“I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat … Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.” —
- from “A letter to my students” (8/24/10) by Michael O’Hare, a public policy professor at Berkeley.
A friend and fellow Berkeley grad used Facebook to link to O’Hare’s letter. That’s how I saw it. The overall message makes me wish I could still vote in California. Things are bleak.
What moved me most, though, is O’Hare’s mourning over students being less and less equipped to “push back intellectually against me or against each other.”
SInce it was just a couple of days ago that I used this blog to push back intellectually against another Berkeley professor, I want to give O’Hare props for craving students who can push back intellectually. (I write “props” even less than I say it, but it’s the only word I can think of right now. Not much sleep last night. Besides, “give O’Hare props” beats “I’d like to salute O’Hare” and the other feeble alternatives my brain is offering.)
“Must Muslims unequivocally reject all forms of terrorism—especially those Muslims who wish to promote full Muslim participation in American society? Of course. But if the Catholic experience in the United States holds any lesson it is that becoming American also means asserting one’s constitutional rights, fully and forcefully, even if that assertion is occasionally taken to be insulting. The genius of the American experiment in religious liberty is precisely this long-term confidence that equal rights for all religious groups builds the loyalty every democratic society needs. Certainly American Catholics learned that lesson long ago.” —
John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby, Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy (via nybooks)
I have yet to read the full piece that this excerpt links to. The excerpt itself is sensible and worthwhile, so I’m reblogging it. It reminds me of a post I wrote in ‘08 for Huffington Post about the anti-Catholic smears Al Smith endured when he ran for president in the 1920s. I’d been ignorant of that.
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UPDATE:
Now that I’ve read what McGreevy and Appleby wrote, I want to call attention to another passage from their post: “For much of the nineteenth century Catholics in America were the unassimilated, sometimes violent ‘religious other.’ Often they did not speak English or attend public schools. Some of their religious women—nuns—wore distinctive clothing. Their religious practices and beliefs—from rosaries to transubstantiation—seemed to many Americans superstitious nonsense.”
They go on to acknowledge that “historical comparisons are bound to be inexact.” Even so, their rundown of the American Catholic experience is helpful. They do leave out Al Smith, though. So here, for whatever it might be worth, is a link to my aforementioned 10/19/08 HuffPost, “A Cell Phone Call During Mass (Remembering the Anti-Catholic Smears of the 1928 Election).” (I just re-read it. Parts of it make me cringe. Style stuff. Not substance. Let’s just say that it was written at a certain historical moment that is not now. I’m tempted to delete the link, but the stuff I quote from NYT stories in 1928 is worth knowing about. For example, one Alabama senator refused to vote for his fellow Democrat because Smith’s Catholicism supposedly would drive him to use the presidency to annex Mexico. Because Mexico has lots of Catholics, see? And then pretty soon the Protestants are outnumbered and America is ruined. “Smith!!!!” Crazy, bigoted stuff.)
“… prose in itself does not describe at all. The words rely very much on what the reader brings to them. In fact, it is the associative power of words rather than their “meaning” that makes prose work on its ultimate level. It seems to me that Hemingway’s achievement, whether calculated or instinctive, was to get his effects by making the reader do the work. This was not a completely original perception (as readers of HUCKLEBERRY FINN must know), but if one tries to write like Hemingway without understanding that, as I did 20 years ago, one ends up with merely a Hemingway gloss.” — Tom Stoppard’s “Reflections on Ernest Hemingway.”
So often, with interesting lighting, my phone’s camera won’t shoot even a facsimile of what I’d manage with the total control of my Nikon. This evening it did just what I wanted as I waited for the bus on Market Street in the glare of the 7 o’clock sun.
I have just made a mistake that, with better luck, might not have been a mistake at all. I searched the iTunes U collection for lectures about Hemingway, specifically about The Sun Also Rises, a novel that keeps calling me back for more this summer. The search led me to a lecture by Associate Professor John Bishop. Bishop devoted two of the 27 lectures in his English 45C course to The Sun Also Rises. Great. Bishop teaches at Berkeley. I graduated from Berkeley. Great.
But no.
I regret listening. I can only regret listening more if I take the time to explain all the reasons I regret listening.
Here are just three reasons:
1) Professor Bishop seems not to have noticed that the novel has scenes that are really, really funny and that there must have been days when Hemingway sat at his writing desk laughing out loud.
