For the last four weeks, I have failed to find adequate time
to write a respectable blog post. Events and past commitments have gotten the
best of me. I spent four days in Iowa during the first week of this month, and
two days in North Carolina the following week. In between, I was racing to stay
ahead of the demands of my online teaching for the University of Iowa. One
surprise request for consulting work intervened on a very short-term basis.
Why do I mention this?
Because, despite that drought of blog production, this blog has been gaining new subscribers by the hundreds weekly, a trend still underway. It seems logical to conclude, without any new posts, that the most recent article, “If You See Something, Say Something,” from September 22, remains the driving force. When I wrote it, however, I thought it an interesting turn of phrase but hardly the most interesting overall post I had ever written. I had modest expectations for the reaction it would get, and that seemed confirmed by an underwhelming reaction on Facebook.
I believe I underestimated the utterly accidental convergence of events. It was not long after that post that a whistleblower in the U.S. national security establishment complained formally about President Trump’s telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelenskiy, in which, the White House summary of the call later revealed, Trump pressed Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden in return for the sale of needed weapons for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia and Russian-allied separatists. That set in motion an entire train of revelations including testimony by current and former diplomats and other officials. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry. The house of cards in the White House has been tumbling ever since.
I simply had the dumb luck of writing what I wrote and
asking citizens to become whistleblowers to save American democracy right
before one of the most consequential series of events in modern presidential history.
I have no doubt that my increased readership is simply the product of people searching
for content on whistleblowing and similar subjects and stumbling into my blog.
I can say that I am glad so many of you liked what you saw and decided to stay.
But be prepared for me to explore many other subjects in coming weeks and
months.
Why?
More than six years ago, after I had initiated the blog, I wrestled
with its focus. Experienced blog writers seemed to suggest one needed a “subject”
for a blog. What was mine? I was not entirely sure. Every subject I considered
seemed insufficient.
I was an urban planner. I was an author. I loved literature.
I read a lot of books and did not mind reviewing some of them. I had religious and
moral beliefs and perspectives that had evolved over decades. I graduated with
a B.A. in political science but later earned degrees in journalism and urban
and regional planning. I had become a disaster planning expert. I did not feel
whole without embracing the full extent of my far-ranging curiosity.
One morning I awoke with a special insight. The blog, I
decided, was about whatever I damn well chose to write about on that day. It would
express everything I had to offer, everything I felt competent to discuss. That
was in 2013. It was three years later before the turn in American politics
concerned me to the point that I also felt strongly that expressing my
opposition to some current developments was simply a response to my own moral and
intellectual center, politics notwithstanding. I would say whatever I felt I
needed to say. Every so often, the urge would emerge, and I would somehow find
words to say something unique.
One never knows how what one must say feeds into the larger community
or national narrative. It is the role of faith to help one make that leap and
join the dialogue. And that’s all I did four weeks ago. But I am overjoyed to
have so many of you join me. It makes me want to wake up in the morning and
write something. Stay tuned. More is coming.
What astounds me about what I am about to say is that the
last time I posted to this blog was July 24, more than a month ago. There are
reasons for that, but in the meantime, despite the lack of new articles, this
blog continued to find new subscribers—and their numbers just yesterday crossed
the 20,000 mark. Already, the numbers have exceeded that threshold by a few dozen.
I would have expected the increase to decrease until I wrote something new. I
can only assume that past writings have continued to propel interest despite my
lack of activity. That fact is profoundly humbling.
I wrote twice in July. The other post occurred on the July 4
holiday. It detailed my cataract surgery in June and offered some medical
history concerning the procedure. What followed, in addition to two trips to
Colorado and one to Washington, D.C., between mid-July and early August, was a
mad rush connected to a fall semester course I teach for the University of Iowa’s
School of Urban and Regional Planning,
as an adjunct assistant professor. But this year, the decision was made to move
my class online, which meant a great deal of added work to make that change
possible. And just to complicate matters, in mid-August, my laptop suffered a
hard drive failure that delayed my timeline. I then worked to restore course-related
files, an odyssey I will not detail here. It would be an overdose of minutiae.
I have been teaching in Iowa City since 2008. After the massive floods that
struck much of eastern Iowa and some neighboring states in June of that year,
the planning program began an urgent search for a way to add curriculum related
to natural hazards and to make itself more relevant and useful to communities
in Iowa needing assistance with flood recovery. It was easier to import such
expertise than to develop it among existing faculty, apparently, because they
soon made an offer for me to teach beginning that fall. I am an alumnus of the
program, and they knew me well. At the time, I was already co-instructing such
a course at the University of Illinois-Chicago
with colleague Richard Roths, although that ended after the spring 2009 class
the following year. But the arrangement with the University of Iowa has
continued. The course has grown and evolved over time, naturally, just as the
subject matter for “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery” has also
changed. Every year is a new adventure and an exercise in updating teaching
materials. As I like to say, it is hardly like teaching Shakespeare. The script
is rewritten with each new major disaster. Recent years have added multiple exclamation
points to that statement.
Thus, while the subscriber count was climbing yesterday, I
was preparing for and then presiding over the first online class session for
URP:6280 last night, with eleven students in attendance. I still have work to
do in reformatting PowerPoint files from past years and recording lecture
videos that used to be presented in a classroom. But I discovered yet again that,
from the first class to the last, my students are inquisitive and thoughtful
and have very good reasons for choosing this course as an elective in pursuit
of their Master of Arts in Urban and Regional Planning. As before, some make
clear that they see this as possibly the most important class they will take.
Some past students are now in leadership roles in the field of hazard
mitigation and disaster recovery planning. They are not deluded about the
challenges that communities will face under the influence of climate change,
demographic shifts, and other factors. They want to do the planning that matters.
Although I have not written much for this blog lately, that
will change very soon. I had to keep my priorities straight, however; my
students had to have their materials ready on the course website by Monday,
August 26, as classes started, and it was my obligation to make that happen. After
Labor Day, I can gradually shift some of my attention elsewhere. My recent travels,
to San Francisco in April, Manitoba and Cleveland in May, and to Colorado and
Washington in July and August have supplied me with excellent subject matter
for at least several future posts. I relish the prospect of making up for lost
time with subscribers both new and old. Thanks to everyone for their support
and interest.
