tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69380024033331302262024-02-18T20:35:36.310-05:00richardsblogAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.comBlogger88125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-41012648425988833212013-07-03T18:53:00.001-04:002013-07-06T11:23:50.305-04:00REVIEW <br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHbVbEGjNK3eM1-deHUwRBhpcGCRA10XCHDC8f9gr7LXu1L7BJEQ0LG0zTY3r_5z9NxyTczJtvnRA45P1bYKo_NkEPoywiBkxuDS86NIlK3e8eesC50hywNCNXNBDUZgz4qh2xA3bOm5Ey/s600/Dimaggios.jpg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHbVbEGjNK3eM1-deHUwRBhpcGCRA10XCHDC8f9gr7LXu1L7BJEQ0LG0zTY3r_5z9NxyTczJtvnRA45P1bYKo_NkEPoywiBkxuDS86NIlK3e8eesC50hywNCNXNBDUZgz4qh2xA3bOm5Ey/s320/Dimaggios.jpg.png" width="320" /></a></i></b></div>
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When I told my wife I was reviewng
a book titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dimaggios</i>, she
asked me, “There was more than one?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were, in fact three –
the brothers Joe, Dom and Vince, all big-league ballplayers of varying
skill-levels and fame.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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But it’s the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>subtitle that’s the problem, identifying
the book as a document in the long literary history of this country’s animating
vision, of which baseball, of course, played a part. The DiMaggio parents,
Italian immigrants who worked hard to give their children a better life in San
Francisco than they could have in Sicily, had a version of the American Dream
in their minds that corresponded to the classic narrative that has shaped the
fiction of Horatio Alger, Nathanael West, John Updike, F. Scott
Fitzgerald,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and Arthur
Miller.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem is that none
of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>these three brothers was Jay
Gatsby (though perhaps Vince, who ended up selling Fuller brushes door to door,
was a kind of Willy Loman.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dom, the
one with the brains, always underrated and in Joe’s shadow as a ballplayer though
he was voted American League MVP in 1947, at least found a successful career in
business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Joe, after Marilyn
Monroe’s death, became even more reclusive, bitter and paranoid than he had
always been. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None of them
was a hero, least of all Joe, who “just wanted<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“an excuse to get out of the house.” </div>
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The fact that Joe was lionized by
the press and the fans was the product of America’s conflation of athletic
skills and character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Undoubtedly,
the cult that surrounded him was enormous: Paul Simon’s lyric “Where have you
gone, Joe DiMggio? / A nation turns its lonely eyes to you” testifies both to
the size of the myth and to the absence of the man, and Joe reveled in his
fame, using it as a screen to keep everyone else out. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was from the start vain, not very
bright, suspicious to the point of paranoia – a loner who seldom spoke to his
teammates, and ended up estranged from both brothers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here’s what he told Gay Talese in 1966:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“There are . . . personal things that I
refuse to talk about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And even if
you asked my brothers, they would be unable to tell you about them because they
do not know.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clavin quotes
Charlie Silvera, a Yankee teammate, as saying that Dom and Joe, “each is his
own way was a great guy and a great ballplayer.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Clavin makes it abundantly clear that Joe was anything
but a great guy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vince was the affable
one; Joe was, as Gay Talese put it, “a kind of male Garbo,”</div>
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Telling the story of these three
lives involved, for Clavin, a prodigious amount of research; <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he seem to have read every book, every
article, every news story written by, for and about the brothers, their family,
and about baseball itself in the 30’s and 40’s – he stops just short of
including box scores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this is
a problem: he doesn’t really tell a story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The DiMaggios</i> is something
of a cut-and-paste job, an immense amount of data arranged in chronological
order, but with no overarching idea to serve (not those in the subtitle, at any
rate). Too much space is taken up by meaningless factoids (a friend of Joe’s,
serving in Korea, was promoted to sergeant; Ted Williams had fun learning how
to fly; Lefty O’Doul, died on “the anniversary of the American attack on Pearl
Harbor.”)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it isn’t only facts
that Clavin’s research turns up, but opinions as well:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>whenever things get pulled together in
a meaningful way, it’s Roger Kahn or David Halberstam who’s doing the pulling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clavin seems to have interviewed several
members of the DiMaggio family and scene, but the only one he quotes
extensively is Vince’s daughter, Joanne DiMaggio Weber.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And she’s good for an anecdote every
few pages. But as a family member, she’s not necessarily a reliable witness
(though I believe her when she says that her favorite baby sitter was Phil
Rizzuto.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “as told to”
autobiographies produced by each of the brothers are, as Clavin rightly calls
them, formulaic, self-serving and unreliable. </div>
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But there have been many
biographies of Joe, one of the best being Richard Ben Cramer’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Joe Dimaggio:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Hero’s Life</i>, an excellent and juicy book that probes
into all the sordid, interesting crannies of “the hero’s” stunted personality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where Clavin tells us that after his
divorce, Joe “wasn’t looking for another wife, just companionship,” Cramer
reveals that between and after his marriages, virtually the only women he met
were prostitutes, one of whom still marvels at Joltin’ Joe’s physical attributes:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he was “bigger than Milton Berle,” she
said, Uncle Miltie representing the phallic paradigm of the 40’s and 50’s. This
is juicy stuff, and it’s what’s missing from Clavin’s version.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The DiMaggios</i> is sanitized, just that it’s plodding and literal,
lacking narrative style and telling details.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The brothers’ personality quirks are mentioned regularly but
Vince’s affability, Dom’s shyness and Joe’s sullen grudge-holding get lost
among endless reiterations of what happened in Cleveland, in New York, in
Boston on summer afternoons 70 years ago, when Joe went 3 for 4 and won a game
that won a pennant that led to yet another World Series. In 1950, “The gutty
Red Sox did not fold. On July 18, their 12-9 win over the Tigers at Fenway Park
brought them to .500 at 39-39.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the next <a href="" name="_GoBack"></a>59 games they went 47-12.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There must be baseball fanatics who
will lap up all these stats and replays, but for most of us, a little more than
a little of that is much too much.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When
the book gets interesting, predictably, is when Joe meets Marilyn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clavin observes that they slept
together on their first date, though I think it would be bigger news if they
hadn’t; “dating” doesn’t seem like what these two were up to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet Clavin, in defiance of all evidence
that their marriage was a liasion between two damaged, narcissistic,
sex-addicted celebrities, tells us that their wedding was “a fairy-tale event
for gossip lovers,” attended by none of Joe’s family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The marriage lasted less than a year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“He had loved her deeply.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He always would,” writes Clavin. But
Joe really was incapable of love, and didn’t want a homemaker and child-rearer
for a wife; he’d tried that once before and gotten burned. Neither had any idea
who the other really was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Returning
from a promotional tour of Japan, Marilyn told her husband, by now retired, “You
never heard such cheering.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
replied, “Yes, I have.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The people
closest to him probably shared Toots Shor’s opinion of her: “Joe, what can you
expect when you marry a whore?” </div>
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The last few chapters of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The DiMaggios</i> are painful, as the
brothers’ relationship deteriorates and one after another, they sicken and
die.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joe seems in his later years
to have fallen under the spell of a sleazy lawyer named Morris Engelberg who
made him money on the memorabilia circuit impersonating, as it were, Joe
Dimaggio, and who, as Joe lay on his deathbed, may have pulled his World Series
ring off his finger and then tried to pull the plug on his ventilator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The kid who just wanted to get out of
the house ended up hoarding money and, except for a moocher, alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If this is the American Dream, it’s a
sad one. </div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-31693933420594711582013-06-03T14:23:00.004-04:002013-06-03T16:44:02.849-04:00A TALE OF TWO CITIESNancy and I were in Paris last week with the kids and grandkids. I had been looking forward to seeing them, but Paris? Not especially. I've hardly spent any time at all there, and when I have, it was either freezing January or broiling July. I have trouble understanding the machine-gun bursts of spoken Parisian French, and a good part of this trip would be spent with my son-in-law's many relatives, in suburban Houilles, where I anticipated mind-numbing language difficulties. I had no interest in doing the tourist things; my most vivid memory from previous visits is lines longer than Disney World's. And this, at least is still true; here's the Louvre on a weekday morning:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitntPuXyH0sye9pJK5VqsjQvuGGp7sGleSSsY10rfUXjSaGr3jLbPeuMp8-Y9TEJxyaoJ8qMOULJrxvhyphenhyphentyY9HTSwYz64u_lTMK5RX5k6VjtF8NncjZjeZWbGS31XEfn3EeVZIj01XMtkW/s1600/Louvre+line.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitntPuXyH0sye9pJK5VqsjQvuGGp7sGleSSsY10rfUXjSaGr3jLbPeuMp8-Y9TEJxyaoJ8qMOULJrxvhyphenhyphentyY9HTSwYz64u_lTMK5RX5k6VjtF8NncjZjeZWbGS31XEfn3EeVZIj01XMtkW/s320/Louvre+line.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Of course, the food would be great, at least in restaurants, though we'd need a second mortgage to eat out. And to top it all, the long-range forecast for that week was cool and rainy -- and so it was, except for one perfect, sunny afternoon when the two of us went to Roland Garros for the second day of the French Open, buying grounds-only passes from a scalper for a mere 300 euros. That's euros, not dollars. <br />
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But something strange and wonderful occurred: I fell in love with the city. We were in Houilles twice, and the <i>famille</i> Bellenoue all came into town once, and I mean<i> all</i> --<br />
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<br />
and the more time I spent with them, the more charmed I was. Most of the conversation was indeed in French, but they took pains to speak slowly and distinctly, and they were <i>amusant</i> and <i>interessant</i>, and they cooked us a wonderful day-long meal, and it was the first time we'd ever met any French people who weren't waiters or cab drivers or hotel clerks (except for a girl named Jeanne, in Cassis, when I was 19, but that's another story). <br />
<br />
The other thing that made the week special was that instead of staying in a hotel (which really would have required a second mortgage), we rented an apartment. It had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, the latter feature not typical of the city's housing. It was in the 1st, just up the street from the Jardin des Tuileries, which had a nice playground for the kids, and though it was on the Wrong Bank (the Right; we'd have preferred the Left), it was perfectly situated to bring everyplace we wanted to go within walking distance -- the Musee d'Orsay, le Marais, St. Germain, Sainte Chapelle, restaurants that Benoit and Danielle could ferret out, where we ate the best meals of 2013, for less than $100 (that's dollars, not euros) a couple. We walked our feet off, miles and miles, past the famous landmarks and into neighborhoods I'd never heard of, and I loved every step of the way.<br />
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And the Right Bank ain't so stodgy after all. Look at these pictures: the first was taken from the window of our NY apartment, on the Upper East Side, a very desirable location, and probably New York's equivalent of the <i>Rive Droit</i>:<br />
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What we see, across the street, is an undistinguished church and a gutted building containing, from left to right, a newsstand, a shoemaker, a frozen yogurt place, a farm stand, and of course, across Lex, a Starbucks. Here's what the Marche Rue Ste. Honore´ looked like from the terrace of our Paris apartment:<br />
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The store with the green awning sells every kind of oyster you've ever heard of. On the corner, elegant young Parisians are converging on the mecca of a small bistro; across the street, more chic <i>citoyens</i> are congregating at a little bar that every evening trundles out a bunch of barrels and puts checkered tablecloths over them. Bicycles and scooters predominate; the parked cars seldom move, so the street is quiet enough to catch snatches of conversation floating up. </div>
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And all this has been here all my life. It was never a problem falling in love with London, and our friends Jeff and Linda, who live in Rome, plugged us into that wonderland, but now, only now, do I get what Balzac and Proust and Woody Allen have been proclaiming. Might have to make this reunion an annual <i>affaire</i>. </div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-74941305153740138062013-04-25T14:29:00.001-04:002013-04-25T14:40:01.608-04:00A TALE OF TWO (UNIVER)SITIESWhat an odd academic career I've had! My first full-time job after grad school lasted thirty years -- at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York, from which I retired, at the rank of full professor, in 1998.<br />
<br />
I did so not because I wanted to stop teaching, but because I wanted to teach fewer courses to better students closer to home, which in practice meant become an Adjunct Professor at NYU. The salary was minuscule, but I was very happy there, principally because I was spared the scut work of teaching composition courses, which made up the bulk of everyone's schedule at BC. Instead, and inexplicably, I got to teach Shakespeare seminars because no one on NYU's permanent faculty was interested in doing so.<br />
<br />
This year, NYU let me go. They had hired two Shakespeareans, making me expendable, and were trying to rid their midsts of adjuncts, which is in a way commendable; too many departments nationwide depend too heavily on underpaid, overworked (and perhaps unqualified) part-timers to relieve the superstar profs of the tedious business of teaching undergraduates, grading papers, holding conferences. The fact that I felt violated and desolated when I got the news that I was being let go (by email!) was beside the point. I had fallen into the trap of thinking that, though my job description was "adjunct," my years as a professor put me on more or less equal footing with the permanent department. Hadn't I published almost as much as some of them had? Didn't I win NYU's Outstanding Teaching Award (seldom, if ever, awarded to adjuncts) in 2005? Hadn't I been assured by several chairpersons that I was a valued member of the department?<br />
<br />
But that was then. My friends and supporters at NYU have retired, or transferred to the Abu Dhabi campus, or taken other jobs, and, as Willy Loman said to his boss, sealing his own fate, "They don't know me any more." <br />
<br />
Not ready to leave the classroom, I got myself another job -- back at Brooklyn College. Home is where, when you have to go back there, they have to take you in. I'll be teaching a Core course next fall, and Shakespeare in the spring -- but I have no idea to whom. I loved NYU's students, and a lot of them loved me back. I don't know what I'll find at BC. Probably enough bright kids to sustain a classroom discussion, but certainly a much higher proportion of what are termed "students in difficulty" -- clueless, unprepared, bored, desperate -- who will need a lot of special attention. But will we be friends? Many of my former NYUers -- hi Kea, Carol, Oz, Sarah, Heidi and Loidee -- are still my buds. Only one of my BCers is -- hi, Ruth -- and she followed me to NYU to do graduate work and became my TA there.<br />
<br />
Then there are the practical matters. NYU is only 20 minutes away on the 6 train from my New York apartment. . BC is about an hour away on the 5 train. NYU is in the East Village, than which no neighborhood is more fun; BC is in Midwood, off Flatbush, which becomes quite dreary that far out. NYU has Washington Square Park, which on warm, sunny days like yesterday is New York theater at its finest:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3rIJP1DOkAS4DZLRsP9IxVU_-Kuj-Gte5GQR-AEzixGsgKFLD8RZ8SzEllA91D0vztv4N_yjB9VTWC84VBAWUBt9lZE9sgiyYAKDmgFRGo2AHZdw1r1qYGECIfLEsiM7E1UJkgvGH98mB/s1600/stepdance.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3rIJP1DOkAS4DZLRsP9IxVU_-Kuj-Gte5GQR-AEzixGsgKFLD8RZ8SzEllA91D0vztv4N_yjB9VTWC84VBAWUBt9lZE9sgiyYAKDmgFRGo2AHZdw1r1qYGECIfLEsiM7E1UJkgvGH98mB/s320/stepdance.jpg" width="244" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
On the other hand, BC has a beautiful campus, one of New York's finest examples of Georgian Revival architecture, with its own little park, including a koi pond, that soothes the soul:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-kluWOzyE0oZ1rN_KspuNjnAOOQpXAAZiKZPgUexz3un95CBo12LENc60eUoz8C8f71uNc8WV1Hcq5o7NvytFtVKZzqbltP_wrZo0PL2Ptwh4JdMj_0MQHe9Q7P_vBpv0MxQPQFjaKDjG/s1600/BCgarden.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-kluWOzyE0oZ1rN_KspuNjnAOOQpXAAZiKZPgUexz3un95CBo12LENc60eUoz8C8f71uNc8WV1Hcq5o7NvytFtVKZzqbltP_wrZo0PL2Ptwh4JdMj_0MQHe9Q7P_vBpv0MxQPQFjaKDjG/s320/BCgarden.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
So maybe, in terms of environment, it's a wash. I just don't know, and won't until September. Isn't all change good? On the other hand, is this a change, or just deja vu all over again? I'll let you know in six months.</div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-49660419192333772752013-03-09T13:25:00.000-05:002013-03-09T13:29:25.602-05:00TO MOOC OR NOT TO MOOC?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 17.6pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;"> A STUDENT MOOCING</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 17.6pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 17.6pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">As
everyone who reads a newspaper or a blog knows by now, Marissa Mayer, CEO of
Yahoo, has put an end to perhaps the most valuable perk in Silicon Valley,
permission to work from home.