2) Professor Bishop quotes the novel out of context. Repeatedly. I only know this because I’ve started to memorize The Sun Also Rises. Not on purpose. Not with any premeditation. It’s just from repeated exposure to the prose. Very concentrated exposure. All of it during this summer. Really, all in the last few weeks.
3) I’ve eaten a hard-boiled egg. Many of them by now, at 37. So experience clashes hard with Professor Bishop’s statement that “You probably noticed hard-boiled eggs showing up throughout the novel. On page 73 and 126 in Spain, hard-boiled suggests everything looks hard on the outside but it’s very soft on the inside.” Symbolism is nifty, but I’m here to say that an egg is sometimes just an egg. Even so, I’m also here to say that a “hard-boiled” egg that is “very soft on the inside” needs to go back in the boiling water. It hasn’t been cooked enough. My dictionary says so. Its definition for “hard-boiled” begins with “1. (of an egg) boiled until the white and the yolk are solid.”
I’m not writing this because of eggs. I’m writing because of words like this in Professor Bishop’s lecture:
The characters who are admired keep their pain to themselves. We know that they’re in pain. And they include Bill Gorton, who on page 76 to 77 we learn has just come back from Vienna and he can’t remember what happened there, presumably because he’s been on a drinking binge. And he says that, “I make it a point never to be daunted. Whenever I feel daunted, I creep off like a cat and hide.” Now, that line’s repeated by Harry Stone on page 50. The stoic characters just go off, like Jake Barnes in his hotel room, crying to himself, and not telling everybody how miserable they are.
The least important problem with those words is that I can’t find a place where Gorton says that. Not that exactly. His speech is clipped. It’s clipped because he’s drunk. Drunk and ridiculous. So Gorton’s doing stuff like trying, on the way to a restaurant dinner, to talk Jake Barnes into buying a stuffed dog from a taxidermy shop. To me, that’s funny all by itself. Same with Jake’s disingenuous attempt to fend Gorton off with “We’ll get it on the way back.”
Damn near everything that follows is funny, too:
“All right. Have it your way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”
We went on.
“How’d you feel that way about dogs so sudden?”
“Always felt that way about dogs. Always been a great lover of stuffed animals.”
We stopped and had a drink.
“Certainly like to drink,” Bill said. “You ought to try it some times, Jake.”
“You’re about a hundred and forty-four ahead of me.”
“Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public.”
“Where were you drinking?”
“Stopped at the Crillon. George made me a couple of Jack Roses. George’s a great man. Know the secret of his success? Never been daunted.”
“You’ll be daunted after about three more pernods.”
“Not in public. If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself. I’m like a cat that way.”
“When did you see Harvey Stone?”
It goes on. But I’ll stop because that last line matters so much.
Harvey Stone matters to Professor Bishop. (Bishop calls him Harry Stone, but that’s nothing.) Harvey Stone matters to Professor Bishop because Stone “on page 50” repeats what Gorton says “on page 76 to 77.” I promise I’m not being pedantic by insisting that the guy speaking earlier on page 50 cannot repeat the words another guy speaks later on page 76. The whole point is that Gorton (page 76) is repeating Stone (page 50).
This matters because it’s this nice little joke that we’re in on with Jake Barnes. Like Barnes, we’re many, many steps ahead of the pitifully sloshed Gorton. Barnes knows he’s way ahead of Gorton. So when Gorton says “I’m like a cat that way,” Barnes doesn’t say “You know, I heard Harvey Stone say something like that a few days ago.” No, he’s so sure of the source of the “like a cat” talk that he answers straight away with “When did you see Harvey Stone?”
That makes me laugh. I’m not saying it needs to make you laugh. I’m not saying it needs to make Professor Bishop laugh. I’m just saying that Professor Bishop, minimally, needs to not ask his students to pretend that page 50 comes after page 76. I’d also urge him to rethink whether the buffoon going on about “road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs” should be put quite so cleanly into the category of the “characters who are admired” and whether there isn’t actually a certain vulnerability inherent in confiding to a friend that “If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself. I’m like a cat that way.”
Professor Bishop laments that “Bill Gorton and Harry (sic) Stone seem to me like versions in the novel of what Jake Barnes would look like if we weren’t privy to Jake Barnes’ thoughts and reflections.”
There — right there in that lament — is Hemingway’s triumph in The Sun Also Rises. With minimal fuss, minimal sharing of feelings, we see right through to the hurt at the center of Jake Barnes and the people around him. There’s real beauty in that.