Some readers may have noticed that it has been seven weeks
since I last posted to this blog (May
13). That delay was not by design but resulted from circumstances. For two
weeks immediately after that last item, I was largely on the road, but that has
happened before without slowing my pace. What followed most certainly did.
In early April, after sensing some eye strain in late
winter, I responded to notices from Pearle Vision that it had been more than
two years since my last eye exam. My last prescription for glasses was in 2016.
I figured an updated prescription would cure the problem, as it had before.
This time, the optometrist noted some indications of cataracts,
though he stated that an ophthalmologist would have to determine whether they
were serious enough to require surgery. I took note and arranged for such an
exam. There was a little discussion of floaters, and I indicated they had not
been a problem. He ordered new lenses, and by late that week, they were
installed in my existing frames. I thought I was good to go.
I was dead wrong. Before the weekend was out, I returned to
complain that the new lenses had done nothing to cure some blurring, which I
attributed to a long-standing combination of astigmatism with my well-defined
myopia. I had been near-sighted since childhood and had
glasses since I was ten. I am now 69. Glasses have been part of my
existence for six decades. The optometrist conceded that he had not tested for
astigmatism, noting, to my surprise, that the 2016 exam had shown no sign of
it. Astigmatism,
which causes blurred vision, can wax and wane over one’s lifetime. In mine,
apparently, it had become much less pronounced than I had realized. But he
conducted a free second exam and made minor adjustments to the prescription to
solve the problem.
By then, there were only two days before I left for San
Francisco for the annual National
Planning Conference of the American
Planning Association. I had to leave with the existing lenses and wait for
the new ones to arrive. Pearle called while I was still in California to say that
they had arrived, and I visited their store the very evening I returned. I
tried on the new lenses. There was still no benefit in clarifying my vision. I
decided to be patient and see what would happen—but nothing. I began to realize
other factors might be at work.
In scheduling the ophthalmology exam, I contacted the highly regarded clinic at Northwestern Medical Center, part of the Northwestern University hospital system. They first offered an appointment for May 14 because they were booked for a few weeks, but I was already in their system because of a different issue a year before. I had to decline; I would be flying to Winnipeg that day to speak at the Manitoba Planning Conference. The following week, I would be in Cleveland for the annual conference of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. We finally settled on May 30. My own schedule produced the delays.
Dr. Pyatetsky and me during a post-op appointment.
At that appointment, I met Dr. Dmitry Pyatetsky, who conducted the exam. He quickly informed me that my right eye had a serious cataract that needed surgery. The left eye had a smaller cataract, and the wise approach would be to follow with surgery on the second eye. Cataract surgery basically involves breaking up the cataract, which clouds one’s vision, and then replacing the natural lens in the eye with an artificial lens that provides 20/20 vision. I would no longer need glasses, except for reading and computer work. For the first time in my adult life, I would spend most of my day seeing clearly without glasses. Moreover, Dr. Pyatetsky chose to waste no time. Surgery on the right eye was scheduled for June 20, just three weeks later, preceded by some preparatory appointments including a biometric exam to acquire precise eye measurements. That exam also determined that there was nowhere near enough astigmatism to justify Toric lenses, which can correct astigmatism but involve an out-of-pocket expense in the low four figures. I would have spent the money if there had been a problem to solve that insurance would not cover, but I was relieved to find out otherwise.
In fact, I was relieved by many things I learned about
modern eye surgery. We live in an age that has made routine many procedures
that used to be either problematic or downright dangerous for past generations.
I was aware of this already on an intellectual level, but this experience made
it personal.
Just a year ago, as an adult nonfiction book awards judge
for the Society of Midland Authors, I had read The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform
the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, a remarkable piece of medical history by Lindsey
Fitzharris, for which our Honorable
Mention was merely one of several prizes, topped by the 2018 PEN/E.O.
Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing. This graphic, often gruesome
story made me acutely aware of the benefits we enjoy from medical advances, for
only two centuries ago, it was demonstrably dangerous to visit doctors or
hospitals, who understood nothing about germs and infections and seldom
bothered to clean the instruments with which they performed their surgeries.
The result was a high death rate but no grasp of their cause. The story details
Dr. Joseph Lister’s struggle to prove that sanitation was essential, in the
face of a medical profession in the Victorian era that preferred not to believe
that its own practices put patients at risk. One can, of course, read much more
about this monumental shift in medical thinking that put many benighted practices
behind us. Nearly 15 years ago, in reading Dark
Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A.
Garfield, by Kenneth D. Ackerman,
I learned that Garfield’s death in 1881 was more the result of medical
malpractice and the refusal of his doctor to accept modern bacterial science
than a direct result of the assassin’s bullet. Historically speaking, we are
not so far removed from the Dark Ages, yet the medical advances of recent
decades have been stunning.
As someone who will turn 70 late this year, I am experiencing a growing appreciation of all that is possible with modern medical practice. Old age no longer need be the cavalcade of horrors that it once was. What is true generally is certainly true of modern ophthalmology. The time is not long past when cataracts were simply a fact of advancing age. The Bible is replete with references to lost vision as a result of age, such as “Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see” (Genesis 27:1). The situation was common well into the 20th century. Although medical history documents surgical procedures for cataracts dating back for many centuries, a close reading of the techniques mostly reveals what must seem a catalogue of horrors from the perspective of modern patients. Couching, in which the lens was pushed into the rear of the eye with a curved needle, was replaced in the 1700s, at least in Europe, by extraction, which broke up the cataract and sucked it out. Johann Sebastian Bach underwent couching but remained blind and, in his case, died four months later. Nothing about these procedures sounds pleasant or painless, or without profound side effects.
It was not until the 1940s that
British ophthalmologist Harold Ridley hit upon the use of polymethylmethacrylate
(PMMA), a type of plastic that lacks any inflammatory qualities (so long as it
does not touch the iris) as an artificial lens implant, now known as the intraocular lens
(IOL). Among the inspirations for this approach to restoring sight was the
observation that Royal
Air Force pilots in World War II showed no adverse impacts from absorbing
PMMA when their fighter plane shields were shot out by German planes, leaving
tiny shreds of PMMA shrapnel in their eyeballs. This biological tolerance for
PMMA paved the way for the first transplant of an IOL in 1949 in London.
Subsequent innovation introduced the use of phacoemulsification, which permits
the use of ultrasound to emulsify the natural lens and eliminate the need for
removal with an incision. In short, the past half century of medical
improvements in this field has made a world of difference for patients like me
in 2019. The surgical success rate is now somewhere around 99.5 percent.
