It was a nice service, and nice weekend with my family – a group that I love and admire so much. Everyone who spoke about Gigi talked about her sense of humor, and her sharp tongue. And when the church pastor, during the homily for your funeral, mentions how sharp your sense of humor is, well, that’s something distinctive. (He quoted Jack as saying, “She could bury you with a single word.”) Makes me smile to think of that – and I guess I know that I myself come by that particular character trait honestly.

And of course, books and Gigi reading them to kids, were featured prominently.

There were probably a couple hundred people there, from the island, from Brunswick, from Jacksonville and beyond. I think we had the service that she wanted. (And in fact, I know that we did, as she left extremely detailed instructions regarding, well, pretty much all the details. Also characteristic of her.)

And while only my brother David and I will really feel this, it’ll always be hard to think of this weekend without thinking about another day in August in south Georgia when we buried my dad’s father (Grandee is what we called him) 15 years ago.

The two experiences were incredibly different from each other – just as different as the two families are, really. Quitman, where Grandee lived most of his life and where my dad grew up, is a tiny, tiny town about 60 miles north of Tallahassee – and what I remember the most from those days was the funeral procession through the town, with the police at the intersections with their hats over their hearts, and then how impossibly light he was in the coffin was when we laid him to rest.

Gigi’s service was very different, though – she was cremated a couple of weeks ago, and before the larger church service we had a very small gathering of just the family and the pastor to put her ashes in the memorial garden of the church. No body, no pall bearers like at Grandee’s funeral, just us, with my uncles and brother putting her ashes into the garden. It was a good remembrance, and honored who she was.

What connects the two events most viscerally for me, other than the obvious relationship, is that I think I’ll always remember how hot and humid it was both times – a characteristic Georgia heat that makes you sweat almost immediately when you step outside – and all of us in our ties and dresses and nice clothes.

Anyway, two completely different experiences, different families, separated by 15 years. But for my brother and me, these two August days will always be connected by the heat of the Georgia summer, and of remembering and honoring our grandparents.

This week we’re starting resistance training, so having my shoulder be more active in lifting and in normal use. As a result, it’s feeling a little sore, but I’m able to do planks again, and can see that I’ll be able to do dips, pushups, rows, pullups before too long.

The last 2 months have been tough in a lot of ways related to my shoulder — much more painful than the dislocations themselves — but so far I’m really happy I made the decision to go with surgery as quickly as I could, and couldn’t really be happier with my surgeon (Colin Eakin at PAMF) and physical therapist (Paula Chan in Mountain View), plus my trainer (Ben Kenyon).

I really liked this book a lot. The author decided to go through a year’s worth of month-long experiments to try to be happier. To adjust her behavior in big and small ways to see if they made her feel happier day-to-day. And they did.

There’s a lot in this book, and I’m going to want to go back to it to think about the concrete actions I can take in my own life. I think it illustrates, more than anything else, a couple of ideas. First, act the way you want to feel — that will tend to reinforce. Second, being mindful and focusing on the things that are important, you can always make a difference.

I think some will view this as a bit of a hokey self-help type of book, but I didn’t read it at all like that. It’s an essay on mindfulness & intentionality, and making your life the way you want it, instead of just sliding along.

I liked this book by Sanjay, but didn’t love it. Interesting medical survey of the ways we think about death, work to prevent it. Lots of stories of surprises to doctors, of courses of therapy that are significantly more effective than the accepted conventions, etc.

As followers of my tweets know, I was really excited to see Rush in concert this week at Shoreline. Naturally, since the band is over 30 years old now, a bunch of people around work had no idea who they are. (And I got a bunch of questions like “You’re going to see Rush Limbaugh?? Why??”)

Anyway, the truth is, Rush is about my favorite band ever, and I could listen to them pretty much all day long, every day. They’re the only band I can listen to and sing along to, while reading a book about something completely different. The lyrics of their twenty-odd albums are that deep in my brain.

