The Teacher's View

Never Passing "Go"

2012-01-19T23:10:00.000-08:00

This is an edited version of my story published by Karl Heiss in his magazine, Hippo, in that long ago summer of 1990.

* * * *

Outside the clear glass windows, the headlights of passing cars hurried home in the dark. Inside the crowded restaurant was a swirl of frenetic movement composed of wait staff, busboys, and patrons moving and bumping their way from booth to booth. People at a window table—man, woman, a bond between them that one could see in their eyes—whispered, smiled, chatted. The whole globe of this swirling world existed only for themselves. They stood suddenly, nuzzling each other and moved out of the restaurant together. In contrast, Clara and Josh sat, nearly motionless at a nearby table, he in his standard dark jeans, black tee shirt, and tweed jacket, and she in a simple pink, cotton dress.

“So?” she asked.

“So?” he replied.

The waiter rushed by, sizzling platters resting on both arms. Tangible smells of roasted onion floated above their heads, mingling with the cigarette smoke of the restaurant.

“Do you play Monopoly?” Clara asked.

A five year courtship and he still found cause to wrinkle his eyebrows at her. “Only on rainy days.”

“I always spend my money buying properties. It’s tough because I usually wind up selling them back for cash.” Josh looked around at the other tables, afraid people might have heard Clara’s confession. “How about you?” she asked.

“No, I don’t take chances with my money.”

“It’s only paper.”

A well-known character actor sat in a corner booth. Clara knew he was somebody, but could not remember his name. A woman going to the restroom so intently watched him that she collided with the busboy. Polite apologies were exchanged and both parties kept moving.

“So, can we set a date?” she asked, avoiding his eyes. She feared there might be something too easily seen in his face. She knew this was wrong. He should ask.

“I don’t know.”

She glanced at him but he wasn’t looking at her.

“What about this year at school?” she persisted. “It worked, Josh. We lived together six months and you said yourself it was the best.”

“So?”

“Doesn’t that mean something?”

“Sure,” he answered, meeting her gaze. “It means we saved money!”

Clara couldn’t swallow the choking sensation. “We were good, Josh…” She let her voice trail off. The muscles in her back were corded, tensioned like guitar strings. She kneaded the skin on the back of her neck.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t want anything,” she snapped. “What’s wrong? What changed you? We’ve been over and over this. Nothing was going to stop us. We didn’t need anybody’s blessing. You said,” she choked.

“What?”

“You said you loved me.”

“Yeah, but money, what are we going to do for money?”

“We talked about that too! What happened at that tennis match today?”

“Nothing.”

“What did my father tell you?” She wanted to slam her fork into the wood table. It would stick there, wavering slightly. No one would be able to remove it.

“It was just tennis,” he said. “It was just a game.”

Clara hated tennis. Her father always made her play. Summers, winters, rain, heat, or cold, he would always force her to play. After she had the heat stroke July of her sophomore year at State, the game was over. Daddy still liked tennis, but he never bothered her about playing anymore. Instead, he challenged everyone else—co-workers, acquaintances, her boyfriends. She should have gone with Josh and daddy. She knew her father: big, red-faced man, and how he monopolized the game and the conversation. It was money, finances, stock portfolios. It was college graduations and futures and how much money could be made with certain degrees and occupations. That’s all that ever mattered to her father. Life was a Monopoly game. He had his favorite piece, his favorite moves, and he always avoided unwise or impulsive decisions. Wrong moves must be terminated. Send them to jail. Never let them pass “Go.”

Josh was so open with his brown-grey eyes that changed with his mood. He was boyish and innocent and poetic. The man with two divorces and four daughters sucked him up on a clay tennis court at some country club and spit him out into the net. To her father, Josh was weak. He wanted a money man—a man with substance and meat. A man with these qualities had backing. This was most important: he must have money. Love never mattered. He didn’t want a poet to marry his daughter. Innocent people get slaughtered and poets never play Monopoly.

The waiter levitated in from nowhere and refilled their coffee cups. Clara waited for him to flutter away.

“What did he say to make you change?” she asked.

“Who?”

“My father, you know who!”

“Nothing.”

“He hates marriage,” she spat, “unless he gets something out of it.”

“He has nothing against marriage,” Josh answered. “He said it made him a man.”

“Wrong,” she said. “He’s an asshole and his marriages were disasters, scorched earth.”

“Come on, Clara!”

“No, you come on, Josh! He’s still a manipulator and he got to you.”

Josh let his eyes rove the restaurant. Clara noticed him shaking his head in a silent no. It was a gesture backed by the constant movement of patrons leaving the bistro—walking out into the damp night air. She could smell them, with exotic and varied perfumes as they passed her table. Passing, passing out into the night which in short hours would become day and then night again. The restaurant was nearly empty. The piano player was putting his music away. Glasses with various levels of amber liquids in them decorated the top of the instrument. The piano player turned and sauntered sleepily to the door. Something was ending, had already ended.

“So what are we going to do?” she asked. This time, Clara had no trouble looking at him directly.

“I don’t know,” Josh answered, pushing his plate away. He folded his napkin and dropped it on the table, a gesture of finality. “Too much,” he said to his plate and to her.

“Don’t Josh.” He finally locked eyes with her.

“I’m thinking, Clara. I’m trying to do what’s right. I’m trying to see the future.”

Clara felt the heat build behind her eyes. She felt the moist reflections of early rage seep out the corners of her eye sockets. The flood came and she couldn’t stop it.

“Look, don’t cry,” he said. “I still love you.”

“Oh my God!”

“What?”

“You can’t even come up with an original line.”

The red glow began at his Adam’s apple and flushed upward. “I do. I really do.”

“But it’s just not a sound financial decision right now,” Clara offered sarcastically.

“I just need time,” he said.

“Another cliché!”

Clara slid out of the red booth and walked toward the sign that read “Exit.” People criss-crossed her path—waiters, waitresses carrying platters once hot and steaming but now cold, with scraps of food and refuse. A busboy leaped past, a tray of milky glasses in his arms. Tomorrow, they would be crystal clear again. A woman with a green, silk dress sat at the bar, but even she was moving, rubbing her hand up and down the thigh of the grey, distinguished man standing next to her, gently kissing his neck.

Clara took it all in. She looked down at her own legs. At first, they seemed to move sluggishly, but as she immersed herself in the liquid, flowing movement of the restaurant, she seemed to float. She picked up speed, building momentum for what would come next, for the rest of her life. Then she realized. It was a subtle but powerful difference. She was not propelled by schemes or money or a desire to win. The mass of muscle behind her acceleration was her heart.

Once at the door, Clara gave herself a moment to look back. In the current of movement there was a note of stillness. Josh sat staring down at his fingers spread like a fan on the dark wood table. She remembered when he wrote her poetry and kissed her neck. She remembered when he studied her long fingers, brought her flowers, caressed her. She remembered shared secrets, veiled inferences, and making love on cold, rainy, windy afternoons when they should have been in class but stole a moment to themselves in the connection, the weaving interloping of their bodies. But now, it was only she who prized the jewel of crystal-clear love that once moved between them. Now he would be left behind, holding his Monopoly money and his “Get out of jail free” card, never passing “Go.” She would transcend the game, find love and discover an authentic life. This was the last time that she would ever look back.

Someday he would wake to discover that in the end, the things he valued were ephemeral, that he had missed out by standing still. She would choose another path; she would keep surging forward. In an instant, everything was clear: anything real must move, or die. Clara pushed through the doors out into the night where a warm spring rain had begun to fall.

The Dying of the Light

2012-01-14T22:47:00.000-08:00

for K.H.

It had been more than a few years since I searched for you. I plugged your name into the search engine generating 43 million hits. “Remembering Karl and Marisa…Karl Heiss…Marisa Bauducco-Heiss…taken from us far too soon…fatal traffic accident…Olympia, Washington, October 3, 2008…11-year-old daughter, Aliana, suffered brain injury…6-year-old son, Alden, severe case of whiplash…southbound Subaru braked for slowing traffic, but lost control and went across the median, under the cable barrier and into northbound lanes. The car struck the semi-truck head on.” I slumped in my chair. We were best friends in college, you with your trumpet and me on piano. Then, we decided together that a music career wasn’t for us, so we switched to creative writing and English. The only recording session I did as a musician, you produced. You published one of my stories in your magazine.

Now, you are gone, dying with your wife on a lonely stretch of Interstate 5.

* * * *

“How are your blood sugar numbers?” the doctor asked me.

“They’ve been high lately. In the two hundreds.”

He looked up from writing his notes. “Why?”

“It’s my fault. I am not sticking with the program.”

“What can I do to help you?”

I felt my throat muscles tightening. “I am anxious all the time now. My body hurts, and I have constant headaches. I am worried about my financial situation, worried about the future.” My voice trailed off as I studied the floor of the exam room.

“You are not answering my question,” he insisted. “What can I do to help you? I am concerned about your decreased kidney function, your heart. You have to get your sugars under control.”

“Look, my mom died at 62 from diabetes, multiple sclerosis. I mean, I already have some of the complications she had, and they are irreversible. I don’t know if I can fight anymore.”

“Paul, this doesn’t have to end in death.”

Wrong, doc, I thought. It all ends in death. Everything ends in death.

* * * *

I can’t stop thinking about you, all day at work, Thursday, Friday, at home on the weekend. What went through your mind as you slid toward death on the highway? What did you feel? The articles all say you died instantly. What does that mean? You must have felt something. There is no way death is instantaneous. The heart would convulse one last time, even while being crushed. It would have taken a few seconds at least for the oxygen to leave your brain. Even people who are guillotined live a few seconds after the head is separated from the body.

And where are you now? Do you inhabit a different dimension? Are you in the house you built for your family in Idaho? Do you walk the highway where you died? Are you on the beach in Malibu where you grew up? At the bottom of the world in Argentina where your children now live with your wife’s family?

* * * *

Sister Joseph Adele Edwards, CSJ, died on Christmas day. We worked together for the last year and a half at the college. She had worked at Mount St. Mary’s for fifty years. English teacher, administrator, and in retirement, writing tutor at her desk near mine in the learning center. She called her writing students “customers,” and greeted them with a light in her eyes that belied her seventy-eight years. Only when she came to work and left for home did we see the thin, bird-like frame of her body, her fragility, her careful maneuvering around students and tables so she would not fall.

Then, late last school year, as spring was in full flower, she did fall. Her driving privileges were taken away, and she was moved to the convent on campus so she could receive medical supervision. From there, she began to decline. This past summer, she was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and her physical abilities quickly deserted her. She came to the center in November to visit, and the staff had to carry her into the building. Her chin rested on her chest, and her hands were flattened out, the fingers curled at the tips. We crowded close to her to hear her thin voice. Her body had failed her, but in her eyes, we all saw her steely resolve. Sister Joseph Adele was a tough cookie. She would not go down without a fight.

A few days before Christmas, several of us went to see her. She was now under hospice care. She had stopped eating, and the decision had been made to give her intravenous fluids but not to insert a feeding tube. We talked to her, told her news and gossip, wished her a Merry Christmas. She wandered in and out of consciousness, sometimes appearing to register what we were saying, but other times drifting away. A few days later, while watching Mass on television, she died.

At her funeral, the Bishop read from the Gospel of Luke: “He said to his disciples, Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life and what you will eat, or about your body and what you will wear. For life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Notice the ravens: they do not sow or reap; they have neither storehouse nor barn, yet God feeds them. How much more important are you than birds! Can any of you by worrying add a moment to your lifespan? If even the smallest things are beyond your control, why are you anxious about the rest?”

I stared at the high, beamed ceiling of the church. I thought of the dead; so many have gone before. Where are they now? Many of the people around me at Sister’s funeral were looking at their own mortality. I was looking at my own mortality. Not knowing what happens when we die has preoccupied me for months, and I was no closer to any answers. Of course, how could there be an answer.

Sister Joseph Adele touched so many lives—students, teachers, community members. They shared their stories of her. I kept thinking about the last time I saw her. Next to her bed, on the window ledge, were pictures of her parents in Texas, her beloved San Antonio Spurs basketball team, her early days of pre-Vatican II religious life wearing the full habit. She was both a Texan and a Californian. On that ledge her entire life could be traced, and lining the floor underneath were boxes of papers and books, a lifetime of work in an academic institution. Where would all that life go now?

At the end of the funeral Mass, the small choir sang the Irish Blessing. It was my grandmother’s favorite prayer. “May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. May the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand.” Sister Joseph Adele, my grandmother, my mother—I suddenly felt aware of all of history, all of the dead, the past, present and future colliding and losing their boundaries and lines becoming blurred.

* * * *

Do you remember that recording session? It was a demo tape for a middle-aged guy who wanted a second career as a lounge singer. He sounded like Jim Morrison of the Doors. He was not purposely imitating Jim Morrison of the Doors. He wanted to be Frank Sinatra. The cassette tape of the session is in a box in storage now.

When we were young writers starting out, you decided to avoid the slush pile and start your own magazine: Hippo Magazine. Typed and edited on an early desktop computer, you printed it up at Kinko’s or someplace and put together a mailing list. I have the issue with my story in it: “Vernal and Summerly ish, 1990.” I page through it and hear your voice in the words. Inside the front cover, you handwrote to me: “Hello, Paul. Hippo’s here and Karl is elsewhere. More info later. All the best, Karl.”

I turn to the “Hippeople” section, your authors’ bios. For me, you wrote: “Paul L. Martin—Northridge, CA. Paul teaches at a Catholic elementary school where he spends his time stunning the nuns by actually inspiring the children to think about life and—sometimes—even God!”

I always wanted you to be a teacher. I wanted to teach alongside you, because I knew you would have been great at it. You would have inspired me and your students. But you were still finding yourself and your trajectory through life. You lived everything on your own terms, never compromising. I wish I could talk to you now. To be honest, I feel a little lost, jagged, bruised. Things have changed so much, and I am no longer sure of the path.

I cannot see the type in the magazine anymore. The colors run and fade, the light grows dim.

* * * *

My father called me the other night. We have not spoken or seen each other for a few years now. We make a date for the next evening to get together. When I arrive at the house where I used to live, I find that he has remodeled it, added a bathroom and family room, expanded the kitchen. It looks nothing like the house of my memory, and the feeling is disorienting. My father is bent and twisted, and struggles to walk across the room. Years spent in a physically destructive and demanding job have taken their toll. He looks so much older than his 71 years.

When we speak, his syntax is as twisted as his body. He struggles to find words, loses his train of thought, stutters. I am frustrated because I cannot even guess what he is trying to say to help him out. As we move through the evening, I am quite sure he has had a stroke. In his words as I decipher them, I still hear a bit of the passive-aggressive behavior I have recognized in the past. He tells me that all of his brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends got together for his seventieth birthday. I, his eldest son, was absent. I don’t say anything, but I think about all the birthdays I have had where he did not acknowledge the date. I think about all the things that have happened in my life in recent years of which he did not take part. I needed a father, and he was absent. A relationship between a father and son runs both ways. I was never the son he wanted, and I was certainly the child he understood the least. In the same breath I am sorry about that and angry. I love him, even though he can be ignorant and narrow minded. I love him for working seven days a week for most of my life to support his family, to keep his kids in Catholic schools. I love him because he was once strong. I love him because he is my father. I recognize him in some of my habits, my movements, my life. But we will never be close because he cannot deal with my emotions, my intensity, my need for a life of the mind. I don’t follow sports. I don’t work in a factory with my hands. Inadvertently, I sometimes make him feel inadequate or unintelligent. Yet he has called on me when he needs someone to parse the language of his retirement accounts, or when he needed to redraft his will after my mother died.

We sit in his remodeled house and talk about what has happened in our lives over the years since we last spoke. He asks after my health, but I do not tell him what the doctor has told me. I don’t think he wants to know, not because he does not care, but because after burying his mother and father, his two brothers, his wife, he does not want to contemplate burying his son. We stay with safer subjects—remembering when I delivered the newspaper, our various neighbors over the years, and the latest good news from other family members. As I leave the house that does not resemble the house of my memories, he insists that we must talk more, go to dinner soon, and keep in touch. In his voice I hear a note of panic; he means what he says and is afraid I won’t keep to my part of the bargain, that I will disappear back into my life and he will not hear from me again. He does not have to worry. Even though he is not the father I need, and I am not the son to whom he can relate, I will not let anymore years go by without contact. Even though I struggle to understand his words as he fails to understand who I am, I will work to keep our connection, because years fly away like birds in winter, and he is my father.

* * * *

Do you remember when we took that logic class together? You tried to teach me, but I could not comprehend the readings. “If A is B and B is C, A must equal C.” Sure. Right. We used to study in the cafeteria on the top floor of that building. I was thick headed, and some of my answers made you laugh.

Karl, you were the better musician. You were the better writer. You were just better. I do remember only one time when I could help you. Do you remember when you broke up with the girl you were seeing, and out of anger, you put your hand through a plate glass store window? The cuts on your hand and arm severed the nerves and left you unable to play your trumpet and guitar as effectively. We talked about your anger. You told me you did not think you’d fall in love again, a young man’s retort in the face of rejection. I am glad you found Marisa. Although I never met her, I am sure she made you happy. And I am relieved that you died together. If the next life is one where we can be with those we love, it must have been some comfort to arrive there together. But of course, this is only conjecture. We really do not know what happens when we die, although the poets, saints and philosophers try to teach us something of their theories of the other side.

This is where my burning questions live, Karl. Where do we go when we die? Could you ever be at peace knowing your son will grow up without you, or that your daughter is severely brain damaged? Were you able to let go of what was and move on? I don’t think I could. What bothers me more is that here in this life, I long to talk to you again, or to hug my grandmother, or to tell my mother I did love her, even though we rarely found common ground in the last years of her life. You, and they, are elsewhere, and I miss all of you and regret the lost years. I should have tried to contact you. I should have done so many things, and I didn’t, and that is the tragedy of middle age: realizing there are things you should have done and now you have lost the opportunity to do them.

* * * *

During my lunch breaks at the college, I often go to sit in the chapel on campus. It is cool and quiet there, and I can close my eyes and meditate. Sometimes I see my grandmother kneeling in a pew ahead of me, her head bowed and the veil covering her hair. She does not turn to look at me, but I know she is aware that I am there. In the side aisle, I often see my mother, standing and looking at me. She does not smile, but I know she recognizes me. Both figures fade in and out of my reality, like a distant radio signal.

Through the open doors of the chapel, I can hear the voices of students—laughing, teasing, sharing gossip. They have years ahead of them, stretching to infinity. They firmly believe they will never die, and they cannot wait to seize the world and make it their own. I cannot teach them the way life has strict borders, the way that the years flash by. To understand the finite nature of existence one must live it. So it is a paradox that human beings do not recognize the limitations of their years until they approach the end. Then, as Dylan Thomas wrote, they rage against the dying of the light.

I come back to life in the darkness of the chapel. Somewhere in the distance, a door slams in the wind. I stand, straighten myself out, and walk out into the brilliant light of January. As I make my way down the steps, I see Santa Monica Bay, the water like glass. I feel the wind on my face. The sky is an intense, forever blue. For now, the light is clean, strong, and true.

As night follows day, I know that existence is transitory, and that death is the end of life. Questions cannot always be answered, but that does not mean we should ever stop searching. I will look for those I have lost in the faces of those I meet. I will listen for their voices in the wind. I will continue to question this life, even though the answers may never come. That is something with which we all must live until the day we pass “into that good night.”

Cliff Walk

2012-01-06T23:55:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to be brave? Is it different from being fearless? Being brave means facing our fears and not letting them overwhelm us. Fearless means one is afraid of nothing. We can only be fearless in increments. There will always be something that terrifies us. However, it is possible to be brave in the scariest moments and in the horrible face of what terrifies us.

Over the holiday, I was rereading Don J. Snyder’s 1997 memoir, The Cliff Walk: A Job Lost and a Life Found (Little, Brown and Company/Back Bay Books). Snyder was a successful English teacher at Colgate University in upstate New York when he received his pink slip. The experience changed his life in dramatic and decisive ways.

Snyder’s journey follows his departure from Colgate and details his emotional climb through anger and arrogance, his shortsighted immature approach to the crisis. He is 41 years old, married with three children under the age of seven with a fourth child on the way. Not a good time to be adrift and unemployed in America. (Is there ever a good time?) He applies to universities and colleges literally all over the map, but fails to find another teaching gig that meets with his criteria.

After several late night sessions making endless lists of job prospects and his dwindling resources, Snyder decides to relocate his family to Maine, and they begin to draw on his retirement and meager savings to survive. He proceeds through a number of misadventures, both comic and disturbing, while trying to skate over the thin ice of his collapsing future before he is forced to face facts. The episodes will make the reader cringe, and Snyder is painfully honest, often painting himself in a less than positive light. He bottoms out and takes a physically demanding job as a day laborer in construction at far less pay than any teaching position. His is frigid, exhausting work through the bitter coastal Maine winter, but he is transformed by the experience.

Snyder’s story is one of redemption, and the book contains moments of ethereal beauty. It is a story that moves from fearlessness born of denial and ignorance to bravery and resilience. For most of the book, Snyder seeks to avoid retrospection; he is immature, stubborn, and childlike. But his life forces him down the path to salvation and maturity.

His story reminds me that we suffer our way into wisdom and knowledge. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote, and although he was speaking of the tyranny of an oppressive monarch, he could have been speaking of the human condition. Every day, in every way, we are tested in this crucible of life.

When we are young, bravery comes more easily because it is born out of ignorance. Young people relish their invincibility; every generation believes they will live forever. And then someone dies, or a war begins, and the illusion is shattered. We become older, more aware of the risks, the high percentage of failure, the fragility of human life.

We seem to want to ignore the signs around us. Things are not that bad, we tell ourselves as we race to the malls for the latest sales. It is all about instant gratification, getting what we want now, rampant materialism. But homeless ghosts wander our streets. People have been so demoralized that they have stopped looking for work. Our government is locked in partisan politics, with ego and party taking precedence over what is right for the American people.

Where is the deeper understanding? Where is our humanity?

We clearly have not suffered our way into wisdom, which means we face more difficult days ahead. On the edge of a chasm, we can claim to be fearless, but the sentiments ring shrill and hollow. To summon true courage to face our fears we first must admit we are afraid. We must be realists and dig deeper to find a way to deal with a rapidly changing world. We must embrace change and accept that impermanence is a part of life. Empires fall, the wind shifts.

I know in this new year there will be pain and suffering because there is always pain and suffering. We must accept the consequences of our lives, even when we did not have a part in creating the situation. Things happen, and we must deal with the fallout. This scares me and makes me wonder if we have the strength and courage to persevere. There is only one way to go: forward. Against the odds, against what fears may come, we must endeavor, every day of this new year, to be brave.

Blue Nights*

2011-12-21T22:26:00.000-08:00

On a recent Saturday, I attended the funeral of a sixteen year old girl. In the space of a single week, she had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, had surgery, and died. One week to go from being full of life to ashes. As I sat in the cold church watching the service, I realized that her parents had been transposed into an entirely different reality, one that most people could not access, and one that haunts every parent every day: the death of a child. Parents should never have to bury their children.

It was a coincidence that at the time of this funeral, I was reading Joan Didion’s Blue Nights (Knopf, 2011), a book that takes as its theme the death of a child, although Didion’s daughter, Quintana, was not a child when she died. For Didion, her death launched an inquisition of self, a clear-eyed, unsparing review of life and parenting, and of course, loss. The book follows Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf, 2005), a meditation on the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The two deaths are deeply entwined; Quintana suffered a series of illnesses and was in the hospital when Dunne dropped dead of a heart attack at his dining room table one evening after visiting his daughter. In a very short period of time, Didion lost two-thirds of her immediate family.

Didion is the rare writer who works in a number of genres. Together with Dunne, she wrote movie scripts including Panic In Needle Park (1971) and Up Close and Personal (1996). Her novels include Run River (1963), Play It As It Lays (1970), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). However, it is her nonfiction that stands out, a genre often called New Journalism, but is simply composed of sharp observation and razor-edged nonfiction prose that utilizes the first person. Didion is not a polemicist like Christopher Hitchens, but a writer who conveys the emotional and physical truth of a scene and allows the reader to draw conclusions. She gives us the world through her eyes, and she does not shy away from the dark matters of the human heart, the slippery slope of the center disintegrating beneath us. Her nonfiction books, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and After Henry (1992) contain some of the best essays of the late twentieth century.

In Blue Nights, Didion uses a circular and fragmentary style of prose poetry to examine both Quintana’s life and death as well as her own parenting. Her daughter was adopted, and loved to hear the story of how she came to them: the birth at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica; the way the hospital would give them no information about the baby’s family; the way John told the story of “Not that baby…that baby. The baby with the ribbon,” as if choosing a beautiful jewel in a store window. For Didion, it was then that the questions started: “What if I fail to take care of this baby? What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me?” The worst question was almost too much to contemplate: “What if I fail to love this baby?”

Early on, Didion had a foreshadowing of the things to come: “It is horrible to see ones self die without children. Napoleon Bonaparte said that,” she writes. “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripedes said that. When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. I said that.” She goes on to write that now that her husband and daughter are dead, she fears not death itself, but not dying.

Foreshadowing the end of things, the decay of culture and society, are the threads running through Didion’s work. This from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing.” Not far off from today, with our gunman firing indiscriminately into cars in Hollywood, workplace shootings, and mothers who fail to report their children missing, whose children later turn up dead, and for whose murder, they are acquitted. Seventh graders execute each other in classrooms. Joan Didion’s work was never more prescient.

In this book, Didion turns her pen on herself only to discover, there are no easy answers. The blue night of which she speaks is the way the light dies at twilight during early summer in New York, where she now lives. She connects the blue night to “illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.” She returns to this motif at the end of the book, writing to Quintana? John? Herself? “Go back into the blue…what is lost is already behind locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”

This is what I wanted to tell the grieving family. There will never be a day when the pain of loss subsides. There will never be a day when you won’t think of your child. But that is the way we live now, with loss and absence and sorrow, even in spring.

The Buddhists tell us that pain, suffering and loss are part of life, and must be accepted as such. Still humans go on and on, raging against the dying of the light, reaching out to hold on for just one more second, the blue light of memory.

*Writer Annie Wyndham was nice enough to mention this post today (12/22/11) on her blog. Access her piece here.

Arguably (Updated 12/16/11)*

2011-12-13T21:18:00.000-08:00

There is no doubt that the world of arts and letters will be a poorer place without Christopher Hitchens. His latest book, Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve, 2011) is another brick in the wall of his substantial oeuvre. Coming in at well over 700 pages, filled with 107 essays, and spanning what appears to be every subject known to humankind, the book works well as a doorstop or tool for blunt force trauma as well as for literary enlightenment. But these are superficial matters. The deeper truth is that Hitchens is a formidable literary critic, an historian, a raconteur, and a social critic bar none.

Hitchens’ work can be found in publications such as Slate, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times Book Review, and of course, Vanity Fair. In that last magazine, Hitchens is nearly the voice most recognized, and in fact, his writing has served to establish that Vanity Fair style, a kind of intimate storytelling voice that is “in the know.” He seems to have read every book, every journal, indeed every word published in the literary journalism universe. He can write with depth and insight, and often wit, about politics, the military, history, science, philosophy, and literature. He is the very definition of the life of the party.

Arguably is stunning in the sheer breadth of what he has covered over the last decade. Hitchens is most comfortable when writing about the world and not himself. His recently published memoir, Hitch-22 (Twelve, 2010), is an excellent book, but never completely escapes a kind of self-consciousness, and reveals Hitchens’ penchant for name-dropping. In Arguably, Hitchens is at his best, stabbing into the heart of the matters at hand, ripping apart facades and fabrications, and cutting to the bone of literary icons and posers.

His section on history, “All American,” assesses the legacies of literally every significant American from the Revolution forward: Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, John F. Kennedy, Upton Sinclair, Saul Bellow, John Updike, and his frequent sparring partner, Gore Vidal. Considering that most of the essays are brief, Hitchens dives in and brings us to the sharpest of points with energy and verve. His word pictures are often not pretty. “As president, Jefferson began to suffer intermittently from diarrhea (which he at first cured by what seems the counterintuitive method of hard horseback riding), and though he was unusually hale until his eightieth year, it was diarrhea and a miserable infection of the urinary tract that eventually carried him off.” Historical details that our teachers left out back in school. He speaks of Lincoln’s life long struggle with spelling and pronunciation, and details how the great president’s clothes were often shabby and ill-fitting.

Several figures make recurring appearances throughout the book. Hitchens has long been a fan of George Orwell, and the British writer is a touchstone for him. There is a deep and abiding connection between Orwell the essayist and Hitchens, and in this collection in particular that communion is acute. His interest in communism is also apparent as a through-line in many of the essays, as is his strong feeling that Saddam Hussein had to be removed and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were justified.

Hitchens makes no excuses for his beliefs, nor does he allow himself to be pigeonholed. Many people have been confounded by his latest forays into neocon territory, but Hitchens does not play favorites. He follows his heart and mind wherever they lead, and he appears to not care a whit whom he offends. Here is a guy who supports the war on terror, but also allowed himself to be water-boarded in an effort to determine if the procedure should be considered torture. It is quite clear from the title of the essay which way he comes down: “Believe Me, It’s Torture.”

In a collection of this magnitude, it is expected that there will be a few missed notes, but for the most part here, Hitchens is true to his contrarian nature, and a joy to read. He challenges us to be better readers, deeper thinkers, more worldly students, and he never panders or condescends. I take that back; he is not kind to idiots and liars, but they deserve what they get. Along the way, jihadists and terrorists also do not fare well. What I found most startling here is Hitchens’ love for his adopted country, America. However, any thoughts that he has mellowed or become sentimental should be left at the door.

Over the entire book hangs the pall of Hitchens’ battle with cancer. “I was informed by a doctor that I might have as little as another year to live,” he writes in the introduction. “In consequence, some of these articles were written with the full consciousness that they might be my very last.” Rest assured that Christopher Hitchens will go to his grave as one of the best social critics of the age, unbent, unapologetic, and razor sharp. Arguably, he is an enlightening voice in a darker age.

*Update 12/16/11: Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. He was 62. Please read this reflection on his life and writing by his good friend and Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter.

American Teacher Fights To Survive

2011-11-23T22:39:00.000-08:00

Competing for space in the American mind, which Allan Bloom famously declared closed more than twenty years ago, we have unemployment, a recessed economy, two wars, and a confederacy of dunces vying to be the next leader of the self-proclaimed “greatest country on earth.” Somewhere in the middle of that pack is American education. Every yahoo running for political office from dog catcher to president wants to be known as the education candidate. Yet once in office, those same politicians offer the old tired mantras of standardized test scores and teacher accountability. We must return America’s students to the top of the heap in math and science, they bray. Let’s hope they can read, too.

We have been treated to a number of documentaries in the local cinema over the last few years regarding our education problems in America. There was the much ballyhooed Waiting For “Superman,” (2010) by the people who brought us global warming and the Al Gore PowerPoint lecture; there were also a number of lesser known films like The Lottery (2010) and Teached (2011). Vanessa Roth and Brian McGinn have been flogging their take on the education crisis with American Teacher (2011).

The film follows the lives of several teachers as they navigate the emotional and difficult waters of a typical school year. To be fair, Roth and McGinn are not breaking new ground. The film, The First Year (2001), which aired on PBS, did a much better job of packing the emotional wallop of the daily life of an educator. That film was directed by Davis Guggenheim, who went on to do An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Waiting For “Superman.”

American Teacher was inspired by the Daniel Moulthrop, Ninive Clements Calegari, and Dave Eggers’ book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers (New Press, 2005). Eggers went on to help produce the film. Look, one would have had to be living under a rock for the last few years not to know that teachers are the republic’s version of the sacrificial lambs. They work for little pay, even less respect, and in dire circumstances to educate our children. We pay the big salaries to our corporate CEOs and professional athletes while our teachers put in eighty hour weeks and work part time at Home Depot. So the film tells us a story we already know and for which we can easily predict the outcome. However, the portions of American Teacher featuring Jamie Fidler and Erik Benner are exceptionally moving.

Fidler begins the film very pregnant while attempting to teach her class. She purchases her own supplies, and works endless hours for her students. She looks haggard and worn, and one has to wonder if her exhaustive preparation and teaching will harm her baby. Once she returns from giving birth, a miraculously short few weeks, we see her wandering the halls looking for an empty classroom or office in which to pump her breast milk. Other scenes show her spending her limited lunch break on the phone with her medical insurance carrier, determining the procedure for her upcoming pregnancy leave. But she is a diehard teacher through and through, a woman who is fiery and passionate about her work.

Benner works his time in a Texas classroom, while simultaneously coaching school teams and working evenings and weekends at the local Circuit City. He is a bear of a man, appearing to have fathomless reserves of energy. Then, his job at the electronics store is cut, and he moves to a tile and flooring emporium. His days are long and draining, and his hard work forces him to pay a price: the loss of his family. His marriage crumbles and he agonizes over whether to take on extra shifts or spend the time with his children.

Director Brian McGinn says that the film purposely avoids politics, or assailing any one party, such as teachers’ unions. This film does not participate in the same dust-up instigated by films like Waiting For “Superman.” They did not interview union leaders or charter school entrepreneurs. Education secretary Arne Duncan sneers his way through a comment on teachers, and Bill Gates performs his rumpled version of Steve Jobs on stage talking to an audience, but that’s it. Gates contributed some money to this production, says McGinn, but only at the end when the film was finished. He did not know if Gates had even watched it.

I wonder how many Americans will sit through another documentary about teaching. This country loves the feel-good stories, the films like Stand and Deliver (1988), Dangerous Minds (1995), and even To Sir With Love (1967), none of which were documentaries, but were purported to be based on true stories. The story of education, and its failure in America, defies the classic cinematic narrative. The audience wants the white hats and black hats, the cowboys and Indians. When the house lights come up, there must be a catharsis, and an upbeat ending. We want to know that we are on the right track, and that there’s a workable solution around the next bend. We do not like stories that are downers, and this is why so many films and television shows get the drama of the classroom wrong.

In American education, the happy ending is proving quite illusive. There are no easy solutions, no quick fixes. There’s graft and waste and mismanagement. There are slimy politicians and shady characters waiting to make a fast buck in the rush to privatize our schools. Meanwhile, the kids languish and suffer, and we fall down as a nation.

The film makes a big deal out of other countries who have better education systems. Although they fail to give much detail about what exactly they are doing that works, it seems like the best solution might be to copy what those nations are doing, and build on that. Instead, we get the almost lemming-like focus on standardized test scores, with the resulting cheating scandals when teachers teach to the test because they are always aware of the loaded gun pointed at their heads. Teachers in America kill themselves, buy their own supplies, work outrageous numbers of hours, forego family life, and in the end, find their jobs eliminated in the latest budget bloodbath.

We do not need another documentary to tell us how bad things are. We know: the system is rigged, the fix is in, and nothing ever changes. More and more, bright, compelling, excellent teachers find other careers that offer not only a decent salary, but a chance to work more than five years without a nervous breakdown. Americans do not really want to know the true story of education, because that one isn’t going to end well, and with everything else that is going wrong, we can’t stomach all that darkness.

Here There Are Only Ghosts

2011-11-09T22:09:00.000-08:00

For many of us, “Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is,” as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in 1937. It is in our sepia-toned memories of childhood that our futures are born. Never is this nostalgia for our remembrances of things past more evident than in our literature of reflection, the coming-of-age story so prevalent in our life of letters.

Giuseppe Tornatore, writer-director of the Italian film Cinema Paradiso (Miramax Films Presents, 1988; Miramax Classics, 2004), explores his remembrances of his post-war childhood through the experiences of Salvatore “Toto” Di Vita, a fictional, well-known movie director who is forced to re-examine his life’s journey upon the death of his mentor, Alfredo.

“Tornatore pays homage to the American, Italian, and European films that influenced him as a child and as a director,” Stanislao G. Pugliese writes in The American Historical Review. The film had a troubled, but ultimately successful history. The first cut was 185 minutes, and when shown “in 1988 at a small European festival…received a mixed response along with an ambiguous award for ‘best artistic contribution to the first part of a film,’” says Stephen Holden in The New York Times. Tornatore continued to work on the film, trimming it down to 150 minutes for general release in Italy. The cut did not do well at the box office. Returning to the editing bay, Tornatore cut it down to two hours in a last ditch effort to find an audience.

Holden quotes Tornatore: “This was the autobiographical film I had waited my whole life to make, and it felt like the failure of my life.” However, the two hour version was greeted with acclaim. “The shorter version proved a surprise hit at the 1989 Cannes International Film Festival,” Holden writes, “where it won the special jury prize. Cinema Paradiso went on to win the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for best foreign film.”

However, Tornatore was to have his director’s cut after all. He released an extended cut of his film in theaters in 2002. According to Bill Desowitz in the Los Angeles Times, “It’s like watching another movie. We get a sense of closure, and the story takes on greater depth and complexity. The disparity between movies and life becomes more ironic, and the great friendship between the young boy and Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), the local film projectionist who serves as his father figure is much darker.”

The shorter version plays to nostalgia. It is a whimsical film, full of the magic of cinema, and the humor and subtle irony of real life. However, the 2002 film is indeed richer, darker, and even more realistic. To examine this film as literature, as history, as a reflection of changing values, of developing technology, of culture itself, we must look closely at Tornatore’s cut of 2002.

Tornatore’s cut differs from the two hour version by adding about 48 minutes to the end of the film. Up until that point, the versions are basically the same.

The film opens with a long pull back shot of a flower pot on a sunny veranda overlooking the sea. Tornatore, throughout the film, makes good use of his location and the bright Mediterranean sun. He shot the film on location in his hometown of Bagheria, Sicily, (Giancaldo is the fictional town in the film), and also in Cefalu on the Tyrrhenian Sea.

As the shot pulls back, we see an elderly woman on the phone. She is looking for her son, Salvatore Di Vita. She has an urgent message for him, but she fails to locate him. Her daughter, sitting across the table from her, tells her to give up her search, but she knows her son would want to hear her message, so she persists.

The film cuts to a man driving through Roman streets at night. In his apartment, we see the weariness in his walk, and in his bedroom, the woman in his bed tells him his mother has called. Someone named Alfredo has died. The man is Salvatore Di Vita, and he lies awake thinking, and the film shifts into flashback.

We see life in a small Sicilian town, post-World War II. The Catholic Church is the supreme rule, even more powerful than the government. Salvatore is nicknamed Toto as a child, a small boy serving Mass in an ancient church. After the service, the priest goes to the town’s one movie theater, Cinema Paradiso, to preview the flicks that will be shown that week. Observed by Toto, the priest rings a bell during each intimate kissing scene, informing the projectionist of what he finds objectionable and what therefore must be edited out before the public sees the movie. This is our introduction to Alfredo, the projectionist, and his relationship with Toto. Alfredo is a middle-aged man with little education. He has become a father, or even grandfather figure to little Toto.

Tornatore does not delve too deeply into the historical background of the time period. He effectively alludes to the historical context. We see water rationing and a street vendor selling nylons, which could only be had at a premium after the war. Toto’s father has not returned from the front lines in Russia, and we are led to believe he is probably dead. This is later confirmed for us in a heartbreaking scene where Toto and his mother are informed of his death and walk home through the rubble of the bombed out town, passing movie posters for the Italian-dubbed version of Gone With The Wind.

Actually, the films we see playing at Cinema Paradiso serve to establish the timeline of the piece. “In recycling fragments of favorite movies, including Jean Renoir’s Lower Depths [Films Albatros, 1936], Luchino Visconti’s Terra Trema [Universalia Film, 1948], Fritz Lang’s Fury [MGM, 1936], and John Ford’s Stagecoach [United Artists, 1939], Mr. Tornatore treats them as beacons of enlightenment to a benighted culture riddled with fear and superstition,” says Holden.

Tornatore perfectly illustrates issues of class and economics in the film. The Bourgeois intellectuals sit in the balcony of the theater above the peasants, and one takes great pleasure in spitting on the rabble below. And from that rabble, we see something akin to Shakespeare’s groundlings. Some are illiterate. They fight, fall asleep, roar epithets at the screen, throw things (including a feces-laden diaper at the spitter), mimic the actions they see, speak the lines of their favorite films, have sex both intimate and illicit, and of course, laugh and cry all while the dream-life of celluloid plays on the big screen in front of them.

Out in the town square, we see a socialist denied a chance at work—“Go ask Stalin for a job,” he is told. When Toto’s friend, Peppino, leaves for Germany with his family, some kids refuse to say goodbye to him because his family is communist. A mentally ill man roams around screaming at people and claiming the square is his property. The Neapolitan Ciccio wins the football lottery, and a citizen remarks that “It’s always the northerners who are lucky!”

Old women wash tables. Children have their heads shaved because they “have a lice factory up there.” Then they are hosed down with bitter insecticide to finish off any remaining nits.

The centerpiece of this story, however, is the relationship between Alfredo and Toto. In the beginning, it is a tug-of-war: Toto wants to be in the projection booth, but Alfredo wants to keep him out. He bugs the older man for the kissing clips that Alfredo must remove. Alfredo promises him he can have them one day, but for now, they must remain in the booth. So the boy steals pieces of film to play with at home, reenacting scenes verbatim while holding them up to the lamp light. These are his movies, his way of playing and make-believe. When the highly flammable film accidentally catches fire—it was made of nitrocellulose up until the mid-twentieth century—Toto’s hobby nearly costs his sister her life. For that, and his almost unhealthy obsession with movies, Toto is banned from the projection booth and Alfredo is admonished for allowing the boy the freedom to steal film.

The punitive sentence does not last long. Toto schemes to get back into the booth, and good thing, too, as the small boy saves Alfredo’s life when the projector catches fire and the theater burns down. Ciccio with his lottery wealth returns to rebuild the movie house, ending the era of Church censorship and control.

Post-fire, Toto runs the booth himself until Alfredo returns, blind and scarred. He encourages his protégé to stay in school, knowing from experience that a lack of education traps one in places like Giancaldo. Alfredo is the classic character ignorant of book learning, but rich in the wisdom of life and experience. “Now that I lost my sight,” he tells Toto, “I see better.”

As time passes, Toto becomes a teenager, and Cinema Paradiso takes on a more mature, titillating atmosphere. Ciccio books racier and more violent films. A prostitute operates openly in a closet, and Toto samples her wares. The manager catches boys masturbating to the nudity in a film, and Alfredo reveals that when his first wife died, no one told him until he was done with his shift so the evening’s showings would not be interrupted. A small time gangster is murdered in his seat. This is a gritty movie house, not nearly as magical as Toto’s childhood Cinema Paradiso.

Technology also advances. A new type of film doesn’t burn, and Alfredo laments that “Progress always comes too late.” He continues to offer Toto wisdom and advice, especially after he meets Elena. While watching some film footage Toto, himself, shot, Alfredo has him describe Elena to him. “Ah, the blue-eyed ones are the worst,” the older man tells the lovesick teenager.

Toto’s relationship with Elena develops slowly. She comes from a wealthy family, and they do not take kindly to their daughter dating a poor projectionist from a single-parent family. Again, we are reminded of class struggles in post-war Italy. Even as the 1950s progress, we see reflected in the life of Giancaldo the struggle to recover and rebuild. Cars and buses travel through the town square with herds of sheep. The old ways and the new do not meld easily.

In a particularly moving and poignant scene, Alfredo and Toto sit in a doorway. As the camera slowly moves in, Alfredo passionately relates the story of the soldier who falls in love with a princess. To prove his love, the soldier agrees to wait outside her window for a hundred nights. The weather beats him down, “birds shat on him,” and by the ninety-ninth night, “He didn’t even have the strength to sleep.” The soldier abandons his vigil on the final evening, never to return, and letting go of his princess forever. When Toto asks what this story means, Alfredo says he has no idea. The power of the story, the poetry with which Alfredo tells it, and Tornatore’s deft camera work, enhance the scene with cinematic brilliance. The comic payoff is that neither knows what the story means.

Toto is so impressed with the story that he emulates it outside Elena’s window. Elena has told him she does not love him, so he decides to prove his love for her in hopes of winning her heart. It is sentimental and romantic, and Tornatore revels in it. Toto ends his one hundred day vigil at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. There are fireworks in the sky, and the citizens of Giancaldo throw plates and dishes out of their windows to crash in the streets. Out with the old, in with the new. Alas, but Elena never appears. Later, at Cinema Paradiso, she comes to Toto, kisses him, and swears her love in an emotionally cinematic embrace. The projector spins in the background as Toto and Elena twirl together. This is the marriage of cinema and life, two worlds existing in the same space in the projection booth. One is only a projection of reality, a fiction, while the two lovers are real, and although this would make for the perfect fade out at the end of a movie, in real life, things do not always work out this way.

The lovers’ relationship continues to face obstacles. At the theater, television arrives, and Ciccio invests in a receiver to show the broadcasts on the big screen. Alfredo expresses his disgust with game show programming. During the summer heat, Toto shows films outdoors in a seaside amphitheater, and the cinema continues as the prominent medium of mass entertainment and culture.

Toto and Elena are eventually separated when he is drafted and she is sent off to school. In a last ditch effort to see her before they both leave, Toto abandons the projection booth, leaving Alfredo in charge, while he goes to search for Elena. He promises to return before the end of the film, since Alfredo cannot see to change reels. However, Toto fails in his quest, and when he returns, Alfredo tells him it is better. He must follow his destiny and not hold back for a girl whose parents do not want the relationship to continue.

The largest leap forward for Giancaldo comes while Toto is serving in the military. Upon his return, someone new is working the projection booth. The town is drier, more deserted and desolate, more bleak and small, especially for Toto. And Elena has disappeared. All of his letters are returned, and he has no way of locating her. Alfredo has become a recluse, rarely venturing out from his stifling rooms. Toto goes to see him and asks why he does not speak much anymore, or get out more often. “Sooner or later,” the old man tells him, “a time comes when it’s all the same, whether you talk or not.”

He takes his elderly mentor down to the seaside, and there, in a field of twisted ships’ anchors, Alfredo tells him he must flee Giancaldo. The land is cursed, he says, and there’s nothing left for Toto there. “The thread is broken,” Alfredo sighs. Everything has changed. When Toto asks what actor said that in what movie, Alfredo tells him nobody said it. They are Alfredo’s words. “Life isn’t like in the movies,” he says. “Life is much harder.” With intensity, the blind man leans toward Toto. “I don’t want to hear you talk anymore. I want to hear others talking about you.”

Tornatore cuts back to the present of the film with Salvatore sitting up in the dark of his bedroom, remembering. He cannot sleep because he is lost in the past. He jump cuts back to the train station in Giancaldo as young Toto leaves. Alfredo tells him not to come back, and as he pulls him close in an embrace, whispers, “Whatever you end up doing, love it, the way you loved the projection booth at Cinema Paradiso.”

This action leads to an airplane landing on Sicily. Toto, Mr. Salvatore Di Vita, has come home for Alfredo’s funeral. True to his mentor’s wishes, he has not been back for thirty years. His elderly mother greets him, and he finds his bedroom preserved like a museum. His mother tells him she remodeled the house with the money he sent her.

In his old room, Tornatore sweeps his camera lens over the pictures on the wall, accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s lyrically sad score. There is the lost father, Toto’s first Holy Communion, and finally, the child Toto with Alfredo. The camera lingers before we cut back to see Salvatore’s eyes welling with tears.

At the funeral, Salvatore sees all the old faces from Cinema Paradiso, out to pay their last respects to the projectionist. They are grey and weathered by time. They pass the theater, now closed and dilapidated, about to be torn down to build a parking lot. Nobody goes to the theater anymore, a wizened Ciccio tells him. “The old movie business is just a memory.” The rise of technology killed Cinema Paradiso—television, videos, et cetera.

Later, in an eerie, haunting moment, Salvatore goes inside the shuttered theater. As he walks through the destroyed interior, he hears the cheers of the audiences of the past, the echoes of history through the dusty curtain of memory. Jacques Perrin’s acting is superb here. With simple expressions, no dialogue, and Morricone’s melancholy score, he conveys every heartache his character experiences in his walk through the abandon movie house.

From here, Tornatore’s additional 48 minutes come into play, and the differences between the 120 minute and the 174 minute versions are clear. In the shorter version, Elena never appears again and is a wistful memory for Salvatore. Cinema Paradiso is demolished and the famous director returns to his life in Rome.

In the 2002, 174 minute film, Salvatore sees a girl on the street who appears to be Elena as he remembers her. He follows her, and wonders if she is somehow connected to Elena. Back at his mother’s house, he watches his films of Elena taken back when he was a younger man. It is clear she was, and is, the love of his life, a colossal missed opportunity that has haunted him now into middle age.

He sits at the dining room table to have a talk with his mother. He apologizes for not having come home sooner. She tells him she understands that he had to go away. “Here there are only ghosts,” she says with glistening eyes. Then she drops a bombshell—when she calls him, she knows none of the women who answer truly love him. She wishes he was settled, in love, happy.

Salvatore continues to follow the girl and discovers she is Elena’s daughter. His former love is now married to one of Salvatore’s school friends. He calls her and they meet up in the field of anchors where Alfredo told him to leave Giancaldo. There, in Elena’s car, Salvatore tells her of his lifetime love of her. She tells him that she came to Cinema Paradiso that day to say goodbye, but Alfredo told her that he, Salvatore, did not want to see her anymore. Dejected, she left a note for him, but since he never got in touch with her, she had no choice but to go on with her life. Alfredo, he realizes, may have thwarted his happiness for the good of his future. According to Bill Desowitz “Alfredo seems to betray Toto since it is he who pulls the strings of the young man’s life to the point of making him sacrifice the great love of his life on the altar of another love, that for the cinema.” This renders the Alfredo-Toto relationship in much darker tones. The story shifts from sentimentality, comedy, and nostalgia, to bittersweet nostalgic postmodernism.

The reunion scene ends with a tryst. Tornatore backs his camera off, and we see the car in the distance, illuminated by the spot lights from the sea coast, and we hear the crashing of waves. As Elena makes clear in subsequent scenes, this long-delayed union of these two characters is a one-time thing. Cinema Paradiso, like the possibility of their lives together, is demolished, and Salvatore returns to Rome.

Giuseppe Tornatore maintains his famous conclusion in both versions. Alfredo has left a reel of film for him. Back in his screening room in Rome, Salvatore has the film cued up, and sits in the empty theater to watch. What follows is a montage of all the intimate scenes of lovers kissing that Alfredo had to remove from the movies by order of the Church. It is a beautiful denouement, cutting back and forth from the action on the screen to Salvatore’s face. Once again, Jacques Perrin’s expressions and Morricone’s score create magic. The scene distills the power of cinema to move us and reveal the scope of human emotion. It is a sad, brilliant, bittersweet moment worthy of its place in the pantheon of exquisite cinematic moments.

When analyzing film, we find three levels of quality: flicks, movies, and films. Flicks are lighthearted, explosion-and-car chase extravaganzas, or horror pictures; movies might be character-driven, romantic comedies. Films are serious works akin to literature, and therefore can be analyzed with a critical eye like good novels or poetry. Cinema Paradiso is most decidedly a film, especially Tornatore’s director’s cut.

There are several key aspects of the film that we can examine using literary terms and ideas. Tornatore is a master of literary symbolism in film. His central character is Salvatore Di Vita—“salvation of life” in translation—his doppelganger who shares Tornatore’s love of film. He begins with Salvatore transitioning to memory after learning of Alfredo’s death. The journey into the past is symbolized and initiated by wind chimes hanging outside his bedroom window. Tornatore imposes the shadow of the chimes, gently buffeted in the breeze, across the actor’s face even as their melodic tinkling can be heard.

The Catholic Church plays a key role in the life of Giancaldo as the moral and instructive force in daily events. Tornatore uses the icons and statuary of the religion to reinforce the presence of the Church in every day life. We see a Sacred Heart statue in a priest’s closet, and when Cinema Paradiso burns, Tornatore gives us a tight shot of the Virgin Mary surrounded and consumed by flames. The fire ends the Church’s influence on the theater and lessens its control of the town. The priest no longer censors the movies scheduled to play there, and Ciccio brings in racier and more erotic films when the theater reopens.

In the summer scene where Toto as a young man projects films outside in the amphitheater, he is lovesick for Elena. He can see nothing else in his life. “Will this summer never end?” he sighs. The film he is showing is the story of The Odyssey. The scene is Ulysses’ battle with the one-eyed Cyclopes, who, like Toto, can only see the world one way and suffers for this lack of vision.

The piece de resistance of symbolism in the film is the anchor scene where Alfredo tells Toto he must leave Giancaldo. The ships’ anchors take the shape of crucifixes. This small town, provincial life will keep Toto from achieving his dreams, and if he stays there, he will sacrifice his future for others, much as Christ did on the cross. It is ironic and symbolic that Alfredo tells Toto he must flee Giancaldo and never look back amid a field of anchors used to moor ships in the harbor.

In the same way, when famous movie director Salvatore returns home for Alfredo’s funeral, his mother rushes to the gate to greet him. She drops her knitting, but a thread catches on her clothing. Tornatore gives us a tight shot of the cloth unraveling as she hurries downstairs to greet her son. Our lives are often unraveled by our past. This also plays into Alfredo’s earlier admonishment to his protégé that he must leave Giancaldo because the “thread is broken.” However, the image of the unraveling cloth tells us that we can never entirely break free of the past.

Tornatore also uses themes to deepen the resonance of his work. Love, of course, is most prominent. Unlike other more religious views of paradise, Cinema Paradiso is a paradise of imagination, of dreams and schemes played in celluloid on a forty foot screen. Meanwhile, all strata of human life are on display on the floor, the balcony, in the projection booth, and in the vice-laden nooks and crannies of the theater foyer. The theater is all of human life, brimming over with the stench and beauty, the familial and erotic, the lonely sadness and communal joy of being alive.

Religion, specifically the Catholic Church, is a thread that runs through the story. Bert Cardullo, writing in The Hudson Review, says “To be sure, the Catholic Church is still a force to be reckoned with in Giancaldo—we see the villagers at confession, at Mass, and at funerals, and Toto, himself is an altar boy to the vigilant Father Adelfio—but the Church must be content to attract believers with the promise of salvation in the hereafter, whereas the cinema can lure them with the guarantee of salvation from the here and now.” Cardullo sees the movie house and the Church as “two faiths” that “manage to exist side by side.”

In the face of Jacques Perrin, we see the theme of regret clearly in play. It is in this theme that we find the film’s “richly textured realism,” as Rita Kempley notes in The Washington Post. In the character of Salvatore, we are made aware of the sacrifice one makes to achieve his dreams. Often, this regret is a barrier to total happiness and satisfaction in life. “Toto had to give up something in order to get something,” Cardullo writes, “had to give up the community of tiny Giancaldo for the individual achievement of a career in the wide world, and had to leave the village, paradoxically, in order to discover the extent of its benign influence on him.” It is debatable whether one can go home again. Tornatore posits that we can, but we will find neither the place nor ourselves the same.

The biggest regrets come in Salvatore’s feelings for Elena. Their separation, although necessary to his success in the future, was not of his own choosing. There is a point in life when missed opportunities transition into fate—things necessary to our advancement into the future. Salvatore had to let go of Elena to seize his destiny. Yet in the last 48 minutes of the film, we see the price of this separation. That is what makes the director’s cut a better film than the earlier, shorter version.

Lawrence Kasdan, in his film, Grand Canyon (20th Century Fox, 1991), writes that “All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” Indeed, even the most exotic of science fiction films tells us about ourselves. When it is done well, film tells us what it means to be alive and what the purpose is of our existence. Cinema brings us to the altar of sorrow and joy, loneliness and communion, bitter vitriol and love. Sitting in the dark, staring up at the screen, we witness the scope and heft of our lives. This is who we are, lest we ever forget where we’ve been, or what we have dreamed for ourselves.

Cardullo concludes that “Cinema Paradiso, then, is a paean to the cinema at the same time that it is an elegy for the cinema, a bittersweet film whose bittersweetness is underscored by Ennio Morricone’s music, which neatly combines the pensive with the buoyant, and Blasco Giurato’s cinematography.” Let us not forget the brilliant writing and direction of Giuseppe Tornatore. This is his film and his parallel universe, and his work ultimately leaves us glowing in the warmth of human experience.

Film can be a reference to history, a pageant dedicated to the spirit of humanity and the human condition. Film can be literature and a window on a culture. Cinema Paradiso is all these things and more.

So, after Alfredo is gone, and the substance of memory has turned to dust, Cinema Paradiso, like all films, must end. The screen fades and the house lights come up. We are startled out of our reverie. Off we go, into the harsh light of our lives, leaving behind the ghosts and landscapes of a parallel universe, the tender kisses of lovers, and the rustling leaves of regret. We are gently reminded that, like all movies, we, too, end. And so it goes.

"Saint Cinema" by Bert Cardullo, The Hudson Review (Autumn, 1990).

“Movies: A Deeper Vision of ‘Paradiso’” by Bill Desowitz, Los Angeles Times 13 June 2002.

"A New ‘Cut’ Only Deepens The Nostalgia" by Stephen Holden, The New York Times 09 June 2002.

"Cinema Paradiso" by Rita Kempley, Washington Post 16 Feb. 1990.

"Untitled" by Stanislao G. Pugliese, The American Historical Review (April, 2001).

One Day I Will Write About This Place

2011-11-05T18:38:00.000-07:00

It is always interesting to pick up literature originating in another culture and find echoes of our own. In that spirit, I was intrigued by Binyavanga Wainaina’s coming-of-age memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (Graywolf Press, 2011), set on another continent and within a completely different culture.

Wainaina writes about growing up in Kenya, the tensions among tribes and factions, his own mental breakdowns and inadequacies, and finally, his triumph upon finding his path in life centered on the twin suns of writing and literature. Even in his darkest moments, it is reading that saves him, and writing that allows him to capture the fertile decadence of his African life. Wainaina writes how he loses himself in literature, devouring books like a man steeped in hunger. This rabid reading habit comes at the expense of his social life and education. “I do not concentrate in class,” he says, “but I read everything I can touch.”

The echoes of American cultural influence come in the form of television. He cites cultural icons like the 1970s TV series, The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors, reciting the show’s distinctive opening narration: “Steve. Austin. A me-aan brrely alive,” he writes in dialect. “Gennlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the tek-nalagee. We can build the world’s frrrrst bi-anic man.”

His experiences in Kenyan schools also echo American institutions. There are the tests that act as gateways to universities and higher education. There are the expectations of his parents that he will choose something lucrative, and their pressure on him to do something with his life. He struggles to find his own path.

In the first two-thirds of the book, Wainaina adopts a highly poetic, fragmentary style of writing. He mixes up descriptive words and sensory perceptions, making for some stunning prose. He speaks of his mother’s voice “like shards of water and streams of glass.” Examples of sound description include, “One bee does not sound like a swarm of bees. The world is divided into the sounds of onethings and the sounds of manythings. Water from the showerhead streaming onto a shampooed head is manything splinters of falling glass, ting ting ting.” He uses creative juxtapositions of adjectives and modifiers as well as interesting combinations and spellings of words.

His poetry is beautiful and effective especially when he writes of his reading life. He closes his eyes to the hot African sun, only to open them a few seconds later and return to his reading. “If I turn back to my book,” he writes, “the letters jumble for a moment, then they disappear into my head, and word-made flamingos are talking and wearing high heels, and I can run barefoot across China, and no beast can suck me in, for I can run and jump farther than they can.”

His language is mesmerizing, intricate, crystalline, simply beautiful. “Science is smaller than music, than the patterns of the body; the large confident world of sound and body gathers. If my mind and body are quickening, lagging behind is a rising anxiety of words.” He captures the rituals of the Catholic Church, which he says are “all about having to kneel and stand when everybody else kneels and stands, and crossing and singing with eyebrows up to show earnestness before God, and open-mouthed dignity to receive the bread.” By far the best line is the one where he assesses his fear of ending up as a school teacher, something he calls “A fate worse than country music.”

Occasionally, the language can be overdone, too obscure and obtuse for its own good. An example: “The sun is the deep yellow of a free-range egg, on the verge of bleeding its yolk all over the sky.” An egg does not “free-range,” only the hen laying it. I am not sure a supermarket egg might not be able to bleed the sky yellow just as competently.

Wainaina does not shy away from his more difficult moments: his breakdowns where he withdraws from everything, including his family, to hide away and read books, avoiding responsibilities or facing his own failures. These difficulties lead to statements of startling wisdom. “If there is a miracle in the idea of life,” he writes, “it is this: that we are able to exist for a time, in defiance of chaos.” He manages to get a handle on his “chaos” and emerge as a writer and journalist.

In the last third of the book, he shifts to a more concrete language as he struggles to write and publish. Noticeably, the tension increases. He realizes the purpose of his journey. “It often feels like an unbearable privilege—to write. I make a living from simply taking all those wonderful and horrible patterns in my past and making them new and strong. I know people better. Sometimes I want to stop writing because I can’t bear the idea that it may one day go away. Sometimes I feel I would rather stop, before it owns me completely. But I can’t stop.” The emotional peak comes when he returns to life and embraces family and country, no longer afraid of the dichotomy. It is then that he decides that “One day I will write about this place.”

The book is by turns moving, poetic, full of grace, tinged by anger and humor. Like the African art that adorns the cover, the book revels in the color, the bloodshed, the tribal conflicts that are so much a part of Africa today. Out of the heat and dust, we are indelibly marked by Binyavanga Wainaina’s poetic prose. His words are infinitely earthy, primordial, ethnic. Yet, his book is filled with a tragic, desperate beauty. His story is that of a young man developing a life of the mind while never truly escaping home.

Personal Matters

2011-10-29T19:42:00.000-07:00

I spend my days working with individual writers on papers for their college classes. For the most part, these papers are research-based analysis of topics within the disciplines of sociology, medicine, and psychology. I spend time reading through the essays, marking them up, correcting grammar and format, and making suggestions on how to bring out the strengths and minimize the weaknesses in the writer’s work. I have, however, learned to go easy on one aspect I always find missing from scientific research and analysis: the first person pronoun “I.” Most teachers do not allow the use of “I.” “You must be objective,” they tell the students. “Only the facts and your analysis.”

Some of the papers this semester focused on the film, Mysterious Skin (2004), a rather intense and graphic depiction of child sexual abuse and its effects on the lives of two boys. Many of the students found the film disturbing on many levels, and a few struggled to even write about it with any kind of depth or discussion, subconsciously trying to avoid confronting the horrific acts depicted in the film. The startling realization I came to when speaking with each writer is that many of them had experienced or witnessed some kind of abusive situation, either sexual, physical, or verbal, and the movie served to dredge up those memories and refresh the trauma.

When it came to writing an analysis, the students were asked to take on the case of the two leads and discuss how they would approach the situation as social workers. In their essays, the students were to write in third person—“a therapist should…”—and avoid reacting on a purely visceral, personal level. To show anger or any emotional reaction could make the patient shut down, or feel as if some kind of judgment was being rendered.

But here, I have a problem. I understand the need for an academic approach, an objective scientific stance when observing a case. However, as a writer, this goes against the grain. The personal is always important, even when it is subconscious.

A journalistic essay requires the who, what, where, when why, and how, the solid lead, the salient facts, the descriptive details. In true third person objective journalism, personal feelings about the events must be left out. Yet, is this practically possible? A writer can choose which facts to emphasize, which, in a way, can evoke emotions in the reader. Through an objective, carefully organized telling of the facts, the journalist can subtly influence the effect on the reader of the writing.

Readers of journalism are seeing the story through the writer’s eyes. It is the world “as seen by,” and even reaction to a film clip of a news event can be influenced by the editing of the tape. Often, journalists will say, “I want to be a fly on the wall, a neutral observer of the story.” By his very presence in the space, the journalist alters the scene.

Writing is a personal act. Even a “just-the-facts” rendering has strands of the personal buried in it, and the personal matters. If the writer removes herself from the page, if the writing is merely an academic exercise, readers will turn away. So, how does one bring in the personal, and how much “personal response” should be allowed onto the page before objectivity is corrupted?

Writers are entitled to an opinion if they have done the homework—read the text in question, read articles and research about the subject, witnessed the event, and/or thought about it and considered all points of view. Too many teachers tell students, “You have no right to an opinion. You need to listen to me because I am the expert, and you are only a”—insert here: child, amateur, etc.—and thus begins the “expert lecture” where students tune out and check their Facebook page while the sage on the stage drones on and on.

Good writers find a way to write from the personal to the world. A good personal essayist resonates with readers. The writing strikes a chord. A narcissist resonates only with himself. He whines and complains, but in the end, doesn’t give a shit about the rest of the world. He’s only interested in airing his grievances and showing how smart he is.

Joan Didion, one of my writing heroes, was taught that she was the least important person in the room, and she believes this role serves her well in her job as a journalist. It is okay to be unobtrusive, but a writer is always present. The writer’s eyes see the world for us. She is the witness. That is the success of the writing—the reader feels the experience as if he were present. That’s not narcissism; that’s good writing. Didion also insists that she writes to find out what she thinks. Writing is always about self-discovery. The additional obligation is to bend that revelation so that readers discover something as well. Good writing must resonate. That, in the end, is the only criteria that matters.

We are all on a journey—separate and together—and that journey has a finite end. We are singular in the way we live as part of the plurality. It is a paradox. Therefore, writing is not about the “me” or the “other.” It is the singular “I” or “eye.”

For example, the student writing about theories of hospice care for her nursing course should not avoid the experiences she had while interning as a hospice nurse. This could make for a fascinating essay as well. How can she bring in the “I,” (eye) to her research essay? It will take a bit of slight of hand, and a clever disguise, but her direct experiences with the theories in practice are too valuable to leave out. So, the writer must work to bring some of what she saw into the essay without compromising the third person objective research.

In the end, writing in a vacuum without the “I” (eye) is pounding sand. It is mental masturbation, the ultimate narcissism. It’s showing off. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Leaving out the “I” can actually be narcissistic. But it is true. That kind of writing is stillborn, vapid, mere facts without context. Like a masturbatory experience, it has a beginning, middle and climax, but the writer still wakes up alone, bereft of the communal experience of being alive. In the end, it is the personal that fosters the connections to the readers. Good writing is the solitary tone that is universal, the sacred sound that resonates with all existence. In the end, it is the personal that matters most.

Selling (And Saving) Catholic Schools

2011-10-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

According to Monsignor Charles Pope, writing from the Archdiocese of Washington this past summer, “over 6,000 [Catholic] schools have closed since 1970.”

Andy Smarick, in National Affairs (Issue Number 7, Spring, 2011) tells us that the decade of the 1970s saw 1,700 schools close. He goes on to say that Catholic schools are as American as George Washington, and were here before the Revolution began. In fact, he says, “these schools long pre-date the American founding.” The first Catholic school, started by Franciscans, opened in Florida, circa 1606. The Jesuits “founded a preparatory school for boys in Newton, Maryland” in 1677. “In the early 1800s, parochial schools—those affiliated with parishes—emerged and became the foundation for Catholic elementary schools.”

Across the country and around the world, millions of students have been educated in Catholic institutions. They have gone on to give back to the world as doctors, lawyers, artists, thinkers, and business leaders. A Catholic education is synonymous with higher test scores, greater achievement, and effective learning. And all of this was done on a shoe string budget, and with none of the bloated bureaucracy of public education. These teachers taught values, ethics, moral codes, as well as Latin, mathematics, literature, English grammar, government, history, biology, and all the sciences. Students graduated from Catholic high schools prepared for the rigors of college.

Today however, Catholic schools are in trouble. “Dwindling enrollment and other challenges have decimated urban Catholic schools nationwide…” writes Carla Rivera in the September 27, 2011 edition of the Los Angeles Times. The days of classrooms staffed by underpaid nuns are over. Now schools come with lay teaching faculty, men and women who must be paid a decent salary and receive basic benefits like health care and retirement. The cost per pupil is also on the rise. Education costs are climbing, and the reasonable tuition of most parish schools is not so reasonable anymore, especially if one or both parents are out of work, like many Americans across the country. There is competition from Charter schools and non-religious private institutions. So-called “helicopter parents” examine every facet of their child’s education, and are quick to jump ship if they think the school across town might offer the key to the Ivy League. So education is a competitive market, and Catholic schools can no longer afford to rest on their laurels.

So it is with that in mind that a crowd of Catholic school teachers, administrators, parents, and support staff gathered at Bishop Alemany High School in Los Angeles this past weekend to participate in a marketing think tank led by Dennis Polito and Caron Willits. The facilitators were part of a program called MAX LA, or Marketing Archdiocese Excellence in Los Angeles. These men and women who worked a long week teaching kids, grading papers, planning lessons, and running schools became Mad Men, marketing their schools in an effort to boost enrollment and grab the brass ring of financial stability.

Saturday’s topic was preschool outreach. How do we bring in more students? How do we keep the students we have? How do we get the word out about the quality education we offer? With a lot of energy and no cynicism, every school representative in the room focused on finding answers to these and other questions.

Participants willingly shared ideas and strategies: updated websites help, and teachers, even with all their other duties, should have class pages that are refreshed weekly with news items and pictures. Social media now plays a greater role: if a school is not on Facebook or Twitter, someone better get on it.

People who normally talk about books and papers and lesson plans spoke succinctly about “branding” and community outreach. Some spoke of unique and clever strategies to recruit students, like visiting local mommy hangouts and selling DVDs of school activities to parents in the hope that they will pass along copies to extended family members. Never under-estimate word-of-mouth.

One principal advised participants to make creative payment arrangements with parents who struggle financially. “Just get them in the door,” she urged. Some schools stay open during the holidays as a way of offering extended day care. Another principal said she opened the doors to her school at six in the morning and did not close them until six at night so children could stay until parents finished work. One school offered incentives to students to plan news-worthy events, and when the local channel sent a reporter, the kids got free dress.

The high point came when Archdiocese Chancellor of Schools, Sister Mary Elizabeth Galt, B.V.M., announced that for the first time in ten years, enrollment in diocese schools was up. “We were losing a thousand students a year,” she said. But the marketing efforts begun last year seemed to be making a difference. Sister then drew a name from a hat and sent one educator home with a $250 gift card to an office supply store.

In an age of failing schools and deep concerns about the future of American education, these participants were willing to devote weekends and additional hours to writing ad slogans, creating brochures, and formulating grant proposals. That is the new paradigm of teaching today, and even though a Catholic education has been the gold standard for decades and should need no huckstering to save a school from closure, teachers, administrators, parents and staff are more than willing to step to the plate and sell. It may be the only way to save their schools.

Logo courtesy of National Catholic Education Association website.

Blue Mornings

2011-10-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

This piece was written for the Daily News in Los Angeles on the occasion of the paper’s centennial.

I will never forget flying through the dawn. In many ways, those mornings in the eastern San Fernando Valley delivering the Daily News shaped my entire life.

I started my delivery service when the paper published on selected days of the week. By the end of my time, the Daily News was a seven-day-a-week publication with a unique valley slant. There were no mornings off for us carriers. I pedaled my ten-speed furiously through the neighborhood, racing the sun to get all my papers delivered and get back home to get ready for school. My salary helped pay for my Catholic school education and relieve the financial burden on my working class parents.

My daily journey was an adventure, fraught with a hint of danger and full of hidden secrets in the darkness.

There was the vicious mutt that stalked me. He ran loose in the neighborhood and would lie in wait to launch himself out of the dark shrubbery to attack me with gleaming fangs and horrible snarl. His teeth nipped at my frantic legs, and once he had a hold of my jean cuff, he tried to tear me off my bike. As a twelve year old who had just read about Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, I feared being torn apart by this beast. In a last ditch effort to survive, I loaded a plastic squirt gun with ammonia, and when the dog leaped at me the next morning, I managed to nail him in the face. He slid away into the darkness, never to harass me again.

There was the body on the sidewalk. I nearly ran over him and thought he was dead. Staring down at him, my chest heaving, I heard him moan and realized, as my nose registered the stench, that he was only drunk.

There were the mishaps, mostly due to my bad aim and weak throwing arm. The guy who demanded his paper on his porch or he wouldn’t pay me received a slamming wake-up call every 5 AM as I furiously hurled his paper against his screen door. Until I developed some skill, papers landed on roofs, in flower beds, and one time, through an open window with a crash of broken dishes and who knows what else.

Little did I know, when I returned home smeared with ink and smelling of newsprint, those days of delivery, in rain, cold, heat, and dust would lead me to a life centered on words as a writer and English teacher. But they did, and I would not trade the memories for anything.

I’d like to think that somewhere in another dimension of time and space, that twelve year old boy is still pedaling his way through another blue morning. In that place, people still read newspapers, children feel safe at school and on the streets of their neighborhoods, and a child flies through the dawn’s early light, launching a bundle of newsprint through the air to land on the front porch to inform the world.

Photo: Getty Images

La Seduction

2011-09-24T22:56:00.000-07:00

Americans have their stereotypical views of the French, which is why every American should read Elaine Sciolino’s book, La Seduction: How The French Play The Game Of Life (Times Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2011).

Sciolino is the former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times and was once a foreign correspondent for Newsweek. Currently, she lives in Paris with her husband, an American lawyer who practices with a French law firm.

Her goal in the book is to examine the way seduction is an integral component of French culture and behavior. She begins with the custom of the male kissing the hand of a woman to whom he has been introduced. The kiss is not romantic or passionate; it is offered like Americans offer each other their hands in greeting, but it is intimate and unique to French custom. It is all part of the way France integrates the fine art of seduction into every day life.

“In English,” Sciolino writes, “‘seduce’ has a negative and exclusively sexual feel; in French, the meaning is broader. The French use ‘seduce’ where the British and Americans might use ‘charm’ or ‘attract’ or ‘engage’ or ‘entertain’…The term might refer to someone who never fails to persuade others to his point of view. He might be gifted at caressing with words, at drawing people close with a look, at forging alliances with flawless logic.”

France remains an enigma for many Americans. This was never more clear than in the days leading to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which France opposed. French President Jacques Chirac saw his country’s approval rating in the U.S. fall from 80 percent to 30 percent. “French products were boycotted,” Sciolino writes. “French wine was poured down kitchen sinks. Vacations to France were canceled. French fries became ‘freedom fries’ in the House of Representatives’ cafeteria.” Sciolino characterizes the incident as “the most serious diplomatic crisis between the two countries in nearly a half century.”

In France, philosophers appear on television and enjoy the status of rock stars. The country vigorously embraces a café culture, of thought over action, and the life of the mind is prized far more than physical effort.

Arguably, France has one of the most distinct cultures on the globe. However, some might argue that it is in decline. Sciolino believes this as well. “And yet the French still imbue everything they do with a deep affection for sensuality, subtlety, mystery, and play,” she writes. “Even as their traditional influence in the world shrinks, they soldier on. In every arena of life they are determined to stave off the onslaught of decline and despair. They are devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and the need to be artful, exquisite, witty, and sensuous, all skills in the centuries-old game called seduction.”

Emblematic of the need for seduction in every day life is the palace at Versailles, to which Sciolino devotes a chapter. She calls the wondrous chateau “France’s national monument—to love and to power.” She interviews a gardener there who wrote a book about the palace which included such details as: “the famous actress who loved to visit there to expose herself; the older politician who had sex in the garden with a young woman whom he had tied to a tree; the elderly couple who complained when one of [the] gardeners fell from a tree, landing on them as they were in the throes of lovemaking.”

She devotes a chapter to the magic of the Eiffel Tower, explaining the complex method of repainting the monument every seven years. To complete the job takes sixty tons of paint. The color formula is a state secret, but Sciolino learns that there are subtle differences in shade moving up the tower: light color on the bottom moving to darker tones at the top to create an optical illusion of a uniform look.

What baffles most Americans, however, is the behavior of the French. “For the French,” Sciolino says, “life is rarely about simply reaching the goal. It is about the leisurely art of pursuing it and persuading others to join in.” America is a land of finished projects, of goals realized. At the end of the day, we want to see accomplishment, whereas the French are content to let it ride, especially in appreciation of the journey.

Sciolino believes that as deep as the work ethic is embedded in American culture, the life of the mind is imperative to the French. She writes, “France’s history and literature reflect centuries of crafting ideas and intellectual concepts. The French have long pushed to persuade the rest of the world to consider and even adopt them. Modern philosophy originated in France, with Descartes. The eighteenth-century French philosophes—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot—forged a set of values for society that gave preeminence to reason, democracy, and freedom. In the twentieth century, existentialism bloomed with Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.” France cannot escape its mind-life anymore than America can abandon its obsession with achieving goals and objectives.

Tourists, especially, have differing reactions to the French and their culture. Both men and women in France are expected to please each other on the street—men by verbally complimenting a woman for her beauty, and women by receiving the compliment and enjoying the attention. On American streets, this is tantamount to sexual harassment, the wolf whistle of the working man to the unfortunate beautiful woman pedestrian who happens by the job site. Americans are put off by French behavior. The confusion, says Sciolino, has to do with a smile. “Smiling is complicated in France. Americans are accustomed to smiling at strangers; the French—particularly Parisians—are not. This helps explain why some Americans find Parisians rude.”

By far, the most interesting chapters in the book are the ones devoted to hallmarks of French culture with which the world is so familiar: perfume and cuisine. Sciolino delves into the importance of scent to Parisians especially, giving us a history of the industry. She tells us that perfume has been used in France since Cro-Magnon days, when men rubbed themselves with mint and lemon to remove the taint of body and wild game. In interviews with French perfumers, she finds that Americans value scents of cleanliness and power, meaning deodorant and perfume that can be detected from several feet away. The French, she says, are more subtle and mysterious with their pleasant odors. And food is an orgasmic experience, she writes, full of subtle tastes and textures. The French raise the work of the vine and the labors at the stove to an art form, and tourists should close their eyes and surrender to the experience.

Sciolino also takes us through the gallery of French presidents, explaining how each managed to seduce the world, and where they tripped up in their efforts. Nicholas Sarkozy comes off as one of the worst in history. She brands him as “unskilled as a seducer in the classic French mode.” He is “frank rather than indirect, prone to naked flattery and insults rather than subtle wooing, perpetually in motion rather than taking time for la plaisir. He is contemptuous rather than enamored of the complicated codes of politesse.” He “contracts his words and salts his sentences with rough slang. In a country where food and wine are essential to the national identity, he prefers snack gobbling to meal savoring.”

The book ends with a grand salon dinner party, a fitting finale to a book so connected to good food and seductive culture. In the preparation for the event, we learn that French apartments come with bare kitchens, often with only a water source and maybe a sink. It is custom that the new tenants will install their own fixtures, appliances, and cabinetry. Then there are the rules of etiquette for the dinner party itself. I’ll save a little something for the reader to discover, but let’s just say that the biblical Ten Commandments are positively spare in comparison.

Elaine Sciolino has given us a veritable treat, a meal in itself, in her book. French culture still has much to reveal to the rest of the world, and in an age of global connectedness, it serves us well to be handed such an intricate and intimate study of a country once a super power, but now more of a philosophical influence on the rest of the world. It is not our similarities with the French that should be stressed, but that culture’s uniqueness which should fascinate and intrigue us. France, like a good meal, always surprises, always delights, and Elaine Sciolino prepares a banquet for us, with the depth and nuance of the journalist’s eye on the world.

Rage (And Hope) Against The Dying Of The Light

2011-09-16T22:49:00.000-07:00

For a week now, I’ve been trying to write something about 9-11 and the last decade. Perspective eludes me; optimism is hidden in the darkness; disappointment and frustration have been my companions. The more I think about that day, watch the replays and tributes at Ground Zero, hear the personal stories of the victims and survivors, I am filled with rage.

When Osama bin Laden was killed, I was uncomfortable with the celebrations on the streets of America over the death. I felt it was crass and jingoistic. Then, I heard a Port Authority police officer speak on television last week of spending days digging, sometimes with bare hands, his colleagues out of the rubble, uncovering their broken bodies piece by piece so they could be returned to their families for burial. He said bin Laden’s death was most definitely a moment to celebrate. In his telling, I made the journey with him; I, too, saw the necessity of celebrating the vanquishing of this enemy. I am deeply conflicted between my unbridled rage and my better nature, and some days, I think rage is winning.

By the time I arrived in my classroom on that day ten years ago, the towers were down and the Pentagon was on fire. The world had literally and decisively changed on our thirty minute drive to work. In the classroom, even before the first bell, several seniors were in my face. I wasn’t supposed to see them until third period, mid-morning.

“Mr. Martin, you have to postpone the test today,” said their leader, a girl who normally slept through class.

“Why?”

“Because the World Trade Center was hit,” she yelled at me, as if the logic of her demand was so obviously rational. She smirked. “You can’t give us the test because we’re too traumatized.” At this point the dean came over the loudspeaker and decreed that all tests, quizzes, and homework were indeed cancelled for the day.

Later in the day, I stood watching a television with some faculty and staff members. The image on the screen was one of Palestinians dancing in the streets over news of the attacks. “This is what the United States gets for the way they’ve treated Arabs and Palestinians all these years in support of Israel,” a staff member said. “America deserves this.”

I turned to face him. “Don’t forget where you live,” I said. “They attacked your country, and like it or not, you’re an American. If you were on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings, none of those hijackers would have given a shit if you agreed or disagreed with your government. They would have killed you just because you’re American.”

When the news broke many months later that we had invaded Iraq under a veil of lies and deception regarding weapons of mass destruction, a student in one of my classes said he did not feel sorry for American soldiers who gave their lives in the war. “They knew what they were getting into when they signed up. Being lied to comes with the job.”

At the close of the decade, where do we stand? The wars have bankrupted us. More people live at poverty level, unemployment stands at almost ten percent, our children sit idle in our schools, our culture rots from the inside as we gorge ourselves on fast food, reality television and celebrity gossip while the sun sets on the empire. We are bereft of leaders and ideas, mired in the muck of our entropy.

Sometimes, though, we get a glimpse of hope in the eyes of a child.

This year, a young man in my wife’s English class, barely a teenager, wrote an essay about his hopes and dreams for the coming year, and for the future. His essay was written as a meditation on the themes of S.E. Hinton’s novel, The Outsiders.

“I have achieved a lot throughout my life,” he begins, “but what I am most proud of is placing 1st in the spelling bee when in 1st grade. I am also proud of being on the [academic] decathlon team, having an undefeated season with the school soccer team, winning track races, and participating in all kinds of sports. Although I have achieved a lot, I still need improvement…” He also speaks of the need to strengthen his “work ethic,” the desire to be more responsible, and more neat. These are his goals for this year. Long term, he says, his “life long dream is to have my own house, with a good paying job that I enjoy, and a family that I can share my happiness and memories with.”

He closed his paper with the words of Robert W. Service, poet of the Yukon, and his poem “Success”:

"The haply seek some humble hearth,
Quite poor in goods yet rich in mirth,
And see a man of common clay
Watching his little ones at play;
A laughing fellow full of cheer,
Health, strength and faith that mocks at fear;
Who for his happiness relies
On joys he lights in other eyes;
He loves his home and envies none. . . .
Who happier beneath the sun?"

Sometimes we must put down our rage and look to the far horizon. We must, against our darkest hours, realize the smallest joys, the mysteries of love, the comfort of friends and family. In the midst of ignorance, cynicism, cruelty, and dissembling, we must embrace hope. There is no closure, no solace in our tragedy; there is only one tentative, yet brave step, into the future.

I have written previously about 9-11. You can access that piece here.

A Listening Thing

2011-09-01T23:18:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, as winter slipped away into spring, William Michaelian asked if I would interview him for the tenth anniversary edition of his novel, A Listening Thing (Cosmopsis Books, 2011).

William is a force to be reckoned with, a great, eccentric ball of energy who publishes his writing and art in book form and on the internet. He blogs every day at Recently Banned Literature.

Our friendship goes back to the early days of The Teacher’s View when William contacted me about my review of Aram Saroyan’s poetry. He has become a source of wisdom in my life, and simply through our discussions, he has made me a better human being. Reluctantly, I must share him with a myriad of readers, writers, and artists around the globe who have discovered William’s incredible work as well as his deeply soulful insights into life and the human condition. I consider his friendship a blessing, pure and simple.

He sent me copies of his books and I found his writing riveting and beautiful. My favorite of his published works is The Painting of You (Author’s Press Series Volume I, 2009), a collection of poems, essays, and literary fragments detailing his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s Disease. The book serves as William’s account of his round-the-clock care of her and his meditation on the fragile, often ephemeral joy and sadness of this life. In the tragic loss of a parent’s mental stability, one might not expect to find optimism and beauty, but it is there on every page, giving us as much a celebration of what was as an elegy for what is passing away.

It is difficult to pick favorites with William’s work. It is an embarrassment of riches. However, when he sent me one of his collector’s copies of the galley proof of A Listening Thing, I knew I’d found a classic. I was shocked to learn the history of his novel, the almost publication, the bankrupt publisher, acclaim so close yet so far. But what a book, indeed.

As I enter mid-life and realize there are fewer days ahead than there are behind, I find deep resonance with Stephen Monroe, the central character of A Listening Thing: regrets, mistakes, and like all of William’s work, a profound sense of the beauty of life and the hope intrinsic in each new year, each new day. The book is wise and sad and joyful like its creator.

I am also proud to have been offered the chance to co-author the interview William and Cosmopsis Books included in this new edition. My goal in taking on the assignment was to get out of William’s way and let him tell his story. I wanted to observe literary journalist Joan Didion’s rule to be the “least important person in the room.” I sent William a set of questions. He refined, sharpened, and then answered them. I followed up and offered a few additional topics. William shaped and integrated the material together. When I came to write the introduction to the finished interview, I nearly quit my writing career then and there. What could I say to match William’s words and his novel? I felt his hand on my shoulder. Just write, I heard him say. Words have never failed me, and they remained true on this project as well. The finished piece is included along with some new words from William. And of course, Stephen Monroe’s story is complete in this authorized print edition.

Fiction has the power to create a make believe world that resonates in our reality. William himself has often posed the question, what is real and what is dream life, and he has taken the opportunity in many of his works to explore the nature of reality, to push against the often blurry line between what is real and imagined. A Listening Thing will bring you into the fictional world of Stephen Monroe’s interior monologue, but it is ourselves we will find on the page. I invite you to embark on a journey, and like Odysseus returning, you will come to know yourself a little better upon reaching the end of Stephen’s story. In reading William’s work, that is the promise and the treasure.

For a complete list of William Michaelian's books in print, go to his website here.

The Grammarian

2011-08-25T20:13:00.000-07:00

I am performing my yearly ritual as school starts: cleaning out my files. I happened upon a gem. The article was a Los Angeles Times obituary from February 18, 2005. Eleanor Gould Packard, grammarian for The New Yorker magazine for 54 years, was dead on that day at age 87.

In my life as a teacher, I have been deeply disturbed by my colleagues’ and students’ disrespect for grammar. Nouns, verbs, active voice, pronoun-antecedent agreement—these are the building blocks of our language. When grammatically correct, writing has a symmetry and beauty that supports meaning and nuance. Teachers disparage it—grammar is pointless when it’s taught in a vacuum, they say. Teaching whole writing is better. The bottom line is, they can’t teach it. It does not lend itself to touchy-feely writing assignments that stress putting down feelings, putting down anything, really, on paper. Corrections to grammar and spelling come later, they tell their students, if they come at all. Grades are awarded for writing something, not for a grammatically correct, logically sound argument of an idea.

Teaching grammar is hard work. There is a right and a wrong answer. The rules are concrete, and must be committed to memory or looked up when needed. And yes, the teaching of grammar must be connected to writing so students can learn the rules and then apply them as they revise their papers. Students must learn that when writing is grammatically correct, logically sound, coherently developed, the essay soars. It is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, to borrow from the poet John Keats.

As a writer, I strive for correctness with grammar. I actually become angry when I catch a mistake in my work. I consider it a ding to my credibility. How we speak and write indicates our level of education, as my teachers taught me.

But I wasn’t always a receptive student.

In high school, we had a separate class in grammar, and only grammar. We did no writing at all. Our assignments each day were to complete all the exercises in the Warriner’s Complete Course grammar text. I had yet to realize I was headed for a life of words and sentences. I slouched in the back of the room and either slept through class or lured flies to land on my open book so I could squash them between the pages. Later, when I made tentative forays into writing, I looked up how things were done in the books I was reading. I learned much grammar from those writers—Louis L’Amour, Mark Twain, and John Knowles, among others.

As a teacher preparing my first grammar-writing classes, I realized some of those lessons from the fly-filled, drowsy days had actually seeped into my brain. Teaching made me a student of grammar, finally.

All of these memories came flooding back due to a newspaper clipping in a file. Eleanor Gould Packer “read every nonfiction article scheduled for publication. She saw the galley proof after the assigning editor, fact checker, copy editor, and lawyer went through it. She still found reasons to fill margins with questions and comments.”

The obit goes on to quote Packard: “I do grammar, I go for sensible sentences, I avoid awkwardness, avoid ambiguity, try to make a thing hang together.”

In her margin notes to writers, she was all vinegar and spice: “This clear? (not to me).” Or, in challenging an assertion: “How so?” And when catching an error, she wrote the unequivocal “NOT grammar.” She even had a sense of humor: “Have we completely lost our mind?” she wrote in response to an error in logic.

In her 54 years at the magazine, she rarely took a day off, inexplicably woke up deaf one morning, and retired in 1999 after a stroke. She was one tough contrarian grammarian. We should all be so diligent and meticulous as writers, and especially, as teachers.

Photo: Eleanor Gould Packard as photographed by Sara Krulwich for The New York Times.

New Digs, New Year

2011-08-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

Here are some shots from my first week back on campus in my new office. It's a small piece of real estate, but it is all mine. Now all I need are my writing students.

By the way, anyone want to take a shot at identifying the writers and artists on the board?

Deep in the Heart of Texas

2011-08-13T15:54:00.000-07:00

A thousand lifetimes ago, I believed with all my heart that I would be a musician. The impulse began in childhood with the accordion, and later, the piano and percussion. It took me halfway through college as a music major to realize the music life was not for me, but I was left with some indelible memories. One such memory occurred when I was nearing the end of my freshman year in high school. The year was successful, and I felt as if I had found my niche in the difficult hierarchy of secondary education—not an athlete, but I had a front row seat at all the football games, and I was part of the percussion section, the coolest subgroup within the band.

In April, the band traveled to San Antonio, Texas for the annual Battle of the Flowers Festival, an event that commemorated the much-mythologized siege of the Alamo during the Texas War of Independence in the 1830s.

We arrived in San Antonio for some sightseeing leading up to our performance on a Thursday evening at an open air stadium in front of thousands of screaming fans. In marching band lore, this kind of performance is called a field show, and consists of formations and music on a football field, similar to a halftime show. I had never performed in front of such a large crowd, and the energy of the audience was like a drug. We were singing, screaming, and cheering all the way back to the hotel.

On Friday, we were scheduled to march in the Battle of the Flowers parade through downtown San Antonio. We arrived on time at the staging area, a large empty parking lot under a curving freeway overpass one block from the start of the parade. We were to be the third group to step off, with a local band and a float ahead of us. The drumline gathered under the overpass to warm up. We played through our exercises, taking great pleasure in the sheer cacophony of the thunderous drums echoing off the concrete above us. Across the parking lot were the backs of all the shops lining the parade route. As we pounded through our warm-ups, I kept trying to see between the buildings, wondering if the first band was off and running.

I remember glancing around at the other bands watching us warm up. I remember people milling about, some in parade costumes—clown suits, matadors, Spanish dancers. When I looked back toward the buildings along the parade route, a good seventy-five yards across burning asphalt, I saw hundreds of people running toward us. The looks on their faces could only be described as panic-stricken. Mothers were clutching children and literally dragging them along. I motioned to the other drummers to stop playing. The wave of humanity advanced toward us, and I began to feel a rush of adrenaline. All I heard were their screams.

The wave of humanity engulfed, and then passed us. Almost immediately, we became aware of another sound. Pops and deeper, more resonant explosions purpled the air, sounding at first like firecrackers, but then we heard the whacking slap of something repeatedly striking the concrete above us. I recognized the whine of a ricochet: bullets were flying. The band director yelled for us to drop our instruments and run after the crowd. We all made it around the corner of a building and down into a loading dock area between two tractor-trailers. At least a hundred people crowded and crouched in the bright sunlight. Next to me, a woman cradled her child in her arms, sobbing softly. I began hearing sirens in the distance.

The gunfire increased exponentially, and I could tell that there were now multiple shooters by the sound of the different caliber of weapons. With each sharp volley, people ducked reflexively, praying the bullets were not headed our way. Across the top of the loading dock was a sign: The Lone Star Brewery.

“He’s coming,” someone screamed.

A policeman sprinted around the corner of one of the trucks. “Gun, gun, gun,” he shouted.

In mass, the sea of people flooded under the trailer. The woman with child was caught up by the crowd like a piece of driftwood in a wave. I watched as her head slammed into the rigging under the trailer and she went down. Several people surrounded her to prevent the others from trampling her. When they pulled her to her feet on the other side of the trailer, she was bleeding profusely from a head wound.

We crossed an alley lined with police officers and entered into the walled courtyard of the brewery. The policemen shouted at us to get inside and stay near the brick walls. After the last person entered, the heavy iron doors were pulled closed. The barrage of gunfire continued less than a block away, and now helicopters hovered overhead. The band gathered around the director in one corner of the courtyard where he took a roll call to make sure no one was missing. Miraculously, we had all made it inside.

The gunfire continued, sporadically, and various rumors spread through the huge crowd of people: there were multiple gunmen; there was one gunman; he was firing from a camper in a gas station on the parade route; the first band to step off was directly in front of him and suffered casualties; and, tear gas was being used to pry him out of his hiding place. We had no choice but to sit around and wait. Someone provided water, and allowed us to be escorted individually to a bathroom inside the brewery.

The standoff lasted several hours, and culminated in a massive barrage of gunfire and explosions. Whatever was going on, it sounded like the Battle of the Bulge. As the sun started to go down, the band director moved us through the beer factory and out the other side to our buses. Most of our instruments were still back in the parking lot, but he told us they would be retrieved later.

Once back at our hotel, we were told to go to our rooms and wait to be called for a meeting. My three roommates and I sat in stunned silence, the TV and air conditioner on, watching the story we had just experienced firsthand unfold on the evening news.

The shooter was a 65 year old man named Ira Attebury. This was the third year he had attended the festival and parade, parking his camper in a paid spot outside a tire store eighteen feet from the intersection where the parade was to begin. He told neighbors that he would attend the festival and then embark on a multi-state vacation in his RV. Family members said he had become paranoid recently, fearing the police were following him. Whatever the case, at one p.m. on Friday, April 27, 1979, Attebury kicked open the door of his trailer and began firing one of six high caliber rifles at the 4000-5000 people lining the parade route in front of him. Witnesses said he shouted “Traitors, traitors, traitors,” and “What kind of a society is this,” as he fired into the crowds scrambling to take cover. Ida Long, age 26, and Amalia Castillo, 48, were killed. Thirty-two people were injured by direct gunfire, bullet or shrapnel fragments, or flying glass. Twenty were hurt in the resulting melee. Six policemen were also shot. After thirty minutes, a police officer managed to wound Attebury while he was reloading one of his weapons. Officers surrounded the now quiet camper and unloaded a barrage of bullets and tear gas into the vehicle hoping to finish the job. When the smoke cleared, Attebury was dead, possibly from a self-inflicted bullet wound in the head. Investigators said he had an arsenal of weapons and enough ammo for a war.

The following evening, we were scheduled to march in a night parade along the exact same route where the shooting occurred. Each band member would have strings of lights powered by a small battery pack attached to his or her uniform and instruments. We would all be fully outlined in lights as we marched down the boulevard. Most of us believed we would be heading home after the tragedy, but the director made a startling announcement. We would do the night parade. Police officers would line the route, and all attendees would be screened and searched before taking their seats on the street. Law enforcement, parade officials, and our teachers believed the shooting was the work of a lone, crazed gunman, and that we would be safe with all the security now deployed on the parade route. I was truly fearful, as were many of the other members. Our bodies would be outlined in lights; what better targets would a shooter have?

The next night, we arrived at the parking lot and suited up for the parade. I did not think many people would show up to watch the parade after what happened, but I was wrong. The crowds seemed larger than the day before, with people wildly cheering and screaming as we lined up at the fateful intersection to step off. As we marched the parade route, several people threw firecrackers into the street, and it took strength to fight the urge to panic and run. Cops swarmed the areas from where the fireworks were thrown. A man also ran through our ranks screaming, which unnerved all of us, but he was quickly surrounded and carted off.

At the end of the parade route, we stripped down our equipment and packed up. All of us were drenched in sweat as much from the humidity of a spring San Antonio night as well as from nerves. We boarded the bus and went for a late dinner of pizza near the hotel. By the time we arrived at the restaurant, we were screaming and cheering again. We had made it, and we were happy. The fear and trepidation vanished and we made jokes and told stories about what we saw and experienced. Death had touched us, but we had lived to tell the tale. We were invincible, as only young people believe they are.

Read more about this incident from other accounts here, here, and here.

A Day In California

2011-08-08T15:08:00.000-07:00

A Day in California from Ryan Killackey on Vimeo.

Just one more time lapse film, I promise. This one is by Ryan Killackey with music, once again, by Cinematic Orchestra (seems they have the market cornered for time lapse music soundtracks). Enjoy.

The Left Coast City of Light

2011-08-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

LA Light from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

It took photographer Colin Rich six months to put together this montage of the lights of Los Angeles. It's a beautiful piece with haunting music by Cinematic Orchestra.

If Memory Serves

2011-07-28T16:37:00.000-07:00

In the rapidly disappearing bookstores on the boulevards of America, the memoir has become as ubiquitous as rain. We can read the words and memories of autistic children, progeny of drunks and acrobats, the woman who made her way through Harvard by sleeping in the library. It is a rich and varied story, the memoir, shaped by elements of fiction and narrative, and often treading heavily on the border between truth and illusion. “This is my story, the way I saw it, the way I believe it happened to me, and if you don’t remember it that way, write your own book!”

Most readers do not realize that much of the overheated prose simmered in the juices of reflection can be traced back to one book: Stop-Time by Frank Conroy (Penguin, 1977) originally published in 1967. The book was an instant classic, a finalist for the National Book Award. Conroy went on to write novels and essays, even doctored some screenplays, but he never achieved the level of success of his memoir. He became the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1987 to 2005. He was not, however, your typical academic or writer. He was an accomplished pianist, winning a Grammy in 1986, and he influenced generations who wandered the halls of the English-Philosophy Building on the Iowa campus. He died of colon cancer in 2005.

Stop-Time is not a story about writing, although writing plays a huge role in the book. Conroy gives us a life on the pages that could have gone either way—artist or criminal—and offers us a glimpse of the boy who barely escaped into adulthood. He forces the reader to engage in his story by utilizing, quite effectively, the narrative trick of fragmenting the frames of memory. Events pass by us, like the landscape rushing by the windows of a train, and if we do not pay attention, we miss out. He also does not stick to a strict chronological telling of his life story. But all of this makes the book evocative and involving, and demonstrates that Conroy, above all else, was a gifted writer. Moments are frozen in place like butterflies trapped in amber. He holds them up to the light to let us see the gossamer wings with the subtle and gross imperfections of the human condition.

Conroy is very good at capturing the non-sequitur nature of life, the seemingly random events and twists that we are left to puzzle over years later. Hindsight, the cliché goes, is twenty-twenty, but often even in the rearview mirror, we are tempted to look at scenes from the past and ask ourselves, “What the hell did that mean?” Conroy does an excellent job of letting the scenes speak and allowing the reader to create sense and meaning.

I came to read Frank Conroy’s memoir when I picked up a more recent book at the store, Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes (Tin House Books, 2010). Grimes’ book is his reflections on the role Conroy played in his life as a father-figure and mentor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The two writers approach the subject of their lives very differently. After reading Conroy, I found Grimes’ take much more conventional. It unfolds in a more chronological manner, and focuses on the writing life. This is not to say that Mentor is flawed. It is an excellent study of what it means to be a writer, the sacrifices, the rejection, the mental health issues, the disappointments and rejections. Ultimately, though, it is a tribute to the power of a mentor in an artist’s life.

Grimes’ book is less fragmentary and episodic. If one is looking for inspiration and solace in the writing life, this is the book to read. Here is the writer’s manifesto: “This is why I write. It’s my way of controlling my world and my emotions. I focus on sentences. For several hours a day, nothing else matters. I live inside language. And while I’m often frustrated by writing’s difficulty, I’m also at peace.” Grimes, in one short set of sentences, defines the writer’s paradox.

Most gripping is Grimes’ account of his sister’s suicide attempts and his own downward spiral into depression and paranoia. Like his mentor, Grimes examines all facets of the memory, and does not hesitate to lay his own bloody soul on the table. His is an honest book, the kind of writing that leaves no shadows or darkness unexplored.

The writer’s life is difficult and uncertain. Grimes takes us through the maddening odyssey of getting a book published. Feast or famine is the rule, but even when feasting, the success is momentary and ephemeral. It is on to writing the next book, which might involve years of slaving away at the desk.

The most moving part of the book is when Grimes takes us through the end of Conroy’s life. Grimes now runs his own MFA program at a university in Texas, although his life is still deeply entwined with that of his mentor. They move from teacher-student, to father-son, to writer-to-writer, a deep communion of friendship and art. In one of his last calls to Conroy, the sick and dying mentor asks his former student, “You know I love you, right?” From the reserved and stoic Conroy, this is a major revelation, and Grimes struggles to find words to respond before the older man hangs up the phone. It is left to the student to sum up the relationship between the two men and their books: “I hadn’t expected to write this book,” Grimes says, “but, in a way, our memoirs form bookends. His about childhood, adolescence, and a lost father; mine about writing, teaching, and a father found. Our story has come full circle.”

Both books are excellent, full of emotion and insight. Writing a life is harder than writing a novel, but not by much. Frank Conroy and Tom Grimes do both, and we the readers are the richer.

Lawrence Clark Powell

2011-07-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

I have spent many wonderful hours in the Powell Library at UCLA, but I knew nothing about the man for whom the library is named until I found his books. I quickly pulled his books off the shelf and began a few days’ worth of rapturous reading, and even wrote about him in a previous post. I quickly realized that even though they were out of print, I wanted my own copies. So I scanned my usual used book outlets on the web and found clean copies to order. Now, after several weeks of reading each book and reveling in Powell’s delightful memories and prose, I am ready to say that these books need to go back into print, especially now that we face a budget crisis with libraries, public and private, and the art of reading seems to be migrating to electronic readers from the tactile pleasure of the physical book.

At his heart, Powell was a bookman, a lost breed of salesmen who knew their products and traveled the world buying up old and antiquarian books for their used book stores and libraries. Powell began his career at Vroman’s Books in Pasadena, California, an institution in Los Angeles having been around since 1894. It remains a vibrant and important place today after all the other great independents have gone out of business.

From selling books, Powell moved on to the UCLA libraries where he worked himself up through the ranks to head librarian and first dean of the School of Library Service. He felt that UCLA was the place for which he was destined, and under his leadership, the holdings of the library grew from 285,000 volumes to more than two million. He taught librarians across the country, and worked as an advisor to a number of university libraries who followed his example at UCLA and became important centers of learning and scholarship.

Although he wrote fiction, his métier was nonfiction books about books. I examined four of Powell’s works in particular, two books of memoirs and two books of essays. The man was, in addition to being a reader, a prodigious writer, publishing hundreds of articles and papers in journals and magazines about books, writers, and the literary life.

Fortune & Friendship: An Autobiography By Lawrence Clark Powell (R.R. Bowker Co) appeared in 1968. He begins at the beginning, detailing his early years in Washington D.C. with Quaker parents. In 1911, he moved to southern California where he grew up in the Pasadena area. Upon reaching maturity, Powell found his life’s work and began climbing the ladder at UCLA after studying at Occidental College, the University of Burgundy in Dijon, and U.C. Berkeley. When writing about books, Powell has no equal. However, the one problem I had with this book is that many of the people mentioned have dropped into obscurity now. Powell throws out names and book shops like a madman, and sometimes the stories could have been improved upon if he took some time to dig deeper into the experiences. There is a lot of “then we did this, and then we did that,” and although during the time of publication, many people may have known of whom he was speaking, readers today might need a bit more context. The book does work as a portrait of a life-long reader, and Powell’s love of the printed word always shines through in every story.

In 1986, Powell wrote a sequel called Life Goes On: Twenty More Years of Fortune and Friendship (The Scarecrow Press, Inc.). The edition I found contains a separate checklist of publications by and about Lawrence Clark Powell from 1919-1986. Here we see Powell in the twilight of his career, moving back and forth from Arizona and the American southwest to his home base of southern California. Powell wrote extensively about Arizona and his travels there. His life shifted in retirement from a guardian of books to a writer of books.

His book of essays, A Passion For Books (The World Publishing Co.), was published in 1958. All of these pieces originally appeared elsewhere in such publications as Antiquarian Bookman, AB Bookman’s Yearbook, or as lectures given across the country and later composed into essay formats. In his Preface, Powell writes: “These essays on the art of librarianship were written from 1948 through 1957. Some were intended to be spoken to library conferences; others were meant only to be read.” Powell is able to meld travel and life experience with his reading experiences, and that is what makes this book so readable and enjoyable. He discusses some of his favorite authors, and explains how he searches out rare books for his libraries. The passion in his title is clear on every page, and this book has special appeal to those of us who remember how we came to love the heft and feel of a book.

Books In My Baggage (The World Publishing Co., 1960) is really a travelogue through the world of books and people. Of special interest is what Powell calls his “biblio-geiger counter,” a tingling in his fingertips when searching in a dank cellar or drafty estate somewhere and he realizes something of rare and exquisite value is nearby on a dusty shelf. He takes us through how he manages to scoop up these rare artifacts without letting the seller know he is interested. It is the joy of the hunt that comes through Powell’s every line. The book also addresses a few of Powell’s favorite writers, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, and J. Frank Dobie. For native Los Angelenos, it is interesting to note that Miller and Powell were neighbors up in Beverly Glen, a hilly canyon behind the UCLA campus that connects Westwood with Sherman Oaks. Powell also tells us some moving, poignant stories here. In the essay, “Speaking of Books,” he writes of a student with whom he works in the library order department. The boy is a track star, a discuss thrower, who moonlights unpacking the shipments of books that come to the library each day. The boy discovers just who Powell is when he stumbles across an article written and published in a journal. They strike up a friendship. Powell writes: “That was the first of many conversations we had before he was called to duty in the navy. I learned that this lad was akin to Thomas Wolfe, in that he wanted to be a writer in order to release the immense feelings and desires that were locked up inside himself. He would have become a writer, I am sure, and possibly a good one, if he had lived. He was killed in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.”

Lawrence Clark Powell is a writer of uncommon grace and goodwill. Books were his world, and he brought them to us in our everyday lives. Just last evening, I heard on the news that public libraries will now be open on Mondays here in Los Angeles thanks to a ballot measure. This means more access for those who need books and a place to study, and more jobs for librarians to staff the additional days. Libraries are democratic institutions, and they are imperative to our democracy. Lawrence Clark Powell made this his life’s mission, and I cannot help feeling his spirit beckoning me into the stacks, to read, gently reassuring me that my love for books is a good love, and must be nurtured.

Literature, Television, and the Genius of David Simon

2011-07-08T09:18:00.000-07:00

Critics like comparing television writer-producer David Simon to Charles Dickens; they marvel at the way Simon serializes his stories across multiple episode arcs. They love to call his characters “Dickensian.” But Simon is in a class by himself, a man who creates and writes shows that offer social commentary and cultural criticism as well as intriguing and compelling stories. Calling him the second coming of Charles Dickens is meant as a complement, but it is unnecessary. David Simon is a unique genius who makes television dramas that should be classified as literature, pure and simple. His latest effort, HBO’s Treme, continues this tradition.

Treme is set in a neighborhood of New Orleans circa 2005, a culturally rich and diverse place nearly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The first season of episodes took place only a few months after the disaster. The recently completed second season found the characters more than a year on and still struggling with the effects of the storm. Simon and his producing partner Eric Overmyer created a cast of characters from every walk of life in the city who are interesting to watch, but the show is truly rooted in the music and culture of New Orleans. The camera lingers on the beautiful decadence, the gothic squalor of the city. They construct visual feasts of graveyards, Mardi Gras celebrations, second line parades, homes and businesses filled with mold, and piles of muddy rubble. When a young boy blowing a trumpet wanders through the detritus of the lost city in the second season opener, we see the glimmer in the muck, the ray of hope in a storm of trouble. The show is transcendent in a way no American television production has ever been, at once native and elemental yet heartfelt and incendiary.

As with previous Simon productions like The Wire (also HBO, 2002-2008), the stories unfold slowly. Scenes sometimes have no dialogue. The writers do not pander to their audience—one must listen closely and pay attention. The writing is nuanced and subtle, but viewer beware. Events can transpire in a gut-wrenching moment, as when a street musician played by the legendary Steve Earle is gunned down by a mugger. Or, in the first season when community leader, Big Chief Albert Lambreaux (played by Clarke Peters) discovers the decomposing body of a close friend under an overturned boat in a shed.

Simon makes it clear that this show will not fall back on stereotypical television tropes—cops, lawyers, or doctors—although, Treme characters include a lawyer, and this season, a deeply troubled cop. Story lines carry over an entire season, and characters come and go, relocating to other cities and even to the grave, but always remaining connected to New Orleans. One such example is novelist Creighton Bernette, played by John Goodman, who commits suicide at the close of season one after the audience has followed his journey through rage and impotence over the fate of his beloved city. The suicide itself could easily be missed—he stands smoking at the rail of a ferry boat, the camera pans away and back, and Goodman is gone—but the emotional fallout for his wife and daughter permeates the entire second season. Goodman only appears in a dream sequence during a single episode in season two.

Bernette’s wife and daughter are portrayed radiantly by Melissa Leo and India Ennenga. Leo does work worthy of Greek tragedy—subtle, quiet, inevitable and yet forceful, conveying a range of emotions in eyes of dark uncertainty, feeling her way through the anger and sadness. She must deal with her husband’s act of abandonment and fight for her clients as a civil rights lawyer and police watchdog. But Simon is true to his word about those tropes. Toni Bernette is the moral voice in the wilderness of civic corruption, less bombastic than Goodman’s character, but Leo plays Toni razor sharp and resilient. Her husband may have given up, but she will not.

Wendell Pierce and Steve Zahn play loveable shlubs who work the music scene. Pierce’s character is the womanizing trombone player Antoine Batiste, an imperfect man who struggles, often comically, to make ends meet. His stories this season as he mentors young musicians as a music teacher have been especially good. Zahn’s zany D.J. Davis McAlary can be annoying and profound in the same scene. I found his character tiresome last season, but Zahn found his grounding with the character this year, giving us much to love and empathize with in this frustrated musician.

Treme’s cast is a large and talented ensemble: Kim Dickens as a struggling chef; Khandi Alexander as a bar owner, and this season, a victim of a violent and brutal crime; Rob Brown as a trumpeter trying to balance his New Orleans roots with his New York jazz sensibilities; Lucia Micarelli as the beautiful and sad violinist; and Michiel Huisman as the troubled Sonny. This season, Simon added David Morse and Jon Seda to the cast. Morse is the aforementioned police officer sickened by the negligent corruption of the NOPD. Seda comes to town a modern-day carpetbagger looking to score on the misery and destruction of the hurricane aftermath.

In some episodes, music runs through nearly every scene, and all kinds of famous and not-so-famous New Orleans musicians make cameos and even guest starring stints. The stories pulse with the music, from live performances to radio, CDs, background and foreground score. It is clear that music and New Orleans are synonymous, the blood and tissue of the larger body. The soundtrack for this show is epic, and the music is alive and organic. In Treme, music and storytelling are inseparable.

That a show of this complexity and nuance would struggle for viewers is to be expected. HBO is a premium channel, which excludes many customers right from the start. That Treme is so different from basic cable and network shows might also put some people off. But HBO should be applauded for keeping Treme on the air. Quality television, like good literature, sometimes takes time to find an audience. Indeed, Simon had his doubts that Treme would be picked up for a third season. He wrote the second season finale as a possible final episode for the series if HBO did not come through with a renewal. They did, as cast and crew were wrapping the last episode. So we can anticipate a return to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras.

Of course, Simon probably takes uncertainty in stride. His previous shows, all excellent, were not ratings blockbusters. Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC 1993-1999) led a constantly threatened existence; The Corner (HBO, 2000) was critically acclaimed; The Wire had a small but loyal following; and Generation Kill (HBO, 2008), a nonfiction miniseries, utilized many of the hallmarks of fictional storytelling. Simon has made a career out of turning journalism, much of it his from the time when he was a reporter in Baltimore, into quality television literature. He proves the adage that great storytelling can be journalism or fiction, as long as it is interesting and compelling.

With any luck, Treme will be with us for many more seasons. In this series, Simon celebrates the rich decay, sordid beauty, and grotesque poetry of an eccentric city and its denizens. New Orleans has a resilient and intriguing culture, a people unbowed by tragedy who continue to sing songs and blow trumpets in the mossy swamp of a graveyard we call life and all that jazz.

Here's "Oye, Isabel" by The Iguanas featured in the second season finale of Treme.

The Deal From Hell

2011-06-29T18:07:00.000-07:00

According to journalist James O’Shea in his new book, The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers, there is no shortage of bad guys in the epic story of the decline of newspapers. This is especially true in the case of the Los Angeles Times, a paper once edited by O’Shea. His is a fascinating, riveting tale, especially for those of us alarmed by the disintegration and rapid decline of print journalism. These days, newspapers are becoming relics of yesteryear, archaic artifacts for the culture museum, a disturbing development for journalists and readers who once created and consumed the insightful, in-depth reporting found on those ink-stained pages of newsprint.

In his book, O’Shea is self-effacing, attempting to be clear-eyed and forthcoming about his own role in the L.A. Times disaster. But make no mistake; he had a major part in the trials and tribulations of the paper during those days, and The Deal From Hell is his rationalization and defense of his own participation in the difficult decisions made during that time. The editor-in-chief of a major metropolitan paper once wielded great power in matters of politics, culture, and civic life. With the rapidly declining powers of his office, O’Shea could not save the paper and restore it to its former glory of the years under journalism titan Otis Chandler. He fights the good fight, but is simply another middle manager subjected to the whims of vacuous corporate executives.

O’Shea makes it clear that the overall decline of print journalism is not easy to diagnose, nor can blame be assigned to a single phenomenon in our culture. He believes that the shift of newspaper ownership from privately owned family businesses to public corporations traded on Wall Street has much to do with the decline. He singles out old-school journalists who resisted change as another problem, as well as the changes in the working lives of Americans, the lack of disposable leisure time, the rise of cable TV news channels, and plain old problems with delivery. In the story of the Times Mirror-Tribune merger that crippled a number of print outlets in addition to the L.A. Times, O’Shea cites a focus on continuing to increase profits over serving the public good as the central cause for the paradigm shift.

O’Shea quotes Frank Knight, part of the Knight Ridder newspaper empire, who says that print journalism is a tricky business because it is really four businesses in one: editorial content, which should have top priority; the business side, including advertising; production; and distribution. Each area has its own pitfalls and danger zones, but O’Shea believes when the walls between the business side and the editorial side break down, major problems ensue.

Never was this breakdown more apparent than in the infamous Staples Center-Sunday magazine scandal. The Staples complex is a 400 million dollar sports and entertainment venue in downtown Los Angeles. The Times entered into an agreement with the Staples organization to publish a 168-page Sunday magazine section featuring a series of puff pieces trumpeting the grand opening of the center. The paper and the management of Staples agreed to split the ad revenues from the publication, thereby obliterating the line between journalism and advertising. Articles became ad copy, not objective reporting, and this was only the beginning. The Times now wraps major movie ads around the paper as faux front pages, complete with same style, type and layout of the real front page underneath, confusing readers with ads that look like news. O’Shea takes pains to point out that newspaper front pages are sacred cows in journalism, the one place in the paper that readers can expect no ad placement, only the top stories in the news.

O’Shea gives us more than a peak behind the scenes of the L.A. Times-Tribune merger and subsequent sale. He rips the cover off and exposes the soft, white underbelly of the deal, detailing the legal maneuvering, the surviving Chandler family members’ greed, the incoming executives’ sexual misbehavior, and the pornographic excess of bonuses and payouts, a golden shower of parachutes as CEOs and corporate officers raped and pillaged the company they were supposed to serve and then bailed, leaving behind a sinking ship.

The most evil of bad guys is Sam Zell, real estate cretin and hero of the unwashed counterculture posers. He passes his ignorance off as outside-the-box thinking, but it is clear he had it in for journalists from the get-go, a caste of public servant for which he has only loathing and disgust. He buys Tribune to dismantle it, and it remains to be seen if this foul-mouthed, snake oiler with deep pockets gets what he deserves as the story winds its way through bankruptcy court.

Where O’Shea goes a bit hysterical is in his negative assessment of bloggers and news aggregate websites like LAObserved. Yes, there is a lot of hot air blowing across the blogosphere, but arguably there are bloggers who have broken major stories and who do follow the precepts of journalistic integrity. News aggregate websites like LAObserved actually spread the good work of journalists in print and on the internet, bringing readers to news sites and journalism publications. O’Shea attacks LAObserved editor Kevin Roderick for doing his job and publishing revealing memos and missives from Times editors, but it seems like sour grapes when a life-long reporter and secret-sharer like O’Shea complains about having his own secrets revealed. Did he really think his actions should be off limits to public scrutiny? His whining in this part of the book is disingenuous to say the least.

The Deal From Hell is an intense and interesting piece of work. O’Shea’s years as a reporter and his participation in the events described in the book make him uniquely qualified to tell this story. He does an excellent job of explaining the complex financial dealings of the merger and the details of each step and term of the process. If journalism is the first draft of history, James O’Shea has moved us forward into the realm of understanding as we are faced with a less knowledgeable future here in the dark ages of the alleged information revolution.

"RIF Now, Pay Later"

2011-06-24T20:06:00.000-07:00

Check out these kids from Roy Romer Middle School in North Hollywood, California.

Leonardo's Legacy

2011-06-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

Every evil leaves a sorrow in the memory except the supreme evil, death, and this destroys memory itself together with life.”

Leonardo Da Vinci

Do we really need another book about Leonardo Da Vinci?

Here’s a guy we cannot categorize. Was he an artist? Painter or sketcher? Was he a designer of machines, of flying contraptions that bear a passing resemblance to a helicopter or hang-glider? If so, did he ever actually build a working model of any of his designs? Was he an anatomist, and more importantly, did he break medicine’s strict code of ethical behavior by stealing bodies upon which to do postmortem experiments in hidden laboratories late at night? Is he the ultimate Renaissance man, or someone with an epic case of Attention Deficit Disorder? How do we evaluate Leonardo Da Vinci?

It is because of these questions and the endlessly fascinating person of Leonardo that we, in fact, do need another book about him. German science writer Stefan Klein does a good job in his latest book, Leonardo’s Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World (Da Capo Press, 2010) of not giving us just the warmed-over bits from urban legend and myth; he gives us the truth and cites some new information and analysis about Da Vinci’s life and work.

As translated by Shelley Frisch, Klein focuses on Da Vinci’s notebooks and sketches. He portrays him as an experimental artist, a scientific and engineering genius whose best and most forward-thinking work was done in voluminous notebooks and on what we might call today, “scratch paper.” He ingeniously groups his chapters not in a strict chronological order, but by Da Vinci’s focus. “The Gaze” develops an analysis on the beguiling and ever-popular Mona Lisa. “Water” brings us numerous sketches on how water flows and moves with notes written in mirror reversal to accompany the drawings. Da Vinci’s less explored affinity for weapons of war and his contradictory belief in peace are examined in the chapter, “War.” Of course, Klein also gives ample attention to Da Vinci’s “The Dream of Flying,” his construction of automatons in “Robots,” and his intense study of anatomy in “Under The Skin.” Da Vinci’s apocalyptic visions are saved for the chapter, “Final Questions,” before Klein delves into his title, “The Legacy” of Leonardo.

What makes Klein’s work here unique is that we get some of his research experiences along with the results of his study. We learn that the House of Windsor owns a treasure trove of Da Vinci’s manuscripts, and that Bill Gates possesses the Codex Leicester for which he paid thirty million dollars at an auction, the highest price ever paid for a book. In fact, one of the more interesting parts of Klein’s journey is his opening explanation for how the world came to possess the sketches, paintings, and notebooks we have all seen either in person or on the pages of books and the internet. Da Vinci’s student, Francesco Melzi was entrusted with a trunk filled with his teacher’s work. The luggage was so heavy, Klein tells us, that two men were required to lift it. Melzi took it back to Italy after Da Vinci’s death in France, and guarded it with his life. He began work cataloguing and organizing the disparate notebooks, sketches, random pieces of paper, and works-in-progress, but realized he would not finish in his lifetime. He employed secretaries to whom he dictated Da Vinci’s ideas, but still, time was running out. “When Leonardo’s star pupil dies of old age in 1570,” Klein writes, “his son Orazio proved indifferent to his father’s passion. He let the plunderers have at the collection.” Household help stole manuscripts and books. Pages were torn out and pasted back together out of sequence. In the end, Da Vinci’s works were spread all over the world missing vital connections and coherence. It has been left up to Da Vinci scholars to piece the puzzles back together and restore at least some of his work to its original condition.

Klein also explains some of the behind-the-scenes information beyond what Da Vinci left on his pages. He says the great man always had a notebook with him, and he believes that he actually carried one on his belt at all times. He noted everything he saw and observed, even something as simple as how water flowed down a river, swirling in eddies around rocks. When Da Vinci was dissecting human cadavers, a practice that was not necessarily legal both under civil and religious law, he made deals with hospitals to take the bodies at night to basement rooms to cut, parse apart and examine nerves, tissues, and organs. Some body parts simply would not cooperate. Da Vinci boiled human eye balls in egg whites so that the gelatinous mass would hold together to be transected for examination. Those prophetic flying devices resembling modern helicopters, hang-gliders, and even the wings of jumbo jets were not just sketches and theoretical models. Klein believes that at least some of them might have been built and tested, possibly with disastrous results. His research on Da Vinci takes him to Bedfordshire, England where on an abandoned farm, “seven men who enjoy tinkering with aviation devices are spending their days assembling historical flying machines using original parts.” Original in this case means native to the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Using Da Vinci’s sketches, they have built a giant crossbow, a weapon of war, as well as a 30 foot wide wing that world champion hang-glider Judy Leden sailed down a hill, landing on her feet in an exhilarating if brief trip.

Leonardo Da Vinci is, in the best sense of the term, a classic idea man. He is the embodiment of the Renaissance individual, a student educated in a broad range of subjects. Born illegitimate, Da Vinci went on to revolutionize art and observation, science and technology. He anticipated later discoveries often by centuries, not just a few years. He is a unique character in history, a complex human being unlike any who came before, or have come after. Da Vinci thoroughly explored his world leaving no subject unexamined. Stefan Klein brings us the man and his incredible mind without delving too deeply into the more gossipy facets of his life. He does clarify who he thinks was the model for the Mona Lisa, and touches briefly on Da Vinci’s sexuality, but he saves the majority of his pages for an examination of the artist’s ideas. He includes an annotated timeline, bibliography, end notes, gray scale drawings and renderings of paintings, and an index as well, although it would have been better if the plates were in color. Still, we get a good discussion of what Da Vinci thought about and discovered.

As sure as the voyages of Columbus and Magellan opened doors to the greater world, Leonardo Da Vinci crossed the frontiers of science, technology, and the breadth of the human mind. He brought an artist’s sensibility to a scientific study. In all this talk of boosting science and math education, we would do well to follow Leonardo Da Vinci’s example and open our eyes to the subtle connections among ideas, disciplines and life forms, while keeping our sense of awe and wonder at the precise and intricate beauty of our ever-changing world.

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

2011-06-14T22:44:00.000-07:00

I have spent some time in this early summer thinking about evil. The days are gently warm, the air is pure, and the landscape lush. It seems like Satan and the nature of evil would be better suited to late summer when the heat is a furnace blast, the mountains around Los Angeles are dried to a crisp and a raging inferno seems imminent, making us believe that the end of times is near.

I checked out a number of books from the library to do some background reading on the subject. Of particular interest was John Demos’ book, The Enemy Within: 2000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World (2008). Demos has made a study out of the history of early America, and considers witchcraft an integral part of that history. In this book, he traces the rise of witchery in Europe and its journey to America with the Puritans. He also discusses some modern witch-hunts. The book covers quite a broad scope, a swath of human evil and devious behavior all in four sections: Europe, Early America, Salem, and Modern America. His work is exhaustively researched and rendered with a clear and vibrant eye.

Demos is at his best when presenting the stories of witchcraft and then analyzing them for their factual content and truth. He dispels the rumors and clarifies the legends. In this way he presents us with a clearer idea of what went on in those Puritan courtrooms and halls of inquiry.

In the first section, Demos deals with the prosecution of witchcraft in Europe. I found the chapter that explained the Malleus Maleficarum to be utterly fascinating. This is the book written by a Dominican priest named Heinrich Kramer, also known as Institoris. He composed the book in Latin around 1486. In it, Kramer details his investigation into charges of witchery in the German town of Ravensburg near the Swiss border. Although Demos assures us that Kramer’s was not the first book on witchcraft, it is the definitive text that religious officials used during the late 1600s, a period of intense witchcraft allegations, trials, and executions.

Of course, to anyone who has taught or read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the section on Salem, Massachusetts is gripping. Demos sketches out the history of poor, saintly Rebecca Nurse, a woman who against all evidence to the contrary was found guilty of witchcraft and executed. He also profiles Cotton Mather. In the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692-93, Mather was a controversial figure who claimed success in curing people accused of witchery, usually teenage girls whom he took into his home for intense prayer and meditation. This of course led to rumors and gossip about his methods, but he claimed he had to study the victims up close to gain an understanding of their afflictions. We discover in this section that other characters from Miller’s play also were true to life: Giles Corey was actually crushed to death in an ancient procedure known as peine fort et dure. “He was laid flat while large stones were piled on his chest.” Reverend Hale, Ann Putnam, Goody Proctor and John Proctor all had familiar roles and met similar ends in real life as they did in the play, although John was not a farmer but a tavern-keeper.

Demos dispels many of the urban legends and attempts to explain witchcraft as a phenomenon. He tells us that a theory in the 1970s that the behavior was caused by ergot fungus poisoning is not plausible when compared to the facts in the historical record. He also explains how the Enlightenment thinking of Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton helped to negate some of the hysteria by advancing scientific knowledge and introducing a healthy skepticism into the culture. “The momentum for prosecution did not collapse all at once,” Demos writes. “Rather, it disintegrated piece by piece, day by day, person by person.”

Demos takes pains to tell us that the idea of a witch-hunt continues today. He discusses the anti-Freemason movement of the nineteenth century, the red scare and rise of McCarthyism in the twentieth century, and the more recent McMartin preschool case as examples. He presents and picks apart in detail the Fells Acres Day School abuse case in Malden, Massachusetts, ironically the site of early witchcraft prosecutions. The hallmarks of these modern cases are leading questions of child victims, the fantastic stories spun by those victims many of which defy logic or coherence, and rabid hysteria in the face of factual evidence. The story of witchcraft and a history of Satan usually includes a deviant sexual component, so the fact that modern witch-hunts involve sex crimes is not all that different from the witchcraft prosecutions in history.

I would highly recommend Demos’ book for those reading or teaching the Arthur Miller play. Students who have a nose for the macabre will appreciate the information that Demos presents, which is of a kind not fully explored in most history books. Demos does occasionally bog down the flow of the story with a little too much dogmatic research, but he presents a thorough and complete picture of witchcraft and its history. In the end, the witchery is far less hair-raising and more tragic in its impact on the innocent victims accused of the crime. The story makes for a clear window into the psyche of human beings detailing their ability to buy into the supernatural over the rational, and revealing the normal human predilections for jealousy, greed, and power of which our history is so rife to be the true cause of this most heinous miscarriage of justice in our history.

Illustration: Gustave Dore’s The Harpies’ Wood, from Dante’s Inferno

If Disney Designed A Villa

2011-06-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

Unlike the Getty Center in the Sepulveda pass, the Getty Villa in Malibu requires some pre-planning for admission. Parking reservations are required, and can be made online. This was easy enough, even the day before the time we wished to visit. However, there were other issues. One must arrive at the villa while traveling northbound on Pacific Coast Highway. No turns permitted from southbound lanes. And don’t be more than ten minutes late or the reservations expire.

So there we were with our internet tickets making the turn into the driveway across from Malibu beach. I noticed two workmen in orange vests, but as they seemed to be adjusting traffic cones, I decided to continue on to the guard shack further up the hill. One of the cone guys yelled at me, so I quickly braked. “You need to stop here, buddy,” he said. I stared at him a beat while he continued to fumble with the cone. “Okay, go on up to the guard booth.” I was not sure why he required me to stop.

The museum is technically free, but parking is fifteen dollars. So my car must pay an entrance fee, but we humans go free. We parked and began the steep climb into the villa proper. Everything had been remodeled since my last visit. There were endless stairways, elevators, and paths leading up, up, up. Originally designed by the architect Stephen Garrett, the museum is a replication of a real Italian villa buried in the volcanic eruption near Vesuvius in 79 A.D. According to the video on the website, Garrett and oil baron J. Paul Getty copied the original villa’s Bay of Naples architecture when they began construction in the 1970s. Getty, however, never saw the finished product; when the museum opened, he was living in England and died there in 1976.

The 1997 renovation was a way of defining the new Getty Center in the pass while redefining the scope and purpose of the original museum in Malibu. The Getty Trust decided to make the Malibu location the home of the antiquities collection. They added a Greek-styled amphitheatre, a separate bookstore, and a new café, among other things. They set the place up to resemble an archaeological dig, hence all the stairways and scaffold-like design features. The new and improved villa seems too perfect. The frescoes and colors are too bright, resembling a Disney version of a 2000 year old Italian villa. The antiquities are installed indoors thematically, which makes sense, however, something felt like it was missing. The collection seemed sparse. The statues outside are replicas of those found at the excavation site in Italy, and what is most striking about them are their eyes. They penetrate like laser beams from the black sculptures. They are a bit creepy, even in a museum that is itself a lost world of a previous millennium.

The most off-putting aspect of my day at the villa, though, was the crowd. People in Los Angeles and people who travel to Los Angeles, seem to have no concept of etiquette or manners. Kids run through the grounds and exhibit halls screaming. Parents take photographs of their kids splashing in fountains and with arms around the replica sculptures. One group did a portrait peeking out from behind a pillar. In a small alcove with a fountain, a mother watched while her son yanked on the water lilies blooming on the water’s surface. Everyone, everyone, wanted to touch things. Museums are for viewing things, people. If your kid wants to swim in the fountains or fondle the statuary, take him to a public pool or Hollywood. He can splash away and I am sure someone on the boulevard will let him cop a feel.

There was literally nowhere to go in some areas with people crowded around snapping pictures, and doing that most ridiculous of tourist acts: making a video of a sculpture. The thing does not move. Yet several cameramen were crowded around with their iPhones and Sony Handicams filming the stone-faced Greek god. I pity the friends of those poor shlubs when they get back to wherever they call home with their exciting movies from the big trip to L.A. “Here’s Aphrodite standing in the gallery. Ain’t she a looker!”

I am tired of seeing people at cultural landmarks in Los Angeles behaving badly with no idea what the hell they are doing there. “We’ll do Disneyland on Wednesday, the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday, and finish the week at the Getty.” Go, go, go! What does a howling brat in a stroller appreciate in 2000 year old statuary? And why do the parents insist on continuing to look at the art and discuss it over the banshee wailing of their child? And what a discussion: “Look, Irma, that one ain’t got an arm.” Or, “Mommy, that statue of the man is missing his wiener.” Or my favorite: “Hey run up ahead and see if the snack bar has funnel cake.” Do they think they are at the county fair? Are they waiting for the livestock auction, the awarding of the judges’ prize for best squash?

The Getty Villa is a beautiful place, the way people in Los Angeles are beautiful until you get up close. Then, in the harsh southern California sunlight, something does not seem right. Things just do not seem real. They are too perfect. The Getty Villa is a museum that has had one too many facelifts. But hey, what the hell. It’s free, only the car has to pay, and the kids can run around for a few hours, up and down the endless stairways, through the amphitheatre, and over to the snack bar for some nachos. “Whaddya mean you only sell a cheese plate? What kind of hoity-toity place is this?” There are some nice statues and grandma can throw coins in a fountain or two while junior rips up the flora and fauna. If they’re lucky, they can still make Grauman’s Chinese Theatre before sundown.

The Time, The Place, and The Book

2011-05-31T23:39:00.000-07:00

On the very first page of Islands of Books (1951), Lawrence Clark Powell sets up his thesis: “There is a power in certain books to evoke the time and the place of their first reading, when by merely giving a glimpse of their backs they take us backwards to that time of discovery which now seems magically inevitable.” He is speaking here of staring at his book shelves and reading the spines of the books therein, and this acts as a fuse to light up his memory.

In this cloth-bound, old book, Powell celebrates reading. He talks about his bicycle trips to the library and filling his bag with books he hasn’t read, and then pedaling home to spend the evening in bed with his finds, eating chocolate and satiating his boundless appetite for the written word. Heaven. He also writes of his library writer’s room as an adult, nine feet by nine feet, lined with books, the voices that comfort and inform him on his journey through life. This is a delightful book about books and the power of reading to set fire to a life of the mind. Powell has a library named after him on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Powell takes us through his reading of Rabelais and Chevalier de Seingalt (we know him as Casanova), D.H. Lawrence, Melville and Whitman. Powell writes of books the way M.F.K. Fisher writes of food—the beautiful, the colorful, the tasty, the sensual. He revels and celebrates writers and writing by making a poetic tribute of his own, and his work makes for thrilling reading for those of us who love the smell of binding glue and cottony paper pages.

Powell is a book collector, and the impulse begins at an early age. He remembers being a “starveling book clerk” and happening upon a beautiful book special ordered from England. He sneaks the tome home and types himself a copy of the nine thousand word essay. No digital copiers in those days. It is his special privilege to buy a copy of the book, Glory of Life by Llewelyn Powys, when his ship finally comes in many years later. His favorite author is Robinson Jeffers, and he spends time in his career researching and writing about him. Because of this, Powell’s unique vision focuses on California. It is rare to find a Californian celebrating literature; we are not known for our intellectual pursuits according to the stuffy east coast denizens. We are a film and Hollywood culture mired in the doldrums of escapism and Saturday matinees. This, of course, is an insupportable stereotype. We go to the movies every day of the week, not just on Saturday afternoon! Read books? Only if they’d make a good script.

I love Powell’s use of symbolic objects as literary talismans. He writes in “Ripeness Is All” of a mobile hanging in his study. Made of twigs, bone, shells, and thread, it turns in the thermal air generated by a space heater. He compares the mobile turning in the heat to the works of Yeats, Gide, and Bunin simmering in his fevered brain. Can we all cite books that did that to us, the books we stayed up all night to read in those sweltering summers?

Comfort Found In Good Old Books from 1911 is another gem from the past, one that qualifies itself in reference to the title: this book is now itself a good, old book, one hundred years old. George Hamlin Fitch writes out of the grief and desperation of inescapable tragedy. “These short essays on the best old books in the world were inspired by the sudden death of an only son, without whom I had not thought life worth living.” It is in his “darkest hour of sorrow” that Fitch finds his only comfort “from the habit of reading.” The story is heartbreaking. Fitch and his son Harold were in the habit of meeting for dinner every Friday evening. On that particular Friday, Fitch waited for his son until six o’clock. “I left a note saying I had gone to our usual restaurant,” he writes. “That dinner I ate alone. When I returned in an hour it was to be met with the news that Harold lay cold in death at the very time I wrote the note that his eyes would never see.”

Out of tragedy comes this little book. First came the loss of Fitch’s library in the “great fire,” (San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and subsequent fire?) and then the death of his son. This book is a celebration of literature for the common man. Although he admits to reading six hours a day, Fitch writes for mere mortals who can spare only an hour. His target audience was one without university or even high school degrees. For sure, this book was written in another time for a different audience. Fitch’s tone is simple and clear with brief articles on Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Cervantes, Thomas a Kempis, Dante, Milton and others. His explication of great works is gentle and avoids the pedagogical fog of academia. He never writes down to his audience, and that makes his prose sweet natured and quaint.

The illustrations throughout the book are pasted in place in a process known as “tipped-in.” Evidently, this is consistent in every edition produced by Paul Elder and Company, San Francisco, and lends each copy a hand-crafted appeal more common in art books. Fitch compiled the book from his articles in the San Francisco Chronicle where he worked as a book reviewer for many years. He too, like Powell, is a California writer. Of special note is the annotated bibliography at the back of the book. Fitch gives the history of each work’s publication and the best edition or translation as of 1911.

While browsing in my one remaining Barnes and Noble, I noticed there is no shortage of books about books and reading. However, I like Powell’s and Fitch’s books because they come from a time when kids and adults found escape and adventure in literature and auto-didacticism flourished. In an age of increasing demands for our attention, it is restorative to find comfort in good, old books. In these authors’ works of cardboard, paper and dreams, we can find enlightenment for a new age.

Mencken and the End of the World

2011-05-25T00:44:00.000-07:00

I could not help thinking about H.L. Mencken this past weekend while listening to the boobs and dunces on cable news proclaiming the end of the world. No doubt that is what he would have called them: boobs and dunces. Mencken was a journalist and cultural critic from Baltimore, and he never tired of finding innovative ways to denigrate the idiocy displayed by Americans. This weekend, I dipped into the middle volume of his three book autobiography, Newspaper Days 1899-1906, and came out the other side adding him to my list of influential writers I feel I know but have never met.

My first encounter with Mencken’s voice was through the character of Hornbeck, the cynical reporter in the play, Inherit The Wind, who was modeled after the distinguished newspaper man. From that moment on, I have been a dedicated reader of his work. However, this was my first foray into his autobiography. I found his writing here infinitely readable, although the times and people of which he writes are long gone. His were the days when America learned of itself solely through news print, and Mencken’s prose could both lacerate and eviscerate America’s sacred cows. Journalism also dictated the story, and Mencken tells us insider tales of rival reporters colluding on the narrative, sometimes resorting to minor fictions over absolute truths to advance the telling.

Journalism must be an objective art, as the academics tell us. A good reporter presents the facts and lets the reader decide. But any journalist worth his salt knows this is dogma and that the reality of the situation may call for a subtle influence on the part of the writer. Facts can be manipulated, especially when a writer chooses which ones to tell his readers, and how to place them in the story. Mencken was a master of this art. His work was not anonymous or interchangeable with other writers. As his reputation grew, he did not undergo as much editorial vetting nor suffer the homogenization of his prose by the rewrite desk. No sir, early 20th century newspaper readers knew Mencken’s prose when they encountered it. His writing was acerbic and sharp, and he was not afraid to call out the miscreants and hold their feet to the fire especially if they were politicians or other blowhards, all of whom were the same horny beast to Mencken.

So I did not have to think too hard to know what he would say about the end of the world charlatans of May 21, 2011. And of course, they were wrong, unless one lived in the path of those tornadoes in Missouri. For those poor souls, some of whom lost their lives and others their homes, it was the end of the world, but the world is always ending for someone somewhere, which renders those predictions meaningless.

In all the punditry and flailing on cable news, I hear no voices like Mencken’s. Newspapers have lost the war for relevancy as hard copies or first drafts of history. What news these former paper giants publish now is digitized and one might argue, superficial at best. Few aspire to say anything of depth or insight. Statements of the obvious are the rule, and we face a wall of sound hurled at us by those boobs and dunces pretending to offer analysis for the consumption by other boobs and dunces lounging in their recliners screaming their amens. We need someone like Mencken to cut through the crap. Yes, he had his prejudices and blemishes, but they were his own and not bought and paid for by corporate rapists and spin-meisters. He was smarter than that, and so were his readers. He could irritate and annoy, but his work challenged readers to consider their beliefs. These days we are beset with people who tell us what to think and then the message is repeated over and over again. We suffer from our own misidentified cleverness which in reality, is superficiality bordering on stupidity. Some of us have even crossed that border.

What I mourn for here are the days when good journalism challenged us to be better citizens, not offer us targets to blame for our own inadequacies. Writers like Mencken used to come along and report world events and help us make sense of the world where those events occurred. They were professionals, voices that came with a body of knowledge. Journalists were smart people who had a broad range of knowledge and experience. They lived their stories, and functioned as voices of reason in the wilderness of daily life. Nowadays, with all the noise and compromised pabulum disguised as reporting, it is difficult to hear the true voice over the cacophony of celebrity news readers, aka the pretty people who scream simple words devoid of substance on our televisions twenty-four hours a day. The only good thing about the end of the world is that hopefully, it will bring some much needed peace and quiet.

Joy*

2011-05-13T18:14:00.000-07:00

The quiet, old, musty-smelling, echoes of history. The library has survived fires, earthquakes, floods. This makes it biblical, mythological, the field of Elysium for the mind life.

I have come to this library in late spring to read, to write, to consider where my life is going. All the students have left, and I am alone with my thoughts, and the thoughts of those lining the shelves. Mute testimonies from another age. I hear the voices calling me. I walk between the stacks, selecting random volumes: 1909, 1921, 1894, 1910. The spines are creased and lined, the type worn away. I open the books and find some have not been checked out since the 1950s. There they sit, waiting patiently for someone to come along and bring them to life again by reading.

The library is a four-story affair built on the side of a hill. You enter on the third floor. Spanish colonial architecture, all arches and vaulted ceilings. This is the reading area, now filled with computer stations. Above is a sort of balcony fourth floor—open-air, lofty, overlooking the main floor. I take the elevator down. The second floor houses the audio-visual department and more computers as well as a warren of offices and work rooms. The first floor is my destination. The stacks. Far side, a long narrow room of tables, shelves of art books, and windows with a view of the Pacific Ocean only a few miles away. This is where I belong, my home. Outside the window, a twisted pine stands sentinel. I am the monk at my wooden table dedicated to a life of study and reflection, staring out the window at the world. Here I can think, reconsider, revise. Here, there are no cell phones or computers. Here, paper and leather binding rule the world. I am Charlemagne in my purple robe of thought. I am lost and I am found. I am a paradox. I contain multitudes.

I have been told over these last months that we must imagine the lives we want in order to create them. Somewhere, all our dreams exist. In the minutiae of the universe, every possibility occurs, fracturing space like cracked glass, radiating out in every direction. This is the life I want: solitary, monastic, a place for the written word, but not the spoken one. I long to take a vow of silence. I will remain on this perch at the library table until all my thoughts return, until everything makes sense again.

From here, I can see forever, on and on, until the earth curves and the sky ends in the sea. I can sense the rising columns of warm air, the coming of summer, all of history both forward and back. I can speak with Magellan and argue with Galileo. I can climb the steps of Montmartre, and dip into the Aegean Sea with Odysseus. I can laugh with Whitman and cry with Mary Magdalene. My soul splits like an atom with the force of megatons.

This is the house of questions with a million answers.

I will stay here forever, even after I am gone. This is the paradox—I am alive in the midst of dead trees that record millennia of human thought. I am joy in melancholia, summer in winter, dreaming when awake. The paradox is inexplicable, the angel at my table. This is the crystal moment in the plasma-pause of time. In the library on the hill, light is primordial, elemental, eternal. Ideas echo and double back, swirl and gather in the afternoon shadows. I listen to the whispers. I feel the acceleration of time, past, present, future. Every thought that ever existed, lives here and now. I am poised on the precipice of the universe, listening.

*Check out Vicky the Archivist's discussion of my post and the library here. Vicky writes a wonderful blog about the life of an archivist in this digital age. For those of us in love with books, printed matter and photography, her work makes for interesting reading.

Mark The Grave

2011-05-09T22:13:00.000-07:00

Remember when we lamented the demise of the independent bookstore? We swore the chains were conspiring to push them under. Barnes and Noble and Borders were the evil empires, crushing the poor mom and pop stores into oblivion.

Now we all gather to mourn the passing of the chains. In my neighborhood, almost all the Barnes and Nobles and the Borders locations are gone. I went from having the independents like Dutton’s—four locations in Los Angeles—and the chains—one Borders and two Barnes and Nobles within a five mile radius—to just one Barnes and Noble. Bookstores in Los Angeles are disappearing faster than spring flowers in Death Valley.

To add insult to injury, I drove by the most recently closed Borders location only to see it had already been etched with graffiti. Worse, one tagger’s pen name is “Thinnk.” That’s right: with two letter Ns.

Inside the shuttered bookstore with the shelves standing empty and forlorn, all the lights were on. In broad daylight!! I guess for the ghost readers who haunt the place?

Sure Amazon will deliver your books to your doorstep, but I am a dedicated book browser. I enjoyed wandering through the shop, discovering some gem on a shelf. Amazon works well if you know what you are looking for, but I love surprises. Now it seems the best used bookstore in town is Goodwill. Sad days, indeed.

Easter In Mojave

2011-04-25T22:38:00.000-07:00

It is a city on the edge of forever. Endless desert, empty and dead, even on the holiday to resurrection. My family has lived here for generations. My great-grandfather and grandfather built a cabin in Bouquet Canyon in the early 1900s, and we used to go there for long weekends when I was a child. This is where we would go deer hunting and fishing. Here in the sands among the Joshua trees are my roots. Joshua tree: Yucca brevifolia, a monocotyledonous tree given its more Biblical name by Mormons who crossed the Mojave in the mid-1800s. Whenever I travel to Mojave, I am reminded of Jesus’ forty days and nights in the desert, tempted by Satan.

It is Easter and we are driving out Highway 14. The temperature is still mild, even for late April, and heavy dark clouds hover in the sky with only patches of blue and thin, wispy strands of white. All of this skyscape indicates a low pressure system moving out to make way for a high pressure system later in the week, where the winds will kick up, and the temp will rise to more summer-like conditions. But today, there is still a bit of moisture in the breezy, cool air.

At one point in my life, I thought about moving here. Rent is cheap, and housing is abundant. But I drove through the open gridwork of streets, the miles and miles of empty roads baked by the sun, the sun-bleached tract homes with blank windows, and I came to the realization that I could not survive here. There is a nothingness that is profound.

On every corner, a fast food restaurant. Burger King, Carl’s Junior, KFC, and McDonald’s. Liquor stores and faceless donut shops. One mall with a strip of nicer restaurants, always packed with tired, bleached out people waiting endlessly for tables on Saturday night. That is all there is to do here: eat and go to movies. Driving through the neighborhoods at night, I see people hanging out in their garages, drinking, playing nortenas. Or, the blue glow through shuttered windows of plasma televisions and home theater set-ups. People stay entertained in their homes because there is not much else to do.

Walmarts, Super Walmarts, Sam’s Clubs, Targets, WinCo—they dot every expansive parking lot. This is the place to buy in bulk. It is a desert, I guess, and supplies are hard to come by, and even if that is not the case anymore, people stock up for Armageddon. That is the other main attraction out here in Mojave: religion. Churches are everywhere, mostly Pentecostal Christian varieties. I interviewed a real estate guy out here last summer for a story I wanted to write. He told me he moved here because the San Fernando Valley was the porn capital of the world, and he did not want to raise his kids there. Out here in Mojave, he is ready. The end of times is coming. Barack Obama is a Muslim. And he is ready for the fire next time. He told me of President Obama’s secret plan: collapse the financial sector and the infrastructure of the United States from within. It is a plot, a Muslim plot to take control of our country. I asked him what possible benefit would Obama get for destroying the country that elected him president. “I’m just saying,” he insisted in his bovine manner. “Barack Obama is a Muslim.”

“So, he’s a Muslim, let’s say. We’ve had a Catholic president, loads of Christian presidents. I’m sure we have had an atheist or two.”

“Barack Obama is a Muslim, that’s all I’m saying.”

I dropped the subject and the story. Cities on the edge of forever, living in a shroud of ignorance and desperation, are not that interesting. They are everywhere and nowhere, and therein lies the problem in our country. These are the people willing to believe the fantastical because the reality is too dark and oppressive. Barack Obama is a Muslim, and that is why America is going to hell in a hand basket. Couldn’t be that our culture is collapsing upon itself because we are suspicious of intelligence, we have bankrupted our education system, and we are mired in greed and narcissism? It couldn’t be that we have been telling the story so long that we are the greatest country on earth that we have finally accepted our own arrogance as fact.

Out in Mojave, one can see the America of the Cold War, back when we thought we were fighting against something that turned out to be ghosts and shadows. Be on the lookout for the communist next door. In any case, from the 14 we can see the Lockheed plant with the skunk on the side of the gigantic hangar in the middle of the desert: the Skunkworks 2.0. They relocated here from Burbank in the valley. Now the Bob Hope Airport sits next to a Superfund site, so toxic it will take millions to clean up. My grandfather worked his life there, and I wonder if his cancer might have been caused by his work environment. Just speculating.

There is also Blackbird Park, an air museum featuring a number of planes parked in a landscaped field. Here is the whole history of the Antelope Valley and Mojave aerospace industry. Not too far away is Edwards Air Force Base, home to the west coast NASA space shuttle program. Lots of the testing for the shuttle missions was done here, and when the weather was bad in Florida, the shuttles often came down with a thunderous sonic boom to this airfield in the Mojave. The space shuttle program is at an end. Just a few missions left and then the fleet will be mothballed. What’s next? Didn’t George W. Bush want to go to Mars? Maybe there is aerospace life left in the Mojave. There are always more bombers to build. However, the planned international airport to rival LAX was a bust here. There is an airport, but no one chooses it as a departure point or arrival destination. So it stands here in the middle of nowhere.

There is a lot to see in Mojave. Shacks and desolation, western towns, old movie sets, abandoned mines, boarded-up stores and housing plans that dried up and blew away. Why come here on Easter Sunday, 2011? I still have family here, and I am sure they get tired of me dragging them to civilization down in Los Angeles. I feel bad because it is a slap in the face to where they live, but the harsh and brutal landscape, a creation of both desert and economic starvation, is hardly conducive to a respite away from the city, a day to appreciate the burgeoning spring.

However, the air is clear, the sun is brilliant when it makes its way around the dark clouds, and the static electricity raises gooseflesh on the skin. The Mormons thought the Yucca trees reminded them of Joshua supplicating to heaven with outstretched arms. Therefore: the Joshua tree. Mojave is a land locked in a vow of silence amid the thunder of man-made flight. The largest bird has jet engines, and heat waves dance an ancient ritual across the blacktop on miles and miles and miles of empty roads. Windmills slash at the sky. The California Aqueduct meanders through the sand in a concrete ditch. Mojave is a land of waiting, of praying, of heat and death, and in the event of hard rain, a tiny bit of green life one day that will burn up in a flash of heat from the desert sun tomorrow. It is a land locked in on Easter Saturday, the pause in the universe when the entire Christian world waited for Jesus to resurrect the next day. Only in Mojave, the resurrection never comes, and the land and its people have made a career out of waiting for what comes next.

Before The Rain

2011-04-21T22:57:00.000-07:00

Before The Rain (Macedonia, 1994)
Dir. Milcho Mancevski
Criterion; $39.95, DVD

Milcho Mancevski’s Before The Rain, utilizes a circular narrative to uniquely portray the civil strife in Macedonia between the Orthodox Christians and the Muslim Albanians in the 1980s and 1990s. The film is beautifully shot, with a film clarity that appears almost of digital quality, highlighting the rugged and sparse terrain of the Macedonian countryside. The theme, expressed by one of the characters, that “Time never dies. The circle is not round,” recurs frequently in the fragmented story line.

Using the motif of tomatoes on the vine, we see a young priest who has taken a vow of silence, picking the fruit in the crystal clear Macedonian sun. This section of the film is entitled, Words, and adds the additional motif of almost the complete absence of words, or in limited occasion, the inability of words to express thoughts and emotions.

The priest, upon returning to his Spartan cell, discovers a young androgynous figure hiding in his bed. The young person is a girl who is hiding from a mob bent on exacting revenge upon her for murdering one of their members. The young priest is startled by her appearance, and runs from the cell to seek help from an elderly priest. Since he is unable to speak, the elder believes he wants company to go into the night to urinate before bed. Because of this misunderstanding, the young priest returns to his cell and allows the girl to sleep on the floor. She also eats some of the tomatoes, representing the extreme poverty and starvation of the ethnic Albanians. The mob storms the monastery and conducts a search, but somehow, the girl avoids detection. The mob displays particular cruelty, with one member callously shooting a cat several times. Mancevski uses these visual cues to portray the violence and brutality of the ethnic and religious conflict.

The priest is forced to resign and flee the monastery with the young girl as the segment ends. Upon leaving, they pass a funeral, and a woman who cries out upon witnessing the burial. Later, the priest is captured by members of the girl’s family who wish to punish the girl for her actions. In the melee, she is shot and killed by her own brother, and dies face down on the earth with the priest tearfully crouching next to her.

The second segment, entitled Faces, jumps to London where a young magazine editor finds herself torn between her husband and a former lover, a photographer who has been covering wars and violence throughout the world. He is world weary and haggard, even as the husband is neatly groomed and a business man. The woman rejects overtures from her former lover and after a sexual encounter in the back of a taxi, leaves him to go to her husband. She meets him in a restaurant where a bloody tragedy occurs. A bearded and swarthy man, not unlike the Orthodox Christians and Albanians in the first segment, causes a disruption in the restaurant, is expelled, and later returns with a gun. He fires indiscriminately into the restaurant, killing many people, including the husband.

Mancevski makes clear in Faces that ethnic strife and violence do not respect borders. Was the shooter a Christian or an Albanian? We do not know for certain, but he is ethnic, gesticulating wildly in his conflict with the restaurant employees, and babbling in a strange tongue. He is quick-tempered, uncouth and violent, contrasting sharply with the husband who is urbane and civil. The Londoners are not spared the violence even in a sharply ordered, civilized city.

The kick in this section is in the photographs that that editor works with at her office. They are of the young girl’s murder from Words. It is a bit disconcerting, yet deeply involving, that the time line is unclear. This again reinforces the theme of “the circle is not round.”

The final section, Pictures, depicts the photographer from Faces returning to his home village, a place he has not visited in some time. After inadvertently causing another man’s death, he is tired of being caught up in war as a journalist, and longs to rediscover a place where he belongs. A woman he once loved, Hana, is now a widow, and asks him to help her with her daughter, the young girl from Words. The photographer’s fate is not to escape the violence he has seen, and in his desire to help the young girl, he becomes a victim of the that same violence. His fate leads us back to the first segment and the funeral we witness in passing.

Mancevski is clever with his fragmented time line in the film. He illustrates that violence carries over, through time and space, never ending, and always a threat, in cities and in rural areas. No one is safe, and the threat never ends. It is somewhat pessimistic to think that human beings will never escape their need to shed blood over religion and ethnicity, but the film maker’s thesis can hardly be refuted by history.

To add gravitas and epic scope to his story, Mancevski weaves in subtle lines from Shakespeare. He alludes to Romeo and Juliet when a character advises another to “Deny thy father and refuse thy name.” It is not a simple matter to deny personal history, ethnicity, or religion. Are these things not the causes of all wars and violence? Another character, upon realizing he has inadvertently caused more bloodshed, says, “Will these hands never be clean?” an echo of the famous lines in Macbeth when the murderous Thane asks the heavens if he will ever be free of culpability in the rivers of blood that run through that play. It is an effective conceit that adds much to the scope and heft of the narrative of the film.

Before The Rain is a stunningly realized piece of historical narrative. The gathering storm clouds that hiss lightening and rumble ominously throughout the film, especially during the bloody climax of the final segment, add sonic and visual punctuation, lending the work its title. Mancevski’s masterpiece is emotional and intense, possibly lacking the distance of years to mature the narrative, but one can feel both the violence and the endless cycle of brutality so heavy a burden on the shoulders of all humanity with roots in the fertile soil of bigotry, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing.

The Arbiter of All Culture

2011-04-18T23:28:00.000-07:00

What the world needs now is Edmund Wilson. There is no cultural criticism, no literary criticism, no historical perspective, at least not in the sense that Wilson created it in his volumes of essays, and in journals like Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.

Wilson came into the world in Red Bank, New Jersey on May 8, 1895. He attended The Hill School, an eastern boarding academy located in Pennsylvania that prepared students for college. His literary aspirations began there when he edited the school’s magazine, The Record. He went on to Princeton University and started on his journalism career at the New York Sun after graduating. Rene Wellek, writing in Comparative Literature Studies (Volume 15, No. 1), says Wilson “disclaimed being a literary critic.” He quotes Wilson in 1959: “I think of myself simply as a writer and a journalist. I am as much interested in history as I am in literature.”

The journalist Wilson came to Vanity Fair as the managing editor, He later joined the staff of many other cultural publications that are icons in American cultural literature. These articles, essays, and pieces were later collected into a number of important books, including Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties, The Triple Thinkers: Ten Essays on Literature , and The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. His most famous book is probably To The Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, a chronicle of Marxism and the rise of socialism in the twentieth century. Many of Wilson’s best pieces take on the influence of Marx and Freud, and he applies their philosophies to the analysis of literature and history. In a nation that found itself locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, this was daring stuff. And Wilson was not afraid of changing his mind. He later moved away from his admiration of communism, becoming shocked and disillusioned with the Soviet purges.

Wilson could be polemical and cantankerous, but his point of view came from a place of deep thought and consideration. He was willing to step out in front of American life and thought and take a critical stand. For his courage, he inspired generations of literary and cultural criticism.

My favorite of Wilson’s books is A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty. Here is Wilson in all his difficult and demanding glory. Here to, is Wilson at his most poignant. This is a man who refused to pay income tax as a protest against America’s Cold War policies. This is a man who supported communism when all of America was caught up in the witch hunts of the HUAC hearings. By the age of sixty, Wilson had adopted unpopular opinions, and later modified and even refuted them publicly. Upon reflection, Wilson wrote, “And am I, too, I wonder, stranded? Am I, too, an exceptional case? When, for example, I look through Life magazine, I feel that I do not belong to the country depicted there, that I do not even live in that country. Am I, then, in a pocket of the past?”

Wilson died in 1972, but I would argue that far from residing in a “pocket of the past,” we need writers, critics, and yes, journalists like him now. Unfortunately, arbiters of culture and literature like Alfred Kazin, Frank Kermode, Norman Podhoretz, Susan Sontag, and indeed, Edmund Wilson, are voices all but ignored in today’s world. We need to listen to them again, and to encourage new writers to pick up the mantle and carry the torch. We require a more intelligent America, and it is a sad day when no one is there to make us think for ourselves. It is a world of greater complexity and lesser minds, leaving us alone in the woods without a match to light the way home.

Photo: © Bettman/CORBIS

Shambhala Sun

2011-04-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

Shambhala Sun: Buddhism Culture Meditation Life
Bimonthly; $29.95 per year
www.shambhalasun.com

Maybe it was the smiling cover photo of Pema Chodron, whom I have written about previously. Maybe it was my ongoing pursuit of peace and tranquility amid an increasingly cacophonous world. In any case, I grabbed the March, 2011 issue of the magazine, Shambhala Sun.

The magazine is filled with ads offering retreats, seminars, and lectures on the Buddhist lifestyle. The Dalai Lama will be visiting the University of Arkansas under their Distinguished Lecture series next month. The two sessions sound interesting, but I would not expect him to visit Arkansas. Nothing against the folks from Arkansas; I just didn’t think there would be that many Buddhists there, although Buddhism is a religion where one could follow the philosophy—non-violence, meditation-prayer, and compassion for the world and its people—without actually being a Buddhist. Jesus, in fact, would have made a good Buddhist. There are also pages of book ads. All the major Buddhist publishers are represented, and I found a number of interesting books on Eastern philosophy. The articles, however, are excellent as well.

Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle’s piece, “Touch of Grey,” examines the “sacred dimension” of growing old. “Consider the central Buddhist tenet of the three characteristics—dukkha (suffering), anatta (nonself), and anicca (impermanence),” she tells us. “All three are beating the drum of our diminishing years. Time to wake up!”

The thrust of her article is that growing older is a time for shifting focus to the spiritual. She advocates more practice of meditation and more awareness of the inner self. We must meditate on how physical diminishment and death are inevitable. “Everything changes, and we must part from loved ones,” she reminds us. This focus echoes “the ancient art of memento mori, remembering that I will die so I can live to the fullest.”

In her piece, “The Garden Path,” Cheryl Wilfong examines meditation practice through the metaphor of gardening. She discusses the growing white noise and unreasonable demands for our attention in daily living. We are stressed, distracted, and fatigued from living our days. We must take action to rejuvenate and grow our spiritual awareness, she tells us.

One of my favorite writer-philosophers is Thich Nhat Hanh. He weighs in on “Healing the Child Within.”

“We must listen to the wounded child inside us,” he says, and nurture healing every day. He compares Eastern and Western views of human psychology, the conscious and unconscious mind. In the scope of the article, the author peels back the layers with which we insulate our psyche to avoid dealing with trauma, pain, and emotional distress, much of it originating in our childhood.

“Buddhas Without Connections” is a unique piece by Tokyo crime reporter, Jake Adelstein. He investigates the mysterious deaths of a couple virtually no one can recall.”

“For many,” he writes, “the coming of spring is symbolic of birth, rebirth, vitality. For me, it’s a reminder that a lot of people are going to start dying, and that I’ll be busy.” Summer for this reporter is a season of death—bodies rotting and hot temperatures leading to short fuses.

Adelstein investigates the murder-suicide of an older couple in their apartment in Tokyo. It is a tragic, heartbreaking story he pieces together. What makes the deaths even more poignant and sad is that they lived without connections. None of their neighbors really knows them. Then there is the couple’s suicide note: “Don’t worry about us. We’ve been dead for a long time. Sorry we didn’t clean up before we left. We didn’t have the energy.”

Shambhala Sun has a lot to offer us in these troubled times. Eastern philosophy is known for its simple, brief language that generates deep, reflective soul searching. I would not subscribe, mainly because over the course of several issues, I found too many repetitive ideas. I will buy individual issues at my local news stand when a particular article calls to me. If they put Pema Chodron on the cover, I’ll plunk down my precious coin for every issue. Who can resist that reassuring, bemused, wise and wrinkled face?

Postscript: Check out writer William Michaelian's post called Silence on his blog, Recently Banned Literature. Very Zen.

Notes From Harper's

2011-04-11T22:53:00.000-07:00

Here are a few interesting tidbits from Harper’s Magazine, March 2011:

“Estimated percentage change since 2000 in the U.S. defense budget, not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: +80.”

Can you imagine what our education system would be like if the budget for schools increased eighty percent in ten years? Even though the statistic above does not include the wars, what if we added it all together? What would American education be like if we spent, over the last ten years, the equivalent of what we have spent on defense and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Libya no-fly zone?

And if the government had shut down last week, who were the people whose paychecks would be immediately delayed? Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shouldn’t there be some kind of clause in the budget that says no matter what, our men and women in uniform still get paid? I mean they are dodging bullets for this country.

Moving on:

“Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8. Minimum number who died after being struck by lightening: 29.”

Seems like we need a war on lightening. I wonder if George W. Bush would come out of retirement and help us hunt down the evildoers who used this lightening on our citizens. I think they’re called clouds. Go get ‘em, George.

“Date on which student loans first passed credit cards among the largest sources of private debt in the United States: 6/30/10.”

More people now owe a greater debt on student loans than their credit cards. Yes, it is getting harder and harder to finance education in this country. But that’s okay. No one wants a smart populace questioning the wisdom of Boehner and company. The Tea Party does not want America to discover they are a confederacy of dunces. Stupid people stay quiet, or so our fearless leaders hope.

The back of the magazine has an interesting feature that I enjoy called “Findings.” It is a collection of facts and data from around the world. It seems 2011 has already been a bad year for birds. Given their mythological and cinematic (at least to Hitchcock) importance, maybe we should take note:

“…flipper-banding was correlated with king-penguin deaths. Columbian officials seized a narco-pigeon, and Saudi Arabia detained a vulture affiliated with Tel Aviv University. Police in Pforzheim, Germany, detained an owl who was drunk on schnapps. Dozens of Romanian starlings drank themselves to death. One thousand Italian turtle doves fell from the sky with blue-stained beaks; 500 starlings and red-winged blackbirds were found dead on a road in Point Coupee Parish, Louisiana; and 4,500 Arkansan blackbirds were thought to have been killed by fireworks.”

Something is definitely wrong with the world. When owls and starlings drink themselves into oblivion, can the end of days be far behind?

East/West

2011-04-07T23:15:00.001-07:00

East/West (France, 1999)

Dir. Regis Wargnier

Union Generale Cinematographique (UGC); price varies, DVD

The roiling ocean in the opening scenes of Regis Wargnier’s 1999 film, East/West, makes for a powerful symbol of the disturbing upheaval to come. Inside the ocean liner, the atmosphere is warmly lit and exuberant. These White émigré Russians—those who emigrated from Russia during the revolution of 1917—are returning to their motherland. They have been offered Soviet citizenship and amnesty for fleeing. Here, in the midst of the journey home, they dine, sing patriotic songs, and tell stories. One family stands out—Alexei Golovin, his French wife Marie, and his son, Sergey.

As the journey ends in a starkly lit dockyard in the new Soviet Union, we see the contrast between the warmth of the scene on the ship and the new reality. Wargnier punctuates the frightening change of scene with gunfire: the newly returned citizens are gunned down in cold blood. The horror begins to dawn on the faces of the family, especially Alexei.

The family now must survive under the oppressive regime. Alexei makes a deal with the Soviet officers and they are sent to Kiev, but not before Marie is brutalized by an officer, accused of being a spy for the French government. Wargnier uses this as a catalyst for Alexei and Marie to begin to grow apart. It is clear that Marie blames him for taking them to this hellacious land of oppression, and Sandrine Bonnaire, does an excellent job portraying a woman who suffers and smolders while never losing her vulnerability. Bonnaire is a veteran film actress whom I remember from another excellent French film, Monsieur Hire (1989). Here, her character only wants to return to France, and as the film progresses, we see her determination to escape from Soviet oppression.

Catherine Deneuve plays an actress in a theatrical troupe that tours the country. During a performance the Golovins attend, she gives Marie an ally in her escape. Meanwhile, the couple and their son move into a rundown house that has been converted into apartments with a cast of interesting, or in some cases, malevolent characters. Alexei goes to work as a medical doctor in a textile factory.

The central characters in this narrative are Alexei and his wife, but it is Marie whom we see being crushed by her new world. The movie charts her journey: growing distant from her husband, striking up a relationship with her seventeen-year old neighbor, a competitive swimmer named Sasha, her fomenting an escape plan for Sasha that leads to him swimming out to and boarding a Turkish freighter to freedom, her subsequent accusation as a CIA spy, and her long sentence in the Gulag from which she is released a broken prematurely aged woman.

Alexei suffers his own horrific trials as well. The actor Oleg Menshikov portrays Alexei so poignantly that we can never forget his shame and guilt at bringing his family into this mess. He leaves his family and takes up with another tenant in the building, and we ponder whether guilt is the prime motivator for his infidelities. He cannot live with himself, nor with his family whom he has betrayed. Marie resents his allegiance to Stalin and the Soviet regime, failing to understand that his playing along with the Soviet leadership is a method of survival. He is biding time and waiting for the right moment to escape. He ultimately sacrifices his own security for his family’s freedom, and his fate is revealed to us in a postscript to the film.

Wargnier hits all the notes of impending tragedy in his film, and in this way, his work is a bit formulaic. There are plenty of comparisons with other like-minded films, one of which is The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), a work which predates Wargnier’s film. Still, East/West is a powerful and moving piece of art, capturing a time and place that has only recently emerged from the darkness and secrecy of Russian history. The west still has much to learn about the Russian mindset, and one of the successes of the film is Wargnier’s ability to render the richness of the émigrés on their way home with the stark and dilapidated environment of the new Soviet Union. Like the gunshots that ring out almost as soon as they arrive on the dock, the fast-changing fortunes of these people, duped into returning to their homeland, startle and shock us into the realization of the brutality of the regime and the inescapable quagmire in which our characters sink almost to oblivion. From the first moments over the roiling sea, we feel the tension in the plight of Alexei, Marie, Sergey and the others, and although the story seems destined for a tragedy of immense proportions, the end of the film does offer redemption, especially for Alexei, whose desire to return to Russia nearly costs his family their lives.

Saturday At The Getty

2011-04-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

The Teacher's View will now be updated with new posts every Monday and Thursday. Please check out my education blog, LocalSchool Directory, which updates every Tuesday and Friday.

Across the Street and Around the World

2011-03-30T23:12:00.001-07:00

A few years ago, I took a group of senior high school students to the Getty Center perched on a hilltop here in Los Angeles. I suspect many of them had been to a museum before, but I am also sure a few had not. In a room filled with priceless statues from antiquity, several girls moved within inches of the statues and mimicked the poses captured in the marbles. This involved balancing on a single leg, arms outstretched while craning their necks to see the statue they were emulating. The security guards did not hesitate. They quickly moved in to prevent a costly disaster.

Later in the cafeteria, the girls questioned me about their stern reprimand from the security staff. They felt the museum personnel overreacted and embarrassed them. I tried to explain. “Those statues are thousands of years old. Can you imagine what would be lost if you fell against one and knocked it over?”

“It’s not a big deal,” one replied. “They have stuff like that all over Caesar’s Palace in Vegas and you can touch them and everything.”

In a recent posting on YouTube, a UCLA student ranted about Asians and their behavior in the library. Her views were obviously racist and ill-considered, and she not only received an angry response from around the world, but also death threats.

In an article on the Huffington Post by Jonathan Montgomery, Americans are taken to task for their cultural ignorance, and Montgomery argues that this could have worldwide repercussions.

Why should Americans be concerned about their cultural I.Q.? “With the United States graduation rates and scores in math, science, and literacy falling behind other developed nations,” Montgomery writes, “researchers are now looking at ways to give students an edge to compete globally.”

The first step in the process of learning how to compete globally is to develop a cultural intelligence. The Cultural Intelligence Center defines this as “a person’s capability to function effectively in situations characterized by cultural diversity.”

The elephant in the room here is that we have a rancorous debate ongoing in this country over the admission of “foreigners” and “illegal aliens.” We are deeply suspicious, and extremely prejudicial against those who look different, speak another language, or worship a different god. It is an obvious paradox that the most multi-cultural society on earth has major problems with racism, discrimination and prejudice.

Montgomery cites a Metlife/Harris Survey that says “Two thirds of teachers (63 percent), parents (63 percent), and Fortune 1000 executives (65 percent) think that the knowledge of other cultures and international issues is absolutely essential or very important to be ready for college and a career.

Jonathan Montgomery quotes David Livermore Ph.D., author of Leading With Cultural Intelligence, at the end of the HuffPost piece: “It’s less about becoming an expert about every culture and more about developing an overall capability that allows you to become effective and respectful in any cultural situation.”

Never Too Broke To Bomb

2011-03-28T08:09:00.001-07:00

Due to technical difficulties, this Sunday post was delayed to Monday.

How long have we known that Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi is a nutcase? We recently heard from Libya’s ex-Minister of Justice Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil that Quaddafi himself ordered the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. He has been a thorn in our side for decades. However, can we really dedicate our dwindling resources on yet another front? Now we find ourselves policing a no-fly zone over Libya while mired in a budget crisis here at home.

According to Glenn Thrush, senior White House reporter for Politico.com, speaking on National Public Radio’s Madeleine Brand Show this week, the cost of our efforts in Libya amounts to $100 million per week. The Tomahawk missiles we lob into Qaddafi’s command and control installations run a half-million dollars a piece. Times that by the more than two hundred missiles fired so far, and the cost of this latest action becomes clear.

What is far from clear is the strategic importance of Libya to U.S. interests. The debate rages across the internet and on the news channels. Yes, Libya occupies several miles of Mediterranean coastline, and produces about two percent of the world’s oil, most of which goes to Europe, and, as Jason Pack points out in his article on the NPR website, “Libyan nationals have been prominent jihadists in Iraq.” Pack rails against Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations for describing U.S. interests in Libya as “less than vital” in a Wall Street Journal piece last week.

Putting aside the economic and political ramifications of the situation, do we not have a responsibility to defend human life? Yes, we do, and not only because we are Americans and Americans always come to the defense of the defenseless. We need to defend human rights because it is the moral and ethical thing to do. There is really no equivocating on this, but increasingly, we here in the U.S. are facing choices, and none of them are good.

We have high unemployment, bankrupt cities and states, a weak economy, and in many cases, a collapsing infrastructure, as is the case with our public school system. States are forced into dramatic cuts in services, and no help will be forthcoming from the federal government as President Obama fights with Republicans over spending cuts and tax breaks. Now, to add to the burden of Iraq and Afghanistan, we are fighting on a third front in Libya. We are sending our men and women in uniform into yet another desperate situation. The president said he would not put boots on the ground, but as we saw last week, things can go wrong quickly. Two of our servicemen were lucky enough to be rescued after their fighter jet crashed in Libyan territory.

Muammar el-Qaddafi is certainly a problem that we might have handled years ago. He is a brutal, incoherent tyrant who has raped and pillaged his country for decades. We need to support people who wish to be free and have basic human rights. However, the degree of sacrifice in the U.S. for the Libyan people opposing Qaddafi is a topic that must be discussed. This is why I believe President Obama should have made his case to congress and the American people before launching the offensive. The strange thing about our president is that on several occasions, he has waited too long to take action. Often, it feels as if he wants to put a poll in the field before he decides what to do. When he does act, he tends to do so without consensus, and I have not been impressed with his choices. Increasingly, I am disturbed by his arrogant attitude and lack of explanation of his actions to the country. For a man who was considered an excellent communicator on the campaign trail, he has not been as good at getting his message out in office. We could blame his advisors and staff, but those faces were changed recently and the communication problem continues.

So, do we have an obligation to spend 100 million dollars a week to help a ragtag group of citizens rise up against a tyrannical dictator? We have an obligation to help, certainly. But at a time when nine percent of the people in this country are unemployed, many more are underemployed, where almost twenty-one percent of children and fourteen percent of all Americans live in poverty, where states are facing billions in deficits, and schools are struggling to offer a basic education, we need to think twice about trying to right all the wrongs in the world. We have a responsibility to take care of those who struggle against the tyranny of poverty and the lack of education right here, right now. For the moment, we have enough on our plate here at home.

Photo: Raytheon

Bread and Chocolate

2011-03-23T23:26:00.000-07:00

Bread and Chocolate (Italy, 1974)
Dir. Franco Brusati
Hen’s Tooth Video; $24.95, DVD

This feature film, directed by Franco Brusati and released in 1974, tells the story of an Italian immigrant in Switzerland and the discrimination he faces as he tries to survive. The film represents the “commedia all’italiana” genre, meaning Italian-style comedy.

The central character is Nino Garofalo, played by Nino Manfredi, a guest worker from Naples who works as a waiter in a Swiss café. From the moment, Manfredi appears on screen eating a sandwich in the park while watching various Swiss people enjoying their holiday, he reminds one of American actor Jack Lemmon. He has the comic facial expressions of Lemmon, and the ability to portray a range of emotions—humor, fear, confusion, regret, et cetera—with a simple look into the camera. Director Brusati uses the actor’s face throughout to convey the bewildering misfortunes, trials, and tribulations of the poor immigrant character, a man whose hair is too dark, whose skin is too olive toned, and whose mannerisms are never quite right to fit in with Swiss society.

The comedy in the film ranges from the sly to the more obvious. Nino loses his work permit through a series of accidental incidents culminating in a charge for public urination. There is a good dose of black comedy here, too, as when Nino stumbles upon a murder in the park for which he is paraded in front of the magistrate. Nino’s life is one of inopportune moments and misfortunes, all of which Manfredi plays with a subtle patience that moves toward exasperation as the movie progresses.

Elena is the Greek woman who supports Nino, one of a number of people he encounters in his travails as an immigrant worker. Johnny Dorelli is an Italian industrialist who becomes Nino’s friend and benefactor, and whose suicide due to financial stress sets off one of the funnier set pieces in the film. Brusati ably stages tragedy with comedy, such as in the suicide scene, where the audience can feel Nino’s discomfort and unease while also finding humor in his facial expressions and mannerisms.

The film also presents a number of cultural cues, portraying the Swiss as cultured and high-mannered while the Italians are the lower class workers who fail to understand fully the snobbish attitudes they experience in their guest worker roles. The Neapolitan chicken farmers who offer Nino a place to stay offer us a commentary on the “hillbilly” nature of the Italians in another culture. They are rubes who live, literally, with the chickens, and Nino finds them too rural even as he finds he does not fit with more polite society in the city.

In an attempt to blend with his new country, Nino dyes his hair blond to look more Swiss. In a comically played scene, it is not just his olive skin that gives him away. He is caught cheering for Italians in a soccer match while in a bar. For this heinous crime he is arrested and deported. The scene demonstrates clearly that Nino does not fit in anywhere: in Switzerland, he is too ethnic and lower class; or back in Italy, where he cannot find steady employment and respite from misery. He rides the trains back and forth between the two countries, listening to the other migrant workers and passengers sing of sun and sea. Manfredi conveys the sadness and confusion of the character in this scene.

His misadventures lead Nino to decide he would rather live illegally in Switzerland than in Italy with nothing. He does not feel he belongs anywhere, the proverbial man without a country. It is a powerful and sad epiphany for the character. Brusati gives us this in the final image of the film. Nino is on a train headed back to Italy when the train enters a tunnel. The camera lingers on the darkened entrance. A figure emerges on foot, suitcase in hand. Nino has decided to try once again to live in Italy. There he is with his symbolic burden, the suitcase.

The source of comedy is often pain. In watching a character experience difficulty, embarrassment, ridicule, loneliness, heartache, and discomfort, we are able to live out our own fears of just these same emotions. Nino Manfredi and Franco Brusati create for us a man caught between to worlds, neither of which he fits. Like the character of Nino in the opening scenes of Bread and Chocolate, we wander through the picnics in the park, outsiders looking in on a world we can never fully inhabit. We feel Nino’s pain, and we understand the poignant humor of the marginalized, the outsider doomed to always look in the window and never come inside.

Photo: Crossed Flag Pins

The Conformist

2011-03-16T22:06:00.001-07:00

The Conformist
By Alberto Moravia; Trans. by Tami Calliope
Zoland Books, $17.00 paper
ISBN: 978-1-883642-65-5

What drives someone to cruelty? Were the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity in the Second World War psychopaths from childhood? Did some event occur to turn them against their fellow human beings?

The answers to these questions become clearer through the lens of history. Alberto Moravia attempts to analyze what makes a fascist by using a fictive narrative. His main character, Marcello Clarici in the novel, The Conformist, displays many of the traits of a psychopath from early in his childhood. Moravia also gives us some suggestions on how a person’s experiences and genetic history might push him toward anti-social, murderous behavior.

Marcello cannot locate his emotional center from the start of the novel. He studies others to see their emotional reactions and then apes them in order to manipulate. As the novel opens, Marcello is a child torturing and killing lizards in his Italian garden. When his friend, Roberto, expresses horror at Marcello’s shredding of the lizards with a rush, he becomes angry enough to fire off his slingshot at Roberto’s hedge availing himself of the opportunity to at the very least, scare his friend, but also quite cognizant that he could potentially harm or even kill him. Marcello succeeds only in killing Roberto’s cat, but this is a powerful scene because of Marcello’s lack of empathy for the suffering of the animal. Instead, he finds himself terrified because he confessed to killing a cat the night before to his mother to see her reaction. Now, he is faced with the fact that he has actually killed the pet, and confessed it to his mother. This, he believes, is “an uncontestable sign that he was, in some fatal mysterious way, predestined to commit acts of cruelty and death.”

Beyond this experience, Marcello suffers with his feelings of abnormality. He is abused by his father, a man later imprisoned in a mental asylum because he believes he is one of Mussolini’s men. His mother lives in squalor, a woman who lacks the sense to know the difference between sex and abuse. His schoolmates taunt and abuse Marcello because they consider him too feminine. When the boys attack him on the street and attempt to dress him in a skirt, a chauffer named Lino comes to his rescue, only to attempt to molest him in exchange for a real gun. Marcello does not understand the defrocked priest’s motives, but he dearly wants the gun in order to commit more mayhem. Marcello’s childhood comes to a close when he shoots Lino during an encounter in the chauffeur’s bedroom. The boy leaps out the window, believing he has killed the older man.

From here, we jump to Marcello as an adult, about to be married, and searching for normalcy in his life as a way of hiding his secret work for the fascists as Italy ramps up to the war. He agrees to take his honeymoon in Paris in order to renew his acquaintance with a former teacher, a man named Quadri. Moravia takes us through Marcello’s thinking, driven by wanting to be normal, something Roberto denied him in childhood, but which Marcello has searched for all his life. He harbors no real dislike for his teacher, but he is an anti-fascist agitator and therefore must be eliminated. The novel takes an interesting turn when Marcello, his new bride, Giulia, Quadri and his partner, Lina meet up in Paris. Marcello sees his betrayal of Quadri as similar to Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus. He even considers kissing his former teacher on the cheek to identify him to the assassin, another agent named Orlando.

Moravia should also be credited with writing scenes of frank and open sexuality in the novel. Lina, Quadri’s partner, wants to start a lesbian affair with Giulia, who rebuffs her. Meanwhile, Marcello develops an obsession with Lina and believes they are secretly destined to be together. She, of course, wants nothing to do with him since her sights are focused on Giulia.

The novel and the characters are twisted and deformed by their lives. This is not a study of fascism per se, nor even of Italy during the war. Moravia truly focuses his work on characters. How does one reach such a level of depravity? Is there any such thing as redemption for someone so devoid of emotion and so bent on murder? The resolution of these conflicts in Marcello’s life makes for powerful reading, and in the end, themes of lost innocence and the confusion of normalcy with conformity, hence the title, come to a satisfactory if somewhat coincidental conclusion. The reappearance of Lino is especially too easy, offering Marcello a chance to confront the person he believes set him on the path to ruin.

Moravia writes in spare, poetic prose, relishing in the details and brilliantly lit Italian landscape. Although Marcello displays many of the stereotypical traits of a fascist, Moravia avoids the clichés by making his character an individual. The thread of sexuality that runs through the story borders quite often on the perverse, assuring the connection between sexual repression and fascism in the novel.

Alberto Moravia, who died in 1990, is a challenging and powerful writer. He resists the standard existential angst of more famous work such as Camus’, The Stranger. It might be easy for some readers to dismiss Marcello’s evil as a product of his abnormal nature, but psychosis does not happen in a vacuum, and the depravity of the fascists cannot be explained away as simply a matter of dysfunction. Moravia knows better; he recognizes and develops the psychology of evil, and in the end, the reader can actually feel for Marcello even as we identify him as a monster. This is what makes Alberto Moravia a good writer and The Conformist an engrossing and compelling novel.

Malaise

2011-03-13T20:51:00.001-07:00

I am caught in one of those periods where I cannot focus or concentrate for longer than a few minutes. There are piles of books and articles to be read, pieces to write, work to get done, but I find myself watching endless tape loops of the devastating earthquake in Japan, or the people of Libya rising up against that odd looking tyrant.

It does not help matters that I am struggling to breathe. For the last few weeks, what started as a chest infection blossomed into a pneumonia-like conflagration. I have completed my cycle of antibiotics and still, the hacking cough lingers. It is one of those coughs where you pull muscles trying to clear the airway. So I cannot breathe, I am sore, and the fatigue is overwhelming. Writing the last sentence requires a rest.

Outside, we are experiencing perfect spring weather here in Los Angeles. No doldrums between winter and the first buds here. We have jumped right in with both feet: eighty degree temperatures, bright sunshine, and beautiful blue skies. This weekend, we moved the clocks ahead an hour for daylight savings, so now we have what would constitute summer for many parts of the country.

I have been struck over the last months that things are changing. Of course, they are always changing, but I have felt this change in my bones, on a profound level, but what puzzles me is the nagging question: changing to what? I sense movement, but I cannot ascertain the destination. At heart, I am a control freak, I guess, because when on a journey, I like to know where I am going. Of course, we never know where we are truly going, but I like a trip with an announced destination, even if we do not wind up there. All I know is that things are moving, I am along for the ride, and there is no telling where we will end up.

The other thought that keeps circling my brain is that in America, we are defined by our jobs. I am a writer or a teacher or a content-provider. Right now, I feel like Paul. That’s it. Just Paul. When I am thrust into the role of student, teacher, writer, I don’t feel permanently those things. I feel like I am in Burlington Coat Factory and they are having a sale. I am trying on different coats and looking at myself in the mirror. Sometimes, when someone calls my name—“Paul!”—I want to stand there and see what happens, as if a ghost me will come bounding into the picture and respond. My name does not feel it belongs to me anymore. This weirdness started up when a colleague of mine kept confusing me with another person named Daniel. I actually emailed her to tell her I was not Daniel because she kept labeling my work as “Daniel’s Report.” Both names are strong and biblical, but if she were going to rename me, I would have liked Ezekiel, or Elijah. Paul was Saul who had to have God knock him off his horse because he was too stubborn to mend his ways, and Daniel hung around with the lions, and I hate cats, but Ezekiel and Elijah were prophets, seers of the future. Plus, how cool is this dialogue: “What is your name?”

“I am Elijah.”

That would stop conversation at a party.

I am not Elijah. I am Paul, a distracted writer living in Los Angeles, recovering from a chest infection, and trying to refocus his attention on the world. Just last week, someone was saying how bloggers are clogging up the universe with too much navel gazing. Sorry to reinforce the stereotype.

Occasionally, we must all take a time out, a moment to breathe and let our attention wander. We reassess, refocus, redouble our efforts, set new goals, and off we go. We are not defined by our jobs, but often our work gives shape and heft to our lives, and although work pays the bills, it often informs our existence and gives us purpose.

I also think that when things are too overwhelming, we have no choice but to become distracted. The pictures and stories from Japan keep haunting me. Yes, we could have something like that happen here in Los Angeles, but it is more than just self-interest that paralyzes me. Once again, real life trumps anything we could create. We are so proud of our evolution, our higher order thinking skills. We are civilized. Yet, who really runs this planet? In the end, like sheep or gazelle, we are at the mercy of nature and the forces of the universe. And the disaster may not be over. The coup de grace may come at our own hand: our desire to harness the power of nuclear fission. Not the earthquake or tsunami, but the exploding power plant will be the one to get us all in the end, although the earth shaking and the flooding killed their fair share on Friday.

So maybe it is the waiting for the ax to fall that gives me the temporary attention deficit disorder. Maybe it is the fragility of life, the perilous way the future might unfold that gives me pause. Like I didn’t know these things before?

There is only one defense against the awesome power of fate, the destructive force of nature: the story. We must tell the story. That is what the poets and the prophets do. They tell us what it means to be alive. They tell us of heroes, of battles on the horizon, of strength in the face of adversity. We must lift ourselves out of the malaise and go on. These are the best of times, the worst of times—isn’t it always that way? We are human, and often, humans must be knocked from the saddle on to their asses and struck blind to see the error of their ways. Then we get up and shoulder on. In the midst of immense tragedy and destruction, the story continues, and so do we. That is the way of the world

Humanitas

2011-03-09T22:38:00.000-08:00

Many people think of a study in the humanities as light-weight work. Cancer will not be cured by a humanities student. Neither the tallest skyscraper, nor the spacecraft that carries the first humans to Mars will be built by a humanities student. However, if we seek to understand the glory and the dream of being alive, the power of human intuition, the beauty of art and poetry, we will find answers to many of life’s questions. The sciences will come from our understanding of the world and the laws of nature; wisdom comes from understanding ourselves. We need both, but our other pursuits will be vastly enriched if we begin our study with the humanities.

To study humanities, one must be ready for critical self reflection. The path begins with a question, not a thesis, another difference from sciences. What does it mean to be human and humane? Rational and reasoned? Cultured and moral? Learned and worldly? How do we envision ourselves as human beings bound to other human beings? What roles do empathy and imagination play in our existence? Humanities links traditional interests and values such as aesthetics, ethics, and politics, with imagination, signification, deconstruction and power. History matters, as does conscience and historical memory. They are essential to any understanding of the universe.

Humanitas was a word coined by Cicero regarding what he saw as the ideal human being, “educated to possess a collection of virtues of character suitable for an active life of public service.” He felt there were certain disciplines of study that would enrich the life of a human being. These included poetry and literature, mainly, but the term soon broadened to include ancient and modern languages, literature, law, history, philosophy, religion, visual and performing arts. These early concepts of humanistic study influenced the Renaissance, and a host of other revivals of the classical education model, as well as persuaded some eighteenth century British citizens in new world colonies to form “a more perfect union.”
Many people argue that American education has become too focused. Students pick a course of study as early as high school, and therefore lack the scope and breadth of learning required to be a citizen of the world. Others argue that students waste too much time and money studying things in school that they will not need in life.

Education is to make a better, more aware, more active and cultured person who is guided in life by strong morals, values and ethics formed from intense study of the world. Whatever challenges one faces in life, whatever setbacks, disasters, blows, and storms a man must weather, his education will guide him to make the right choices, and he will understand that money and fame are transitory, but love, honor, courage, and friendship fuel the journey.

So what can one do with a humanities degree? One can understand why ignorance is more dangerous than any bomb. One can understand why the greatest threat to humankind is humankind. One can understand why racism, bigotry, and bullying are products of fear. One can see great beauty in a farmer tilling his field. One can appreciate the plight of a beggar in Calcutta. One can understand when people demand a better life, a more informed government, a voice in the process. One can understand that human beings often succeed against overwhelming odds, and that some will call this a miracle or an example of divine intervention. In the end, it is simply human beings and their remarkable capacity to thrive in the most harrowing of circumstances.

Years ago, I took an astronomy class. I dreaded taking it, because I lacked ability and confidence with advanced science work, but it was a requirement for graduation, so I signed up. The course began in the laboratory with parabolas, elaborate equations for computing the arc of planets through the skies, the mathematical positioning of entire constellations. Numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. I was lost. One night class meeting, we trudged out in the middle of a citrus grove to a small shack that contained a telescope owned by the university. We each had a set of stars to chart in their paths across the sky. Once out there, hundreds of yards from the nearest campus building, the professor found that the telescope was missing an important eyepiece. He cancelled the evening right there, and rescheduled the event for later in the week. The students packed their notes and returned to the campus. I found a grassy patch in an open area among the blossoming, sweet-smelling trees, spread out my jacket on the cold ground, and threw myself down to stare up at the stars. No calculations, notes, or graphs. I lay there, hands under my head, the night skies of March above me. It was so hard to believe that the light from the stars was a million years old but only reaching my eyes on earth right then. Some of those bodies of light might not even exist anymore. I thought of philosophy and history, struggling to find a comparison. We live and die, but the light from our lives continues long after we ourselves are extinguished.

I stayed out in that citrus grove for a good hour with the stars, the blinking lights of planes, the whispers of the universe. When I stood up, it was close to eleven o’clock, the air was crisp but heavy with the scent of orange blossoms, as only early spring nights in Los Angeles can be. I gathered my things and walked toward the lights of the university, knowing only a little about the science of stars, but already becoming fully aware of my place in the universe. It was a good night.

Ophelia In Winter

2011-03-02T21:15:00.001-08:00

I have spent some time in the last weeks rereading Hamlet, and that brings me around to contemplating Ophelia again. To me, she is one of the most captivating characters in English literature. Why? Because she is caught in the mechanizations that are not of her own creation. Because she is a lost soul who can find no other way to fight back in her world but to sink into madness. Because, in the end, Hamlet loves her, and the result is tragedy of the deepest kind.

I love literary critic Elaine Showalter’s essay, “Representing Ophelia: Woman, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” if only because she gets it right when she writes about Ophelia that she brings forward “the issues in an ongoing theoretical debate about the cultural links between femininity, female sexuality, insanity, and representation.” Ophelia suffers in the play, caught in the pedantic spying of her father, Polonius, the treacherous actions of Claudius, the savvy escapism of Gertrude, and Hamlet’s focus on revenge for his father’s murder. Meanwhile, here she is, simply in love, and thinking that love is all that is necessary to live a rich life. Instead, she gets pushed away by Hamlet, who publicly tells her she is a whore and to “get thee to a nunnery.”

Showalter tells us that “She appears in only five of the play’s twenty scenes; the pre-play course of her love story with Hamlet is known only by a few ambiguous flashbacks. Her tragedy is subordinated in the play; unlike Hamlet, she does not struggle with moral choices or alternatives.” I would posit her scenes are by far the most harrowing. Upon the dissolution of their relationship, Ophelia longs to give Hamlet some “remembrances” that he gave her once, and he coldly refuses them with the line, “I never gave you aught.” Their back and forth leads Hamlet to rage: “Get thee to a nunn’ry, why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?”

He is as much as calling her a whore, and this from a prince. It is a harsh slap in the face for Ophelia, crushing her. There are many theories about their relationship—how far it went, what should have been the future, and what promises were made. Kenneth Branagh, in his film of the play (1996), makes it clear in brief flashbacks that Ophelia and Hamlet were intimate, which means that his public rejection of her would be tantamount to saying she was not a virgin or was damaged goods. In any case, when Hamlet rejects her and then kills her father, she descends into real madness played against the feigned craziness of her former lover.

We later see Ophelia when she “enters, distracted,” into a room with the queen after her father’s murder. She is out of her head, singing and parading around. When questioned, she says, “Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me, you promis’d me to wed.’” Later, she encounters her brother, Laertes, returned to Denmark upon hearing of his father’s killing. He cannot believe his eyes when Ophelia enters handing out symbolic flowers to each person in the room. She has no way to fight back against society; she cannot dispute Hamlet’s rejection of her, and she cannot avenge her father’s death, so she must resort to symbolic acts like handing flowers to characters that represent their personalities and actions: fennel for flattery; columbines for ingratitude; rue for sorrow and repentance.

And then she is gone, and the much better manipulator, Gertrude, gets in the final epitaph: “There is a willow grows askaunt the brook, that shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream, therewith fantastic garlands did she make of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples…When down her weedy trophies and herself fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, and mermaid-like awhile they bore her up, which time she chaunted snatches of old lauds, as one incapable of her own distress…Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death.”

Like a crippled mermaid, she goes down singing, wreathed in flowers to a watery tomb. Sad, indeed, but Hamlet learns from her death. He comes to understand the impermanence of life, the fragility of existence, and that he must seize the day and his own destiny. He comes upon the grave diggers preparing Ophelia’s tomb after her death now labeled a suicide, and he has an epiphany. He tells his best friend Horatio: “To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander…Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beerbarrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O that that earth which kept the world in awe should patch a wall t’ expel the winter’s flaw!” In the end, we turn to dust and our essence returns to the earth, as Adam was formed from the same earth in Genesis.

Upon the conclusion of the scene in the cemetery, Hamlet leaps forth to declare himself, and says “I lov’d Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum.” Better late than never, Hamlet.

So it is in the dead of winter, I am thinking of Ophelia. Is she a victim of love, a casualty of life and the innocent belief that things will work out in the end? Life is, as Darwin told us, a matter of survival of the fittest. Gertrude knows how to play the game, the role a woman should embrace, wrong as it is. Ophelia, who takes the world as she finds it, goes down to a watery death.

I believe we are all a little like Ophelia. We dream of a better world, and trust that all we have to do to get there is to love. Often, we are crushed when we cannot reach high enough, or travel far enough to find this better world, if the better world ever existed in the first place. Deep into winter, we wait for the spring, hoping that this year will be our year, that love will be enough, and that faced with the fathoms of water beneath our fragile lives, that we will float on just a little longer until someone, anyone, will reach out and save us.

A Boat Beneath A Sunny Sky

2011-02-23T21:45:00.001-08:00

A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise.
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?-Lewis Carroll

In my dream we are in a boat upon a lake, neither of us speaking, my grandfather and I. We are fishing on a foggy summer morning, like we did for a brief period a very long time ago. He looks the same: baseball cap on his head, dark, squinty eyes, ruddy skin, double chin, pot belly, but sickly, just beginning to show the signs of the disease that would kill him. He stares out across the water, silent, holding his fishing pole. He does not look at me.

“I was there the day you died,” I offer. “Good Friday, 1980. I came over and mowed the lawn and cleaned up the yard. Then I sat by your bed awhile. You moaned and spoke gibberish. I went home and that night, we got the call you were dead.”

He continues to stare off in the distance. I do not understand what he is waiting for. Do the dead wait for the fish to bite? I realize my own fishing pole is slack in my hands. Did I bait the hook before casting? I remember he taught me to bait the hook with cheese. I could not stand to impale the worm, watching it twist and turn to escape the barb stuck through its body.

“You were kind of a jerk,” I say as gently as I can. “You were mean sometimes. Always calling me Bub. Never letting me play pool on your table because you said I would destroy the felt. You were kind of a jerk.”

I see he does not respond to my criticism. We had just started going fishing when he got sick. We were never close, and I feared him, but when we were out on the water, he changed. Between us there became an unspoken bond. But for the life of me, I cannot remember what we talked about on those cold mornings out on the lake.

Now the fog swirls around us, and I hear voices. “Please,” I call. “Help us. My grandfather is sick.” The voices continue their murmuring. They sound a little like Gregorian chant, like monks in the distance saying their Liturgy of the Hours.

“I stayed behind in the chapel after your visitation and before they took you to church. They accidentally rammed your casket into the door frame when they wheeled you out.” He is unaffected by my words, and I realize he does not care. I continue anyway. “Christopher is dead, lost at sea. Sean is dead, a delayed victim of the Vietnam War. Do you know where they are? I cried for you at the funeral. I think my father thought I was weak. Sixteen years old, and I cried for you, as much as for the end of innocence as for you. We had only begun to talk, like this, on the water.”

The sun begins to burn away the fog. I see the far shore. There is a lone person standing there and I cannot tell if it is a man or woman, but the person waves at us. My grandfather starts slowly reeling in his line. The sun grows hotter and more intense.

“You never told me how hard it is,” I say. “You never told me how hard it is to live.” But as I say the words, I realize he did tell me, every day, while the cancer ate through his prostate, his intestinal track, his colon, his bones, while he writhed in pain on that Good Friday when Jesus was crucified, died and was buried, while struggling to come to terms with the fact that after working all his life, raising ten children, and coming to retirement, he died.

“Do you remember the garden?” I am overwhelmed by the scent of tomato vines ripening in the sun. The furrows he plowed with the push tiller, the tepee of string bean vines, strawberries with the earth shrouded in plastic and the green shoots of the plant sticking through. I used to hide behind trees and the woodpile and watch him work. I believed he could not see me, that I was invisible—games of a child. He could see me. He was ignoring me.

The fog is gone. We are in a boat beneath a sunny sky, my grandfather and I. A solitary tear runs down his cheek. He is not a man to cry. Crying was for sissies. Yet, the tear is there, tracking gently down his cheek. Regrets. He regrets something.

In the distance, the man on the beach—I’ve decided he is a man—has gone away. The sand is unbelievably white.

“I need to tell you that everything is gone, everything is changed,” I tell him. “The garden is gone, the house is gone—sold to the first offer that came along—grandma is gone, I do not speak to anyone in the family anymore. We are like the sound of thunder in the distance. We are heat with no lightening. Everything is gone. Everything you worked for—gone. What do I do now, now that life is so hard? I wish you would tell me.”

He is far away, sitting right next to me in the boat, receding in the distance. The light shifts to winter and declines away in the sky. Twilight time.

“I am dreaming you alive again,” I tell him. He is shadowy and indistinct in the dusky glow. “I wish I could dream you all alive again: mom, grandma, you, Christopher, Sean, the life we had, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, family reunions, Notre Dame football games, Christmas, and trailer trips—the trailer is gone, too. Where are your travel journals, the ones you kept in a drawer in the trailer where you wrote what we did on those trips?” I realize he is fading with the day. “Sometimes, I no longer believe that world existed,” I tell him. “I am trying to hold fast to the memory, but I do not remember what you told me in the boat on those mornings on the lake. I wish I did.”

He is gone now, and I am alone in the boat in the darkness on a lake of my childhood.

“Did you tell me that life would be hard? Did you tell me you believed in me? Did you tell me I would get through? I am asking what you told me because I am losing the memory piece by piece.”

It is too late. He has vanished. Even his essence has evaporated into the darkness. Far off, a bird screeches in the night. The water is alive with fish, swarming around the boat. Everything is blue, quiet, like glass. Far in the distance, a lighthouse, guiding me to shore, and across the water, I hear the voices again, lingering in the golden gleam. And in this dream life I am alone on the water beneath a million stars, waiting for what comes next.

A Treasure Hunt Without The Treasure

2011-02-16T21:50:00.001-08:00

I have written previously on LocalSchoolDirectory.com about a former student of mine lost in community college hell. Such is the educational reality in America these days that one must wade through a lot of crap to get to a decent university and a desired program of study. This is the case for Elda, a student much too smart for her particular ring of Dante’s Inferno. However, she hasn’t allowed her woefully deficient education experience to damage her sharp sense of humor.

Logging on the other night, I found her latest rant lodged in my inbox. A new semester brings yet more grievances from the land of allegedly higher education. She listed her most pressing pet peeves:

“Expensive college textbooks that are assigned merely because the professor must assign a book or is too lazy to make his own multiple choice exams and thus, I must go buy a $200 book for a class I have already taken in high school.”

“Taking a class I have already taken in high school because a 3 on the AP exam is not sufficient for the high, high standards of community college.”

“Online classes—I made the mistake of signing up for 3 of these this semester because they were the only classes open at the time, and now I’m stuck with ‘Tell me about you, what are your interests, if you could be any part of a bicycle which would it be?’”

“Quizzes on a syllabus. Yes, I repeat, a quiz on the syllabus.”

“Deadlines that are not truly deadlines. If you’re posting an assignment and you’re going to say that it’s due on February 15, then why do I get the full points only if I post it on the 13th and partial points if I post it on the 14th and even fewer points if I post it on the 15th? Am I the only one completely baffled by that or am I just weird?”

“What is an online treasure hunt? Are these teachers trying to kill me?”

“And if you’re going to post an online treasure hunt then please have the decency to tell me what I’m looking for before I have to click the little button that says ‘Begin treasure hunt.’”

I wish I had better news with which to console her. Governor Jerry Brown has proposed major cuts in all areas of education in California, including a 500 million dollar decrease in the CSU budget. In a report released by The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, students were in dire straits before Brown’s proposed cuts. According to the press release announcing the publication of the report, “the students at CSU Northridge are struggling to finish college as tuition soars, class offerings shrink, and families are devastated by the economic turndown, the housing crisis, and the very high levels of joblessness and underemployment.” Because of these cuts, “A large portion of students face enormous challenges to graduating and preparing for their future.” The report discusses how students must support their families while completing their studies, and therefore are burdened with an overwhelmingly high level of stress.

The key findings of the report are disturbing:

58.6% of students said their families relied on them more now for financial support

26% of both Latino and African American students’ families in this study cannot pay their bills

Parents of more than 1 out of 10 students overall had lost their job; 21.3% of students have parents who hours or salary was reduced

40% of Latino and Asian students, 25% white students, and 20% of African American students helped support or provide emergency aid to other family members

80% of all students say it is harder to meet expenses today than two years ago; 30% say it is much harder or they simply cannot meet their costs

2/3 of students say they are unable to get the classes they need to progress towards degree attainment; most think it will take at least one additional year to graduate.

One of the co-authors of the report, Gary Orfield, education professor and co-director of the Civil Rights Project, says “If we care about the future of this state…then there is only one option—to listen to the struggling students and to find ways to lift their burdens and preserve the state’s promise.”

Meanwhile, President Obama’s federal budget submitted this week offers only bleak news for students and their educational futures: cuts of $100 billion to Pell Grants and other higher education programs mainly benefiting low and middle income students. He also wants to reduce loan subsidies for graduate students and stop paying the interest on their student loans while they are enrolled in a degree program as opposed to waiting until they finish the degree as it is now. This means the interest will accrue the moment the loan is awarded, exploding the amount of student loan debt in a job market that may not support the repayment of those loans.

The death of education is the death of a culture and our future’s end. We must do better. If we are to convince our children that education is the key, the treasure at the end of the hunt, we must offer them the support and a map to get there. Right now, they are lost in the wilderness of a poor economy and weak job market, all while facing disappearing classes and a lack of educational opportunities. They are on a treasure hunt built on lies: no weapons or tools to hunt with, and certainly no treasure to be found. The message from the government at this point? “Good luck, kids!”

The Sin of the Brother

2011-02-13T18:11:00.001-08:00

I did not set out that day intent on murder, but that is what happened.

I was nineteen, and reveling in the freedom of my first car. The world was an open door, it was summer, and every day was a gift. My mother decided it was time to bring me back to earth. She had me running errands all over town, both before and after my part time job at the aerospace parts warehouse where I sweated out every afternoon from two to eight.

So it was on that fateful day she sent me off to pick my sister up from some activity or day camp. I was not happy. For one, I would barely have enough time to pick her up, drop her at home, and rush to work. Second, the streets surrounding the school would be clogged with traffic, and I hated traffic. However, I was given no choice but to fulfill my obligation.

I raced the streets to the school, double parked, and hit the horn as soon as my sister came out of the gate. She got in the car and I sped away toward my destiny. About six blocks from home, the street slanted downhill in a deceptively steep incline, and I took the opportunity to accelerate. At the bottom of the hill was a flock of pigeons, gurgling over some seeds or bread crumbs. I figured they’d hear my approach, or feel the yellow tornado of my little hatchback on the horizon, and fly off at the last second. They didn’t. In a moment of confusion and panic, the entire gaggle flew into my front grill and I mowed them down. I can still hear my sister’s screams.

I pulled to the curb, shaken, and because of the squeal of my tires and my sister’s cries, several parents behind me pulled over, and at least five or six people came out of the houses. I walked to the carnage in the middle of the street. There was my handiwork for all to see. Pigeons, pieces of pigeons, blood, guts, and feathers littered the asphalt. I was ashamed and devastated. I had killed animals, helpless, defenseless birds, and the only way the situation could have been worse is if I murdered an endangered species or ran over a, gulp, human being.

Right in the center of the mess, strangely undamaged except for a tiny bit of blood near its mouth, was a perfectly snow-white pigeon. I reached down and stroked its downy plumage. The tiny body yielded to my touch, still pliable, but obviously, undoubtedly dead. Suddenly, my sister was at my side, and we stood there in the middle of the street, holding up traffic, the center of the entire neighborhood’s attention.

“Oh my God!!!” she screamed. “You killed the Holy Spirit!!”

To a child who had just made her First Holy Communion, a product of Catholic school, a weekly attendee at Mass, someone who had a picture in her room of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity of sacred mystery, I had indeed killed the Holy Spirit, the entity so often portrayed as a white dove surrounded by a halo of light or fire. And there before us, a breeze ruffling the light feathers, was the Sacred Symbol, dead. Her brother had done the deed.

I tried to ease her back to the car, but this seemed to only fuel her raging fire. She twisted and sobbed and refused my hand. I got her into the car, finally, started the engine, and eased away from the horrific event. “I’m…telling…mom…you…killed…the Holy Spirit,” she sobbed brokenly.

“I didn’t even see them,” I offered weakly.

“Yes…you…did. You did…it…on purpose.”

Well, she had me there. I was not afraid that my mother would be upset over the dead bird. But she would nail me for driving recklessly with my sister in the car, and my sister would put on a good show depicting the life-altering trauma she had experienced. Then my father would get involved, as well as my grandmother, who would be upset that I had killed the Holy Spirit and driven so irresponsibly with my sister in the car. My aunts and uncles would get a good chuckle: “Did you hear? Paul killed the Holy Spirit.”

“Okay, look,” I said to my sister, pulling over to the curb yet again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see the damn bird…”

“Oh my God, you sweared,” she nearly screamed.

“Swore, and so what. I already killed one third of God.”

“What?” I’d lost her there.

“The white bird is only a symbol.”

“No it’s not.”

“There are a lot of white birds.”

“But there is only one Holy Spirit.”

I was getting nowhere. “Okay, why don’t we stop for candy and we’ll talk about it.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“But you do want candy?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ll promise to settle down and not tell mom?”

This was the deal-breaker, the point of contention. She hesitated a long moment. “Can I get a Slurpee, too?”

I had five bucks in my wallet. “Sure,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

Tears dried up like magic, and we were off to the local 7-11. “We did finger painting today,” she said cheerfully. “I drew our house. I can bring it home tomorrow.”

The crisis had passed. I had gotten away cheap. How much is it worth to kill God and buy off the witness? Two bags of M&Ms and a Grape Slurpee.

But long after that fateful day, I wondered if all the bad luck in my life was not a product of that day when I ran down the Holy Spirit with my brand-new-to-me used 1978 Chevrolet Chevette on a residential street one hot summer.

12th and Falling

2011-02-09T22:43:00.001-08:00

Stanley Aronowitz teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He studies labor, social movements, science and technology, education, social theory and cultural studies. This is the long way of saying that when he announced the death of critical education on truthout.org last September, he knew of which he spoke.

He begins his essay, entitled “Education Reconsidered: Beyond the Death of Critical Education,” by telling me something I already knew: “Credentials seem to have lost their advantage; parents and politicians are complaining that the schools have faltered in delivering what students need.” His first point leads directly to the second. Graduating from an education school with a license or credential does not, on the whole, produce good teachers, and therefore, the public has lost faith in, and no longer trusts, the educators in our schools.

People hear the media’s overwhelming focus on failing schools; they see the incompetence of school administrations and teachers; they are hit with increased fees and taxes to pay for school systems mired in entropy and stagnation; they realize the failures of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation; they observe the falling graduation rates—12th “among capitalist societies” and falling; and they hear President Obama and others decry that “the engines of global economy are math and science, and this country is turning out fewer trained physicists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists.”

Aronowitz argues what we do not need is more time in school, more discipline, and more homework. He also says to stop punishing teachers for students’ poor performance. We need to use the time in school more productively and stop focusing so much energy and attention on standardized testing scores. Because of this heavy-handed focus, teachers are tempted to teach to the test in order to receive positive performance reviews, pay raises, and tenure. Once the testing concludes, many times so does the instruction. We must use every minute of every day in the classroom to educate kids for life. I have argued for a longer school day, but we could make a huge difference now if we use the time we already have in the classroom more judiciously.

Aronowitz asserts that the right and the left have thrown their weight behind the idea that “schooling should serve the economy; first and foremost students should be prepared to take their respective places in the world of work.” The goal of education is not to prepare a child to fit into a workplace niche. “Education should be a preparation for life,” Aronowitz writes. Working and making a living are a part of that life, however separate from a job, people must know themselves and the world and understand the beauty and truth of life. We must educate our children not to simply be a cog in the economic machine, but to have a deeper life of the mind.

Aronowitz breaks down what each stage of a child’s educational life should include, using the work of Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bruner. Age three to seven requires imagination to be the subject and object of learning. “Reading, writing, and math need not be withheld, but the main content of learning at the earliest years can be delivered by means of play,” Aronowitz writes.

The years eight to twelve should not confine the student to a desk, but transfer the classroom “to a large extent, from the school building to the wider world.” He advocates trips to museums, research labs, health and senior centers, concerts, factories, offices, parks, even streets. Literally anything could be a site for learning.

Age eleven to eighteen should introduce academic rigor and higher order thinking skills. “Rote should be combined with a broader understanding” of the uses of particular knowledge. Introduction and development of math skills, chronology of history, laws and procedures of the sciences, and ecology, all have a central place here at this level of education. The middle and high school levels are where we have dropped the ball. What we offer high school kids today does not challenge them to excel and is woefully insufficient to prepare students for the rigors of college and university study. We must push our students harder at this level, meaning more critical and analytical thinking, self-directed learning, and the idea of research as a way forward to a more complete understanding of the universe. No more forty math problems on a worksheet. No more busy work.

Aronowitz also has interesting views on student publications and the requirement to teach philosophy. He argues that “students need their own periodicals that they control without interference by school authorities.” These outlets for writing and opinion foster critical thinking and create an environment where “criticism of both school and society can flourish outside the official channels.” He tells us that like the French, we should include philosophy as a core subject. Knowing the ideas behind world cultures and thinking teaches students how to think. The concepts of doubt and skepticism, so crucial to a method of inquiry, can be taught and developed here. Students should be required to read and understand complex texts and differentiate between fact and propaganda.

Aronowitz returns to his initial point at the end of the essay: “we need a major reformation of education schools.” He writes, “the students must be required to major in subject matter, and education becomes only a minor. The education minor should not focus on teaching methods, but on the concepts associated with critical thought, that is, philosophy and history, but not only of education.”

Education schools have failed to produce better teachers or improved education. They teach theories over subject matter, and they neglect to get down to the basics of the art and craft of teaching. Many of these teachers of teachers, the education professors, have never set foot in an elementary or secondary school classroom. The professoriate, Aronowitz argues, needs renovation as much as teacher education.

Aronowitz does not hold out much hope for major changes in the future. “School reform is unlikely except in the cosmetic sense,” he writes. “But we need projects that challenge the mainstream if there is to be any change at all.”

The art of teaching is one of constantly rethinking and revising practice, procedure, and methodology. We never reach perfection, and every year presents new obstacles and challenges. We must rise to meet these challenges if we want to reform education in America. 12th place and falling is just not acceptable.

A Highlighter and A Pencil

2011-02-06T21:58:00.001-08:00

For far too many years, I had an almost pathological aversion to annotating my books. Was it because I wanted to resell my textbooks at the end of the semester? I did need to scrape up every penny I could find to pay for those books, and many times, I would rush to the library to check the course books out before anyone else got them because there were no pennies left to scrape up. However, the answer is no, I kept every book I purchased during high school and college. When the semester ended, I simply had grown to love them all too much. I’m the guy who at the end of my ninth grade year, was sickened by the sight of my fellow students burning their books in a bonfire at the bus stop.

The reason I could not mark up my books for so many years was that I did not want to mess up the pages with yellow highlighter and penciled notes. That is not what you do with holy objects, and to me, books are sacred.

So why am I a committed annotator now? I got over my trepidation and changed my thinking.

Reading a book, indeed, reading any text is an engagement of minds: reader and writer. It is a discussion, an argument between two intellects across time and space. One of the parties might even be dead and therefore, it is an argument that transcends the grave. The book might be ancient, but that is why when we write about literature, we write in the present tense. The poem may be crumbling, but the analysis, the discussion, is happening now.

My engagement with my books started tentatively. I used a highlighter, and I made the marks infrequently but quickly before the gods of literature struck me down for blasphemy. “You did that to my book?!” I thought I heard them scream. I used different colors of highlighters before settling on yellow only. Other colors are too garish, like a literary strip club on the edge of town. Yellow makes the text stand out without ostentatious linear flamboyance.

My next foray was to put a tiny pencil mark in the margin, a “yes,” or “what?” or “huh?” Yeah, I was a real, high-brow annotator.

It took a while, but I finally began writing definitions of unfamiliar words, background data and dates, and questions and comments on nearly every page, filling the margins on all sides until the text overflowed. I took the words apart, I rubbed the pages between my palms like Play-Doh, I lived inside the paragraphs and did not clean up the pizza boxes. I made the book mine.

Although I don’t think I need to worry, anyone who covets my library after I’m gone will find only over-used, well-worn books on the shelves. And many of the annotations will make sense only to me, because I wrote the notes to myself. It is an exclusive club with just two members: the writer and me.

One must engage with the text. Highlight main characters, interesting dialogue, a potent image. Also, yellow in unfamiliar words, names, historical events, and items needing further research. Use yellow only; highlighting a book need not look rainbow pretty, although different colors could be used for different categories of notations.

Use a pencil to make notes in the margins: dates, definitions, questions, your thoughts, what the passage reminds you of, and anything else the book fires up in your imagination. Use pencil because you can erase. Different readings of the same book can provoke different thoughts and ideas at different points in your life. Leave some space for the future, I always say, as well as for maturity and autumnal reminiscence, which is quite different from juvenilia jangling.

And what if money is so tight that one must sell the books at the end of the semester? Or what if one cannot buy them in the first place and must use library copies?

Use Post-It notes, those sticky squares of paper that peel off easily without permanent damage to the page. The larger sizes allow plenty of room for annotations while the adhesive lets you affix the square right to the relevant line or paragraph. Yes, the squares could lose their stickiness and fall out of the book, but there are not a lot of other options for annotation. You simply must get your hands and the page dirty.

Really and truly, a reader must fully engage with the text she studies. This is not about light reading or reading for fun, although I often mark up those books, too. If you are a dyed-in-the-wool reader, a student of everything, annotate, deconstruct, disassemble, pick apart everything you read. Pick the word-bones clean and fully link up with the writer’s mind. You, the writer, the book: locked in battle, deep in discussion, maybe even kindred spirits shouting “Amen, Alleluia, Yes it is!” to the literary gods in heaven. There is no better life of the mind, no other Holy Grail of discourse than to read and note and cogitate.

Engage the book, mark it up, dare to annotate. If you exhaust your copy, fill every margin with notes, ideas, questions, cover every sentence in florescent yellow, it’s okay. As the ad slogan says, “Don’t worry; we’ll make more.”

Books, that is.

Communion

2011-02-02T21:41:00.001-08:00

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “The process of writing…includes as a dialectic correlation the process of reading, and these two interdependent acts require two differently active people. The combined efforts of author and reader bring into being the concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. Art exists only for and through other people.”

For Sartre, and many other cultural critics, art requires three things: the artist, the object, and the viewer. It is only through the communion of these three that the art is fully realized.

In literature, there are also three conjoined entities: the writer, the book and the reader. Only through the work of these three can the story, the image, the poem be fully imagined and come alive.

Writers write to be read, and anybody who says otherwise is a liar. It is a way for the writer to process the world, to make sense of the experience of existence. Therefore, shut down a writer, refuse to publish him, and he will die. Although it has happened to so many writers and artists, the lowest level of hellacious frustration must be to die before anyone reads the work. We admire Emily Dickinson’s poetry, but no writer wants to be Emily Dickinson. Writers require readers to actualize their work.

Tim O’Brien, in his book The Things They Carried, characterizes the dead as books on a library shelf that no one is reading right now. In a dream, a child version of Tim O’Brien talks to a girl on whom he had a crush, and who subsequently, has died of cancer. He asks her what it is like to be dead. “Well, right now…I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like…I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading.”

“A book?”

“An old one. It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”

I think about those lines every time I walk into the library: all those lives, those ideas, those minds, those characters, just waiting for me to pull them down from the dusty shelf and bring them back to life by reading them.

Writers are often asked in those inane interviews or by the patrons who wander into the book store to hear them read, “For whom do you write? Who is your imaginary reader?” As if a writer could conjure a fictional reader alongside his fictional characters! Writers often respond that they write for themselves first, as a way of figuring out what they think.

In truth, it is both ways. We write as a way of making sense of the world, of figuring out our own minds, but we also need to be read. We want readers more than anything else in the world. We crave the communion of minds. A writer without readers is a man without a country.

I think of all the writers I’ve talked with over the years in my reading, often late at night, long after the house has grown silent and ghosts wander freely. Age nine, plowing through one Hardy Boys mystery after another, never realizing that Franklin W. Dixon was the nom de plume of a number of pulp fiction writers. Twelve, and it’s Louis L’Amour, lost in his saga of the Sackett family in the Old West. Brother Ray Bradbury and the creepy carnival, the burning books, and the Illustrated Man. Sylvia Plath, poet and novelist, desperately trying to live while frantically attempting to die. She made me Esther Greenwood. And Frost, and Cummings, and Eliot—oh, we’ve had some great talks! Shakespeare’s kings, Chaucer’s pilgrims, and Huck and Jim floating down the Big Muddy looking for freedom. A dark, stormy night at Wuthering Heights, Pip and his great expectations, the jagged, jiving poetry of Allen Ginsberg, and of course, on the road with Kerouac. Hundreds, thousands of writers whose crude symbols on a piece of pulped up wood led me to visions and hallucinations and adventures. Stories brought to life, Dr. Frankenstein, I presume? Every writer works at the top of the house. The reader brings the lightening.

I love the fragile schizophrenia of reading at night. In the silence, the voices come to me:

“He did not want to be the father of a small blue pyramid.”

“Summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born when the ibis came to the bleeding tree.”

“If a body catch a body coming through the rye.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”

“Call me Ishmael.”

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”

Because your pen and your words go with me.

The voices come fully fleshed out and alive again. On the deck with Horatio Hornblower; sailing across strange seas with the Dawn Treader; with Peter in Neverland; longing for Ithaca with Odysseus; dying on the battlefield with Hektor, in sight of the walls of Troy and home. I have traveled the universe and back, and all my wars are laid away in books, to paraphrase Ms. Dickinson.

Art and literature need us. They are calling from the marbled halls of the museum, across the years from the dusty library shelves. They whisper secrets and promises. They tell us how to live in a world where we are destined to die. They tell us how to be heroes. Listen. Shhh! Listen.

In the quiet communion of writer, book, and reader, the dead and the lost return to tell us stories of love, regret and adventure, and we imagine them to life again and again. The boy and the book and the long dead writer, deep into a winter’s night, traveling.

Six Days

2011-01-30T20:04:00.001-08:00

Watching the Egyptians take to the streets of Alexandria and Cairo this week, I am contemplating what people will do to change their lives. And, I wonder if Americans have the strength to change theirs. Do we have what it takes against bullets, tanks, and tear gas? Or maybe it is just as simple as making a commitment to live differently.

Egypt has had years of Hosni Mubarak’s leadership, or lack thereof. Unemployment is very high, and most of the middle class and poor must make do on a few dollars per day. The country is bereft of new ideas, new thinking, of open doors of opportunity. The rest of the world awakens to the burning façade of Egypt’s stability and a populace clamoring for fresh ideas, a new start, and a reformed government.

Doesn’t sound familiar?

The American government is involved in an extended game of tit for tat, Republicans and Democrats. We have our own extremists fringe group, only they’re called the Tea Party. They are obsessed with returning America to the mythological good old days of yore when the Founding Fathers roamed the land enslaving Africans while protecting their own rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Everyone forgets that we are still an imperfect union. That is, paradoxically, what makes America great: we never quit trying to get it right. We never stop working to be the country of our destiny, but lately, the process has slowed considerably, and that has me worried.

I am wondering now if we, you and me and every American, have the strength and willpower to rise up on a personal level and change the way we live to create positive collective change in the life of our nation. Can we awaken the sleeping giant within us and shake off the sloth and stupor of excess and privilege?

This means giving up our luxuries, our self-righteous behavior, our materialism, our strident trumpeting that we are the greatest nation on earth. It means living with less, and inhabiting smaller, quieter lives where we put others’ well-being ahead of our own. Do we have the foresight not to hate others because they are different, or have only recently come to this country to work for a better life? What if they are gay or lesbian? What if their God goes by another name, and their beliefs conflict with ours? Can we do it? Can we overcome our differences? Of this, I wonder.

Being a better country means being better leaders, the end of partisan politics, and making decisions based on what is morally and ethically right. This is the government for the people, and a considerable number of them have been lost in the fray between left and right.

But let’s go one better. Let’s educate like our lives depended upon it. Let’s introduce the right to a free, top-notch education for every American, pre-school through college. Let’s try to exceed our reach, overcome our natural prejudices, and put art and culture on every street and in every school. And let’s make those schools shining beacons on the hill, give teachers respect and a decent salary, and teach our children well. Let’s foster sculpture, painting, dance, music, theatre and imagination. Let’s fire up the American mind, and consider again the mysteries of the universe, the symmetry of mathematics, the poetry of physics. Let’s fly and soar and excel. Let’s be explorers of existence on the ship of our own intellects.

But most important, let’s give our children back their dreams.

I know, a lot of lofty talk. Education is expensive, and we love our big houses and our big cars and our rich lives. But hey, bub, why the emptiness? Why the loneliness? Why the hatred and why the anger? Our lives are okay, change is difficult, and although we are dissatisfied, things are fine as they are, right?

And still, what if?

There are those grainy images of young men in the middle of the night on a street in Cairo, facing down an armored personnel carrier bristling with weaponry. There, but for the grace of God, go I. And I believe our grace is running short in this American life. Too many unemployed, too many denied an education, too little hope, and too much unfocused, nonsensical anger.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.
Tonight, I sit in my study, in my warm home, in my middle class neighborhood. There are at least a few cold, dark homes locked in foreclosure on my block, and shadowy figures rummage for cans and bottles in the trash cans outside in the street. We are all waiting for hope to return.

Meanwhile, across the world and ten hours into the future from my time zone, Egyptians huddle in the dark, scared, anxious, yet determined, waiting for a new day to dawn.

Speechifying

2011-01-26T22:55:00.001-08:00

I found myself struggling to stay focused last night during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. Lots of words, some tepid applause, and not a lot of inspiration. He said some things about jobs and spending and education, but I felt as if I had heard it all before, and some of it he did not fulfill the first time he promised to change things.

Clearly, President Obama feels corporate, big business, and banking industry pain. He is also sympathetic to Wall Street. He did address middle class suffering, and vaguely alluded to the poor. Jobs came up a number of times. But the line that hit me in the first part of the speech was this one: “Corporate profits are up.” Yes, they are, even as they laid off employees, slashed benefits, and shipped jobs overseas. In theory, a corporation does not elect a president. I know that a corporation does donate a lot of money to a candidate’s coffers. Still, I would like to hear that the average middle class American’s profits are up. I would like to hear that fewer people are living below the poverty line.

I am also continually upset with President Obama, and nearly every talking head in education today, trumpeting a “greater emphasis on math and science.” The president went on to say that “The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to ninth in the proportion of young people with a college degree,” and that America is “the home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any place on earth.” Simply pushing math and science will not cut it. We need an emphasis on intellectualism across the board. We need more work in math, science, history, English, the social sciences, languages, literature, reading, music, art, and theatre, and all of it taught by teachers and administrators who model ethical, moral, and values-based behavior. We do have the best universities in the world, yet many of our own American students cannot get into them because they lack the foundation in core subjects necessary to compete at the college level. The president mentioned his work to make college affordable, but for struggling middle class and the poor, saving for college is an extreme hardship, and students go into significant debt to secure a degree. He is not trying hard enough. College should be free to all those Americans who qualify.

I felt his words about teachers were condescending, and this from a man who used to be a law professor. “Here in America,” he said, “it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect.” That is a nice sentiment, but he is the president who wants to base teacher performance on standardized test scores, and who advocates sending money to schools based on those scores. He has rubber stamped much of former President Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation, which even its own architects say was a failure. Those scores are not the only picture of a successful education, and it is a bald, pathetic attempt to quantify education like bottles of beer on a brewery line. We need to know if we are filling our children’s minds up to the proper level. Who cares if they are simply being taught to the test! The education of a human mind cannot be measured concretely. Ingenuity, innovation, experience, wisdom—you will not find these on any standardized test, but you will find them in classrooms led by fiery teachers on a mission to educate and empower young people.

The most condescending line about teaching was this one: “If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life a child—become a teacher. Your country needs you.” Just not enough to pay you a decent wage or give you job security. America does not respect its teachers. We live with the attitude that “those who can’t, teach.” If President Obama is serious about encouraging the best and the brightest to go into education, then make college educations free for those who qualify and pay teachers a decent wage. Furthermore, raise them to place of esteem in our culture. And by the way, being a teacher is not for everyone. It is not a job, but a calling, a vocation. People who become teachers must be able to fire young minds to think and create, and if you believe just anybody can do this, you are mistaken. No license or credential can make you a teacher. Great teachers are born that way, and although degrees and credentials might help improve a teacher’s craft, the ability and passion must be there from the start.

President Obama is not a man known for his jokes. However, like many presidents before him, he is the master of the unintentional joke. Here’s one: “Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying…” Really, Mr. President. This is what you have to offer us in new technology and innovation in the years to come? Twenty-five years to come, to be specific?

Japan launched the first high speed rail line in 1964. President Obama has promised us the astounding feat of bringing 46 year old technology to our city very soon, or a quarter century from now depending on where you live. And it will take us places in half the time of automobile travel. Wow. Does it come with a jet pack and a secret decoder ring? This is our “Sputnik moment?!” We went to the moon! We bettered Sputnik and the Russians. That was our “Apollo moment,” and there will be more of them if we can find leaders with passion and vision to take us there.

Driving in heavy traffic today on the west side of Los Angeles, I could not help laughing. Some day, I’ll be able to take a very fast train to work for low pay and no respect as a teacher sunk in student loan debt while corporate America counts its profits and two branches of our government are gridlocked over how to cut taxes for people who make as much as small countries every year without manufacturing a thing and simply manipulating the stock market. That is the state of this union.

Angry Russians: Sergei Eisenstein's October

2011-01-23T16:43:00.000-08:00

History On Film Film On History: History, Concepts, Theories and Practice
By Robert A. Rosenstone Pearson Longman
$39.20 paper
ISBN: 978-0-582-50584-4

October: Ten Days That Shook The World
Dir. Sergei Eisenstein
Sovinko; $24.99, DVD

Sergei Eisenstein, according to Robert Rosenstone in his book, History On Film Film On History, was one of the first to use film to convey history and foundation myths. His work in the film, October: Ten Days That Shook The World, demonstrates his ground-breaking artistry utilizing “a kind of montage that helped him to construct epic works which promoted the twin-edged theme of the masses entering history and history entering the masses.”

He also uses camera angles to indicate the power of a character or the chaos of a street riot. His film is a recreation of the Bolshevik Revolution, completed ten years after the historic event. To audiences, the film could be labeled propaganda, but Eisenstein is brilliant in the way he uses his camera to tell a rich and intense story. Rosenstone marvels at his ability to use “humour, repetition, visual metaphor, mini-essays, the poetry of movement” to convey the story. “October manages to provide an overall interpretation of its subject that is not so different from those argued by major historians of the revolution.”

The opening image in the film is the pulling down of the statue of Alexander III, emperor of Russia. The symbol of a statue of a failed leader being destroyed is a recurring motif in film, literature and even real life. The scene is an obvious influence on Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) which ends with the pulling down of King Hamlet’s iron image outside the gates of Elsinore. Even in the waning days of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, there is the well-known film of the American military and Iraqi civilians pulling down his statue on the streets of Baghdad. The citizens of Iraq willingly assist in the destruction, and strike the fallen idol with their shoes to demonstrate their hatred and disgust. In the absence of the deposed leader to tear limb from limb, Eisenstein uses the symbolism of destroying the statue to represent the people’s feelings.

Eisenstein’s intent in the film is not entertainment but to recast the drama and recreate a version of historical events. Rosenstone writes: “Through a refusal to focus on individuals, radical editing techniques (four times as many cuts as in the standard film of the time), and overt visual metaphors (a screen full of raised sickles represents the peasantry; raised rifles stand in for the army; turning wheels mean a motorcycle brigade; a statue being torn down indicates the fall of the Czar; the same statue reassembling itself suggests the provisional government has taken over the role of Czar), a work like October clearly reveals that it is constructing rather than reflecting a particular vision of the past.”

The historical relevance of this is that October, while not history per se, allows us to see the dream life of the people. The revolution is filtered through the camera lens and subjected to the manipulations of fiction. The film is history and fiction, containing some historical accuracy while capturing the emotional point of view of memory and reflection. We see a version of what happened and the way an artist like Eisenstein interprets the event.

Eisenstein uses jump cuts and hand-held cameras to convey the jittery excitement of documentary film making. He also uses a wealth of visual symbols to convey character and ideas. His influence on modern film makers is evident here as well, with one example being Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, Avalon. In that film, Levinson utilizes fast motion filming techniques that give the impression of early cinema and newsreel, yet he photographed in color with modern film stock.

Rosenstone tells us that: “October can only make arguments about the past the way a film can make arguments: through visual, dramatic, symbolic, metaphoric and fictional forms. Like any work of history, October will use traces of evidence from a vanished world as a basis for staging, or creating, a representation of that world in the present. As a film, it will deliver to us a world in a narrative, a story of people, events, moments, or movements of the past in an effort to make them meaningful to us in the present.” The danger in this effort to create a deeper meaning in historical events is that people see the film and adopt that version as history.

Eisenstein’s film succeeds as propaganda and in telling an interesting story in a compelling manner. But Rosenstone warns us that “The subtext of each suggests that film is not a proper medium for telling us about the past…Any film maker knows that facts can never speak fro themselves. We have to speak for them.”

The strength of filmic history lies in the image. For better or worse, fiction or history, we are there, transported into the moment when the world changed. However, we must never forget that we are examining the world, the events, as seen through the vision of the film maker, in this case, Sergei Eisenstein. Although his film offers an intense, graphic, and compelling version of history, the clear light of historical accuracy in October might still be elusive.