These seem to be our choices for the next president.

(And, for the record, I’m an ENTJ, a type never mentioned in this piece.)

Halle Berry’s quote to the Philadelphia Daily News:  “I’ll do whatever he says to do.”

Mrowr.

There’s great wisdom in this piece by Marsha Norman (writer of “‘night, Mother,” which, coincidentally, I’m teaching from tonight). I especially like Ms. Norman’s insight that smart playwrights are smarter than critics about where fault lies. I still read the critics — sometimes — but no, I don’t heed them, not really. Playwrights can often hear the play that poor direction has muffled, but critics, who often have limited working knowledge of the theatre, can’t knowledgeably separate these creative roles.

Thanks to EM Lewis for bringing this piece to my attention.

Yesterday I wound up discussing politics long-distance with my elderly mother, something I believe I’ve done only once before. (And that would be only if abortion is truly a political issue, and not a personal or moral one.)

Here’s how I think we got on this subject: I asked her if she had voted in the recent primary in New Jersey. This was my clever way of checking in on her health. It took my father’s death to keep him from voting (and if he had lived in Chicago, I guess he’d still be voting). It’s the same with me and with my mother. And lately things have gone so bad that even my 15-year-older brother Ray started to vote — but that was for Kerry, and it didn’t wind up helping. So if I heard that Mom didn’t go out to vote, I’d figure I should make some plane reservations pronto.

Me: So, Mom, did you go out and vote?

Mom: Yep.

Me: (Fishing for followup, after a suppressed sigh of relief.) Um… so… who’d you vote for?

Mom: Hey! I don’t have to tell you! That’s for me to know!

She was stern on this point, much as she’s been stern on most points the entire time I’ve known her. Stern, but somehow giving, like the Mormon mother in “Angels in America” who miraculously transforms into the personified haven for distressed gay people. But eventually after piecing together various contextual clues, I wheedled out of her this, to me, astonishing revelation:

Me: So you voted for Hillary Clinton?!?!

Mom: Yes I did! I want to see a woman president while I’m alive. Don’t think I’m gonna get to, but I want to.

Somehow I couldn’t imagine my mother voting for Hillary Clinton, the often snide and snotty attorney in the power suit who as First Lady had turned up her nose at baking cookies. On further thought, though, my mother represents the last crumbling bastion of Hillary support: the older white female. Mom continued.

Mom: Hey, I’m a Democrat. Your grandparents were Republicans.

Me: Dad’s parents?

Mom: (snapping at me because I seem stupid) Yes, Dad’s parents! My parents didn’t vote! They were German!

(I believe they were U.S. citizens, though, but I left that aside. I also left aside the point that Dad’s parents were German, or at least German-American.)

Mom: I’m a Democrat. Democrats side with the working man. They were Republicans. My vote always canceled out at least one of ’em!

My father, by the way, was a registered Democrat who always voted Republican. But then, he was also a guy who expressed a strong dislike for every possible group or subgroup of people, including the ones he belonged to. At the same time, he was probably the friendliest guy you ever met; any place you went, Dad would wind up making friends with strangers. He said he didn’t like “the negroes,” for example, but he’d make friends of every one he came across. In his personal habits he was always open and friendly with people of all types. When I would ask him about this, posing a variation of, “Dad, I thought you didn’t like black people,” or “Dad, I thought you didn’t like hippies,” or so on, he’d say, “Oh, yeah, but not that guy. He’s all right.” This is the sort of logic that kept my father, a man who loathed unions, in the union. In retrospect, I prefer the actions of a person who welcomes individuals who seem to belong to groups he rejects, over the hypocrisy of people who profess to love all mankind but can’t even be nice to a waiter.

I think my father would have liked John McCain. In fact, I’m sure of it. Part of me likes John McCain. I respect his service and I respect his (previous) stands on principle. But I won’t vote for McCain. I disagree with him on almost every issue, but more importantly, just seeing him in that photo where he’s groping George W. Bush conjures the expression about what happens when you lie down with swine. Once upon a time, McCain was a guy who wouldn’t have done that; that guy I would have taken a closer look at.

Of the candidates still remaining, I’m sure that Clinton and McCain and Obama all have supporters among my family back in New Jersey. (And that Huckabee has none.) Whatever happens, it’s looking less likely that Mom will get her wish to see a woman in the White House. Clinton lost at least one more primary today, and by a whopping margin. She could still turn that around, but she’d better hurry. Mom is 83.

Above you see an artist’s representation of what the prehistoric Devil Frog, freshly discovered in fossil form, may have looked like. In the foreground is its smaller cousin, the Malagasy frog.

What I like so much about this rendering isn’t the impressive size of the Devil Frog, although I’m sure that if I ever came up against a frog the size of a basketball I would take notice. No, it’s the human psychology underlying this illustration. Good art always tells a story, knowingly or not. Bad art just sits there. One of the games I play with my students is to ask, “What happened just before this scene?” Because scenes are extensions of character, and these characters did something before this scene. In the above illustration, it looks to me like the smaller frog has just rounded a corner and screeched to a halt before colliding with serious trouble. The Devil Frog, or Beelzebufo ampinga, meanwhile, wears a sanguine expression, the sort recognizable by every littler guy all over the world. From the brow ridge to the faint jowly smile, that is an anthropomorphosized expression. Did the artist put it there intentionally, or was it discovered after creation? In my experience of my own writing and that of my students, I don’t know any more. Did Kafka intentionally set out to illuminate in his body of work the 20th century’s bureaucracy of death and degradation, or is it the fortunate byproduct of what he happened to be writing anyway? No matter what the adherents of formalism thought, there’s no separating the creator from the creation, the subtext from the context, or the figment of fossilized frog from the artist rendering it.

I don’t know what to do about the genocide in Darfur, but I would like it to stop. So I’m glad at least one of the presidential candidates has a close advisor who literally wrote the book on genocide. (That candidate would be Barack Obama.)

Here’s an interview with that advisor, Samantha Power. Read it and tell me again whether or not it would be an interesting change of pace to have a president who is intellectually curious. Obama read her book in 2005, then requested a one-hour meeting; it lasted four hours. Gee, an interest in learning things. How old-fashioned.

My favorite line from this piece:

“The idea that [Obama] doesn’t have experience is nuts to me. He’s a constitutional law professor. I happen to miss the Constitution; I thought it was a good document”

My friends Doug and Stephanie Hackney are on a permanent tour of the world. Lucky for them and us, the world is a large place. That way they get to upload awe-inspiring photos like these. Click here to see their photos from the furthest tip of the world and to read Doug’s simple, striking, declarative narrative. Favorite line: “But as the mountains shook off their cloak of nighttime clouds, the day looked more promising.” That approaches Hemingway.

“Everybody who fights me loses,” said my five-year-old this morning, his Pokemon game in hand.

I replied, “You’re not the first to say that.”

A professor of rhetoric digs at the meaning beneath Obamalingua.

This video is well worth your five minutes.

Remember how I was saying that every day is a lesson in what I don’t know? Today’s lesson would be about octopi.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for alerting me to this.