I think we all tend to be musical products of the years we were in high school, and more than any other bands, Rush and R.E.M. were the definitive ones for me. R.E.M., of course, were the guys you wanted to be as cool as — they were hip, were talking about things that didn’t really make sense to a teenager (or R.E.M. themselves, apparently, as Stipe later said he mostly made up the words because they sounded good).

Rush was different, though. They wrote music about things that mostly misfit males of my generation cared about. They struggled through Ayn Rand, wrote music about The Lord of the Rings, about science fiction. They worked through a lot of what then seemed like important existential questions, but now seem a little embarrassing to have struggled through in the first place. But in the middle 80s mostly what they wrote about was what it felt like being out of the mainstream — really, they sang about what it meant to be a nerd, and the things that nerds went through as they figured out how to become functioning parts of society.

I always felt like they were writing for me and people like me, and it really struck a chord. I loved the music, too — they wrote some of the most complex music of the times (ever?), with lots of moving time signatures, lots of unusual arrangements where the bass led, things like that. A lot of people have always been critical of the band for being a little too perfect, a little too soulless — in pursuit of technical perfection rather than connecting at an emotional level. (To make this article even nerdier than it already is (!), the claim is that they’re sort of the rock band equivalent of the font Helvetica — a little too perfect to have much character.)

But I never felt like that. I just loved the music, loved the lyrics, and as uncool as it is now to like a prog rock back, I still really love listening to them. (Other bands of the era like Yes haven’t held up nearly as well for me.)

Watching the recent documentary on them (Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage — highly recommended) was a bit of a revelation for me — it tells the story of these 3 guys from Toronto (Alex & Geddy & John Rutsey, with Neil coming along after the first album) who were nerds themselves growing up, who never really fit in either. [Yes, I know this fact is/was obvious to even the most casual of outside observers. It took me a little while to deconstruct my own feelings, I guess.] And the doc was great in that it had other rockers — from Pantera, the Smashing Pumpkins, others — who were clearly also outsiders and nerds, and admired what the trio from Toronto had done.

Anyway, it’s way past being cool to like Rush, if it ever really was, but they and their music still means a lot to me. Really glad to get to see them in concert again, after a few years, and hope to get another chance. (For the record, they sounded really terrific Monday. I think that if Geddy’s voice can hold up, they should be around for a few more tours, and I like their new material as much as anything they’ve done in probably 20 years.)

I really liked this book a lot — it’s a look at our relationship with the 4 main “food fish” that we eat in huge quantities: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna. It starts by talking about salmon farming, something that humans have been doing for something more than 500 years — I had no idea. Goes into pretty good detail about the relative merits of wild salmon fishing versus farmed salmon harvesting — although it doesn’t really make it clear at all what to buy at Whole Foods.

He makes it clear that sea bass — or, more generally, perciforms — despite their relative ubiquity, are a pretty strange choice in fish to domesticate — very tricky. (Also, there are a lot of different fish that we call sea bass, but they’re all pretty different.)

Cod, of course, was well chronicled by Mark Kurlansky in his outstanding book Cod, about 10 years ago — and Greenburg does a good job of taking that work as a baseline and extending it in the context of sustainable oceans now, and what’s happened in the Grand Banks over the past decade or so.

And it’s a bit of an ode to tuna, especially the dwindling bluefin tuna, which he asserts is one of the most incredible fish species and that we need to stop fishing now.

Anyway, great book, and with real suggestions for sustainability at the end. (In short, pick fish more suitable for farming: tra, tilapia, and the Kona kampachi.)

My mom reminded me the other day that I have sometimes, um, esoteric tastes in what I read — and I guess that’s true. But I really liked this book, and think it’s relatively rare for books to change the way you think about your relationship with the world. Very recommended.

And with sentences like this:

“The hoki is a gadiform descended from a fish that ended up in the Southern Hemisphere after the great gadiform radiation tens of millions of years ago.”

How can you not want to read more?

I’m an unapologetic lover of children’s literature — really liked the Harry Potter books, grew up with The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, and some (now) obviously horrible books by Piers Anthony.

