Bill Stott, 71 and keeping his "residual" (i.e., after prostatectomy) prostate cancer at bay,

Hal Sheets dies: former student and great friend

2010-11-18T18:19:00.010-03:00

Dear University of Texas at Austin American Studies community member,

Hal Sheets, who received his Ph.D. from our graduate program back when it was still called the American Civilization Program and who was a dear friend to all who knew him, died on October 27. His wife, Ladd Frisby Sheets, writes of his death, then five of his colleagues remember him.

Dear Friends-

I am sorry to have to be bringing you this news via email rather than a personal call. Hal passed away peacefully in his sleep at home early today with family around him. He had been battling cancer for several years. His recent decline was much more rapid than we expected, and that is a blessing for him. The one fear he had was that he would linger in some depleted state.

We are dealing with this loss as best we can, and I am very fortunate to have a wonderfully supportive family and friends.

Love to you all,

Ladd

Bill Stott:

Hal and I began at UT the same fall, 1971, he as a graduate student, I as an assistant instructor who hadn't finished his dissertation. The next fall I taught an introduction to American civilization course in which Hal, Suzanne Buckley, and Mark Smith were class discussion leaders. Preparing the course Hal and I bonded big time. He taught me how to make slides for classroom use; as important, he got me interested in architecture, which continued to be an interest and may be reflected in my son having become an architect. We confided in each other about our fears and concerns about the program and his progress in it. I felt him then and after to be the brother or close male cousin I never had. Though I didn't say it then --as I should have and would (and do!) now--I loved him and hope he felt much the same toward me.

Later, I was flattered but felt it entirely appropriate that I got to write the most important letter I ever wrote: to the Edna Gladney Center, accompanying the successful adoption application Ladd and he made. When they adopted a second child, I got to write a follow-up letter praising them both and meaning every word of it.

Not having known of Hal's illness, I'll never believe him gone; he'll always be in my heart, as positive, energetic, manly, ruminative, and suddenly funny as I knew him to be. His immense kindness and concern are visible in the photo of him below.

Suzanne Buckley:

Hal and I shared an office when we were graduate students, and my day often started with a big smile from the teddy bear of a man I came to know as Hal. He was generous, warm-hearted, fair, and humble, and often very funny. He had integrity and a deep commitment to his family, which I respected, and a great interest in ideas in those days of Goetzomania. When it came time for PhD orals, Hal and Steve Pyne and I studied together. Because architecture was one of my fields, I inhaled everything I could from Hal's vast store of knowledge, and from Steve, well, I just held my breath and tried to keep up! Together we were the first "SOS" class. We had tee-shirts made--I remember mine said "Art for art's sake," we were so idealistic then!--and passed on shirts to the orals candidates after us. Those were beautiful days, and Hal's friendship is something I will always treasure.

Jeff Meikle:

I'm saddened to learn only today of Hal's death. I was out of the country and not checking email. He was a great person. Bill's story of the copy stand reminds me that Hal inadvertently taught dozens of later students how to use it--by teaching me.

Emily Cutrer:

Hal was among a group of much-admired "elder" graduate students when I first joined the American Studies program, first as an undergraduate and then a graduate student myself in the early 70s. Our "younger" generation looked up to him as someone with deep knowledge about American culture, a commitment to living a scholar's life, and the savvy to make his way through a challenging--and often mysterious--program. While I'm saddened by news of his loss, I'm also gratified to learn from colleagues about the good life that he led.

Mark Smith:

The first time I encountered Hal was in the initial class of a graduate seminar at the University of Texas in 1971. Scarily enough, it was with Bill Goetzmann, who after a very few pleasantries asked us first years why we were in grad school and what we had to offer. Luckily for us, Suzanne was first and she spoke of dance, modernism, and creativity and, if memory recalls, threw in a couple of dance movements as a bonus. Bill was overjoyed. I felt sorry for the next guy, who turned out to be Hal, who, in turn, launched a ten-minute brilliant overview of the historic, cultural, and even aesthetic history of American architecture. (I could be wrong, though Hal never said anything in ten minutes or less.) Bill Goetzmann stared at him and said, “Vincent Scully. Yale.” Hal grinned and stared back.

And at that moment two questions entered my mind as I crouched in a far corner: “What the hell am I going to say?” (Those who know me know that “hell” was not the operative word.) And ”How the hell am I going to pick up my game so I can hang with these people and stay in graduate school?” And, although our meetings were infrequent after grad school, Hal always reminded me of those questions every time he opened his mouth. Except, of course, those many times when he launched his booming and infectious laugh and you happily joined in.

Go in peace, my friend.

Harold Frank Sheets III

Harold Frank Sheets III, died peacefully with family around him on Wednesday, October 27, 2010, age 67. He is survived by his wife, Ladd Frisby Sheets, and his children, Abigail Sheets Gibson and Jacob Austin Sheets. He is also survived by his sister, Ferne Elizabeth Sheets-Archibald; his brother, George Archibald Sheets; and his grandson, David Philip Gibson. In addition he is survived by his nephews: Ben Sheets and Nicholas (Pelu) Sheets; and niece, Penny Sheets.

Dr. Hal Sheets was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and lived in Argentina and Venezuela until his family moved back to the States in 1957. He graduated from The Gunnery in 1961 and earned a B.A. in Architecture from Yale University in 1965, and a Master's and PhD. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. He taught U.S. History and Spanish in several private schools over the years ending up his career at Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, where he taught U.S. History and was chair of the History Department for 12 years. Writing novels and building ship models were his favorite ways to spend time when not involved with his students and classes. In addition, there were many home remodeling projects over the years that he took great pride in.

The family wishes to express deep appreciation to Isidore Newman School's staff and students for their continued support over the last few years. Thanks also go to St. Catherine's Hospice for their care and concern for our every need. In lieu of flowers, donations to the Tulane Cancer Center with a designation for "Sartor-Cancer Research" on the memo line: Dr. Oliver Sartor, 1430 Tulane Avenue, SL-78, New Orleans, LA 70112. Arrangements are being handled by LAKE LAWN METAIRIE FUNERAL HOME. To view and sign the guestbook go to www.lakelawnmetairie.com

Published in The Times-Picayune on October 31, 2010

The writer Mark Dow pays eloquent tribute to Hal as a teacher at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/span-a-remembrance/.

On the Rescue of the 33 Chilean Miners

2010-10-23T21:49:00.000-03:00

The hope of Lazarus
now bedazzles us.

The Death of My UT Austin Mentor, Bill Goetzmann, Is Something I Won't Get Over.

2010-09-23T18:19:00.005-04:00

I was Bill's assistant director in American Studies from 1971 till 1980, hired because it was thought that having been a propagandizing diplomat in Third World nations, I would be able to help American Studies – which was to say (at that time) help Bill – make peace with the English department. He and I meshed as a team because, though he was hundreds of times better read, more imaginative, and more energetic than I, and loyal and funny to boot, he also had complexities of character that reminded me of my father. I had spent 30 years learning how to get along with my father and had a head start working with Bill.

In the fall of 1971, among the dozens of ideas Bill put forward was one I thought I could carry out: making a pamphlet about our graduate program. I wrote it and had UT designer Tom Johnson prepare a mock-up. Bill glanced at it and said, "It's so dull!" And he transformed the pamphlet into the first of our once-notorious grad posters, with a huge photo of well-upholstered matrons dressed in black in a Model T with a pennant calling for "Votes for Women." Down at the bottom of the poster Bill had us add an armadillo, a salute to the Armadillo World Headquarters, then at apogee.

From Bill I learned the question every inquirer needs to answer (though most don't), "So what?" Or, put more expansively: "What do we know when we know that?" Or, again briefly: "Why does that matter?" From him I learned most of what I know about academic politics and the wisdom of knowing when to stop playing them and start, as Bill would say, "banging on your cereal bowl."

Bill's fear always was that the state was going to turn UT into a monumental junior college. "They don't know what education is," he'd often say about people running the university (The University, as it styles itself). He stood on the bridge to keep the philistines at bay and taught an uncountable number of students who now carry on his crusade.

The crusade is conservative, as was Bill – in most matters outspokenly. In his last years he despaired about America. And yet, just to show his complexity, his 2009 book, Beyond the Revolution, has as its central generative intellectual the despised revolutionary “atheist” Tom Paine, whom Bill salutes for embodying just what is so needed now: “the spirit of revival, constant regeneration, and future-oriented habits of pragmatic thinking.” America has gotten through rough times before, and it is in our character, the scholar William H. Goetzmann tells us, to do it always again.

The photo of Bill accompanying the Austin American-Statesman obituary notice below shows him at his most affable. Likely as not, he was then cooking up one of his sudden, terrifying questions. "What painter would agree with Faulkner's definition of culture?" say. We who were fortunate enough to know him well will never be free of his way of thinking.

William M. Stott, Professor Emeritus, American Studies and English 8 September 2010

William H. Goetzmann, 1964 Founder of American Studies at UT, Dies

Historian William H. Goetzmann, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 and emeritus professor of American Studies and History at the University of Texas, died on September 7, 2010. His book Exploration and Empire, a study of the 19th century scientific exploration of the American West, won both the Pulitzer and Parkman prizes in history in 1967. His book on the art of the American West, The West of the Imagination, co-authored with son William N. Goetzmann, was the subject of a PBS television series by the same name in 1985. His most recent work, Beyond the Revolution (2009), traced the development of post-Revolutionary American thought. His writings and scholarly interests ranged widely over his career, from ribald historical memoirs (My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue: Sam Chamberlain, 1993) to definitive contributions in American intellectual history (The American Hegelians, 1973). A consistent theme of his work was the variety and vitality of the American experience.

Bill Goetzmann taught History and American Studies for fifty years, first at Yale University and then at the University of Texas. As the chairman of the University of Texas History department in 1968-9 and as director of the American Studies Program from 1964 to 1980, he played a key role in the racial integration of the university's faculty and in the development of multicultural studies in the humanities. In 1968, he recruited the College of Arts and Sciences' first African-American faculty members, Dr. Henry Bullock and Dr. George Washington, and instituted the university's first women's studies course, "The Intellectual Woman in America," taught by Prof. Susan Conrad. In 1969, he instituted a course in Hispanic-American studies taught by Prof. Raymund Paredes, now Commissioner of Higher Education in the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. He continued his vocal advocacy for minority recruiting until shortly before his retirement from the university. As an educator, Bill Goetzmann chaired more than 60 doctoral committees and taught 83 different undergraduate and graduate courses over the course of his career. He held the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Professorship in History and American Studies at the University of Texas until his retirement 2005.

The son of Viola and Harry Goetzmann, Bill Goetzmann was born in Washington, D.C., in 1930 and passed away in his home in Austin, Texas. An only child, he is survived by his wife Mewes Goetzmann, three children: William N. Goetzmann, professor of finance at Yale School of Management; Anne Goetzmann Kelley, co-executive director and founder of the Austin School of Film; and Stephen R. Goetzmann, an attorney in Dallas; and five grandchildren, Brooks Kelley, Jr., of Austin, Texas, Zoe Goetzmann of New Haven, and Griffin Goetzmann, Sophie Goetzmann, and Wells Goetzmann of Dallas.

The Austin American-Statesman 8 September 2010

In summer 2011, Bill's widow, Mewes, and their children, Will, Anne, and Stephen added this monument to his grave in New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery.

Discussing Documentary; Visiting Elqui*

2009-10-28T19:12:00.013-03:00

My dears,

Two internet postings you may want to visit.

First, the filmmaker Errol Morris and I discuss Walker Evans' documentary ethics:

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-5/

Second, Irene, her daughter, Nettie, and I visit Elqui Valley with Brooke Gregory, with whom Irene and I visited it in 2007 (see http://billstott.blogspot.com/search/label/Elqui%20Valley*), and Angela Harnish, a U.S. "Elf" (English-language fellow) assigned to teach preparing English-teachers here in Santiago. Brooke works for the Tololo telescope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Tololo_Inter-American_Observatory), and among Angela's wonderful pictures you'll see some of the installation and of the memorable international lunch we had with Tololo astronomers--would that we had a recording of it!

http://picasaweb.google.com/harnish614/20091026PiscoElqui?authkey=Gv1sRgCLqex7bA-fycDw&feat=email#

Donald Barthelme and the Death of Fiction

2009-07-16T18:30:00.009-04:00

The attached article changed my life. I wrote it in April-May 1969 as the final paper in a graduate course on recent American literature taught by Benjamin DeMott at Yale. DeMott had mentioned Barthelme among a group a writers we weren't reading in the course but who deserved our attention. DeMott gave me an A- on the paper, adding in a note to the other teachers in American Studies that the minus was entirely deserved.

In December 1970, when the American Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin recruited me and asked for a talk, I offered them this paper, knowing it was in much better shape than the dissertation I'd begun on documentary in the 1930s. Bill Goetzmann, the Director of American Studies, accepted a talk on Barthelme, a Texas writer, because he judged it would draw a bigger audience. "You said it would take an hour," he told me after the talk. "I thought that was too long. But it was too short!" The paper got me the job I enjoyed for the rest of my teaching career.

In the summer of 1972 or 1973, I gave a copy of the article to my friend Jane Kramer, Barthelme's fellow New Yorker writer, and I assume she did as she said she would and passed it on to him. His fiction after this time largely drops the theme I spotlight here--and is, I find, less interesting than the fiction I discuss.

In 1975 I revised the article slightly, and my friend Jack Salzman put it in the first issue of his annual magazine, Prospects (I:369-86). In 1992, Richard F. Patteson, put the article, probably again minimally revised, in his Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme (G.K. Hall & Co. pp. 70-84). It is the Prospects version I reprint here:

https://webspace.utexas.edu/xythoswfs/webui/_xy-31712637_docstore1-t_AJA4o1Dt

The Making of OLYMPIA: My Life as a Hotdog

2009-04-09T21:11:00.011-04:00

Article from The Austin Chronicle, November 12, 1998.

I got involved with Olympia for two reasons: love and money. I loved the filmmakers, I loved the film's characters, and I loved the idea of being involved in making a movie. And -- my children grown, my mid-life dental work done -- I had money to play with.

Olympia's writer-director, Robert Byington, had been a graduate student of mine in American Studies at the University of Texas. I was surprised when one day in 1992 he told me he'd grown tired of analyzing art and was going to make some. "I'm going to make a movie," he said.

"Just like that?" I thought. But I smiled and nodded in empty-headed encouragement.

When Bob did make a film, Shameless (1994), I wasn't much involved, though he cast me as a professor lecturing about chaos, grief, and urbanism. I liked Shameless; it received an NEA grant and got excellent reviews here (The Los Angeles Times liked the film's "highly personal, distinctive and unwavering vision") and in Europe, where it won the Audience's Favorite Film Prize at the Mannheim International Film Festival.

Two years later, Bob sent me an uproarious short story ("Javelkemeiche!"), which would evolve into Olympia's script...slowly. Bob didn't have an ending for the film that he or anyone else liked. At his invitation I tried doctoring the script. He had given me bold and quirky characters to work with, and he liked some of my suggestions, though he thought the end of my ending too romanticized.

"But it's a romantic comedy," I protested. "But of the Nineties," Bob said. "Which means not necessarily romantic. And not necessarily funny." (The Variety reviewer Len Klady later commended Olympia's ambiguous tone when he wrote of the film's combining "goofball situations and serious themes to disarming effect.")

Once a few of my words were in the script, I was hooked. I wound up not only helping write Olympia, but investing in it, and playing a small role -- not a professor this time, but a crazed thug in a hotdog costume.

In the spring of 1996, a drove of people worked in my house-turned-production office, laying plans, interviewing and hiring, soliciting money, locations, props, food. It was a chaotic time, filled with worry, disputes, and soul-searching about our financial condition and the script.

In contrast, the filming itself, that May, was placid and professional. Our lead actors came from New York, L.A., and Houston. Half the crew of 25 were Austin professionals; half were volunteers, mainly from UT's film program, learning by doing. Nearly everyone but me was under 35 and worked 12-14 hour days, often in heat over 100 degrees, with never a murmur of complaint.

There were no fist fights, no shouting arguments, no affairs that hadn't already been ongoing, no broken friendships, and only two accidents. For reasons unnecessary to explain, the second assistant director cut his leg with a hatchet. I drove him to Brackenridge Emergency, deeply relieved that the injury was minor and that we had accident insurance. Our production truck also drove into a tree and ripped its top -- minor damage, also insured.

Bob and I transferred the dailies to video in Dallas. Then he took the tapes to Los Angeles for the editing. This took 14 months and included the painstakingly tedious process by which the format we shot in, Super-16, is "blown up" to 35mm. We had a Dolby SR sound mix donated, and premiered the film last January as the Closing Night Film at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. We also showed Olympia as part of the Opening Night festivities at this year's SXSW Film Festival and at the Taos Talking Pictures Festival. Last month, we won the Grand Jury Award at the Long Island Film Festival. In late November we take the film to London for its European premiere. Friday it opens at the Dobie Theatre in Austin.

Author Bill Stott, in his Olympia cameo as a giant hotdog.

My Olympia involvement taught this old dog new tricks, and I here offer nine suggestions for those who consider either producing or investing in an independent film:

1) Work with a writer-director who has a good script with strong characters. Said writer-director must (a) have made at least one earlier film, short or long, that you like and that shows the ability to tell a story and put lifelike people on the screen; (b) be not only talented but frugal and honest; and (c) know production crew people who do high-quality work at reasonable rates.

2) Never forget: a sad film has to be really terrific to attract an audience. As Oscar Wilde said, life isn't happy; fiction is -- that's how we know it's fiction. My chief struggle was to make Olympia's end as happy as I could.

3) Hire professional actors who have done work your writer-director and you love. In general, professional actors do much better work than amateurs, and most of them are so grateful to work that they work cheaply. The Screen Actors Guild has an enlightened contract that permits low-budget films to hire professional actors for little up-front money. Our lead actors, Jason Andrews (Rhythm Thief), Damian Young (Amateur), and Carmen Nogales (Shameless) give Olympia a calm authority it wouldn't have had had we hired friends and acquaintances to play the roles.

4) Hire a professional director of photography whose work you and the writer-director like. Our DP, Paul Kloss, won praise for his work as DP and relentless cameraman on Hollywood Madam: The Heidi Fleiss Story. Also, get the best sound recordist you can; we got Mac Melson, the best in Texas. Many independent films go cheap on the sound. A mistake! Audiences will accept odd, jumpy images, but not bad sound.

5) Don't shoot outdoors at night unless you want a dark, neo-documentary look. An independent film can't afford the lights necessary to make outdoor night scenes look anything other than menacing.

6) Don't have the writer-director edit his or her own film. Make him or her work with an editor whose work the writer-director likes, and who, again, is experienced. Our editor, Garret Savage, had edited commercials and film trailers and was ready to move up to a feature. He worked tirelessly and selflessly to make Olympia the best it could be.

7) Don't invest in a movie thinking you will make money. Hope you will, and work toward that end. But be financially and psychologically prepared to accept a loss. When I told the film writer-producer-director Bill Wittliff I was going to put money in a movie, he said, "Bill, why don't you just buy a convertible and throw the rest of the money out the window?"

8) Get the community involved in the filmmaking. Everyone wants to be in a movie. Restaurants and local businesses -- often not the national chains -- will give you help if you thank them in the credits.

9) Shoot in color. There's no longer a market for black-and-white films that are less than staggeringly brilliant or by well-established directors.

Film is a social medium; unlike the novel, it is not one person's creation. A culture where the young aspire to make movies is, I would argue, healthier than one that encourages the fabrication of private fictions. Such fictions, as the careers of Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck suggest, often lead to madness and alcoholism.

I'll always wish I had gotten into films 35 years earlier than I did.

Bill Stott has taught American Studies and English at UT since 1971, and is a major investor in Olympia.

Olympia opens on Friday, Nov. 13 at the Dobie Theatre.

Selecting Documentary Pictures: Art Versus Sociology

2009-02-25T17:33:00.005-03:00

[I wrote this essay to accompany a 1985 exhibit of the work of Texas photographers set to travel to Mexico. The exhibit was organized by my photographer-photohistorian friends Rick Williams, Roy Flukinger, and J.B. Colson.]

I often think that what is most interesting about a picture, a book, an essay, a movie, a song—often more interesting than the thing itself—is the story behind its making. Consider this exhibition. Don’t you wonder what drove this or that photographer to the subject he or she treats? And don’t you wonder how his or her pictures got chosen?

•

I think I know what is driving me to the subject I am going to write about here. I am writing this in the Dallas – Fort Worth Airport on my way to Poland, where I will talk about American culture with university students of English. I am acutely aware that what I say to them, and how I behave, may color their view of our country, which they know through the gaudy violence of our movies and news, and the gaudy nonsense of our celebrities. I would like to help them understand a bit of our true complexity. At the same time I’d like them to like us.

•

I trust it doesn’t violate an important confidence to say that the other members of Rick Williams’ advisory committee and I saw the pictures in this exhibit before Rick made his final choice. Rick and Roy Flukinger had done a rough cut, and they wanted our opinion of what they had. The exhibit then was different from the exhibit you see now: a few photos have been added and a slightly larger number have been dropped.

As the committee discussed the pictures, we found ourselves talking about what I’m sure the pictures will make you talk about: truth and beauty. We love the beauty (by which we sometimes meant ugliness, strength, and artistic and visual interest, as well as handsomeness), but we talked much more about truth. It was easier to talk about, of course. More important, because this exhibit will be seen by people beyond the U.S. border, it seemed to use more important.

“Is this picture true?” we kept asking, though in words less bald. Was it a true image of what Texas life, American life, was like? Why were there—for instance—so many strong-looking men and so few strong-looking women? We actually counted the strong- and weak-looking members of each sex. The totals dismayed us, being ourselves women or having daughters.

“What will people who don’t know us think?” This was the crucial question, which we asked in oblique ways. Would this picture, for example, in the context of the others—especially of that picture, say—mislead a foreign audience?

We wanted to protect strangers from a small truth (half truth?) in the interest of what we felt to be larger (i.e., more statistically and morally significant) truths.

•

“But this is cheating!” one of us should have said, but didn’t. “We’re using general, numerical Truth, with a capital T, to hide a particular, unpleasant truth. We’re like parents who come upon somebody crippled or drunk or demented on the street when we’re walking with little Jimmy or Jennifer. What do we do? We try to turn the child’s attention from the afflicted person because we don’t want Jennifer or Jimmy to think life is like that.”

•

Though none of the committee pointed out how close we were to cheating, we all must have felt it, because we finally did something about it. We explicitly adopted a standard for inclusion that I’m sure is used in many cases where truth and beauty conflict but that I’ve never seen spelled out. If a picture was beautiful enough, we paid no attention to how true it was. On the other hand, if a picture showed a truth we felt we had to have for whatever reason (statistical, ethnic, sexual, vocational, religious, etc.), then we used it even though it wasn’t beautiful enough. “The photographer wanted to make a better picture,” we told ourselves. “Unfortunately, reality didn’t cooperate.” Thus, to the best of our ability, art and sociology were both allowed to make their strongest claims.

Curtis' Aberrant Criticism

2009-01-22T13:01:00.012-03:00

[Review of Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered by James Curtis, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989, 139 pp. $29.95, as published in The Journal of American History, December 1990]

This book reinvents the wheel--badly.

James Curtis argues that the pictures by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) were often propaganda made by photographers who wanted their images to carry certain messages and who "manipulated" what they photographed to make their points stronger. This has been a truism of photocriticism for a long while, and few readers will accept Curtis's claim to have invented "a new methodology for visual analysis."

Some readers may be surprised, as I am, that Curtis thinks all manipulation the same. He would have us believe that Russell Lee's choosing to go off the beaten path and photograph a settler community in New Mexico is morally equivalent to Arthur Rothstein's carrying a cow skull around so he could photograph it in various parts of South Dakota, and that Dorothea Lange's making a closeup of a migrant mother pea picker showing only three of her seven children is as duplicitous as Rothstein's stage-managing a picture of a father and two sons running from a dust storm that had in fact passed over, telling the young boy to put his sleeve in front of his eyes as though he were having trouble seeing, and later lying about how the picture was made.

Curtis's chief intention is to prove that the most admired of FSA photographers, Walker Evans, also manipulated photographers. On this question I must declare a personal interest. My Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973, 1986) quotes Evans saying that documentarians should disturb what they photograph as little as possible. Specifically, they should not add things, as Rothstein added the cow skull. "That's where the word 'documentary' holds," Evans told me in 1971. "You don't touch a thing. You 'manipulate,' if you like, when you frame a picture--one foot one way or one foot another. But you're not putting anything in."

Curtis points out that several of Evans's interiors of sharecropper houses differ in small details--a cotton smock missing from the wall, a windup clock on the mantel--from the elaborate written descriptions James Agee gives us in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). This point was made by Erling Larsen in his James Agee (1971), though Curtis does not credit Larsen. I discussed it with Evans, and he discussed it with students in University of Texas classes when he visited in 1974, a year before his death. He said he and Agee worked in the houses at different times. This would be likely since the two would have gotten in each other's way (Evans was using a view camera on tripod and external flash). When I mentioned Larsen's specific accusation--which Curtis echoes--that Evans moved a bed to an oblique angle, Evans said he was sure he had not. "Why should I?" he said. "It was fine where it was."

This is the central problem with Curtis's theory as regards Evans. It fails the pragmatic test. He does not show that Evans's picture are aesthetically any better for the the manipulation he thinks took place than they would have been had they followed Agee's descriptions to the letter.

One Thing to Do in Heaven

2008-11-22T16:03:00.003-03:00

Those of us born around 1940 are the last generation who grew up with the pop music now called the Great American Songbook. We heard the work of masters—Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Fats Waller, and maybe 100 others—all the time on the radio. I pity subsequent generations the bilge they have been made to love as their own.

Great though the Songbook is melodically, it’s only fair to admit that some of its lyrics fall short. Stephen Sondheim, one of the last living Songbook contributors, has said that when he had Maria celebrate herself as “pretty and witty and bright” in West Side Story he unfortunately had nothing to say.

I’ve decided that something useful I can do in paradise is improve the lyrics of the great songs that need it. Consider these stanzas:

Way down among Brazilians
Coffee beans grow by the billions
So they’ve got to find those extra cups to fill
They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil

You can’t get cherry soda
Cause they’ve gotta sell their quota
And the way things are I guess they never will
They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil

Sold a million records, but I’d like it to make more sense. As, for example,

Here’s the problem for Brazilians:
Coffee beans grow by the billions
And there aren’t sufficient cups for them to fill.
They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.

Don’t ask for mineral water,
You must drink your coffee quota,
Though the way beans grow you know you never will!
They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.

The song’s bridge lyrics look to be a challenge—“No tea or tomato juice / You’ll see no potato juice / Cause the planters down in Santos / All say no, no, no.” It’s nice to know I’ll have as long as I want to work on them.

Bart Alberti RIP

2008-08-25T09:23:00.032-04:00

DEATH OF CONTRIBUTOR BART ALBERTI, A SUICIDE, LAST SATURDAY IN SAN FRANCISCO
Saturday, June 3, 2006 [The Santiago Times]

(Ed. Note. Readers of our Sunday issues over the last month will have noticed four quirky poems we’ve run by one Bart Alberti. Last Saturday, Bart took his life. Bart was a high school classmate of our weekend editor, Bill Stott. In the following collection of emails, Bill informed his and Bart’s Scarsdale High School class of 1958 classmates about Bart’s death and his odd life. Bill publishes two of Bart’s poems at the end of this article and says more poems will continue to appear in the weekend ST.)

Dear Classmates,

This Monday John Austin was called by the San Francisco coroner’s office. After the call, John emailed Dan Neary and me.

John

Dear Bill and Dan, I am sorry to have to report that Barto Alberti is dead. He apparently committed suicide. It occurred at about 2:30 p.m. Saturday in San Francisco when Barto stepped on to the tracks in front of an on-coming train arriving from San Jose, turned his back and was struck. He apparently was killed instantly. As far as I know, he left no note. That is all the information I have. I got it from the San Francisco coroner's office, which called me seeking information on Barto. I was of no help to them because all I could tell them was that Barto lived in Scarsdale, at least until 1958, and graduated from SHS. I am sorry to say that I don't know if Barto had any living relatives, and if so, where they might be. Of course, the city is trying to locate any living relatives. The person who called me said that from all indications Barto was "a loner." If you have any information that might help in locating any relatives, I'd be glad to try to pass it on to the city officials. Again, I am sorry to be the bearer of this very sad news. John

I replied in an email to [classmates] John, Dan, Jennifer Carden Rogers, and [non-classmate] Beverly Spicer, whom I will introduce a bit later.

dear john, dan, jen, and beverly,

what SAD news. what a sad life.

bart--i've trained myself to call him that, knowing that he wanted to outgrow barto--once wrote me, before he joined our email junta, that he had struggled with depression, but i thought that, since he'd made it so far, and all alone, that he'd make it further, particularly if we could cook up a little community for him (the mark vonnegut notion of helping each other through whatever it is we're going through).*

so far as i know, bart had no relatives and no close friends. he worked as an actuary in NYC for a national life insurance company in the 1960s but never mentioned having another job, though i'm sure he did.

john, remembering how sensitively you handled the fact that x----- y------ didn't get a valentine card in mrs. reed’s sixth grade, i'm going to work with you on an announcement to send our classmates.

i tried to get some big-name historians, then some little-name ones, to look at a remarkable philosophy of history thesis bart had written, but no one bit and i was too ill-informed to evaluate it. (its thesis, so far as i understood, was that every generation is condemned to repeat its great grandparents' mistakes because human memory only keeps pain that we or our parents or their parents have experienced vividly enough before us for us to avoid it.) if it had its facts--about the middle ages through the 19th century--correct, which i couldn't judge, i told myself i might be christian enough to translate it into readable prose; i'm sure i would have wiggled out of that commitment. but, hey, i was publishing his unfathomable poems in the ST.

i did enough, i tell myself, not entirely feeling sure.

but that's my problem. the real sorrow here is bart's.

love you, john. love all you guys. let's virtually hug each other and really hug those around us.

bill

Now a long background note. Bart had emailed me out of the blue after I’d sent out a classmate email like the one you're reading. He knew I'd published some books and told me he was living in San Francisco and had written a manuscript he wanted to get published. I read the manuscript, was bowled over by it, and wanted to get someone competent to read it. I drafted an email that Bart sent to a number of prominent historians I suggested. I can’t remember all the names—Garry Wills was one, and Bart suggested someone—but no one responded except for my historian-friend Gaines Post, Jr., (about whom more later) and David Hackett Fischer, who had received the following emailing from Bart explaining what he was up to:

I am an independent scholar (as they say), 64, and living near to the bone in San Francisco. I have discovered a pattern of economic activity similar to Kondratieff's long-term cycle but based on something other than lucky innovation. It is my theory, which I demonstrate in a manuscript of 87 pages (with, I hasten to add, pages of endnotes), that the economic cycles of the past 1000 years are based on the adult human life span (50-60 years), because people apparently only "learn" from the history they have themselves experienced. True, humanity's short-term memory is prolonged by institutions that collect cultural memory, yet I bring forth evidence that even the collective memory breaks down after 120 years or so. Great paradigm shifts -- the Renaissance, Modernism -- appear after two shifts of cultural memory: that is, every 250 years. I have table showing all that I've said to this point, and also showing the interlocking of economic innovation with social, cultural, political, and artistic change. None of these interconnections have been so clearly set forth by anybody else.

