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I made a Xerox copy of Doreen Spitzer’s manuscript. I went up to visit her in Princeton on May 21, 2001, when I was still actively pursuing Belle’s story. She was kind enough to talk with me then at some length. I suspect she has since died (like so many people I should have pursued conversations with, but that’s another story). I can barely read my notes, my handwriting is sloppy and telegraphic. I suppose I thought I’d remember the context, but now, seven years later, I remember nothing. All I can excavate from my scrawling is that she first went to the American School in the fall of 1936 (probably after graduating from Bryn Mawr that spring), returned in the summer of ’37 and stayed for almost three years.
Her manuscript was typed on onion skin paper, so thin I laid each sheet individually, and gingerly, on the glass face of the copy machine. I didn’t want to take the chance that a page might become stuck in the machine’s feeding mechanism. Getting stuck would irreparably damage the paper, and I couldn’t afford to lose a single word. As I copied it I was transported back to the time of typewriters, onion skin paper, and carbon copies, to a time when my father brought me to his office one Saturday and showed me an enormous machine that made negative copies (the paper came out black, the printing white). I remember begging my mother to be allowed to play with the carbon paper and then had to refigure out which way it went every time. The typewriter made it even more confusing. Doreen’s manuscript was a carbon copy on paper the thickness of an old, old woman’s translucent skin. Its text a glorious recounting of her years in Egypt and Greece. The open-mouthed marveling of an American woman in her early twenties is palpable as she immerses herself in the new cultures she is discovering. On the very first page:
We went through miles of crowded streets until we came up a lovely broad avenue between two huge, magnificent mosques, with another at the top of the street. On our right was the Sultan Hassan Mosque, which still has embedded in its walls the cannon balls that Napoleon fired into it. It is perfectly plain inside, and the effect of light and shadow from the machicolated walls is incredibly impressive and dignified. The chains from which elaborate lanterns used to hang made thin perpendicular shadows against the walls. The lanterns themselves are in the Arabic museum. We shuffled along ant-like in the canvas slippers they fastened on to our shoes when we entered. We felt very small and unimportant in the vastness of the mosque and much impressed with a religion that can achieve such a masterpiece of architecture. It has all the dignity and religious quality of Chartres or the English cathedrals, plus a sort of rich simplicity – if you see what that can be – more awe-inspiring than any I have seen elsewhere.
Tree branch came down in a storm last night; it’s resting on my neighbor’s phone wire. So I called Verizon and they said “It’s not our job to clear trees. We have the safety of our workers to think about. If the dial tone goes out, we’ll come repair things. Call the power company.” Called the power company. They said “If it’s not on a power line, it’s not our job. The phone company has contractors just like we do. Call the phone company.” Called the phone company back, “no, we don’t have contractors. You need to call the power company.” I know the power company will do nothing because I called them once when I saw a tree had shed a large “Y” shaped branch that was now straddling a cord running from one to another. They sent someone out right away. By the next afternoon a note was left on my door saying “Branch not on power cord. Phone?” So there they were, but they wouldn’t take the branch down. This branch from last night is about to take my neighbor’s phone out. It’s Sunday so I can’t call a tree company. But neither the power company nor the phone company seem to care much. Until the tree actually does the damage. So the branch, it’s really larger than a branch – it’s a split in the higher up trunk – is held on by some bark and probably just a bit of wood. If it weren’t resting on the phone wire, it’d definitely come down. And nothing to be done. Ah well. That’s life in the big city.
Crafty Bastard craft fair in Silver Spring wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Lots of local artists & craftspeople (nice), lots of artists finding their way (good in a few years). Most of the crafts for sale were pretty derivative -- at least three crafters selling stuffed felt "ugly" dolls (and one selling felt penises -- who felt them?), homemade buttons sporting clever 21st century sentiments, and too many T-shirt artists to count -- an explosion of your crafty neighbors. A tiny few who had stuff that was worth thinking about. But that was about it. So much for craft day.
I’ve been trying to write about this woman, Belle Mazur, for over ten years. But each time I begin to dip into the history of what I want to know, I do just that – dip only. I’ve resisted the full body dive into her world. All kinds of excuses. I can’t lay all the stuff out on the table. It’s too much to access. How can I ever find the information. I can’t make sense of the sequence. There’s too much missing. But the underlying truth is a resistance to really immersing myself in the project. I’ve never actually read her book. I’ve looked through the papers I have, but I’ve never spent the hours pouring over them that they require if I’m to commit them to a place in my brain where they will be able to drive other work on the project. I hate to admit this, especially in this semi-public spot. And I don’t do it with the hope that the embarrassment will force me to do different, or with any intention of changing my slovenly research ways. It’s just a simple admission, yet another example of my resistance to committing to the project. I have fantasy of clearing every surface in my office and remaking it in the shape of a Belle research center – you know, really doing it up right. But of course that never comes to pass and I’m so preoccupied by the moronic demands of my day job that I never take such an idea seriously. I do have a colleague who regularly writes books of 80K words, but I don’t want to mirror his self absorption. The stuff in my office seems to close in on me as I add, single sheet by single sheet, thin pieces of paper to the piles of things that must be attended to. Yes, I’m filled to the brim with excuses. Maybe this form, the blog, can help me undermine my undermining tendencies. By giving me a completely new form, not forum, in which suggest her life maybe I can find a new entry into what has felt completely impenetrable. Not fiction, as David suggests, but the slow blog construction that just lets me, actually demands, tiny sections of little – or even no – connection to one another. Maybe.
A few nights ago I was awakened at 3 AM by what I took to be gunshots. None of my neighbors said anything about them so I wonder if maybe they occurred in my dream. But I’m pretty sure they were outside. The sound was loud, loud enough to rouse me from a sound sleep into a state of semi-consciousness. But the odd thing was that they did not sound the way gunshots are always reported to sound: “a series of pops, like firecrackers, not at all like what you hear in the movies.” No, they sounded like the gunshots, exactly the kind of gunshots you do hear in the movies. Loud reports like downsized TNT explosions going off one after another. Five in all. Bang bang bang bang bang. I could picture a muzzle of considerable size discharging speeding bullets.
Today I saw the eye doctor who replies to “I can’t see the street signs” with “get closer.” He continues to maintain that I do not need distance glasses. I don’t. I can see. Although things are fuzzy, I can see. He showed me “with” and “without” glasses, and there is a marked difference. However, he feel certain it’s not enough to make me want to wear glasses all the time. And I’m afraid I agree with him. I don’t want to wear glasses all the time. I don’t want trifocals. It’s enough that I will be wearing bifocals and have to carry them around with me all the blasted time. I think this is the reason I actually want the distance glasses – so that I will have to wear them all the time. So I can have distance glasses and be done with it. I will carry around with me all my lenses on my face and not have to take the things off, leave them somewhere, and I can see the world without fuzz. But no, he says I won’t want them. And I am still bowing to his expertise. I will continue to get closer.
Fox in the henhouse. Me being invited into a nation-wide grant writing assessment rubrics? Certain people at my shop moving into other departments where they are, although partially welcome, objects of suspicion because they are…foxes in henhouses. Minions of the head honcho never to be fully severed from his honchoness. Chiefs of departments that have been the objects of ridicule so we must now muffle our guffaws, hold our fingers daintily to our lips. A nice guy, to be sure. But just has too much access.
Marianne Hirsch writes of something she calls projected memory: the power of public history to crowd out personal story. She uses the term postmemory to describe the relationship of children to the traumatic cultural experiences of their parents – experiences they “remember” only as stories and images they grew up with, but that are so powerful as to constitute memories in their own right. (This is basically a quote, but I’ve rearranged it enough so that it is not a quote – the academic insistence on citation is never far away from me.) She is referring specifically to the children of holocaust survivors, which I am not.
I am, however, the child of World War II survivors, depression survivors, and immigrant grandparents. The trauma of the holocaust was seen by these people at a distance; I’m sure there is a word for their once removed experience and memory of that cultural trauma. They were connected to the events in that they were Jews, but Jews who had already begun the journey toward American secularism, not denial of their Jewishness, but an adaptation of Jewishness as a political identification. Their secular Jewishness did not deny their connection to the Holocaust; their sense of horror was mediated by their distance and their assimilation into the cultural Jewishness of New York City.
History shows, as James Carroll points out in his new film, that to be a Jew is to be never very far away from the hatred of others. So the images of the holocaust permeate every Jew’s life, but particularly those who lived through it. Whether they were in Auschwitz or on the Upper East Side determined their own safety and relationship with the event, but their children inherit equally their memories of what happened. How do we incorporate traumatic memories that preceded our own birth, but that nevertheless define our own life narratives?
It’s a matter of memory, intertwined with all those deep questions of identification. My father, my mother, even my grandparents were all secular Jews. When I was born my grandmother, who’d lost her husband a year earlier, told my father she didn’t believe in this, but she’d give him a small bounty if he’d name me with an “S” – non-religious at her core, but her own cultural memories impossible to jettison. I never identified as a Jew, never practiced, never even knew really what it meant until I turned 12 and friends started being bar mitzvahed. Then, even though I didn’t choose to adopt it, it was thrust upon me when we lived for a time in a community where there were no Jews. I detested being forced to identify as a Jew because it felt like a lie: I didn’t have the right knowledge, memories, relationships. But I did have postmemory: the displaced memories of my grandparents. My postmemory of the Holocaust involves involves being a member of the most reviled group in history and the shock of surviving.
The cultural identification as a Jews felt by my grandparents and parents became my political identification. I can feel this identification without the guilt of not having been there, without survivor’s guilt. I’m still struggling with what my own postmemory of the Holocaust is, but I know my reaction to Holocaust books and movies is more than just as a removed observer.
About ten years ago my entire immediate family was having a lovely evening in Maine. We sat on the back deck of the house where we stayed listening to crickets and watching darkness fall. My father talked about his own grandmother. He’d only met her a couple of times. She’d come to America to visit her son, his father, but she didn’t like it here and so she returned…to Germany. Wistfully, he said “I don’t know what happened to her. She probably died in the Holocaust. My memory felt brightly illuminated by this newly revealed connection. I felt it: the inconsolable sadness, its incomprehensibility, its pervasiveness.
Hirsch points out that postmemory is powerful precisely because its connection to the event is mediated “not through recollection but through projection, investment and creation.” That it is not a direct connection to the past makes it almost more powerful because as we travel through time the story can be further colored in. James Carroll’s documentary of his personal journey trying to figure out what went wrong between Catholics and Jews shows vividly history as an ever-repeating pattern. Can postmemory and history teach us?
A short film from the fifties shown prior to the movie invites theatre patrons to visit the snack bar and load up on delicious “snacks.” It’s shown at the local “art” theatre in the medium-sized city where I live. Buy “snacks,” it says, as it shows fully dressed hamburgers and hot dogs, and “full meals” while the screen shows us pizza. I’m not sure what distinguishes pizza as a full meal as opposed to a hamburger (especially fully dressed with lettuce tomato, relish, mustard, and ketchup) or hot dog (adorned in relish and sauerkraut). Maybe we think hamburgers and hot dogs need a side dish but pizza contains its own side dish.
It’s fun to see the old crushed ice melting in the old brightly colored paper cups. And the perfectly dressed mothers helping their perfectly dressed children. We are exhorted to buy the snacks of full meals and delicious beverages. And all the rest of the standard movie fare: popcorn, gum, and candy. Gum? Gum?? There’s not a theater in America at this moment that sells gum. No theme park sells gum. No organization wants gum on its premises. Gum. No current candy counter would sell gum.
But the biggest problem with the film is that it takes place at a drive-in. It’s not so bad that a drive-in film is being shown in a theater. We’re intelligent patrons, we can make the cognitive leap from one environment in the film to the environment in which we actually find ourselves. But when the patrons take their snack bar comestibles back to their car it is daylight. Hmmmm.
My objective for Donald and Belle never was that they should meet – I never imagined fiction occurring at this crossroad. In my mind what was interesting was the struggle we – the “biographers” – had with each subject. But that, I suppose, is my own solipsistic way of conceptualizing the idea. The story I was seeing was a double memoir about the struggle to find our people.
But suppose they had met somewhere sometime. What would that be like? And could I ever construct such a meeting? I keep saying that fiction writers (turn away, all my fiction writing friends) don’t make stuff up, they simply write stuff down. This coalesces nicely with my belief that there is little distinction between fiction and nonfiction (a fiction author took great issue over this with me – life, apparently, is not plot). But as I attempt to write something that didn’t happen I become confused and stuck. (Apparently writing fiction is making stuff up.)
They both spent some formative years in Pennsylvania. She in Scranton, he in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh? I’m not so sure). As I try putting them together I’m resistant. Because I don’t want my aunt – who probably suffered from depression and maybe a little manic-depression – to meet up with the crazy guy who murdered his wife. But I probably needn’t worry, he would not have appealed to her. She flitted from person to person, never making deep connections and often cutting off contact when it became too intrusive for her. She fought bitterly with her only living relatives, her sisters. Donald’s obvious charm (how else could a man who murdered not only his mother-in-law, but his wife get another woman to marry him) would not have seduced Belle. Why did Donald murder both women? Because he knew his wife would be sad to be without her mother. It was out of consideration.
So I couldn’t get them together. Not yet. But maybe a fictional entry is coming…a scene. Maybe.
The parallel stories of Donald and Belle are not quite parallel. Only in the doing of the research did they take on any sense of parallelism. Neither character had enough umph in their own lives to command anything being written about them, or even really much being mentioned about them in the lives of others. But Donald, as I understand him, was a fascinating character. Now here I am telling someone else’s story but I’ll give it a shot.
Donald graduated from high school in 1937 and joined the army. He was shipped off to the Pacific theatre and was in China when the Japanese entered Nanking in early 1938, and played out their rampage. He saw things no human being should see –pregnant women eviscerated, limbs hacked off, mangled bodies left in the street. At some point during the rape of the city he may have been captured. But that possibility is not clear and it seems somewhat unlikely since the American soldiers were ordered not to intervene. The rules of non-engagement, of course, made things all that much worse for the American GIs since they had to stand by and watch as one country’s soldiers murdered another country’s citizens. Thousands of them. So something in Donald snapped.
It’s not clear what went crazy in him, but crazy he went. His buddies tried to calm him but he was unreachable. The separation from reality was deep enough that he was shipped back to the states and locked away in St. Elizabeth’s – the famous psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Washington DC that has housed, in the years before and since, some of America’s most famous crazy people. Donald spent the next five years, much of World War II, locked up in America’s government run mental institution. When he arrived back in rural Pennsylvania after his release, the small town to which he returned simply assumed he’d been away fighting for god and country. He’d joined the army, after all, and there was a war on. Donald did nothing to disabuse them of this reasonable notion.
Soon he took up again with his high school sweetheart. The courted and soon married. Her mother was part of the deal and the two women moved in with Donald at his farmhouse outside of town and settled into married life. Donald wasn’t as happy with the situation as he’d let on. He probably felt trapped by when he considered to be his shrew of a mother-in-law. One day he took his shotgun and killed his mother-in-law. He sat in the kitchen waiting for his wife to come home. When she arrived she knew something was wrong, but before she could find out why this awful thing had happened, Donald killed her too. Then he calmly called the police and reported that he’d just killed his wife and mother-in-law.
Much like the last time he’d been in trouble, Donald wound up locked away in a mental institution. For a period of time, he was treated by the famous psychiatrist Thomas Szaz – the man who hypothesized that people aren’t crazy, they’re simply not conforming to society’s ideas of who they should be. Donald was a long walk from society’s expectations, having shot his mother-in-law in the face and then killed his wife. This time he spent thirty years locked away. Thirty years. But when he was released he again returned home to his small town and took up his life. He didn’t drive, but he would walk into town to eat at the nice restaurant on weekends. And there is where he met my friend Diane’s mother.
Although she knew his bizarre history, she fell in love with sweet Donald. And he with her. Before Diane could suggest a second thought, Donald and her mother were married. And from there things became, as you might expect, stranger than one could ever expect.
Here my story of Donald ends (for the time being anyway). Not because I know nothing about the remainder, but because this is where my friend Diane enters Donald’s life and can be a first person narrator. All prior story was discovered by her and told to me in the course of her working on a book about Donald’s life. And that is the intersection – the non-parallelism – of Donald and Belle. They both stymied their biographers. The bare bones of their stories, odd enough and compelling enough, are lifted away to reveal…nothing. All that we can unearth are these skeletal remains of their lives, the stories that engage listeners and elicit requests for more. But the more, the context, feels permanently locked away.
I haven’t killed the flowers on my front porch yet. I haven’t planted anything for two or three years because I’m such a plant-killer. But this year the boy cleaned off the porch and I felt as though it deserved some prettiness. Red and white impatiens and several basil plants. So far, so good. Although it’s not yet very far. A couple of the flower plants aren’t growing too much, but at least they’re still alive. It feels precarious, though. Every day when I come home I am very tentative approaching the porch in case I’m going to have to deal with deceased flowers.
So I’m writing first thing in the morning, but of course my mind betrays me after last night’s listing of evening distractions. This morning’s distractions are the what-can-I-possibly-write-about kind.
Things that you need to pay special attention to might want to arrive with small signs indicating that. When an event happens at the beginning of a movie or play its position there says pay particular attention to me. But in life the events aren’t separated out in that way. There’s no way to know if this conversation will have immense later significance or if the lateness caused by missing this green light will alter your day so significantly that it might change your entire life. They should have little stickies on them, tiny neon post it notes.
I’ve never been back to the Athens Airport. My flight out of the enormous Eleftherios Venizelos was the last time I stepped on Greek soil. During the time I was visiting Greece – two visits in just over a year – I felt as though I was working on the story. But in the years (yes, years) since all construction has ceased. As I look back over my notes from the last visit I find I can make no sense of them, waiting seven years has not added to the little sense they made in the beginning. (I must improve my note taking strategies.) Of the long list of people I interviewed after the visits, many are probably dead now. And even if they’re not, I’d be embarrassed to call them back again now and ask the same questions again. I never understood at the time I was talking to them the trajectory of the narrative and so my questions and my notes were undefined. Often the people were often only tangentially related. And my interview skills were minimal. As I attempt to retrieve the strands of this story, I’m not sure what to do with these folks, these partial interviews illegibly annotated in unintelligible shorthand. I feel as though I’m constructing these tiny bits from memory. It’s an archaeological dig in my fading memory. A word sets off a memory of talking with someone. But only the strongest, most consistent, strands keep surfacing. So it seems all the same story. I could never imagine the trajectory of the narrative. That’s why the interviews all seem so faint – they were faint as they happened, not one single neon sticky. I did have an idea, but it involves writing a totally different narrative – not fiction, not even really about Belle. But about the futile act of trying to track her down and the intertwining of my story about her with my friend’s story about her mother’s crazy husband Donald. Donald and Belle. Now there’s a story.
By the time the end of the day rolls around my mind is such a Grand Central Station of things I need to attend to that I could never begin working on a focused piece. I need to write in the morning. First thing. Before I let my mind wander off to other more mundane and topical items. How to rewrite a piece of curriculum, how many people must I email in order to accomplish this single task of hiring this individual adjunct, I need to reread this text so I can teach it in a few hours or a few moments, I want to read the news and see how badly John McCain has done in the last polls, my colleague’s daughter is competing in Olympic trials – when are they on TV and can I remember to record them, I need to copy this tape for my brother, and I’m waiting for my new windows – when will they be able to begin work, this desk is an untenable mess – it must be straightened for my mind to work properly, and that cabinet with the plasticware – stuff falls out when you open it, I bought these new pots and pans and they’re still not put away because the cabinets are too unwieldy to welcome new visitors, I need to work on that article I said I’d co-submit with my friend – I’m afraid she’s no longer talking to me it’s been so long, and the assessment plan for next year – that needs tending to or I’ll start off the year confused, I’ve remade the course schedule and to abide by it I’d need to rearrange next semester which is impossible so how can I get around that, oh hell – there’s that brand new course I’m teaching in the fall that I haven’t even begun to think about yet, I need to read these four articles, and boy oh boy I wish I could just sit down and read a book – what in the world was that like. I need to write before all this stuff wakes up too. The morning. That’s when I need to get here. Before the rest of my brain wakes up. Blog first.
Thinking tonight of those singing divas I used to love. Many years ago I was a subscriber to the New York City Opera. I preferred that opera to its next door neighbor, the Met, because it was a company of the people. I’d become an opera fan in college when my good friend Stephen took me to see a City production of Mephistopheles. He thought an opera about Beelzebub was just what I needed to turn me into a fan. Although my father had played opera in the house all through my childhood I never got beyond thinking it was just so much noise. But when I saw Samuel Ramey sing Boito’s devil I was completely entranced.
One of the things that made me such a fan during those years was Beverly Sills. I began my dedicated opera going during her final years as a member of the company. I saw her sing many roles, including Gian Carlo Menotti’s Juana la Loca. Juana was a mediocre opera made far more popular by the fact that it was written for Sills. She sang its debut and I can’t imagine that it’s been performed much since. She made what felt like an unfinished composition sound like a triumph at La Scala.
What I loved about the City was that you could find enormous stars on the boards singing beside the company. What I loved about the City was that their schedule was robust and had a wide rotation. What I loved most about the City was that I could see stars like Sills and Ramey almost whenever I wanted to. They sang often. And, although Sills was wrapping up her career, they sang beautifully. Like angels.
In 1979 Sills became the sole director of the New York City Opera. The original plan was for her to share that role with the former director, Julius Rudel. But when Rudel suddenly resigned Sills took on the role solo. There was much consternation at the time. Bubbles, as she was known in the opera world, had little administrative experience. And running an opera company seemed a big job for a poor little soprano. But Sills rose to the challenge and made the company really feel like New York’s opera.
My fondest opera memory came one night when Sills was firmly ensconced as director. I can’t even remember the production, but I remember clearly Sills’s part that night. Before the overture began, while the houselights were still up, she appeared before the curtain. The spotlight illuminated her wonderful red hair and the house went silent as she stood waiting for her moment to speak. The star of the production was ill, Sills explained, and we would have to hear an understudy. It was disappointing, but singing opera is demanding and, although stars don’t often find themselves unable to sing, it does happen.
But that wasn’t all.
The understudy had a terrible case of laryngitis. She could not go on either. The audience groaned. What now? What could Bubbles possibly pull out of her hat to fix this? “So…” she continued, a principal from the company had quickly learned the role that afternoon. She would sing from the orchestra pit, while the voiceless understudy acted the role onstage. What an inventive solution, gasped the audience. How will this work, we all asked ourselves.
Sills was asking herself the same question and, with not totally fake exasperation, she explained that such was the life of an opera director, always having to come up with inventive solutions to unimaginable problems. And then she made her fingers into a little gun and shot herself in the head.
It was an adorable and endearing gesture that, once again, forever linked her with her audience. We were exasperated, but none of us more than our poor Beverly who was trying to give us the best. She stood with us, wanting to hear astounding opera. We knew she would never let us down.
The Rachmaninoff third piano concerto – amazing. Fingers dancing over the keys like centipedes. An astonishing pianist sits almost completely still, arms at right angles, shoulders relaxed, fingers at a thousand miles a second. The few junctions when emphasis is called for the pianist’s entire body plays the notes, or a hand flies backwards off the keys. Such economy of movement, such amazing speed, such perfect sound.
Flag day. Day after the Supremes issued a third rebuke to the administration (I can’t even write his name) about the habeas situation at Guantánamo. Of course the troubling thing about the decision was that it was 5-4. Just one more justice and we’d be sending people to jail for thinking bad things about the government. The tipping point is ever so much more precarious now than ever. We’ve got to get these guys out of office. They have made incompetence a professional virtue. They have politicized every level of government – particularly and especially those management and professional levels that used to actually do the work. Agencies that used to manage the everyday goings on of policy making and enforcing are now bloated with ideologues. I doubt the damage this administration has done can be undone in my lifetime.
I remember an episode of The West Wing where a reporter (I think) refused to stand when the president entered the room because she did not agree with or respect his policies. He rebuked her strongly saying, that although she certainly had the right to disagree, she did not have the right to disrespect the office of president. “You stand for the office.”
If that man entered a room I was in, I might be able to stand for the office. I think I could. But I could never respect him. How could I even remain in the room with him? What would I say were I in a position where I had to speak with him. I have nothing but contempt for him. He’s a war criminal. He’s plundered his own government. He took us into a war in a fashion so irresponsible it could be a farce if it weren’t so serious. He’s so far worse than the “drunken frat boy drives country into ditch” stuff we said about him in his first year. Before 9/11 made him into a war president. I’m not sure I could keep from spitting on him. It would be a test of all the grace I could summon just to say an innocuous hello.
We got Nixon and thought he was bad and it couldn’t get any worse. Then we got Reagan and thought he was bad and it couldn’t get any worse. Then the Bush continuation, the man hardly had a personality. During the Clinton years it felt as though the person who’d been hitting me with the stick for 12 years had finally stopped. And now this. Not even elected. A stolen election, in a state run by his brother and a woman who had not even a passing acquaintance with the law, lost the popular vote, did it again the next election. The extent of the damage, the trashing of civility, policy, and practice so far reaching, it’s hard to begin comprehending its enormity. The puppetmasters making plans since the Nixon administration let presidential powers slip have finally had their triumph. We are a country gutted.
So flag day. Is there a glimmer of hope for us to halt the slide this November? One small possibility we can prevent the court from tipping for the next forty years into indecency, return reason to policy and remove politics from pragmatics? A chance?
I’m working on revising an article I submitted to an academic journal. First, may I say how I detest having to publish work in academic journals. Academic writing is almost always wooden and generally incomprehensible. A very few academics manage to bridge the gap from their world to the real world – folks like Neil Postman and Barbara Tuchman. Their writing is engaging and interesting. But most academic writing is like the article a colleague showed me some years ago. He’s known in his field and at my shop he keeps getting kudos for publishing wonderful stuff. I expressed interest in this piece he’d told me about so he sent me a copy. As I read it I was horrified. It was so poorly written I wouldn’t have accepted it from a student. I never got up the nerve to tell him how awful it was.
Anyway, I’m revising this piece based on some really negative feedback from a blind reviewer (maybe if I’d been blindly reviewing my colleague’s piece I’d have had more courage). I was initially saddened by the negative feedback until I started working on the revision yesterday and I discovered that most of the comments made are incorrect. So someone who doesn’t really understand the scholarship I’m basing the article on has decided that I didn’t interpret it correctly. I suppose I always feel that I’m not being a good reviewer when I blind review stuff – that I’m always missing the point of what the writer is saying. I always try to ascribe to the writer the benefit of knowing what she’s saying. I figure if I miss it, it’s my problem. But if, after reading the piece, three or four times, I still can’t figure it out then I think something may be missing. But really. I try not to correct things that I’m not sure about as this reviewer has done to me. She/he “corrects” a specific term used by a specific scholar. But the term is correct as used. It’s just that sort of thing that tells me the reviewer isn’t paying the right kind of attention.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays we get quick, down and dirty, what’s goin’ on entries. So here’s one. I’m completely perplexed by the new language we’re having to start using in the workplace. I blame it all on George W. Bush – that hellcat – by (indirect) way of Margaret Spellings. After No Child Left Unharmed, she turned her sights on higher education. Like so many industries before us, higher ed said “no-no-no, we can police ourselves…at least let us try.” Hence the arrival of assessment, or as we call it ass-ass-ment. Because it’s asinine. Get it? I won’t get onto a long tear about assessment now, although I could, but I’d just like to put some of the words out here that I cannot figure out. They all sound the same to me. Take one word from column A and combine it with a word from column B and you’ll have a term you can salt into your program assessment plan. But I’ve no real idea how they differ or even what they really mean. Can anyone reading this help me make up some definitions?
A
Course
Program
Learning
B
Goal
Objective
Outcome
The entire enterprise seems idiotic. Why not just focus on what’s actually going on in the classroom? How’s that for an idea? This stuff is like looking at the very first holograms. Every now and then, if you hold it just right, for just a nanosecond, you can see the whole picture. But mostly what you see is just shards of an idea.
(continued from 6/9/08) The joke in Athens, as in so many place that secretly want to claim this distinction, is that everything comes in months behind schedule. But at 6 AM that day as I pulled up to Eleftherios Venizelos in my very expensive Athens taxi, there seemed to be activity all about. Maybe my flight actually would take off from the new airport.
The first thing I noticed inside were signs announcing the airport was a no smoking space. Athenians are famous for smoking anywhere and everywhere. I heard stories about people smoking in hospitals. An orderly, told that he shouldn’t be smoking inside the building replied with “Oh, I work here,” as if that was all it took to explain his lit cigarette. Athenians cannot not smoke and they were entirely flummoxed by the new no-smoking rule. Anticipating the flummoxedness, airport authorities had indicated smoking areas where it was legal to smoke. Where could you smoke? In restaurants. Yes, the first places to be made non-smoking in America were the last places you could smoke in Greece. So as I was buying and trying to eat a pastry that morning I was surrounded by puffing airport mechanics, flight attendants, airport cleaning staff, counter attendants, police, even people who worked in other airport stores, all standing just inside the white line on the tiled floor that indicated, like Les Nessman’s office on WKRP in Cincinnati, the imag
inary boundaries of the restaurant. It was crowded
I lost count of the number of moving sidewalks I rode on the journey from the check-in line to my gate, but I seemed to be going directly to my stopover point in Munich. The airport was the psychic and physical opposite of the quaint old airport nestled at the bottom of Athens’ reach. I collapsed at my gate, raw with morning exhaustion, having arrived before sunrise, nibbling my pastry in an actual non-smoking area.
Athens International Airport, in Spata, was now large enough to accommodate the millions of visitors Greece was anticipating at the Olympic games. The airport’s website announces that they welcomed their 100 millionth passenger on June 4. It says she is Greek, that she arrived on an Air France flight, that she was welcomed by the marketing director for AIA and the manager of the airline in Athens, there are even three photos. But her name is mentioned nowhere. She is, apparently, every-passenger.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are very difficult because I have to work first thing and cannot blog. Just got home from seeing Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure. Pretty damned chilling. Although I found the piece I read about it even more compelling. Seeing the people interviewed was interesting – especially with Morris’s method of straight on camera work. It was a little long and the chronological structure was unexpectedly and irritatingly confusing. It was called Standard Operating Procedure but it really wasn’t about that at all, it was about the pictures. The pictures from Abu Ghraib. It never looks straight at the question of what they were doing, who told them to do it, and what in the world they were thinking taking the photos. And the Danny Elfman soundtrack is only mildly annoying in a Philip Glass sort of way. It is a powerful and gripping film about a subject that, unfortunately, as with far too many things that have arisen during this administration, is unresolved.
(continued from 6/1, "first trip") When I arrived at the Athens in early 2001 I was stunned. I remembered, from years earlier, a photograph of the aftermath of a terrorist attack in the airport. It was a shot taken from above; people were lying in small pools of blood, chaos surrounding them. This was all I’d ever seen of the Athens Airport. We touched down on the tarmac and taxied to a few hundred yards from what looked like a small warehouse. We exited the plane via an exterior stair ramp – the first time I’d done that since the sixties. No jetway for the Ellinikon International Airport. I followed the line of people departing the plane in front of me to a bus that looked a little like an old San Francisco trolley. The large doors remained open as we sped across the remaining yardage to the small warehouse. I thought we would be going through customs in this place and then get to the airport arrival terminal from there. But no. This small warehouse was the airport. The Athens Airport. Inside were four old fashioned baggage carousels – the kind where the bags came up from below and made that oval circuit around and around on their 35 degree angle. And that was about it.
After I’d retrieved my luggage I headed toward the customs counter to let them have a look at my passport and stamp me in. But no one was tending the counter and as I waited for someone to return it became obvious no one was coming. No papers, no working desk, no sign of life told me no one was returning here. After a few minutes of trying to figure out how to make my entry into Greece legal, I just gave up and exited through the double doors. Now I was in the arriving passenger part of the terminal building. As I looked to my left there was the newsstand where Shelly had suggested I meet my friend. It was not only the only newsstand, it was the only commercial entity in the airport. I strolled over and stood near the magazines. After about twenty minutes Katy showed up, as incredulous as I was that this was where we were meeting. That this was where we were! Athens. In an airport that would probably be just the right size for Three Forks, Montana.
That would be the end of the story had it not been for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. My Greek friends who lived in Piraeus loved the old airport. Arriving visitors could call when they deplaned to say they’d arrived and Katrina and Dionysus would be at the airport to pick them up by the time they’d retrieved their luggage. It was close, it was convenient, it was teeny tiny. But the Olympic committee could have none of that. Millions would be coming and going when the games returned to their ancestral home. So a new airport was built. You now have to drive over 20 miles on the Attika Tollway (Attiki Odos) to arrive at Eleftherios Venizelos – the Athens International Airport, in Spata. That's Spata, not Sparta.
Athens International Airport is enormous. Just to bookend my experience with Athens airports I returned to Greece in 2002. I flew in to the old airport. My departure, however, was to take place on the opening day of the new, gargantuan, airport 20 miles north of the city. I called three or four times to make sure everything was on schedule. In Athens things are famously delayed. I lived in terror that I would arrive at Eleftherios Venizelos only to find that my plane was taking off from the old airport.
I’m not sure how it can be so that I’m old enough to remember a time when women weren’t welcome in the workplace, when they were expected to stay in the home and take care of the children and the cleaning, when they were supposed to keep their mouths shut, when they were not only not taken seriously, but were ridiculed for the very notion that they might have independent thought. I’m not sure how it is that I was actually a part of not the first, but it seems the second wave of women entering a work force where non-discrimination was the battle cry – the battle cry but far, far away from accomplishment. I’m not sure how it could be possible that I can remember all those commercials that made women stupid, that made a woman’s prime reason for existence to make her family happy, that made women simply sexual objects – but only as long as they were pretty and young. But I do. I lived this.
In the same vein, I remember childhood as a distinctly different experience than what I see children living through these days. My childhood seems just a few seconds removed from the childhood when a good toy was a board with a nail in it. We had toys. But the most our dolls did was wet themselves. Dolls were babies. It wasn’t until Barbie came along that dolls became adults with lives, and careers, and plans of their own. The television we watched was for adults – the Max Fleischer cartoons were a terrifying peek into his nightmare where children wandered into the forest and were accosted by trees that bounced and danced ominously in time to the threatening classical music and hurled apples at the backs of the few children who tried to escape. Gumby and Pokey were virulent racists, making sarcastic double entendre insults to the redface Indians they visited. The highest tech toy we had was Mr. Machine – a plastic man about 18 inches high wearing a top hat and showing his totally non-functional assembly of gears and buttons through his flat transparent body. Our playgrounds had no soft landings, steel cage jungle jims, and working concrete water fountains.
A consecutive date. Only possible in the beginning of the century. Today Hillary Clinton suspends her campaign for the democratic nomination and concedes to Barak Obama. Yes, Hillary is not my personal favorite woman in the country. Certainly not the woman I’d select as the first woman president. Far too conservative for me and I’m not a Clinton bandwagonite. But she has made a powerful statement in history. Just forty years ago, when we lost Kennedy and King, the very idea of a woman even running for president was laughable. Even if we dislike the Clintons, we have seen her crumble that notion. It is often left to those most unlikely to take on the tasks the advocates move most passionately. Only Nixon could go to China. Only Begin could make peace with only Sadat. Only a republican Governor could commute all death sentences and clear Illinois’ death row. And only the intensely loved and intensely hated Hillary Clinton could become the first serious female candidate for highest office. In my working life, I experienced the trailing end of gender discrimination. And even as it began to slither to its death it was a powerful element in all our lives, defining so many things about what we were permitted to do, think, be, and become. It’s not gone yet. But Hillary has brought us another few feet toward the road’s convergence. And for that, we must all be grateful – like her or not.
Fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Like most Americans my age, I’ll never forget that day. It’s seared into my memory as an eternal event, one of those events by which I mark off the time of my life. JFK’s assassination. MLK’s assassination. RFK’s assassination. But for RFK, a special place. In those two days after he was shot, before he succumbed, I’d written on my sneakers “pray for Bobby.” (I think it was the first thing I ever wrote on my sneakers. Later I’d write “acid queen” after the Who song from Tommy.) Many years later when I went to Washington for my first time as an adult I visited Arlington National Cemetery. I thought I wanted to see John F. Kennedy’s grave and we walked up the hill to the enormous cut out that was laid with granite marking his grave and the graves of his two infant children. The eternal flame floated invisibly above the gas spigot, identifiable only by the vapor curling the air. I was impressed. I summoned my memory of Black Jack and his backwards boots high stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue. I recalled the feeling of having been shocked. But I was not moved. Then I walked a few steps away down the path to Robert Kennedy’s grave. And as I saw the small pool, the simple white cross, and the green hill climbing up behind it I began to weep. Carved in the granite behind the water was a quote from Aeschylus that has been with me since. “In our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
I completely forgot to blog yesterday. I remembered at one moment early in the day. But I was in class and couldn’t get to my blogging equipment. By the time the day ended I’d totally spaced it out. I will try to blog twice today to make up for it. Blog is another word spellcheck needs to learn. In fact spellcheck is a word spellcheck needs to learn. It’s interesting to have this technical evidence of how the language evolves. Sometimes I feel like we should all just adopt the spellings that spellcheck offers us for difficult words. We’d wind up with words that are completely different from what we’d intended. Some words that were close, but just spelled slightly differently. It’s particularly interesting to see what it does to names. Sometimes it seems that if you capitalize something it’ll leave it alone. But other times, as with Obama, it insists. In this paragraph alone, I’ve got nine words underlined with red squigglies. Now ten, because squigglies is not a word (eleven).
Finally. “Obama clinches nomination…marks end of epic battle with Clinton” is today’s NYTimes headline. Finally. So. Now Microsoft Word will need to teach its spellcheck that Obama is not a misspelling. It would be unseemly for the president of the United States’ name to be constantly underlined with a red squiggly.
And now it is entirely up to Hillary Clinton too unify the party. She needs to bring her vociferous and unyielding supporters in line with the democratic nominee. Otherwise the November election will be lost and she will be to blame. She must not only stop them from staying home, but she must engage them to be vocal, happy, and equally demanding supporters of the party nominee. She needs to work as hard on this as she has to get the nomination.
Yes, it’s true that she’s been eliminated principally as a result of the deeply embedded misogyny in this culture. Yes, it’s true that she probably would have won the nomination had she not been a woman. (Or a Clinton.) Yes, it’s true that she’s been vilified and dismissed in ways no other candidate has had to suffer. But now the race is over – these things become fodder for academics and her role remains in the real world. She must knuckle down and get back to the job of making sure a democrat is elected in the Fall. If republicans win the White House in November it will be at least, at least, partially her responsibility.
The photo of Belle with ER and MMB came to class with me today. Students were interested in it and its origin. We agreed that I’d keep at the mystery and see if I could find out more for them. We gave me an assignment. I asked if they were interested and they said I could give myself that assignment. Now I have to work on that too. It’ll keep me blogging about the actions I take to find the answer. I feel, after all my work in the past, that the answer is not out there. But someone suggested I post it on flickr. I’d never even thought of that because flickr didn’t exist when I was doing this last time. How things have changed. I will do the posting (although that student may have to explain to me the best way to do it). I will look at the websites and archives they suggested to me. What fun, to bring them in on the mystery. It’s not really visual or verbal rhetorically related. But it is a mystery and a mystery is always compelling. Now, if only I can get the rest of the class involved in discussions.
Yves Saint Laurent died Sunday, Bo Diddley today. Two giants. One brought us the pantsuit the other, the clave, 3/2, beat. A father of women’s fashion and a father of rock and roll. Who will be their successors? How will we survive without them. Without Yves what would Hillary wear? Without Bo where would the beat be? Ahh me.
My first trip to Athens was made easier by my friend Katy joining me for the first of my two weeks. Except for a long forgotten business trip to Santo Domingo (yes, Santo Domingo, yes business) I’d never been off the continent of North America. Canada, a northern-most town in Mexico had been the stretching of my boundaries. Katy was living in Germany at the time and I’d suggested that we meet in Greece for a working vacation. I needed her European expertise – how to manage in a place where one is unfamiliar with the language. She needed a vacation. It was perfect.
I did have one contact in Greece who wasn’t associated with my quest. Shelly, the sister of a friend had married a Greek man and been living in Greece for over two decades. She would help me understand how to get around. In our very first discussion about the trip she’d made it clear that she was a limited resource. “You can’t stay with me” was the first thing she said as she began listing the ways she could and couldn’t be helpful. But she was a font of helpful information. And when I finally visited her home in Marathon I understood perfectly why I couldn’t stay with her.
But I needed her help to figure out a spot to meet my friend Katy since the two of us were arriving at the Athens airport less than an hour apart. When I’d asked Shelly for a spot where Katy and I could meet at the airport she’d said “Oh, just meet her at the newsstand.” I kept sending her emails asking her to describe specifically which newsstand, specifically where it was, where it was located on the concourse, which concourse. Each question was frustrated with the same reply, “the airport is small, you’ll find each other.”
I could not believe that any international airport was so small I could just tell someone to meet me at the newsstand, but getting absolutely no satisfaction from Shelly beyond “meet her at the newsstand” I reluctantly told Katy that’s where we’d meet. She had the same questions and was similarly disbelieving when I conveyed the reply. But since that was all the information we had, I approached the day thinking I could page her if it came to that.
