Year: 2007

I had dinner with Robert Bly last week. Now you may think the biggest perks of my job involve food and wine and freebies but it’s not true. The best thing is meeting people like Bly and being able to ask anything I want.

And here’s what I wanted to know: What’s up with men?

I was sitting in a booth at Cue, drinking a glass of M. Chapoutier Côtes du Rhône, which you may know by now is one of my favorite affordable wines. I also like that Chapoutier is one of only two winemakers in the world who puts a braille label on all of his bottles because, he says, wine selection shouldn’t be limited by people’s ability to see.

Bly was sipping a Bombay Sapphire martini while eating roasted ringneck pheasant. And we were discussing Peer Gynt, the 1867 Norwegian play about a hapless, self-absorbed young man, which Bly had — just hours before — finished adapting so that it contains, for the first time in history, Ibsen’s original rhyme scheme in English.

"This is a great play about a wild young man," Bly told me. "Gynt is loved by women but hardly knows his own father. And the play asks what happens to such a man?"

This, of course, is a perennial theme of Bly’s as well. In addition to being an internationally-recognized poet and translator, he wrote Iron John: A Book About Men and helped found the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, a 1990’s-era self-help method for men that involved storytelling, new age shamanism, forest gatherings and drums. Yes, it sounds like voodoo.

But ask Bly about the rites, as I did that night, and his explanation is clear: "We were just pleased to be with other men who weren’t brutal or cruel," he told me. "The men who came weren’t angry with women, they loved women. If anything, they were angry at their fathers." The one thing his followers shared was a hunger to be recognized by older men. "The question they were asking," Bly said, "was, Am I worthwhile as a man? That’s all they needed to know."

It happens, coincidentally, that I have for several months been reading books by men: those muscular, intelligent but addled, sex-fueled American types ranging from Saul Bellow to Richard Ford. Currently, I’m in the middle of Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs, a novel as uneven as a hastily-gathered deck of cards, but one that I nevertheless like.

It’s about a man named Lucy. (You can imagine, I’m sure, why he needs assurance that he is worthwhile.) As a child, Lucy is accosted by a bunch of older boys and locked in a trunk down near the blood-red Cayoga River. Terrified, he passes out and awakens hours later to the sounds of a couple having sex on the ground at his side. (Why they didn’t wonder about a trunk on a riverbank, I cannot say. . . .this is one of the ragged elements of the book.) The woman hears him shifting and throws open the lid of the trunk — naked from the waist up, of course — thus freeing the boy who gets out, walks home along the river, and finds his father waiting for him on the bridge by their house.

It cannot be coincidence that there is everything in this scene that Bly described: the brutality of boys and the joy at seeing a bare-chested woman and the desire only to be gathered up by his father and safely transported home. It is, I’m beginning to see, a ubiquitous and rather winsome theme in men’s literature and lives — this need to be comforted, to be carried, to be loved.

I’m a big fan of men: wife to one and ex-wife (still good friend) to another, as well as the mother of two nearly-grown sons. I can speak to the softness that exists in all of them, the hunger, as Bly put it.

So I found myself wondering one day about men and wine. There is a strange, swooning, wide-eyed fever that men bring to their drinking. The same one, it seems to me, they bring to most everything else, be it war or stamp collecting or golf. And maybe it is the reason that most of the world’s winemakers and tasters and raters and vendors even today are men, though women have been proven, scientifically, to have a far more acute sense of smell. Biologically speaking, Robert Parker should be a woman in her 30’s, not a 60-year-old guy with an outdated JD.

As a woman wine writer, I can hardly claim prejudice. After all, you’re reading me. But I’ve been examining these men and their stories, thinking about what I can take from them — Bly and his moonlit drum beating, Russo and his childhood fear and fantasy, Chapoutier and his gallant but quixotic mission to make wine buying easier for the blind. Then there’s the man I met the other day.

I was at Costco, where I’d gone to buy a case of the Chapoutier Cotes du Rhone for a party. Why would I battle the traffic and noise and hotdog stink of that hellhole? Because here the Chapoutier sells for $8.59 a bottle rather than $12. This fact — and a Xanax — were enough to get me through the horror of a Christmas shopping throng. Only then, there was no wine! Luckily, I found a man in a red apron who lifted another case off a high shelf.

Selling wine was his hobby, the man told me. And he wasn’t just a fan of the wine I was buying, he was avid, recommending it to everyone he knew. As I was checking out, he came running over to hand me a sheaf of background materials. I mentioned that I was a writer, told him my name, and said I might post the information. . . .then felt ill and called it an early night. He called the Rake first thing the next morning and demanded to know where my new column was, leaving his number so we could alert him the moment it went up.

I’m not complaining. In fact, I think if there’s something we women can learn from men, it’s to indulge in a little reckless enthusiasm and genuine need. Men in the woods, telling each other fairytales and beating drums. It kind of makes sense.

Last year, instant runoff voting
was approved by an overwhelming majority of Minneapolis residents. 65
percent of voters, to be exact. Given that it’s difficult to find
65 percent of people to agree with something as uncontroversial as whether
Britney Spears’ contributions to the gene pool violate environmental
protection statutes and constitute illegal dumping, a 65 percent mandate
seems fairly miraculous – and all the more unassailable for its unique
nature in today’s partisan atmosphere. So why is Andy Cilek and his
Minnesota Voters Alliance suing the city to prevent the new system from
starting? Especially when Minneapolis residents seem fairly convinced
the new system will help third party candidates, increase election turnouts,
and generally make the world a better place, complete with smiling,
magical, winged unicorns cavorting in the streets with adorably fuzzy
animals and martini making robots in every household.

To answer the question of why
a "non-partisan" killjoy is looking to piss all over a rare bipartisan
voter mandate that somehow didn’t bring the Earth’s rotation to
a world-ending halt, we need to start off by defining instant runoff
voting. Keep in mind however, that there is no hope of understanding
a system obviously designed by the Elder Gods – a system created with
impossible angles never meant to be understood by the base animal that
is man. In fact, the poor unenlightened masses Mr. Cilek and his ilk
are so desperately trying to protect were clearly hopped up on special K and were offered special service
packages in return
for their vote when they stopped off at polling places last year. That’s
the only explanation for the measure’s passage. But despite this fundamentally
unknowable nature of this concept, the effort must be made.

Instant runoff voting, at its
most base level, involves ranking candidates on a ballot in order of
preference so that, in the event no one receives a clear majority, the
candidate receiving the fewest "number one" votes is dropped from
the ballot and everyone who gave those "number one" votes has their
"number two" votes applied – and on down the line until someone
receives a majority of the votes. Fairly simple and straightforward,
no? So why does Mr. Cilek think Minneapolis residents are too addlepated,
inbred, and generally too fucking dumb to understand the process?

In fact, to help illustrate
just how close the average Minneapolis resident’s mental capacity
is to that of Jessica Simpson, the Minnesota Voters Alliance engaged
in a highly scientific survey to demonstrate that Minneapolis voters
didn’t even understand what they were voting for last year and just
filled in the pretty circle on the ballot. Mr. Cilek’s flunkies talked
to "about 300 people" and found less than three voters who could
explain the instant runoff system. Of course, it’s entirely possibly
the survey was taken at a Sigma Chi fraternity party on the U campus
(keg stands are really an underutilized opportunity to take the pulse
of the community), or while canvassing the city’s finer gentlemen’s
clubs (I’ve heard the dancers at Sinners are particularly well informed, though
the ones at Schiek’s have fascinating opinions on farm subsidies)
– but we may never know, since there’s no published methodology,
or even official results. We’re just expected to take the Alliance’s
word for it – non-partisan political organizations being so credible
these days. Plus, to put it bluntly – I have no damn clue exactly
how my TV works, but I manage to tune in to Robot Chicken just fine. And I’ve got news for
you…Seth Green is a
fucked up little man.

Of course, the stultifying
idiocy endemic to Minneapolis isn’t the only reason the Alliance opposes
instant runoff voting. It’s unconstitutional and disenfranchises voters!
I’m not a constitutional scholar, or even a Talmudic one, but I can’t
really see how a system used by all sorts of countries that have managed
to figure out the whole affordable health care thing, and even a few
states right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. that don’t seem to
feel that it violates the whole "one person, one vote" concept.
And as for disenfranchising people? I, and most other political analysts,
fail to see how giving people the opportunity to vote for the candidate
that best matches their ideology, be it Republican, Democrat, or cannibalistic
anarcho-syndicalist, without feeling as if they’ll be wasting their
vote. So Mr. Cilek response is to use his angry monkey style– that is, throwing a whole bunch
of shit against the wall in the hopes that some of it sticks. This is
not to be confused with tiger style, crane style, or the ever popular doggy style.