A Litte Learning Is A Dangerous Thing

The Times today has yet another account of some rich person giving Harvard millions of dollars in a friendly rivalry with some other rich person who has been flinging his money around for education in the last few days.  Harvard is awash in money from their celebrated endowment, to the assessed worth of their physical plant, to the money that pours in a grand scale from their many admirers.  It is amusing in the thick of all this largesse to hear the constant complaint of fear at the lack of funds which will hamper some one or another aspect of their educational mission.  Like the regulars at the court of Louis XIV they just have no idea what life in the educational factories of this country is like.  And by the same token their students, most of whom have been, if not exactly bred, well, then indeed fed, clothed, and exercised to take their place in this exotic and demanding setting are like no other entrants into America's education mill.  They are as borzois paraded out to train before the pack brought out for exercise from the local pound.  The elites talk endlessly of their despair at not accepting or encouraging deserving intellects from low income people into their elite establishment.  I doubt many of them could imagine how very much those folks need to take one sniff of the Cambridge scene to feel an instinctive aversion rise in them.  I used to teach at a humble place, and often talked to those among my students who did make it into Harvard who could regale me with stories of the entirely different language, the different assumptions, social behaviors they encountered.  Children in the United States who are born into affluence are usually also born to ambition; getting them into an Ivy League is usually first and foremost on their parents' plate even as they lie in their basinette waving their chubby legs in the air and murmuring goo goo ever so sweetly, looking up at the Evil Fairy peering down at them, with her Phi Beta Kappa Key necklace, the word "summa" woven into her blouse, her package of Advanced Placement materials at the ready in her capacious bag.  These children are like those who enter the fabled ballet schools in Russia, reared from their earliest days to perform, to accept the ritual and sacrifice of casual normal life for the promise of excellence and all it obtains.  As such they present a facade that cannot be chipped.  Pity the ordinary guy.  Indeed I knew one, a product of my home down, his father had gone to high  school with me.  He came over once to our house when my niece from back home was visiting, and laughingly allowed that he was sure the Admissions Office had accepted him just to have someone "ordinary" on the dorm floor.  He had no illusions about his talents, his ambitions, his drive, nor his chances of developing close relationships with the guys around him whose concern for managing all their electronic equipment was equaled by their nervous expectation of of not correctly anticipating the pressures put upon them by their professors.

The Photo Gallery

My husband has indulged me by spending countless hours hanging the framed photos I have accumulated over the years of various family members and close friends.  Today I was looking at a photo of my paternal grandmother pouring tea at some afternoon do--you can see other ladies in the background, a silver pot, a plate of something or other.  So genteel.  She was from Boston, often remarked upon by my mother, who grew up in Oak Park, Illinois as did my father.  My mother could never get over the mystique of Boston where she had spent a couple of years at a finishing school, the educational program of which I guess included a course or two at Fanny Farmer's Boston Cooking School.  She always mentioned Fanny Farmer with a peculiar flourish, as though the lady were an habituée of the court of Louis XIV.  The Boston grandmother lived to be very old, so that my life span began before she bid this earth adieu, and I had the chance more than once to hear that plummy marbles-in-the-mouth Boston accent over which I do believe my mother secretly swooned.  The odd thing about this hyper gentility was that the grandmother was married to my grandfather, who immigrated to America as a teenager before the Civil War, and had grown up in a small farming community in Braunschweig.  Enlisting in the Union Army gave him citizenship and somewhere along the line he acquired business skills which brought him to sufficient prominence that a public school building was named after him. as an immigrant a gentleman who died long long ago, and thus was unknown to almost all of us.  He crossed the ocean with only his teenaged cousin for company and the two boys somehow worked their way on farms all the way out to the Midwest.  How he got from that to the woman from Boston pouring the tea is a mystery.  Still more mysterious is that the father of this Boston grandmother came from Maine, and left there as a teenager, and walked, yes, walked all the way to Boston, another courageous youngster on a mission, and when he got to what is now Charles Street which was in the nineteenth century the embankment of the tidal basin, he claims to have sat down, taken off his shoes and socks, and soaked his feet in the soothing waters of the Charles River.  And how do we get from that scene to the grand dame pouring the tea?  Which of these people knew each other?  Did the German immigrant ever have the chance to exchange anecdotes with his father-in-law?  And yet we know that the couple met and married in Oak Park, a suggestion that she never went home again, never brought Wilhelm around.  He fathered nine or ten children and promptly died. There are no photographs of him, I don't remember hearing anyone describe him.

I Coulda Been A Contendah

For a narcissist and egomaniac like me reading the obituaries in such publications as The New York Times and The Harvard Magazine is torture.  What have I ever done with my life?  The chances that I have missed!  True enough, growing up in a little nothing place like Iowa City is not exactly the springboard for a major launch--think "unsung Milton," and all that sort of thing.  But then I went to Andover when I was fourteen and roomed across the hall from the son of the famous German painter-in-exile, George Grosz.  Why didn't I ever get an invite to their Manhattan pad?  Heirs to Union Pacific, Kohler Plumbing, and the Los Angeles Dart fortune lived just down the hall.  Why oh why did I leave Andover after one year when I had those four available to cultivate serious friendships?  When I was eighteen I left home for New York City, but did I find fame and fortune?  No, only gonorrhea.  When I read the poems of Frank O'Hara I could kick myself. Where was his gay set, all of them just graduated from Harvard, and so three years older than me, and surely out in some bar or another, and I was bright, witty, good looking, hey, sexy! Why when I was mingling with my brother in law's painterly crowd in Greenwich Village did I not meet young gay males on the make to fame and fortune.  Frank O'Hara and his chums, they must have been everywhere in the Village. I could have become one of those bright young gay things, who went on to celebrity in Manhattan.  Instead I got married at twenty one, still out in the boondocks in Iowa, was part of a married couple at Cambridge, and, hey, then what? majored in classics and pursued a doctoral degree! Classics, dude! Doctoral degree!  Duh!  Dullsville.   This is not the road to a great obituary in The New York Times!  People who anguish over death seem to forget its one great consolation: chances are you will not know how meager or non-existent your obituary was.  So I shall keep that thought by me, try to do less measuring when reading those obits.  Actually they are a constant source of inspiration for anyone.  Persons of such creativity as to have had lives that are recorded for posterity in the Times demonstrate a remarkable capacity for reinvention and more often than not leave behind at least two and sometimes three well developed and successful careers, not to mention marriages.  Reading obituaries, apart from those needy sickos who have to measure everything against themselves, are an inspiration and suggestion of all the rich chances on offer in human lives.  I recommend obituaries to teenagers as must read literature; it gives one such hope for a creative interesting life.

Original Sin

I am planning to teach a course centered on the tragic dramas enacted in Athens in the fifth century BCE, but with very few of them surviving in manuscripts into the modern age, there are certainly not enough to form very coherent generalizations.  Still we can talk about the ancient notion a "tragic sense of life," reflected in the story of the Iliad, and how that view is other than the Judaeo-Christian notion of original sin.  The Genesis story of Eve's disregard of the Lord's prohibition on eating fruit from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil set in motion a series of rejections and human disgrace which is often simply labeled Orginal Sin.  "In Adam's fall we sinned all," as the old saying goes.  God's covenant with mankind expressed in Yaweh's announcement to Noah that there will never be another flood is not so powerful an expression of divine concern as the later pronouncement by Jesus and his followers that He promises eternal life to all those who will believe in him.  Original Sin is an idea that is in strict contradiction to the ancient Greek notion of having to explain misery and evil doing.  They were more in the vein of Dick Cheney's "these things happen."  When Herakles is driven  mad by the goddess Hera so that he kills his children, the explanation is that this is still another manifestation of her insane jealousy of his mother whom her husband had impregnated.  Divine malignancy, then is the answer to this horrible tragedy.  Nowadays when a human father does such a thing, non-believers will look for pathologies in the perpetrator's brain or some other medical circumstance, and Christians will see this as yet another expression that man is inherently sinful and prone to breaking the laws of God with the right provocation.  Human misery is sometimes a lot more bearable when it is clear that there is a cause, even if it is divine action, the will of god.  Human beings "matter" in this view of things.  Sometimes world events are so awful that this view becomes difficult to sustain, the horrific events known as the Holocaust, for example.  Sometimes the Greeks flatly stated that such things were the due to the gods, for no reason particularly, other than inherent divine malignity.  It is comforting for some persons to know that the misery they suffer is in no way caused by them.  It would be nice if the finger-pointing, holier than thou, well to do citizens of our communities would not so often assume that the poor and homeless are what they are because it is "their own fault."  There is the underlying notion of "original sin" perverting their human judgements.  It is always dubious to ascribe God's will to any act; better to remember the Lord speaking out of the whirlwind in Verse 100 as I remember it in Job, rebuking those trying to "understand" Job's plight, thundering out "Were you there when I created the world?" in effect, lay off, you know nothing.

Tenure

My husband who taught in public schools for the best part of his career has always been a strong supporter of the tenure system.  Anyone who is familiar with the over invested way of the modern American parent will know that as a rule parents have no sense of their child's academic failings whether by poor performance or by limited intelligence, and they almost always fault the teacher.  Contrary to the high regard in which the public school teacher was held in the early half of the twentieth century, their role in American society has consistently been devalued since those days as income has become a more popular index of worth, raising the--to my mind--highly morally dubious professions of real estate, investment banking, financial planning, attorneys, and the like to the new pinnacle of perfection.  Everyone has their story of the desiccated old bitch who ruined some year of the subject of something because she mumbled, didn't care, she couldn't hear, and so on.  They are often featured in films.  I was not immune to the disregard in which public school tenure procedures were held when I met my partner (we weren't to be married for twenty years), even though as a college professor I of course held tenure as well.  It has always seemed to me to be obvious for the college professor, given the well known knavery that haunts the corridors of higher academy; feuds, cruelties, knives in the back, these things are the daily fare of the university professor.  School teachers by contrast never seemed to be quite so hostile in their interaction.  And, indeed, when I met my soon to be partner I was startled by the genuine pleasure and pride his colleagues took in teaching youngsters.  Part of it is, I believe, that they are seriously invested in the growth and development of the intellect and soul of young people, whereas college professors are there to dish out the facts and show why they are the facts--take it or leave it.  It's the difference between fine dining and a cafeteria. In any case, as my partner later husband immediately demonstrated to me through his very own job, if someone has real oversight, and he was the department chair, then they have the obligation to observe and review the performance of everyone in the classroom.  I had taught twenty years by that time and had never had a colleague review my teaching, and of course colleges are rife with hilarious legendary professors who are so boring and out of it that students routinely get up and leave the class without the professor noticing.  Nowadays I have been told most students are on facebook or games when they have their lap tops open in lectures.  But my loved one seriously took on inadequate teachers, patiently explained their pedagogical problems, got them to mend their ways, and if over time they could not, went to the union to explain that he intended to move against the failed teacher.  I was amazed, more amazed that in the four or five instances, relative good will obtained through to the dismissal of the offender and that the union gave the procedure its blessing.  But the lesson here is that observation, correction, firmness, a standard, common courtesy and good will must underlie the procedure.  To my mind tenure is there to protect the school teacher from the community, and compassionate, intelligent department heads who have the will to observe, judge, and move for dismissal are there to protect the tenure system from abuse.

Bearing Witness

A colleague at Stanford was a naturalized citizen of German-Jewish birth who had survived her wartime incarceration in Dachau.  She was a neurotic mess, occasionally remarking that she wished she had thrown herself against the electrified fence there and ended her life.  So strong was her instinct for suicide that despite having a very nice Jewish American husband, two darling children, a tenured position she did indeed manage to do herself in.  She haunted me later on since through my friendship with her husband my wife and I moved into the top floor of a two family house that his mother let in Brookline where I took up residence when we moved back East for my job at Boston University.  This was the quintessential Jewish mother, all Gemutlichkeit but tough as nails, who asked me once "Why did she do it?  That was years ago, why didn't she get over it?" words spoken I realize by a Jewish grandmother who could never excuse the psychic damage suffered by those little ones, but to me betraying a shocking indifference to what it meant to be a Holocaust survivor.  Years later on a trip through Germany I visited Dachau as a conscious act of piety toward my former colleague, and had a weird experience.  I had picked up a hitch hiker, a young German male, a college student on his way to Vienna.  We were just outside of Augsburg, and I told him that I would take him to the exit ramp near Munich.  He figured out I was going to the town of Dachau--I didn't even realize it was a town!--and said he would get off there downtown.  Moments later he popped up with the intuition that I was going to the camp, preserved as it was as a monument to the Nazi horror and a memorial to its victims. He wanted to join me.  And so we went, and it was so laid out that once you started going through, looking at all the photos, growing increasingly more menacing and frightening as the Nazis bore down on the Jews, there was no way out but to turn back ignominiously, or suck in your breath and continue on to the horror of the logical end.  By the end the young man and I were holding hands and crying, he muttering "They never told us any of this when I was in school." A couple of years I was in Munich with my sons, and I felt I had to take them through, although they were only in their early teens, and then a few years later I was with my daughters, and so another guided tour was imposed upon them.  I felt false this time, as though I had assimilated the experience too much, made it mine, the way teachers do, could talk about it with my offspring in a meaningful, intelligent way, help them with their anguish.  But afterwards after a brief pause for coffee or whatever, they looked up from their guide books and asked excitedly if we could now visit the famous Munich zoo, and as the image of a zoo came into my head, a concentration camp for animals I suddenly realized, I burst into tears and sobbed as I had not done so strongly before, but it was not for those beasts, but the vision of the fence that enclosed them, perhaps not unlike the fence against which my long ago colleague yearned to hurl herself.

Happiness In The Kitchen

Sometime mid-afternoon yesterday my husband pounded in the very last nail to hang the very last item of my vast hoard of paintings and photographs which the moving van deposited here at our condo some few days before I arrived myself on August 10th.  All the dvds have been shelved, and nearly all the books; only his tools await sorting out for their very own special place on the gallery of the so-called "guest" condo.  I would have put them in a less conspicuous place, but then I do not have the romance of building and repairing things in my blood, an inheritance from a father who made his living by carpentry.  Last night I made risotto with freshly pesto sauce into which I had put chunks of cooked chicken.  The risotto was made in six minutes in our excellent pressure cooker while I sat idly by in the living room sipping slowly on a white wine spritzer.  The fact of the matter was that, if I had not almost entirely given up drinking, I would have downed one or two martinis to take away the incredible edge of nervousness and dread which my moments of cookery inspired.  I had approached the kitchen in so light hearted a manner it was hard to believe how broken I left it.  First of all, this was the first meal we had not eaten in a restaurant in the last two and a half months, so that, despite a lifetime of cooking--for many years three or at least two times a day, with between one and four hungry, discriminating, rebellious teenagers at table--I had pretty much, hard to believe this, forgotten the drill.  Assembling the pesto was as though I were putting my grandfather's gold watch back together again, somehow I just kept forgetting basics, like the garlic, for god's sake!  I had to go back to the processor time and again to blend in yet something else originally overlooked.  When I had got the gleaming multi purpose electric gizmo from Bellevue or something like that which friends rave over--it steams, sautees, slow cooks, pressure cooks, who knows what else--I discovered I had quite forgotten how to put on the sealing rim for the lid, how you turned the thing on, the timer, too, how you set the valves so as to avoid being blown up.  By this time we were approaching six o'clock, after I had told my husband an hour earlier that the meal would be out "in no time."  I got that damn lid on, set the timer, took a white wine spritzer into the living room and waited for the explosion.  Six minutes later I did not even hear the"six little beeps,"  which the instruction booklet told me accompanied the appearance of zero on the timer panel.  Dare I open the damn thing without the beeps?  But I could not go back in time to await the beeps, how could I?  So, steeling myself, I repeatedly pushed some pressure release and the steam came out and eventually stopped and I opened the thing.  A spoonful proclaimed "delicious!", called hubby to the table, ladled out steaming platefuls after having stirred in the chicken bits, the pesto and grated parmigiano.  "Fabulous" came from my spouse.  I was almost too broken to eat, God, I thought to myself, am I going to have to go on doing this for the rest of my  life?