Sure, I have a few pictures of my baby. I even have a 20-minute videotape of an anthropic cobwebby figure jiggling about that I’m told is of my child. And then there’s the fact that Mleeka’s figure has changed noticeably and that something in her swollen belly (or is it a well-executed pregnancy suit?) taps and rolls and lava lamps like crazy until I come over to feel the activity (at which point the supposed baby arrests all movement). But in spite of all this evidence, it still hasn’t really hit me yet that within a month or so, I’ll be a dad.

We’ve both had this sort of thought. It’s kind of a “what kind of nut is in charge who would let us have a kid?” feeling. Not that we’re not responsible or perfectly capable of raising a child. It just seems bizarre. We’ll be in charge of someone, will effectively own her. When you upgrade from goldfish to a dog, you’ve moved from a flushable to an unflushable pet. This upgrade from (debatably and vaguely) disposable pets like cats and dogs is so much bigger.

For Mleeka, it’s been more real for longer, not least of all because she’s the victim of all the kicking and rolling and pitching. It’s less real to me. I’ve worried a bit because I’m not as excited as I’ve thought I should be. Mleeka actively wants to hold the baby, but I’ve still been sort of lackadaisical about it, happy to have another month or so of time for myself. I think this is natural, but it doesn’t decrease my concerns. I’m not the warmest person, after all, and while I know I’ll love my kid, there is that nagging irrational worry that maybe I’ll turn out to be too unfeeling for parenthood. I’ve been planning a longer entry about this that states my concerns and their resolutions more thoroughly, but I’m not ready to write that one yet, and I wanted to record some news:

My Baby has a Head!

How do I know this? How is this any different from the no doubt digitally-fabricated pictures and videos I’ve already got of my child? How is it different from the pounding and undulation produced from within the bowels of Mleeka’s well-crafted animatronic pregnancy suit? I don’t know, but it is.

Let’s forget for a moment the logistics of a doctor’s discovering that my baby has a head and concentrate on the findings. If you’re at all familiar with pregnancy lingo, you’ll know that effacement describes the thickness of the cervix. When you’re 0% effaced, you’ve got big walls of cervix blocking entry into (or out of) the uterus. When you’re 100% effaced, you’ve got at most a very thin membrane barring the way. Dilation describes the diameter of the cervical opening. You typically do the final pushing to bear a child when you’re dilated 10 cm. (Again, try to avoid the visual here and just think about the math and the ramifications.) Mleeka found out this morning that she’s 50% effaced and 1 cm dilated. Which means that the doctor was able to touch the baby’s head.

Which makes things seem for the moment very much more real. Of course, this could be an extension of the conspiracy between Mleeka and the doctor, but for the time being, I’ll suspend my skepticism and accept that contact has been made.

If a bunch of fundamentalist Christians wish to secede from the United States of America, that’s just fine with me. Were it not for the fundies, my state wouldn’t be the scientific laughingstock of the world for its early (and ongoing) views on evolution. Thank you, Dayton, Tennessee. Were it not for fundies of various creeds, we might not be at war today, and it’s highly unlikely that the World Trade Center would have been destroyed as it was. Were it not for fundies, we might be a good bit closer to having equal rights for all in America rather than only for those who, a hundred years ago, were white and those who, now, happen to be attracted to members of the opposite sex. The fundies want a state of their own? I say give it to them. I say give them California and hope it’s in their vengeful fundy god’s will to split it off into the ocean sooner than anticipated.

Whence this outburst? An acquaintance sent me a link to Christian Exodus today. The site provides information about a movement appealing to the Christian Right to find 50,000 people willing to relocate to a conservative state and vote to rescind that state’s ratification of the constitution and thus to become an independent state. The site seems to be self-contradictory, as its author cries out for a return to the “moral and constitutional government that we have demanded for so long” while encouraging the denunciation of that very constitution.

The fact is, it’s not the constitution that’s problematic. There are means to amend it, as the Christian Right, with its Defense of Marriage Act and its attempts to have the U.S. declared a Christian nation, well knows. The problem here is that the Christian Right just doesn’t have the numbers to get what it wants. Rather than filtering the issues through the appropriate (electoral) channels, this group is skulking off to find a way around the protocol defined by the very founding fathers they insist were all good Southern Baptist prayer leaders. Yet they consider me unpatriotic because I don’t support their war or their particular ancient set of moral codes.

I do think it’s a shame that they’re going to ruin a perfectly good state for those of its residents who disagree with the fundamentalist ideology. (And by the way, I’m not railing here against Christians generally — just this particular offensive subset of them.) If the fundies were coming in such great numbers to Tennessee, I’d be inclined to move away, and I’d be pretty steamed about it, because I like it here in spite of the stifling climate of intolerance for anyone besides the hetero WASP. My residency here is safe, it turns out, as they’ve narrowed their prospective venues down to Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina. And they’re welcome to the hypocritical legacy of Strom Thurmond and racial division, which they were happy to spur on with scripture 150 years ago.

Yes, they’re welcome to any of these backwater states, as far as I’m concerned, though for my part, I’d have the government designate an island for them so that they can commit their social atrocities in isolation without displacing any harmless non-extremists, hurting or “helping” none but themselves. If as big an island as Australia was good enough for British criminals, then surely we could devote a few hundred square miles to the likes of Falwell and Robertson.

My reading lately has set me to thinking about art. Gaddis treats of it extensively in his books (The Recognitions is specifically about art and the others all hover around the topic), and that’s what really got me going. From there I went to rereading a bunch of Browning’s poems about artists and picking up an edited book about art and aesthetics. One of the most thought-provoking things I’ve read recently comes from the April edition of POETRY, which half celebrates poetry month and half decries the fact that there’s any need to stand up and wave arms and say “hey, look, poetry!”

Part of the April spread was a pair of reviews of Garrison Keillor’s newish anthology, entitled Good Poems and filled I believe with many of the poems he reads daily on his writer’s almanac segment on NPR. Neither reviewer was especially fond of Keillor or his baritone rendering of the poems he selects (which rendering I’ve always found to be rather pleasant), but August Kleinzahler in particular was utterly vitriolic, executing an ad hominem review that, as a subsequent leter-to-the-editor writer noted (one of many such letters crying foul in the subsequent two editions), was so focused on assassinating Keillor’s demeanor that it gave hardly an indication as to the quality or composition of the anthology. I found Kleinzahler’s review to be jaw-dropping and brutal and a little inappropriate by and large, but it contained one very interesting assertion:

“Most people have neither the sensitivity, inclination, or training to look or listen meaningfully, nor has the culture encouraged them to, except with the abstract suggestion that such things are good for you. Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.”

I think he’s correct that we’re culturally conditioned to accept that art is good for us, and I don’t think most of us question the fact very frequently or broadly, a testament to the depth of the conditioning. Is art really good for us? Really?

I suppose we can use art as a barometer for a given society’s capacity for flourishing. If you’re busy trying to scrounge up food, you don’t have time for art; so societies with a rich and ongoing tradition of art, one might argue, are in better shape from a survival vantage point than those with a paucity of art. Thus, in a sense, the urge to make art (and to have the leisure to enjoy art) is good for us because it drives us to do things that help our society to flourish.

I don’t really believe that, though, or not the part about our being driven to flourish by our desire to have the leisure to enjoy art. And I’m not convinced, either, that the production of art correlates with the flourishing of a society, if only because I don’t have the data to support such a proposition, and I do know that even the poorest societies paint their household implements and make carvings and perform dances.

So, though, is art good for us or do we just want to think it is because we’ve always been led to believe it is? If the latter, have we always been led to believe art’s good for us because it actually is (or was when that belief took off) or because artists and art dealers nurtured such a belief for various self-interested reasons?

I don’t have any answers. It occurred to me while tapping this out just now that maybe Mencken (with his derision of the Bozart) has some answers. Off to the bookshelves I go.

