certainly if this were an Emersonian tale of spine and pluck, we would have been. We made blue. Not bad.
This was in a period in my life in which I went to four different schools in four years, and five schools in six.
I’m not sharing this middle school memory because, in the end, it was a study in resilience — though it was. Or even, perhaps, an exercise in stubbornness — though it was that, too.
I have now lived here in Lincoln, a village partway up Vermont’s third highest mountain, for more than a quarter century. Tomorrow marks my 25th New Year’s Eve in Vermont. My wife and I moved to Lincoln from a co-op in Brooklyn the size of a walk-in closet when we were very young, and among the first things I learned was this: The sort of mind-numbing focus that had served me well as a 13 year old at Palm Springs Junior High was going to be of little help here. I knew … nothing. Not how to stack my wood so that it would dry in time for the burning season. Not how to butter a brick to build a hearth for my woodstove. Not how to break an ice jam on my roof, as melting snow was running like cave water down the inside walls of my kitchen.
I was an almost archetypal idiot flatlander — a white shirt in the truest sense of the word — and my wife and I wouldn’t have made it through even our first winter were it not for the kindness of people named (among others) Rudy and Rosemary, Reed and Lisa, Fletcher and Hattie, David and Donna, Jim and Judy, and Jack and Betty. All that mental toughness I had nursed years earlier? Completely useless.
This, too, was a lesson in resilience. And gratitude.
Make no mistake: Everyone in this world is humbled. Humiliated. Hurt. The key? Never lose sight of the reality that resilience is not a synonym for hardness. For obstinacy only.
The resilient heart? It is also the open heart. As another New Year’s Eve nears — and another winter continues — this white shirt sends his thanks once again to a lot of the gold shirts here in the Green Mountains.
Happy New Year.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on December 30, 2012. Chris’s new novel, "The Light in the Ruins," arrives on July 16, 2013. You can add it to your Goodreads queue by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
December 23, 2012
When pop culture meets profound faith
Every year in November or December I spend a few hours rereading one of my favorite Christmas novels: “The Joyous Season,” by Patrick Dennis. It’s the tale of a pair of Manhattan siblings whose parents’ marriage implodes over one Christmas in the mid-1960s, and over the years it has had me laughing aloud on planes, trains, and all alone at coffee shop counters. It was published in 1964 and I discovered my mother’s copy when I was 12 or 13. It’s narrated by a precocious (perhaps implausibly precocious) 10-year-old named Kerry, which – he informs us – “is short for Kerrington, for cripes sake, spelled with a K and an E and not a C and an A.” Imagine Holden Caulfield from “The Catcher in the Rye” with a sense of humor. Dennis is known best for “Auntie Mame,” which was the inspiration for the musical, “Mame,” but “The Joyous Season” is an underappreciated gem.
The novel is not precisely my childhood because Kerry’s family lives in Manhattan and I grew up in suburbs of New York City and Miami, Florida. But there are moments that capture perfectly the universal chaos that can mark Christmas morning, especially those Christmases from the “Mad Men” era when some parents (no names, please) just might have had too much to drink on Christmas Eve and the toys were less likely to have been vetted for safety. Here is one of the presents that Kerry and his six-year-old sister, Missy, open before awakening their parents:
“It was a genuine Martian Outer Space Squirt Gun. It holds a pint of water and, depending on which knob you turn, shoots either a hundred Instant Locomotor-Paralysis Rays or one full-pint Gamma Death Ray, which means curtains for Earth Mortals.” Inevitably, Missy surprises their half-asleep, badly hung over father in their parents’ bathroom: “Missy did something with her squirt gun and Daddy got it up and down his whole front with a full pint of ice-cold Gamma Death Ray. There was a bellow like he’d grabbed a live wire and then a stream of language like even I have never heard.”
The book is one of those Proustian madeleines that catapult me instantly back to any one of a hundred childhood memories. I never surprised my father with a genuine Martian Outer Space Squirt Gun, but I did nail him accidentally with a dart from a toy robot that shot small projectiles – including number two lead pencils – from its eyes. Another Christmas morning, I thought it would be great to wake up my parents with a toy train engine I found under the tree. I wasn’t old enough to tell time, but it was still dark outside and I can’t imagine they were thrilled to feel a metal locomotive rolling over their shoulders and backs and heads, especially since “the night before” had only ended for them a few hours earlier.