Especially considering that I had almost no other health problems that might
interfere with recovery, I was happy to take those odds. In fact, by the time
the second surgery was conducted, on the left eye, on June 26, I was mostly
just anxious to get it all over with.
The reason was simple. Until April, I was not even aware I had a cataract and had never given the possibility of it much thought. However, by May, aware that new glasses had solved nothing but increasingly aware of my own blurred sight, I found myself increasingly limited in my ability to read or work efficiently. One turning point came while I was in Manitoba. My agreement with the Manitoba Planning Conference was both to lead a three-hour workshop on the opening day (Wednesday) and provide a keynote address on the closing day. The workshop posed little challenge because I had converted a lengthy article I had produced for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science, on “Planning Systems for Natural Hazard Risk Reduction,” into a teaching format with substantial audience participation. It was a small group in a small room, I knew the material thoroughly, and my need to rely on the screen to see my PowerPoints was minimal. Nothing challenged my visual acuity. Then, on Thursday, I was introduced to the format in the ballroom for the next morning’s keynote, in front of 250 Canadian planners. Two large screens would be on either side of me, facing the audience, but speakers should face the audience and not be looking at those screens, so another, smaller screen was set at the base of the dais, away from audience view, but allowing me to see the slide on display.
Presenting the keynote at the Manitoba Planning Conference in Brandon, Manitoba.
I quickly realized there was one
problem: I could not see the slides clearly. I knew right then that I did not
want to be squinting at slides in the middle of a tightly timed, 45-minute
presentation. I simply had to know the slides intimately so that the broad
image reminded me of what I wanted to say even if I could not quickly or
clearly discern the details of a graph.
And so it was. I undertook the extra work of memorizing those details overnight because only rarely do I speak from a script. I prefer to be able to remember what I want to say about each slide, but under ordinary circumstances, I can also see that slide in front of me, on a laptop screen or, in this case, a screen sitting on the platform. In this case, I had to wing it. I did it, and all was well. The main lesson was that I realized I had a noticeable problem two weeks before the ophthalmological exam confirmed it. For some people, cataracts grow slowly and can remain small enough not to merit surgical attention for months or even years. In my case, the cataract grew quickly, and my life had to adjust accordingly.
Dr. Pyatestsky with his assistant (and sister) Julia, who plans to start nursing school.
All that said, the adjustment has
changed a significant aspect of my life permanently. I have reading glasses for
computer work and reading newspapers, books, and the like. But for all other
purposes, including driving and physical activities, I now benefit from 20/20
vision. I am grateful to the medical staff at Northwestern, including Dr.
Pyatetsky, for their outstanding care and patient services. They have been excellent.
I am also simply grateful for living in the 21st century. There was
a time when people like me had few options once they had grown old “and their
eyes grew dim.”
Instead, I can enjoy life, exercise
safely, and continue to contribute to the world and community around me. I
consider that the very essence of satisfaction with life.
New
Zealand is a nation that counts its annual
totals of gun homicides in single digits, as a friend of mine who just
returned from a visit Down Under accurately notes. It is, by comparison to most
of the world, an incredibly peaceful, peace-loving country. Yet two days ago,
on Friday, March 15, an Australian
white nationalist allegedly killed 50 people and wounded 39 others in a
mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, the largest city on the South
Island. This same city lost 185 people in a series of earthquakes
in 2011, but that was a natural disaster. While it delivered painful
lessons about building standards and preparedness, it did not hang the specter
of evil over the city or the nation. Brenton Harrison Tarrant is alleged to
have done exactly that. Christchurch is a city in shock and mourning.
I don’t ordinarily use this blog to discuss mass shootings,
bombings, and terrorist incidents. For one thing, they have become too common
in some parts of the world, including, sadly, the United States, and I prefer
to spend my limited time trying to use my special expertise to make the world a
better place to whatever extent I can. That expertise lies largely in urban
planning and natural hazards, not in terrorism or crime, but readers will
notice that I also discuss more pleasant topics like travel and books and the
arts. I write a blog because I am also a professional writer.
But some events become more personal. In 2008, at the invitation of the Centre for Advanced Engineering in New Zealand (CAENZ) at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, I accepted a three-week Visiting Fellowship to work with CAENZ on land-use policy for addressing natural hazards in New Zealand. In late July and the first half of August of that year, I traveled the country with Kristin Hoskin, then a member of the CAENZ staff and currently an emergency management consultant who lives in Christchurch. I delivered seven lectures and seminars in those three weeks, visiting several cities on a tour that ended in Christchurch, which did not experience its earthquakes until more than two years later. In the course of much advance reading and a great deal of inquisitive conversation and exchange with Kristin and others, I learned a great deal about the country. When I left, I was aware that, while it faces challenges and problems like any other nation, it generally does so through remarkably civil debate and politics. While I realize that New Zealand benefits, in that regard, from its relatively small size—about two-thirds the area of California and a population of roughly 4.2 million—I still must say, as an American, that my own country could easily learn something about civil behavior from the Kiwis. Far too much of our own current political debate is not only over the top, but downright crude and thoughtless.
And so I reacted, when I learned of the shootings in
Christchurch, like someone who had, on an emotional level, been stabbed in the
heart. It was hard even to picture the scene that was being painted on the
news. I tried to imagine the horror felt by people like Kristin, and George Hooper,
the executive director of CAENZ when I was visiting, or others I had met around
the country. I will admit it brought tears to my eyes thinking about it. How
could it happen?
I first got the urge to write about it on Saturday but did nothing about it. I labored to produce a title, then sat there, staring at the screen. Mind you, I am not one who ordinarily wrestles with writer’s block. The words often come pouring out, and the challenge is simply to edit and refine them. But this time, I could not get started. Two or three times, I stared at the screen but wrote nothing. It was too hard. More than ever, I am filled with admiration for the young people from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who found their voice after the mass shooting there, or others who have similarly taken action after violent tragedies. It is not easy. But it is extremely important. And if New Zealanders respond positively to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s promise to tighten gun laws, then they are far ahead of the tortured American politics that have stood in the way of gun reform in the U.S.
I would also note that I am spurred by some of what I have read today in the Chicago Tribune. One article recites the story of Abdul Aziz, 48, a father of four sons and a member of the Linwood mosque, who shouted, “Come here!” to lure the gunman away from the mosque, risking his own life, and who stunned the man by throwing a credit card machine, which he said was the first thing he could find, at the shooter’s car, shattering the window. Other stories of courage will probably emerge in coming days, but it is a reminder to all of us that such courage is not tied to any one religion, race, or nationality. It reflects depth of character.
That is the saddest part of it all. There are those among us, and they hide within a wide variety of identities, whether it is Islamic extremism, white nationalism, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu tribalism, or some other perceived affiliation that somehow fosters hatred instead of a common love of humanity, who fill the void in their own emotional and intellectual development with a fear of others that causes them to fail to see our common humanity. The justifications vary, but one common thread is paranoia and a painful, even crippling, inability to reach out and open their hearts to those different from themselves, whether in language, skin color, national origin, gender, religious belief, or some other supposedly defining characteristic.
And every so often, that sense of separateness and need for a feeling of superiority erupts in an attack against people who are simply living their own lives, worshiping as they believe they should, but have done nothing to the perpetrator(s). In the case of Dylann Roof in Charleston, members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church welcomed him into a Bible study before he unexpectedly opened fire on them and killed nine people. Welcome was greeted with murder.
The real miracle of God is when his worshipers responded to such violence by insisting that more love is the answer. The Charleston survivors chose to forgive Dylann Roof. People suffering such attacks are certainly entitled to ask, “Why?” Even, and most certainly, “Why us?” That is a vital part of the grieving process. But don’t be surprised if New Zealanders, and the Muslims of Christchurch in particular, insist that love is the only path forward.
Okay, call me a copycat. If an idea is good enough, why not copy it proudly? On New Year’s Day, I read in a Chicago Tribune column by Heidi Stevens about a woman, Jen Kramer, who began a daily effort on Facebook a year ago as #yearoflove. Every day she posted about someone who meant something.
It occurred to me that we all have many people for whom we should be grateful, and we may not always do a good job of saying so. I thought hard about whether I could sustain a daily effort for a year as Kramer did, and then I thought, you’re a professional writer. How hard can one paragraph a day be? So I decided to take the plunge, starting that day, with #gratitudeonparade. Friends will begin learning why I am grateful and to whom. Some of it may be random, and some may be well planned. It’s a daring commitment, so I’ll see how it goes. But I have a feeling I may learn much about myself by trying.
Once a week, I will compile these short entries into a composite blog post to expand the audience. So, if you miss the daily feed on Facebook, feel free to visit www.jimschwab.com/Hablarbooks.
Posted on Facebook 1/1/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE #gratitudeonparade Gratitude should start in the most logical places. My mother, Hazel Schwab, who has outlived almost all her peers, would probably prefer that I not state an age on Facebook (she does not own a computer and has never used the Internet), but I want to state that she has shown me and three siblings the power of determination and the will to live and resilience many times over. She and my father early on made sure that we were in a good school district and encouraged education, even though they finished high school but never attended college. When I moved to Iowa, later married in Nebraska, and ended up in Chicago, I knew she would rather I had stayed in Cleveland. Reluctantly at first, however, she learned pride that I had spread my wings and soared professionally, even if she never fully understood exactly what I did–it was a bit esoteric by her standards, not easy to explain to her friends. (Even my wife wondered what an urban planner was when she first met me.) But she was tough of mind, and if we did not always agree on some things, we learned to disagree. But by now I have watched her survive and surmount so many challenges, it is hard to escape the conclusion that I owe some of my own dogged persistence to my mother. Thanks, Mom. You get the first tribute.
With my brother, Jack, his son, Kyle, and Kyle’s two young sons, Ryan and Dylan, at Christmas.
I suffered a disappointing discovery yesterday while
composing my blog
post. Long-time friend and former University of Iowa professor
Michael F. Sheehan had died on May 30. I
was mentioning his role in my career and searched for an appropriate link only
to find a May 30 obituary. He was 72. A physically fit ex-Marine, I expected he
would live longer, and the obit does not say how he died. I had not talked to
him in a long while, but I still felt a loss. He was the pivot point in a vital
decision that changed my life.
In late 1981, I was pursuing options for graduate school
after two and a half years as the executive director of the Iowa Public
Interest Research Group. Mike was a fierce advocate for the environment and
knew me in that role. At lunch one day, I mentioned that I had just explored a
Ph.D. program in the University of Iowa’s political science program, but had a
disappointing conversation in which I had told the head of the department’s MPA
program that I had lobbied in Des Moines in my Iowa PIRG role. He responded,
“That wouldn’t be relevant here. If you had done a study of lobbying . . . .”
Mike reacted to this curt dismissal of real-life experience
by simply asking, “Why don’t you apply to our urban planning program? We love
people like you.” I did, and the rest is history, so to speak.
But it was more than that turning point. In his classes,
Mike had high expectations for me and tolerated no flimsy excuses if I fell
short. That was of a piece with his approach to life. He never hesitated to be
a thorn in the side of polluters, the powerful, and the pompous. By the time I
completed my degree, he was entering law school so that, as they say, he could
“sue the bastards.” The advocate in his soul triumphed over the academic.
Several years later, still in his needling mode but living in Oregon (where he
remained), he joked that I was the best of a “mediocre lot” in my class. But
this time, I was ready with a verbal ambush. My first book was out, and the reviews
were appearing.
“Do mediocrities get their books reviewed in the New York Times?” I asked.
I could hear the chuckle over my one-upmanship. “You know, I’ve been bragging on you, Schwab,” he replied. It was like that with him, and it was always fun. Today’s tribute of gratitude may be too late for Michael Sheehan to read, but it is owed nonetheless. Here’s to the man who guided me into a career I have never regretted.
Yesterday, I offered tribute to Michael Sheehan, who persuaded me to try a career in urban planning. Today’s honoree gets to enjoy reading his tribute, fortunately. University of Iowa Professor John W. Fuller followed closely on Mike’s heels by quickly hiring me as a research assistant as soon as I was accepted into the program. I worked with him year-round for more than three years in the Institute for Urban and Regional Research and in the Legislative Extended Assistance Program, neither of which remains extant. The latter produced policy studies each year from four-year colleges and universities for the Iowa legislature at the request of its leaders. In my final year of graduate study in both Urban and Regional Planning and Journalism, John sold those leaders on my combination of writing and analytical skills to produce what he promised would be a plain-English assessment of the farm credit crisis, arguably the biggest issue facing the state as the 1985 legislative session commenced. John knew I could also draw upon research I was doing for my master’s project in journalism, an oral history of the farm credit crisis, to humanize the report’s conclusions.
