"INP"

Poised and Ready - Brendan Benson

A colleague’s school in Atlanta hands out something called INPs to students.

INP stands for “I’m Not Prepared.”

These INPs go on a student’s record. They are tracked, and garnering certain numbers of INPs result in a variety of disciplinary actions and parent meetings.

At this point, I told her to stop explaining this to me, because I wanted to imagine the Rest of the Story on my own. I didn’t want reality to get in the way of my fantasy, because I think the INP concept is FB (Friggin Brilliant).

INPs should be considered WTF (Worse Than F’s), because one cannot be properly graded if one has not properly prepared oneself for one’s obligations. In the sheltered bubble of school, few things if any are more counterproductive to learning than a lack of preparation.

An INP is like the John the Baptist of grades. No wait. It’s more like the Jeremiah of grades, the prophet who crashes your party and smashes a clay jar into a bajillion pieces on the floor and says, “See that jar? That’s you. That’s the grade you will earn if you don’t prepare yourself for what’s coming.”

With an idea this brilliant, I only wonder why it must stop with children and students. Why can’t INPs be a part of our daily professional lives?

We have a “calendar team” at my school, and we sit for two hours twice annually, paging through the upcoming year’s events. Members are given several warnings and told to enter all their known events into the system, but inevitably, the meeting rolls around, and several people have failed to enter key events, or they’ve been entered so shoddily and haphazardly that errors abound.

INP.

Twice in the last month, I’ve arranged meeting times where I could train someone on software. In both cases, I asked the other person to compile sample information prepared for use, because I’ve learned that the best way to learn is to watch your work have an actual and practical outcome, to see the training actually result in something useful. In both cases (and in numerous previous encounters as well), the person “was too busy” to prepare for the training sesson. Just didn’t have the time.

INP. Not to mention they’ve made a clear statement about what they think of MY time.

Herman Cain sitting for an interview without knowing how to find Libya on a map. Rick Perry, proposing cuts to departments he can’t even remember. (Hell, at least Reagan forgot stuff AFTER he did it rather than before.)

INP. Which could also stand for “I’m Not President.”

I realize that we all have times in our week, in our personal and professional lives, when we walk in less prepared than we oughtta be. All of us would earn occasional INPs in our weekly and monthly lives. We know it; we shrug it; we move on.

But how many INPs should a good and dedicated employee earn before they’re, well, neither good nor dedicated? How unprepared must one be to earn an INP -- grossly unprepared... or is being merely less prepared than necessary , or “noticeably unprepared” sufficient to earn one?

Four INPs a month? Is that a reasonable over/under? Should we expect even better of ourselves and our coworkers and demand no more than two INPs?

Employee compensation and raises should be tied directly to INPs. A lot of people at my school who regularly earn INPs are overstretched on responsibilities, juggling three or four large jobs, and they’re generally getting paid extra amounts of money to juggle those extra responsibilities. But you can only fit so many clowns in the Time Car, in your Mind Car.

They’re overstretched, but they keep getting rewarded for overstretching, despite the fact that their being overstretched results in less-than-quality performance.

It’s like this in most workplaces, I suspect, but especially true in private schools. I’ve met numerous heads and associate heads of school who teach one or two classes and coach teams. As if running an entire school is only a part-time job.

Hell, maybe it is. Bob isn’t even sure if I do anything all day, so what would I know about what it takes to run an entire complex organization? Maybe not nearly as much as I think.

But it sure would be nice to see just how often, how egregiously, how frequently with one obligation over another, we found ourselves walking in unprepared. A precious few brilliant mutants can wing it every day and get by, but most of us, our INPs cause damage and waste other people’s time. We should at least have to own up to it when we do it.

If you would like more information, contact Billy at INP Consultants, Inc. I’d give you my per diem charges, but I haven’t gotten around to writing them up yet.

Franzen Probably Stuck Firecrackers Up His Star Wars Figures' Butts

Umbrellas - Sleeping at Last (mp3)
Stay Down - Smoking Popes (mp3)

“I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I wanted. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”

Patty, the depressive and tortured wife at the heart of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, wants an apology from her mother for damages done. The quote above is all she gets. And, by the time she pulls it from her mother like some impacted wisdom tooth, it’s more than she ever expected and more than sufficient.

Unfortunately, some three decades pass between when Patty first needs the apology and when she finally receives it, and in that time she’s placed her faith in a domestic house of cards and watched as it crumbles under the weight of time and things unsaid. Her husband, Walter, was never a candidate for The Bachelor. He was more suited for Beauty & the Geek. Their daughter Jessica is so well-rounded and mentally balanced as to have rendered her parents prematurely insignificant. Their son Joey ends up serving as the vehicle for every demon and angel in Patty’s Pandora’s Box of needs and wants and fears.

Contemporary literature cannot have a family without dysfunction, so the challenge for the best writers is to fight to convince us that the dysfunction of their tale is somehow deserving of the magnifying glass.

Unfortunately for Jonathan Franzen, everything I read is filtered through the comparative lens of a fanatical Richard Russo fan, and everything is doomed to lack an ingredient that the demigod Russo offers.

In the case of Freedom -- and it was also true with Franzen’s maybe-slightly-better previous novel The Corrections -- what Franzen lacks is a true, deep, sincere sympathizing love of his characters. Franzen loves the family at the heart of Freedom, but he can’t help but detest them, too.

When Richard Russo (Straight Man, Nobody's Fool, Bridge of Sighs) creates a character, I get the feeling he’s let this person swim around in his brain for eons, as if he’s developed relations with these characters in Inception time, the dream-within-a-dream slowdown where, in the time we waking souls spend watching an episode of Modern Family, he has lived a lifetime with these creations of his. He loves his characters the way a sagely wise shaman loves all people, knows all people, knows their hearts, knows they’re all deserving of forgiveness and honesty.

Franzen, on the other hand, can’t help himself. He loves his characters like Romeo loves girlfriends. It’s a roller-coaster of nauseating emotional flux. One minute he would take a knife for them, and the next he would prefer shoving the knife into them. One minute his prose gushes with admiration for their nobility and the next you can feel his seething superiority, and you know he thinks they’re inexcusably pathetic creatures.

This difference is crucial for me as a reader. It speaks very specifically to what I seek in great books, to what I value, to my weaknesses and needs. I make this clear because this difference need not be proof that a Russo book is “better” than a Franzen novel. The American canon of great books is filled with authors whose attitudes toward their characters run these two lines and millions more. Some great authors create characters as vessels of hate, as reminders of evil. Some treat their characters like infants or like gods.

Franzen, Perotta at his best, and Russo all love humanity. But only with Russo do I never get the sense of condescension. It’s why I love him so completely as an author; because as much as I write, I can’t imagine how he can so easily avoid such an omnipresent emotion in the evaluation of hundreds upon hundreds of human beings.

But back to Freedom. Twice in the book I felt he took things down an inevitable path that bordered on the absurd, as if he started hydroplaning and couldn’t hit the brakes in time. But his odd narrative choices -- writing close to half the book as an autobiography written by Patty in the third person... (yeah, read that one again)... or opening and closing the book with a semi-omniscient take on the Berglunds as bit players in the complex organism of a neighborhood -- worked very well.

I loved ⅘ of this book, and it’s a great book for anyone who enjoys a beautifully-written book about royally screwed-up families. For some of us in the Land of Beautifully-Flawed Domesticity, books like this are like gladiator battles and 5-car accidents on the side of the Interstate, and we can’t help but buy a ticket and cheer on the hungry tigers or slow down as we pass to see if there’s any blood on the windshield.

The Road

Whatever Gets You Off - The Last Vegas (mp3)
The Road to Ensenada - Lyle Lovett (mp3)

I cried twice when I first read Cormac McCarthy's The Road three years ago.

The only other time I ever recall having to wipe away tears from my eyes while reading a book because the damn pages got too blurry was when I was in seventh grade and read Where the Red Fern Grows for summer reading. In that book, I cried when the boy is carrying his disemboweled dog home in the desperate hopes of saving its life. What can I say? The kid's name was Billy. I was young and took the book very personally.

This isn't because books don't stir my emotions. But, much like a book is played out in the mind, on the storyboard of imagination, my tears for a novel's plot are usually leaked inside the synapses in my brain. I weep more openly for movies and TV shows. It's more visceral, for better and worse.

On Tuesday, I saw the film version of The Road. I'd read the reviews. It was going to be a draining and miserable experience, but I'd promised myself I would do it the day I first heard about the movie. I owed it to the book, strange as that sounds. To the characters. Especially that father, and that son, but to others as well. For books I really love, I feel obligated to see the films, knowing damn well the movies can't be as good. But they don't have to be. I don't expect that out of a movie. It's not fair.

Few if any of you will see this film. Doing so means you want to be weighed down, sad, full of despair, for almost two hours. And you're paying an ungodly amount of cash to do so.

That said, here's my take: It's the perfect film to conclude 2009.

Although I haven't seen Up in the Air and desperately want to, and although lots of folks claim that flick captures much of 2009's angst and zeitgeist, I can't imagine it's a more pristine way to wrap up this year than The Road. Especially if you watch it alone. No one to share your reactions. No one you can look over and see their reactions and feel like you've got company in that hellhole of a film. Just you, with a handful of strangers, miserably engaged in a nightmare scenario.

Massive unemployment? Skyrocketing health care costs? Political backbiting better suited to professional wrestling? Terrorists with explosives next to their nuts? Yup, that all feels pretty damned oppressive. But 20 minutes into The Road, all that shit ain't shit.

None of the world's current burdens matter as much. You just want to go find a loved one and hold them. You want to go out and start your car engine and hum along to its happy engine tune. You want to roll down the window and look at all that glorious light pollution coming from street lamps. You want to play that glorious iPod and hear mindless stupid shit like The Last Vegas, whose sole skill is making AC/DC seem high-minded. (No offense, Vegas... I enjoy the hell out of this song.)

You think you got problems? Try living in a world without electricity, without plant life, with few mammals, and where your fellow man is just as likely to eat you as shake your hand. Try shepherding your child in that environment, without any assistance from anyone.

Parenting, brought down to it's very primal core of love, protection, and nurturing.

You want some theology? You want a kind of violence that makes the shit in Transformers feel even more fakey and meaningless than it already does? You want Robert Duvall pulling off a kind of role only Robert Duvall can? You want to see a kid evolve from an almost ignorable sidekick into an actor who convinces you he's really living the part? This flick's got it.

You want to leave a movie feeling a moral compulsion to be a better parent, to savor the mundane miracles embracing us every minute, to go watch some sitcoms and maybe back that up with The Hangover? This is your film.

Sure, it's probably 2010 when you read this. But it's not too late to watch a film that makes 2009 seem pretty damn OK.

And the next time you find yourself about to say the words, "I'd do anything for my children"? Maybe you'd best comprehend just what you're saying, and then maybe you should find another way to say it.

New Music on the Bottom

Billy is not a music critic. (Hell, he can't even hear the Springsteen influences in a Gaslight Anthem album.) But he does love music, and we have a dozen or so bands and artists sending free music our way every month. No sane music-lover likes turning away free music! So on occasional Sunday, he's going to offer my thoughts and recommendations on the better stuff we get sent to us. This isn't American Idol, so he's not gonna go all Simon on any of the stuff that sucks. (And let's be honest -- we've received some bona fide stinkers that you'll never hear.)

So, with that in mind, here's the first official installment of New Music on the Bottom.

The Bottom's Top Song of the Week: Blind Rhetoric
I Am a Ghost - Blind Rhetoric (mp3)

Blind Rhetoric only sent me two songs, and it's tricky to judge a band on a single album*, much less just a song or two, but here's my take. Nothing about these two songs made me think this band is trying to blaze a new trail of sound. Still, they've got some power in that pop, and if it's derivative, then they're deriving it from a place I enjoy visiting. If I stumbled into one of their concerts, I'm sure I'd stick around and enjoy myself plenty. These songs are tightly-produced -- which for me is a good thing but can annoy more finely-trained folks. Their lead singer has a honey-sweet voice capable of packing a punch, although it doesn't have a particularly unique signature to it. Then again, a band shouldn't need singularity of Axl Rose or Elvis Costello to kick some rock butt.

* -- If we judged artists on a single album, then according to Bob, Bruce Springsteen would f*#king suck.

The Bottom's Top EP of the Week: Gas Station Robber's Out of This Place
Cigarette - Gas Station Robber (mp3)

Their sound is definitely on the melancholy electronic tip. Neither of those descriptors would be words that draw me in, normally, since I tend to prefer my sad whiners be folksier or with a little more rock bombast. But something about their sound is worth paying heed. They call their sound "electroacoustic," and who am I to argue? The song I've included, "Cigarette," is the least electronic and most acoustic of the songs they sent us, so naturally that's the one I find most mesmerizing, but none of the five songs they sent had me holding my nose or praying for it to end.

More to the point for you, dear readers: They are all about sharing their music in DRM formats without asking for anything but donations. While it's possible they're as financially secure as Radiohead, I highly doubt it, so if you like what you hear, maybe you'll consider tossing a few bucks their way.

The Bottom's Top Album of the Week: Wintersleep's Welcome to the Night Sky
Oblivion - Wintersleep (mp3)

Don't ask me to defend my connections with this band, but when I hear Wintersleep, I think Arcade Fire. I think Weakerthans. I think a hint of Coldplay and a dash of the Eels. Maybe even the haunted spirit of the Mountain Goats. Except Wintersleep feels like it has a little more country and roots rock in them than these other bands. But again, I'm totally spitballing here. The key factor in all of those comparisons is that I either really like or mostly like all of the bands I just mentioned. They're all a little bit avant garde, and other than Coldplay they only hit the "pop" category infrequently and seemingly by accident.

Wintersleep are legit. "Oblivion" is their catchiest and most pop-friendly song, but a few others lean in that direction. "Astronaut" could have been performed by one of those many '80s bands from Athens, and "Weighty Ghost" deserves consideration on any college radio station worth its salt. The concluding 8-minute-plus number, "Mismal Smoke + The Yellow Bellied Freaks," might alone convince me to desert my family and obligations and see them live.

This band feels like an album band, with music better suited for a 40-minute investment rather than mixed in on your iPod's shuffle. Assuming the dudes don't secretly hate each other or dream of solo careers, I'd be stunned if this album is anything but a strong step up to bigger things.