Manhood for Amateurs

Because I was going to my second weekend chess tournament requiring an overnight stay and at the first one I had read Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother, I decided to read Michael Chabon's new collection of essays entitled Manhood for Amateurs this weekend. I find that parenthood memoirs are always good reading over a weekend you're dedicating to your child's enjoyment, and since I've already read Fred Waitzken's memoir of being a chess parent, it was on to more general topics.

The tournament went extraordinarily well. Walker played to the best of his considerable ability, winning all five of his games in the under-1600 division and walking away with first prize, which is a check for a thousand dollars (just to mislead him about how lucrative the world of chess really is).

And Chabon's book was just right for dipping into between people-watching and paper-grading. I found the first essay rather discouraging, however. He talks about how writing is like sitting in a room full of empty chairs waiting for someone to come and join your club, and says that, basically, a mother's encouragement doesn't count, that a person feels like a failure until other people come and fill up the chairs. Concluding that "a father is a man who fails every day, " Chabon's first essay sets up the idea that a father's encouragement actually can count.

His second one, though, reveals his experience with what counts about mothering:
"the daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush."
Personally, I've never been horrified by a child's breath, but think that snot should not have been omitted. Currently, my favorite billboard on the way to the next big city is one that reads "WE KNOW SNOT" and in smaller letters advertises an urgent care clinic.

The rest of the essays meander through various topics, from Chabon's entire family's love for the new Dr. Who series to how legos have changed to how hard it is to keep your kid reasonably safe while encouraging him to explore the outdoors. I particularly like his description of taking his four children on vacation and waiting "for them to fly out into the grass and sunshine....and they stand there on the doorstep eyeing one another, shuffling from foot to foot" like the "free-range" chickens described by Michael Pollan who are raised in confinement and so are afraid to venture outdoors.

I enjoyed his definition of a rogue, couched as part of a passing observation on why Jose Canseco, a baseball player who got caught using steroids, is admired:
"It's not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue--break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat--you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything's a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn."

Because Chabon is such a good writer, there are beautiful little phrases in these essays. My favorite is "the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day." He also talks about writing and how he turned from a self-consciously literary admirer of Henry Miller, a "callow", "misogynistic" "little shit", into a real writer. And at the end of that essay, entitled Cosmodemonic, he says:
"We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared."

So yeah, this is a book worth reading, and not only for men. It's for any contemplative person who wants some ideas presented in short bits, like little pieces of brain candy to pop in and suck on from time to time.

Chess Books

Walker picked chess over playing a sport this winter, so we've been driving him to chess matches and tournaments instead of indoor soccer games or swim meets. At his first tournament he won a trophy and established a U.S. Chess Federation rating of 943. I found the parent's role at the tournament to be much like the parent's role at a swim meet--you stay there to feed and encourage your young participant, and to help him figure out where he's supposed to be next and when. Actually Ron has been doing most of the care and feeding with the chess stuff, since he's a little more interested in the game than I am. (I think it's fair; I did all the swim meets a few years ago.) But I did acquiesce to Walker's repeated requests that I read the 1980's chess book about how the father of a young chess prodigy took his son all the way to the national chess championship. Entitled Searching for Bobby Fischer, it's part baby-boomer memoir of the apparently heady days in the 1970's when Fischer was up against two great Soviet players at the height of the Cold War, and part parental memoir about how it feels to raise a champion.

I was disturbed by the way the father/author, Fred Waitzkin, was so deeply invested in each chess game his son played. (One example: "Joshua's bad moves felt like little stings.") It reminded me of the parents you see at sports events who yell at their son when he misses blocking a goal, or hug each other and dance around when their kid's team wins. I'm not the first person to have an uneasy feeling around people who are obviously living out their own dreams through their children.

But I do think that if you're the parent of a child who has proven to be extraordinary in some way, you have a responsibility to provide opportunities for that child, just as the child has a responsibility to use his gifts in a way that can eventually benefit someone besides himself. And that idea of responsibility is a very interesting one when it comes to chess. As Fred Waitzkin pointed out in this book (published in 1984), playing chess is not something that gets you respect, much less money, at least in the U.S. I don't see any evidence that that's changed, despite the $4 Walker won for accurately predicting the next move on a chessboard set up to challenge the players between rounds at the tournament. (The thought did cross my mind that winning money at his very first tournament was, for Walker, a lot like winning money for her very first poem was for Eleanor when she did it in 8th grade--a misleading entry into a world that really doesn't pay that well.) In fact, Josh Waitzkin has branched out from chess in his adult life.

But for right now, Walker is immersed in chess books. He is spending all his allowance and all his Christmas money on books about things like the queen's indian and sicilian najdorf. He has a big box of books that were lent to him about a month ago, and which he has read and reread. Sometimes I wish he were getting more exercise (in their infinite wisdom, the school counselors scheduled him for gym class only during fall soccer season), but I can't complain about how much he's reading.