Sense and Sensibility

Crack the books

My college friends used to joke that I spent so much time at the library, the clerks should just give me a Dewey decimal number.

Maybe I was dumber than the rest of the students, but for four years, I spent every night in monkish devotion to my studies, force-feeding my wayward brain an unpalatable diet of facts, theorems and French idioms it had every reason to reject.

At one point during my socially anemic youth, I could boast of having memorized all of the constitutional amendments in order of adoption. (This, like being able to conjugate French irregular verbs in the plus-perfect, failed to impress anybody at keg parties.)

But I see now that my study habits have become as obsolete as my Smith Corona typewriter. A new study out of the University of California system found that the amount of time students spend studying has dropped from 24 hours a week in 1961, to 14 hours today.

Well, why should they study?

 After all, they’re paying through the nose and manage to haul themselves to class, don’t they? That matters, according to researchers at the University of California-Irvine who reported last year that a third of students expect to obtain B’s just for showing up and 40 percent believed they should get a B just for doing the readings.

Is it simply that today’s wired generation is incapable of serious thought? A number of professors, including a friend of mine who teaches at a North Carolina university, are increasingly coming to that conclusion.

“Many members of this generation, being raised on computers and video games, have brains that are literally wired differently than the generations that had the time and environment in which to sit still, concentrate and study,” he said. “The concept and logic of deferred gratification is foreign to them. It’s all about now…. They’re bombarded with input constantly, dispensed in byte-sized pieces at warp speed, so that nothing is absorbed or contemplated for very long. They don’t know silence. They wouldn’t know what to do in a room where there is not the continuous stimulus of fleeting images and a backdrop of noise.”

Yet the University of California has surprisingly acquitted the Internet of culpability, the Boston Globe reports. The bigger problem, they say, is the increased pressure on professors to dumb-down their courses.

Or more bluntly: Professors cave to students and parents who are increasingly seen as consumers and not as learners. “Parents and students want high grades,” former Duke professor Stuart Rojstaczer wrote in a 2002 Washington Post op-ed.<

“Given that students are consumers of an educational product for which they pay dearly, I am expected to cater to their desires not just to be educated well but to receive a positive reward for their enrollment. So I don’t give C’s anymore, and neither do most of my colleagues. And I can easily imagine a time when I’ll say the same thing about B’s.”

“No one really has an incentive to make a demanding class,” Mindy Marks, from the University of California Riverside, told the Globe. “To make a tough assignment, you have to write it, grade it. Kids come into office hours and want help on it. If you make it too hard, they complain. Other than the sheer love for knowledge and the desire to pass it on to the next generation, there is no incentive in the system to encourage effort.”

In 2002, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences reported that fewer than 20 percent of all college students receive grades below a B-. And even if students are banished to the ignominy of the grade cellar, there’s a good chance their tragic transcripts could be surgically corrected.

Last month The New York Times reported that at least 10 law schools, including Georgetown, Tulane and New York universities, have deliberately made their grading systems more lenient. Loyola Law School Los Angeles retroactively inflated every grade it recorded by 0.333 to make its graduates more competitive in the job market.

“If somebody’s paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don’t want to call them a loser at the end,” Rojstaczer told the newspaper. “So you artificially call every student a success.”

The problem is that the entire system is built on a fraud. It may be platitudinous to invoke beliefs about education being a value unto itself [--] a homiletic about as popular as saying that failure helps build character [--] but eventually, the rubber has to hit the road. Eventually, these “high-achieving” phonies actually have to work for a living, where their deficits will be made abundantly clear.

c. Republican-American, 2010

No, it’s not dementia, it’s the Internet

 In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the novelist Gary Shteyngart gave a particularly glum view of the future of his craft. “The novel is a disaster at this point,” he told the newspaper. “It’s not a disaster that there are no good novels being written… it’s that our brains are being disassembled right now and being put back together in a whole different shape, and that is not going to be conducive to reading a 300-page thing that doesn’t have any links.”