My sense is that these are the sorts of recollections that draw us to contemporary Christmas novels, and why we have affection for such tales as “Skipping Christmas” by John Grisham or “Wishin’ and Hopin’” by Wally Lamb – or the chaotic, raucous living nativity in John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany.”
Of course, Irving’s narrator also reminds us of another reality: “Any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas,” he says. Indeed. The modern Christmas novel – the modern Christmas itself – is often more about popular culture than the virgin birth of the Son of God. The original Christmas story, the one with a star and shepherds and a psychotic king named Herod, is often presented as a comic set piece in a church or school auditorium. There are exceptions, of course, such as when Charles Schulz masterfully brought Linus van Pelt to the stage to explain the meaning of the holiday – reciting the key verses from the Book of Luke – in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
But this time of the year it remains important for me to separate out the Christmas novel from the Christmas story: Pop sentimentality from profound faith. I hunger for the healing powers of each, especially this December when we are all grieving for the lost children of Newtown, Connecticut. In some ways, we will be mourning them forever. And among the precious, possible gifts of the season – of this season in particular? Sometimes the soul can find both. Certainly that will be among my prayers tomorrow night when I am lighting my candle with my wife and my daughter at the Christmas Eve service here in Lincoln.
To 2013: May, somehow, the New Year bring us. . .peace.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 23. 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 16, 2013. You can add it to your Goodreads To-Read queue here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
The novel is not precisely my childhood because Kerry’s family lives in Manhattan and I grew up in suburbs of New York City and Miami, Florida. But there are moments that capture perfectly the universal chaos that can mark Christmas morning, especially those Christmases from the “Mad Men” era when some parents (no names, please) just might have had too much to drink on Christmas Eve and the toys were less likely to have been vetted for safety. Here is one of the presents that Kerry and his six-year-old sister, Missy, open before awakening their parents:
“It was a genuine Martian Outer Space Squirt Gun. It holds a pint of water and, depending on which knob you turn, shoots either a hundred Instant Locomotor-Paralysis Rays or one full-pint Gamma Death Ray, which means curtains for Earth Mortals.” Inevitably, Missy surprises their half-asleep, badly hung over father in their parents’ bathroom: “Missy did something with her squirt gun and Daddy got it up and down his whole front with a full pint of ice-cold Gamma Death Ray. There was a bellow like he’d grabbed a live wire and then a stream of language like even I have never heard.”
The book is one of those Proustian madeleines that catapult me instantly back to any one of a hundred childhood memories. I never surprised my father with a genuine Martian Outer Space Squirt Gun, but I did nail him accidentally with a dart from a toy robot that shot small projectiles – including number two lead pencils – from its eyes. Another Christmas morning, I thought it would be great to wake up my parents with a toy train engine I found under the tree. I wasn’t old enough to tell time, but it was still dark outside and I can’t imagine they were thrilled to feel a metal locomotive rolling over their shoulders and backs and heads, especially since “the night before” had only ended for them a few hours earlier.
My sense is that these are the sorts of recollections that draw us to contemporary Christmas novels, and why we have affection for such tales as “Skipping Christmas” by John Grisham or “Wishin’ and Hopin’” by Wally Lamb – or the chaotic, raucous living nativity in John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany.”
Of course, Irving’s narrator also reminds us of another reality: “Any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas,” he says. Indeed. The modern Christmas novel – the modern Christmas itself – is often more about popular culture than the virgin birth of the Son of God. The original Christmas story, the one with a star and shepherds and a psychotic king named Herod, is often presented as a comic set piece in a church or school auditorium. There are exceptions, of course, such as when Charles Schulz masterfully brought Linus van Pelt to the stage to explain the meaning of the holiday – reciting the key verses from the Book of Luke – in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
But this time of the year it remains important for me to separate out the Christmas novel from the Christmas story: Pop sentimentality from profound faith. I hunger for the healing powers of each, especially this December when we are all grieving for the lost children of Newtown, Connecticut. In some ways, we will be mourning them forever. And among the precious, possible gifts of the season – of this season in particular? Sometimes the soul can find both. Certainly that will be among my prayers tomorrow night when I am lighting my candle with my wife and my daughter at the Christmas Eve service here in Lincoln.