So when I heard that my 11 year old nephew really loved these books, more than the Harry Potter books, I gave them a try. I read all 5 books, in order, but didn’t really like them very much. They’re sort of like a cross between Harry Potter and Greek mythology, but with all the action, including Mt. Olympus, centered around present day Manhattan.

What could go wrong, really?

Yeah, everything you just imagined as an answer to that last question is pretty much true. This really isn’t a very good series of books. I totally understand why my nephew liked them — they’re basically fun books with a teenager in control, with some tortured Greek mythology thrown in the mix.

Anyway, since I read all 5 books, they’re obviously not horrible, but they weren’t really what I was hoping for. The mythology is pretty dubious, but it did cause me to run down the rabbit hole on Wikipedia a few times to learn about various Titans and minor gods, so that’s not all bad.

I’ve written about my trip there before on this blog; they’ve also put up a page with a video about our conversation there on Transparency. It was a unique and amazing experience — and an interesting conversation and day took place. As the video makes pretty clear, a lot of people came in with the expectation of talking primarily about physical and architectural transparency, but I’ve been more interested in transparency as a metaphor — as a way to live your life, as a way to manage organizations. A lot of interesting ideas came out of the blending of physical and metaphorical ideas of what transparency is.

Of course, in my time at Mozilla this has been a theme we’ve come back go again and again, as we try to learn and discover how to lead effectively in an organization built on ideals of transparency. (That isn’t the only ideal, and there are many others that it interacts with regularly, but it is an important one for us.)

Leading transparently is often hard – it’s tough to know how to be most effective, how to get things done – and often, being transparent seems to be counterproductive. John Maeda, after spending his first year as President of RISD trying to be as transparent as possible, wrote this piece on transparency versus clarity, and a lot of things clicked for me as I read it – I’ve come back to it often over the past year or so.

And then the Wikileaks/Afghanistan papers situation occurred — and while leaking confidential information is nothing new, I think that the scope of the information leaked, and the way that it was leaked, is something that is quite modern. It raises a serious question: is it even possible to keep secrets in organizations and governments now? Should it be? Is this new transparency good, destructive, a little bit of both, or is it just too early to tell?  Jeff Jarvis posted a nice piece for thinking about this a couple of weeks back.

I’ve got lots of thoughts here, as you might imagine — living and breathing Mozilla over the past 5 years has made some things very clear and others not so much but not that many answers myself, so I’d love to hear (and engage with) a broad range of thoughts on this during the week.

I’m very happy to be moderating this Glass House Conversation online. Please contribute.

But I’ve been struggling with moving between roles the past few days — and it’s got nothing to do with online life — but I would wager is a decidedly non-modern one.

Kathy & I took SPL to Disneyland for his first trip there. We’d been on some smaller outings, like to Legoland, but I’ve really wanted to take him to Anaheim for quite a while. There are lots of reasons to be cynical about Disney and Disneyland/Disney World, but I’m not — I really love it there. I love how it feels, even with crowds. I love all the colliding mythologies. Most of all, I love how it makes kids feel when they ride Space Mountain or interact with characters during the parades or watch the fireworks over Sleeping Beauty Castle.

I’ve been to the parks in Anaheim and Orlando both many times, but obviously it was our first trip as the parents of a 5 year old — so lots of new things to consider in that role.

But we knew earlier in the week that Gigi was in the hospital and might not make it out — and Friday morning before we left the hotel I got a call from Mom about Gi’s prognosis; a few hours later Mom called again to let me know that Gigi had passed away. We were in line for a ride at the California Adventure side of the park (bumper cars for the Bug’s Life section), but the specifics aren’t that important, really.

What is important was that at that moment, a bunch of roles I have all crashed into each other at once. I was trying to be a good son for my mother, who had just said good-bye to her own mother. And I was trying to communicate at least a little bit with Kathy, my partner in all things, so she would know what was happening. The line was moving, though, and SPL was anxious to get into the seat of the bumper car so we could crash into his mother’s car — and so I wanted to be a good attentive dad for him. Over the top of all that, though, and of course, I was mostly Gigi’s grandson, and mostly Gigi’s grandson just felt sad.

I felt those roles all collide with each other a lot over the next couple of days — sort of like waves crashing at the beach one would come in, and then later be overwhelmed by a different one. It was a hard set of feelings to really understand and process and deal with appropriately — I don’t honestly know whether I’ve processed this much yet at all. (Which is one of the reasons that I’m  blogging it — to be able to understand it a little bit better.)

I do know that I was much more aware of the roles that I play in life this week — and in particular, the roles that really, really matter a lot to me. I think it helped me clarify some of the things I love about being a father, a husband, a son — but I know this is all a bit of a moving target. Things change, relationships change.

Mostly, I was very happy to be able to spend so much time with Kathy & SPL at a difficult juncture for me. That, I know for sure.

She was my mother’s mother, and I never knew her as May, really, but rather “Gigi,” a name she gave herself when I was born. It came from the old Pogo comic – there’s a character called Grundoon in it – a wrinkly baby woodchuck that always spoke in gibberish – and she thought I looked a little like that. Thus G.G. for “Grundoon’s Grandmother.” I’ve never really known what to make of that story (although, in retrospect, not really all that flattering) but she’s always just been Gigi to me.

A couple of little glimpses into my memories of her:

When I was growing up, she always used to send cards for about every holiday — birthday, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, whatever – and they always had a dollar bill in them. She moved to two dollars in the eighties, when I was in my teens and able to spend with more velocity. Those cards continued into college for me, and even after. In 1997, after I’d been working at Trilogy and then Apple, we saw each other at my Mom’s graduation ceremony (for her Masters in Library Science) and I remember proudly giving Gigi one of my Apple business cards. Without missing a beat, she said, “I’ve been sending $2 to a Senior Scientist at Apple??” Pretty funny. She was always super quick and super sharp with her humor — so that, at least, I come by honestly. She’s been sending SPL cards with a couple of dollars in them since he was born. A nice tradition and connection to her that always made me smile.

But the thing that I really remember about her is all the books. She owned a bookstore on St. Simons called The Shorebird, and one of my favorite things to do was to go to work with her. I would sit in the back and read everything back there, for what seemed like hours (but probably wasn’t) and remember feeling like I was a very lucky kid – and, of course, that’s exactly right.

I’ve been thinking about her a bunch the last few days, naturally, but especially because we’ve been at Disneyland, for SPL’s first visit there. One of my earliest memories is going to Walt Disney World with Gigi and the rest of the family (since they lived pretty close to Orlando), and it brings a lot of things full circle for me to be here now. More on that in a bit.

She leaves behind such a good family — my mom and her two brothers, who have been wonderful uncles (and now great uncles), and the seven grandkids (my cousins, my brother, and me), who are such a smart, funny, diverse, and talented group. No small feat.

Anyway, Gigi lived a good life, and I’ll miss her a lot.

R.I.P., May Pearce Korb, 1923 – 2010

Well, after 3 days of SPL waiting for me to get dressed, I now realize that maybe it’s the kids, not the parents, setting the fashion agenda.

It’s a little mortifying to my finely honed sense of style , but is more than made up for by how endearing it is to have a hopper want to be like you. And knowing that it’s a phase that won’t last forever makes it more precious.

SPL really wanted us to match on the way home today. How can you say no to a five year old on his vacation?? Irresistible.

And voilà: the matching family.

I will happily ignore a little fashion ignominy for SPL to enjoy things even a little bit more.

I liked the first book in this series, Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer, pretty well.This book was pretty different — the main character is still this necromancer named Johannes Cabal, and the setting is still this sort of Victorian era steampunk type of universe. But this time instead of a Faust type story, it’s more like a locked room mystery on a blimp.

It’s weird & quirky, and not the sort of thing I generally like all that much, since it’s a little, um, overly Victorian for me, but I read this one in a weekend, and liked it pretty well.

Not for everyone, for sure, but a fun read for me.

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how great Stross is — I think this was the wrong book to start with. It’s the sort of book that mostly made me want to reread Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles (not on Kindle yet — what’s the deal with that?)

I didn’t like this one much — found the plot pretty derivative of other stuff I’ve read, didn’t like the writing much. Some good parts, but not really my favorite.

This book is a full-out assault on the ethics and principles of eating meat. Foer is one of the most talented novelists that I’ve read in the past decade, and he’s a very compelling writer. This book is a bit of why he’s become vegan himself, as well as an attack on industrial ranching and meat production, not to mention an illustration of the many ways we’re cruel to the animals that we eventually eat.

I’m not a vegetarian (or vegan) myself, although I’m trending that way. It used to be that I’d have meat for every meal — now as a family, we tend to eat vegetarian at home at least half the time. (We probably eat salmon 30% of the rest of the time, and chicken the remainder.) We’ve been looking for more recipes that use garbanzo beans and black beans — found some good ones, especially Indian dishes.

In any case, intellectually, I’m pretty sympathetic to Foer’s arguments here, and wholly in agreement that industrial ranching is a very bad development. In practice, I still eat meat that’s produced like that. I tend to think we’d be healthier with more vegetables compared to meat, it would be more sustainable globally, and would be overall ethical. I’m not quite the guy I want to be in this regard yet, but this was a good book to remind me about how I’d like to be.

For me personally, it’s acute: I don’t really even like buying books that I can’t get electronically anymore. It shows in my library — I’ve been giving away about 100-200 books a year to our public library, but still have well over 1,000 in the house. But I have more than 150 on my Kindle, after 2 1/2 years. My physical library is shrinking, my electronic one growing.

I have zero sentimentality – none - about the form of the book. I’ve noted elsewhere that what I discovered on getting my Kindle is that it isn’t particularly books that I love so much, it’s reading that I love. Novels, non-fiction works, short stories, whatever. It’s the words that I’ve always cared about, the ideas, the narratives, the characters. Not the wood pulp, the binding glue, the flashy book jackets (that often don’t have anything at all to do with the author’s intent).

But lately I’m worried that as we rush headlong into the electronic future that we’re losing something.

I think it’s pretty clear that we’re not reading as well — every reader I talk with reports that they’re not comprehending the books quite as deeply as they used to. I believe we’ll get better at reading electronically, and the format will allow better paging through and spatial memory eventually, but that’s far from obvious to me. (Most avid readers I talk with say that they can usually remember where on the page they read something — top left, lower right, in the middle, whatever — and that’s always been true for me. The reflowable digital form obviously breaks that spatial memory, and is a bit of a problem.)

But the thing I’m worried about more lately is the disappearance of books in our physical spaces. I’ve always found that when I go visit peoples’ houses that what’s on their bookshelves is a bit of a lens into their lives and their values. Almost invariably when people come over to our house for dinner, I’ll hand them a book from my shelves that they’re interested in with no expectation (or desire, actually) to get the book back.

I find it even in my own home — when I’m in the office, I’ll often notice a cluster of books about something that reminds me of a time in my life, or stokes an old curiosity, or that just makes me happy.

But now the books we have in our house don’t really represent the current me. We tend to have 3 categories: (1) kids books, (2) coffee table books, and (3) books from our past that we haven’t given away yet. I believe that will happen in most homes — and maybe it already has been, since the introduction of the television — and it makes our personal spaces much more anonymous — more screens, less deep content.

I feel the same thing as I travel around — in the airport or on airplanes, nobody can see what I’m reading. Mostly, that’s okay with me — I didn’t really want to talk to my seat neighbor about Stieg Larsson that much anyway. But it bugs me more that my wife can’t see what I’m reading — the books used to serve as an instant conversation-starter. Now the reading experience is faceless, not conversation-inviting at all.

Anyway, I’m sure we’ll replace books as a lens into our brains and lives with something else — digital picture frames? Facebook pages glowing from our walls at home?

Nevertheless, I think we’re losing something in the process. That always happens as we move from one technology to the next, but we’ve overturned a 500 year old technology in less than a decade, and it’s going to be very disorienting.

I’ve never missed reading physical books nearly as much as I miss having the physical artifacts in our world, and how so many clues to who we are are disappearing along with them.

It’s no secret that I think incredibly highly of Bob Sutton and his work. I’ve always found him to be smart, encouraging, engaging, and interesting to talk with about work and management, and find that, more than most people in the field, he’s extremely data-driven in his work. I also find that he’s got an incredible ethical framework, and is very wise about the art of management.

He’s got a new book coming in September, and I really, really like it — I think it’s his most profound and useful work to date. I’m generally not a fan of business books — I find that usually their main value is in the title (and if it’s really awesome, maybe the introduction is useful) — but this one, which I’ve read a pre-pub copy of, is great.

His last book, The No Asshole Rule, got a lot of attention, partly for the provocative title, but really more for the ideas on how much culture matters in productive workplaces. And it clearly struck a nerve with people suffering from bad or incompetent managers. His new book is a little less situated in the negative context associated with bad managers, and talks more about how to be an exceptional leader. That distinction is important — it’s obviously easy to be a bad manager, and hard to be a good one — but it’s another thing entirely to be a really exceptional leader, and Bob has gone to great lengths in this book to look at some of the world’s best leaders and really understand what sets them apart.

You can get a taste of the book in this Harvard Business Review post by Bob titled “12 Things Good Bosses Believe” — this is an extremely powerful list of things that the best managers believe.

I fall short of these ideals a lot — I imagine everyone does, really — but every single one of them is worth thinking about and striving for each and every day in the workplace. This book is a great one because it reminds me of how good great leaders can be, and I really recommend you pick it up when it comes out.

I know that I’m writing and tweeting a lot about all of this lately — to be honest, it occupies a huge part of my brain — it’s a big deal for me this year. I was talking with someone over the weekend who said he’d had a similar surgery last year, and that it completely changed the complexion of his year. I’m finding the same thing — it dominates my mood and thinking — whether it’s how the shoulder hurts, the psychology of maneuvering with the sling, whatever.

Other than just being on my mind a lot, I’m writing so much for a couple of other reasons. First, as a reminder to myself over the years of the specifics of the injury and recovery. Second, because as I progress through this, I’m finding relevant information about what everything feels like to be tough to find on the web, and I hope that it can help others who are going through it.

My last post was a couple of weeks after the surgery, and we’re now a couple of weeks past that — I saw the surgeon Tuesday and things looked good enough to stop wearing the sling and start physical therapy. I’m really happy not to wear the sling anymore. The physical aspects were annoying, but it was really the psychological aspects that I was getting tired of — being in a sling for weeks, I found that I started to think of myself as less vital, more gimpy. I knew it wasn’t really true, and it was just temporary, but it wore on me a lot in any case.

Overall, things are going well — it’s been pretty painful overall — and lately my shoulder hurts most of the time (although it goes up and down). Sleeping has consistently been the biggest problem. Was hard to sleep with the sling, is hard to sleep with the soreness and sharp pains when I move in the wrong way. But making it through.

Wednesday I started physical therapy — I’ve got 2 weeks of passive stretching & range of motion exercises (I move the arm with my other arm, or the physical therapist moves it) and then another couple of weeks of active range of motion (where I use the arm itself). After that, 4 weeks of resistance training rehab, and who knows after that. So now I’m about 5 days into it. The exercises aren’t complicated — it’s about 30 minutes of laying with my arms wide, stretching them on an exercise ball, doing pendulums, etc. They’re designed to stretch out the capsule that holds the shoulder. The point of the surgery is to tighten up the capsule — and they overtighten it in surgery and use PT to loosen it to a manageable level.

The most interesting/freaky aspect of this phase is psychological, too — the therapist on Wednesday moved my shoulder into positions that my brain knows will dislocate — or rather would have dislocated before the repair. So when I start to approach those positions, I’m finding myself tense up and fight against the motion, which makes everything hurt more. I find it’s also triggering a strong fear response — just a very strong aversion to letting my arm get moved around, some feeling of nausea, etc. The next day, the first one where I was doing the exercises by myself with nobody to ask questions of, was actually a little scarier to me, just because it was a completely unknown feeling.

The good news is that, as of today, Day 5, things are going really well. The difference between today and last week is astonishing, and I’m finding that every day my range of motion is a little bit bigger, and the fear & nausea responses are becoming less severe and happening less often. It hurts most of the time — there’s not really any time that goes by that I’m not aware of it and devoting some attention to it. But it feels pretty good in the mornings now, and hurts more through the day as it gets more tired.

I find, too, that I’m trying to be as aggressive as I can about it — doing the exercises a couple of times a day instead of just once (I asked whether that would be okay) — so hopefully that’s helping. I know I can’t accelerate it that much — I think a lot of it is just diligence and time to heal.

The most amazing thing so far is that I can’t remember, at all, what the surgery and rehab was like when I first repaired the shoulder, in a much more invasive open procedure, in 1990. I literally can’t remember going to a physical therapist, can’t figure out when I got better, since I didn’t take any time off from school, and can only vaguely remember being in the hospital (it was a 3 day thing instead of just the morning like this year). I can remember a lot about both years at Stanford before and after it, but really nothing about getting my shoulder better. Weird.

Anyway, this note is a little all over the place, which is a little how I feel, too. But I’m happy to be more active now, and optimistic that the rehab is going well and starting to convince myself that my shoulder really is repaired.

My shoulder repair surgery was 11 days ago now, and things seem to be going pretty well. 17 more days with my sling, not that I’m counting, really. Pretty minimal pain at this point, except at night, when it’s pretty brutal — I think laying down on my back or side puts the shoulder into a position that puts pressure on the repair. So I’m not sleeping very well at all, which is discouraging, but overall I’m quite happy with how things are progressing, and am fired up about getting into PT in a couple of weeks.

I am blown away by the precision of the arthroscopic surgery. When I had my shoulder repaired 20 years ago, they made a 4 inch incision, detached the muscle from the bone, and generally had to open everything up to get in to repair things — that meant a 3 day stay in the hospital, and a long & painful rehab, although I don’t really remember much about it, honestly.

This time the experience is much different. I’ve got 3 band aids on my shoulder covering up 4mm incisions where the camera, vacuum and tools went in. My stay in the surgery center was 3 hours instead of 3 days. And as I’m recovering, it’s clear that only a few of the surrounding muscles and tendons and ligaments were really very disrupted. (Wearing my arm in the sling, by contrast, is creating more complaints — sort of a contact rash, a very sore elbow, and my wrist is pretty tweaked.)

On the whole, though, so far so good. 2 weeks left in the sling, then 4 weeks of PT (1st week is passive, where they will move my arm around; next 3 are active), then 4 weeks of strengthening. Feeling pretty doable at this point. Lots to see as I start to use the joint again, but optimistic so far.

I’ve included the pictures from the surgery above (click through to see the full size), although I don’t really understand too much about how to read them. If you number the pictures 1-9, going from left to right, top to bottom, here are a few choice shots:

• #1 is showing the healthy tendon, no problem
• #3 and #4 show the labrum before repair — pretty much shredded is what they said
• #5 is the posterior top of the shoulder ball — shows a notch in it that’s come from repeated dislocations, as it gets bumped by the labrum on the way out — didn’t repair that since it doesn’t seem to be giving me too much trouble
• #6 & #7 show the surgeon cleaning out the old stuff; #7 shows him roughing up my bone to cause “bony bleeding,” which encourages scarring like we want in there, I guess (sounds sorta awful to me, honestly, and I have lots of imagined pains due to my bones bleeding)
• #8 and #9 show the repair, with some striped thread and metallic-looking anchors, which the surgeon (of course) said “looks great.”

Anyhow, that’s the update from shoulder central — in a bit of pain at nights, but super-optimistic.

Next up, traveling to Vancouver with my sling.