Writers may be cynical by nature, but Shteyngart’s lamentation is

not the standard beef from a miserable bohemian drowning in rejection slips. He’s facing what some scientists and many pundits believe to be the inevitable alteration of the human brain. Our appetite for fiction is not only diminishing but facing extinction, they believe. The Internet, as Nicholas Carr proclaims in his new book “The Shallows,” is literally changing our brains.

It will not surprise you to learn that the Internet is changing our brains for the worse, as Carr suggests in his absorbing, if discouraging book. Carr, who has reported on technology for The New York Times, The Atlantic and Wired, writes about an epidemic of scatterbrains who can no longer sit for long periods of reading without a serious case of the fidgets.

 ”I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” Bruce Friedman, a pathologist at the University of Michigan Medical School,” told Carr. “Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Friedman’s mind, Carr insists, has become rewired by the Internet, which allows users to jump, skip or link with aerobic ferocity. German researchers have found that the average Internet user spends 10 seconds or less on a Web page. Carr reports that when researcher Jakob Neilson was asked, “How do users read on the Web?” Neilson answered, “They don’t.”

They skim.

“The web is almost built for distraction,” author John (‘Slow Reading’) Miedema told The Christian Science Monitor. “The [hyper]links are designed to take you away from what you are reading.”

In “Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age,” William Powers, riffing on the same theme, suggests that the culprit is the brain’s inherent hunger for new stimuli. Early humans who could react to the nearest leaping rabbit or cave-dweller’s cudgel had advantages over their slow-witted neighbors. Today, even academics, like one philosophy major interviewed by Carr, talk about becoming a “skilled hunter” for information online, rather than being weighed down by the typographical albatross of a book.

Neuroscientists, Carr writes, have found that “virtually all of our neural circuits [--] whether they’re involved in feeling, seeing, hearing, moving, thinking, learning, perceiving, or remembering, are subject to change.”

Is that a ghastly prospect? Consider the Cassandra-like outrage of the learned gentry when Guttenberg’s printing press allowed the masses access to the written word. In 1660, England’s first book censor bewailed that “more mischief than advantage” was spawned by the invention of typography.

“Now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write merely for the sake of entertainment,” rued but one 15th-century Italian.

But think of how the mere setting down of thoughts altered the ability of human beings to remember.

The great orator Socrates, writes Powers, was horrified by that written language would curb the ability to remember [--] though people had been writing things down for centuries. Why would anyone remember anything if they could simply look it up on a scroll?

But Carr writes that the very act of reading thoughtfully [--] which scrolls and, later, books encouraged [--] allowed us to become deeper, more interpretive thinkers.

Now, he writes, we are losing that ability in favor of the newer, more adaptive, behavior of “decoding.”

“We’re no longer guided toward a deep, personally constructed understanding of the text’s connotations,” Carr writes. “Instead, we’re hurried off toward another bit of related information, and then another. The strip-mining of ‘relevant content’ replaces the slow excavation of meaning.”

We will undoubtedly make it through the hyperlinked forest, but we will likely find ourselves in a highly stratified landscape in which some of us remain readers of deep reflection, and others skip heedlessly from one spasm to the next, barely stopping to buy a vowel.

c. Republican-American, 2010

What do the simple folk do? Save

I shed no tears for Teresa Giudice.

No tears that the all-too real housewife from New Jersey is being forced to sell the 16-room 10,000-square-foot bungalow she shares with her four children and her sugar daddy husband. Together, the pair has done more for the image of Italian-Americans than a decade of Tony and Carmella.

Now that the Giudices are $10.85 million in debt, they’re auctioning off the whole magillah – including the four chandeliers, decorative urn, antique pool table, jet boat and – my favorite – a suit of armor. When you’re facing destitution on that scale, even collagen injections can look like an elective procedure.

Giudice is, of course, not the kept woman squaring up to a life of T.J. Maxx. The rich are defaulting at numbers that far outpace the middle class. More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are “seriously delinquent,” the New York Times reported. Only one of 12 mortgages bellow the million dollar mark are in the same boat, according to the newspaper.

Yes, the rich are different from you and me. They default quicker.

All of this might fill a middle-income American with a devilish case of schadenfreude, particularly when such gluttony is displayed with such tawdry insolence, as it is on “The Real Housewives of Fill-In-The-Blank.” The problem is that just as our economy is inextricably linked to the knuckleheads who imagined they could afford million-dollar mansion on a retail minion’s salary, it is also tied to the lifestyles of the rich and obnoxious.

The top 5 percent of income earners ‑  those making $210,000 or more‑ comprise nearly one-third of consumer outlays, according to Moody’s Analytics. How – or whether – the affluent spend has a disproportionate effect on the rest of us.

And what most of the rich are doing right now is hoarding. Gallup reported that upper income consumers spent an average of $145 daily in May, an increase of 33 percent from last year. By June, that daily spending dipped to $119. As Time magazine reports, most recessions are followed by great bursts of spending “because people sat on their money during the lean years and then unleashed pent-up demand for all sorts of goods and services. That hasn’t happened this time.”

While many companies have seen their profits rise even in this touch economy, many of them have achieved that through slashing their costs – which includes laying people off.

Well, I’d hoard, too, if I had it to stash away.  Problem is, the only economic indicator that hasn’t gone up is middle class incomes. We’re treading water, waiting for the other half to cough it up.

Fern Berman’s painterly images

Yes, they are photographs.

They only look like paintings.

Perhaps its the vividness of the color, the richness of the texture or the surprising revelation of the subjects themselves, but Fern Berman’s stunning series of photographs, on view at Good News Cafe & Gallery through Sept. 20, take your breath away.

That’s because once you get over the essential legerdemain [--] that these are color photographs and not abstract oil paintings [--] there’s another shocker in store. These vistas, with their ebullient, Matisse-like color and bracing, Kandinsky-like color contrasts, are ordinary splashes of color that we pass every day.

Some of these images are close-up examinations of flaking stucco paint on a wall. There are tiles and hub caps and the rusted rim of a cornflower blue window. They are, in other words, banalities, not only ordinary, but, in their way, sub-ordinary. But under Berman’s lens, they become sparkling, luxuriant meditations on beauty, the passage of time and the rich parenthesis of our visual culture that we otherwise overlook.

An image of what appears to be the front axle of a rusting car turns into a painterly evocation of light on an arc of gray. Above the rim, moss green hues bleed into irregular swaths of butterscotch, blotted with swabs of crimson.

It is not just the color, however, that makes these works so evocative. Berman manages to convey the sandpaper texture of the flaking paint, as well as the abrasive, splintering feel of blistered metal. Step closely and you see these visual haikus for the first time. Step away and an abstract landscape emerges.

Berman shoots film and prints on archival, typically watercolor paper. That is likely how she gets the opulence of color that define her work and gives it its lavish texture. Too, there is the composition itself. Berman has an eye for absurd juxtapositions as well as enigmatic, often surrealistic compositional swatches. This is particularly evident in a series of four images of what appear to be the same blot of graffiti on a wall.

Graffiti may be our most organic folk art, or it may be litter, but what Berman does to it suggests the color harmonies of Paul Klee. Berman captures the creamy mint green and turquoise orbs snuggling against the thick black lines of the words “Everything Fades.”

Well, yes it does, but the fading itself is a marvelously lucid, hypnotic whorl of color that Berman urgently articulates in these thoughtful compositions.

All I am is ‘Just a Housewife?’

I am not,” Mrs. Hastings shrieked emphatically, “married to my house.”

I am 10 years old, sitting at the cedar picnic table in Susie Hastings’ tidy back yard and I am being read the riot act by her mother. This wounds me, because I really enjoy Mrs. Hastings, with her cinnamon-brown page boy, Danskin culottes and collection of alphabetically arranged board games. Mrs. Hastings was the first person to demonstrate that you could combine peanut butter and honey between two pieces of Wonder bread and achieve alimentary ecstasy.

My offense had been to ask the perky and terminally fastidious Mrs. Hastings if she enjoyed being a housewife. I was wildly curious because my mother worked, which meant that we ate a lot of Stouffer’s Salisbury Steak and Elio’s frozen pizza and certainly never had diagonally-cut sandwiches served on festive paper plates accompanied by a big pitcher of Funny Face Choo Choo Cherry.But Mrs. Hastings, a brainy woman who drove around in a lemon-yellow Volkswagen bug and hung New Yorker magazine covers in her bathroom, was incensed. She clearly took her motherhood as seriously as she took her peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and was incensed that I could malign her with such an epithet. Did I have any idea what her days were like?

I didn’t, but after her painstaking enumeration of them, I left her home certain that her beatification was imminent and that my own slipshod mother was lucky she wasn’t imprisoned.

Which makes me wonder what Mrs. Hastings would think of “The Real Housewives of New York City?”

Or, for that matter, “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” or, my new favorite, “The Real Housewives of D.C.,” which features party crasher Michaele Salahi.

Bravo, which started out as the cultural cable alternative and has disintegrated into the tawdry purveyor of shop-worn clichés, has done for “Real Housewives” what “CSI” has done for forensics. It plucked the wormiest apple out of Wisteria Lane and seeded an orchard with it. “The Real Housewives” are not just bored, underappreciated gardener-hopping sexpots with more square-footage than brains. They’re bitter, meretricious slatterns (and, in one case, an ex-felon) looking to topple their girlfriends right out of their Manolo Blahniks.

So why now? Why in 2010, when women are earning more college degrees than men, outnumbering them in fields from veterinarians to pharmacists to optometrists, should television offer this “Mad Men-” retro flavor of women: All acrylic nails and push-up bras, embalmed in Aqua Net and enough Eternity to gas a cat?

Take a gander at the serial bitchery that is the prime mover in these cat fights. It makes the Krystal versus Alexis brawl look like Madonna’s tongue-smooch of Britney Spears. What these women specialize in is not peanut butter sandwiches, soccer matches and drape-hanging, but the ego-withering, venom-spewing torment of an unseated high-school prom queen. What the “Real Housewives” franchise does is remind us what women really are: catty, scheming viragos who will saunter into your tent and slay you before you’ve had the chance to savor their Michael Kors.

Part of it, I suspect, is the sheer exhaustion of the “Mommy Wars.” After the internecine battle between rapacious careerists and sacrificial soccer moms, we all needed a break. It’s not surprising that seven of the nine writers of the misogynistic “Mad Men” are women.

One fine way to measure the unbalanced scales of career and motherhood is to wade neck-deep into a time when that option didn’t even exist. I cannot be the only woman who watches “Mad Men” with a suffocating sense of horror.

c. Republican American, 2010

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

A Fallen Priest: Saint or Sinner

The Rev. Kevin Gray is either a humble servant of God or a manipulative instrument of Satan. Take your pick.

Earlier this week, Gray pleaded not guilty to police charges that he stole $1.3 million from Waterbury’s Sacred Heart parish and used it to finance a high-end lifestyle of male escorts, expensive hotels and fine Manhattan dining. Believe the police and this is a story so salacious it is almost a cliche.

But among the more startling revelations in this pathetic, sordid tale is the blind support of those he purportedly swindled who do not believe the allegations. His defenders [--] most of them parishioners of Sacred Heart [--] not only endorse his character but insist on his innocence. No, they say, a man who was the embodiment of compassion could not be a scoundrel, a gigolo and a thief.

Both hearts could not have beat in the same chest.

Denial, as many say, is not just a river in Egypt.

But it is probably not the only answer to this squalid and bewildering tale.

A couple of weeks ago, Allen Barra, writing in the Wall Street Journal, criticized the classic “To Kill a Mockingbird” in part because of its too-neat division of good and evil. “There is no ambiguity in “To Kill a Mockingbird”; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad.”I don’t agree with Barra’s conclusion: I think “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a classic, particularly for high school students, who yearn for a crisp delineation of good and evil.

“I defied you, even so far as to relish the thought of lust, and to gratify it, too [--] within the walls of your church, during the celebration of your mysteries.” That’s Saint Augustine, writing in the fourth century about the “hissing cauldron of lust” in which he indulged. It was Augustine who argued that evil was not a creation of God, but a choice to turn away from Him. As he later wrote, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.”

What’s easy for us to believe are conversion stories like Augustine when a wicked man turns saintly, or, conversely, when a virtuous man sinks into iniquity. If the allegations about Gray are true, he seemed to go from one to the other in the space of a week [--] or maybe an hour.

Most of us cannot tolerate behaving with the extremes of charity and carnality Gray allegedly did. Yet most of us, myself included, can attend Mass on Sunday and badmouth our neighbor on Monday. It’s conscience that nudges us into contrition and corrects our course.

But Gray, who told police he was bitter when the Archdiocese transferred him to New Hartford in 2001, far from New Haven, where his mother was dying, convinced himself he was owed a bacchanal. Gatzak, the spokesman for the archdiocese, told me Gray never alerted the archdiocese about his concerns. We are left to wonder whether any of that would have helped.

‘Structured Elegance’ at Yale Center for British Art

During the Middle Ages, when most books were written on luxurious, but incorrigible vellum, bookbinders fastened metal clasps on the front and back of the volumes to keep the text from yawning. 

 The metal did double duty; not only did it secure the vellum, but it lifted the leather just enough from the surface to keep it from scratching.

Plus, it looked awfully good.

It looks smashing, too, on the breathtaking “The Complaint,” a book bound on vellum board and lashed together with leather straps by Romilly Saumarez Smith, one of Britain’s most highly-acclaimed bookbinders. But the little strips of copper, which stud the four leather straps that cinch the book’s covers, also serve as a bridge for Saumarez Smith. They are the conduit for the artist’s unlikely but remarkable jump into jewelry making.

How Saumarez Smith made this transition is the subject of an intimate and engrossing exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art. “Structured Elegance: Bookbindings and Jewelry by Romilly Saumarez Smith” is at once the story of the extraordinary way in which an artist can encase a story and how the story they tell evolves through the materials they use to tell it.

Metal, in Saumarez Smith’s case, is adornment and utility [--] it is the rustic, staple-like hash marks on the edge of a book, and the snarly field of coiling copper that press into calfskin to give a book, like her “Parcival,” its texture.

To call Saumarez Smith’s works books simultaneously misses the point and elevates the medium. Certainly, books have had a hard time of late, having been compressed, digitized and decanted into slender metal tablets like the e-reader and Kindle. The aesthetic value of a book <—- the sensuousness of the paper as it fits into the palm, the brittleness of the pages softening with the touch [--] has become a precious and slightly aesthetic indulgence. Call it the “slow food” movement of the bookish.

Books did not always come with covers. For centuries, stories were told and records kept on rolled pieces of papyrus or parchment. “Flat books” emerged as a more convenient alternative. During the Middle Ages, the ornamentation of the cover was clearly as tantalizing an artistic opportunity for scribes as the illumination of the interior. Until about the 1820s, says Yale curator Elisabeth Fairman, books were not bought bound, but wrapped in blue-gray “sugar paper” and loosely sewn together. Those with the cash could then take their book to a bookbinder and ask to have it bound [--] typically in the same way, in red Moroccan leather with gold tooling.

What links the lush, elegantly organic bound books of Saumarez Smith and the glittering bouquets of metals she assembles in her jewelry is an almost medieval approach to craft combined with a contemporary awareness of the integrity of material.

We all know that leather is the tanned hide of an animal, but Saumarez Smith’s blatant admission, on the cover of Vita Sackville-West’s “The Land,” is an astonishing acknowledgement of the animal’s intrinsic beauty. And while Saumarez Smith is adamant in her intention to look at the bound book as an object unto itself, the use of the cow’s hide in the West book is a beautiful articulation of the book’s intent.

That’s not always so obvious. Take the gorgeously understated Circle Press edition of “Antony and Cleopatra” that Saumarez Smith bound in 1979. The book looks sponge-painted in a malachite and copper hue. This is Saumarez Smith’s own innovation of using wax resin on the calf boards.

The spine of the book is then secured with four green leather straps, each ornamented with vaguely Egyptian copper fastenings. The sinewy clasps insinuate the manner of Cleopatra’s suicide.

The coiling, serpentine copper clearly coiled into Saumarez Smith’s imagination. It is a hallmark of her jewelry and the first hint viewers get of its impact is in the artist’s “The Romance of Parcival and the Holy Grail.” For the cover, Saumarez Smith created a cardboard press board filled with small pieces of twisted copper.

You will see those spiraling helixes and writhing twists of metal in her jewelry as well. Much of the work has the feel of delicate, miniature chain mail, annealed in wreath-like pendants of 18k gold and tiny freshwater pearls. Pendants swirl in spaghetti-like strands. Broaches and earrings shimmer in a clot of tiny cymbal-shaped loops.

The jewelry, like the books, is suggestive of antiquity, a link Saumarez Smith clearly recognizes. “When something is right for me, I get a certain rush of excitement,” she has said. “I think the same thing happens to every creative person and that, when it does, it can be very powerful. When you realize that, you feel ‘I am in a tradition.’ To me, that’s a consolation, it’s a tremendous comfort.”

 The exhibit continues at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., New Haven, through Sept. 19. For details, call (203) 432-2800

No More Facebook for me

I’ve de-faced.

I’m obliterated, scrapped from the clattering maw of Facebook, the online social network with 500 million users who wish to “only connect.” 

I wish I could say that I’d opted out of Facebook because of some principled stand on its privacy regulations, currently a lusty spat on the Internet. But the truth is that I bailed because my Facebook sojourn, though fleeting, verified to me that it was possible to be bored to death.

I had joined the social-network site with deep reservations. A friend more technologically fluent than I (we’ll call him “the pusher”) insisted that the only way to sell a book I had recently published was to join Facebook. He was not alone. Public relations officials had been telling me for some time that a Facebook page was indispensable to their advertising campaigns.

“All our marketing is Facebooked,” one confided, an admission that wounded me on multiple fronts, not the least of which was the unforgivable mangling of the English language. (Facebook is evidently a verb, along with those other, steroid-enhanced nouns “google,” “parent” and now “friend”).But the main reason I conceded to the Facebook page was that my 67-year-old mother already had one and I was sick and tired of feeling less-cool than she.

Naturally, it was my mother who helped me navigate the bowels of Facebook.

“I ‘friended’ your old friend Gloria, and she sent me a sheep.”

“Yeah,” said my mother. “Just hit ‘ignore.’”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “Gloria sent me a sheep.”

“Yeah,” says my mother. “Just hit ‘ignore.’”

“It’s some stupid game they play. Just hit ‘ignore.’”

“But can they graze sheep in Florida?” I say.

“WILL YOU FORGET THE STUPID SHEEP,” she bellows. “It’s a game!

This “game,” as it turns out, earns big bucks for the manufacturers of virtual goods who sell $1 illustrations of costumes, champagne bottles and, yes, sheep, to the playful Facebook members who fork over real money for a bunch of pixels. Some 62 million players of Farmville cultivate produce, milk cows and shear sheep [--] to the lucrative delight of the techno wizards who conjure them. Thanks to sites like Facebook, virtual goods have become a $5 billion worldwide industry.

And who says we’ve lost our manufacturing edge?

About the same time I was disconnecting from Facebook, the Pew Research Center released a study that found that only 43 percent of Americans know all or most of their neighbors by name and more than a quarter know none.

The study followed a 2009 study by the organization that found that social networking users are 26 percent less likely to use their neighbors as a source of companionship.

Well, after all, who needs them?

Isn’t it so much easier to sit on your buttocks and enumerate your pot-holder weaving exploits than to have an actual conversation<$> with the guy next door?

Proponents will say that Facebook is a more expedient way to let your friends [--] and whatever viral parasites have dug their fangs into your Facebook page [--] know what’s going on with you.

But if anybody really cared to know, wouldn’t they pick up the phone and ask? Drop by with a few cupcakes? Put (gulp) a letter in the mail?

Research indicates that Facebook members spend a collective 10 billion minutes on it every day.

“Friend” may not be a verb, but it requires a bit more work on our part than hitting the “send” key.

Planned obsolescence, blowhards confuse consumers

I’m an American consumer who consumes more than she’d like.

It’s not my fault.  Everything I buy breaks.

Not immediately, and not catastrophically, but just inconveniently enough to require repairs that cost roughly half to a third of the fee it would take to replace the item.Maybe you’ve been in this situation. It’s called planned obsolescence, an intentional slip-shoddiness devised by wily manufacturers to keep you coming back for more. And you do come back for more because, while it may cost only $59.99 to replace that little plastic thingamajig on your camera, why, heck, you could buy a brand new one for $109 and twice the number of mexapixels.

Never mind that you’re not quite sure what megapixels are, or that the snapping pictures of the family barbecue hardly requires a digital camera worthy of Agence France Press, a new camera has more megapixels and more is always better.

So, we’re caught in a disposable society in which we throw away enough vacuum cleaners, videotape players, microwave ovens, toasters, bagel slicers and foot warmers to create a new Iron Age. In fact, Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet. It’s no wonder that one out of every six American cars is a garbage truck.

I’m not happy about this, and not just because I, as an average American, will likely throw out 600 times my weight in garbage. I want to be responsible. But more than that, frankly, I’m tired of being taken.

 I want one of those vacuum cleaners I had when I was a kid. I saw my mother hurl that machine down the stairs at least 75 to 100 times and the vacuum still had the power to swallow the entire Gulf of Mexico. It really sucked.

My efforts to find the Exact Right Appliance led me to develop a virtual Consumer Reports concordance. I bought everything that magazine told me to buy, even if several of the products whirled into the familiar spiral of obsolescence. But after then their highly-rated Toyota Corolla started pulling those “Herbie Rides Again” stunts, I started to sniff around for other sage advisers.

Improbable as it may seem, I started trolling the Internet for advice.

The Internet is full of advice, of course, all of it free and most of it rubbish. More than 20 million Americans blog, and while a 2006 Pew Research Center report found that most of them are intent on describing their personal experience to a small cadre of readers, a growing number of Americans are now making their living as bloggers.

The Wall Street Journal reports that more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Don’t get your hopes up. Of those 20 million bloggers, only 1.7 million profit from their work. And what, you may ask, does that have to do with blenders, Blu-Ray players and Megapixels?

A lot. While many bloggers make money by hosting advertisements on their sites, others rake in money by mentioning an advertiser’s product in their blog post without ever revealing that what they’re doing is shilling for hire.

Then there are “spokesblogger,” bloggers who work for a cause or an organization they advocate in their blog. Generally, they don’t tell you that. As one such blog explains, “Like a paid postings blogger, a spokesblogger generally does not reveal that they are a paid spokesperson for the cause or organization they advocate in their blog.”

Plenty of bloggers are honest wordsmiths, churning out scintillating prose in the hopes that someone will notice it. But others endorse products for a paycheck. Companies like payerpost.com or blogdistributor com help facilitate the game.

“Make money blogging,” cries payperpost.com “PayPerPost lets you pick your advertisers, name your own price and negotiate your own deals.” Or, as blogdistributor puts it: Approximately 25 percent of bloggers now get paid to write postings on their blogs and link those postings to web sites.  Those web sites are willing to pay for your assistance.”

Why, sure they are. They’re happy to make the Internet just like any other Infomercial, with plenty of “satisfied customers” extolling the Snuggie for a few bucks. Well, you can hardly blame them. Let the buyer beware, and all that.

But, for once, I’d love someone to help me select an appliance that really sucks.

Al Tipper, and the boxwood debacle

After Al and Tipper Gore’s marriage imploded, I started worrying about the hedges.

The boxwood hedges that erratically fence our front lawn are the third rail in my 17-year marriage. Invoking them in conversation, strolling by them with a sharp implement, or merely plucking a hapless, pathetically misaligned leaf from can be cause for a marital squabble whose venom exceeds all horticultural parameters of civility. No doubt this quarrel speaks to some larger, more malignant fissure in our marriage, the depths of which I have not the belly to uncover.

The fact is ours is a mixed marriage. I am a boxwood absolutist, reared in the tradition that boxwoods are to be slashed to geometric precision, their maverick nature to stick, creep and bloat curtailed. Boxwoods require discipline. They must be scrupulously slashed, sliced and chiseled to resemble their etymological progenitor, the box.

My husband, a ‘60s rebel, believes the boxwoods should be liberated to soar, swell and nurture with beer-barrel liberality. Let nature take them. And take them, and take them, spewing out on to the street like insulating foam, their feral branches cascading in forsythia-like languor out on to the street.

Our intransigence on this agricultural point makes the Arab-Israeli conflict look like the 13th century meeting of St. Francis and St. Claire in Assisi.

The agreement is this: I take care of the hedges on the right side of the house. He takes (naturally) the left.

But what I have feared of late is this: Is this what finally sent Al and Tipper over the (h)edge? Was it just one two many electric hedge trimmers assaulting the rhododendron? One too many stray toenails in the Percales? Was it just, “I don’t care if you won the Nobel Peace Prize, if I have to tell you to lift the seat one more time, I’m going to flush you back to Oslo.”

 Among all married couples, I suspect, there is this unspoken, yet deeply held pact: “Once we get past 20 years, we get to coast.” Nobody says it, naturally, but secretly we all make a little deal with ourselves: I won’t say anything about that extra chin you have, if you don’t mention that the last time I was a size 6 was in the Reagan Administration. I’ll say nothing while you grow a rump the size of an ottoman if you don’t rib me about my penchant for flannel pajamas and Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey.

This is called the Too Lazy to Try Anymore Concordat, and the Gores abrogated it, making the rest of us vulnerable to the big “D.” The sundering of the Gore’s marriage resembled nothing so much as the Christie Brinkley divorce.

What kind of a man could not be satisfied with Christie Brinkley? (A pervert, as it turned out, which was no consolation). The whole thing makes you feel as if the future of the comfort waist band itself is under attack. Not long ago, the father of a friend of mine, a long-married patriarch, well into his 70s, came into the family dining room and announced, “I’ve been unhappy my whole married life. My time to start living is now.”

A cynic might say it was a little late, or that he had an unmitigated nerve to call his entire family life fraudulent. But many couples are following his lead. The Boomer generation, with its creed of continual self-actualization, is particularly apt to divorce. Some experts say more than one-third of divorces occur in couples who have been married for more than a quarter century.

“Mostly it’s people in their late 50s and early 60s,” Phyllis Bossin, a Cincinnati, Ohio, lawyer and past president of the Family Law Section of the American Bar Association, told the Providence Journal. “Being 60 is a lot younger than it used to be. If you’re a baby boomer, you’re young when you’re 60. People think, ‘I’ve got 30 years left. I can have a whole other life.’”

 Any historian can tell you that the 40-year marriage, to say nothing of the 48-year-old nursing mother, are a new twist in human history. Historically, men went through several wives, and not because they “grew apart,” but because childbirth, disease or back-breaking labor killed them first. As marriage has grown longer, we have also asked more of it, as historian Stephanie Coontz has reminded us.

Stephanie Coontz

“For thousands of years, love, passion and marriage were considered a rare and usually undesirable combination,” Coontz has written, adding that the Roman Catholic Church initially saw Valentine’s Day “as a check on sexual passion.”

“Even though young people centuries later turned the holiday into an occasion to celebrate romantic love and sexual attraction, few of them expected to marry on the basis of such irrational emotions. Almost no one believed that falling in love was a great and glorious thing that should lead to marriage, or that marriage was a place to achieve sexual fulfillment.”

So those of us who are hoping for the soul mate who will read us Browning as we lay dying, are the hopeless cockeyed-optimists worthy of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. You can pity us or you can praise us. We are the crusaders of a Brave New World, a realization so invigorating it can make you want to hurdle the boxwoods.

Contact TraceyOSh@gmail.com