To 2013: May, somehow, the New Year bring us. . .peace.
* * *
This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 23. 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 16, 2013. You can add it to your Goodreads To-Read queue here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
December 19, 2012
Forrest Gump Goes to Beirut
We all have a little Forrest Gump in us. A bit of Leonard Zelig.
We’ve all had those moments when, suddenly, we are not merely witnesses to an instant fraught with meaning, but we are participants in the scene. We see ourselves both in the minute and with a cinematic distance: Camera pulls back wide to reveal the majesty of the spectacle, the sheer grandeur. And there, much to our surprise, we see ourselves. We are at once in the moment, and an observer of it.
I had one of those experiences when I was in Beirut in December. I was in Lebanon as a guest of Hamazkayin and the Vahe Setian Publishing House. I had spent a week visiting universities and schools, and now I was in the Catholicosate in Antelias, meeting with His Holiness Aram I, before he and a pair of scholars were going to discuss my most recent novel, "The Sandcastle Girls," in front of a packed house of roughly 300 people. After the two of us had talked for 45 minutes in his office, we were summoned to Gulbenkian Hall, and here is where I went from Armenian-American novelist to Zelig or Gump. I started to walk toward the hall, but His Holiness put his hand on my shoulder and guided me into the line of Reverent Fathers beside him. Fourteen men in black cassocks and ceremonial vestments and…me. And thus, I walked into Gulbenkian beside Aram I, in a formal procession of Armenian priests.
It wasn’t the most terrifying moment of my professional life, but it was up there. It was also, however, among the most moving.
The reality is that my visit to the Lebanese-Armenian community—my second in 2012—was rich in memories like that.
There was my sobering conversation with the principal of one of the Armenian high schools where I spoke. I asked him how the students who had arrived from the cataclysm that has engulfed Aleppo were doing. “They are accustomed to studying physics and chemistry in Arabic,” he answered. “We teach those subjects here in French, so that has been a struggle for them.” I told him I had meant, how are they doing emotionally? How are they coping with the trauma of upheaval and civil war? He nodded gravely and said, “The ones who have both of their parents with them are doing better than those whose fathers are still in Aleppo, or whose mothers and fathers are both still in Aleppo.”
There was my visit to the Levon and Sofia Hagopian Armenian College—another high school, actually—in Bourj Hammoud. Friends of mine in the United States had told me that even though the Armenian students in Beirut might speak English, it was unlikely they would understand the nuances of my presentation. Not true. The very first question? A 16-year-old girl asked me, “Has writing this novel been healing for you personally? Emotionally?” Two other students had already finished the book by the time I arrived and wanted to discuss the ending with me with all the passion of readers in Los Angeles or Milwaukee or Watertown.
There was my afternoon in Anjar with the Lebanese Armenian Heritage Club from the American University of Beirut (AUB). I had spoken at AUB on a Friday night and was planning on making the second pilgrimage of my life to Anjar on Sunday. Franz Werfel’s "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" is among my very favorite novels, and so I wanted to return to the village where the descendants of the Musa Dagh resistance now live. (For those unfamiliar with the story, in July 1915, roughly 4,000 Armenians from the 6 villages on the mountain refused to be resettled, knowing that “resettlement” was a euphemism for “extermination.” From atop Musa Dagh they held off the Turkish army for 53 days, before they were rescued by a part of the French fleet, which saw their red cross distress flag dangling off the Mediterranean Sea side of the cliff.) Three of the AUB students offered to join me, including Razmig Boyadjian, the great-grandson of one of the martyrs of the mountain. He showed me his great-grandfather’s name on a replica of the canister that once held the man’s ashes. Meanwhile, moments before I spoke to some of the citizens of Anjar, we heard shelling, as Syrian opposition forces made a foray into the Bekaa Valley, trying—and failing—to steal Lebanese Army weapons.
And orchestrating my week was Hagop Havatian of Hamazkayin, arguably the hardest-working man in Beirut. Thanks to him, I was also able to bring the story of "The Sandcastle Girls" and the realities of the Armenian Genocide onto Arabic television and Arabic newspapers, reminding the country of why the Armenian minority today is such an important cultural and economic part of modern Lebanon.
The culmination of the trip, of course, was my visit to the cathedral and the Catholicosate in Antelias. The reality is that as a novelist, I meet a lot of extraordinary people. Most novelists do. But my audience with Aram I and the presentation in Gulbenkian Hall was, for me personally, a night for the ages.
I am not easily awed, but I was nervous. There are a variety of reasons for this, some grounded in the man’s profoundly important stature in the church, and others in the chasm-like gaps in my own religious training. Although my Armenian grandparents went to an Armenian church, my parents usually attended Episcopal churches in the New York City suburbs. Today I live next door (literally, right next door) to a Baptist church in Vermont, and have gone there happily for a quarter century. Nevertheless, my religious training has a long history of eccentricity. Exhibit A? Most of my training for confirmation when I was a 12-year-old at Trinity Episcopal Church in Stamford, Conn., revolved around Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” To this day, I still know an embarrassing amount of the libretto.
In any case, the idea that I was going to meet His Holiness certainly got my attention when I received the invitation back in September. I learned key phrases in Armenian and I drove my friend Khatchig Mouradian, the editor of this newspaper, a little crazy with my obsessive-compulsive insistence on practicing precisely how much I should bow when I met Aram I. And I asked Hagop Havatian to share with me which of His Holiness’s books I should read prior to our meeting. I did considerably more homework than before I had been confirmed three and a half decades earlier.
And yet, in hindsight, none of it was necessary. I never had to impress anyone because, pure and simple, everyone was so supportive of my visit. Everyone was appreciative of my attempt with The Sandcastle Girls to bring the story of the Armenian Genocide to readers who could not find Aleppo or Der-el-Zor—or even the Armenian nation—on a map. I remember sitting in Gulbenkian Hall, almost overwhelmed with gratitude, as Arda Ekmekji of Haigazian University was discussing where two of my favorite characters, Nevart and Hatoun, fit into the story and what their journeys in 1915 mean to all of us today.
Was this, too, a Forrest Gump-esque moment? Not at all. I had never in my life felt more like I belonged.
(This article originally appeared in "The Armenian Weekly" on December 17, 2012.)
We’ve all had those moments when, suddenly, we are not merely witnesses to an instant fraught with meaning, but we are participants in the scene. We see ourselves both in the minute and with a cinematic distance: Camera pulls back wide to reveal the majesty of the spectacle, the sheer grandeur. And there, much to our surprise, we see ourselves. We are at once in the moment, and an observer of it.
I had one of those experiences when I was in Beirut in December. I was in Lebanon as a guest of Hamazkayin and the Vahe Setian Publishing House. I had spent a week visiting universities and schools, and now I was in the Catholicosate in Antelias, meeting with His Holiness Aram I, before he and a pair of scholars were going to discuss my most recent novel, "The Sandcastle Girls," in front of a packed house of roughly 300 people. After the two of us had talked for 45 minutes in his office, we were summoned to Gulbenkian Hall, and here is where I went from Armenian-American novelist to Zelig or Gump. I started to walk toward the hall, but His Holiness put his hand on my shoulder and guided me into the line of Reverent Fathers beside him. Fourteen men in black cassocks and ceremonial vestments and…me. And thus, I walked into Gulbenkian beside Aram I, in a formal procession of Armenian priests.
It wasn’t the most terrifying moment of my professional life, but it was up there. It was also, however, among the most moving.
The reality is that my visit to the Lebanese-Armenian community—my second in 2012—was rich in memories like that.
There was my sobering conversation with the principal of one of the Armenian high schools where I spoke. I asked him how the students who had arrived from the cataclysm that has engulfed Aleppo were doing. “They are accustomed to studying physics and chemistry in Arabic,” he answered. “We teach those subjects here in French, so that has been a struggle for them.” I told him I had meant, how are they doing emotionally? How are they coping with the trauma of upheaval and civil war? He nodded gravely and said, “The ones who have both of their parents with them are doing better than those whose fathers are still in Aleppo, or whose mothers and fathers are both still in Aleppo.”