That model seemed to make perfect sense in an internet company; doesn’t
it simply fulfill the core promise of the internet itself, that interaction on
line can be as rewarding and effective as face-to-face contact? Mayer’s reasoning was interesting: she admitted that working from home was
more productive than shlepping into the office and hanging out by the water
cooler, but, she said, it was less innovative. For innovation, you need that water cooler, or cafeteria, or
couches in hallways, or any place that encourages 24-year-old whiz kids to
excite each other with new ideas, to improve and refine and think of new uses
for the company’s products.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">That’s not
a new idea; Steve Jobs, when he designed Apple’s new headquarters, made sure
that even going to the bathroom routed you past watering holes and gathering
spots. I don’t remember Walter
Isaacson, in his biography of Jobs, mentioning any real or expected decline in
productivity, so we don’t know whether that would have been a successful
trade-off for the Magus of McIntosh. But, in a <i>Times’s
</i>op-ed page last week titled “In Defense of Telecommuting,” a sociology
professor from UT-Austin commented that the powers-that-be at our large
research universities, “among the most successful engines of innovation in our
economy,” never have to artificially enforce face-time between faculty members.
“To give one small example,” she
wrote, “two of my colleagues, at Cornell University, a demographer and
geographer, recently came up with the idea for a study to improve the retention
of women working in science while chatting during their children’s after-school
swim lessons.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">Ah,
yes. But what works at Cornell (my
undergraduate school) might not work at NYU (my current employer). Ithaca, NY, is at best a medium-sized
town, with a somewhat limited palette of restaurants, cultural and sporting
events, and pools that offer children’s swim lessons; in my day, and I imagine
now, wherever faculty happened to find themselves off-campus, other faculty
would have found their own ways there.
Ithaca, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Austin, and State College, PA, are, to
varying degrees, almost suffocatingly insular places, but Boston, New York, San
Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia (think Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and
Penn) are geographically and culturally polyglot and diverse. If I’m not eating in the vicinity of
Astor Place, I almost never run into my colleagues or my students. The same was even more true of Brooklyn College, where I taught from
1967 to 1998: it was, and is, a
commuter school, and though there are a cafeteria and lounges, they’re almost
empty; faculty and students met in
the classroom for 75 minutes, and then either retreated to their offices, if
they had them, went home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">All this
connects to the Next Big Thing in education – MOOCs, the clumsy acronym for
Massive Open Online Courses, in which a superstar professor lectures to
thousands of enrolled students worldwide, who will eventually take online exams
and receive course credit without ever having set foot on the campus (which
might itself be virtual).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">Why not
take this to its extreme: just
have the students read a book and pass quizzes on it. No, say the innovators of this potentially huge money-maker,
that would defeat the principle of collegiality. After each lecture, the students will have the opportunity
to interact with their teacher, advancing ideas and asking questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">Are they
kidding? Picture the virtual
classroom as if it were a real place the size of, say, Madison Square Garden --
20,000 students, 7,000 of them with hands in the air. I’ve taught lecture courses at NYU with as many as 120
students in them, and I didn’t field questions and queries after I was done
speaking; I had three TAs, each of whom met two sections of 20 students once a
week, to do that. How many TAs
will a big-time MOOC require?
Where will they come from?
Mine were graduate students studying for Ph.Ds in English, but in a
virtual university, they’ll be on-line too. So, at least in one model, there’s no face-to-face contact
at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.6pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">Is that so
bad? How would Baxter Hathaway’s
creative writing class at Cornell all those years back have suffered if each of
us students had submitted our stories and poems online and discussed them via
teleconference (which hadn’t yet been invented)? Here’s how: I’d
never have met my fellow student Tom Pynchon, never have had coffee with him
after class, never have picked one of the most subtle, original and powerful
minds I’ve ever encountered. College
– at least a humanities college – isn’t a place where you’re trained to
regurgitate factoids. It’s a place
where you find your cohort, the people who shape your character and outlook and
become your friends. There are no
friendships in the MOOC landscape. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.6pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.6pt;">And there may be perils, having to do with isolation and distraction and
social infantilization and possibly even worse things.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.6pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.6pt;">“Officer, I know I ran that red light at 60, but I was tweeting my BritLit final.”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.6pt;"> </span><br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-42780546525251571732013-02-26T15:26:00.000-05:002013-02-28T11:24:17.725-05:00SETH MACFARLANE'S NIGHT OUT<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBg4E5n-6weTZhI6lXL3XvLCOHcp4q7jpouMuLVTnpBDTfz1ZdKbaxQUicHwyFApUK3tiYqX9HSAeznsamnwBHM0HJWdLxqo1EQlMeqTPUs_DBGRYkGNOhCwHSS6gPxeoFl3PpIh2UPcg6/s1600/JLtripping.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBg4E5n-6weTZhI6lXL3XvLCOHcp4q7jpouMuLVTnpBDTfz1ZdKbaxQUicHwyFApUK3tiYqX9HSAeznsamnwBHM0HJWdLxqo1EQlMeqTPUs_DBGRYkGNOhCwHSS6gPxeoFl3PpIh2UPcg6/s320/JLtripping.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Did Jennifer Lawrence trip, or is she mourning the death of humor?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"We saw your boobs!”* “The only guy who really got inside Lincoln’s head was John Wilkes
Booth.” “It’ll be sixteen years
before Quvenzhane Wallis is too old for Clooney.” Other targets included Jews,
Latinos, gays and rape victims. With
these and other tasteless and misgynistic <i>bon
mots</i> did Seth MacFarlane regale the billion or so people watching the Oscar
presentations the other night, prompting a backlash in both directions: <i>The
Onion</i> tried to get into the spirit of the evening by saying of Ms. Wallis,
“that Quvenzhane Wallis is kind of a c**t, right?” But most people who have offered
commentary, in the press or on the social media, expressed indignation, even
outrage, at the whole unseemly spectacle.
Perhaps the most eloquent criticism was the look of disgust on Charlize
Theron’s face when MacFarlane exulted in having glimpsed her breasts onscreen.
(It’s possible, however, that this moment was pre-recorded, which interestingly
complicates Theron’s take on the joke.)
It’s kind of surprising that when Jennifer Lawrence tripped over her
dress on the way to the podium, there weren’t at least isolated peals of mirth.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I
have a particular interest in this cultural moment because, as it happens, I’m
teaching a course at NYU this semester in bad taste and misogyny. That’s not how it’s labelled, of
course; its title is “English Literature in the Earlier 17<sup>th</sup>
Century,” but as it happens, the years between the death of Elizabeth I in 1603
and the Puritan takeover of the country in 1642 saw the birth and flowering of
an esthetic of bad taste and contempt for women, a kind of wholesale reaction
against the decorum of conventional thought and image that had governed the
world of letters until then.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Consider
this epigram by Sir John Suckling, who, in his short lifetime served as James
I’s secretary of state, invented the civilized game of cribbage, and was a
trusted advisor to James’ son and successor Charles I:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Love
is the fart</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of
every heart.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It
pains a man when ‘tis kept close</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And
others doth offend, when ‘tis let loose.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
first fart joke of the early modern era!
Aside from the literary merits of this ditty (at best it’s clever,
though it tops any of MacFarlane’s sallies hands down), it served as an
announcement that a new kind of joke was permissible. The body and all its various sounds, sights, smells, and
secretions was no longer off-limits to poets – particularly the female
body. Where the previous
generation of sonneteers (Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Phillip Sidney, Shakespeare)
dwelt on their mistresses’ golden hair, alabaster foreheads and coral lips,
John Donne wrote avidly of his mistress undressing before him, saluting “the
hairy diadem which on you doth grow” and begging her to “License my roving
hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below.” But women were just disposable
toys to the misogynistic Donne, who will “swear / No where / Lives a woman true
and fair.” In his poem “The
Indifferent,” he views female
constancy as a vice, asking those few women who still practice such abberant
behavior, “Will it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers?” Low blow! In one of what he problematically called his “Holy Sonnets,”
Donne (who was not only a priest but Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral), entertains
a fantasy of being raped by God:
“O’erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn and make me
new. . . . for I, / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever
chaste, except you ravish me.”
Suversive enough for ya? </div>
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In
the light of this rather short-lived fad (when the Puritans seized control,
decorum returned, sharpened to a razor’s edge that resulted in the beheading of
Charles I), the gross-out humor of our own time, and its vast appeal, may be
more explicable. Perhaps it started with Bill Osco’s 1980 film <i>Gross Out</i>, whose premise was that a
woman threatens to withold her children’s inheritance unless they produce a
movie so disgusting it makes her vomit. It caught on. To millions, it’s funny
to watch Cameron Diaz rub semen into her hair in <i>There’s Something About Mary</i>.
The food fights and fart jokes of <i>Animal
House</i> are hilarious not only to frat boys but to much wider audiences as
well. Judd Apatow’s <i>This is 40</i> is a
gross-out movie for the mildly middle-aged. Beavis and Butthead speak for themselves. </div>
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The precondition for the esthetic of bad taste, I think, is
an ironic outlook on life – the outlook of Seinfeld’s cast, of Chris Rock, of
the Farrelly Brothers. Irony turns
everything on its head, so that a joke, or a movie, or a routine such as
MacFarlane’s can be so bad it’s good, outrageousness for its own sake is
worthwhile, airing in public what used to be private is nothing but
liberating. The more literate
apologists for all this cite the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of
the “grotesque body” – the body we all have and used to deny or attempt to
ignore, a hairy, squelchy bag of flesh enclosing sacs of urine, feces, semen,
mucus, pus and snot. Such, seen
from the reductive, grossly physical point of view, is your body and mine, John
Belushi’s and Elizabeth Bennet’s.
Even George Orwell, though he never grossed anybody out, provided a
rationale in his essay “The Art of Donald McGill” for pictorial obscenity: “It is the voice of the belly
protesting agains the soul,” he wrote.
</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
So was Seth MacFarlane’s the voice of the belly? Perhaps he’d like to put himself in the
august company of Rabelais and Donne.
But it’s one thing to smash the icons of a repressive, prudish society
in the name of freedom, and another to pick on nine-year-olds. In truth, are there any icons
left? Lincoln, maybe. But except for one (big) Oscar,
Spielberg’s reverent epic was largely ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences.<br />
<br />
*This has already inspired a parody titled "We Saw Your Junk," at http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/02/we-saw-your-junk-a-boob-song-parody.html<nymag .com="" thecut="" we-saw-your-junk-a-boob-song-parody.html=""></nymag></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-87669588295420500462013-02-18T15:26:00.002-05:002013-02-18T15:28:07.589-05:00RUN IN CIRCLES, SCREAM AND SHOUT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhclO1g2nxkNTkgVGVZikh_FE-5Yx_toNCvI2lAuTB8-IhEu-qdSZAB4V5n3OvcTYV80-lfoRd-01sbRRnq9u7abKKT_Sno-TqdUSkxCIeQpEgRL9ywhQfTO1u0tBonIT-A2o5FgthygR_K/s1600/panic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhclO1g2nxkNTkgVGVZikh_FE-5Yx_toNCvI2lAuTB8-IhEu-qdSZAB4V5n3OvcTYV80-lfoRd-01sbRRnq9u7abKKT_Sno-TqdUSkxCIeQpEgRL9ywhQfTO1u0tBonIT-A2o5FgthygR_K/s320/panic.jpg" width="268" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I love signage. Those of you (all three of you) who have remained my constant readers throughout the years know that I've written on signs and their sign(ificance) a lot -- there was the article in the<i> East Hampton Star</i>, titled "The Semiotics of Springs," that almost got my house firebombed twenty years ago, just because it traced the ongoing conflict between townies and weekenders to the unconscious ways in which they marked their territories. I wrote on the unintelligibility of NYC parking signs on this blog a couple of years ago, and now they're being reworded (obviously Bloomberg is a fan). And later, I took the town of Southampton to task for displaying mammoth billboards depicting a cop in combat stance aiming a pistol-like radar detector at motorists, which I found less than subtle.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
But the above falls into the category of mere whimsy. The device is attached to the wall of the room in NYU's Skirball Center where they give flu shots, though I'm sure it's used many other purposes than that, none of them obvious but perhaps known causes of panic -- doctoral orals? Job interviews? Theatrical auditions? </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
What, exactly, might the sign mean?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
1) If you're in a panic, activate this alarm (and a doctor will come and give you a thorazine shot?).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
2) If you're not in a panic but there's panic around you, and you want to put a stop to it, activate this alarm (and paramedics will rush in and slap everyone's face, the way they do in the movies to people having hysterics?).</div>
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<br /></div>
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3) If you want to cause a panic, activate this alarm (and snakes will start slithering out of the heating ducts?).</div>
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<br /></div>
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The most interesting thing is that none of these could conceivably be the real answer, yet I can't imagine what it is. "Panic," in this or any context, would seem to be a bad thing, but is "alarm" a good thing? An antidote to panic, not a synonym for it? The sign itself is obviously home-made, stuck above the switch that it fails to identify, and urge to pull that switch, just to see what would transpire, was hard to fight down -- though I wouldn't say it alarmed me.</div>
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<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-35705322560364012892013-02-15T12:12:00.003-05:002013-02-15T12:12:32.399-05:00THE ARABIAN GOLF<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGaEIW0pv0O_UmQWZoyVovst-vIxBvbC-cFlWgYuswLBMomOvBsY20Qs67xNAnCQKmpySqbgyHMAP9b4daKQBGFqR0RG6a-hlfdKn91BYaqMddo5IEGF3s-MLsZuP8T85RcfGdN6BBkw84/s1600/Torrey+Pines.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGaEIW0pv0O_UmQWZoyVovst-vIxBvbC-cFlWgYuswLBMomOvBsY20Qs67xNAnCQKmpySqbgyHMAP9b4daKQBGFqR0RG6a-hlfdKn91BYaqMddo5IEGF3s-MLsZuP8T85RcfGdN6BBkw84/s320/Torrey+Pines.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
This is a photograph of a typical hole at the Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, where the Farmer's Insurance Open was played in January.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjefneh8O3MZqasMuX15jyQIovb4_DPgSGrN8ujoJjjGU1T73pOSlvE3BloK0NJLsZYRkF4hWv8FbnVJAvFeZ97AS_7MTlcf9lpIiPB-XWGXzNB2lq-NFs1z9bkkH3YJfjD7z_OM9YoNt-5/s1600/ADgolf2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjefneh8O3MZqasMuX15jyQIovb4_DPgSGrN8ujoJjjGU1T73pOSlvE3BloK0NJLsZYRkF4hWv8FbnVJAvFeZ97AS_7MTlcf9lpIiPB-XWGXzNB2lq-NFs1z9bkkH3YJfjD7z_OM9YoNt-5/s320/ADgolf2.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
And this is a photograph of a typical hole on the Abu Dhabi Golf Club, where the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship was played a week earlier.<br />
<br />
Notice any difference? <br />
<br />
Abu Dhabi, which is perhaps the richest country in the world per capita, wants a seat at the golf table, and is prepared to spend whatever it takes. Apparently, they paid Tiger Woods and Rory McElroy, ranked second and first in the world, over a million dollars apiece to buzz in on their private jets and participate in the tournament. (Both of them played miserably and weren't around for the last two days of the four-day event.)<br />
<br />
But the Emirates don't get golf. One of the most appealing things about that much-maligned sport is the beauty of the courses themselves, oases of green and gold, mountains and pastures, lakes and rivers and oceans. Golf courses are the formal gardens of the modern era; if you were a landscape architect, wouldn't you want someone to give you 300 acres of virgin land and a blank check? In the United States, in the UK, in Spain, in Australia and New Zealand, there are stunning courses, many of them with seaside vistas that are so gorgeous it's impossible to keep your mind on the little white ball. This is the 17th hole at Pebble Beach, on the Monterrey Peninsula of northern California:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuU0Xn7bfnxmeK-7fVKj5FsxOmlLGRtI4IaaCsBCBdCD7G6N2dbk-MObsilhfZyRFUolMANxE2UhbbfOpN7AfssOJZ2cqDJJpttBy6IB5HmzyML9cSbQZrsO2ocSwxbDkTgAiNbcvvUREE/s1600/PB,jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuU0Xn7bfnxmeK-7fVKj5FsxOmlLGRtI4IaaCsBCBdCD7G6N2dbk-MObsilhfZyRFUolMANxE2UhbbfOpN7AfssOJZ2cqDJJpttBy6IB5HmzyML9cSbQZrsO2ocSwxbDkTgAiNbcvvUREE/s320/PB,jpg.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
You can see pods of migrating whales from the course itself. The Abu Dhabi course is right on the Persian Gulf, but you'd never know it, at least from the TV coverage. All you can see is advertising (and those signs, by the way, interfere with play, as you might imagine).<br />
<br />
<br />
So why does AD, dripping with money, visually pollute what could be a major attraction? Because money is what they know about and what everything in the Emirates comes down to, from the tallest building in the world to the so-called "souks" where, instead of interesting examples local artisanship (as in, say, Morocco) you're confronted with shlock. The first thing you see in the biggest souk in Dubai (which is even more commercialized than Abu Dhabi, despite or because it's poorer) is rack after rack of T-shirts:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAwUfFEkzEGdwv-nf5PPWdxzRsQ334bhX9DD575p3KRouyoDfJ8KcqXHherMFjMdyGaihbUi3reLi67BoSjFjGyDGlKolmt9zmTf0bnvbWoUsnH6QUiNZLUoBL9YMh5-xaKSmZ46ZQZaU4/s1600/I+heart+dubai.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAwUfFEkzEGdwv-nf5PPWdxzRsQ334bhX9DD575p3KRouyoDfJ8KcqXHherMFjMdyGaihbUi3reLi67BoSjFjGyDGlKolmt9zmTf0bnvbWoUsnH6QUiNZLUoBL9YMh5-xaKSmZ46ZQZaU4/s1600/I+heart+dubai.jpg" /></a></div>
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I spent a week in Abu Dhabi last year, courtesy of NYU's new humanities college there, and I was both fascinated and repelled by the place. Their path to Westernization seems to be the fastest of any country in the world; where fifty years ago there was nothing but desert, there's a city -- if a city is a place with enormous skyscrapers all built at the same time, and no neighborhoods. Golf may not be the most important feature of a country's cultural life, but it's a handy barometer of the extent to which a society's values bypass esthetics and art in favor of money.</div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-27868653410247371782013-02-14T14:03:00.004-05:002013-02-18T23:45:14.665-05:00SPACE -- THE FINAL FRONTIER<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">This font is Courier. I've left two spaces after the period. </span> <span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This font is Times. I've left one space after the period. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Who cares?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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Farhat Mamjoo, that’s who.</div>
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My friend Amanda Gibson posted a fascinating <i>Slate</i> piece on FB earlier today –
fascinating, at least to her, to me, and to an apparently enormous cohort of
grammar fanatics who feel passionately about a conflict so apparently trivial
that it will probably bore you to tears or make you laugh out loud.</div>
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<br />
<br /></div>
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Ready for this?
When typing, should you leave one or two blank spaces after a period at
the end of a sentence.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
I kid you not.
You can read the piece – “Space Invaders” by Farhat Manjoo -- at <b>http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html</b></div>
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There’s a generational divide here: many of us who learned to type on
typewriters rather than keyboards were taught to leave two spaces, which
several of the authorities quoted find deeply offensive because it’s, well, a
waste of space, and also esthetically unpleasing. </div>
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<br /></div>
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There was once, Manjoo admits, a good reason for this
practice: before they disappeared,
typewriters evolved from using monospaced fonts to proportional ones. If a font is monospaced, each character
– whether an ‘l’ or a ‘w’ – takes up the same amount of space. Proportional fonts allocate more space
to wider letters, less to narrower ones.
In the earlier mode, the spacing in sentences looked a little
weird. (You can check this out for
yourself by typing a few sentences in the font called Courier, which is
disproportional. I’d do it here, but Google won’t let me.) Two spaces after the period made it
clearer that the kind of full stop represented by the end of a sentence had
occurred.</div>
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What galls me about Manjoo, who says what galls him about
the two-spacers is “their certainty that they’re right,” is his certainty that
he’s right. He should know
that there is no right and wrong when it comes to usage. There was no such thing as English
grammar until the 18<sup>th</sup> century, and it’s been changing ever since,
like all living languages. It’s no
more “right” to use one space than it is to leave out or put in the final comma
in a series (like “red, white, and blue”). The one-space rule “is one of the
canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the
salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork,” says Manjoo. Canonical rules were made to be broken;
they’re silly and arbitrary. Another “canonical rule” is that you’re supposed
to put colons and semicolons outside of quotation marks, but commas and periods
inside. Why? Who in God’s name cares? (Manjoo,
probably.)</div>
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Manjoo cites as his authority typographers – the people who
turn typed manuscripts into type for printing. But in these days of self-publishing, typographers are a
dying breed, made increasingly irrelevant by the practice of self-publishing. And they certainly aren’t the arbiters
of usage that they and Manjoo think they are. All they have a right to do is come before us like some
Dickensian child, and in a small voice humbly and politely request that we drop
the two-space rule –<i>which was their idea
in the first place! </i>So, the convention has changed? It’s still just a convention, an
arbitrary way of doing something that could as easily have been done
differently.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you want to get overexcited over writing conventions, I
have a few more worthwhile ones to consider. I get emails from my NYU students in which nothing is
capitalized, commas are non-existent, and emoticons appear. Want to talk about esthetically
offensive? Here’s what I think
about that: : (</div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-84407299859613705752013-02-12T13:40:00.000-05:002013-02-12T13:40:01.227-05:00GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS<br />
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<a href="http://writingforundergrads.blogspot.com/2013/02/good-guys-and-bad-guys.html" style="color: #888888; text-decoration: none;">GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS</a></h3>
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What alarms me most about the rhetoric of the NRA-worshipping far right when it comes to guns is their taxonomy: everyone is either a "good guy" or a "bad guy," and it follows, as Wayne LaPierre put it, "The only thing that stops a bad buy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." </div>
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But where does Osakarose of San Antonio fit in? She wrote, "The whole point of being a registered owner is: #1 to own the gun legally and be trained in its use, #2 to protect myself and my property from criminals. I do not want them to know I own a gun; I want it to come as a complete surprise to them when they break into my home and I blow them away."</div>
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Rose, do you sit up all night in your darkened living room, locked and loaded, waiting for the doorknob to turn? Is it protection you want, or the thrill of shooting to kill? Are you, in short, a good guy or a bad guy? Isn't a good guy a gun owner who hasn't committed a crime with his gun -- until he ambushes someone (maybe a family member who forgot his keys), or feels threatened by an innocent passerby in states that permit an armed, violent response, or experiences an ungovernable fit of road rage while wearing a Sig Sauer on his hip -- in which case, doesn't he cross that boundary and become a bad guy? </div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-88976323790971421402012-07-17T13:09:00.003-04:002012-07-17T14:22:00.043-04:00SHAKESPEARE AND MORE SHAKESPEARE<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">How remiss I have been!</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">Why should anyone bother reading my blog if I’m not going to
write it?</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">But I’ve been very busy,
and at last have something to write about.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">I’ve been working as dramaturg on <i>two</i> – count them, two –
plays over the past month:</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">the
Green Theater Collective’s production of </span><i style="background-color: white;">The
Tempest</i><span style="background-color: white;"> and Shakespeare@Hitfest’s production of </span><i style="background-color: white;">A Midsummer Night’s Dream.</i></div>
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GTC is a tiny group dedicated to performing Shakespeare in
minimalist fashion with as smalll an ecological footprint as possible . Only six actors (here are two of them)</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSum3DHB-muEbg1CG80qI-f9XBNLEzsJjCzG_smuRMvi7_FIokSjeSujcAMoIONx-pmqgA4AAKR9AYUeuEO7mT2AeFr8UofWO16UubScCTu_7wDmFbQktYRRECWihzXc_J31605kH5bIiZ/s1600/739733.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSum3DHB-muEbg1CG80qI-f9XBNLEzsJjCzG_smuRMvi7_FIokSjeSujcAMoIONx-pmqgA4AAKR9AYUeuEO7mT2AeFr8UofWO16UubScCTu_7wDmFbQktYRRECWihzXc_J31605kH5bIiZ/s320/739733.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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performing in an orchard, without a stage, lighting, or costumes, doubling
and tripling roles, cutting the play to 90 minutes. Their director is the incredibly talented Sarah Hankins, and
it was a privilege to sit wih her and the cast and discuss the play,
contributing whatever I could. Its
run is only six shows, in two venues, and this is the only aspect of the
project I wish were different.
They’re like an itinerant bunch acting company in the 16<sup>th</sup>
century, putting on plays for whoever will watch, solving production problems
on the spot, improvising when they have to, and this is, for me, <i>echt</i> Shakespeare – the real thing.</div>
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By contrast, Sh@hitfest's <i>Midsummer </i>is a full-dress, 17-actor juggernaut which will run for most of August in Bridgehampton, staged in the
athletic fields behind the high school.
I’ve worked with the director, Josh Perl, several times, but only when
he was acting (<i>Julius Caesar, Macbeth,
Hamlet</i>, all at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton); this is a whole new
relationship. A dramaturg has
variously been defined as "the director’s bitch" and "a powerlesss smart person," and in this case, it’s more the latter; Josh and I often disagree on what the
text says or means, or whether the actors should make that their primary focus,
and so far my batting average is fairly low. Sarah Hankins revered me and hung on my every word. I know Josh really likes me and appreciates me but he’s more
about staging than about academics.
But the play is taking shape; there’s a lot of talent in the cast. Here are some rehearsal pix:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK5bhi4mXhhmj-EkBd-VjocMXA1b6tX39dKBT8R6VlZdzBgtE8kJ92d6KqmaZm-BnrUcSDpwIKcjYDlsGJmTwGxYmyTMcoQQhnbjgRrzK2DRYMQJy5kAyXdY_-vZFFgHlzMRdLfV34vyhy/s1600/photo-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK5bhi4mXhhmj-EkBd-VjocMXA1b6tX39dKBT8R6VlZdzBgtE8kJ92d6KqmaZm-BnrUcSDpwIKcjYDlsGJmTwGxYmyTMcoQQhnbjgRrzK2DRYMQJy5kAyXdY_-vZFFgHlzMRdLfV34vyhy/s320/photo-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Josh Perl expounding to the cast</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeezm9702lEze49tchWvbdIXO9wmTuyvhoqUNtt-kF3mJ83gjKvt4Bno1fIix7kyQhALGCrpTWerynsx9Gacmu22P7Ukq4c-vVRjn4EYxJ_Hw6YZGr9SzH2J-5VfYeZIY9CpmffE_yi7wJ/s1600/dramaturg1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeezm9702lEze49tchWvbdIXO9wmTuyvhoqUNtt-kF3mJ83gjKvt4Bno1fIix7kyQhALGCrpTWerynsx9Gacmu22P7Ukq4c-vVRjn4EYxJ_Hw6YZGr9SzH2J-5VfYeZIY9CpmffE_yi7wJ/s1600/dramaturg1.jpg" /></a></div>
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The dramaturg keeping an eye on things</div>
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One pleasant surprise is that one of my former NYU students, and a prize student at that, Kea
Trevett, is not only playing Helena, probably the largest and certainly the funniest role in the play, but is living
with me and Nancy for the summer. </div>
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She keeps thanking us for our hospitality, but having her around is pure pleasure. She takes up
next to no space (in any dimension) – deals with her own needs (she’s a
vegetarian), leaves the kitchen spotless. My favorite part of the day is when she and
I get home from rehearsals and have a nightcap with Nancy, and we do a debriefing. She's so smart and funny! Too bad she's as ugly as a bear. (Well, that's how Helena describes herself in the play, anyway.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd5s-lqLkM5iB_CS3Jhz5xhHV7yyjVtG314yeH8Oyo8BCpghdbkBVklqCl1EW5lghUQ1GE3GyxMEZBDdgpB9-cExPUrxcznS3fHi5kXrsbLdVQx-eOprN9SuSjO7r5mpQ007ehwFwAqeO9/s1600/k.trevett.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd5s-lqLkM5iB_CS3Jhz5xhHV7yyjVtG314yeH8Oyo8BCpghdbkBVklqCl1EW5lghUQ1GE3GyxMEZBDdgpB9-cExPUrxcznS3fHi5kXrsbLdVQx-eOprN9SuSjO7r5mpQ007ehwFwAqeO9/s1600/k.trevett.jpg" /></a></div>
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Nancy and I have adopted her as a
second daughter, whether she likes it or not, and it will be lonely out here when she
leaves, though three weeks later the real thing -- Daughter #1 + family arrive -- for an extended stay.</div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">Opening night is August 2<sup>nd</sup>. If anyone reading this would like to
see the play, we’ll be there.
Details at<b> http://mndhitfest.blogspot.com/.</b></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-33577098961713358922012-06-07T12:40:00.000-04:002012-06-07T12:40:33.566-04:00BETTER HER THAN ME<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwz-naDIPzjwUtV1XhT7xUuiuT746GKdYQHLmOB5fOlruoBBZ8WM38ArWPRzIY_UAhkr62ovsQakVNk_0hRX1fp7r_co23_3qlLQ5Pj0PYiKrPinyPhQRKsvLczmLhECoAEOq8ubDl52Zt/s1600/NancyReagan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwz-naDIPzjwUtV1XhT7xUuiuT746GKdYQHLmOB5fOlruoBBZ8WM38ArWPRzIY_UAhkr62ovsQakVNk_0hRX1fp7r_co23_3qlLQ5Pj0PYiKrPinyPhQRKsvLczmLhECoAEOq8ubDl52Zt/s400/NancyReagan.jpg" width="400" /></a>
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By chance, I came across an amazing video clip on YouTube this morning,* and it brought back a vivid first-hand memory, dating back to 1986, to which my fervent response was, and is: Better Nancy Reagan than me.<br />
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That was actually my second thought as I watched the First Lady's chair tip backward off the dais in the East Room, depositing her in the flowerpots. My first thought was that something incomparably more awful had happened. After all, the President was there as well, delivering some graceful concluding remarks to the two hundred of us privileged to hear Vladimir Horowitz's White House recital; his presence, along with the Secret Service, the Marine Guards, the press, inevitably lends a kind of supercharge to the aura of any room he inhabits. So that sudden flurry, the chair toppling, the involuntary gasp from the crowd, the people rushing forward all conjured up a sense of waking nightmare, even fifteen years before 9/11: can something awful be happening? Here? Now? <br />
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But the next instant, Mrs. Reagan had bounced up unhurt, and she and the President were quipping away as if they'd rehearsed the whole thing. "Honey, I told you, to do it only if I'm not getting any laughs," he said, and got a big laugh. And smiling, unflustered, unwrinkled, not breathing hard, not flushed, without a stammer, Nancy tossed off a bon mot of her own -- "I guess I livened things up" -- and resumed her seat (her chair having been moved, in the interim, a good two feet from the treacherous edge of the platform). Horowitz locked his left arm around her waist and kept it there until the President had finished his speech, and then, smiling and chatting, the Reagans and the Horowitzes trooped nonchalantly out of the room, leaving the rest of us to buzz.<br />
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"I saw it coming," said my wife. "She had on a tight skirt, and she was tugging it down, and the chair was inching backwards at every tug." And that became the Official Version, as reported by The Washington Post and The New York Times the next day. But everyone else had his or her own version, some little detail that non one else had noticed, some explanation, some point of view. It was like Rashomon; no one of us could quite take in the totality of the event we'd just witnessed. It was a leveling experience, though; it restored the democratic balance between the celebrity musicians and politicians, who'd never seen anything like it in all their visits to the White House, and the nobodies (like us) who had lucked into an invitation and were there for the first time. Now, everybody had something to talk about, and if you had had a better sight line than a symphony conductor or a newsweekly publisher, he wanted to know what your angle was.<br />
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Nancy (Horwich) and I were there because fate had kindly arranged, forty years earlier, that my family and the Horowitzes should become friends. We've had the good fortune to hear him play many times -- once, several years ago, in Washington, when we came down the morning of the recital and went home as soon as it was over. Could anything could be more special than listening to the greatest living pianist? What would those musicophiles (mostly Russians) who froze all night waiting for a ticket, whose tears streamed down their faces as he played, answer? But such is the human capacity to become inured to blessings that this time, it was the Presidential overtones that set our hearts to beating a little faster.<br />
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In some ways, we felt very privileged: just telling the cab driver, "The White House, please -- Visitors' entrance," gave me a charge, though as it turned out, he couldn't find the Visitors' entrance, having been misdirected by a D.C. cop, and we had to walk a quarter of a mile from where we were let off. Next time we'll get a limo, we told each other. But sweeping past the crowds of tourists toward the portico, the heart-stopping moment when the guard holding the Guest List couldn't seem to find our names, showing the requisite identification (our social security numbers having been provided weeks before), all reminded us that this was a special day, a time to soak up the memories and impressions for our daughter and our friends in New York.<br />
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Going through White House security (at least in those days) was just a politer version of going through airport security these days. The identification, the metal detector, the handbag search reminded us that this wasn't a routine social or cultural occasion in any way. If I had a sense of being a witness to history on a very small scale, I had a complementary sense that my role was to remain invisible, on my best behavior, while history unfolded. One doesn't go wandering around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, thumbing through books and opening closet doors; if you have to the go the bathroom, a Marine major escorts you. Remember being an adolescent, worrying about developing a pimple before the dance, about buying the wrong corsage, or saying the wrong thing, or not being able to say anything at all? My wife was nervous too; an hour before, in the hotel room, trying on and discarding innumerable pairs of pantyhose, she was worried she'd faint if she didn't eat something. Not since my wedding, when I was sure that during the ceremony my knees would lock, pitching me forward onto the rabbi's feet, have I fretted so about keeping countenance. What if I started coughing while Horowitz were playing? Belched? Sneezed on George Schultz’s tie? None of these things was likely, but I could imagine it, everyone slowly turning around and looking at me with an expression of incredulity on their faces.<br />
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That was just the expression on the face of the Leader of the Free World when his wife did her back flip into the geraniums. The kind of thing that would surely mortify you if it ever really happened actually did happen -- in the middle of the President's speech -- and to the President's wife! But that, of course, made all the difference. If I'd fallen off my chair, I doubt whether the Chief Executive and I would have shrugged the incident off together with a little exchange of impromptu humor. Nancy Reagan belonged up there; she was in her own home, surrounded by her own guests (though I imagine she'd not met a third of them), and her aplomb undoubtedly stemmed, in part, from her sense of security: if I want to steal the stage from my husband by taking a pratfall while he maunders on, by God, I'll do it! And of course, all those years of social training, of discipline, of learning how to carry off difficult moments with tact, diplomacy, just the right gesture or remark -- they had prepared her superbly for a really juicy example of what the Reader's Digest would probably have called My Most Embarrassing Moment. If it had been me, I'd never have appeared in public again; five minutes later, at the reception, she was laughing about it as if she actually found it funny! I loved her at that moment. By a process of Darwinian selection, the one person in the room who could survive accident, or practical joke, or trick of fate, and actually triumph over it, was the person it happened to. Confirmed atheist though I am, I thought, there is a God. Better -- much, much better -- Mrs. Reagan than me.<br />
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*Check out the video yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bA8rb3yka4Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-86557468199390782532012-05-22T14:48:00.001-04:002012-05-22T22:18:20.995-04:00STUDENT BLOOPERS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />All teachers prize and collect them, and share them avidly with colleagues and . . . friends, but only discerning friends. One of the defining features of this form of humor is that the blooper is not readily accessible to the public at large; bloopers tend to be snobbish inside jokes, depending for at least part of their effect on self-congratulation: they’re funnier if you know what the student was trying to say or should have been saying. At the least, inside knowledge of literary texts is the sauce that brings out the flavor of the bloop.<br />
<br />Consider this sentence, written only last week by a student in my Shakespeare Colloquium: “One of the most important moments in the play comes in Act 5, when the Prince exclaims, ‘This is I, Hamlet the Great Dane!’” Everyone knows that can’t be what the Prince actually exclaims, but if you know the original line, you can see how the process of authorial recollection got thrown off the track. The line is “This is I, Hamlet the Dane,” meaning the de facto king of Denmark and the personfication of the national zeitgeist. Hamlet is a Dane, and a Great one at that, it’s just that in this one case, the adjective and the noun collide in a priceless way. <br />
<br />Another of my favorites, from a Survey of Western Drama course at Brooklyn College some years back, was, “Oedipus fell through his tragic floor.” Unless one has a cursory acquaintance with the Aristotelian concept of <i>hamartia</i>, (mis)translated as “tragic flaw,” this makes little sense but does conjure up a graphic image. But what makes it delicious is that, if you've ever heard Brooklynese, you know that when I said the word “flaw” in class, this kid heard the more homely and common “floor.” What did he think I meant? That the stage at the Festival of Dionysus in 5th-century B.C.E. Athens was honeycombed with devices like the one pictured above, which gave way unexpectedly at the pressure of a heroic foot?<br />
<br />The breakdown of oral communication in the classroom -- and outside it -- is notoriously responsible for the generation of nonsense, which usually comes to light only when the lapse is preserved in writing. One of my freshmen once described himself and his girlfriend as “shits that pass in the night.” Floating human waste caught in a cross-current during the hours of darkness? Or pure nonsense, like “Gladly the cross-eyed bear.”<br />
<br />A more predictable confusion occurred when yet another Brooklyn student wrote, “I saw the chipmunk emerge from his burro, look around, and disappear.” Circling the word “burro,” with a sense of misgiving but unable to help myself, I wrote in the margin, “You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.” The writer immediately complained to my department chair that I had verbally abused him. The bureaucrat thought it was pretty funny, but patiently explained to him what I had meant. The student was not mollified.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-74294707777858264242012-04-19T10:37:00.004-04:002012-04-19T18:33:45.547-04:00TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmwyKd4NobbX3pJtP8ktQ0yVR_IsmLiEdnBUI9gzLd1_-X1YqKRVujyPNcbvE_AIvBdekIRsZINqeFpay4ILHUgPGQKBKt2XROOshdRTtK0Wf99v3bBdFykZ8UD8wHRSn4ELGyooPO-2Sz/s1600/photo.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmwyKd4NobbX3pJtP8ktQ0yVR_IsmLiEdnBUI9gzLd1_-X1YqKRVujyPNcbvE_AIvBdekIRsZINqeFpay4ILHUgPGQKBKt2XROOshdRTtK0Wf99v3bBdFykZ8UD8wHRSn4ELGyooPO-2Sz/s400/photo.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
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Many baseball fans I know would rather watch games on TV, especially now that DVR makes it possible to pre-record the contest and fast-forward through commercials, pitching changes, conferences on the mound, mid-game interviews, minor celebrity sightings and the like. <br />
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And I confess that this is my usual <i>modus operandi</i>, especially in April, when I often have to get through televised Knicks games as well. I can, if I set my mind to it, knock off both a baseball and a basketball game in under three hours, if I hew ruthlessly to the principle that everything extraneous to the play itself -- not only Cialis ads but also everything that smacks of human interest and sports rumination -- must be ruthlessly expunged.<br />
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But the other night, Nancy and I were at Yankee Stadium to see the Bombers come from behind and thwack the Twins 8-3. And yes, there were things we sacrificed for the <i>en plein air</i> experience: the dubious benefit of announcer commentary and explanation, for one.<br />
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But here’s what we gained: <br />
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First, a perfect night. When I was teaching at Brooklyn College, a freshman handed in a paper that began, “It was a day such as poets write of: not too hot, not too cold.” It’s become a family joke: “It was a burger such as poets write of: not too rare, not too well-done.” But in the case of last Tuesday evening, Alexander Pope or some other champion of the moderate and picuresque might have been inspired to comment in verse on the clemency of the climate.<br />
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Second, a streaker – a nice retro touch, and one that TV viewers always miss because of YES Network's policy not to encourage such behavior. Granted that the guy was wearing trousers, which means he had no balls (that we could see), but he put on a nice, if brief, display of broken-field running before being brought down at second base by a fat old cop with surprising speed.<br />
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Third, for me, a nice sausage on a bun with peppers (admittedly, it was preceded by two $8 hot dogs, purchased at different stands, of such inferior quality that I discarded each after one bite) and, for Nancy, her favorite slum-food: a corn dog.<br />
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Fourth, the fans, including the two cuties pictured above who repeatedly photographed themselves against the backdrop of the field, but also, and more so, the lovely group of smart, knowlegeable, nerdy Jewish high-school kids we found ourselves sitting amidst. The boy on my right respectfully quizzed me on my vast experience as a sports fan: had I ever seen Mantle and how good would he have been if he’d stayed healthy? (The best ever.) Who was my favorite all-time Yankee pitcher? (Whitey Ford.) Did I prefer the new Stadium to the Old? (In some ways.) And he produced a fascinating hypothesis: during the sixth inning, the Yankees had the bases loaded: Gardiner on first, Granderson on second, Nunez on third. Wasn’t it possible, my young friend asked, that never in the annals of the game had three runners of equal or superior speed been on base at the same time? What team, in my long memory, might have produced their equal? And I couldn’t think of one; perhaps we were watching an arcane quantum of baseball history, live and in person. (To provide a nice sense of closure, Swisher drove them all in with a ringing double to right.) When we left, the kid respectfully shook my hand and told me what a pleasure it had been to talk with me. Such a nice bright boy, such a high probability that someday he’ll be the next Grantland Rice or serve as Commissioner of Baseball.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-40971067675762646322012-03-25T13:10:00.004-04:002012-03-25T13:19:51.075-04:00ABU DHABIIn January, I returned from a week’s trip to Cuba and blogged about it – chiefly its architecture, which constituted a rich and detailed record of the island’s history over the past hundred years. The opulent, Europeanized villas; the splended Catholic churches; the public squares; the narrow warren of alleyways of Old Havana all gave way, starting in 1959, under the avalanche of Communism. The villas were given to the People, who couldn’t take care of them, and most of them crumbled into splendid, decaying old piles. The churches have slowly been colonized by Senterria, the local form of Yoruba folk religion. The Castro regime built blocks of depressing Soviet-style flats and monumental, faceless public buildings. But Old Havana remains what it was, and forms the core of a lively, West-friendly fun-loving culture that refuses to die.<br />
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Two weeks ago, I got back from a visit to a country so different from Cuba as to represent its diametrical opposite: Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest of the United Arab Emirates. And again, architecture has a story to tell. Abu Dhabi, unlike Cuba, has virtually no history; fifty years ago it was desert. And the indigenous culture, if it can be called that, is Bedouin, and therefore, by definition, fleeting and insubstantial, for the Bedouins were rootless wanderers.<br />
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Where Cuba is a very poor country, Abu Dhabi, which owes its existence to its enormous oil reserves, is rolling in wealth. A (somewhat oversimplified) profile of an Emirati is someone who has little or no education (why bother, when there’s no vocational motive?), doesn’t work (ditto), is waited upon by servants who have immigrated from other countries (and who live outside the city in what are called – I kid you not – labor camps). The typical family car is a Porsche Cayenne. <br />
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And the architecture? Monumentality knows no bounds in Abu Dhabi (it’s even more striking in neighboring Dubai). Ego-driven oil-rich sheikhs have, with no master plan or guiding purpose, created a city of enormous glass towers – apartment buildings, office buildings, hotels – quite indifferent to the fact that their occupancy rate is ridiculously low. There is no dominant style, unless whimsical fancy may be said to be a governing esthetic. Consider, for example, the towers pictured below, which are fairly typical:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieZlnG6nPgRAUkkPzzlnD6wAjDaTKYftkQX_Rz474Ws3r8ca-sMrvgok-dODtiYCP9CEdVAcR_qvigHlqi081OndDfSKICiBEizaENSiAIsC0_t7wC9v1Sn7fkMlXqHLar0l1Ub4Lr6KAL/s1600/Leaning+Tower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieZlnG6nPgRAUkkPzzlnD6wAjDaTKYftkQX_Rz474Ws3r8ca-sMrvgok-dODtiYCP9CEdVAcR_qvigHlqi081OndDfSKICiBEizaENSiAIsC0_t7wC9v1Sn7fkMlXqHLar0l1Ub4Lr6KAL/s320/Leaning+Tower.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCz9h4voZgrYeSEaXQsx8qD8s3Mrgxw_-ODZ31mXjK0wezBoYvVnosZYwxDM9GawJMkPWIV3ZQCg2-sK2tUioUaggtsZ6T5GFcINW1tn7ohuwTC_QChuy8IIFesXtnz3ov3sRuBk5LAT3N/s1600/Cocoon+buildings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCz9h4voZgrYeSEaXQsx8qD8s3Mrgxw_-ODZ31mXjK0wezBoYvVnosZYwxDM9GawJMkPWIV3ZQCg2-sK2tUioUaggtsZ6T5GFcINW1tn7ohuwTC_QChuy8IIFesXtnz3ov3sRuBk5LAT3N/s320/Cocoon+buildings.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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Bizarre? Tasteless? Look at the decor of the Grand Mosque. The exterior is impressive enough. . . . <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwutNrByevBNVu9SjaqHDD8h2n-RnEXBIy295wKOHZXgW_Rppc9Lxf-Ol-nfVWwA3fsP9MgLvxBpELn55IdOqIWEqlzKZ_VKIaRwCIoodfgA3r9R59sePUlegUGY0wNxQ-ghuN9XIBPqIg/s1600/Grand+Mosque.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwutNrByevBNVu9SjaqHDD8h2n-RnEXBIy295wKOHZXgW_Rppc9Lxf-Ol-nfVWwA3fsP9MgLvxBpELn55IdOqIWEqlzKZ_VKIaRwCIoodfgA3r9R59sePUlegUGY0wNxQ-ghuN9XIBPqIg/s320/Grand+Mosque.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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But the interior is tacky; it looks as if it had been furnished by a a policeman's wife in Nassau County. Who came up with this chandelier?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEise0UPOoWyUaNqQY2x06jiA_gBpdJiTJd0RB2QbR4_vpWhSFJ5QVmABL-7XqW75BMVNnAatIYi1pcUZNpOpJJRbbi2lTi67rFvGb5gZ7MhixCfpoVCyG50D6C6T8OzKG1468QBuYDdVT5X/s1600/CHANDELIER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEise0UPOoWyUaNqQY2x06jiA_gBpdJiTJd0RB2QbR4_vpWhSFJ5QVmABL-7XqW75BMVNnAatIYi1pcUZNpOpJJRbbi2lTi67rFvGb5gZ7MhixCfpoVCyG50D6C6T8OzKG1468QBuYDdVT5X/s320/CHANDELIER.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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Here's the opposite number of that chandelier in the extraordinarily beautiful Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiwYYR_SZDwXmtfTAuRTlXDLxf7Jt4-j3e_EqY7-SK_kmAUfBiyGw06nFl6aZCm-na2QmFtgALjFlAtDcFrNrxJ-jSAZSINIJyJhKwX3nzHmxTYcshwOGDC4iiyWlkYczTgbCWwYAU_1Nu/s1600/CHANDELIER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiwYYR_SZDwXmtfTAuRTlXDLxf7Jt4-j3e_EqY7-SK_kmAUfBiyGw06nFl6aZCm-na2QmFtgALjFlAtDcFrNrxJ-jSAZSINIJyJhKwX3nzHmxTYcshwOGDC4iiyWlkYczTgbCWwYAU_1Nu/s320/CHANDELIER.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The physical setting of Abu Dhabi -- on the Gulf of Arabia, facing west toward Iran -- is stunning. But the Emiratis don't mix with tourists or expats; theirs is a closed community, but an untethered one: not truly Arab but not Western either. They've taken the worst of our culture, its obsession with material goods, and broken away from the best of Arab culture, its subtlety, intellectual accomplishments, and style. As of now, there's no "there" there.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-8731086985175351062012-01-07T13:29:00.007-05:002012-01-07T13:53:28.585-05:00CUBA!I wanted to go to Cuba for the same reason that many Americans go there: we all heard/saw <i>Buena Vista Social Club</i> and were blown away by the music. But when we got there, during the last week of December, though there was music aplenty (some wonderful, most OK), the way that Havana imposed its presence on us was through its architecture. <br />
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I'm not qualified to write about recent Cuban political history -- or architecture, for that matter. But the enormous variety of styles, and the variation in the condition of the diverse buildings and neighborhoods, was so clearly evident that I can't resist. <br />
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Old-style buildings in Havana and its environs date back to the days when it was a Spanish colony, and even after it became an independent republic in the 19th century, Cubans continued to build in the Spanish mode, which is exemplified by the opulence and elegance of those few structures that have been restored and/or preserved, like the Hotel Sevilla --<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Fs4l7DkvkKWg6isLvCLH_QptLMKhe5p_i6CJsBEoMY6TVBvd3MoTDt9L8KtYQFHHADp_yeJZrYtKXI59J882FA5QpwJes5xjzGixRfTjlQ0XdoJpjpn2-Vw_1bhAL7c6KtFwZM1qjEQu/s1600/Hotel+Sevilla.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="314" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Fs4l7DkvkKWg6isLvCLH_QptLMKhe5p_i6CJsBEoMY6TVBvd3MoTDt9L8KtYQFHHADp_yeJZrYtKXI59J882FA5QpwJes5xjzGixRfTjlQ0XdoJpjpn2-Vw_1bhAL7c6KtFwZM1qjEQu/s400/Hotel+Sevilla.jpg" /></a></div><br />
-- and this monumental government edifice --<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8uihAsIgsOYJIE5V2Mfq38MkSlEGpnE4PKHTDjmUE4GfuzYeQ8Zo2BaQVZh-NIeLEf7OyYz1A9stUuBwbfPLp816OoaIW-M67V3bo8FCurSS8q54Bs_Je_ipy1bklSlYQT2zGjmuI8oL/s1600/MonumentalBldg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="267" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8uihAsIgsOYJIE5V2Mfq38MkSlEGpnE4PKHTDjmUE4GfuzYeQ8Zo2BaQVZh-NIeLEf7OyYz1A9stUuBwbfPLp816OoaIW-M67V3bo8FCurSS8q54Bs_Je_ipy1bklSlYQT2zGjmuI8oL/s400/MonumentalBldg.jpg" /></a></div><br />
But most of Havana's streets -- particularly in Old Havana, the "autentico" neighborhood that draws tourists -- looks like this <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwqJ-NZdx_ih2S7SAuAzYIsVNCMQuwkHP7nlcTGhMFas2aA14NgTUNBhuxDKmLXqu2HfeQYimGtGzA8JDPD1iuEdR9iNjnAyjDm5PtX-Cbz1JVFD567BYQowX6vSycYiGsWkciOc1CcKhh/s1600/OldHavana.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwqJ-NZdx_ih2S7SAuAzYIsVNCMQuwkHP7nlcTGhMFas2aA14NgTUNBhuxDKmLXqu2HfeQYimGtGzA8JDPD1iuEdR9iNjnAyjDm5PtX-Cbz1JVFD567BYQowX6vSycYiGsWkciOc1CcKhh/s400/OldHavana.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Though some look like this:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrK7giw0-7C856BDFCTksLmnSCfNGaXY1z35jpX4VeYfAOGOYA0FPuHE8RJtF1Jz73dmQqNmm5maZITPWNOKl8ph-HbkNaURDTsNfkM72YYnpYtGDQf5_lrvVScN7JpGqCaAJNh2ko8foU/s1600/HavanaStreet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrK7giw0-7C856BDFCTksLmnSCfNGaXY1z35jpX4VeYfAOGOYA0FPuHE8RJtF1Jz73dmQqNmm5maZITPWNOKl8ph-HbkNaURDTsNfkM72YYnpYtGDQf5_lrvVScN7JpGqCaAJNh2ko8foU/s400/HavanaStreet.jpg" /></a></div><br />
It's clear from your first stroll that while most citizens are fighting the good fight against erosion and decay, it's not always winnable. In another half-century, if the regime doesn't change, and the island stays closed to U.S. trade and tourism, might not the whole city look like this?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlsj3R8iG5XPKAQw23ndTZSzBGnVs6303I2TYFTGXzCMqsbTPVzF3BvPoUrxo4LGkWDtini_NoA8WCPLTKM8ZDKG3lqFeU_eaaPsl2vE15c03NARhvaMDi9UQmeH5BWtm3KleNCwEDw6RS/s1600/ruin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlsj3R8iG5XPKAQw23ndTZSzBGnVs6303I2TYFTGXzCMqsbTPVzF3BvPoUrxo4LGkWDtini_NoA8WCPLTKM8ZDKG3lqFeU_eaaPsl2vE15c03NARhvaMDi9UQmeH5BWtm3KleNCwEDw6RS/s400/ruin.jpg" /></a></div><br />
What happened was that after the upper class left in a hurry in 1959, with only those assets they could carry, Castro gave their houses to the people -- who couldn't afford to keep them up. What the New Regime itself built has an inevitable Russian tinge to it: monumentally dull and highly politicized buildings:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj85nbKvt7CjTpXv2KXQN6wkLHT7Fr2MWrtd4EZrpwSC7-qdAt6HEREzNIARz2JLhp8HJQBrZMMBpwLPSjGij4174BvbGMNG8gA5GgCrmWdbA2_2197NduLRLjPGIU3HLJCBfm-VPSu0Kaw/s1600/NewArchitecture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj85nbKvt7CjTpXv2KXQN6wkLHT7Fr2MWrtd4EZrpwSC7-qdAt6HEREzNIARz2JLhp8HJQBrZMMBpwLPSjGij4174BvbGMNG8gA5GgCrmWdbA2_2197NduLRLjPGIU3HLJCBfm-VPSu0Kaw/s400/NewArchitecture.jpg" /></a></div><br />
So, in a way, Havana's architecture resembles its cars: there are stunning blasts from the past (the favorites seem to be Chevy Bel-Airs from 1955 to 57, like this one, which would cost about $70,000)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGxbryVSLNnWhdCx1GHum3hOp4M8USRyGm1usDI9mR7MQOv9ZQuZ4BIqyPESb0LOJ2xgymH7SLs8zMcD5Z8YaVs75lxV79A_OGBpFh0vtwnJ-2lHqm-il2AJkRh0zWKh4LSFx4cF0Sk4Y7/s1600/White+BelAir.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGxbryVSLNnWhdCx1GHum3hOp4M8USRyGm1usDI9mR7MQOv9ZQuZ4BIqyPESb0LOJ2xgymH7SLs8zMcD5Z8YaVs75lxV79A_OGBpFh0vtwnJ-2lHqm-il2AJkRh0zWKh4LSFx4cF0Sk4Y7/s400/White+BelAir.jpg" /></a></div><br />
with a few brand-new Audis and Beamers mixed into a general population of clapped-out Ladas (the Soviet people's car, with none of the charm or engineering of the VW Beetle).<br />
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So: here is a city of two million people, part of it looking like Dresden after the fire-bombing, part of it a nondescript commercial and government metropolis, and part of it heartbreakingly beautiful. I leave you with an image of how some Cubans lived before Fidel & Co. --<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAyiOfQL7QSON8Xi_DAXgWTO6jZMJf3zRRvi8AubDwhQZKzkvCY_H9Is6ZDlmERmDbrG9DodGU8yaAVnCg1GUcNF2-3QDlhlcWFv2CFWYFxOI792bh5Evd5W9SHnOBz-O76ARv8FV3Cj2R/s1600/mansion+interior.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="267" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAyiOfQL7QSON8Xi_DAXgWTO6jZMJf3zRRvi8AubDwhQZKzkvCY_H9Is6ZDlmERmDbrG9DodGU8yaAVnCg1GUcNF2-3QDlhlcWFv2CFWYFxOI792bh5Evd5W9SHnOBz-O76ARv8FV3Cj2R/s400/mansion+interior.jpg" /></a></div><br />
and a more accurate picture of a city that's in which even the most modest attempts at beautification have to be seen through chain-link fences:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyKJ1uO1x5AdJN6OA1Fw2FB0kdekpi8sg_BT26gdTmMy58TWCvFZaseN0Mbl_CKRslIXZWRVLkQfJE4M1iRuGctiKJ25YPKP1Mm_9daLgz8JbdFCZ7xXP2QHhgBBH_MY439ht4GuYcbNj4/s1600/WireFenceGarden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyKJ1uO1x5AdJN6OA1Fw2FB0kdekpi8sg_BT26gdTmMy58TWCvFZaseN0Mbl_CKRslIXZWRVLkQfJE4M1iRuGctiKJ25YPKP1Mm_9daLgz8JbdFCZ7xXP2QHhgBBH_MY439ht4GuYcbNj4/s400/WireFenceGarden.jpg" /></a></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-41079014817058360662011-10-27T14:11:00.007-04:002011-10-29T11:34:11.934-04:00A 2031 LOVE STORYBack in the year 2011, twenty years ago, four children lived on a magical island called Utila, which looked like a whale swimming in a blue-green sea. <br />
<br />
Maxim, who was four, <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7YMaQsJSgC0ST1qsISD3cLx_MeDNIlNZb32obf3pfK52YgfuQZ1FuZJ-645zWoT5ya05ZoyrLsstwUSDHQaS52Gh3nyClvNpsl2YyQPw6Gq9vbIwu-l9Jom_AQ4vjGwvkfxlFLb4qeDBI/s1600/Maxim.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="392" width="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7YMaQsJSgC0ST1qsISD3cLx_MeDNIlNZb32obf3pfK52YgfuQZ1FuZJ-645zWoT5ya05ZoyrLsstwUSDHQaS52Gh3nyClvNpsl2YyQPw6Gq9vbIwu-l9Jom_AQ4vjGwvkfxlFLb4qeDBI/s400/Maxim.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
and Pai, who was eight months old, <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijNnpWpqKrnlA6-sLOrFx-K-NccRI_HiucunK709zLs78vV_PyrPg1UK0RSUEEkFweU25TlCQ6Z1pDnz1qbKpMR-gRrIJRyH9dmVHwmMJlPzzsmmSbOot6-1yPYnXKd1jbGSUNoNV4o3Jg/s1600/Pai.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="391" width="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijNnpWpqKrnlA6-sLOrFx-K-NccRI_HiucunK709zLs78vV_PyrPg1UK0RSUEEkFweU25TlCQ6Z1pDnz1qbKpMR-gRrIJRyH9dmVHwmMJlPzzsmmSbOot6-1yPYnXKd1jbGSUNoNV4o3Jg/s400/Pai.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
were brother and sister.<br />
<br />
Bine, who was four years old, <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF17nx7rMH9jM3fv16yBITTmQY5stj7r6grCsAxnzd9M6zwvjEOQ-p7ksGskKxgI8eWZZ2TZyFcJjqj6mcUqGEKuFF6GAQKuRiT3zxsBwMkFwvMT-otwqpke0ZuKa2bTjwh-1xABtqTsg5/s1600/Bine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="265" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF17nx7rMH9jM3fv16yBITTmQY5stj7r6grCsAxnzd9M6zwvjEOQ-p7ksGskKxgI8eWZZ2TZyFcJjqj6mcUqGEKuFF6GAQKuRiT3zxsBwMkFwvMT-otwqpke0ZuKa2bTjwh-1xABtqTsg5/s400/Bine.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
and Angus, who was two,<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlnMiBoXDurRcPTRaRSGyAI5QPeLaucbVBXXstgylEk-zzH99pOyEKQEuNqyCx6qbVGR0nUxbMoVEfD6SXvJmEne4Mhlufgfi54Nx7aiU1ixRUj1xg3vXi2WiquPbsLw7kJP3YaV3OCUxC/s1600/Angus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="391" width="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlnMiBoXDurRcPTRaRSGyAI5QPeLaucbVBXXstgylEk-zzH99pOyEKQEuNqyCx6qbVGR0nUxbMoVEfD6SXvJmEne4Mhlufgfi54Nx7aiU1ixRUj1xg3vXi2WiquPbsLw7kJP3YaV3OCUxC/s400/Angus.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
were also brother and sister. <br />
<br />
All four of these children were friends and played together all the time, except that Pai, being so young, couldn’t talk to her friends, because she couldn’t talk at all. Still, she was part of the charmed circle, or rather rectangle, that these children formed. One thing they had in common was that each of them possessed stunning beauty, as you see. They were also very smart and very nice, which some people think is even more important than being beautiful.<br />
<br />
Maxim and Bine, who were the same age, had been friends their whole life. In fact, they loved each other, and it seemed natural to them that when they grew up, they would get married and have smart, nice, beautiful children of their own, although they didn’t yet know how to have children. <br />
<br />
But when they started going to school, another girl fell in love with Maxim.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhndLAwiJlkBtqN1NufZ3tMMezKYDT5V39eL3dBT-5hZT8DyOqgugO-BKZ8TsmZ4jfYFh_zACGO0LHLErnAIesbmwyrxqSG0tpaL5XURns09G6cZfsmsZya53dfqO1J-kF94jFi-7JSnb7O/s1600/Maximfirstkiss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="268" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhndLAwiJlkBtqN1NufZ3tMMezKYDT5V39eL3dBT-5hZT8DyOqgugO-BKZ8TsmZ4jfYFh_zACGO0LHLErnAIesbmwyrxqSG0tpaL5XURns09G6cZfsmsZya53dfqO1J-kF94jFi-7JSnb7O/s400/Maximfirstkiss.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
and that made Bine worried and sad. She worried that Maxim would fall out of love with her and in love with the other girl, and that they wouldn’t be able to get married after all. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBcGQk9NCyonmtmax9ek3UGS4c-mzFFjm2fifAUU2uEeV26QiyDPmwTrG3EHSc2V7SYiYBFjGiP6y0Ksj3t6e9_kSRlG7pxP0q0W_RNUYRv1xVJETPXLpmGI-jVLgFonkMf7s3Ej3B12P5/s1600/Bine+pouting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="380" width="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBcGQk9NCyonmtmax9ek3UGS4c-mzFFjm2fifAUU2uEeV26QiyDPmwTrG3EHSc2V7SYiYBFjGiP6y0Ksj3t6e9_kSRlG7pxP0q0W_RNUYRv1xVJETPXLpmGI-jVLgFonkMf7s3Ej3B12P5/s400/Bine+pouting.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
Maxim didn’t worry about things like that because he knew that he was a prince and Bine was a princess, and that someday he would build a house for her. Besides, he was a boy, and boys don’t worry about things; they just want to get through the day. <br />
<br />
But Bine need not have worried. Even though he and his parents and his sister moved away from the magical island to a country across the ocean, Maxim went on loving Bine. Over the years, many other girls fell in love with him because he had the longest eyelashes of any boy they knew. And many other boys fell in love with Bine’s blond hair and brown eyes. When other people fell in love with Maxim and Bine, they would sometimes forget each other for a little while, but then Bine would remember that it was Maxim she really loved, and Maxim would remember that it was Bine he really loved. And last year, in 2030, they got married on the beach of the magical island of Utila.<br />
<br />
But what of Angus and Pai? Pai moved away from the island with her parents and Maxim before she and Angus could become close friends, and she only remembered him from pictures of him that her parents showed her. But he remembered her very well, because he had fallen in love with her way back when they were very little.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFC-ybfVPgBvdfG0eytR-Zeej-NolL3xECZZgwMnr43PIARIgoExlz0doO_u29gCaQB8jt_Oe6rTWjjPQqVtL-Iqvzdu1XZGyRfEtP797PD9oD9168AguZuACjDaG5BB7FeF9l7lKFQKsf/s1600/Pai+and+Angus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="297" width="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFC-ybfVPgBvdfG0eytR-Zeej-NolL3xECZZgwMnr43PIARIgoExlz0doO_u29gCaQB8jt_Oe6rTWjjPQqVtL-Iqvzdu1XZGyRfEtP797PD9oD9168AguZuACjDaG5BB7FeF9l7lKFQKsf/s400/Pai+and+Angus.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
And when her whole family came back to the island for the wedding of Bine and Maxim, she looked at the handsome young man whom Angus had grown up to be, and fell in love with him. And Angus looked at the beautiful young woman whom Pai had grown up to be, and fell in love with her all over again. For the next year, even though Pai had gone back to America, where she was attending a school called the New York University, she and Angus texted and twittered and e-mailed and telepathed and mind-locked every day, so it was almost as if they were together, except that they couldn’t touch, or go swimming, or eat lunch with each other. But they knew each other so well that they wanted to spend their whole lives together, and one year to the day after Bine and Maxim had gotten married on the beach, Pai and Angus got married on the beach, at the same spot, near the house of Amanda and John, the mother and father of Bine and Angus. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcysb5VeZz5ScJCAwsdtM1MCa4THlhzdH0HyOXYEtr3XfuaWunBXZbbT_iyky0WDopgokXT748bwFpA3y9RODRCz3_Ez5rZUvyYUeXpw7D_tvYsaiOWfqRPQFA0UDWeiYVszZRMkpFoOT-/s1600/Amanda+and+John.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="247" width="386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcysb5VeZz5ScJCAwsdtM1MCa4THlhzdH0HyOXYEtr3XfuaWunBXZbbT_iyky0WDopgokXT748bwFpA3y9RODRCz3_Ez5rZUvyYUeXpw7D_tvYsaiOWfqRPQFA0UDWeiYVszZRMkpFoOT-/s400/Amanda+and+John.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
And Danielle and Benoit, the parents of Maxim and Pai, came to both of these weddings. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK5Ux0mkYlV1fxUZ8X9NHWfVFGSxVL8qFbBcfmuIFT3tuZ5yFmx7PE5QWjeH0FhR8GBoRNfi1l0UQO2GWKdPGp_jaHMEZ-aOUS3PSxoJ7OZN8YWpwDT7MuCquTxMorB6LzEwUgaYPe_pHe/s1600/Dan+and+Ben.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="315" width="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK5Ux0mkYlV1fxUZ8X9NHWfVFGSxVL8qFbBcfmuIFT3tuZ5yFmx7PE5QWjeH0FhR8GBoRNfi1l0UQO2GWKdPGp_jaHMEZ-aOUS3PSxoJ7OZN8YWpwDT7MuCquTxMorB6LzEwUgaYPe_pHe/s400/Dan+and+Ben.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
and so did the old, doddering grandparents of the four now-grown-up children, and everybody ate gooey cake and drank bubbly champagne. And they all lived happily ever after.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-72889202405765952772011-09-11T11:35:00.003-04:002012-01-31T21:50:29.050-05:00REVIEW OF "THE ART OF FIELDING," NEWSDAY, SEPT. 11, 2011<i></i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdkOdnmn88Zb9sAyDoYsIiiv5JpoirSfMf8-s6cuQ4MNd0z_FVcF8NIj4x9it0TxLRPelsW8NTjfdMDumDHghR0yXMwEp0dGeW31sqtE5au6XoTsfQRAmYOIt2qd4Dalv4M1rzJu_or1e7/s1600/Harbach+review+9%253A11%253A11" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="307" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdkOdnmn88Zb9sAyDoYsIiiv5JpoirSfMf8-s6cuQ4MNd0z_FVcF8NIj4x9it0TxLRPelsW8NTjfdMDumDHghR0yXMwEp0dGeW31sqtE5au6XoTsfQRAmYOIt2qd4Dalv4M1rzJu_or1e7/s400/Harbach+review+9%253A11%253A11" /></a></div><br />
Men in groups abound on the campus of Westish College, where Chad Harbach sets his brilliant, intensely readable first novel, <i>The Art of Fielding</i>. Its president, Guert Afflenlight, besides being a Melville scholar, is the author of a best-selling historical study of what is described as “the cult of male friendship in nineteenth-century America . . . boys’ clubs, whale boats, baseball teams.” The book’s own version of such a cult is the Westish Harpooners (fittingly, a baseball team named after men in whale boats), and the team’s interlocking friendships provide a context for Harbach’s main plot, the story of shortstop Henry Skrimshander’s obsessive struggle not only to become the finest infielder ever to play the game but to attain his “one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect” in all things. <br />
<br />
Henry’s particular friends include Schwartz, the team’s catcher and spiritual leader, who is sleeping with President Affenlight’s daughter, Pella; Henry’s gay mulatto roommate Owen, who is sleeping with Affenlight himself; and the rest of his teammates, a spectrum of colorful and surprisingly individualized young men. Hovering over Henry is the presiding spirit of one Aparicio (as in Luis) Rodriguez (as in A-Rod?), a former major-league shortstop whose Zen-like treatise, meta-titled <i>The Art of Fielding</i>, is his bible, as <i>Moby-Dick</i> is Affenlight’s. But the short, interwoven chapters devoted to these subsidiary stories all lead back to Henry’s quest for perfection. <br />
<br />
That quest comes abruptly to a halt when Henry (like several real-life ballplayers – Steve Blass, Steve Sax, Chuck Knoblauch) develops a malady that’s something like writer’s block in an outdoor setting: Henry almost kills Owen with a wild throw and is suddenly plunged into a state of Prufrockian paralysis every time the ball comes his way. His future on the line, the stands filled with major-league scouts, he can effortlessly field any ground ball but he can’t bring himself to fire the ball to the first base. “You couldn’t plan it out beforehand,” he thinks. “You just had to let it go and see what happened.” Instead of letting go of the baseball, he lets go of himself: he quits the team, toys with suicide, stops eating, starts smoking dope, becomes reclusive and listlessly allows Pella to seduce him, thus estranging himself from Schwartz, and eventually from Owen and Pella too.<br />
<br />
Harbach, whose knowledge of baseball is encyclopedic but never ponderous, resists the temptation to which many other baseball writers – Malamud, Roth, Kinsella -- have sucumbed: to write not a novel but a version of the core baseball myth, the game as a pastoral vision of America, in which the heroes and villains, the fictional stand-ins for the Babe and the Say-Hey Kid and Shoeless Joe, enact predestined roles. Instead, Harbach finds analogies in other literary genres: the epic, the picaresque, the coming-of-age story, the self-scrutinizing memoir. Along with Melville, whose footprints are everywhere, he invokes Homer, Eliot, Emerson and Whitman as guides, though never without ironically undercutting this technique; Affenlight reminds himself, and us, that dwelling on literature rather than life is a futile practice that turns us into jerks.<br />
<br />
<i>The Art of Fielding</i> posesses a texture and resonance that will remind some readers of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Safran Foer, but what could have been merely post-modern decoration genuinely enriches Harbach’s narrative. In the end, in an endearingly traditonal way, he subordinates the ironic commentaries and the mirroring influences to the tender, funny, poignant story of Henry’s travails and their unexpected resolution.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-85430911607501389382011-08-13T16:41:00.004-04:002011-08-13T16:50:10.486-04:00RULES OF THE ROAD<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe7_yrM1vQERAfottzkbIFA4smrZrfG0w3GobFMLFdSf3ZuntDjOCePfZUIweXWJWrIq0hOISF_1I9aBwkjaKBuwoCzXffrYGxo-750OHoRoTfnDv0dT8SJ8r7OQpCuK8HCbMKx9ZyFxCV/s1600/the+right+%2528left%2529+way.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="269" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe7_yrM1vQERAfottzkbIFA4smrZrfG0w3GobFMLFdSf3ZuntDjOCePfZUIweXWJWrIq0hOISF_1I9aBwkjaKBuwoCzXffrYGxo-750OHoRoTfnDv0dT8SJ8r7OQpCuK8HCbMKx9ZyFxCV/s400/the+right+%2528left%2529+way.jpg" /></a></div><br />
THE RIGHT (LEFT) SIDE<br />
<br />
<br />
It makes me crazy, as I drive or bike around the East End, to see so many walkers, runners, strollers, moms/nannies pushing baby carriages, sometimes two or three abreast, on the right side of narrow shoulderless tree-lined and therefore shadowy roads – Stony Hill Road in East Hampton comes to mind -- which is the wrong side of the road for them. Their backs are to the traffic. Often they’re on their cells; if not, they’re listening to their iPods, as I bear down on them. Often it’s twilight. Often they’re wearing dark clothing. Come on, people! Don’t you want at least a fighting chance at surviving an encounter with a motorist who is blinded by the sun or the darkness or fiddling with his own phone or music player? <br />
<br />
When I come up on a hapless pedestrian, though I know it stamps me instantly as a curmudgeon who is to be either ignored or given the finger, occasionally I can't resist the urge to slow down and try to reason with the 16-year-old girl or the portly middle-aged fellow inches from my right fender. “Safer to run facing traffic!” I’ll yell through my lowered passenger-side window. The other day when I did this, a woman pushing a stroller gave me a thoughtful look, said “Thanks,” and, I watched her cross to the left side in my rear-view mirror. I was so happy, I almost ran down a runner a hundred feet further on.<br />
<br />
<br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-81935962506912285152011-08-02T22:29:00.002-04:002011-08-02T22:33:38.787-04:00INEXORABILITY<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHW27spxerLVu_gM9KspUR2CtcDFRAJbKBplEt0qcf2rnxOaPDyeN0U2aqhYtcZCzzV8rvpUxneMhItbugcLVCdz-2lwf5PpVivR4nhVwrlaLqA1yplGL23VLQ1k5F0RABO53ww190_pmI/s1600/TENNISBALL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="327" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHW27spxerLVu_gM9KspUR2CtcDFRAJbKBplEt0qcf2rnxOaPDyeN0U2aqhYtcZCzzV8rvpUxneMhItbugcLVCdz-2lwf5PpVivR4nhVwrlaLqA1yplGL23VLQ1k5F0RABO53ww190_pmI/s400/TENNISBALL.jpg" /></a></div><br />
What's on my mind today is Fate. To be specific, the fate of a single, nondescript brown moth that landed its bedraggled self on the steaming tennis court whose bench a friend and I were sitting on between games. No sooner had the moth touched down than, as if in some infernal Rube Goldberg device, a tennis ball detached itself from a lesson being given two courts away and trundled, slowly but very straight, toward us and the moth. And as its momentum expired, it homed in on the fragile creature and with on its final turn, like some fuzzy juggernaut, ran over it. It was sheer coincidence, of course, but the vector was so precise that it felt like something else. What would the last thought of the moth, had it been sentient, have been? Something like, "Of all the gin joints in all the wor--"Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-12196528393800676192011-08-01T17:41:00.005-04:002011-08-01T17:46:57.005-04:00ROMEO AND JULIET IN AFGHANISTAN<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcgiXbHHS4NIDewUyQVZ4VEw7woKL60Tf-7YOubFxOSyLofKX42cmYFs3PQYRew4XK4HCWcNp4B6GfvLcrDbajKdNEA9NgIMZ3xGu64G50gP2wfNRmWaPRKM1YkiMca4IY9zkP2L8FQ7TA/s1600/Rafi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="269" width="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcgiXbHHS4NIDewUyQVZ4VEw7woKL60Tf-7YOubFxOSyLofKX42cmYFs3PQYRew4XK4HCWcNp4B6GfvLcrDbajKdNEA9NgIMZ3xGu64G50gP2wfNRmWaPRKM1YkiMca4IY9zkP2L8FQ7TA/s400/Rafi.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
The Times headline read “Afghans Rage at Young Lovers; A Father Says Kill Them Both.”<br />
<br />
The bare facts are these: two teenagers “of different ethnicities” –- Rafi (pictured above in his prison cell) is Tajik, Halima is Hazara (guaranteeing that a marriage between them would not have been arranged by their parents) -- tired of meeting in secret, obtained a car and eloped, heading for a courthouse where they intended to marry. They had driven only thirty feet when a group of men stopped them, pulled them into the road, and interrogated them: what right had they to appear in public together? “An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.”<br />
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Police arrived, and a riot ensued, in which one man was killed. The kids were spirited off to jail (undoubtdly the safest place for them), where they languish at present, awaiting trial. There is no indication that they had engaged in, or were engaged in, any activity more culpable or subversive than sitting companionably together in an automobile.<br />
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“Why can we not marry each other, or love each other?” the 17-year-old Halima asks, from her prison cell.<br />
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If this sounds familiar, perhaps its because the narrative’s outlines conform so perfectly to those of Romeo and Juliet. That is, depending on how it ends, we might well have cause to describe this story as a tragedy. Except that, in Shakespeare’s play, only two characters display anything like the fanaticism that seems to characterize the Afghan social milieu -- Juliet’s hot-headed Tybalt (who indeed thinks Romeo should be put to death, by himself) and Juliet’s father, in a single scene in which he loses his temper volcanically. The deaths of the young protagonists come about because of a series of miscalculations and fatal coincidences: Romeo kills himself because he believes Juliet dead when she is in fact living, and Juliet kills herself when the Friar, who is by her side in the family mausoleum, is spooked and runs away. The parents, at the plays end, mourn their children and erect statues in memory of them.<br />
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But in the present case, the girl’s uncle visited her in prison to inform her that she had shamed the family, and that they would kill her once she was released. Her father stated, “What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,”<br />
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What’s happening in Afghanistan seems to me less than tragic and worse than tragic. Tragedies are about heroic attempts to defeat overwhelming odds, in which the dignity and seriousness of the hero’s (or heroes’) downfall produces in us a complicated blend of admiration, sadness, and resignation. I don’t know about you, but all I can feel about this is rage and a sense that human culture and the bonds of family as we know them have somehow been suspended. There’s no dignity, no heroism, no sense of individual fate playing itself out. Two children are about to be crushed by an ideologically-driven machine, and there seems to be no way of stopping it. (Of course, the law is always a machine, blind and capable only of quantitative judgments; that’s why Cocteau titled is version of the Oedipus story La machine infernelle.) The genre that fits here is not tragedy but irony, whose point of view is such that it reduces human life to a meaningless shadow-play. Macbeth described human life as a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. The lives of Rafi and Halima, in their culture, apparently signify nothing. It’s not a tale told by an idiot; it’s a tale about idiots.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-56106329092214454942011-07-21T13:09:00.002-04:002011-07-21T13:12:45.536-04:00MINIMALIST THEATER<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigM2BM5kuYawyLoHRGxgjcM65xLLMwXH0ht_wnSG36rJ-Rh7b8-coD05W9tB2hWVEyF5FF4NzXAG4x4NpX9XaMdQYvw_KoivcNZWnYRawPbOodSr_tUom9GtLy5ZyKqT2CaQl90i4-GppE/s1600/AYLI+2003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="263" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigM2BM5kuYawyLoHRGxgjcM65xLLMwXH0ht_wnSG36rJ-Rh7b8-coD05W9tB2hWVEyF5FF4NzXAG4x4NpX9XaMdQYvw_KoivcNZWnYRawPbOodSr_tUom9GtLy5ZyKqT2CaQl90i4-GppE/s400/AYLI+2003.jpg" /></a></div> <i>As You Like It</i>, the Public Theater, 2003<br />
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My last blog expressed my admiration for the Green Theatre Collective and their approach to performing theater. The “Green” in their title is not someone’s name; it’s part of their mission to make theatrical production environmentally friendly, to use up as few unsustainable resources as they can. This means taking a “minimalist” approach to theater, the most radical feature of which is: no stage. When Peter Quince, the director of <i>Pyramis and Thisbe</i> the play nestled nestled inside <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i>) takes his band of rude mechanicals into the woods in search of a place to rehearse, he finds just the spot: “This green plot shall be our stage,” he tells them. There’s a metadramatic joke here, of course; the original audience had been watching the actors perform on a stage which they were forced to imagine as a wood; now, either they had to reimagine it as a stage, or simply stop imagining it altogether. The joke is lost, of course, if the stage has been transformed with fake grass and trees into a forest. GTC goes one step further: they perform the whole play on an actual green plot -- in the case of last week’s <i>As You Like It</i>, a lawn on a farm in Shelter Island.<br />
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They also employ no sets, no artificial light, vestigial costumes, and only seven actors for a play whose <i>Dramatis Personae</i> specifies 26 speaking parts. This may be, for them, largely a political and practical decision: they’re saving the earth and making do with what resources they can muster. I experience it more in esthetic terms. I’m a minimalist at heart; I hate lavishness. When I was 19, I saw <i>Aida</i> performed at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome with more pomp and circumstance than Kate and William’s wedding; there were live elephants on stage. I hated it. I was bored by the recent Tony-winning play <i>War Horse</i>, which as far as I was concerned was all chrome and no motor. <br />
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To make the overcoming of obstacles the dynamic of performing a play is not a new idea. Shakespeare would no doubt have welcomed kleig lights, rear projection, moveable sets and recorded sound effects, but he not only made do without them, he made the lack of them work for him. In the Prologue to <i>Henry V</i>, the Chorus disingenuously proclaims both the inadequacy of the project and its solution:<br />
<br />
But pardon, gentles all,<br />
The flat unraised spirits that have dared<br />
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth<br />
So great an object: can this cockpit hold<br />
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram<br />
Within this wooden O the very casques<br />
That did affright the air at Agincourt?<br />
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may<br />
Attest in little place a million;<br />
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,<br />
On your imaginary forces work.<br />
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Shakespeare and Company, in the Berkshires, specializes in small-cast Shakespeare; I saw them do <i>Julius Caesar</i> with five actors, and tour-de-force of doubling. And the Public Theater, in 2003, 21-year-old Bryce Dallas Howard and six even lesser-known actors did an amazing <i>As You Like It</i>, in which most of the problems were solved by tumbling and acrobatics: Ron Pisoni played both Orlando and his brother Oliver, and in a dialogue between them, switched characters by doing alternate back and forward somersaults, donning and doffing a hat in midair. <br />
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Movies, television and the modern theater can supply whatever is needed in the way of realism without taxing the audience's willing suspension of disbelief; in fact, that's the business that Pixar is in. The Dogma movement in film, which I find ridiculously rigid and tendentious in most respects, is at least an attempt to clear the clutter. But thank God for underfunded but undiscouraged theater companies that are proving, all over the world, that less is much more than more.<br />
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Tomorrow or the next day: minimalism in text.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-39615811195669579442011-07-19T12:34:00.001-04:002011-07-19T12:38:57.592-04:00SHAKESPEARE LIVES ON SHELTER ISLANDFirst there was Hamptons Shakespeare Festival, in Montauk, for whom I worked as dramaturg for the six best summers of my life -- <i>As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter's Tale, The Taming of the Shrew</i> -- and which David Brandenburg has been trying to revive, so far without success. Then, when Josh Gladstone became the director of the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, I was able to work on <i>Julius Caesar, Macbeth</i> and <i>Hamlet</i>. The two experiences were very different: one outdoors and the other indoors, one all romantic comedies and the other the darkest tragedies. But in two ways they were alike: they exhibited artistry in the highest degree, and they lost money. So, for the past five years, there's been no Shakespeare east of Shinnecock -- no Bard in Bridgehampton, no Avon in Amagansett, no William in Wainscott, no . . . well, you get the idea.<br />
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So I've pined, and languished, and made occasional summer forays into New York to keep my Shakespeare jones mamageable. But this past weekend, as if in some kind of time warp, Shakespeare came back to me. A company called the Green Theatre Collective, very young, enthusiastic and talented, has been roaming the Northeast, performing for a night or two in unlikely venues. What makes their work eco-theatrical is their tiny footprint: they don't build sets, they don't use artificial lighting (and so perform at 5 PM), they wear street clothes, and there are very few of them: on Sunday, we watched seven talented actors bring <i>As You Like It</i> to life at Sylvester Manor, essentially a working farm with some cultural ambitions on Shelter Island, with only an sail-less windmill as a backdrop. <br />
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Part of the process of paring down involved cutting the text and doubling most of the parts, which is part of the fun: the aristocratic Rosalind was equally convincing both as the male Ganymede and as the sluttish Audrey, and the fearsome Charles the Wrestler, at court, morphed into a gentle elderly peasant in the Forest. Sarah Hankins, the director, deserves full credit for making the limitations into benefits. She omitted Jaques's tedious and unnecessary farewell speech at the end; instead, the audience's peripheral vision caught the melancholy fellow ambling sadly away from the festivities on stage, a sad and moving moment.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0XDxCxy3ci8d0P2slj-f2zirGs1ELHgC6kGT9I0EyZb6krtwsBu2ohqSoXfryMkCM4S3019NZPMQUf16aivvtX152yKmO6rBQtUvdUkLU7f1q3acA224aKGXWazsss3EGBgqPAuOyz2GV/s1600/ayli+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0XDxCxy3ci8d0P2slj-f2zirGs1ELHgC6kGT9I0EyZb6krtwsBu2ohqSoXfryMkCM4S3019NZPMQUf16aivvtX152yKmO6rBQtUvdUkLU7f1q3acA224aKGXWazsss3EGBgqPAuOyz2GV/s400/ayli+2.jpg" /></a></div><br />
I talked to the company's executive director, Hal Fickett (who played Orlando; everyone wears several hats) about the logistics of the operation. In a way, it's very simple: like their itinerant sixteenth-century forbears, they roam the countryside, accepting what humble food and lodging they can promote, living by their wits and Shakespeare's. They're living proof that large ensembles, expensive machinery, and modern technology are almost beside the point. There's an argument in the last act of <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i> in which Theseus, defending the efforts of the amateurs who are presenting a play so tragic it's funny, so bad it's wonderful, by saying, about plays in general, "The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." His bride Hippolyta replies, "It must be your imagination then, and not theirs," and she's hit the bullseye: the more imaginative work the audience has to do, the more rewarding their experience will be. Lope de Vega, the great Spanish contemporary of Shakespeare's, described theater as merely "two boards and a passion," but as the Green Theatre Collective is proving, you don't even need boards if you have enough passion.<br />
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The company's website is http://www.greentheatrecollective.org/.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-41150619368992342992011-07-10T16:44:00.004-04:002011-07-14T23:31:31.204-04:00DOPPELGANGERS?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnpUJtaPI5tHGnHw7JE36Q2Et36hSykXFNS8QKR5WpM2budZrIQn9MG7jVEri7-m6w4x0dbrfwQom8MyY2gysiQLQeoxtJ3211GMhfezvfBGTc_0WQ6Q83yf9RQLTrrFvG7UwpS3ilMuZH/s1600/jeter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnpUJtaPI5tHGnHw7JE36Q2Et36hSykXFNS8QKR5WpM2budZrIQn9MG7jVEri7-m6w4x0dbrfwQom8MyY2gysiQLQeoxtJ3211GMhfezvfBGTc_0WQ6Q83yf9RQLTrrFvG7UwpS3ilMuZH/s400/jeter.jpg" /></a></div>He did it! Well, of course he did; it was only a matter of time. Some record-breaking performances are exciting because the question is whether the record will indeed be broken. Will someone on the PGA tour shoot a 58? Did Roger Maris hit 61 home runs, breaking Ruth’s season record, but in 8 more games? But it wasn’t a question of if Derek Jeter would get his 3000th hit but only when – and, given the season he’s been having, I dreaded the wait, the countdown. Remember when A-Rod was trying to hit that 600th home run, and kept not doing it? Get it over with, already.<br />
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As it turned out, in Jeter’s case, the wait was worth it. For a basically shy, closed-in, inarticulate person, judging from interviews, he has always had a flair for the dramatic: the “Flip Play” against Oakland in 2001, the catch he made against Boston diving into the stands and emerging with the ball and facial bruises are only two of the most famous examples. But five hits, the 3000th a shot into the left-field stands, the 3003rd a game-winning single! <br />
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But what makes him my favorite ballplayer, and the role model, the icon, the poster boy for the Great American Pastime, is not his operatic moments but what has come to be called his “work ethic”: no one in the game prepares more diligently and gives more of himself. In an age when great players like Manny Ramirez and Miguel Tejada (to name two egregious defenders) are known for loafing down to first after they’ve hit a ground ball to an infielder or are sure they’ve hit a home run, Jeter runs everything out. Maybe the infielder sees you busting down the line and makes a bad throw. Maybe your home run doesn’t quite make it and caroms off the wall and you end up at 2nd or even 3rd. When Jeter homered historically on July 9th, he put his head down and sprinted for first, and he didn’t slow to a jog until he’d rounded the bag, at which point the Rays’s first baseman literally took his hat off to him. <br />
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There was another, older ballplayer known for Jeter’s type of play, so much so that his nickname was “Charlie Hustle.” His real name was Pete Rose, but he might as well be called the Antichrist, if you judge him as organized baseball does. On and off the field, he was the antithesis of Jeter, a pugnacious wise guy who played rough (he broke a catcher’s shoulder in the All-Star Game by slamming into him at the plate) and bullied umpires; he was indicted for tax evasion; he was twice-divorced, the second time on uncontested grounds of adultery -- and he liked to gamble, which was his fatal weakness. After an amazing 22-year career as a player he became the manager of the Reds, the team he had played for. In 1989 he was accuseed of betting on them and permanently barred from baseball. That meant barred from the Hall of Fame, as well. Of course, betting against his team would have been a mortal sin, since, as manager, he could have easily rigged games by adjusting the line-up. But even betting that the Reds would win was unsavory – a sportswriter claimed that he never placed bets on nights when he named Mario Soto or Bill Gullickson as his starters.<br />
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Rose denied the charges until, in 2004, he wrote an autobiography in which he confessed to this sin. This only seemed to enrage the powers that be even more; he was accused of hypocrisy for waiting 15 years before coming clean. During those years, he lived a sqaulid life, even, at one point, sinking to professional wrestling.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRladipJ_tPVcWqOLcPd-K-5ZVfCmSnm87KitFxApeleo6grHkcm0hrgykkag1IzF1475pERbh5jk1cHnN_HBYJ0HuuizVXXvb_-JOMXcoeFjyYspOPoOWrdUIDlMLu7FKIvRivj9znTzu/s1600/pete+rose.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="349" width="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRladipJ_tPVcWqOLcPd-K-5ZVfCmSnm87KitFxApeleo6grHkcm0hrgykkag1IzF1475pERbh5jk1cHnN_HBYJ0HuuizVXXvb_-JOMXcoeFjyYspOPoOWrdUIDlMLu7FKIvRivj9znTzu/s400/pete+rose.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Jeter’s accomplishment is not to be scoffed at. It takes talent consistently displayed over many years to amass 3,000 base hits. Only 26 other players have done it, and none of them Yankees – not Gehrig, not Ruth, not Mantle. The 3,000 hit club is one of the most exclusive in sports. Jeter will be a first-ballot unanimous selection to the Hall of Fame when he retires, and he deserves to be, not least because of all those base knocks.<br />
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But what bothers me is that the moment after they put the bat on the ball, Derek Jeter and Charlie Hustle looked a lot alike. If Jeter’s accomplishments on the field deserve to be celebrated both as athletic feats and paradigms of ethical behavior, how are Rose’s great moments invalidated by his private failings? What happens if we judge them both simply as ballplayers? Know how many hits Pete Rose, the Other, the Unmentionable, the living repudiation of all that baseball would like itself to be, ended up with? Four thousand, two hundred and sixty-five.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-22395998565334956112011-07-09T12:01:00.002-04:002011-07-09T13:01:27.104-04:00THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRWSRcgVN154rVR8iXEQFtWmP99vC-GIdIeuO60ok3SNO2Mc1phhyb7iC1LMsotfHaqfTla6sO4i1SZChRRgeJPs11xZ1LNlCvs7zrF7nvqFXBzb3csqiCDidQRSA-xYKwk_dnRPbhVI1r/s1600/OVENblog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRWSRcgVN154rVR8iXEQFtWmP99vC-GIdIeuO60ok3SNO2Mc1phhyb7iC1LMsotfHaqfTla6sO4i1SZChRRgeJPs11xZ1LNlCvs7zrF7nvqFXBzb3csqiCDidQRSA-xYKwk_dnRPbhVI1r/s640/OVENblog.jpg" width="406" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSkBbeyNwa12SK10R_VLEv42hMimO4J52wTIZp7NaC54Fni2icsYYJZSd9WCHoxGoIdTg7Z9GXr3QVrCJoyrfhp9-3qgDhGAyDdjP3uMfd0apnBmf1n_wrLg4_RIx64i2pYKgo0ru0YZNW/s1600/Miata+readio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSkBbeyNwa12SK10R_VLEv42hMimO4J52wTIZp7NaC54Fni2icsYYJZSd9WCHoxGoIdTg7Z9GXr3QVrCJoyrfhp9-3qgDhGAyDdjP3uMfd0apnBmf1n_wrLg4_RIx64i2pYKgo0ru0YZNW/s640/Miata+readio.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
Age starts to catch up with almost everyone in their 40's, especially with their vision. You find yourself holding the menu farther and farther away, or squinting with one eye to make out blurry letters and figures, until you give in and buy a pair of reading glasses to correct your advancing far-sightedness.<br />
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Since the whole population is aging, you'd think the people who design our products would be cognizant of this problem, but they're not -- largely, I think, because engineering is a young person's game. This is certainly true in the software business; those 23-year-old whiz-bangs don't think like the rest of us or see like the rest of us, which is why digital cameras, for example, come loaded with sub-sub-menus that are incomprehensible to laymen. I'd include a picture of mine if I could figure out how to point the front of the camera at the back of the camera, but you get the idea. At least the viewfinder has a diopter adjustment, so I can focus on what I'm focusing on. My wife's camera, which is newer, does away with the viewfinder altogether (people prefer, or are believed to prefer, screens, which suck power out of the battery like a weasel sucking eggs), and to use it, I have to don, of course, my reading glasses.<br />
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But let's stick with the vision thing. Above are two control panels, the top one from our brand-new Hamilton Beach toaster oven, the bottom one the detachable face of our after-market Miata AM-FM-CD player. Note the size of the words and numbers on the toaster oven, and their placement on the dials. Not only do I have to put on my specs to operate them, I have to stoop down until I'm on the same level as the thing, because otherwise the bottom portion of the temperature range (top dial) and the length of desired cooking time (bottom dial) are hidden from view.<br />
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As to the sound system, I think it speaks for itself. There are no fewer than 24 controls on the thing, most of them rocker switches with teensy-weensy numbers on them for mode, preset stations, and a host of other functions. At 60 miles per hour, do you really want to be crouching to peer down at your radio, trying to remember where the volume control is or what you have to press to skip a track on a CD?<br />
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I could multiply these examples by a hundred; these happened to be handy. There are exceptions. Thank you, Kindle, for letting me choose the type size of whatever I'm reading. And thank you iPad for letting me enlarge any portion of the screen just by pinching it. But I wouldn't accept an iPhone if you gave me one, and my iPod isn't much better.<br />
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By the way: if you're having trouble making out the details on the pictures above, you're proving my case.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6938002403333130226.post-25457395133176601722011-07-02T12:00:00.001-04:002011-07-02T18:53:40.102-04:00JEFF NUNOKAWA AND THE FACEBOOK CONFESSIONAL<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0lejDrsLxkioutzJyqeGcCM-6N9jrf7vkxhXYQCdHh22dEnW-xVolBwOzE1svFR7ZOkNGZSxLqHfNJCdAhSfCw3NFjwPhhiofhctZ1xfqsKIeKFffZ9H8u-QQcfyuMdd-kTRBpB_rgkPD/s1600/JEFF+N.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0lejDrsLxkioutzJyqeGcCM-6N9jrf7vkxhXYQCdHh22dEnW-xVolBwOzE1svFR7ZOkNGZSxLqHfNJCdAhSfCw3NFjwPhhiofhctZ1xfqsKIeKFffZ9H8u-QQcfyuMdd-kTRBpB_rgkPD/s1600/JEFF+N.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">Jeff Nunokawa</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I’ve written two books in my life – my dissertation (which was carved up and published as four articles) in 1967, and<i> Shakespeare’s Dilemmas</i>, which was published in 1988 and got me promoted to full professor at Brooklyn College. Both were worthwhile projects; both were endless torture. I’m not suited to the format; I can’t hold the whole thing in my mind at one time. My late friend Richard Uviller was exasperated by my failure to write more books; he thought I had much to say, he admired my writing, he told me I was denying my destiny. Not so, I kept telling him. My destiny, in literary terms at least, takes a short-format form: I write articles.<br />
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He refused to accept that explanation: articles, even scholarly ones, are ephemera, he claimed – they exist only for a moment, and are then buried under an avalanche of more articles. Did Shakespeare write articles, he would ask?<br />
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Well, no, but Shakespeare wrote sonnets, and if I were a serious poet, so would I. I think the greatest poem written in English is <i>Paradise Lost</i>, which is ten thousand lines long, but of course the epic form is not for me. Fourteen lines seeems about right. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet that defended sonnets from the charge that they were too slight to matter; it begins,<br />
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Scorn not the sonnet: Critic, you have frown’d,<br />
Mindless of its just honours; with this key<br />
Shakespeare unlock’d his heart; the melody<br />
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound. . . .<br />
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The image of unlocking the heart points to the private, confessional nature of the sonnet; sonnets were sometimes writ small and folded into lockets, shown at the writer’s whim to whoever was deemed worthy. No less a personage than Elizabeth I indulged in this practice. I’m not a poet, though I write occasional verse, for birthday, wedding and anniversary toasts (see my birthday toast to Roger Sherman in the previous blog), but I can’t resist reprinting a poem I wrote while stuck in a subway tunnel one day years ago:<br />
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They have no need of poetry, <br />
Those who should be moving shortly in the sooty tubes<br />
Beneath the river that surfaces at Times Square.<br />
No need of Strand's or Clampitt’s airy overviews<br />
That fresco the walls of buses,<br />
Short-haul limos awash in the city’s changing lights.<br />
No, those with tunnel vision<br />
Have more pressing concerns <br />
Than thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.<br />
They need to know <br />
Where to get their torn earlobes stitched<br />
How to avoid AIDS and its evil twin SIDA<br />
And most of all<br />
What steps to take <br />
When they can’t move<br />
And the lights go out.<br />
<br />
But I’ve never followed up with more verse. If I did, it would probably be haiku; for me, as for Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the thrill of the short poem is the tension between getting something said despite the formal obstacles – in the latter case, 17 syllables, arranged in a 5-7-5 three-line pattern. Haiku can be sensuous and lyrical, or funny:<br />
<br />
Left the door open<br />
For the prophet Elijah –<br />
Now our cat is gone. (from Haiku for Jews)<br />
<br />
Technology is on my side, of course. Twitter mandates a limit of 140 words; most internet writing is stripped bare of grammar, punctuation and prolixity. (Not mine; I write in standard English and proofread every e-mail I send.) <br />
<br />
But I just read a Talk of the Town piece in the July 4th <i>New Yorker</i> that opened a door for me. There’s a professor at Princeton named Jeff Nunowaka who writes a Facebook note every day – the count now exceeds 3000. Typically they begin with a short citation from one of his favorite authors – George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins -- followed by scholarly “meditations – half literary-critical, half confessional.” <br />
<br />
Nunowaka has respectable conventional credentials; he’s published two books, one on Dickens and Eliot and the other on Wilde. But he now prefers the sociability of Facebook, and the fact that he can more easily connect with undergraduates there. When I read about his approach, I felt instantly empowered. I’ll never write another book or journal article, and the book and play reviews that have occupied me for the past few years do feel insubstantial; when I fritter an afternoon away on the golf course, I feel guilty. I’m very bad about contributing to this blog, because very few people read it (though it’s an endless loop: I don’t write because they don’t read, and they don’t read because I don’t write). But Facebook as a viable medium for actual writing! Nunowaka and I are already “friends”; I’m going to ask him if it’s all right to start contributing notes to my own page.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04254816077631786935noreply@blogger.com0