I am writing in hope that I can prevail upon you to look at my MS.-- which I'd send you in ''Acrobat'' pdf format -- and suggest what I should do with it. I have corresponded with a high school friend, Bill Stott, now professor emeritus in American Studies at the U of Texas Austin, and though he believes my MS., which I call "History and Paradigm," "an incredible achievement of learning, synthesis, and speculation," he finds it "difficult to follow because (1) I don't have the knowledge of European, particularly medieval, history required and (2) it is organized in a scattershot way." He then recommends that because [W.W.] Rostow and [Charles] Kindleberger are dead and my work is an expansion and demonstration of what you argue in THE GREAT WAVE, I get in touch with you, saying, "[Fischer] is obviously a scholar of EXTRAORDINARY energy and cleverness. His ALBION'S SEED revises everyone's thinking on the U.S. colonies. I quote from his HISTORIANS' FALLACIES in my WRITE TO THE POINT, and you may certainly use my name, which will ring no bells with him. Now, what he'll tell you to do with your MS. I don't know. He may find it so charming (it is charming) that it should be published as it stands; on the other hand, he may want a revision."

Professor Fischer, I seek whatever your interest in what I've written and your human generosity will give me: a brief appraisal of my argument; a suggestion of how it can be better made; the recommendation of a publisher who would be interested in the MS., as-is or heavily revised; an offer to collaborate with me in making my argument, however refined and expanded, into a book that would startle the history profession. At this critical moment, with a so-called ''war of the civilizations'' in the offing, perhaps, my essay is right to the point. My ''Table of Great Powers'' resembles Paul Kennedy's discussion THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS, but summarizes hundreds of pages on one page. This is an achievement of compression no one else, in my opinion, has gotten to.

Fischer kindly responded, saying he didn’t have time to read the manuscript.

Bart had also written hundreds of poems, which he sent me in pdf format. I couldn’t understand them—-they are in the mode of John Ashbery, a poet of transcendent incoherence—-but Bart’s language was often amazing. When I became the volunteer feature editor of The Santiago Times, “Chile’s only daily English-language newspaper,” two months ago, I began publishing Bart’s poems, two per Sunday. (The Santiago Times’ website is http://www.santiagotimes.cl/.)

Bart and I emailed back and forth half a dozen times a day, sometimes more. He was full of alarming and, to me, plausible visions of the dollar’s collapse, the bursting of the housing bubble, and the end of American hegemony. He exulted when, as he predicted, the price of gold doubled. He was as amazed by the Bush administration’s incompetence but had the historian’s sense that life has always been messy and people have managed to wade through it to occasional moments of calm. He saw the human golden age as having been the British reign in the 19th century.

We weren’t personal friends—I foolishly doubted Bart had any—but I told him, as I do everyone, about my unrecognized-till-age-51 depression and its cure, 18 months later, when my mail-in drug company, saving money, sent me Paxil, then coming to the market, saying it would work as well as Prozac, which hadn’t worked very well for me, and the Paxil brought me a happiness I’d never thought possible. (I sent Bart, as I do everyone I think might read it, a 20-page essay I’ve written about my depression; if you’d like to read it, just say so.) Bart told me once in passing that he suffered from depression. Another time, he mentioned he had had a nervous breakdown in his 20s. Yet another time he spoke of how a long-ago rejection had meant that he had never had a romance with a woman. He had a fantastic memory of 1940s Scarsdale, of having ridden a milk-wagon over toward Eastchester, of having lived around the corner from where the FBI traitor Robert Hanssen later lived. He told me his father had enlisted in the Spanish-American war at age 19, which would have made him 60 when Bart was born. He mentioned his father several other times; his mother, never.

I send out a daily listserving of articles I like to family and friends, including, gee, maybe a dozen members of our class (if any of you reading this want to be added to the listserv, which is of course free, please email me and say so; you can always ask later to be dropped—people drop all the time), and Bart enthusiastically joined the few and the brave who respond to what I offer by emailing to tell me how benighted my opinions are. Specialists in this are darling Dan [Neary]and sublime Steve Buck (who has dropped the listserve at least twice). But they are as dabblers alongside bountiful Beverly Spicer, an Austin, Texas, artist, writer, cartoonist, photographer, medical and architectural historian, humanist friend of mine, who writes the monthly "E-bits" column for The Digital Journalist . Beverly and Bart took to each other, virtually, in a big way. And when she learned of Bart’s death, she emailed me:

Beverly

Why would anyone think he killed himself? He was animated and excited about his poetry. I just sent him a note in the mail yesterday. He had started sending poetry to me by snail mail. I think it must have been accidental. I cannot believe he did himself in. Very sad and very bad news.

Then, still later on that same day, Monday, she wrote again—this time to John and Dan as well as me:

Dear Bill, Dan, and John,

I just had a call from Bart's very good friend in San Francisco. I talked to Charlie and Sally Wehrenberg, who had given Bart an office that he used every day for years now. He was working on computer voice-sync projects with them and they loved the rare human being that was Bart. They saw him every single day, and ate with him 3 or 4 times a week, every week. He was a very close friend. Charlie said it was definitely a suicide, of great theatrical production, that people saw him jump down on the tracks and purposefully place himself in the train's path. They are profoundly sad about his death, and said they cannot fathom how much they are going to miss him. The coroner contacted Charlie.

Charlie and Sally

We talked for about 45 minutes, maybe an hour. They told me Bart had had rather notable mental problems since the 70's, some of which included earlier on episodes of yelling in the streets, etc, and other dramatic displays, but that he had been pretty well for a long time. He told them that he never wanted to take antidepressants even though he was depressed because he thought "they would make him feel good enough to kill himself." Charlie said he thought it was possible, and not an exaggeration, that Bart thought about suicide virtually every single day of his life.

I had received lots of his poetry by usps mail recently, and had written a few notes by hand to thank him. Charlie and Sally are of Solo Zone too [a company], where Bart had his email, and said he had pinned my letter up on his bulletin board - - that is how they found my number. I just mailed another note to Bart yesterday because he sent me several signed pages of poetry that he'd written this month. My note hasn't even had time to arrive yet.

Charlie and Sally said Bart had many, many friends, many of whom did not know each other. He said Bart was a totally unique soul and a very dear one, and lots of people loved him. He always took care of their place when they were gone. Bart received disability funds and had for many years, was apparently unable to keep a regular job, but he really loved and was good at his computer work that was stimulated by his relationship with Charlie. Sally is an artist. They are 62 and 52, respectively.

They said they published a book with Bart a while ago, and would love to send it out to some of Bart's friends. I would like to ask your permission to give them your names and addresses so that if they do in fact do that, you will receive some of Bart's work.

I loved Bart, found him delightful, and loved his eccentricity. I'm going to miss him terribly, am very sad that I did not know he was so troubled, and wish I could have helped somehow. I don't like it that he is gone, and it felt very odd to type out the addressees to this email and not include his name. I love all of you too, and John that includes you - - don't be mad at me anymore - - and know that you all will grieve in your own ways for our dear friend Bart. I do not even know what he looked like, but there was no one like Bart. Bill, thank you for introducing me to him. I know he was a childhood friend, so my own attachment to Bart must pale in comparison to your lifelong friend. However, I feel honored to have known him during this last part of his life.

Gaines

I got another striking email, from Gaines Post, Jr., a historian (of Germany and England) and, more recently, autobiographical writer (you would all find much to embrace in his Memoirs of a Cold War Son [Iowa, 2000]), who kindly read Bart’s history manuscript and was as baffled and impressed as I.

Dear Bill,

I am so sorry. I can feel your sadness even in this e-medium.

This is a more tormenting era than usual for the loner, the eccentric, the reading-thinking outsider who knows he is onto something that the academy will not take seriously from anyone but an insider. Like you, I wonder whether I could, should have done more to help Bart find a publisher for his theory of history. In my case, ignorance and limited imagination were a big part of the problem: he had gone so far beyond my grasp of events, causation, and the like, that I felt like a student who just didn't get it. At the same time, I sensed a tangle of emotions in the author's prose, as if he were trying to work through his own idiosyncrasies through or with the history. I sensed desperation.

How very sad indeed.

Then, yesterday, there was another email from Beverly:

Dear Bill, Dan and John,

I returned home for a few minutes today before going to class which will last into the evening. In my mail I have a card from Bart, written Saturday morning. A couple of words are eluding me, so I will make copies and send one to each of you.

Here is what it says:

Sat morning, May 27

Bev

I am glad you like my poetry. I have been depressed for months and I wanted to polish off my oe[u]vre. I kept going with poetry. Now I am off for good. You can mail my patron Charles Wehrenberg at charlie@solozone.com.

Goodbye forever,

Bart Alberti

Tell Stott he wont through it too.

I just don't understand the last line, and my brain is not working well enough to correctly interpret what he was saying there.

As these details are shaping up, my sadness is mounting as well. Poor, dear soul. On the other hand, if he was theatrical and dramatic, and if he felt his poetry polished, and if he was feeling good enough for a grande finale, well then, so be it, and perhaps we must celebrate with him rather than grieve for our loss. It may have been his finest moment, in his scheme of things . . . I just don't know. But, he was a dear soul and again I can only feel happy that we were connected somehow.

John, thank you so much for your kind and beautiful note in today's email. Dan, I remember how when Bart hadn't heard from any of us for a couple of days about a week and a half ago, he wrote, "Are you there? I hadn't heard from any of you. Dan, send me something." So, I figured that he was corresponding with you as well, and that's wonderful to know.

Dan

Bill, and all - - you can see Charles Wehrenberg's address and contact information above, and I'm sure he will be most happy to hear from you directly, rather than me gathering names and addresses to give to him. Bill, especially you, might be helpful even to the coroner's office since you knew him as a child and obviously have more on his history and potential surviving relatives than the rest of us.

My heart is really beating for Bart and for all of us now, and along with my sadness, my feeling of love for you all is growing as well. It's big.

This was followed by a final email from Beverly:

Oh, I see. He wrote: "Tell Stott he went through it too."

I, Stott, am very touched by Bart’s p.s. I read it, or I’d like to, as a sort of older brother’s reaching out to me in truculent approval.

I will be in touch with the Wehrenbergs and report anything further I feel needs reporting. Because Bart published his collected poems and his philosophy of history essay in PDF formats, I will be able to send either or both to anyone who wants them; just ask.

It’s hard to think of his writing “Goodbye forever” and mailing the card. It’s yet one more thing about him I won’t forget.

Classmates, thank you for reading this, and my love to you and yours,

Bill

*P.S. The Mark Vonnegut reference:

Kurt Vonnegut, In These Times, March 2006: “When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

“Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

“I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

“Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: ‘Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.’ So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it."

P.P.S. As I prepare to email this out, this from Jennifer Carden Rogers:

Jennifer

jesus h christ...I am just catching up with this.......the poor, poor man.....more than anything in life (literally) he wanted to express it........................love to all, j

P.P.P.S. Then, less than an hour later, this also from her:

EXPRESS

More than life itself

He wanted to express it.

Bart at the BART is a poem --

Or, as he wrote, pome.

Po' me.

Among other things.

TWO POEMS

By Bart Alberti

[UNTITLED]

You, my friend, are wise and simple, you stir

my laziness, as I reach out to grasp impure

imagery; us, fertile in the accord of natures:

acts, superfluous; words, a glance: banter,

truth. Truth? Truth is the substance of sweet

risk. Happy are the possessors of firm knowledge;

unhappy, those who rely on them. Myth, gentles,

it is the melee of the gods where we couple

with enigmas and beget strange children. Behold,

friends, my eyes perceive a clearly lit object:

baroque shapes, hideous fish, tousled octopuses.

Behold, I create myth with a jagged pen stroke!

A tourbillion of coruscations forming... demons!

Killing time, I fall asleep: awake, sleep-

walker, to find that aquarium that mariners

had left behind before their voyage in delight

of children drawing figures in the sands...

of time..., tentacles, feet, feelers, appendages.

So, join the lie to the truth: Let us call it TIME.

But time and the lie are hearing of the bell:

the artifice of speech.... Lady, I said,

to her, Myth! Rivalries gave birth....

Under the rigorous eye (of whom?),

under the repeated and convergent blows

of questions, the fauna of vague things sees

the earth as the combined presence of the body,

as the uncovered foot, free of the bedclothes,

reaches out for the foothold of its slippery

nightmares. Vainly we escape from what is not.

December 6, 1993

LOVE AND CHANCE

You look up at the sky where you see the stars

fastened to the vault of the heavens by thumbtacks.

As you hear the grinding of the crank-shafts that rotate

the world you clasp a wilted peony in your hand.

Reflections... thoughts....

At last the hope of music floats in the empyrean

the drummer, his sticks beating at the xylophone,

the concertmaster, outlined in scarlet letters,

you shudder at the violet violence of the violin

Emotions... feelings....

The classical separation of thought and feeling

is not abolie par l'hazard but remains an ever teasing

possibility of a suggested unity of apperception

(in, say, the poetry of Wallace Stevens

or in such offerings lawful in the several states,

classical-romantic of the which herein hereof)

or even in these lines, which I address to you,

who may not exist, or exist only in imagination.

Farewell my friend. There are many volumes

yet to write.

after C. S. S. Pierce

September 25, 2004

A celebration of Bart's life took place at his favorite bookstore. Beverly Spicer attended and reported to his email pals:

June 7, 2006

It was a sweet and somewhat surreal thing, so Bohemian and full of exaggerated characters that it felt like walking onto a movie set. The Adobe Bookstore was according to Charles the center of Bart's life, as was the Cafe Soma, where many initially met Bart. I kept hearing "the first time I met Bart he was screaming" about this or that at Cafe Soma. Not that he was actually screaming but that he was loudly discussing some issue and holding court. He went to the cafe every day and dropped in at the bookstore every afternoon around 4pm. "Everybody" knew Bart, and Charles said they're getting messages from all over the world, from lowly to lofty people who were so sad to hear of his death.

Over and over people commented that "he compartmentalized everything." Everyone marvelled how he knew so much about everything, and at one point Charles commented that since Bart never worked, he had so much more time than anyone to research things, and he figures that made Bart about 30 years ahead of everyone else. The range of his interests was phenomenal, according to all. Somebody later asked me why I thought he compartmentalized people, places, things, and I said I didn't think it was pathological but that he just categorized people into ways he could relate to them. It doesn't look like anyone knew the whole Bart, but Sally and Charles knew him most intimately. They said he laughed a lot, and said again for emphasis, A LOT. He loved good food, "he LOVED good food," and "he really loved the women." "Oh, he REALLY loved the women." He was a poet, a historian, an eccentric, genius, and flaneur, in the Baudelairian sense.