As the due date in February 1985 approached, I was so
grateful for this remarkable opportunity that I pulled an all-nighter in the
LEAG office at the Oakdale Campus in order to ensure that the 100-plus-page
report could be printed and delivered to Des Moines on time. As for that
master’s project, it eventually became a book—Raising Less Corn and More Hell—published by the University of
Illinois Press in 1988. Just a few months later, he and Kathy regretted missing
our wedding in Omaha because they were on an academic exchange at Universidad
de los Andes in Venezuela, but later that summer they returned with a beautiful
Andean marital blanket as a wedding gift.
But John was never done manufacturing opportunities. Two
decades later, when the 2008 floods were swamping Iowa and the School of Urban
and Regional Planning was seeking expertise to add some hazards training to the
curriculum, it was John who spoke up and asked, “Why don’t we bring back Jim
Schwab?” That was the beginning of an ongoing relationship that has allowed me
to teach and mentor my own crop of students ever since then as an adjunct
assistant professor, teaching an annual course on hazard mitigation and
disaster recovery.
John and Kathy have offered their own home as a place to stay when I visit. This is not at all unusual. He and his wife, Kathy, have hosted and housed innumerable international visitors, students, and others for decades. They are among the most generous people I know. John is a profile in professional dedication and has been a powerful asset for the students he has taught for nearly four decades.
John Fuller (left) with me at his daughter Libby’s wedding near Cedar Rapids, April 29, 2017.
Last night, I failed to post my daily installment of
Gratitude on Parade, but I will make up for it. My excuse is that a groin muscle
strain flared up late in the day, making it uncomfortable to continue working,
so I sat back and watched television instead. Jean was watching the Joy Reed
town hall on MSNBC with Nancy Pelosi, so I joined her.
When such days occur for me, and they are rare, I think about people with much more serious illnesses or injuries, and how they demonstrate personal resilience. They all have lessons to teach the rest of us—to be grateful for their examples, and for our own generally good health. One of those people, who I know thinks the gratitude should run the other way because I have filled in for her as acting chair of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division for much of the year, is Allison Hardin. Allison, a planner for the city of Myrtle Beach, SC, was doing fine as the real chair through April, had the misfortune of nearly being killed in a serious auto accident in which a young man drove into the sports car Allison’s son Robert was driving, and in which she was a passenger. A long string of examinations, surgeries, and treatments has followed for both, and Allison has shown great courage in moving from wheelchair to walker to her own two feet while nurturing her son back to health as well, with the help of her husband. Through it all, she has coped with mountains of delayed e-mail on her job, tough decisions about her own future, and the usual major insurance and medical issues that accompany such a calamity. Allison has occasionally reminded me that she is aware that, while we planners talk about community resilience, it really all starts at a personal level.
I remain happy to be her “acting chair” of HMDR because,
frankly, I have never faced a predicament like hers, hope I never do, and have
no clear idea how well I would handle it But at least I have an example if I ever
need one.
Allison, second from right, after presenting me with my “retirement” t-shirt at the HMDR reception at the APA National Planning Conference in New York, May 2017. Miki Schmidt and Susan Fox of the NOAA Digital Coast staff are to our left and right.
Personally, I would rather be learning or teaching than shouting on any given day.
Last night, I read one of those publisher columns that are often boring and laborious, but this one nailed it. Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein recounted a conversation with a veteran editor she admires who inquired about the partisan bias he perceived in the monthly magazine. Unquestionably, the magazine is known for a left-wing tilt, but it should be better known for its investigative reporting and willingness to ask hard questions. Over the years, after all, Mother Jones has not gone out of its way to spare Democrats, but it certainly is riding herd on President Donald Trump.
And for good reason, although Trump is a symptom of a problem and not its origin. He is exploiting deep divisions and tribal instincts in a nation that seems unsure what it wants, but much of which is troubled by the extent of the deception, corruption, and amorality of the current administration. Bauerlein insists that the media can “stand for something” while remaining fair and accurate in its reporting, and I agree. She also notes that trying to report from the middle while merely relaying contrasting statements from “both sides” of the political spectrum is really reporting from nowhere because it lacks a moral anchor. There are multiple reasons for asking tough questions and engaging in investigative reporting, but two stand out: 1) Public officials often, but not always, cut corners, lie, or shade the truth to advance their own ambitions or protect the tribe; and 2) such questions are the ingredients of serious analysis that gets to the bottom of a problem and advances the quality of our national dialogue. Surely, the latter has been hitting new lows in recent years.
So, my title for this post does not mean that I always agree with everything I find in Mother Jones, nor does it mean that the magazine expects that all its readers will do so all the time. The real point is to advance the quality of the dialogue. And in that respect, I think publications like Mother Jones are essential to the survival of American democracy.
The subject of the purpose of the news media has always intrigued me, in part because, in addition to my M.A. in urban and regional planning from the University of Iowa, I also earned a second M.A. in journalism, way back in 1985. I recall a class conversation with one local newspaper editor. He clearly adhered to a school of thought that held that reporters need to be objectively neutral at all times. When someone asked him about news coverage of third parties, he noted that they got little coverage because they had such limited followings, so the focus was on the “two sides”—the Republicans and Democrats. When that person followed up by asking how third parties would ever get a hearing if all the news media followed that logic, he had no good answer. What we heard was mostly pre-Internet circular logic. We will cover such movements when they matter, and they won’t matter until we cover them. The shallowness of the paradigm of “two sides” immediately struck me: The media seeing itself as impartial mediator was an inadequate framework for finding the truth, which is not always or necessarily located in the middle. (Anyone still believe in slavery?) As Bauerlein observes, the middle moves, depending on how the two sides are defined. It matters whether the right is John McCain or Steve Bannon, whether the left is Nancy Pelosi or the Socialist Workers Party. And no, they are not the same. Where was the middle in Hitler’s Germany? Where was the middle in the segregated, Jim Crow South? Where is the middle when voter rights are being suppressed, so that some less privileged citizens are denied a voice through the ballot box? Whose voice matters (or should)?
Ultimately, it is not partisan to insist on accuracy, truth, human decency, and honesty. It is simply good for democracy and good for society. It is not helpful, on the other hand, simply to accept undocumented Twitter-fed nonsense from a President, a Congressman, or any other public figure without subjecting it to some standards of accuracy, which is why the Washington Post has maintained its inventory of more than 5,000 false or misleading statements by Trump since he took office. It may not be feasible for the Post alone to maintain such an inventory for everyone in a prominent political position, but he is the President, after all, and there are other Internet platforms for tracking political honesty among lower candidates and office holders of all parties at the federal, state, and local levels. These are not partisan sites, for the most part, but they are important tools for voters and activists who want to assess the accuracy of what they hear and read.
One reason I chose to react to Bauerlein’s comments is that they also touched upon much of my own philosophy regarding this blog. When I launched “Home of the Brave” in April 2013, I had no idea who would be reading it, or how many, but now there are nearly 19,000 subscribers, and probably some smaller number of regular visitors who have not yet chosen to register a subscription. I get virtually nothing out of the enterprise except the deep satisfaction of sharing knowledge and perspectives, but being a veteran planning professional as well as a trained journalist, the quality and reputation of what I publish is central to my identity. I also recognize special responsibilities once a readership grows to that size. While I certainly have a point of view on numerous topics, I have sought to emphasize research and analysis over advocacy. Indeed, given my penchant for taking readers deep into the subject matter in my own areas of expertise, while insistently using plain English, I have been pleasantly surprised at how many people have chosen to read this blog on a regular basis. I would rather slake a popular appetite for truth than simply express opinions. If I get something wrong, and someone can prove it, I want to hear from them. To that end, my reading diet is aggressive, and I try to share what I learn when I think I have discovered something that matters. I am always open to recommendations regarding new books and research reports. All the best journalists I have ever known have been equally ravenous readers. It is their best defense against “fake news.” They are not only not the enemy of the people; they are vital resources for a thoughtful public.
If only we could retrain more of America to step outside its current groupthink and exercise their mental muscles to question, not just react, to be open to new information, and to value independent thought, we might get past our current bumper-sticker debates and engage in some serious, rational conversation. And we might learn to show more mutual respect for what we all have to offer.
Not so in this case. Jean follows much more news in her retirement, hears about books by current and former public officials, and occasionally chooses to bring one to my attention by buying it. She knows that I am likely to read it, though it may take a while if I get bogged down with other business. I am also unlikely to read the entire spate of such books in this age of Trump because I don’t have enough time. They seem to be multiplying like rabbits.
Clapper is quite clear that he never envisioned writing such a book until he retired, in large part because, as a largely nonpolitical intelligence officer, his accustomed role was to lie low and avoid publicity. At the peak of his career, as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) under President Barack Obama, he says, he saw his mission as “speaking truth to power.” Like any other high-ranking administration official, Clapper had better and worse days, agreements and disagreements, with the President, but retained a deep respect for the occupant of the office both because of the importance of that office and the dignity of the individual performing the job. Any individual who has ever held a responsible position in business or in public life knows well the profound difference between disagreement and disrespect. In the end, the boss calls the shots. Moreover, Clapper makes clear that, as first a military officer, and then a civilian intelligence professional following his retirement from the Air Force, he served under successive administrations of both parties and retained the same respect for those above him.
He spends most of the book laying the groundwork for the final chapters about life at or near the top of the system. He details his childhood, in which he once managed inadvertently to hack through his family’s television into the communications system of the Philadelphia police, into college and the Air Force and training as a military intelligence officer. Like most public servants, he did not perform his job in his early years with any expectation of someday becoming the nation’s chief intelligence officer. He simply grew into a role that eventually put him repeatedly in front of congressional committees, testifying at hearings about everything from Benghazi to budgets to Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The time he invests in illuminating a background that has otherwise been largely out of the limelight helps us to understand the journey he has made from a lowly son of another itinerant military professional to someone with deep insights into where the nation has lately gone astray.
It is almost surely the unnerving experience of watching Donald Trump become president, even as the evidence of Russian meddling in the U.S. election system was mushrooming—much of which he was at times unable to discuss because the information was classified, or the investigation was underway and under the purview of the FBI, not the DNI—that seems to have dislodged any reservations he once had about sharing this story in a memoir. Like McCain, he uses the aid of a speechwriter, but neither man ever set out to be a professional writer. Still, it is perfectly clear that it is Clapper who assembled the facts for this intriguing book. The insights are clearly his own.
What troubles Clapper is hardly surprising, once one understands the philosophy that has guided his career, one commonly shared among lifelong public servants. There are certain expectations of loyalty to the nation, of the dignity of public service, and of public decency that seem to drive Clapper. No doubt, these motivations also affect many others on the growing list of critics whom President Donald Trump has recently targeted for loss of their security clearances. The sheer amateurishness of this dangerously autocratic move on Trump’s part, already applied to former CIA Director John Brennan, is apparent from the fact that several people on the announced list of those targeted for such scrutiny no longer have security clearances anyway. Would someone explain to Trump the Petulant that you can’t strip a security clearance that does not exist?
This appalling ignorance of history, law, and policy, and the consistent refusal to listen to advisers, certainly the refusal to accept the value of truth spoken to power, all appear to have played a role in driving Clapper, who is on Trump’s list, to construct his memoir and share his fears of the direction in which current events are leading the nation. There is a moment when respect for the office of the presidency is overshadowed by concerns about the abuse of power, as was the case under Richard Nixon. But this week’s events are beginning to suggest that even Watergate may not stand as the worst abuse of presidential power in American history. We cannot be afraid to say so. Clapper, who has made the round of news shows in recent months, states frankly near the end of his book:
I don’t believe our democracy can function for long on lies, particularly when inconvenient and difficult facts spoken by the practitioners of truth are dismissed as “fake news.” I know that the Intelligence Community cannot serve our nation if facts are negotiable. Just in the past few years, I’ve seen our country become polarized because people live in separate realities in which everyone has his or her own set of facts—some of which are lies knowingly distributed by a foreign adversary. This was not something I could idly stand by and watch happen to the country I love.
“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”
And hence the book’s title. It is an intelligent choice. Like Clapper with the presidents and superior officers he served in a five-decade career, I could probably question or object to some points he makes, but his larger points are impeccable. They are about honor and truth and service and honesty. Either you believe these ideals exist and matter, or you don’t. America must decide.
Life can produce very sudden turns of events. The turmoil and destruction dished out by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma may have been predictable in the abstract, that is, events that could occur at some point someday, but that means little when the day arrives that a hurricane is bearing down on your shores.
More than three months ago, I retired from the American Planning Association to move into a combination of activities I had tailored to my own skills and interests, which I have previously announced and discussed. Over the summer, I began setting the stage for introducing these new enterprises, but my wife and I also took time for a long-awaited excursion to Norway to celebrate this new phase of our lives. I began to share that story in August with blogs about our journey.
Meanwhile, I began work on the creation of Jim Schwab Consulting LLC, my solo planning practice. Just two weeks ago, with the help of a web designer, Luke Renn, I unveiled a business website that is a companion to this one. You can find it at the link above. But when we began to construct the site in mid-August, I had no idea what would ensue. By the time we had completed the new website, Harvey was making landfall on the Texas coast and dumping unimaginable amounts of rain in the Houston metropolitan area, and then on Port Arthur and Beaumont, Texas.
As Harvey was losing steam and moving inland, Irma, initially a Category 5 hurricane, devastated the small island of Barbuda, the smaller part of the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda. Officials estimate that 95 percent of the island’s buildings were damaged or destroyed, and residents have been evacuated to the larger island of Antigua, partly in advance of an anticipated second attack by Hurricane Jose, following in Irma’s wake, that mercifully did not come to pass. That would have been bad enough, but the storm also badly rocked St. Thomas and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, sideswiped Puerto Rico and the northern coast of Cuba, and finally passed through the Florida Keys, demolishing much of the community there, and sped up the western coast of Florida through places like Naples and Tampa. Irma was so huge that its waves and winds also buffeted numerous coastal communities in eastern Florida, no doubt shaking many people in Miami Beach to their core.
I will soon complete the tour of Norway on this blog, but it seemed more important to offer some insights, in some small way, into what is happening and will be needed in the recovery in Texas. Irma has been too large an event for me yet to absorb its totality and even begin to understand how I can possibly enhance what people know from the daily news barrage that has accompanied it. I am sure emergency management personnel at all levels are already weary but patriotically staffing their posts.
Planners like me must prepare for the much longer endurance test known as long-term recovery planning. While it is far too easy to say what, if any, role I may be asked to play in this drama, there have been conversations. Recovery, unlike emergency response, will take months to unfold. I will do my best to share what I learn. It is important because long-term recovery provides the opportunity to hash out major questions of the future and the resilience of the surviving communities. It has always been possible to learn from experience and to improve so that we lose fewer lives, suffer fewer losses, and rebound more quickly in future disasters. But possible is not certain. It is up to all of us to decide that we will rebuild with a resilient future in mind.
Ignorance did not make America great. Ignorance will not make America great again. Let’s all vow to stop the glorification of #ignorance.
Like millions of other Americans, I have been deeply disturbed over the past week by the comments of President Donald Trump regarding the events last Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia. I contemplated what I could possibly do or say in response to someone who seems to possess so little desire to educate himself on the basic issues of U.S. history or to consider the impact of his words on the people threatened by demonstrations of torch-bearing, bat-carrying, shield-wearing neo-Nazis chanting Nazi slogans and white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members invoking the horrors of the Confederacy. I finally concluded there is no point in refuting someone who clearly cares so little for the truth. The truth, in his mind, seems to be whatever he wants to believe is the truth.
Instead, I posted the statement above earlier today on both Twitter and Facebook as an offering to those other millions of Americans who cherish equality and dignity and understand that compassion and truth are the foundations of a better future for our nation. If I can share anything with America, it is a gift for condensing the message in articulate language, and so that is what I tried to do here. It is what I can do for my country at a moment when it is pining for clarity of purpose. We need to honor intelligence and intelligent, thoughtful inquiry concerning the kind of nation we want to become. We must rise above hateful slogans.
One reason I titled this blog “Home of the Brave” was that I felt we should not accede to the appropriation of our national symbols and phrases by extreme right-wing forces at odds with democracy for all. We need to keep in mind the closing words of the Pledge of Allegiance: “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Those who want more, and those who want to dispute my perspective, can dig through the rest of this website, and the rest of this blog, and parse and dissect it to their hearts’ content. I have left a long trail by now. But for tonight, at this time, my three-word statement above is what I have to offer. Share it, retweet it, put it on your placard or bumper sticker. But please insist on intelligent dialogue.
Chicago, a city that has spawned at least its fair share of writers and attracted many more, has spawned a national museum dedicated to people who propagate the written word. The American Writers Museum (AWM) opened May 16 at 180 N. Michigan Avenue, situated amid a dense ecosystem of museums, parks, and other cultural attractions that make living in Chicago such a stimulating experience. Let me just state the basic premise up front: If you live in Chicago, or you are visiting, and you care about or have any curiosity about literature, this is worth a visit. It is not a huge museum, at least not now, and you need not worry that it will take all day. You can spend all day, but you can get a great deal out of it in two or three hours if you wish.
Literature, in the context of AWM, does not only mean fiction or poetry. One point that was immediately obvious to me during a visit last week was that the museum takes a broad view of both “writers” and what constitutes “writing.” Communication comes in many forms, and the museum seeks to explore how those forms change in response to numerous changing conditions in American society. AWM President Carey Cranston reinforced that point with me during a brief walk-through when I arrived, before turning me loose to make my own assessments of the exhibits. Thus, in the various displays one can encounter Charles M. Schulz, the author of the “Peanuts” comic strip, which made points about life, love, and laughter just as surely as Jane Jacobs, discussing the status of urban planning in the 1960s in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Jean Toomer in Cane, an intriguing mix of fiction techniques that shed life on African-American life in the early 20th century. Creativity is not bounded by genre. It helps define genre.
Hold that thought for a minute while I explore with you the big question that drove me to visit in the first place. It is obvious enough how some other museums dedicated to natural history (Field Museum, e.g.) or technology and science (Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, or the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.) make their subject visual and sometimes even tactile with displays of dinosaur skeletons or space capsules, accompanied by videos that help patrons relive the experience of exploring the moon. How does one take the words of poems, novels, memoirs, and other types of written expression and make them come alive in an institutional setting? After all, any library can create a display of the ten best novelists by simply stacking the books along a display counter to draw attention. As readers, we engage with these works by buying or borrowing the books and, well, reading them. So, what makes an American Writers Museum a vivid encounter with its subject matter?
One answer lies in the timeline that greets you just to the right of the front desk after you enter. Running from 1490 to the present, it is not, as Cranston noted to me, a display of the best writers America has ever seen, but instead provides an emblematic display that allows you to see the relationship of major themes in American history to the writing American authors have produced. The United States of America, an independent nation for only half of that time and a maze of Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, and British colonies as well as native societies at various times before and since, is rich in historical themes that have inspired literary responses. The vastness of a continent new to Europeans . . . . the interaction of cultures . . . . Civil War and its aftermath . . . . the struggle for civil rights . . . . the fight for dignity and identity for American Indians . . . . immigration and the assimilation of new peoples and cultures . . . . industrialization and its impact on a formerly agrarian nation . . . . America’s emergence on the world stage. One could go on, and one could navigate the endless subthemes and nuances of each topic, which is precisely what American writers, whatever their origins and perspectives, have done for more than five centuries.
Opposite the timeline, and complementing it, is a wall with the names of prominent writers on small boards built in that one can turn for additional information. Many, though not all, feature short videos one can launch with a finger touch that illustrate important points. I played with one for Ray Bradbury, one of my own favorites dating back to high school. The video quotes part of Fahrenheit 451 while showing a pile of books being consumed by fire. Alongside Bradbury’s name is a theme, in his case, Dystopian Literature; this occurs with each writer to help show the range of genre that American literature has produced, how it has responded to both contemporary and larger issues, seeking to excite the visitor’s imagination. Whether intentional or not, it excited mine simply by introducing me to writers previously unfamiliar to me, which is saying a lot. There are American writers of whose work any of us may know little or nothing but who have the potential to stir our thoughts and prod our consciences. That has always been the mission of good writing.
Near all that is a current, periodically changing exhibit, the Meijer Exhibit Gallery, which demonstrates some of the most potent creativity the museum has on display. Its first exhibit displays the work of poet W.S. Merwin, about whom I confess I knew nothing, but who is now a source of fascination for me. The small room one enters for “Palm: All Awake in the Darkness,” features a haunting 12-minute video with no human presence except for the soft voice-over of narrators reading from Merwin’s work dealing with the complex and problematic relationship of humanity and nature. The video features the view from inside a cabin in the Maui rainforest, redolent with the sounds of birds and insects and the abundance of life beneath the forest canopy. You may stand or sit on a simple bench and contemplate this immersive adventure into the mind of a poet. Merwin, now 89, has produced more than 50 volumes of poetry, according to the brochure that complements the exhibit, which discusses writer Gregory Bateson’s concept of an “ecology of ideas,” the network of impressions and perspectives that form our conscious and subconscious minds. Since the late 1970s, Merwin has lived in Hawaii on an old pineapple plantation he has restored to its natural state.
As a Lutheran, I found one other thing haunting. Merwin is a practicing Buddhist, and the brochure contains a typewritten, hand-edited draft of a poem called “Place.” It begins:
On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree
Curiously, for years, I have known that Martin Luther is reputed to have said, “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.” The 500th anniversary of the Reformation is upon us, and I know these two men came from very different places to express the same thought. But if a 16th-century religious reformer and a 20tt-century Buddhist poet can reach the same conclusion about the resilience of our commitment to the earth and the stubbornness of faith, perhaps there is hope for us all, after all.
AWM will be sponsoring events in a modest meeting room that features another challenging exhibit, “The Mind of a Writer,” which explores the connections between writer and audience. Professional writers clearly cannot earn a living without an audience, and the practical questions are both how to define and shape that audience and how to reach that audience. The “reach” forces us to explore the role of technology and institutions in facilitating those connections, which clearly have evolved over time. Displays make us think about the evolution of the book shop, starting with the Moravian Book Shop, launched in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1745, largely to import religious publications, but continuing into such modern innovations as Oprah’s Book Club, using the medium of television to connect viewers with writers; bookstore chains such as the now defunct Borders; and Amazon, allowing people to order books through the Internet. Of course, writers have also used periodicals, which in their heyday relied very much on the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service, as well as other media. Playwrights do not expect people to read their writing, but to hear it on stage. Screenwriters reach people through televised performances of their scripts, and so on. All of that got me wondering whether AWM missed a beat by not discussing the Internet not only as a mechanism for selling printed works but as a medium in itself for digital publishing. After all, the very premise of my visit was to review the museum not in print but online, by blogging. Maybe I missed it, but where was the discussion of blogging as one of the most modern innovations in audience creation? Anyone out there? Judging from the list of subscribers on my admin site, it would seem there are thousands. In the aggregate, probably hundreds of millions. It’s a brave new world. But I suspect it may not be long before AWM addresses this phenomenon.
Just beyond this area is a section where you can sit at an old-fashioned typewriter and play. The staff each day places sheets of paper in a tray with the opening lines or fragments of famous quotes. Your job: start pecking away to fill in the blanks with your own thoughts about how the quote should end. For writers like me who are almost preternaturally oriented to the computer screen, it is slightly disconcerting to hit keys that sometimes skip, but the experience is indisputably tactile, though arguably less so than perhaps using a quill pen. In any event, there is a wall with clips. You are invited to hang up your work when you are done. I did not get around to asking what the staff does with these at the end of each day. Maybe you should ask when you visit.
I hope you are more dexterously agile than I appear to be with one other exhibit that allows you to move any of a number of drifting images across a screen for a surprise exploration of an individual writer’s work. One of several lines of inquiry allows you to hear a short oral reading, but I had trouble triggering that feature because my index finger seemed not to hit the precise part of that line that activated the recording, at least not on the first try. I found myself a little frustrated, but a generation that has become adept at using its thumbs to tap out smartphone messages may be more adept in this respect. I was never very skilled with video games, either. We all have our limitations.
There are other features, including one on Jack Kerouac that includes the “scroll manuscript” he pasted together for On the Road, and a room on Chicago writers, since the museum lives here. I am sure there will be more in the future. The museum leaders appear to have built out their infrastructure of sponsors and board members, and if you’d like to know more, you can visit the website. That is not my mission here. As an active American writer, I hope I’m offering you reasons to visit the museum itself.