For reasons I only partially understand, I love projects like this one.
Is it possible to reunite owners with their long lost photos?
The folks at Is This You? have been collecting photos found on the street and in photobooths for years
…and they’ve found almost half their owners!
“
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel competitive with novelists?
TALESE
Yes, I do. Journalism is not given much respect. Journalists themselves, particularly in my generation, didn’t take their jobs very seriously. I take it very seriously. This is a craft. This is an art form. I’m writing stories, just like fiction writers, only I use real names. If you chopped my books into single chapters, each one could be a stand-alone short story. You could take the chapter about McCandlish Phillips in The Kingdom and the Power, Garibaldi in Unto the Sons, and Harold Rubin in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and they would work together as a short-story collection.
Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can’t quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
” —- from “The Art of Nonfiction No. 2,” an interview with Gay Talese in last summer’s issue of The Paris Review
Thanks to my massive, short-lived, amicable dispute with Doreen Marchionni about creative nonfiction and New Journalism, I picked up Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties, a book which, at this moment on Amazon, can be purchased new in hardcover for $262.91 or used in hardcover for 86 cents. My copy is from the library.
It’s huge and I’ve read little of it. The first few pieces I started didn’t hook me. Then I noticed something by Gay Talese called “Looking For Hemingway.” These days I will taste at least a spoonful of any substance whose ingredients include the name Hemingway. So I started the Talese piece, which turns out to be about the earliest days of The Paris Review. I could just say that it’s great, but maybe it’s more useful to say that the piece left me primed to taste at least a spoonful of any substance whose ingredients include the name Talese. That’s how I got to the interview I quoted at the top of this post.
Meanwhile, someone at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, who may or may not have permission, posted Talese’s “Looking For Hemingway” here. Whether via that link, your local library, an 86-cent book, or a $262.91 book you should find a way read it.
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UPDATE: I kept looking and found a way for anyone who’s interested to get “Looking For Hemingway” while putting some money in Mr. Talese’s pocket: 2009’s The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits & Encounters.
I dream up weird stuff, but so often the world is weirder.
“Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it has always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. But there was also a Command that didn’t feel this, that rode us into attrition traps on the back of fictional kill ratios, and an Administration that believed the Command, a cross-fertilization of ignorance, and a press whose tradition of objectivity and fairness (not to mention self-interest) saw that all of it got space. It was inevitable that once the media took the diversions seriously enough to report them, they also legitimized them. The spokesmen spoke in words that had no currency left as words, sentences with no hope of meaning in a sane world, and if much of it was sharply queried by the press, all of it got quoted. The press got all the facts (more or less), it got too many of them. But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all about. The most repulsive, transparent gropes for sanctity in the midst of the killing received serious treatment in the papers and on the air. The jargon of Progress got blown into your head like bullets, and by the time you waded through all the Washington stories and all the Saigon stories, all the Other War stories and the corruption stories and the stories about brisk new gains in ARVN effectiveness, the suffering was somehow unimpressive. And after enough years of that, so many that it seemed to have been going on forever, you got to a point where you could sit there in the evening and listen to the man say that American casualties for the week had reached a six-week low, only eighty GI’s had died in combat, and you’d feel like you’d just gotten a bargain.” —
- from Michael Herr’s Dispatches.
I started Dispatches yesterday and am close to finished now. With virtually every page, I’m realizing more and more why this book is considered a classic. Here’s a measure of how effective Herr’s reporting and writing are: My very first thought upon waking this morning was an overwhelming sense of gut-level thanks that I get to rest in comfort, that I get to sleep without fear that I will wake to the sound of the bullet, the mortar, the grenade that will end my life.
Herr tells of learning from two Marines that another Marine from earlier in the book had died in combat. Herr couldn’t remember the guy’s name. Neither could the two Marines. Neither could I. Maybe that just means I’m inattentive. But I don’t think so. I think, rather, that a masterful storyteller put just enough space between the Marine’s final living appearance and the news of his death. This left me, as the reader, as something more than a spectator to the forgetting of this young man’s name. The effect is all the more haunting and heartbreaking because Herr never acknowledges what he’s doing or preaches about the shame of it all.
The quote above is haunting in the more macro sense that we must always worry that we are repeating old mistakes, that we are part of some new “cross-fertilization of ignorance.”