John Rember.COM RECENT WRITING ///HOME//////WORKS//////BIOGRAPHY & IMAGE GALLERY//////EVENTS//////RECENT WRITING/// Recent Published & Unpublished Essays Check out John’s monthly column, End Notes, in the Idaho Mountain Express newspaper (Ketchum, Idaho). Here’s the latest installment. Editing Reality (Idaho Mountain Express, August 26, 2010) Last August, Julie and I would drive over Galena Summit, park our car west of Elkhorn Road, and lay out lawn chairs on a blanket outside the Sun Valley Pavilion. We’d get to each Sun Valley Symphony concert a couple of hours early, to have time enough for a pre-concert feast of wine, cheese, and chocolate. By the time applause sounded at the entrance of Conductor Alasdair Neale, we’d be well-fed and happy. We’d lie back, stare at the blue sky and golden clouds above us, close our eyes and wait for the music, which when it came made us even happier. (entire article) Call It Sleep (Idaho Mountain Express, July 28, 2010) In the summer of 1967, I was one of twenty high school juniors attending Idaho State University’s summer honors program. We had been the top scorers on a standardized test given in all Idaho high schools the previous October. The program had been designed to attract high-achieving students to ISU. I was Wood River High School’s representative, which surprised me as much as it surprised my teachers. I wasn’t the highest-achieving person in the class. I was just the best at taking standardized tests. If I ever have a tombstone, it will read Good At Multiple Choice below my name. (entire article) The Shape of Things to Come (Idaho Mountain Express, June 30, 2010) Predicting the future is an iffy business. We think we’re at the cutting edge of history when we’re right in the middle of it. The trends we identify serve more as an indication of who we are and what we’re interested in than anything that will happen twenty years from now. But we do change, and sometimes radically. If I could have a ten minute talk with the person I’ll be in twenty years, I’d pay him my annual salary in Federal Reserve Notes, just to find out who I’m going to be. (entire article) The Community School Commencement Address (The Community School, Sun Valley, Idaho, June 6, 2010) John was honored to be the commencement speaker at The Community School, where he taught for seven years 30 years ago. Read his commencement address here. (entire article) The Human Legacy (Idaho Mountain Express, June 2, 2010) As I approach sixty, I’ve begun to think of what I’ll leave behind. I’m not planning on dying anytime soon, but I can do the arithmetic of obituaries as well as anyone. Barring improbable advances in geriatric science, I’ll be gone from this vale of tears in the next tick of geologic time. (entire article) Headless Chickens (Idaho Mountain Express, May 5, 2010) When I was young my family kept chickens. We raised them, gathered their eggs for breakfast, and when they got to be a certain age, killed them, boiled their feathers off, and ate them. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I learned long ago that a chicken with its head cut off can still run around and act like a chicken, except for being easier to catch. (entire article) Letter from the Gyre (Idaho Mountain Express, April 7, 2010) Dear Mr. Fezziwig: I know you prefer my communications to be embossed on cream-colored heavyweight bond, but paper of any kind is in short supply these days. Anyway, Fed Ex and UPS have ceased operations. The Postal Service is down to that guy with the horse. The satellites have been fried by solar flares. I’m writing this on a flash drive and attaching it to the leg of an albatross, in the hopes that it will eventually get to Idaho. (entire article) Weed Reefer High (Idaho Mountain Express, March 10, 2010) I’ve considered cantankerous old people a mildly comic separate species for most of my life. My becoming one of them seems to violate the laws of genetics. (entire article) Talking About the Weather (Idaho Mountain Express, February 17, 2010) In the late 1950s, the ticket booth at Dollar Mountain was occupied by a guy named Bob Brooks. Dollar was the bunny hill, so Bob got used to giving out advice with his tickets. Little kids would hold up broken bindings to the ticket window for Bob to diagnose. He would tell people which bowl to ski according to their self-assessed abilities, and when they asked when it would snow, he would tell them, “Soon.” (entire article) Boxes of Rocks (Idaho Mountain Express, January 27, 2010) In my sophomore year of college I enrolled in a course that had given generations of students a painless way to satisfy the school’s liberal-arts science requirement. It was known as Rocks for Jocks, and the final exam was the easy identification of every rock in a box. If you wanted an A in science, you took geology. (entire article) If You Build It, They Might Not Come (Idaho Mountain Express, December 23, 2009) We are at Nai Yang Beach, a sheltered stretch of sand on the northwest coast of Thailand’s Phuket Island. It’s a tourist area, and December is high season, but thus far we’ve seen more hotel workers, taxi drivers, bartenders and bar girls than fellow tourists. (entire article) The New Misery Index (Idaho Mountain Express, November 25, 2009) In the late 1960s, economist Arthur Okun, attempting to make the dismal science even more dismal, created the Misery Index by adding the nation’s unemployment rate to its inflation rate. It was a way of calculating the number of Americans unable to earn enough money to live. The Misery Index came to mind during a recent trip to Costco in Boise. (entire article) Ghost Town (Idaho Mountain Express, October 28, 2009) Last spring, a week after the lifts stopped at Tamarack Resort, Julie and I skied the place. We drove around the Tyvek-sheathed high-rises in the village center, parked in the parking lot next to the big white tents that had served as temporary base lodges, put on our backcountry skis and skins, and climbed to the top of the mountain through six inches of new powder. (entire article) Music and Mortality (Idaho Mountain Express, September 30, 2009) I was born in Sun Valley in 1950, on the third floor of the Sun Valley Lodge. The Lodge had been a naval hospital during the Second World War, and it took time for Sun Valley to return to being a full-time resort. After the war but before the Mollie Scott Clinic was built, several hundred children were born in the old hospital. There are worse things to have on your tombstone than Lodge Baby, and worse childhoods than having grown up in the Sun Valley of the 1950s. (entire article) Sarah Cassandra (Idaho Mountain Express, September 2, 2009) I’m still worrying about Sarah Palin. It’s not that she’ll ever be a melanoma away from the Oval Office. Republicans are pretty much done with sexuality of any variety in their candidates. It’s caused them no end of trouble, and the next time they propose a female for vice-president, she’ll look like the homely love-child of Margaret Thatcher and Mitt Romney and she won’t wink at anybody. (entire article) Another Modest Proposal (Idaho Mountain Express, August 5, 2009) Thirty years ago I put together a book on heart attacks. I flew around the country and interviewed physicians who had done seminal studies in cardiology. Although the company paying me folded before the book was published, the interviews made me understand the close connection between diet and exercise and health. Again and again I was told that having a heart attack was a matter of choice. (entire article) An Argument for Not Going About Armed (Idaho Mountain Express, July 8, 2009) In 1962, during my sixth-grade year at Ketchum Elementary School, the Cold War came to town. The Soviet Union had begun constructing deep shelters in its cities, and developing procedures its citizens would follow once those cities had been destroyed in a nuclear war. In response to that program and to the Cuban Missile Crisis, a similar civil defense program was developed for this country. (entire article) And Don’t Have Any Kids Yourself (Idaho Mountain Express, June 10, 2009) Students of poetry will recognize this column’s title as the last line of Philip Larkin’s famous poem, “This Be The Verse.” It’s a bleak little ditty about family pathology, but back when I taught it in undergraduate literature classes, my students loved it. They would ask if they could memorize it for extra credit. (entire article) Emotional Morons (Idaho Mountain Express, May 13, 2009) In the 1951 short story, “The Marching Morons,” science-fiction writer C.M. Kornbluth postulates a far future where smart people have been outbred by stupid ones, and as a result the average IQ is 45. Five billion stupid folks sit around while a few million smart ones work desperately to keep the world going. (entire article) When Meta-Narratives Go Bad (Idaho Mountain Express, April 15, 2009) I teach in a low-residency MFA program at Pacific University outside of Portland. Twice a year, I go there for ten-day residencies. My colleagues and I conduct workshops, read new work, and lecture about writing. My lecture this June will be about meta-narratives, those stories that define what kind of world we live in. For example, one of my students hints at his own meta-narrative when he writes that he gets freaked out at the idea of raising children in a world like this one. He thinks his children might starve or die in a war. (entire article) The View from 2011 (Idaho Mountain Express, March 18, 2009) On the 5th of March, 2009, Idaho’s Tamarack Resort closed its ski lifts. It was a victim of the 2008 world credit crunch, which had slowed the economy of the American West enough to reverse a 45-year run-up in the prices of recreational properties. It was also the end of a ski-industry business model first developed by Bill Janss, who purchased the Sun Valley Resort from Union Pacific Railroad in 1964. Janss operated Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain as the central attraction of a giant housing development. With few modifications, the Janss business model was adopted by every resort in the American West. (entire article) The Tummy Metaphor (Idaho Mountain Express, February 18, 2009) I viewed the photos of Nadya Suleman’s octuplet-distended tummy on the Internet this week, and began to wonder if medical schools shouldn’t put a little more emphasis on First Doing No Harm. If Nadya’s tummy represents the end result of generations of medical research and scientific thought, perhaps we should go back to witch doctors, with their masks and chants and amulets. (entire article) George Bush and History (Idaho Mountain Express, January 21, 2009) Historians two hundred years from now will not regard George W. Bush as a great president. They will not think about him at all, unless they decide to start imagining a history that didn’t end in historians being people whose only job is writing down last year’s potato crop numbers with charred sticks on the halls of mud huts. Even then, it will be hard to remember Bush’s name. They’ll have to give him a name based on rumor, something like Doofus the Second... (entire article) Change and IQ (Idaho Mountain Express, December 24, 2008) One of the Internet ads of the past election announced that Barack Obama’s IQ was 130. It was the sibling of ads that let us know that John McCain’s IQ was 125, George W. Bush’s IQ was 120, and Sarah Palin’s IQ was once one of those little voice-mimicking chips from a talking birthday card. (entire article) Will Chevrolet Still Be the Heartbeat of America If China Buys General Motors? (Idaho Mountain Express, November 26, 2008) I’ve been reading R.D. Laing again, mostly when I wake up at 4 a.m. and worry about the economy. One of the specifics I worry about is that financial pundits are talking about the capitulation level for the Dow. That’s when people like me give up, pull their remaining 401(k) money out of stocks, use it to buy an assault rifle and a cookbook, and start researching how to field dress their neighbor’s Bichon Frise. (entire article) The Last Temptation of Obama (Idaho Mountain Express, October 29, 2008) In Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Satan’s most cunning evil is to offer Jesus a simple, ordinary life as a carpenter, along with a loving wife and family. Instead of dying on the cross, Jesus can have the everyday pleasures of love, work, and the companionship of friends. (entire article) Mayan Economics Lesson (Idaho Mountain Express, October 1, 2008) One archeological theory about the collapse of the Maya is based on evidence that they had perfected a bureaucracy of corn. Exhaustive rules governed how corn was grown, distributed, and consumed. A rigid hierarchy defined every individual’s social position and allotment of corn, and this cultural arrangement lasted almost 700 years. (entire article) Zombie Quotes and Notes (Idaho Mountain Express, September 3, 2008) Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. —Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770) Oliver Goldsmith has been decaying too long to be dug up for any of the Sunday morning talk shows. But if you could grind George Will or Pat Buchanan to a fine powder, and sprinkle it over Oliver Goldsmith’s grave, and thereby transform Goldsmith the dead poet into Goldsmith the talking-head network zombie, Sunday morning TV would get a lot more intelligent. (entire article) Consensus Psychosis (Idaho Mountain Express, August 6, 2008) The late British psychiatrist R.D. Laing made a career out of his idea that Western Civilization is a psychosis. He said you had to be crazy to even get out of bed in the morning in countries that routinely murder millions of human beings with carcinogenic products, zombie-like militaries, and pathological legal and medical practices. He said a diagnosis of mental illness is often the result of seeing things as they are instead of believing the consensual lies of our family or our culture. (entire article) You Crazy Optimist (Idaho Mountain Express, July 9, 2008) Two years ago I began this column, thinking The End of the World would always be fun. The web-postings of survivalists, religious wacko-bongos, free-market fundamentalists, and paranoid old farts would always provide something amusing to write about. And there wasn’t much chance their apocalyptic scenarios would come true. (entire article) Obama and the English Language (Idaho Mountain Express, June 11, 2008) One nice thing about Idaho is that you can commit acts of complete nihilism in the voting booth and it won’t mean the end of the world. For example, if Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader in November. (entire article) You Don’t Have To Be Crazy (Idaho Mountain Express, May 14, 2008) You can be sane and have a sense of humor and a little self-consciousness and still think that if this country were in a toaster, the smoke alarm would have gone off a long time ago. You can relax about Reverend Wright saying, “God Damn America,” over and over on Fox News because you understand that God took things into His Own Hands and damned America the day the Supreme Court appointed George Bush captain of our ship of state. And you can decide that issues of wolves and wilderness don’t matter because within fifty years, they will be trumped by human population growth, national bankruptcy, and the end of cheap energy. (entire article) Thanks for Nothing, Al Gore (Idaho Mountain Express, April 16, 2008) I had no idea so many people think the end of days is like, this year. But if you Google End of Civilization, you’ll get 791,000 entries, along with ads that say, “Looking for the End of Civilization? We can help!” (entire article) March Meltdown News (Idaho Mountain Express, March 19, 2008) Eliot Spitzer is no longer the governor of New York. A woman formerly known as Ashley Youmans met him in a D.C. hotel for an hour for $4300, a sum that makes you hope she donates a day’s proceeds to Habitat for Humanity, and builds a family a home. Youmans has magazine and film offers approaching $5 million, so she could become to Habitat for Humanity what Bill Gates is to malaria. (entire article) Why Republicans Should Fear McCain (Idaho Mountain Express, February 20, 2008) I spent much of the summer of 1972 at Robinson Bar Ranch, on the Salmon River below Stanley. A consortium of Boise oligarchs owned the place, and I was dating one of their daughters, a young woman of beauty, grace, and privilege. Robinson Bar was a welcoming place then, full of music and laughter, and at twenty-one I had my own share of beauty and grace. But I remember gazing at beautiful young wives playing with their children beneath the stilled rotors of corporate helicopters, and thinking that privilege was beyond me. I was wrong. That summer North Vietnam released a number of POWs. Within weeks, some of those POWs were brought to Robinson Bar. (entire article) Fish-Rulers (Idaho Mountain Express, January 23, 2008) We are finally in the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency. I’m mostly certain that on January 20th, 2009, we’ll be listening to the inaugural speech of a new president while the camera plays over the scornful smiles of the outgoing president and vice-president. (entire article) History as Prophesy (Idaho Mountain Express, December 26, 2007) Back when I could read fine print, I spent a winter reading the 1972 edition of The Columbia History of the World, authored by the Columbia University history faculty. I slogged through all 1165 pages of it. It was spring when I finished. I was glad the book hadn’t been published in 2072, after a lot more wars, refugee migrations, currency collapses and epidemics. (entire article) Another Star Trek Episode (Idaho Mountain Express, November 28, 2007) Ever since Dennis Kucinich told us about the UFO he saw at Shirley MacLaine’s house, I’ve figured he didn’t just see it, he arrived in it. Any presidential candidate who advocates universal government-funded health care, wants immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, promises college tuition for everybody, argues for ending the Patriot Act and the death penalty and the war on drugs—where’s this guy from? Andromeda? The Delta Sector? Is he Neelix’s little brother? (entire article) Channeling Jimmy (Idaho Mountain Express, October 31, 2007) It’s weird to be Jimmy Carter. Especially on Halloween. Especially on Halloween in Ketchum, Idaho, where they’ve moved Halloween back four days. When you walk down Main Street, people yell at you from the mouths of bars: “Hey, stupid. Halloween was four days ago. You missed it.” The good news is that they invite you in for a beer and tell you that even though you missed Halloween, your costume is pretty good. (entire article) Countdown to 2012 (Idaho Mountain Express, October 3, 2007) The Maya, whose civilization collapsed 1200 years ago, were obsessed with time. Their calendar makes ours look like a Mickey Mouse watch with a bad mainspring, even if it does lack Columbus Day, Fourth of July, Christmas, and Easter. (entire article) A Drought of Biblical Proportions (Idaho Mountain Express, September 5, 2007) The Sahara Desert was once forests and rivers and lakes, grass-filled savannahs and vast herds of animals. Then the rain ceased to fall. The landscape caught fire. People and animals died or moved to where there were real clouds that dropped real rain, and to where the rivers still flowed. (entire article) Handling Headlines (Idaho Mountain Express, August 8, 2007) Earlier this month, I taught a fiction workshop at a conference in Joseph, Oregon. My workshop was titled “Handling the Headlines.” How can fiction exist, I asked, in a world that is weirder than anything you can make up? How can realism exist in a world that is surreal? (entire article) Sociopaths and Reptile Brains (Idaho Mountain Express, July 11, 2007) The definitive document of our Republic is no longer the Constitution. It’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV. Our separation of church and state has become the separation of reality and state.(entire article) Entropy Is the Plan, the Plan is God (Idaho Mountain Express, May 16, 2007) Lately I’ve been thinking that entropy is God. It’s a reasonable thing to think during the Bush Administration, because even though entropy sounds innocent enough—it’s a term from classical physics referring to energy loss in any mechanical process—in real life it means the ultimate triumph of waste, rot, corruption, and death. The engine of the universe turns organization into chaos. More and more energy does less and less work.(entire article) Survivalism in High Places (Idaho Mountain Express, March 21, 2007) I once worked with a psychology professor whose husband was a survivalist. He had assembled an arsenal in their basement and built a reinforced concrete bomb-shelter in their backyard. In the event of nuclear war, engineered plague, or civil collapse, his plan was to get the family into the shelter for a year or two, and come out to a new and cleansed and uncrowded world. (entire article) Letter to W (Idaho Mountain Express, February 21, 2007) George: If I were a fundamentalist Christian like you, I would be more worried about the halftime show at this years’ Superbowl than I was about Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple a few years back. Because this time the image burned into millions of viewers’ frontal lobes wasn’t a bit of Borg-modified flesh. Instead, cast upon a billowing shroud was a back-lit image of Satan, complete with his two most famous appendages, only one of which was his tail. (entire article) This Information Could Save Your Life (Idaho Mountain Express, January 24, 2007) Don’t believe what you read on the Internet. Especially if it begins, THIS INFORMATION COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE AND FREEDOM. More especially if it continues, “What is going on? Something very sinister is going on. Polls reveal that over 90% of the American people believe the government is keeping UFO knowledge from the public. But why?” (entire article) Wars and Rumors of War (Idaho Mountain Express, December 27, 2006) We missed a Second Coming on December 17. Jesus was supposed to arrive in Puerto Rico, in a televised event witnessed by billions. Jesus didn’t show. It was just as well, because another Internet prediction had Jesus returning in 2006, but only after a head-on collision between Earth and a 14.4 mile-long asteroid. (entire article) ...and the Beast You Rode In On (Idaho Mountain Express, November 22, 2006) It was a good month for the End Times. In Iran, banks of uranium-enriching centrifuges were whirling merrily away. In North Korea, patriotic reactor fuel rods were giving up precious atoms of plutonium for the Glorious Leader. In Israel, the Temple Mount movement was getting ready to tear down mosques and lay the cornerstone for the Third Temple, thereby ensuring the arrival of the Messiah by Christmas. And the Watchtower Lady showed up at my door. (entire article) With Apologies to the Pygmies (Idaho Mountain Express, October 21, 2006) I’ve walked for miles and my feet are hurtin’. It’s a temporary condition, caused by walking on concrete in Washington, D.C. I went there to read to an Albertson College alumni group, but took the opportunity to look around. (entire article) Idaho—The CIEDRA State, and other small tragedies (Boise Weekly, October 4, 2006) In 1968, a professor of human ecology named Garrett Hardin published an essay titled The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin showed how humans, acting in their own self-interest, would inevitably wreck any resource held in common with other humans. Sharing, in spite of what we all learned in kindergarten, would result in the destruction of wilderness or clean water or forests or fish stocks, simply because these things don’t grow with population and in the absence of constraint, an individual who takes more than his share benefits more than the individual who doesn’t. (entire article) Buffalo Bill, Come Back! (Idaho Mountain Express, September 6, 2006) The House of Yahweh, a Texas cult headed by a guy named Yisrayl Hawkins, says nuclear war will begin near the Euphrates River on September 12, 2006. As per Revelation, a third of humankind will perish. Surviving won¹t be a picnic, either. (entire article) Burning Willows (High Desert Journal, Fall 2005) My neighbor hates the sagebrush in her pasture. Bad news for her, because sagebrush grows well in her pasture, easily sprouting and rooting in the decomposed granite sand that covers most of her 17 acres. But good news for her, too, because there’s a missionary glee to her effort. (entire article) WMDs and Wilderness (Sandpoint Reader, October 20, 2005) Weapons of Mass Destruction in America’s wild places? Hardly, although I’ve finally reached the point where nothing the Bush Administration does surprises me. If Karl Rove has decided to turn our archipelago of wild areas into storage depots for nuclear weapons, weapons-grade smallpox, and our just-in-case remaining stocks of nerve gas, well, you read it here first. But that’s not what I’m talking about. My version of WMD stands for Working Mother, Desperate, and it’s not the presence of single mothers in wilderness areas that worries me, it’s their absence. (entire article) One More Paving Stone on the Road to Hell (Sandpoint Reader, September 1, 2005) I’m a believer in the Law of Unintended Consequences. Loosely defined, that’s when you try to accomplish something and what you didn’t anticipate becomes way more important than what you did. We’re about to have a lesson in unintended consequences due to Congressman Mike Simpson’s Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act [CIEDRA]. (entire article) Guests (Sandpoint Reader, August 11, 2005) Summer is the season of guests here in Sawtooth Valley. Guests of the Idaho Fish and Game Department, who look like Cabela’s poster-children, stand on the banks of the Salmon River, and flip flies at hatchery rainbow. Guests of the Idaho Highway Department roar by on whole squadrons of unmuffled motorcycles. Whitewater guests bob up and down on late-season riffles below... (entire article) Writing and Nothingness... (Lecture, Pacific University MFA residency, June 2005) I’ll try to begin with a past-life regression. In this case, the past life is one of my own that happened in the year 1955, in Hailey, Idaho. Hailey is famous in literary circles as the birthplace of Ezra Pound, who was a founder of the poetic movement known as imagism, and... (entire article) Escape from the Ivory Tower (Albertson College of Idaho Coyote, May 18, 2005) It has been a year since I left the halls of Albertson College, saying good-bye to stacks of composition papers, faculty assemblies, classrooms echoing with cell-phone melodies, and a salary. (entire article) Rat Habitat (Sandpoint Reader, February 24, 2005) I’ve just finished Jared Diamond’s big book, Collapse, which is about civilizations and the reasons they fall to pieces and die, along with most of the people in them. Diamond looks at—among others—the Maya, Easter Islanders, Greenland Vikings, the Anasazi, and contemporary Rwandans and Australians and Montanans for examples of humans destabilizing their environments and wrecking their own futures. (entire article) Keeping Death at Bay (Albertson College of Idaho Coyote, January 21, 2005) I had just finished—for the fourth or fifth time—Ernest Becker’s psychoanalytic Denial of Death when news came that the Coyote Culture was doing an illness theme. In other years I would have written about trying to grade papers with a nose running like a faucet, or the sore throat that comes with the first week of standing at the blackboard explaining apostrophe rules. ... (entire article)