A friend of mine got me interested in wine a couple of years ago. He’s what you might call an armchair connoisseur (of wine, not of armchairs); that is, he knows a fair amount about wine and how it’s made and how to tell the different varietals apart, but he’s not one of those people who can swish a mouthful of vintage around and tell you which small vineyard in France the grapes came from. Nevertheless, he taught me everything I know about wine (not much, but that’s my fault and not his), and with his help, I’ve gone from thinking wine tasted bad (my sweet palate accustomed to and expecting something more like Welch’s grape juice) to really sort of liking it. I prefer the bitters to the sweets; a good Shiraz beats a fruity Riesling any day.

But it’s not that Dionysian beverage I ultimately wish to focus on here. It’s my own connoisseurship of another thing entirely, without which none of us could even speak about the things we value. Namely, and to quote Hamlet, “Words, words words.” For years, I’ve had a healthy obsession with words and their etymologies. I call it healthy because it doesn’t interfere with my daily life, because I have maybe 8 or 10 non-dictionary/thesaurus books dedicated to word origins rather than whole shelves full. I consider it healthy because I’ve lived a period of about two years during which I had no access to my copy of that venerable old reference work the Oxford English Dictionary. If the word monkey on my back were too furious and insistent, I would surely have caved in and repurchased the OED during that period of deprivation.

While I would love to own the full twenty-some volume set of the OED (or at the very least the two-volume set that comes with a big magnifying glass), I can hardly complain about a lexicographical deficiency when I do own the OED on CD-ROM. My parents bought this for me when I was in college (they were the worst sort of enablers). And I happily used it for years. Windows 95 was the standard PC operating system for individuals at the time, and the software ran wonderfully in that system. With just a few keystrokes, I was able to discover that the word “elephant” may have come from an old Teutonic/Slavic name for camel (olfend) or that the evil eye can also be called the “jettatura” (from an Italian word). But then came the new millennium and a spate of new operating systems. I used Windows 98 for a while and then moved, briefly, to the factory install of Windows Me, which caused all sorts of problems for my computer. Whether it was with that OS or with the later installation of Windows XP that my OED became obsolete I can’t remember; but at some point a couple of years ago, my OED was no longer functional on any computer I had.

I wrote the loss off to progress. My interest in words hadn’t really waned, but because I was out of school and had a job that didn’t have much to do with words for their own sakes, my focus had changed. And I did still have those eight or ten books I could go to if the history of a word was especially elusive. (Between those and a pocket American Heritage Dictionary, I was able to discover that the word “demijohn” comes from the French phrase “Dame-Jeanne,” or “Lady Jane,” presumably because the shape of a demijohn is similar to the shape of a centuries-ago French lady in her hoop-skirted dress.) I did nevertheless occasionally lament the loss of my dictionary.

The other day, while talking with a coworker about software incompatibilities, I brought up my loss of the OED as an example of one tragic side-effect of such incompatibilities. Since that loss, I have become a Linux user through and through (yet more progress). I cringe at the thought of booting into a Windows system. And my like-minded coworker knows this. So he mentioned a program for Linux called WINE that might be of some use to me. I had heard of the program but had never had good reason to use it. WINE, which I believe stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator” (in the best geek tradition of recursive acronyms), provides an abstraction layer that allows Linux users to run many Windows programs on their Linux systems. What’s more, it allows you to select the Windows version you wish to run. And best of all, as with much of the software written for Linux, WINE is absolutely free.

So I installed a copy, dug up my OED software and data CD, and got it running successfully on my Linux laptop. And voila, I have my precious OED again. At my fingertips are multifarious words such as multifarious (having great variety or diversity), multifid (having many divisions [rather like the Windows security vulnerability list]), mutessarif (In the Ottoman Empire and Iraq, a governor of a province), and mydaleine (a poisonous ptomaine [the generic name of certain alkaloid bodies found in putrefying animal and vegetable matter, some of which are very poisonous] obtained from putrid flesh, etc.). Knowledge is bliss (a good Germanic word), it turns out.

Furthermore, because of the way WINE masks the Linux file system as a WIndows file system, I was able very easily to fake a CD-ROM drive, copy the data file into the directory mapped to the drive letter, and use the dictionary without having to cart the CD around.

And so it turns out that I am, after all, somewhat of a connoisseur of WINE, a software package that has, to use an old phrase, left a most pleasant taste in my mouth.