There was my visit to the Levon and Sofia Hagopian Armenian College—another high school, actually—in Bourj Hammoud. Friends of mine in the United States had told me that even though the Armenian students in Beirut might speak English, it was unlikely they would understand the nuances of my presentation. Not true. The very first question? A 16-year-old girl asked me, “Has writing this novel been healing for you personally? Emotionally?” Two other students had already finished the book by the time I arrived and wanted to discuss the ending with me with all the passion of readers in Los Angeles or Milwaukee or Watertown.
There was my afternoon in Anjar with the Lebanese Armenian Heritage Club from the American University of Beirut (AUB). I had spoken at AUB on a Friday night and was planning on making the second pilgrimage of my life to Anjar on Sunday. Franz Werfel’s "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" is among my very favorite novels, and so I wanted to return to the village where the descendants of the Musa Dagh resistance now live. (For those unfamiliar with the story, in July 1915, roughly 4,000 Armenians from the 6 villages on the mountain refused to be resettled, knowing that “resettlement” was a euphemism for “extermination.” From atop Musa Dagh they held off the Turkish army for 53 days, before they were rescued by a part of the French fleet, which saw their red cross distress flag dangling off the Mediterranean Sea side of the cliff.) Three of the AUB students offered to join me, including Razmig Boyadjian, the great-grandson of one of the martyrs of the mountain. He showed me his great-grandfather’s name on a replica of the canister that once held the man’s ashes. Meanwhile, moments before I spoke to some of the citizens of Anjar, we heard shelling, as Syrian opposition forces made a foray into the Bekaa Valley, trying—and failing—to steal Lebanese Army weapons.
And orchestrating my week was Hagop Havatian of Hamazkayin, arguably the hardest-working man in Beirut. Thanks to him, I was also able to bring the story of "The Sandcastle Girls" and the realities of the Armenian Genocide onto Arabic television and Arabic newspapers, reminding the country of why the Armenian minority today is such an important cultural and economic part of modern Lebanon.
The culmination of the trip, of course, was my visit to the cathedral and the Catholicosate in Antelias. The reality is that as a novelist, I meet a lot of extraordinary people. Most novelists do. But my audience with Aram I and the presentation in Gulbenkian Hall was, for me personally, a night for the ages.
I am not easily awed, but I was nervous. There are a variety of reasons for this, some grounded in the man’s profoundly important stature in the church, and others in the chasm-like gaps in my own religious training. Although my Armenian grandparents went to an Armenian church, my parents usually attended Episcopal churches in the New York City suburbs. Today I live next door (literally, right next door) to a Baptist church in Vermont, and have gone there happily for a quarter century. Nevertheless, my religious training has a long history of eccentricity. Exhibit A? Most of my training for confirmation when I was a 12-year-old at Trinity Episcopal Church in Stamford, Conn., revolved around Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” To this day, I still know an embarrassing amount of the libretto.
In any case, the idea that I was going to meet His Holiness certainly got my attention when I received the invitation back in September. I learned key phrases in Armenian and I drove my friend Khatchig Mouradian, the editor of this newspaper, a little crazy with my obsessive-compulsive insistence on practicing precisely how much I should bow when I met Aram I. And I asked Hagop Havatian to share with me which of His Holiness’s books I should read prior to our meeting. I did considerably more homework than before I had been confirmed three and a half decades earlier.
And yet, in hindsight, none of it was necessary. I never had to impress anyone because, pure and simple, everyone was so supportive of my visit. Everyone was appreciative of my attempt with The Sandcastle Girls to bring the story of the Armenian Genocide to readers who could not find Aleppo or Der-el-Zor—or even the Armenian nation—on a map. I remember sitting in Gulbenkian Hall, almost overwhelmed with gratitude, as Arda Ekmekji of Haigazian University was discussing where two of my favorite characters, Nevart and Hatoun, fit into the story and what their journeys in 1915 mean to all of us today.
Was this, too, a Forrest Gump-esque moment? Not at all. I had never in my life felt more like I belonged.
(This article originally appeared in "The Armenian Weekly" on December 17, 2012.)
December 16, 2012
War and peace and the meaning of heels
The main reason I went to Beirut earlier this month was so I could see “The Dark Knight Rises” four more times at 35,000 feet. Four of the six flights I was on offered the movie as an entertainment option, and I figured if I watched the ending four times, I could finally decide once and for all whether Alfred the butler’s vision at the end is real or imagined. (See how careful I was not to spoil the ending for the seven people left who haven’t seen the film?)
This was my second visit to Beirut this year, and it has to be one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever seen. My impressions are founded on less than two weeks there over two visits, but I was telling my good friend, Khatchig Mouradian – who grew up there during the cataclysmic Lebanese Civil War and now lives in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he edits “The Armenian Weekly” – that I think of three things when I recall the city: A hotel, a cat, and the scariest shoes Christian Louboutin ever designed. On some level, in my psyche if not in reality, they are related.
First, the hotel. Actually, it is the shell-cratered husk of a hotel. In 1975, Holiday Inn opened a towering skyscraper a block from the Mediterranean Sea with an elegant, revolving restaurant at the top. Within months of the start of the Civil War, rival militias fought for the high ground and the hotel was about as high as you could get in that corner of the city. Although much of Beirut has been rebuilt, the Holiday Inn remains as it was in the worst of the fighting: Thirty stories of empty concrete that are dotted with blackened shell holes. I saw the Holiday Inn a lot on my recent visit, because it’s next-door to the Phoenicia, the five-star hotel where I was staying. Nearly forty years after the first mortar carved the first cavity and took the first life in the building, it remains a striking reminder of the violence we as people can inflict on one another. It is among the most powerful anti-war monuments I have ever seen.
And then there is the cat. She was a tortoise-shell the size of a poodle and I would have guessed she tipped the scales at 15 pounds. The feline was on the campus of the American University of Beirut, one of the 150 or so cats that the school’s Animal Welfare Club feeds and neuters. A student who was giving me a tour pointed her out to me and said, laughing, “They have all the benefits of AUB, but none of the mid-terms. They’re so spoiled, they can’t make it outside the confines of the university more than a few hours.” I asked what happened to the cats during the Civil War. He wasn’t sure, but said, “We were the only university to remain open throughout the fighting. And they’ve always been a part of the campus culture.”
Finally, there are the shoes. Not far from my hotel, I came across a Christian Louboutin shoe store. Louboutin is a French designer who either hates or loves women’s feet. I have no idea. I just know that the heels of his shoes look like weapons and cost as much as the monthly rent on a lot of apartments. I picked up one pair, wondering if my 19-year-old daughter might like them, and saw they cost nearly $2,000. (I bought her a hat instead.) Most women in Lebanon don’t have the money to buy shoes that pricey, but high heels matter more in Beirut than in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles. They matter a lot more. Is this a fashion hedonism that’s also linked to the nation’s horrific Civil War – the idea that today we will wear Louboutin because tomorrow we may die? Maybe. Maybe not.
According to the Beirut newspapers, roughly 130,000 refugees so far have streamed into the nation from Syria, escaping the nightmarish war that has engulfed that neighbor. I asked many of the Lebanese I met whether the violence there is going to spread into Lebanon. Some said yes, some said no.
My favorite answer, however, came from a driver who brought me back one night to the Phoenicia. “I don’t think the war will come here,” he said, pointing up at the nearby Holiday Inn. “I hope we’ve learned what can happen.”
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 16, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” goes on sale on July 16, 2013. You can add it your Goodreads "To Read" queue.)
This was my second visit to Beirut this year, and it has to be one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever seen. My impressions are founded on less than two weeks there over two visits, but I was telling my good friend, Khatchig Mouradian – who grew up there during the cataclysmic Lebanese Civil War and now lives in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he edits “The Armenian Weekly” – that I think of three things when I recall the city: A hotel, a cat, and the scariest shoes Christian Louboutin ever designed. On some level, in my psyche if not in reality, they are related.
First, the hotel. Actually, it is the shell-cratered husk of a hotel. In 1975, Holiday Inn opened a towering skyscraper a block from the Mediterranean Sea with an elegant, revolving restaurant at the top. Within months of the start of the Civil War, rival militias fought for the high ground and the hotel was about as high as you could get in that corner of the city. Although much of Beirut has been rebuilt, the Holiday Inn remains as it was in the worst of the fighting: Thirty stories of empty concrete that are dotted with blackened shell holes. I saw the Holiday Inn a lot on my recent visit, because it’s next-door to the Phoenicia, the five-star hotel where I was staying. Nearly forty years after the first mortar carved the first cavity and took the first life in the building, it remains a striking reminder of the violence we as people can inflict on one another. It is among the most powerful anti-war monuments I have ever seen.
And then there is the cat. She was a tortoise-shell the size of a poodle and I would have guessed she tipped the scales at 15 pounds. The feline was on the campus of the American University of Beirut, one of the 150 or so cats that the school’s Animal Welfare Club feeds and neuters. A student who was giving me a tour pointed her out to me and said, laughing, “They have all the benefits of AUB, but none of the mid-terms. They’re so spoiled, they can’t make it outside the confines of the university more than a few hours.” I asked what happened to the cats during the Civil War. He wasn’t sure, but said, “We were the only university to remain open throughout the fighting. And they’ve always been a part of the campus culture.”
Finally, there are the shoes. Not far from my hotel, I came across a Christian Louboutin shoe store. Louboutin is a French designer who either hates or loves women’s feet. I have no idea. I just know that the heels of his shoes look like weapons and cost as much as the monthly rent on a lot of apartments. I picked up one pair, wondering if my 19-year-old daughter might like them, and saw they cost nearly $2,000. (I bought her a hat instead.) Most women in Lebanon don’t have the money to buy shoes that pricey, but high heels matter more in Beirut than in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles. They matter a lot more. Is this a fashion hedonism that’s also linked to the nation’s horrific Civil War – the idea that today we will wear Louboutin because tomorrow we may die? Maybe. Maybe not.
According to the Beirut newspapers, roughly 130,000 refugees so far have streamed into the nation from Syria, escaping the nightmarish war that has engulfed that neighbor. I asked many of the Lebanese I met whether the violence there is going to spread into Lebanon. Some said yes, some said no.
My favorite answer, however, came from a driver who brought me back one night to the Phoenicia. “I don’t think the war will come here,” he said, pointing up at the nearby Holiday Inn. “I hope we’ve learned what can happen.”
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 16, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” goes on sale on July 16, 2013. You can add it your Goodreads "To Read" queue.)
December 9, 2012
The card with the meaning of Christmas
Among the papers and documents and newspapers that Mark Redmond wedges into his briefcase is a Christmas card he received a few years ago. While the papers come and go, that card remains. Redmond is the executive director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services. On the front of the card is a colorful, patchwork Santa Claus. I asked him who it was from and why he carries it with him.
“It’s from someone we’re very proud of here,” he said, “one of our greatest successes.”
It was sent to him from a 22-year-old personal banker and Spectrum alumna named Sara Young. Not long ago, she was living in Brandon, a kid who’d tried killing herself at 13 and was using heroin by 16. On Feb. 3, 2005, there was no reason to believe she’d be thriving — much less breathing — today. That was the night her Brandon home was raided.
“I was calling my mom to pick me up,” Sara recalled, “and I heard a big bang and the phone dropped. I thought it was a home invasion — drug dealers from Massachusetts, maybe, breaking in and stealing our stuff. My mom was screaming, ‘Please don’t do this!’ at someone, and so I had my best friend’s dad bring me home so I could see what was happening.” There, Sara was greeted by a row of flashing blue lights.
“Our house was torn apart, our clothes were everywhere, and I remember the front door wouldn’t shut,” she said. “It was just so cold.”
Her stepfather, Robert “Bones” Nichols, had been arrested two days earlier in Lebanon, N.H., for cocaine possession. He would die on Feb. 5, while housed in the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington. (His death, according to a report by Vermont Protection & Advocacy, Inc., was preventable. The facility, the report suggests, minimized the seriousness of Nichols’s heroin withdrawal.)
At the time, Sara had been using marijuana since middle school and had recently escalated to heroin. A few years earlier, convinced her future was unbearably bleak, she had discovered a stash of amitriptyline — an antidepressant — and swallowed 13. Her mother found her, however, and so she was airlifted to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and survived.
This was the sort of nightmarish history that Sara had when she arrived at Spectrum as a 17-year-old. She was fresh out of rehab and had never lived in Burlington when she spent her first night at the Spectrum Pearl Street shelter. “I was a mess,” she recalled. “I was scared. I was terrified by the idea that once I left the shelter each morning, I couldn’t go back in for even a hairbrush.”
But her Spectrum addiction counselor and case manager worked with her, even when she was awash in anxiety and at risk to start using again: “The counseling program grounded me. Even though I had a pretty messed up background, everyone taught me that I could still accomplish things.”
Within a month, she was out of the shelter and living in one of the organization’s transitional living apartments. Through Vermont Adult Learning, she got her high school degree. Through Spectrum, she learned the skills she would need to apply for jobs and start a career – as well as the basic life skills she had missed because of her adolescence at home.
“Spectrum taught me everything my mom didn’t,” Sara said succinctly. “They also saved my life.”
Which is why, spontaneously, a few years later she dropped a Christmas card in the mail to Mark Redmond. “I just wanted him to him to know how grateful I was for everything,” she told me.
Sometimes, we recycle our holiday cards pretty quickly. And sometimes we don’t — especially when that card’s one of those rare and wondrous reminders that even a very lost soul can be saved.
Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Peace.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on December 2012. Chris's next novel, "The Light in the Ruins" arrives on July 16, 2013. You can add it to your Goodreads "To Read" queue by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
“It’s from someone we’re very proud of here,” he said, “one of our greatest successes.”
It was sent to him from a 22-year-old personal banker and Spectrum alumna named Sara Young. Not long ago, she was living in Brandon, a kid who’d tried killing herself at 13 and was using heroin by 16. On Feb. 3, 2005, there was no reason to believe she’d be thriving — much less breathing — today. That was the night her Brandon home was raided.
“I was calling my mom to pick me up,” Sara recalled, “and I heard a big bang and the phone dropped. I thought it was a home invasion — drug dealers from Massachusetts, maybe, breaking in and stealing our stuff. My mom was screaming, ‘Please don’t do this!’ at someone, and so I had my best friend’s dad bring me home so I could see what was happening.” There, Sara was greeted by a row of flashing blue lights.
“Our house was torn apart, our clothes were everywhere, and I remember the front door wouldn’t shut,” she said. “It was just so cold.”
Her stepfather, Robert “Bones” Nichols, had been arrested two days earlier in Lebanon, N.H., for cocaine possession. He would die on Feb. 5, while housed in the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington. (His death, according to a report by Vermont Protection & Advocacy, Inc., was preventable. The facility, the report suggests, minimized the seriousness of Nichols’s heroin withdrawal.)
At the time, Sara had been using marijuana since middle school and had recently escalated to heroin. A few years earlier, convinced her future was unbearably bleak, she had discovered a stash of amitriptyline — an antidepressant — and swallowed 13. Her mother found her, however, and so she was airlifted to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and survived.
This was the sort of nightmarish history that Sara had when she arrived at Spectrum as a 17-year-old. She was fresh out of rehab and had never lived in Burlington when she spent her first night at the Spectrum Pearl Street shelter. “I was a mess,” she recalled. “I was scared. I was terrified by the idea that once I left the shelter each morning, I couldn’t go back in for even a hairbrush.”
But her Spectrum addiction counselor and case manager worked with her, even when she was awash in anxiety and at risk to start using again: “The counseling program grounded me. Even though I had a pretty messed up background, everyone taught me that I could still accomplish things.”
Within a month, she was out of the shelter and living in one of the organization’s transitional living apartments. Through Vermont Adult Learning, she got her high school degree. Through Spectrum, she learned the skills she would need to apply for jobs and start a career – as well as the basic life skills she had missed because of her adolescence at home.
“Spectrum taught me everything my mom didn’t,” Sara said succinctly. “They also saved my life.”
Which is why, spontaneously, a few years later she dropped a Christmas card in the mail to Mark Redmond. “I just wanted him to him to know how grateful I was for everything,” she told me.
Sometimes, we recycle our holiday cards pretty quickly. And sometimes we don’t — especially when that card’s one of those rare and wondrous reminders that even a very lost soul can be saved.
Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Peace.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on December 2012. Chris's next novel, "The Light in the Ruins" arrives on July 16, 2013. You can add it to your Goodreads "To Read" queue by clicking here:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