Charles also said Bart left massive amounts of data, that his computer contained a whopping 147,000 files. Charles' brother (?) Paul was there, and he handed me his card which states he's with Apple and is "manager of advanced mass storage and optical standards." Charles said Bart had very sophisticated computer equipment in his apartment, but he and Sally also gave him an office where he was working on the programming of the voice sync system with them - - he was really good at what he was doing. They saw Bart most every day, and ate with him 3-4 times a week, and are devastated by his death. It's clear now he was planning this for quite a while, and the week before Bart took the train down to San Jose and back, remarking upon his return how beautiful everything was. Charles said he now realizes that Bart was covering every detail, checking all the schedules, making his plan, sending out his poetry, tying up loose ends everywhere.

The morning of Bart's death, he mailed his cards and stopped by to see Sally and Charles, though they weren't there. I asked Charles how he knew Bart had come by, and he said Bart erased his entire email history that morning. Charles was really curious why the coroner contacted John. That puzzles me too, as hotmail is not necessarily a local address. With no email history, and Bart's own address at Solo Zone, that is even more curious. Maybe John can tell us more.

August 2008 addendum. Those interested in reading Bart’s poetry should go to www.solozone.com and click on “Authors.” (The “Bart Alberti” page has a photo of him that makes him look like—surprise—Jerry Orbach on Law and Order.) His complete, collected poems are available to be read at https://webspace.utexas.edu/xythoswfs/webui/_xy-40986379_docstore1-t_41nxKmIW. Those interested in reading his philosophy of history should email Beverly Spicer (bspicer@austin.rr.com), who will email you a pdf of the manuscript.

Gaines Post, Jr., has published an entertaining on-the-road book in which he travels back into the 19th century West while exploring his family's history in the 1940s to the present. You'll find yourself or your parents in it: Blue Bug, Red Road (iUniverse, 2008).

PBS Allende-Pinochet Documentary Flawed

2008-08-22T11:48:00.004-04:00

Friday, 22 August 2008 [The Santiago Times]

(Ed. Note: Monday’s ST reported that the film “The Judge and the General” about Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán’s prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet is being shown this week on U.S. public television. As we didn’t report, the film can also be seen online till September 2 free of charge at http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2008/judgeandthegeneral/fullfilm.html.

(The following review of the film is by our Feature Editor Bill Stott. His opinions are his own, but it is fair to point out that he is the author of a classic book on documentary, Documentary Expression and Thirties America.)

"The Judge and the General" is moving, impressive, and half-true. It "documents"—that is, shows with vivid, gruesome evidence—why Judge Juan Guzmán came to believe that General Pinochet as well as his followers were guilty of crimes against humanity including torture and murder.

It is only half-true because it doesn’t document, indeed doesn’t mention, why Judge Guzmán—and before-Allende Chilean President Eduardo Frei (1964-70) and after-Pinochet Chilean President Patricio Aylwin (1990-94) and some 80 percent of the Chilean people supported Pinochet’s 1973 coup against President Salvador Allende.

Here’s the part of the truth the film doesn’t give vivid evidence of: Allende and his followers were guilty of crimes against humanity including torture and murder. He reduced a moderately prosperous, democratic country to poverty, chaos, and violence and counter-violence bordering on civil war. He did this through ineptitude and because he wanted to make permanent an apparently totalitarian Marxist regime.

Like Pinochet, Allende was an autocrat; he violated Chile’s constitution and laws when he wanted to. The difference between the two men is one of degree, not kind. Directly and indirectly, Pinochet tortured and killed many more people. But whereas Allende left Chile in shambles, Pinochet—unlike any other dictator who comes readily to mind—left his country much better off for his tenure.

If the public-spirited Americans who watch PBS had been Chileans in the Allende years, 80 percent of them would also have supported his overthrow; more than 80 percent of them, like today’s Chileans, would support the economic and social changes Pinochet brought about; and I suspect that even knowing the crimes committed by Pinochet and his followers, more or less 50 percent of them, like today’s Chileans, would generally approve of his rule.

Bill's Official Obit

2008-05-24T18:55:00.027-04:00

The University of Texas at Austin, where I taught for 30 years, has a nice recent custom: a committee of faculty colleagues writes a memorial article about a faculty member who dies. I've preempted that job.

University of Texas at Austin
Faculty Memorial Resolution
for William Merrell Stott

In place of a resolution written by his surviving colleagues, Mr. Stott requested that this be published.

The idea of writing my own obituary isn't mine. It was done by my History colleague Oliver H. Radkey, Jr. (1909-2000), as a way of celebrating those who helped his career and of settling scores with unnamed faculty who didn't. I think also that Radkey wrote it because he, like me, was a neatness freak--he carried a bar of soap in a soap dish to the men's room--and didn't want to leave loose ends around for others to muck up.

I'm happy for others to muck up my memory any way they care to. And I wasn't afraid that the colleagues who wrote my memorial would say nasty things. I knew the bad things they thought about me--easy grader, intellectual sloth, son of money, buffoon--and I knew the good. When I retired, our wonderful administrative assistant, Janice Bradley Garrett, gave a party for me and Desley Deacon, who was returning to teach in Australia. My colleagues said nice things, one of which I'll never forget. Mark Smith said, "Bill reminded us we were human." And he said no more. I should have fallen to my knees in gratitude.

But even had my colleagues taken the time to remember things I did and said (J.B. Colson might have told you of the time when he and I were circling the lectern, talking in counterpoint in our "History of Photography" class, and I whispered to him, "I wish I were dead"; Tom Cable might remember how I wept--hesitantly, my emotions strangled as so often--when I got a letter from a Polish woman saying she wouldn't join me for a new life in America), they almost certainly wouldn't have given you as much of me as I can do with my own words.

How I wish Radkey's initiative had caught on long before he died--in 1970, say, so that I'd know some of the faculty memorialized and get to hear them speak again. For example, I didn't know well my History colleague Tom McGann (1920-82), though I could tell what a nice guy he was--no trick to that--and once gave him inadequate counsel about his son's wanting to be an actor. After that, when we crossed in the hall or met in the men's room (Tom brushed his teeth after lunch--the History men had better hygiene than we in American Studies), we would smile and joke. Once, at the LBJ School, I heard him give the funniest impromptu introduction of a visiting speaker I ever heard. Nothing of his genius and charm comes across in the canned memorial one of Bill Livingston's secretaries wrote on Tom's behalf because his History colleagues let him down. As so many excellent faculty I knew are let down in their memorials.

Not me! This is going to say what I want it to. And it will be published. That's important to me because of the (I'm guessing) 300 things I've written for publication, bleeding at the knuckles to make them clear, smooth, and stirring, perhaps 50 have been published. My fault, of course. I write for an audience, General Readers like you, gentle reader, that no longer exists--the sort of weirdos who would recognize that those bleeding knuckles I spoke of were stolen from advice poet Robert Lowell gave about writing poetry (why he didn't write bleeding fingers, I can't imagine). Moreover, I took one or two turndowns as definitive. Some editors sort of liked my work. "Nice try," someone at the New York Times scrawled on an essay I'd offered to their op-ed page. "Gee, this is interesting," a few editors wrote, then added the identical, killing words, "I wonder who'd publish it." I'm gathering my short pieces, published and not, on a website I hope you'll visit, http://billstott.blogspot.com, which I'll ask my kids to keep going when I cash in if I don't gather them into a book.

As for longer pieces, I published four books I'm proud to call to your attention:

Documentary Expression and Thirties America, Oxford University Press, 1973; paperback, 1976; second edition, with retrospective afterword, University of Chicago Press, 1986 (in print)

On Broadway, performance photographs by Fred Fehl, text by William Stott and Jane Stott, The University of Texas Press, 1978; London, Thames & Hudson, 1979; paperback, Da Capo Press, 1980 (out of print)

Write to the Point: And Feel Better about Your Writing, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984; second edition, hardback and paperback, with a foreword by Clifford Stoll, Columbia University Press, 1991 (in print)

Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately, John Lee, with Bill Stott, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1993 (in print).

The first book was my dissertation and was written in deeper version of the resigned sadness in which I'm writing this. The fourth book, the only to have been translated into another language (any guesses? German--who else acknowledges having anger problems?) was written in the heady years when my sadness was overcome.

Which leads me to what I most want to say. Some of you are like me--me as I was and me as I happened to be now because I'm recovering from having my cancerous prostate removed and have a fiendish flu. Some of you (and you know who you are) don't enjoy life enough. I had wonderful parents and sister, a world-class education, considerable talents, fascinating friends and girl friends, a fine wife, wonderful kids, a pleasant, useful job--and yet, looking back, I was generally miserable: would find myself singing, driving home, "When the rains come a pitter-patter and I'd like to be safe in bed, skies are weeping while the world is sleeping, trouble heaping on my head. It's so vain to remain enchanted and to wait for a clear, blue sky. Helter skelter, I must fly for shelter, till the clouds roll by." Besotted with the humanities, I felt everyone I admired felt like me (Melville: "That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped"), led lives of what Thoreau called quiet desperation.

I was 51 before I understood that I had an illness: was a lifelong, unrecognized major depressive. There followed a year and a half of counseling and trying antidepressants with a psychiatrist who believed in drug therapy until, thank God, I found an antidepressant that worked for me (Paxil; I now take Effexor). Since then, 15 years ago now, I haven't had a terrible moment. I've been sad and remorseful and nervous, but I haven't felt that total emptiness in the gut that makes living worse than death. I feel much less that I need people to validate me, tell me I'm interesting or gentlemanly or odd. I don't seek out women to admire me. On spring walks, I see the lime-green leaves shake their shadows across the dark leaves below. I live in the moment, not (as I used to) in the past, or the incredible future, when I would be happy. I'm happy now. One night, early on in being well, not really thinking what I was doing—you often don't think ahead when you're living here and now—I found I was on my knees, my palms to my eyes, saying, "Oh, Jesus, I'm so glad my pain has been taken from me and I will never know fear again!"

This is what I want to say to you: “If you’re not enjoying life much of the time--which doesn’t mean enjoying it as much as some of us oldsters say we enjoyed it at your age (life is easier in retrospect than at the moment)--if you find a drizzly November in your soul more than is normal, more than (psychologists say) two or three days out of ten, then don’t follow Melville down to the sea, see a doctor, because he or she may have a pill that will change your life as mine as been changed, to a happiness I despaired of finding. More than 80 of 100 cases of depression can be made much better; more than half can be 'cured,' as mine was, though the cure may not be as simple as a single pill."

I tell you this because it is the most important lesson life has taught me. Having recovered from mental illness, I feel a responsibility to testify to what is possible. I said this to one of my email pals, Shirley Showalter, an ex-student who was then teaching at Goshen College in Indiana (she was later its president and now works for a foundation that promotes world peace). She replied:

I think you are right to testify. I thought about your story as I read about suicide in the last Newsweek and as I listened to a young mother talk about the spot she had picked out on the L.A. freeway. She was going to arrange an accident for herself--and her little boy. The pain of such a thought is too much to bear. But there she was, a beautiful South African-American "coloured" woman able to speak of her pain in the past tense. It was just such a testimony as yours that saved her and took her to a doctor. She's on medication too and getting stronger all the time.

So I'm testifying to you, reader. If you're miserable too much, get help. Fight to make your one certain time alive worth living.

Anything else to say? The essay door is swinging shut.

Well, one thing I did well was revise--other teachers would say "grade"--student writing; I put years of my life into it. (On my website there's an unpublished article about how I did it in my last decade-plus of teaching.) My wife and children suffered from the time I gave to student writing, and I apologized to them then and apologize now. Had I been healthier and happier I wouldn't have done it. Still, let it be to my credit as a teacher.

Let it be to my credit, too, that I gave help and encouragement to such remarkable people as—just to name names that spring to my fingertips—Lisa Beyer, Greg Beal, Martha Boethel, Suzanne Shelton Buckley, Bob Byington, Christa Carvajal, Lili Corbus, Robin Cravey, Michael Eakin, Michael Erard, Mary Ford, Sandra Foster, David Gaines, Juliet George, Kerry Grombacher, Peter Hales, Benita Heiskanen, Caroline Herring, Jeff Levine, Paul Martin, Kherry McKay, Sybil Miller, James Neff, Dean Ornish, Frances De Pontes Peebles, Lisa Rhodes, Irene Rostagno, Sheree Scarborough, Hal Sheets, Shirley Showalter, Mark Singer, Beverly Spicer, Teri Tynes, Richard Trachtenberg, Qui Phiet Tran, and the following student who remembered my teaching kindly in her writing.

Gail Caldwell, the Boston Globe's chief book reviewer (her criticism won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001), was a grad student in our American Studies department in the early 1980s and portrayed our department and faculty in her memoir, A Strong West Wind (2006). To my astonishment, the longest portrait is of me. I am introduced as a "middle-aged teacher of literature . . . known to tap-dance on the seminar table to wake lethargic students"--a misremembering of what happened when one afternoon I got up on the table to do a Lindy step and show one way to put it into words ("a toe-in, ankle-out pivot").

Just as the Fool figures prominently in the tarot and Puck holds the secrets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the tap-dancing madman of Garrison Hall would have his due in showing me the break in the hedge [to get out of grad school]. Simmons was an English professor who had wandered into American Studies because, as was the case for most of its faculty, the program’s peculiarities mirrored his own. He spoke with the melodious enthusiasms of an Elizabethan actor, but his fractured smile disguised his love of literature and made you think he was making fun of it all—the students, the novels, the entire universe—every time he spoke. His seminars were filled to capacity, both for the guaranteed knowledge within and the anticipated show, and Simmons worked this atmospheric pressure like the performer he was: He once broke into a resounding chorus from the musical Oklahoma! —“Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends!”—to make a point about de Crevecoeur’s eighteenth-century classic Letters from an American Farmer. During class he addressed each student with formalities—Mr. Peters, Ms. Miller—and yet he could make even courtesy sound ludicrous. It was hard to get and keep your footing in dialogue with the man; the uninitiated couldn’t tell if they were being praised or mocked.

My first exposure to his magniloquence came during a seminar on major American writers, with a reading list devoted entirely to novels by white men. Because it was the late 1970s, Simmon’s curriculum was still standard fare. When a female student questioned his selections at the first class meeting, he obligingly, almost theatrically, added Edith Wharton to the list. He revealed no gender affinities, though, when it came to his students, each of whom he treated, beyond the mordant veneer, with an oddly precious regard. Deviating from the coolness cultivated by most senior faculty, he insisted at the beginning of each term that his charges explain why they were in attendance; if you gave an answer deemed vague or coy, he pressed mercilessly until he got the deeper truth he sought. So it was there that I publicly muttered that I wanted to write—“Yes, Ms. Caldwell, and what, pray tell, do you wish to write?”—and there, too, that he bestowed upon us the splendor of Light in August, the cranky reveries of Flannery O’Connor, the manic labyrinths of Moby-Dick. Simmons grasped and even applauded the mad sacrifices of creative fire, and he led us through the provinces of literary history as though we were scouts on our camping expedition, with him our merry leader.

Some days this gusto could be crippling: You could summon only so much vigor about Puritan sensibility or Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. But if the class seemed indifferent, Simmons got worse, railing and insisted we share what we know or intuited. One afternoon he was half swooning in his delivery of the onslaught of modernism, assuming we would join in his homage. His students, glassy-eyed one and all, refused to budge. Where, Simmons implored, can we locate the origins of modernism in the novel? No takers, though it was a standard American Studies question. The silence grew mortifying. Finally I blurted out what half the students must have known. “Uh, Ulysses,” I said. “Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness.” Simmons, of course, had been teaching for decades, and he was hard to rattle—he knew someone would take the bait, would crumple under the discomfort he had had spawned. “Yes, Ms. Caldwell!” he cried, grateful but unbowed. “Take us there!”

For a couple of years afterward, this became a departmental refrain, the joke summoned whenever anyone needed to know anything. “Take us there, Ms. C.!” And yet I remember it now with something kinder than the amusement we shared at Simmon’s expense. He knew, with that simple navigational imperative, that in fact there was somewhere to go—knew that literature was just a world over, like Wakefield’s old neighborhood, from our own third dimension, and that it was his task and joy to show us the way.

Simmon’s reputation for class antics sometimes obscured the heartfelt teacher he was; in his commentaries on the essays we gave him, his in-class formalities gave way to more intimate monikers. He addressed me in these written notes as Clever Girl, a reversal of my initials but also his friendly nudge that facility was not the answer for a writer—that one could be clever at the expense of anything deeper. Had I any doubt of this barbed-wired-and-honey interpretation, I was reminded of it explicitly several years after I had left Texas, when he sent me a copy of his book on writing that had just been published. Buried there within his fussy discourses on usage were the exact words he had written on one of my essays. He had changed my initial for publication, but not my epithet, and he had included a passage in which he accused me of wiseacre acrobatics. “There is too much cleverness in the world,” he quoted himself telling a Ms. R., “and too little truth. Let’s try to have more truth.”

Rediscovering his advice all this time later, I didn’t know which was more impressive: that Simmons would so precisely deliver the lesson I had needed, or that he could be so maniacal in his forethought. The book was proof that he had photocopied all his handwritten responses to students for years on end. So! What we had been getting was a calculated generosity that instructed us and served him. This seemed hilariously in keeping with the tap-dancing Fool—Puck, after all, understands the power of his elixir. But it also told me something invaluable about the writer’s soul: Even when dispensing fairy dust, take notes. Clever Man.

My Heart Incident

2008-05-16T23:14:00.008-04:00

I wrote this for the my Yale 1962 classmates in 2003, having "died" on December 2, 2002.

Classmates, I was blessed. I got up after my first "heart incident," as one of two American men do not. Our classmate, my University of Texas at Austin colleague, Bob Crunden did not. Never sick a day, he fell in the shower and may have been dead before he hit the tiles.

I fell on a tennis court at the start of Monday morning doubles last December. I'm told I looked dead: face frozen, eyes open and motionless. After 30 seconds my face relaxed, my eyes blinked. My tennis chums helped me up, walked me about, and asked the Zip Code questions trainers ask groggy football players. I knew my name and little else.

I came to consciousness half an hour later, sitting on a bench with an EMS man staring in my face. "He's awake," I heard a friend say. "Are you okay, Bill?" They told me my feet had gotten tangled as I went back for a lob and I hit my head on the asphalt court.

The EMS team had already run tests. "We didn't find anything wrong," the man said. "You got a little blood on your head there where you fell. You can come with us to the emergency room or go right now to your doctor."

My friends drove me and my car to the doctor. I shooed them away, saw a nice physician's assistant who told me to get an MRI of my head. I told her my daughter was coming to drive me, and then drove myself (bad idea) to have the MRI.

After, I had lunch at a cafe. I felt thirsty and lifted my cup to go and refill it. Next thing I knew, I was looking up at a squatting EMS man looking hard at me. A woman said, "He started to stand and just went rigid." The EMS man said, "Have you been taking drugs? Are you diabetic?" They loaded me on a gurney and rolled me between the tables. "We're going to take you to St. David's. They've got a good nerve doctor. Okay?"

In the EMS truck, they started another test. Next thing I knew, I was being wheeled into a hospital. Not St. David's — Brackenridge, the city hospital where the ER is better because it handles knife fights. I kept blacking out and waking up to nurses with worried faces. "Do you have next of kin in town?" said one. "I think you should call them." "She thinks I'm going to die," I thought. I thought that crazy. Somebody was going to explain what was happening.

But I must have feared death because when my daughter appeared, the first thing I said was, "Moll, I've been a terrible father." Talking with her and my former wife, Jane, I felt my body clammy and shivering, and thought, "Since I'm know what I feel when I faint, I'll just avoid feeling it." Immediately, Molly and Jane saw me die — for 35 seconds by the monitoring machine.

I had 12-16 cardiac arrests, and every time either my heart started itself, as on the tennis court and at the restaurant, or a nurse or a wooden paddle attached to a monitor gave my chest a thump. I was finally persuaded I have "sick sinus syndrome" — the sinus node is the heart's main pacemaker and sometimes, for reasons unknown, its cells get tired of sparking — and had a mechanical pacemaker implanted.

But maybe I don't have sick sinus — there's no test and it's quite rare, not mentioned (then at least) on WebMD. Or maybe I don't only have sick sinus. According to the cardiac nurses who later gave me check-ups, I'm may be one of the usually tall and slender types who, made to stand for 30 minutes in a warm place, faint (remember the British POW who falls from the line-up in Bridge on the River Kwai?). Such people suffer from vasovagal syncope (a.k.a. neurocardiogenic syncope — "syncope" means swoon), a much more common affliction than sick sinus. When their water level is low, their vagus nerve misbehaves, causes blood pressure to drop, heart rate to slow, less oxygen to get to the brain -- blackout.

My manmade (Minnesota-made) pacemaker cures both vasovagal and sick sinus syncopes and has pushed me back into an abundant life. But a word of advice, classmates. You may be able to avoid a pacemaker if you drink lots of water and, unless your blood pressure is high, eat salt.

Shahn & Shahn

2008-05-06T15:57:00.010-04:00

[Afterimage, February 1976, review of Ben Shahn, Photographer: An Album from the Thirties, edited, with an introduction by Margaret R. Weiss, Da Capo Press/82 plates/$9.95 (hb), and The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn, edited by David Pratt, Harvard University Press/147 pp./$15.00 (hb)]

There are now two collections of Ben Shahn photographs: you have a choice.

Ben Shahn, Photographer (1973), a slate-colored book with endpapers of surpassing ugliness, has 82 pictures adequately reproduced on shiny pages. The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn (December 1975) has an off-white linen cover and 110 pictures adequately reproduced on tannish matte paper. All the photos in Ben Shahn, Photographer are from Shahn's work for the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1938. Eighty-four of the pictures in The Photographic Eye are from his FSA work; the rest he made during the early thirties in New York City and a New York state reformatory. Twenty-six pictures appear in both books, but each book has excellent pictures that aren't in the other, The Photographic Eye having more of them.

The Photographic Eye has a better preface (by David Pratt) and an affecting, brief recollection of Shahn by Archibald MacLeish. It also has a much better binding: signatures stitched and glued in the old durable way. The middle pages of my two-year-old copy of Ben Shahn, Photographer, which is bound like a paperback, unsignatured, unstitched, are already falling away from their glue.

There are good reasons why several publishers would come out with books of Shahn's photographs. He was an important painter and graphic artist, and had a following even among people usually indifferent to art (he did covers for TIME magazine, after all). His photos have been unknown, are readily available for reproduction (free of copyright), and frequently echo the work of the photographers of proven marketability who greatly influenced him, Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

And there is another reason, a reason so obvious no one mentions it. Much of Shahn's photography of the 1930s resembles photography now being done. Not in content--in technique. Shahn is worth looking at because he is the granddaddy of the grab-shooters of the Age of Aquarius: the first American master of 35mm.

To see this best you need Ben Shahn, Photographer. Too many of Shahn's pictures in The Photographic Eye are too successful, too discreet, and the book's slightly sepia tone makes his work look as dated as rotogravure. Ben Shahn, Photographer has more crummy pictures--off-focus, ill-framed (half-heads gone, arms gone), disorientedly foreshortened, blurred and grimy with underlighting. Reproduced here in dingy black and white on slippery paper, these pictures look as though they might have been done last week by a ferocious disciple of Robert Frank. It is hard to believe that anyone in the 1930s other than Shahn saw these as photographs and not mere refuse from the "candid camera," as 35mm was then called.

It may be that Shahn himself didn't consider them photographs. They may have been just intriguing graphic possibilities. Unlike Evans and Cartier-Bresson (and, later, Frank) he didn't have a photographic vision to put across; The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn is a misleading title: he had more than one eye. He would sometimes take pictures like Evans', his Leica mimicking a large-format camera (note how Shahn characteristically sneaks a couple of strollers into an Evans picture: page 22 in The Photographic Eye), and he would sometimes be as compositional and poetic as Cartier-Bresson (see the Circleville, Ohio, railway station in both books).

But often his work was unlike either man's. Shahn's fundamental interest in photography was experimental: he wanted to see what it would let him see. Photography was a subsidiary concern to him--subsidiary to painting and even more subsidiary to life. And because it was, he had sufficient contempt for the medium to allow him to do, we now see, astonishingly new things with it.

Being Seen

2008-03-18T23:35:00.012-03:00

I'm an Adam Gopnik fan, and though his January 28th New Yorker bright on Nicholas Sarkozy's love life didn't show him at his free-wheeling, insightful best, it did mention a cover of France's le nouvel observateur I wanted to see. And here it is.

You may not recognize the obscured face or bare fanny, but as the red letters say, it's Simone de Beauvoir. She was photographed in 1950 in Chicago, where she was having a tryst with the slum-living and -writing novelist Nelson Algren. She later wrote ecstatically of the romance and dedicated a book to him. Algren made light of the affair. "So I slept with her," he told his friends. "I showed her around Chicago," he told Paris Review interviewers in 1955. "I showed her the electric chair and everything." In his Walk on the Wild Side (1956), he famously wrote, "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

Though I've read almost nothing by de Beauvoir, I bet she would love appearing in this photo on the cover of a leading French magazine and celebrating her hundred birthday, January 9, 2008, in her birthday suit. First, because the photo shows a de Beauvoir that those of us who remember her don't, can't, remember. This is Simone at 42, still a delectable nymph. Gopkin says, "It's quite a photograph. (It's quite a rear)," as though the rear were big; but no! he's not seeing the rear that's here but rather the rear he imagines from pictures he's seen of de Beauvoir grown old and matronly. The rear that's here could grace a Balanchine dancer. And like a Balanchine dancer's, de Beauvoir's torso is poignantly thin. One wants her to turn from the mirror and run to us for comfort and affection.

Second, de Beauvoir is here presenting herself as she wanted--or was willing--to be seen. (The picture wasn't taken by Algren but by a photographer friend, Art Shay, and was obviously set up.) The Second Sex (1949) had made her famous, and its argument that men belittle women when they see them as sex objects didn't take an Einstein to understand, an Algren would do. Still, de Beauvoir isn't ashamed of being a sex object; on the contrary, she revels in it. Later, she who championed women's equality with men would several times a day put aside whatever she was doing to do the bidding (run to the pharmacy to get cough medicine) of her impossible, life-long love, Jean-Paul Sartre. When a biographer asked de Beauvoir about the contradiction between what she said and what she did, she said, "Real life is messy. I wrote a feminist statement, and then I went on to live my life as I wanted."

Finally, I suspect de Beauvoir would love presenting herself thus because she knew doing so was something many of us--common people, not just artists and exhibitionists--would like to do but lack the guts. I think we would liked to be memorialized naked in a picture or video when we felt our body was beautiful, at the magic age of 27, say, though 42 would do and even later. It's partly the wish to keep something "permanent" of our body from the ongoing train wreck of time. John Wayne said he found it hard to watch the movies he'd made in his 40's because he was so beautiful then; needless to say, he was happy for others to watch them. It's also partly the wish to be known, to be entirely visible yet unashamed. To say, "It's me, this. I'm the person in clothes who you know, and I'm all the things I say and do. But I'm this too. And it's okay. I'm not afraid to be naked to you, and I hope you're not offended." Annie Leibovitz's photographic session with writer Robert Penn Warren, then 75, hadn't gone well, and both of them must have felt it, because, as Leibovitz was driving away, she saw Warren, in an upstairs window, meaning to be seen, taking off his shirt. She went inside and photographed him naked to the waist.

Merle Miller's Coming Out

2007-09-10T17:39:00.007-04:00

The writer Merle Miller was born, in 1919, in Marshalltown, Iowa, and grew up knowing something was wrong with him. From third grade on, the boys called him sissy and worse. He had three friends, all “aliens” like him: a Jewish boy, a girl in a wheelchair, and a woman with a clubfoot who sold tickets at the movies.

He was a great reader, and “read about sensitive boys, odd boys, boys who were lonely and misunderstood, boys who really didn’t care all that much for baseball, boys who were teased by their classmates,” but no boy who was “tortured by the strange fantasies that tore at me every time, for instance, my mother insisted I go to the ‘Y’ to learn to swim. They swam nude at the ‘Y,’ and I never went. Lead me not into temptation.” Then,

I was fourteen when I happened on book called Winesburg, Ohio. I don’t know how. Maybe it was recommended by the librarian, a kind and knowing woman with the happy name of Alice Story. Anyway, there at last, in a story called “Hands,” were the words I had been looking for. I was not the only sissy in the world:

Adolph Myers was meant to be a teacher . . . In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.

Sherwood Anderson’s story ended unhappily. Of course. How else could it end?

And then the tragedy. A half-witted boy of the school becomes enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unthinkable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts.

I must have read “Hands” more than any story before or since. I can still quote it from beginning to end:

They had intended to hang the schoolmaster, but something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape. As he ran into the darkness, they repented of their weakness and ran after him, swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at the figure that screamed and ran faster into the darkness.

Winesburg was published in 1919, and one of the terrifying things is that the people in any town in the United States, quite likely any city, too, would react very much the same way today, wouldn’t they?

I’ve just quoted from Miller’s landmark article, “What It Means to be a Homosexual.” The article was commissioned by and appeared in The New York Times Magazine in January 1971, a year and a half after the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28, 1969, during which the patrons of a gay bar in New York City’s West Village fought back against police trying to arrest them. Miller was the first mainstream American writer-journalist to declare his homosexuality. (His article, with an afterword, appears in his book On Being Different: What It Means to be a Homosexual [1971].)

In 1977 he was in Austin, Texas, working on a magazine article, and my boss, Elspeth Rostow, introduced me to him. Miller was a grinning, square-faced, bespeckled man, rather like Harry Truman, the subject of his biggest bestseller, Plain Speaking (1974). We made affable small talk. Then, perhaps challenged by the presence of someone who had shown so much courage, I mentioned his Times article and said I’d been touched at his naming the woman who led him to Anderson’s story.

“I knew she was dead,” he said. “They couldn’t hurt her.”

How to Grade and Improve Student Writing

2007-09-09T23:20:00.004-04:00

Everybody will give you advice on how to write—no one does on how to grade. I graded student papers for 40 years and finally found a method that felt right to me. Grading this way made me a better composition teacher and my students and me happier people. Since “writing across the curriculum” is pushing many professors into teaching writing, I thought I’d tell my college and university colleagues what I did, in the hope that you can adapt some part of it to your circumstances.

First, I relieved my students of much of the pressure to perform by saying they could revise their papers as often as they wanted and only their highest grade would count. None of this nonsense of “You get one shot. If it’s off-target, too bad.” All published writing is edited, I said—often several times through several revisions. I told my students, “In this course you have the same privilege professional writers do.”

Second, to relax my students even more, I demystified the grading process by admitting that the grades I gave were subjective—my opinion of a particular version of a particular paper. My grade, I said, was exactly like the 7, 9, 4, 10, 6 that judges hold up after an Olympic dive or a figure-skating or gymnastics performance.

I told them a wise Roman once said “In matters of taste, discussion is futile” and thus blocked their begging for higher grades. “I’m not saying my opinion about your paper is right,” I said. “I would never claim that. We don’t know what God thinks good writing is. God hasn’t told us. Even if God had, I don’t think that would stop our liking what we like.

“My opinion is simply my opinion. That’s all I’m paid for: to tell you what I truly, cross-my-heart believe. You’ll soon learn my opinions about writing, and you’ll decide what you think of them. This is a two-way street: teachers judge what students do, and students judge the teacher.

“Now, notice I’ve said teachers judge what students do. We don’t judge students—or we shouldn’t. I try my best not to. I judge the high dive or skating dance you do at a particular time, in a particular paper; and I hold up a card reading A, B, C, whatever. The grade I give has nothing to do with the respect and affection I have for you as a person.

“Why do I have the right to judge what you do? Because the college judges that I have the credentials to do it. How did I get the credentials? I did just what you’re doing: I wrote papers that teachers put grades on. I did this in college and grad school, and when I’d proved to enough teachers that I could write to their satisfaction, I was allowed to write a dissertation. When I finished that to my professors’ satisfaction, I was awarded the doctorate, which is the highest credential in my field.

“This college’s assumption is that by doing all that writing and having it critiqued by teachers I have absorbed the standards of the tribe, so that when I comment on your papers I’ll be saying things other humanities teachers would say, because the subjectivity of my opinions has been sanded down by exposure to the opinions of my elders.

“And maybe this happened. If you gave a paper to me and other teachers in my department, I think we’d probably have many of the same comments on it. But if we didn’t, I wouldn’t be hurt. Because, again, I’m not hired to tell you The Truth—in matters of taste and expression, we don’t know what The Truth is. I’m hired to tell you what I think is true.”

Third, finally, and—I like to believe—most important, I read my students’ papers aloud into a cassette tape recorder, making comments as I went, praising good observations and sentences, suggesting how poor sentences could be reworded, pointing out where the organization was weak and transitions missing (“You’re saying this in the sentence I’ve marked 1 and this in the sentence I’ve marked 2, but you don’t tell us the relation between 1 and 2”), and offering ideas to fix the problems I found.

In short, where I believed my students’ papers could be improved, I collaborated in revising them. I returned the papers and tapes to students and invited them to listen to my comments with all possible patience and charity; talk to me about anything they didn’t understand or seriously disagreed with; and then, if I’d given a grade of lower than A-, revise for a higher grade using and improving on the suggestions I made on the tape.

I believe that my method draws on what is good about the Oxbridge tutorial system. At the elite British universities, students each week read their papers aloud for their dons. Under such scrutiny, writers learn to write clearly and simply because they see their readers’ reaction in their faces. So too, in my system, students can hear when the reader is pleased, puzzled, fascinated, moved, totally at sea.

More important, the students hear that the teacher wants to help them. We all know what happens when students get back papers covered in red ink. They’re affronted, frightened, discouraged. Spoken comments can have a gentle, upbeat, we’re-all-in-this-together tone (“Look how much better the sentence is with the extra words taken out!”). The student gets a tutorial without needing the courage to seek help from the teacher.

To be sure, not all students papers can be improved, because some, to my eyes, don’t say anything of consequence. As I explained in my course syllabus, “If I judge a paper's content to be weak, merely improving its form will generally not raise the grade much; really to be improved, the paper will need to say something else.” The student has to write a different paper. I delivered this opinion, like all others, in a friendly and non-judgmental tone.

I found that most students could find something useful to say, especially if encouraged, as my students were, to write about things—King Lear’s fathering, Edward Weston’s vegetables, crosstown bus behavior—from their own experience and point of view. My syllabus said, “There is no reason for a diligent student not to get a good grade in the course,” and all students willing to rewrite their papers, sometimes three or more times, got an A or A-. They deserved to: they had written a paper that, to my eyes, looked like A work (as it should since I helped write it).

Did my students write better after my course? I like to think so. A few are kind enough to come back and tell me they do. The students left the class having internalized some of my opinions—above all, “use simple diction” and “make each sentence join to the one before it”—whether or not they choose to follow them later.

•

I’ve roughed out my plan. Now let me answer some of your objections and questions.

1) Everybody can get a good grade!

Yes, if they have something to say, competent writing skills, and a willingness to work. I’ve taught my students what I had to teach about writing, and they have shown they understand by writing papers that strike me as good. I’m not worried about giving high grades because I remember Maria Montessori said “A teacher is to teach, not to judge,” and by that standard I have done my job.

2) Some students have to work much harder than others!

True. I hope they learn more, too.

3) The process takes too much of the teacher’s time!

This depends. If you’re a conscientious composition critic and write many comments on papers with a general comment paragraph at the end (as I used to do), my method takes less time, because talking is so much quicker than writing. Talking is so fast, in fact, that you make many more comments and suggested revisions on papers that need them than you would in writing. The final comment at the end of the paper is quickly done, because it takes off from what you’ve been saying all along (“As I’ve said, this paper has a very interesting point to make but makes it less forcefully than it can. There is too much vague abstraction, which I’ve pointed out and tried to rectify”).

Further, if a paper was longer than six or seven double-spaced pages, I would often stop reading every word aloud, put the tape on pause, and start it up again when I had something to say (“Lisa, I’m on page 9 where I’ve made the asterisk”). Similarly, if a paper is a revision of a paper that was fairly good to begin with (a B), I didn’t read it aloud until I got to things I wanted to comment on.

Now, it is true that with students who write well you spend time reading papers aloud and making few if any negative comments—but what’s wrong with that? The good students are rewarded by hearing how smoothly their papers read and by your praise. We composition teachers typically don’t spend enough time on the good students: here’s a way to start.

4) Did you read a paper over before reading it aloud on tape?

No. I gave students my first-blush, stammering, delighted, confused reaction to their papers.

5) Who provides the tapes?

The students. They also provide an 8-by-11 envelope to hold the papers and tapes they submit. Because students often forget to buy a tape, I allowed them to hand in a dollar for a tape I supplied (I bought tapes for less than a dollar). I told students that if they preferred me not to read their papers to them on a tape, I would give their papers a written comment at the end and a grade. In a decade only one student chose this option.

6) Does this method make grading fun?

No and yes. I still looked at a pile of papers with dread and began each paper with reluctance. But as soon as I started reading I found something to interest or disappoint me, something I wanted to talk to its writer about—which I immediately did. And by the second page, unless the paper was going to take huge amounts of revisions, I was caught up in the topic and once again delighted about the career I chose in my salad days.

Welcome for New American Studies Grad Students

2007-08-22T22:23:00.001-04:00

August 23, 2007

If you are like most entering classes of American Studies graduate students, you are filled with people who aren’t sure they want to be here. Aren’t sure they want to be in graduate school. Think they could do more good teaching high school, doing government work, being a reporter or adman or at-risk counselor or counter-terrorist. Really want to make movies, play music, sing, paint, act.

This is one of the things that’s great about American Studies: people bring so many hidden wishes to it.

I tell you not to give up your hidden wishes. Clever as you are, you should be able to weave them into your American Studies work. Further, if you find that American Studies isn’t quite—or isn’t at all—what you want and fall by the wayside before completing the Ph.D., as one in two of you will or at least used to do, you can take American Studies with you into the next wish you try: as our dropouts, MAs, and ABDs have taken it into (I’m citing real people—names available on request) the Foreign Service, writing and singing folk songs, high school teaching in Missouri and San Antonio, bestselling men’s movement-personal growth-drug and alcohol recovery guruing, writing wine criticism for the New York Times, book criticism for the Boston Globe (she won a Pulitzer Prize), running a political polling company or starting an Austin high-tech spin-off that does something I don’t understand involving a phone-bank and the internet.

You’re here now—just as Ram Dass tells you to be—and I trust you’ll give your best attention to your American Studies’ work. But don’t be afraid to listen to your hidden wishes because, much though we love what we’re going to teach you, we, as good Americans as well as American Studies faculty, know that what matters is you, your happiness, which we encourage you to pursue now with us, and always.

A Visit to San Alberto Hurtado

2007-06-23T16:52:00.001-04:00

Today, Saturday June 23, 2007, Irene and I made the cross-city trek to visit the tomb of Chile's 20th-century saint, the Jesuit Padre Hurtado. His caring for the street kids of Santiago grew into Chile's largest charity, el Hogar de Cristo (Christ's Home), and left behind a motto now found on bumper stickers, "Contento, Señor, contento." He also left behind a more challenging observation: "It's good not to harm anybody. It's bad to do nobody good."

In the chapel beside his tomb, looking at the cross, I thought that maybe the reason why I've never been drawn to Jesus (to Christ? I'm so uninstructed that I don't know which is correct) is that I see no reason why we humans should think his suffering special. Thousands of people were crucified before him; thousands after. Presumably his life was no worse than the lives millions of others have lived and will live.

This made me think that maybe in thinking about him I--to speak for no one else--think about my own suffering, which is to say my life, and realize not so much that my suffering has been small but rather that I've made little of value from it.

Christ thus becomes my mocker, not my brother. If he finds something of value in me, it's because his standards are low.

Mark Rothko and Greek Temples

2007-05-14T17:56:00.000-04:00

Classic Mark Rothko, "White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)," 1950

Our family friends Jack and Betty Fischer and their daughters traveled to Europe in the mid 1950s by ship, as was still the customary way. On board they befriended Mark Rothko and his family and were delighted to learn that he was a painter. In fact, Rothko was beginning to enjoy the financial consequences of an increasing fame, whence the money to make the trip.

After landing in Naples, the Fischers and Rothkos visited the magnificent Greek temples at Paestum. The Fischers' younger daughter, Sarah, much taken with their beauty, said, "Mr. Rothko, why don't you paint Greek temples?"

"I think maybe that's what I've been doing all my life," Rothko said. "Without knowing it."

Dorothy Parker, To Whom We Owe So Much

2007-05-08T20:26:00.000-04:00

Today’s politically correct anthologies of American literature are filled with rediscovered writing by rediscovered women and ethnic minority writers. Their writing is sometimes as interesting as well-known writing by well-known writers, but it’s nonsense to pretend that, in general, it is as culturally important. You can tell me that Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Rolla Lynn Riggs, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, who all have work in the p.c. Heath Anthology of American Literature, are as central to understanding the 1920s as Dorothy Parker, but I won’t believe you.

I use the old-fashioned Norton Anthology of American Literature because, unlike the Heath, it includes Parker. Norton gives her only two and one-third pages and her overdone story “The Waltz,” but at least they say the right things about Parker and the 1920s:

This was the decade of “flaming youth,” the beginning of the “youth culture” that still characterizes American society. All over America, the activities of trend-setting and privileged young people were considered newsworthy. Dorothy Parker, a talented writer of wit and charm [question: are there untalented writers of wit and charm?], was among those whose sayings and doings were recorded in the gossip columns of New York newspapers and repeated around the country.

The anthology mentions that wisecracking suddenly came out of the closet and into newsprint and that “nobody was more skilled at it than Parker,” but it doesn’t print any of her wisecracks, nor her one immortal poem: “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” Here are some of Parker’s wisecracks:

He’s a writer for the ages -- four to eight.

One more drink and I’d have been under the host.

[Of the young actress Katharine Hepburn]
She ran the whole gamut of her emotions from A to B, and put some distance between herself and a more experience colleague lest she catch acting from her.

If all the girls at the Yale Prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

[Her contribution to the Algonquin Roundtable’s “Most Unlikely Headline” contest]
“POPE ELOPES”

If you’ve got to be raped, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

[Scene: two women meet before a door. The women: Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous, witty writer-politician wife of Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc.]
Luce (with a smile, gesturing for Parker to precede her): Age before Beauty.
Parker (stepping forward): Pearls before swine.

[On hearing that Miss Luce was kind to her inferiors]
And where does she find them?

Parker was a drunk and a perfectionist, which meant that her writing, unlike her fast mouth, pressed against deadlines. Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker (1925---), sometimes sent a copyboy round to her apartment to get what she’d written, superbly finished or not. One mid-day the copyboy pounded on Parker’s door for a long time before her hoarse voice came from within: “Tell Ross I’m too fucking busy. And vice-versa.”

Though not a twenties feminist in her personal life, Parker the public figure opened doors for women to be as funny and as raunchy as men. But at least once, we now know, one of her immortal wisecracks was topped by something even better, though then unprintable. The wits at the Algonquin Roundtable were told one lunchtime that President Calvin Coolidge had just died. "How can they tell?" Parker blurted out.

"He had an erection," said humorist Robert Benchley, Parker's sometime lover. Benchley’s comment passed down through his family and was only published in 1987.

Elqui Valley*

2007-05-07T19:19:00.005-04:00

Elqui Valley, Chile's New Age tourist mecca (think Taos, Tibet, Machu Pichu, Ayres Rock, the Pyramids), is 370 miles north of Santiago and 40 - 80 miles east of the beach city of La Serena. It begins in the little town of El Molle and runs along the Elqui River--which, like most rivers, is the result of several rivers coming together. The valley is known for its rugged mountains and clear desert air, both of which have prompted international astronomical organizations to set up telescopes here and to the north. In Chile, the valley is famous both as the home of Nobel Prize winning poet Gabriel Mistral, who is buried in Montegrande and memorialized in a museum in the valley's only city, Vicuña, where she was born, and as the home of pisco, a brandy distilled from grapes and flavored in many different ways.

One mid-fall May weekend, Irene and I visited the valley with Brooke Gregory, our physicist-friend who works in La Serena for the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, whose telescopes, along with those of the Gemini and SOAR observatories, are in the valley. Here we pilgrims are--Bill, Brooke, and Irene--at breakfast in the Hotel Galpón, a short walk from Pisco Elqui.

Elqui Valley boasts that it gets 340 sunny days a year. Alas, our Saturday was overcast. This is what the mountain in front of the hotel looked like.

In back of the hotel, there's a swimming pool--the water now far too cold for swimming--and a mountain with wine grapes planted half way up the side.

Grapes are the Elqui Valley's lifeblood; they are planted wherever they can be and watered by drip-irrigation. The fabric fences are windbreaks.

Montegrande, six kilometers from our hotel, has had its church recently restored thanks to the Luksic family, who own much of the valley and have greatly increased its prosperity. The family is also behind the initiative to build environmentally ruinous dams in southern Chile.

The church has a colonial baroque interior, but what I found more interesting was the staircase spiraling up to the choir loft. Perhaps we corkscrew our way into heaven.

Mistral, who was a schoolgirl in Montegrande, studying as well as living with her teacher, her older sister, Emelina, directed that she be buried in the town, and so she is, on a hill overlooking nearby fields. Her shrine has a bust of her romanticized to look like Arthur Rubinstein.

Gabriel died in 1957 in Hempstead, Long Island. Recently reburied with her in the tomb is her nephew and adopted son, Juan Miguel, always known as Yin Yin, who died, a suicide, age 17, in Brazil in 1943. To me, more lovely than the tomb itself is the rock wall in front of it, which knocks off the work of Joaquin Torres Garcia (see his painting in my article on him).

Having paid our respects to the art of poetry, we drove up the Cochiguaz road, looking for hippie painters and potters and jewelers, most of whom had in fact moved on when the end of summer took the tourists away. We walked up a lane with handmade signs promising "art" and crossed a creek. I stopped to look upstream

and downstream

The lane gave us the option of following a handsome horse to the stream we'd just crossed, which here was called the Rio Magico, or pressing on still further toward "art," whose sign pointed to the right; we chose right. (This photo is by Brooke.)

What we found, after a 20-minute walk, was the home of a remarkable woman painter, who built it herself and was now looking to sell it to move to Santiago and be near her 14-year-old daughter, who'd left because she wants to be a musician, needs advanced training, and had had enough isolation. The sign on the house says "Arte" in bright letters.

Interesting woman, interesting history; unfortunately we didn't care much for her paintings. Farther down the Cochiguaz road we came to the Casa de Agua, where Brooke's niece, who also had an interesting history, worked one summer. The remarkable thing at this resort was the pool the river makes for swimming. Please make your imagination quadruple the pool you see here (triple the boulder, too). The rope hangs across the pool for swimmers to grab to keep from going downstream, which wouldn't be dangerous but would be slippery and rocky walking back from.

Exhausted from our outing, we lunched in Paihuano at the bistrot Brooke is standing in front of. The sky looked like it might rain, and a few drops fell.

In the town square, as in maybe 80 percent of Chilean towns, there is a statue to one of the nation's heroes--collectively, they are referred to as "the glorious ones"--in the War of the Pacific (1879-84). He is Capt. Arturo Prat, who with a handful of sailors leapt from his sinking wooden ship, the Esmeralda, onto the Peruvian ironclad that had rammed it, crying out "Let's board them, boys!" and was quickly killed. Chile won the war and took territory away from Peru and Bolivia, which lost its access to the sea. The training ship on which Chilean naval cadets now travel the world to earn their stripes is called the Esmeralda also, and the navy keeps a memorial buoy floating where the first Esmeralda sank. As represented here, Prat is the spitting image of Nettie's handsome father.

At some point in our outing--and neither Irene nor I can remember when or, even more amazing, where--darling Brooke took this picture of us that makes us look younger than we have in years. A miraculous valley indeed!

(Brooke tells us the picture was taken in Montegrande.)

•

The next day, Sunday, the sun came out full blast, and the world looked quite different. Here's the Hotel Galpón pool, for example.

We drove to Pisco Elqui, revisited its square, admiring the facade of its renovated church.

We revisited Pisco Elqui's most famous hotel, the Refugio Misterios de Elqui, which we'd eaten at that Friday night. I took no pictures but I encourage you to see the ones their website shows, which are accompanied by music (http://www.misteriosdeelqui.cl/). Brooke took this picture of bougainvilla growing near the pool.

And we all relished the view up the Rio Claro Valley.

This valley we then drove up. We stopped at the artisanal village at Horcón, which isn't on the tourist map that begins this post (sorry). The tourist season being over, only four artists were showing their wares; we bought from three of them. The village's stage caught my attention; I was glad not to have to think up something to do on it.

For tourists, unless they have special permission, the road ends in Alcohuaz. Here, we came across a new resort, the Frontier. To look at its cabins and waterfront, Irene and Brooke made the long walk down to the river. On their return they rested.

I had neglected to bring my antidepressants on our weekend outing, and was feeling light-headed and glum. So while they walked down to the river, I rested--then wondered why they were taking so long. I looked for something beautiful to record and found it in the Frontier's restaurant trellis with a puffball cloud floating past.

Then, after lunch, when we got to the car to start the drive to the airport, I realized a better photo had been there all along, and I'd missed it.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr. (1924-2006)

2007-05-02T22:45:00.000-04:00

Bill Coffin's mug shots after his arrest for civil disobedience in Montgomery, Ala., May 25, 1961.

Bill Coffin and I came to Yale in fall 1958, he as chaplain and I as freshman. At the ceremony to welcome my class (1000 males—coeducation at Yale, though only a decade off, was unthinkable), he stood out from all the other academics in dark blue robes because of his straight-shouldered leanness, youth (33), good looks, and smile. I had no idea who he was but I felt like smiling back. He was introduced and gave the invocation. My mother, in the balcony and more sensitive to eloquence than I, thought his prayer the best thing said all morning. “There wasn’t anything specifically Christian about it,” she said. “It was about courage and facing up to challenges.”

Later that semester, Coffin spoke to the 120 boys in the freshman program I was in. He wore a dark gray suit, white shirt, and tie. I was again impressed by his muscularity and the ease with which he vaulted up to the stage. He made a joke about the vault, saying he was getting too old to do it. “I was in sports car last week,” he said. “Hardly could get in. Saw what it was like to return to the womb.” I remember nothing else he said, but I do remember thinking that he used his black-framed glasses and his occasional slurring of words to offset the overwhelming impression he gave of physical strength and beauty.

Still later that fall, he had an evening Q&A with our program. By then I would have heard that, before Yale, he had been chaplain at Williams College for a year and that the president had been glad for him move on because Coffin had attacked as undemocratic the College’s all-powerful fraternity system. Amazingly to me now, none of us boys asked Coffin about his past. I never heard him speak of his infantry service and spy work in World War II or his three years with the CIA at the start of the Cold War. I remember that he said of Yale “You’re in a place where people ask ‘What do I need to know to be certain?’ and would never think of asking ‘What shall I do to be saved?’” And later: “Look, if you guys want to go out and lay every woman you can, that’s fine,” though he was telling us there was a better way to live. I was amazed he would permit us such liberty.

In 1959 or ’60 or ’61 I learned that Coffin and some of the boys gathered around him in the campus chapel, Battell Hall, were going as “Freedom Riders” to border states like Maryland and further south. They put their bodies on the line, nonviolently, to try to integrate lunch counters, restaurants, and hotels that didn’t serve Negroes. As a well-brought-up northern liberal, I opposed segregation, but I don’t think it occurred to me to join Coffin. If it did, I rejected the idea out of cowardice, not wanting to be arrested (Coffin was three times) or beaten up by the lunatics, as I thought of them, down south.

At the end of my undergraduate years I went to see Coffin during his open office hours. I was now grown up, 22, married, and I found life to be just as I had expected: desperate, sad, and boring. I was prepared for this by my temperament and, certainly no less, by the literature classes I'd taken. Sophocles and Shakespeare, Melville and Chekhov—all the greats demonstrate that suffering is inescapable, there being no forgiveness from the responsibility of fate and time. Students more sensible than I shrugged off this knowledge as soon as they left the classroom. I believed it. I felt it deep within me.

Not only did literature teach me that life was tragic, it taught me how to respond to tragedy. With stoicism. With unembittered resignation. I was so good at doing this I got the idea that perhaps I should go into religion. Though he didn't say so, Coffin was annoyed that I, not a member of his church, of any church, was bothering him with my problems. Didn't I know he had important things to do? He folded into a soft chair across the room and listened with impatience while I wondered aloud whether I was religious enough to go to divinity school. I said—and how long it took me to get it out—that, though I wasn't at all sure I believed in God, I knew I was looking for Him. "Have you ever thought that maybe God is looking for you?" Coffin said.

I was taken aback. I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to seem swell-headed (was I important enough for God to look for?) or too humble. It struck me as a good idea for God to be on the lookout for people since otherwise, if God really tried to hide, no one was going to find Him. "I don't know," I said. "That hadn't occurred to me. It's a nice idea." It was Karl Barth's idea, but I didn't know this.

I remember another thing from our interview. Coffin was talking about one's vocation when he said, with great feeling, "What we hope to avoid is being in the position of the man who, on his wedding night, suddenly realizes he married the wrong woman." "My God!" I thought, "he knows!" Then, "But he can't."

When I returned to Yale for graduate school in 1968, Coffin was nationally famous for leading the fight against our war in Vietnam. With Dr. Spock—the Dr. Spock—he had been convicted of conspiring to counsel young men to avoid to draft. In 1970, their convictions were overturned on appeal, and the NYT ran a front-page photo of Coffin just after he got the news while playing tennis. He was smiling, sweating, and holding a racket. By then he had divorced his first wife, the mother of his three children, and announced his engagement to his second in a curious press release that mentioned her first husband’s success as head of Encyclopedia Britannica sales in Japan.

I next encountered Coffin in his 1977 memoir, Once to Every Man, which I read to find out what happened to that first marriage, because his wife had been the pianist Artur Rubinstein’s gorgeous daughter Eva, who played Anne Frank’s sister in the original Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Coffin didn’t discuss their problems but he did say something that helped me justify to myself my later getting a divorce. He said, though not in these words, that he had come to realize that he wasn’t as special as he’d hoped—indeed, wasn’t special at all. If other people sometimes needed to divorce, there was no reason for him to think he would escape.

In 2002, I saw Coffin when he officiated at the memorial service for his friend R.W.B. Lewis, the Yale professor who’d been my mentor. Coffin was suffering the heart problems that killed him, his hair was white, and he walked with a cane in one hand and with his third wife holding his other arm. But his welcoming smile was unchanged. In the service he spoke about why death was necessary, giving several reasons. The one I remember was environmental: we had to make room in the world for others. If no one died, then “no Aaron Copland. No Dick Lewis. No you. No me.” He was smiling.

I know I am not the only Yalie between age 50 and 65 for whom his death comes as a reproof. Coffin lived boldly, involving himself in the great public questions of his day—civil rights, Viet Nam, nuclear-war planning. The world could easily have done without me. It was damn lucky to have him.

Do Like I Say, Said E.B. White

2007-05-02T13:18:00.002-04:00

“More Good News for Your Heart” says the headline on the back of a Cheerios box. (Cheerios have oats, and oat fiber, studies have found, reduces bad cholesterol.) A joyous phrase, “good news for your heart”--one bright enough for a Rodgers & Hart song (e.g., “My heart stood still”; “The heart is quicker than the eye”; “If my heart gets in your hair . . .”).

A couple of generations ago, the essayist and children's book writer E.B. White was shocked, shocked, at advertising’s degradation of language (his bete noire: “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should”). But language is always being degraded, and being revived thanks to someone’s imaginative energy. Like the Cheerios copywriter’s.

Or, need I say, like White’s. His college composition teacher, William Strunk, Jr., had written a grammar book, The Elements of Style, that was long out of print. In 1959, White revised and published it, modestly remarking, “Longer, lower textbooks are in use in English classes nowadays, I daresay--books with upswept tail fins and automatic verbs.”

Yep, ad language. Despite his protestations, White in fact loved it, because, used ironically (and how else can an educated person use it?), it showed his cleverness and restrained his sentimentality.

Anthem of 1950s America

2007-05-02T13:14:00.000-04:00

It was common for educated liberal Americans in the 1950s to feel, as the novelist John Cheever wrote in 1959, that we were living in hell. The tragedy of life was then as much talked about as multiculturalism is today. The "tragic vision" was smuggled aboard in the New Critical ideology we learned in our college English classes. This vision fed upon the Cold War and on what we'd learned of human depravity in World War II and Korea. The vision emphasized our profound limits: said we couldn't expect to improve life much -- would fail to overcome our own failings, to say nothing of society's. All we could do was stoically keep muddling on, as we had in the war, pushing toward small, nearby, mainly private goals. At times we almost felt we were living a “long day’s journey into night,” which Eugene O’Neill play burst on the scene in 1956 and won all the prizes.

This narrow view of human possibility was set to music by Leonard Bernstein and Richard Wilbur in their failed 1956 comic operetta, Candide. At the end of the show, Candide -- having been many times seduced, swindled, and murdered -- turns up in Westphalia, where he began, and finds Cunegonde, the woman he's always loved, who herself has been raped and killed again and again. Her optimism absurdly undiminished, Cunegonde says now they can start over and make a life as harmonious and noble as their "master," the tutor Pangloss, promised them. Candide interrupts:

No, we won't "think noble," because we're not noble. We won't live in beautiful harmony, because there's no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best, and live out our lives. Dear God! that's all we can promise in truth. Marry me, Cunegonde.

And he sings the anthem of the fifties as I knew the decade:

You’ve been a fool, and so have I
But come and be my wife.
And let us try before we die
To make some sense of life.
We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow,
And make our garden grow.

Cunegonde immediately sees the wisdom of this new vision of life; she sings:

I thought the world was sugar cake
For so our master said.
But now I’ll teach my hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.

The whole chorus takes up the song, their sound so big the words blur and you have to get them from the script:

Let dreamers dream what worlds they please,
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

And now the chorus overwhelms the orchestra, goes a cappella in multipart harmony for a Messiah-like climax that shakes the stage and phonograph speaker:

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow!
And make our garden grow!

In the original cast recording, you can hear a woman’s voice -- Barbara Cook’s as Cunegonde, I assume -- enter a split second early on the final “And.” I like thinking that much that was positive in my youth is symbolized by Miss Cook’s impulsiveness and energy too great to be contained.

Abortion and Capital Punishment

2007-05-02T13:10:00.000-04:00

This article will offend some readers. If you find you are offended, please stop reading it and try another article.

As you may have found from reading other articles on this website, I believe feelings have an enormous influence on what many people--not all--think about this or that issue. Such people (I am one) find it tiresome or difficult to make much of abstract ideas; instead, their emotions get caught up by concrete instances that “illustrate” an abstraction. These people arrive at many of their opinions, then, via an epiphany, which Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines as “an intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking.”

Take me and abortion. Abortion was illegal and totally disreputable in my youth (I was born in 1940). Countless tears and shotgun marriages and two great American novels--An American Tragedy (1925) and The End of the Road (1958)--turned on this fact. In the late 1960s, my former college roommate the late Joe Chubb got a small celebrity on New York nighttime radio by espousing far-out opinions, among them abortion on demand.

I thought Joe was nuts. I thought abortion--I still think it--a clumsy and cruel way to practice birth control, though I knew it was the method postwar Japan had used to keep its population from growing beyond what its landmass could support. Abortion sickened me morally and physically; like many males, I was squeamish about blood and the body’s liquids.

Then in 1971, my sister Missy’s five-year-old daughter, Julie Woods, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, fanconi anemia, in which, like leukemia, the marrow fails to produce sufficient red blood cells. Julie underwent many transfusions and spinal taps. My father wept telling me about the little girl’s courage. “She’ll do anything Missy says she has to,” he said. “She just holds out her arms to be picked up.”

The doctors said Julie would probably live until puberty, and by that time science might have a solution, because real progress was being made against leukemia. My father took early retirement, and my parents moved from the New York suburbs to Vermont to be near Missy and her family.

Julie died three months later. My sister and brother-in-law, Woody, were in shock. So was their older child, a seven-year-old boy. My mother tried to act as though nothing had happened. My father drank and raged. Because there would always be a 50 percent chance that their offspring would inherit the anemia, Missy and Woody started adoption procedures.

Several months later, though she was on the IUD, my sister got pregnant. By this time, a year before Roe-vs.-Wade, Vermont had laws to permit abortion when there was a likelihood the fetus was damaged. Missy decided to have an abortion and told my parents after a Sunday lunch. My father fainted. My sister had the abortion.

Having seen what Julie’s suffering and death did to my family, I realized I would have done a lot, certainly broken the law, to get Missy that abortion. If I wanted my sister to have an abortion when she needed one, I realized also that I had to allow other women that choice. If a woman’s reasons for aborting weren’t as good as my sister’s, well, they were good enough for the woman. Who was I to say that her suffering was less than Missy’s?

Thus I came to accept abortion because of an emotion-charged event; I had an epiphany. The Pope or Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia can say abortion is always wrong, goes against God’s law, etc., etc., and I will answer by pointing to a specific instance where I know it was right.

(Later reflection. "If we could get this issue away from the abortion professionals and their orthodoxies, we could reach a sensible solution," the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote on April 22, 2007. "Abortion would be legal, with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal except in extremely rare circumstances afterward." I would accept this with the proviso, which I image Brooks would agree to, that pregnant girls who feared to inform their parents could seek a judge's authorization to have an abortion.)

•

I am less sure how I feel about capital punishment. Innocent people can be judged guilty and executed, and that is terribly wrong. Further, those whom the state seeks to put to death are, in huge disproportion, the poor, especially poor African-Americans. This is wrong too.

But . . . another epiphany. In the aftermath of the movie Dead Man Walking (1995), PBS’s Frontline series did a program on Sister Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun who counsels Louisiana death row inmates and who wrote the autobiography on which the film was based. Sister Helen was shown being feted by those who agree with her anti-capital punishment position and applaud the fact that she and the movie have made such punishment a matter of national debate.

Frontline showed several scenes of a scared white man on death row for the rape and murder of a young woman. Evenhandedly, the program also showed two small scenes of the woman’s parents, who want the condemned man executed. The wife of the couple said of him something like, “His life isn’t much, but he gets to see his family and celebrate Christmas. I don’t see why he should. We will never see or speak with our daughter again.”

To me, that seems an unanswerable argument. If that man, being of sound mind, raped and killed that woman, he should die. Sister Helen argues that to kill him is wrong because it implies that he isn’t human and that it isn’t fair to judge him by the worst thing he did. I agree he is human but think there are some acts so bad that there is no forgiveness for them except from God.

Though human, he, by his act, has cut himself off from the human community. Humanity, acting through the impersonal instrument of the state, may choose to make his estrangement permanent--to say, in effect: “When you murdered, you forfeited the right to live among us. We the people of this state have therefore decided to cast you out.”

Five Professional Women

2007-05-02T13:03:00.000-04:00

In 1993, struggling to find something to write about, I decided that since I was so interested in women I’d write about them and their daily work in jobs that interested me. The resulting profiles are in the posts that follow. I showed them to several people in publishing, thinking I might have the start of a book that would appeal to parents looking for something vocational to inspire their daughters. The publishing people said, “Gee, interesting. I wonder who’d publish it.”

I thank the women who permitted me to interview them: a victim's advocate, a foreign correspondent, a high school English teacher, a performing arts administrator, and a movie translator. I gave each woman a copy of her profile. One said she and her colleagues didn't recognize themselves. Another said she didn't have the color (orange) clothes I described. I hope that if any reads her profile now, she is glad to have an image, however imperfect, from her past.

Had the book been published, I planned to put as epigraph what the dead Mrs. Gibbs says to the dead Emily, who wants to revisit her life, in the third act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town: "Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough."

Victims' Advocate

2007-05-02T12:49:00.000-04:00

The staff in the Austin Police Department's Victims Services joke a lot when there are no crime victims around. Mary Lieberman, a victims' advocate, asks her visitor if he wants a cup of coffee, and one of her co-workers, Jerry Usher, who arrived before Mary, says, "Hey, I've been asking for coffee for half an hour."

"Well, you can get your own," Mary says. "Bill's writing a book. On interesting work women do. Sorry, Jerry."

Mary, 41, a short, wiry, dark-haired woman, says there won't be much going on today. She'll be at her desk in her cubicle office doing follow-up calls to some of the families she's tracking.

The first family's son, 19, was just killed during a card game. Mary gets the father on the phone. She asks how they are doing. The father's answer takes several minutes.

"People say the most awful things," Mary tells him. "They don't mean to. They are so horrified by the pain you and Kathy are going through that they don't want to be near it. They sympathize, but they're scared."

The husband talks about Kathy, his wife.

"Yeah," Mary says. "That happens. That's normal. Whatever people do when something like this happens is pretty normal, because this itself isn't normal. One reason I'm calling is that you're going through legitimate grief also. You say that Kathy's taking it out on you -- and that's O.K. But I wonder who's going to take care of you?"

As she talks, Mary makes notes.

"Losing a life over a game of cards -- just senseless," she agrees.

The father talks, again at length.

"Sounds like he had a lot of charm," Mary says. "And the cockiness of youth. Sounds like he was . . . very bull-headed."

She leans to the left and bends her legs beside her on her chair.

"The knife was legal," she says. "Less than six inches in the blade. . . . It really was an outrage; you're so right."

The killer got out on bail without spending a night in jail. He is now in Dallas.

"The anger you and Kathy feel can be put to good use. You know about the support groups, For the Love of Christie and Parents of Murdered Children. They're both very good. There's also P-A-V-C, People Against Violent Crime, and they can help you and us in the fight for justice. Can I give you their number? . . . 458-2501."

The father talks.

"Justice isn't vengeance: justice is justice," Mary says. "Even if you do get satisfaction from the justice system, you're going to have to fight for it. PAVC can help."

The father talks. Mary draws intersecting boxes on a piece of scrap paper.

"When that happens, we just flood the parole board with letters. This didn't mean much until Colleen Reed's murder, but it counts heavy now."

Colleen Reed was a young woman abducted from an Austin carwash on December 29, 1991. For two months her fate wasn't known, and Central Texas TV stations played re-enactments of her abduction, and hundreds of posters with a happy picture of her sought news of her whereabouts. In March 1992, a drifter named Alva Hank Worley came forward and said that he had helped abduct Colleen Reed and been with her shortly before she was killed. Her killer, he said, was Kenneth McDuff, a paroled death row inmate convicted of killing three teenagers in 1969. Reed's body has never been found but is assumed to be buried, as was the body of a woman McDuff killed in January 1992, in a ditch alongside some rural Texas road.

"You and Kathy and Bobby's brother are going to have to make Bobby real to the judge and jury," Mary says. "I'm ready to help you and the prosecutors any way I can."

The father talks.

"That's such a guy thing," Mary says. "I don't care if you're 6'4" and weigh 250 pounds. I want you to cut out thinking you can handle this by yourself. I want you to call me. I've got lots of Kleenex and big shoulders."

The conversation over, Mary turns to her visitor. "His wife is so angry he can't dump his feelings on her, so he dumps them on me. Which is great -- just what we're here for."

Mary got into her peculiar line of work, she now realizes, because she was raped 15 years ago. "The officers who comforted me, well, I hope they've been promoted right to the top. Because they made me feel like a person again, you know, not a thing that had been trashed.

"I couldn't have done this job then. I was too hurt and scared. Later, when I was doing office work -- I'd been an English major in college and loved it without being bright enough to do anything with it -- my boss said I could do something better. And I thought of working with people and went back and got my social work degree."

Mary calls her next client. "Ginny, now that the trial's over and this slob's in jail where he's going to stay, I was wondering how you felt."

Ginny, whom Mary calls "a Supermom," was raising a family and working as a bank teller. She opened the bank at seven each morning. One day a man wearing a Richard Nixon rubber mask jumped her, put a gun to her head, and ordered her to give him the money, without setting off the alarms and without putting "the rat" in the bag. (The rat is a microchip that emits a sound audible to police radios.)

The man was so brutal and so well informed that Ginny was sure he was going to kill her. So she put the rat in the bag. He bound her with duct tape, including her mouth and nose.

An hour after the robbery, the man's house was surrounded with police cars and he was under arrest. An hour later, Ginny and the money were in Victims Services when her supervisor arrived and, without a word to Ginny, began counting the money.

Ginny was so traumatized by the robbery that she has found it difficult to leave her house. She is getting psychological counseling paid for by the State of Texas, which, under a recent law, supports crime victims in this way.

"You're doing so much better now than in the first days and weeks," Mary says. "Are you thinking about going back to work? Not necessarily at the bank -- anywhere?"

Mary nods at what Ginny says. "I couldn't believe it," Mary says. "I would have thought he'd have more . . . maturity than just to sit there counting the money. But it's very good that it was more than $60,000, because that can bring in the federal government, as it did in this case. As I told you, state jail time is one-third to one-half of the sentence; federal time is 90 percent.

"Now, for the sentencing, we get to submit a Victim Impact Statement. This is very important in cases like yours where there's violence -- implicitly, lethal violence. When someone does to you what this son-of-a-bitch did, your mind goes bananas. It's like really dying because you think you're going to die. You wonder stuff not only like who's going to bring up your children but who's going to tell them."

Ginny talks for several minutes.

"That's exactly the sort of stuff we want," Mary tells her. "You write it out just that way. Or, if it's easier, come by the station and I'll bang it out while you talk it."

Ginny talks.

"Well," Mary says, "we sure never stop thinking about you over here. You know that."

After getting her social work degree, Mary ran a shelter for battered women in Killeen, Texas, serving four rural counties. "It was quite a laugh having a short Jewish woman from Detroit mixing it up with these big country Texans. I was there for three years, and liked it. Then one day a director came to me and said, 'We're going to miss you, but we've found your next job.' Which was this job here, with the Austin police. And right away I knew this was what I wanted to do. People say, 'How can you do that -- ugh! It's so depressing.' Not to me."

Before her next call, Mary glances over her notes. Then she says, "You learn stuff about people that you're just sure no one else knows."

"Hello, Paula, it's Mary. How are things?" she says. "You sound great."

Paula talks, and Mary exchanges pleasantries. Then: "Last time I saw you up here at the station you were getting ready to turn your husband in."

Paula talks.

"So are you concerned about the mortgage or anything? You love that house."

Paula talks.

"Don't give that car to anybody," Mary says. "Don't loan it. It's so hard to prove auto theft if you give permission to someone to use it. But at $60 per month, even if you can't pay the balloon, it's a great deal, because you can't rent a car for $60 a month."

Paula says something.

"You're paying on it and you can't drive it?" Mary says. "Forget it!"

Paula talks for several minutes, Mary inserting un-huhs and hmms to keep her talking.

"So you're saying he's done this in the past?" Mary says. "He exposed himself and fondled her in the past -- before this assault? Oh, lady!"

Paula talks.

"Shock and denial," Mary says. "That's perfectly normal. Bless her heart. When kids see something like that, or even us as adults, we go into shock. That doesn't mean you're naive, Paula. When you're married to someone . . ."

Paula interrupts.

"You're a very good mother," Mary says. "You've bonded with Kimmy and heard what she said. That's the most important thing you can do. How is Kim? . . . She is? . . . Oh, yah, spring vacation.

"Hi, Kimmy, it's Mary. Are you pleased to be on vacation? . . . Yah, it's O.K. here, but I don't get a vacation. What're you doing? . . . The Greatest Story Ever Told -- wow.

"You sure have been through a lot lately. How are you doing in school? . . . Just one Incomplete? Kimmy, I'm so proud of you! Are you the smartest girl in your class? Be honest."

Kim says a few words.

"I thought so," Mary says. "Well, things have changed a lot. How do you feel about that?"

Kim talks.

"You bet it's tough at 13. It's tough anytime, but especially at 13. You're a wonderful daughter. Your mom tells me it began a long time ago with him exposing himself."

Kim says a few words.

"You're a very brave girl. You know we know it, and you know how proud we are of you. You're doing just the right thing."

They exchange goodbyes, and the mother comes back on.

"What a kid!" Mary says. "If I'd have known I could have one like that, I'd have had one."

When Paula and Mary finish their conversation, Mary tells her visitor the father in the case is actually a stepfather, which in some ways makes it harder on the mother.

There is a stir and babble in the next cubicle, and Mary stands on her chair to look over the partition wall. Three tired young children are roaming around in a small space that has a sofa, chairs, toys, and stuffed animals.

The children belong to a young woman who appears, holding a crying baby, at the entrance to Mary's office. The woman is a SIDS -- Sudden Infant Death Syndrome -- volunteer come to announce Bozo the Clown's Red Nose Day USA, Friday April 2, 1993, which will call attention to SIDS.

The woman brings with her posters and flyers and red plastic noses ($2.00) and pins that say "I didn't have the courage to wear a red nose" ($2.50). Two of the four children are hers; the other two she babysits 12 hours a day.

"SIDS kills more infants between two and nine months than anything else," she says. "Seven thousand a year in America: one every 75 minutes." Three years ago, she lost a baby to SIDS.

She and Mary discuss current thinking on what may cause SIDS. "They don't know," the woman says, "but there's some statistical evidence that it happens after the infant has had a slight cold. It happens more often to boys."

The woman's children are restless, and she wants a cigarette. "I know this place has become all non-smoking," she says.

"Well, not quite," Mary says. "In Homicide, if you confess, maybe they'll let you have a cigarette." She laughs. "Anyway, that's what they'll tell you."

When the SIDS woman has gone, Mary turns to her visitor and says, "Yah . . . I'd forgotten. That's the toughest part of the job -- dealing with parents whose infants have died. You're totally powerless. I hate it.

"The first day I was on the job, it was the first thing I had to do. A woman was drunk and her child, sleeping with her, got tangled in the sheets and smothered. I thought, 'Why am I here?' I wanted to quit.’”

Mary's next call is to a woman who is being harassed by her estranged husband. "So he's out of jail," she says. "He hasn't gone after your boyfriend, has he? . . . . And you're still waiting to see if your tires are slashed, yeah."

The woman talks.

"Good girl," Mary says. "You're just one of the best. Lots of times people will say 'I want to be friends. We were married -- why can't we be friends?' But, you see, you can't be. He's not behaving rationally. Maybe he will someday, but not now. You can't make him behave rationally. You can't protect his feelings. You have to protect yourself.

"So if he calls you again, would you please call me and I'll shepherd a complaint through the system?"

The call over, Mary says to her visitor, "Assault. . . . There are a lot, a lot, a lot of false assault charges -- I don't care what they say. But there's also a tremendous amount of violence against women. And I'm here to help women recognize danger and avoid it before a conflict moves to a higher level of torment."

Mary's final call before lunch is to the family of one of four teenage girls murdered on December 3, 1991 in an Austin "I Can't Believe It's Yogurt" store. "Austin had 37 murders last year -- mainly family arguments and drug deals gone wrong and bar fights," Mary says. "But what people remember is Colleen Reed and the yogurt shop murders."

"Hi, Lisa! This is Mary." Mary's tone is upbeat and obviously sincere. She has been the Austin police department's contact with this family since the crime happened.

The women chat about the spring weather and their good moods. After several minutes, Mary says, "Say, I wanted you to know that we'll all be there for the dedicating of the memorial on March 28."

A man has put up a monument to the murdered girls outside the yogurt shop, now abandoned.

Lisa says something.

"You didn't even know him beforehand?" Mary says. "Well, that's something! People come in here all the time -- people you don't know -- and they ask how you are.

"Shawn still like school? . . . Does he still have the same girlfriend? . . . