…but we have another short break coming up. I’ll be back in the general vicinity of Saturday. In the meantime, read…well, The Poor Man seems worth looking up. The U-M’s own Juan Cole, who reads Arab-world media in their original language, is always helpful. And can’t forget Josh Marshall, but you already knew that.

…same message, one good point. Richard Cohen
(WashPost, RegReq, as we say now) and Jon Carroll.

(Speaking of which: A Poynter column filed yesterday suggests my man J.C. was in the second-runnner-up group for a Pulitzer. Which shows what those people know. Hmpf.)

I know I’ve written about “Naked Came the Stranger” in this space before, but damn if I can find it, and I don’t have time for a house-to-house search. Anyway, even if you’ve never heard about the crap-tacular ’60s pulp novel, written as a prank by a passel of Newsday reporters and editors, this fun piece in Seattle Weekly is a good primer.

All I can say is: Man, the newspaper business sure was fun, once upon a time.

I’m sorry we don’t have photos for this one, because the visual juxtaposition in my Sunday Ann Arbor News was a real stitch. At the bottom of the Metro page, coverage of the 33rd annual Ann Arbor Hash Bash, the city’s annual celebration of some of the most indulgent marijuana possession laws in the country.

After John Sinclair, the White Panther/manager of the MC5 commonly described as a “political activist,” was jailed for possession of a couple joints way back when, he led a campaign to decriminalize weed within the city limits, and for some time, Ann Arbor penalized personal-use marijuana possession with a $5 fine. (It’s up to $25 now.) Every year around April Fool’s Day, potheads gather in and around the U-M campus to light up and, y’know, mellow out. (But only off-campus; on-campus penalties are much stiffer.)

Anyway, I wish you could have seen the photos: Sinclair Himself was speaker this year, and there was a priceless photo of him flanked by a couple of unidentified supporters, all of them well into AARP-land. Dude, the ’60s are, like, so over.

Elsewhere on the Metro front, though, was a photo-and-caption account of the “annual Easter egg hunt and marshmallow drop” in Ypsilanti, where an actual helicopter hovered over Frog Island Park and dropped 10,950 unpackaged marshmallows on scrambling children below.

All I could think was, man, wouldn’t it have been too cool if the chopper lost its way and dropped the payload on the Hash Bash? Now that would be something to see.

As of today, we have three weeks to go in the fellowship. Three weeks! I don’t know how I’m going to cope. Friday I swung through the Donald Hall Collection, the film/video/script library for students of the program, and exercised the faculty/Fellow perk of checking out items overnight. Five DVDs, specifically — “The Battleship Potemkin,” “Citizen Kane,” “Wag the Dog,” “Monsters Inc.” and the last volume of “My So-Called Life.” The student doing the checkout handled this last item reverently.

“This TV show,” she said, “is why I’m a film and video major.” And then we had a long discussion of whether “World Happiness Day” was the best single episode, or maybe “Weekend,” which I love for the look inside little Danielle’s head.

That show is 10 years old. So is, according to the anniversary journalism in my newspapers recently, the Rwandan genocide and the death of Kurt Cobain. NPR had a piece on the latter event this morning. People who were twentysomething then and are thirtysomething now expounded on why Kurt Cobain mattered, and I got it, sorta. I was thirtysomething then and fortysomething now, and while I appreciated Nirvana, the death of its creative center didn’t affect me much either way, except in that generalized state of regret we all feel for the prematurely dead. (“Wow, what a tragedy. Is lunch ready?”) Another 10-years-distant event: John and I standing as godparents for Deb’s son Patrick. Deb remarked afterward, “I heard some girl saying this was, to her generation, what the death of John Lennon was to mine, and all I could think was, oh, in your hat.” (Note: Others feel differently. Nauseatingly so.)

Was 10 years ago when we were all talking about Generation X? I don’t know. I do know that the other day I read, in a newspaper, a reference to today’s young adults as “Generation X,” and I thought, glad to see editing standards in the newspaper business haven’t gone anywhere but down lately. True, the more the years pile up, the easier it is to confuse “something I read yesterday” with “something I read 10 years ago,” but that’s why publications schedule multiple stops on the editing train. The people with the blue pencils are supposed to catch things like this.

Things get so mixed up. One year ago I had my interview for the fellowship. I drove to Ann Arbor Friday night in a driving rainstorm, which became, as the sun went down, a driving ice storm. I checked into my hotel and decided to drive the shortest possible distance for dinner, which was across the street to the Cooker. I had to wait for a table, and did so at the bar, where I struck up a conversation with a man with a pronounced African accent. “Where are you from in Africa?” I asked. He gave me three guesses. I got it on the third guess — Rwanda, after he gave me a hint. (“My country has suffered much heartache.”) He was wildly impressed, and predicted I’d get the fellowship.

(In my creative writing class, we’d wonder whether this entry uses Rwanda as a motif. Let me just say: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)

Oh, well. Three weeks. This week is positively clotted with activity, and I’m behind on my script pages, again. Best get cracking. Ninety percent perspiration, and all that.

The city’s movers and shakers — correct that, the city’s movers and shakers with school-age children — are mostly gone this week, leaving the city in the hands of the junior varsity. It’s spring break, and around here, people don’t hang around waiting for the daffodils to make an appearance. They’re all on beaches throughout the warmer parts of the western hemisphere, with a few odd skiers out in Colorado. We, the thrifty and/or broke, look for less-expensive diversions to entertain our children on their holiday. Pensacola? No, Michigan City! Yes, Indiana!

My neighbor Deb and I packed up a cooler of snacks and set three car seats abreast, then headed north and west to the shores of Lake Michigan, for its lures of shopping (big outlet mall) and nature (Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore). Those traveling without kids might throw gambling (Blue Chip Casino) into the mix, but when we outlined our plan for visiting the casino — “You kids just sit here in the car, help yourself to some juice boxes and don’t talk to any security guards. Go to sleep when it gets dark and we’ll be out when we’re finished.” — amusingly enough the kids didn’t go for it. So we did the Gap Factory Outlet, Hammer’s Pasta and Pizza (avoid, fellow travelers!), the beach, the lighthouse and Mt. Baldy, a very big sand dune. As holidays go, it wasn’t a bad one. The kids kept the backseat bickering to a minimum and squealed very appealingly as they ran barefoot around the windy beaches. They enjoyed the diving duck we saw at the lighthouse pier and climbed Mt. Baldy with few complaints, which is more than you could say about the adults, who wheezed like cheap accordions by the halfway point. That is a HILL, I tell you. You stand at the bottom and say, “Oh hell, I could do that on crutches,” and then you start up, and you stop to breathe at the halfway point and say, “Well, we’re halfway there,” and then the second half is basically vertical, and it’s sand,which means one step up four steps back, but somehow you climb to the top and it’s worth it. Even with the NIPSCO cooling tower off there in the distance. It’s Lake Michigan. I’m a Midwestern girl, and the Great Lakes impress me.

And then home. Not a bad day. Kate got four new dresses and a tankini out of the deal. How did I give birth to this girly-girl, who looks forward to summer not for the outdoor-recreation activities but because she can wear dresses every day? When we got home she put on a fashion show for her daddy, twirling around to show the action of the skirt. Work it, girl. She also loves her two-piece swimsuit, which she calls “a belly stick-out.”

Life’s funny wheel: I was in Michigan City with my friend and neighbor Deb. The city used to be home to my best friend, Deb. They have lots of other things in common. Strange coincidences.

The wonderful Jon Carroll is back from his monthlong vacation, and mentioned he’d spent part of it reading “Motherless Brooklyn,” by Jonathan Lethem, which I read last month, too. (I so love being in sync with my heroes.) Anyway, if you didn’t believe me when I said it was a good book, take the considered opinion of this San Francisco columnist: It purports to be a hard-boiled detective story, and it fulfills all the conventions of the genre, but it has a lot more on its mind than just solving murders.

The hero is Lionel Essrog, an orphan from Brooklyn who has Tourette’s syndrome. The book is told from his point of view, which allows Lethem to explore Tourette’s from the inside. Lionel’s obsessive wordplay works as both character revelation and subtext, a sort of involuntary Greek chorus of Freudian slips, illuminating the dark landscape like flashes of lightning.

Yeah, that’s about right.

And I’m pretty tired. Let’s conclude this little travelogue with a see-you-tomorrow. Upload. “Once and Again.” Snore.

So what’s the rule on clever references to song lyrics in a newspaper editorial about a music company?

Use them sparingly. Oh, so very sparingly.

Is it possible to go overboard?

Why, yes.

Another day, another mixed grill of AA culture. In the morning: A spotlit stage, a lion in winter, a flattering interlocutor, two chairs and two glasses of water. Yes, it’s a celebration of Arthur Miller here at his alma mater. The tickets were free and I can’t complain too much, but after it was all over it occurred to me that there must be better ways to celebrate a titan of the American theater than to put him on stage and lob cotton-candy softballs at him. But this is the “Inside the Actors Studio” model, and this is how we do it. Granted, the man is 88 years old now, but he’s still sharp; couldn’t we ask him something more penetrating than, “Why are you so much more celebrated in the U.K. and in Europe than you are here?”

Whoa hold the phone, you know? First of all, it’s not like the guy’s standing on street corners juggling for quarters, and the old “Europeans appreciate great art more than we do” ignores some fundamental truths about both them and us, but mostly two:

1) there’s more on TV here; and
2) that whole Jerry Lewis thing.

I mean, even in Ann Arbor, a morning like this was followed by an afternoon like that: A free (for film/video students) screening of “Supersize Me,” which was almost too wonderful to bear, even though we Fellows had to leave early for Thursday’s seminar. The premise of “Supersize Me” is this: A healthy, strapping New Yorker, Morgan Spurlock, decides to eat nothing but McDonald’s food for a solid month and see what happens. When we left, at which time he was only up to week three or so, he was up 17 pounds, his cholesterol was soaring, and his liver was approaching toxicity. The whole thing could be a big tiresome anti-fast food screed if it weren’t so funny, and not in a mean, nasty, ironic way, either. Spurlock actually likes the food, at least at first; the scene where he kisses his double Quarter Pounder before tucking into it is just a stitch.

It opens in May. You won’t want to miss it, although you may never eat a Filet o’ Fish again.

The WashPost’s Joel Achenbach’s a great writer. Today’s wish-that-were-my-byline piece is “Numb Nation.”

Maybe we should have been tipped off by the detached heads.

This is a movie script detail. You can imagine it perfectly because you’ve seen it before, while eating popcorn. As the heads bound along, they preferentially face the viewer. In Kelley’s first draft, a couple of the heads were still blinking their eyes. (Picture a movie producer reading that in the script: “Beeeyootiful,” he says.)

Yeah, it’s the same stupid detail I noticed. But that’s not why I like the piece.

I may be pushing an inside joke too far with this, but: It’s worth sitting through the fleeting commercial to read this Salon piece on my favorite cinematic guilty pleasure, “The Ten Commandments,” scheduled for its annual airing this Sunday.

Back in the Fort, back in the day, I and my friends Adrianne and David, when this special time of year rolled around, liked to make dinner and then sit down to watch as much of Cecil B. DeMille’s four-hour epic as we could stand. “Has he turned the river red yet?” I asked one year, coming in late.

“No, first he has to meet Yvonne DeCarlo and raise her sheep,” David said. “Meet Yvonne DeCarlo and raise her sheep” — now there’s a catch phrase three adults can play with for years.

Anyway, it’s a great party movie, a feeling that’s shared by… dozens, anyway. “I have been to the mountaintop. I saw God. I got a permanent” — this is how my frum friend Eileen describes her own guilty-pleasure viewing.

The Salon story is a stitch, describing its pleasures at some length:

The film still generally wins the night’s top ratings; last year it won both the adult and kid markets, with an average of 10.6 million viewers. And its influence stretches further than anything Nielsen can measure, though especially to modern eyes it’s little more than a load of camp, with outrageous costumes and overacting, which is never more apparent than in the bedroom scenes between Moses and Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. “Oh Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool,” she tells the prophet, who has spent the afternoon making bricks with his enslaved Jewish brethren. “You can worship any God you like, as long as I can worship you.” TV Guide dubs the movie “a great big wallow, sublime hootchy-kootchy hokum.” …Sex was DeMille’s way of roping in wider audiences. “Hit sex hard!” was his frequent order to screenwriters. He dubbed the Golden Calf scene of “The Ten Commandments” — a sultry bump and grind of sweaty Israelites — “an orgy Sunday-school children can watch.” But his critics were unable to reconcile the professed piousness of DeMille’s vision with his vulgar showmanship and savvy. They constantly sought to expose his claim to a “unique ministry” of film as self-aggrandizing sham. To others, his films were “a fraud that enabled immorality to hide behind the protection of the Holy Book.”

Here’s where the interesting part comes in: “The Ten Commandments” was the driving force behind “the Eagle monoliths,” stone reproductions of the decalogue distributed throughout the Bible belt as a film promotion:

In addition to the famous case of Judge Roy Moore’s Alabama courtroom, there have been numerous recent battles over granite replicas of the Ten Commandments displayed on public property — in Indiana, Wisconsin, Colorado, Texas, New York, and other states. In December 2002, Slate reported that nearly half of the monoliths being disputed by the ACLU were from a set of 4,000, donated in the late 1950s by a peculiar partnership: the nonsectarian charitable organization the Fraternal Order of Eagles, and the film director Cecil B. DeMille, who “wanted to promote his movie.” A great many articles written about the contested Eagle monoliths implied or stated outright that DeMille’s involvement was strictly promotional. As proof, they noted that actor Yul Brynner (Pharoah Ramses in the film) had spoken at the very first monolith’s dedication ceremony, in Milwaukee in 1955. Charlton Heston dedicated another in North Dakota.

That number (4,000) is disputed, but not the fact one of the last standing sets did so in far-from-Hollywood Elkhart, Indiana.

Have fun.