Kinzer’s written two of the most influential histories that I’ve ever read: All the Shah’s Men, an account of the CIA-led coup of Reza Shah over Mohammed Mossadeh, and Overthrow, a history of the last 100 years or so of America’s regime-change-happy foreign policy, and its disastrous consequences.

Reading All the Shah’s Men was incredibly illuminating for me — there’s a very direct line from our adventurous and damaging foreign policy under the Dulles brothers to the unstable and antagonistic situation we find ourselves in with the Middle East. I couldn’t recommend more reading that history.

In this book, he recaps a bit of that — goes through the last hundred years or so of Iranian history — but in a parallel way, also chronicles the last hundred years of Turkish history. His basic argument is that, even though Saudi Arabia and Israel are our main partners in the region, and should remain partners, the overemphasis on those two countries is strange (for reasons I’ll state in a moment) and unproductive & dangerous, and that it’s in our best interests to develop significant partnerships with both Turkey and Iran.

He spends the time on history to show that the people of both countries have a longer history of wanting democracy and trying to bring democracy to their countries than any other countries in the region — the difference being that Turkey’s march towards democracy has been mostly unbroken, while Iran’s was massively disrupted by foreign involvement in the 1950s, which created the conditions to allow the 1979 Islamic Revolution to occur.

It’s really important to note 2 things. First, he’s not arguing that the governments are more democratic than elsewhere in the region, he’s arguing that the rank and file populace have a longer history with and very strong desire for democracy. Secondly, he’s not naive about the challenges of partnering, or that many compromises would have to be made — but in his view the set of choices which could result in an enduring, positive situation are very limited, and these are the ones most in our self-interest.

I liked this book a lot, both for the histories and the policies — much to think on.

I picked this book up because it’s mentioned in an online correspondence between Jonathan Lethem (one of my very favorite authors, although I’m finding Chronic Town tough to get through and David Gates. They both clearly admire the work as a way of helping them think about their own writing, and the way that writing is changing.

It’s a funny sort of book — really a collection of about 800 numbered passages, some of which are only 3 or 4 words, some which stretch to 3 or 4 pages. Some of them are Shield’s own writing, lots of them are cribbed from other authors.

His main point is that the novel is dead. More particularly, that the constraints of the novel mean that they’re so predictable and artificial — so awkward and divorced from the pace and intensity and authenticity of modern life — that they’re uniformly unchallenging and interesting for him. More fundamentally, he argues that all writing is fiction. Non-fiction, history, memoir, novels, poems, essays, etc – that they are all a construct of a mix of human memories. He more or less says that Andy Kaufman was right — that everything blurs. He cites a variety of examples of the trend, including some Eggers’ work and some of Frey’s. (In his view, Stephen Frey should have gone back on Oprah, not to take his beating by self-important critics, but rather to help people understand this idea):

“When Frey, LeRoy, Defonseca, Seltzer, Rosenblat, Wilkomirski, et al. wrote their books, of course they made things up. Who doesn’t? Each one said sure, call it a novel, call it a memoir; who’s going to care? I don’t want to defend Frey per se—he’s a terrible writer—but the very nearly pornographic obsession with his and similar cases reveals the degree of nervousness on the topic. The whole huge loud roar, as it returns again and again, has to do with the culture being embarrassed at how much it wants the frame of reality and, within that frame, great drama.

…

I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one. He should have said, Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be. He could have talked about the parallel between a writer’s persona and the public persona that Oprah presents to the world. Instead, he showed up for his whipping.”

He doesn’t really argue that novels will actually disappear — more that they are occupying a less and less central place in our culture.

I highlighted more passages in this book than I have in a really long time, even though I don’t really like the premise — but I know that Shields is correct about single-author long form work receding in importance, and very quickly.

Anyway, I think this is a really important piece of work for anyone who’s interested in where writing is headed at the moment. It’s a little sad to me, but really probably isn’t good or bad, just a reflection of today’s fragmented, multi-media, always synthetic culture.

One of my favorite set of passages: