Der Führer in the Classroom

I woke up smiling this morning, thinking of the tragic sense of life, treasuring the fact that the ancient Greek word "tragoidia" from which it all derives means "goat song," a weird enough source for so great a subject, and the sort of meaningless but possibly deeply meaningful fact that one could cuddle to one's chest and mull over.  I am planning to teach a course on ancient Athenian tragic drama in a school for adults set up in Sarasota which is thriving enterprise with remarkable attendance in a great range of subjects from the sciences to the arts and to literature.  I have enrolled in a number of them but have almost always dropped out, so my project of teaching is fraught with no little anxiety.  There is a common thread that runs through the offerings of the courses I have found which is that the instructors promote discussion.  It stands to reason, of course; these are not children sitting there, but very very mature men and women of some accomplishment.  Hey, living into your eighties in excellent health, still able to stand on the tennis courts for hours or knock a ball around a field of grass, relaxed in the knowledge that you had been successful enough in life's earnings game to have made a very handsome retirement income for yourself, gives you the sense that you are something other than a callow youth picking his pimples sitting in the front row of his first college class.  A small portion of the faculty are retired professors, but more often they are simply another elderly person who has somewhere along the line just taken an elaborate interest in the subject he or she is teaching and wants to share this--shall we call it expertise?--with some others, and is generally much interested in what those who are listening to his/her remarks have to say about them.  That last was the reason I invariably dropped out.  I could not tolerate the chit chat, as it always seemed to be.  As an academic I have always enjoyed learning from someone who knew more than I and the only interaction I cared to have was if I had to, asking questions for clarification.  But that is not how these adult courses functioned.  The students came with interest in the subject, but little factual substance nor informed viewpoints--naturally, one would think, since that is why the students sat there facing the instructor.  Again and again I would hear their questions posed with a qualifying "it seems to me."  This phrase was the opening salvo generally in a home made disquisition on the subject which the instructor was developing.  I should be charitable, but will not be.  Persons not educated in the subject for which they have signed up, thirsting to learn more, are as a rule laboring under a burden of misapprehensions, ill formed theories, ugly untruths, everything else that divide the learned from the ignorant.  That is why they are squelched in college courses by the sheer weight of the system of authority.  In a college course, if a question is asked by a student, the first obligation of the professor to whom it is directed is, if necessary, to disabuse the questioner of the validity of the question.  Otherwise countless minutes are given over to wandering down dead roads.  But in these adult learning courses where everyone is equal, and learning is a pleasantry, and one's own thoughts may be the key to unlocking the group's conscious understanding of the subject, all is game.  It made me grit my teeth; in the classroom I believe in authority, research, published results, well argued theses, peer review.  It is also true that I believe in a relaxed atmosphere, wit and amusement, style and shine, but above all else I believe in authority.  Authority with entertainment.  A difficult combination but one I have always striven for in the years of own teaching.  So this is what I want to do again, and I will be vigilant and firm in editing classroom participation.  I can't wait to get on to the "tragic sense of life," first and foremost which goes against the grain of everything America stands for, to dig right in to the utter incompatibility of Christianity and ancient tragic theater, to rouse up the glories of the ancient Mediterranean sense of fatality, that wonderful grim world where women wear black always, because always they are in mourning for some member of the family, where death is the constant visitor, and there is nothing that will get rid of the ring around the collar.

Sarasota Or Bust

An old friend who just learned that we plan to move full time to Sarasota Florida emailed with a series of questions about the quality of life there (summer heat and humidity, white trash at every turn, distance from the Northeast, etc.), prefaced by a statement in mock anguish about losing the prospect of visits on the beach, lunch under the wisteria climbing on the gazebo, and so forth.  Well, the funny thing is that he had long since decamped to the warmth of winters in California and years later my husband and I had moved to the beach up here south of Boston, and the result of all this was that indeed we have very rarely met either for lunch or dinner in the last two decades.  He did not feel compelled to fly back for our wedding.  It is interesting that I note those who were present and those who were not and record in my Book of Memory their reasons for not attending.  One, a very dear old friend, felt that she had to attend a conference to lend support to a former student who was presenting; another, although she had long since known of the impending nuptials, chose to take on a conference presentation herself.  Withdrawal is very much the nature of growing older, and I do indeed recognize this, and therefore become neither enraged nor sad (although I am sure a psychiatrist would say otherwise), but rather disengaged.  What interests me is whether I turn away so as to spare myself further rejection or in recognizing their turning away, I simply surrender to a kind of human lassitude, a disinclination to pursue relationships.  When I was younger, certainly from my twenties through my forties, I could not get enough of socializing--lunches with colleagues at the university day after day, or with students, colleagues over for drinks and dinners.  I remember so well the years when I would entertain at sit down dinners for ten or fifteen, the laughter, the boozing, the food, and the nuttiness of it all.  It was supplemented by long, gossipy telephone conversations, giggles and laughter, nasty wit, and more nuttiness.  And all that came to an end--I wonder if it was tied in with the decline in libido.  One did not use the telephone, or at least I did not except to call one friend on the West Coast, with whom I spoke almost daily for fifty years until her death.  There was the internet, there was the email.  The cellphone has been my constant companion as I wait for that moment when the elevator stalls mid floor, the car swerves out of control and I am in a culvert, the trembling fingers dial 911 as the vision blurs, and the words slur, but in the interval I almost never use it.  It is not a thing that I find handy, too small, to hard to hear, to difficult to speak into, a sort of non thing, that's what I think of it, always threatening to sink down between the pillows of the sofa into permanent invisibility.  Then there were fewer and fewer email messages until I realized, like the guy with bad breath whom nobody wants to dance with at the junior prom, that everyone had decamped to something called Facebook, and it was joined by a variety of other systems, none of which I use or can quite imagine.  My four children and six grandchildren are in constant communication and know everything of each other's doings, while I have altogether lost touch.  That seems to be true of most of my contemporaries, who either do not know how to manage the new technicals of life or are not quite all there upstairs when it comes to remembering who it is they might want to communicate with.  So living one place or another does nor really matter for the sociability of it all.  Because I am a talker I once planned to get us admission to one of those residences for older people where there is the graduation from independence to dependence within the same campus and dinners with ten random persons nightly constitute the new village square.  The financial collapse of 2008 put that out of the question for which my husband was devoutly thankful.  And then there was Sarasota.  I speak to people on the next treadmill at the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club, I speak to people at the morning buffets for donors at the Asolo Dramatic Student Conservatory or whatever it is called.  There's something agreeable and restful in the fact that we are all old enough that none of it or us really matters and the simulacrum of companionship is really quite sufficient.

Suffer the Little Children . . .

I have been reading Anna Quindlen's novel Rise and Shine, which I guess you would call a feel good woman's novel, although I was constantly filled with dismay and frustration by the behaviors of the minor characters who provide the background and ultimately resolve the narrative.  In sum, two sisters, Meghan and Bridget, orphaned young raised by their Auntie Maureen, are described as they are living their lives in their forties in New York City.  As you may gather, there is an intense Irish Catholic feeling to the story although no one is the least bit religious.  But it manifests itself in the subject of children.  Bridget works in the Bronx in a welfare office having to sort out with a mass of women clients their manifold woes in terms of finding rent, clothing, custody of their children, protection from the men in their lives, whose fathering gives them the right to physically abuse the women constantly.  The women are described often if not always as much out of control and always by virtue of the heavy and constant demands placed on them by the unexpected babies in their lives, which they have produced from a myriad of fathers and almost never by any grand design.  They are women to whom I want to counsel abortion, and as I read the novel, the fact that no one brings up abortion made me want to scream.  The pregnancies never once seemed to me anything other than disasters, even the "charming"  we have to believe unexpected pregnancy at 43 of the maiden lady sister, Bridget, the director, almost simultaneous with the shooting of the other sister's remarkable son leaving him paraplegic following his intervention into the benighted lives of some of the thugs his aunt is responsible for up in the Bronx.  The shining prince is shot down by the spawn of unthinking sexual intercourse but the disaster is redeemed by auntie's producing, of all things, twins (that's when you know Quindlen is dishing out treacle).  It took me back to the years I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx where my classrooms were often populated by the much more successful sisters of the women who were the victims (no, I must call them clients) in this novel.  But their lives were dominated by child bearing none the less; there the women who were in class at age thirty, mothers at fifteen and sixteen of babies by whoever, now watched over by the grandmothers while the women tried to put some middle class structure into their lives by getting an education, who went home to a household of children where they were going to be doing their homework; there was the exceptionally intelligent young woman who was accepted to law school who asked for a year's extension for entrance so she could have a baby in the interval, and when I explained that law school was so intellectually challenging that motherhood was out of the question, insisted that after twenty two she would be too old to have children!  There was the oh, so bright young woman whose interests would be met by a graduate program I knew at Berkley who rejected my encouraging her into that because it would be unthinkable to leave the confines of her immediate family.  These women all saw themselves as something other than an individual, free to make a destiny, able to focus on something other than the flesh and blood that was family, to my mind, the woman's eternal dilemma.  By chance yesterday a young lady friend once the girlfriend of a young cousin of mine came to visit and help me with the gardening while we talked.  She is in her late twenties, exploring a career in broadcasting journalism, and beginning to have the kind of success that merits national prizes and awards.  She has had a couple of candidates for serious men in her life since my cousin and we talked about them at length, and how at this stage of her life, she could not possibly think about a relationship that would confine her into marriage and motherhood.  Her sense of her self as an individual, as someone who needs to make her own choices, was so refreshing to listen to after being mired in the impossible stew of the tangled, tortured, confused, and misguided lives of the women whom Bridget was responsible for in the novel, and again and again I wished that Bridget's office were offering the counsel if not of the virtue of abortion then at least concentrating on the absolute disaster that unplanned and reckless flirting with motherhood brought into society.

So beautiful!

When I was a wee lad my mother used to pack us children into our station wagon, as many who were at hand at any given moment, and take us for a drive.  In the 1930's there were many fewer cars on the road (although ironically one was available to have a head-on collision with the car in which my father was riding--actually probably because neither driver was paying close enough attention to notice the proximity).  Taking a drive was a pleasant diversion, not the nightmare we know today.  At intervals she would vaguely pull to the side to stop and exclaim: "Children, children, look at the view!  So beautiful!"  And we would look out across the gently rolling hills of rural eastern Iowa, and know that it was indeed beautiful.  A professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop once remarked to a colleague of mine that it was "just like Tuscany."  I am always grateful to my mother for sharpening our instinct to seek out beauty in the views we confronted--she took us to Maine, to the Rockies, to Vermont before the gas rationing put paid to such excursions.  This morning, whilst my husband and I waited for friends on the ferry out from Boston, we sat staring at the blue sky, white clouds, glittering water, and the myriad islands of the Boston outer harbor.  In the last thirty or so years I have spent a great deal of time staring out at the Atlantic or Hingham Harbor, at sunrise or sunset, always glorious in sunshine or clouds.  The mother of my children introduced me to the glories of tramping through an extended deep second growth New Hampshire forest, the surround of green and the dappled sunshine.  My instinct is, however, strangely enough for the streets of Manhattan, looking north from Columbus Circle, or standing in Central Park and gazing out at the skyline.  I cannot get enough of the urban scene.  Standing in the Carousel, for instance, to the west of the Tuileries Palace and looking out in the direction of the Place de la Concorde or standing at the western edge of the Pincio and gazing out over to the dome of St. Peters pink and orange at sunset.  More than nature's treasures those are my preferred views.  Still, nature's colors can be ravishing.  I once lived for a year where I could sit on the edge of a portico to which my house was joined and have an afternoon cocktail while looking over to Mount Hymettus slowly turning that delicious delicate purple which marks the end of the Mediterranean day.  I am even a sucker for the petit urban view, looking out from our terrace in Rome down into the gardens below or over across the rooftops of the city of Rome.  Rooftops are one of my favorite defining features of views.  We live in Sarasota in a condo which is on a third floor in an unpromising building set between a school parking lot and a mall parking lot--well, more or less--but I cannot get enough of sitting in the late afternoon watching over the roofs at the clouds turning pink, staring northwest at a lone palm tree that stands as a marker against the blue sky, at the roofs of a mall department store that gives exquisite definition to the evening.  Or standing in the morning, The New York Times in hand, mouth agape, as the sun peeks up over the marvelous lines of the roof of the public school next door.  I never tire of the colors, the line.  It's all wonderful!  (I still hear her voice "Children, children". . . .).  Don't you go to the beach, we are asked constantly.  Well, no.  I prefer sitting there on the third floor looking at the sky against the roofs.  Can anything be lovelier?

Resolute Youth

When my maternal grandfather was a very young man, his mother died, and his father, married a second time, and started another family.  As those things so often happen the first born son did not get along particularly well with his step-mother, and took it upon himself to leave home and set off for Boston.  He was living in Gorham Maine where his father had received a land grant; the family had immigrated north from Truro on the Cape.  The boy walked the 104.50 miles (which MapQuest calculates as a 41 hour hike), and family legend has it that when he arrived at the Boston Common he sat down where now there is the Public Garden and dangled his feet in the waters of the Charles River estuary to soothe them after the long walk.  His counterpart, my paternal grandfather, arrived from Germany as a teenaged boy with his cousin in the mid 40's of the nineteenth century, and knowing no English made his way to Chicago, perhaps by walking and working in fields along the way for shelter and food.  He got his citizenship by enlisting in the Union Army when he was 19, and his education by apprenticing himself to a Chicago businessman, and became enough of a success to sit on the Oak Park School Board and have a local grade school named after him. When he was in his mid forties he went back for a visit to Germany.  The journal he wrote of the trip was in English; one wonders how well he communicated with his father.   He died young in an accident, and left a small estate and lots of progeny who had to be farmed out since their mother did not have the means to raise them all.  The oldest sister Hannah took over a good deal of the housekeeping and mothering.  An older boy who had gone through the University of Wisconsin and their law school, and was now in practice in Chicago supported my father as an undergraduate at Wisconsin, and the family story is that my father, who became ardent about acting and wanted to do a theater major was summoned to Chicago by his older brother and warned sternly that he would not pay for acting, only something practical.  Howard became a surgeon.  When I was fifteen I ran up an enormous bill at a record shop while I was a student at Andover.  Mother made me pay it off by working on the building and grounds crew of the public school system two summers.  I knew later on that this had been a good thing when I was denied a scholarship my second year in graduate school at Harvard and I set forth and got a job as a night watchman at Jordan Marsh, a Boston department store.  Harvard students were not supposed to work, and many of them had no idea of hourly wage labor.  I well remember at a reunion my wife's dancing with the man who married my nominal "girl friend" of junior high school days, and talking later of his telling her about his car tow business, when I suddenly realized that she had never talked socially with someone like that nor herself ever worked at all other than as an architect.  Her parents gave her a small trust fund when she was a teenager so she would never have to pester them for money for her clothes, books, etc.  It was these trust funds that her best friend at Radcliffe always talked about when she reminisced about my wife and her classmates, she herself from an Italian/Irish working class family who had worked every summer for the money she took to Radcliffe as her spending money.  I have taught at Yale and Stanford and I have taught at Lehman College up in the Bronx; the challenges to my Lehman students not only with their working to raise money to live on, but their obligations to help support the family if not with money then with time spent performing tasks, has always seemed to me such a miserable and unfair barrier on the road to success and for many students from ethnic groups other than Anglo Saxon and thus obviously or latently disparaged a subtle or not so subtle hint of their incapacities.  When I went to university the GI Bill was in full gallop and classrooms were filled with men who were being decently supported for being there and thought themselves second to none for what they had done for their country which then brought them into the classroom.  They were so much more at ease because the GI Bill was not unlike the present day expectations of the bourgeoisie: they have a right to try for excellence in education.   That's the way it should be for everyone. 

Saturday Night in Boston

It is quiet this Sunday morning, the sun promises to make its appearance up out of the horizon line of the Atlantic Ocean soon; last night as we were making our return, driving our car from the subway stop the moon shone down bright and round and interesting with a smudge of shadow removing what would have made a perfect sphere (do I mean sphere?  that is a circle, isn't it?  well, whatever is the shape of the moon when it is full).  I am not exactly shell-shocked, but not at all recovered from last night's Boston hours. so frightening, so alien to what I experience in urban situations, New York, Paris, Rome, and of course in contrast with much smaller, sedate, predictable, slow moving Sarasota, Florida.  We chose to go to a theatrical performance of a group that is famous for its stylized, campy parody of well-known narratives.  Last year we saw their "Mildred Fierce," performed to great acclaim in the East Village, and have been following their emergence in the Boston area from a peculiar dramatic taste of a bunch of gays into a well reviewed hilarious seriously silly dramatic piece available to everyone, although its performance venue on Boylston Avenue in a gay bar called The Machine suggests its more focused origins.  We set out from the south shore knowing that transportation would be an ordeal, but willing to make the effort.  Drove to Braintree, parked in the MBTA lot, boarded the train, and as we were happily ensconced in our books, heard the dire but forgotten news that we would have to board a shuttle bus at JFK for two stops to Broadway.  As I have already described, this is a painful ordeal for me since there is a painful series of stairs, up and down, more than once, no escalator available.  We were perplexed by the size of Saturday afternoon's crowd going in town, it was immense.  And then we noticed the Red Sox paraphernalia worn by the subway riders and our hearts sank, knowing that we would share space with them all the way.  Park Street where we were to wait to board the Green Line for Kenmore Square held a grimmer surprise; traffic on the Green Line seemed only to be loading on one of its two antiquated tracks, the crowd was immense, the wait was going to be long, the pressure of the bodies challenging.  Somehow my wonderful husband managed to position us near a potential door opening, and more or less using me as a ramrod jammed us into the humanity trying to board and into a seat.  Bravo!  The crowds surged to enter, the loudspeaker told them to stand back so that the doors could shut on the overloaded cars.  Somehow people were pushed back, doors were shut, and the train creaked forward, only to confront at the next stop an angry throng who were determined to board but a train already full.  Doors were opened, people pushed and shoved, finally relented, the doors shut.  I could only think of Calcutta or anywhere in the third world where public services are so pathetically meager and the crowds are immense.  Somehow we disembarked with the crowd at Kenmore Square and were swept along in the direction of Fenway Park in a vast throng, from which at the last minute we separated and went to our restaurant reservation and on to the theater.  The horror of it all was that the Red Sox game and our theatrical event ended at the same moment.  We were totally unprepared for what we confronted when back out on the street, the crowds of people surging out from the stadium blocking the streets and sidewalks and serious imposing mass upon those who were not flowing in their direction.  It was dark, young males hopped up on the extra testosterone by their identification with athletes in a sports event, bounded around, shouting exuberantly, smoking cigarettes, bumping into one another with joyous abandon.  We were terrified, and feeling lost.  At Kenmore Square the back up of people waiting to enter the subway station was immense and frightening; where were the police, or the MBTA staff?  There were no taxis available in all the surging crowd.  Nothing to do but walk. But where? To South Station?  We set out, then I had the thought at Massachusetts Avenue to take a bus in the direction of Harvard Square and get on the Red Line and pursue our original objective.  But, of course, the bus when it finally came along was filled to the overflowing with patrons of the BSO which had also just let out.  Empty taxis heading to Cambridge would not stop because of the weird law that they can only pick up fares in the city where they are licensed, in this instance, Cambridge, so must remain empty.  Finally we hailed one who was willing to break the law and we got to the Central Square Red Line stop, fighting our way through still more crowds of people, now all of them energetic, young, vital and moving at speeds and with an abandon that reminded me that I was a candidate for a nursing home.  The return to Braintree had the exceedingly frightening moment when the crowd riding up the escalator (yes, they have up escalators, just not any going down) to board the bus was jammed into the crowd already filling the sidewalks at the bus stop, and I was terrified that if I were to lose my footing I would be trampled to death.  A real problem, and the three or so MBTA employees standing down below shouting directions might have been more effectively employed.The psychological makeup of parody, irony, doubles entendres which had been reinforced in us from our theatrical experience, so completely at variance with the raw energy human energy of the night, shattered us completely.  We left home at 3:30 for an hour and one half evening's entertainment preceded by an hour and a half of drinks and dinner at a fabulous restaurant.  We got home staggering from the struggle and the pain at a half hour after midnight.  Boston in the evening?  Never again.

Saturday Morning

It is early morning, the rain is beating down on the house, and although I cannot see this at the moment, knocking down the stands of luscious tulips that have made the various garden boxes glow.  That is in the nature of spring in New England, bouts of quite cold weather, making the experience of the garden a challenge, interspersed with torrential downpours and strong winds that leave whatever you might have braved the cold to go to look for in the garden utterly destroyed.  And once you have digested the salutary lesson on the impermanence of all things, Nature provides a coda to the so-called spring season with the onset of cruelly hot and humid days.  The sense of helplessness that these events inspire is augmented this year by the unremitting process of "depersonalizing" our house which we have now nearly finished at the behest of the real estate agent who insists that this process will make the place no longer a dwelling but now a house instantly salable.  I feel uncomfortable in these empty rooms, the depersonalizing has worked so well, that I no longer really sense myself to be anything at all. Perhaps then it was a mistake today while waiting for the arrival of this morning's New York Times to browse through back issues of The London Review and the Times Literary Supplement which have been piling up as I am otherwise so energetically engaged, and which have been stored away in a dresser drawer for fear they too much betray my personality and would offend the real estate agent.  So I have been having what is off and on a depressing feeling that occurs when I read these journals, the feeling that I am more and more losing touch.  For one thing I find the prose more and more impenetrable or burdensome, either not comprehending all that I read or not carrying to make the effort to understand.  The feeling of inadequacy derived from that experience is augmented by my realization as I go along that I am not going to remember the titles of so many items of real interest, titles of books that I should make some effort to get hold of to read.  I am not going to make lists because in the process of clearing out my desk in the past few weeks I have come across envelopes filled with three by five cards with lists of titles taken from my reading from the past four or five years, a defeating discovery, equal to the realization again and again as I read back issues of these journals that I have not discarded that I have read them previously.  This morning in fact I was reading the review of a biography of Richard Haggart only suddenly to grow dimly aware that I had read another review of this book which had led me to buy it for my Kindle, that is, my flying, subway riding, train going, and waiting in doctors' offices reading, and indeed I had read all or part of it, none of which could I remember.  And I have just  read a glowing review of Claudio Pavone's account of the Italian civic breakdown in 1943 now translated into English and know that I would love to read it, but know that I will not, I will lose the reference to the book, and I am too much in transit right now to organize my thoughts, and then as well, I would probably forget what I had read in it shortly after the reading.  These are melancholy thoughts, the rain continues to pour  down, I will find something light to eat for breakfast and pack up the last of the DVDs and maybe then I will feel better.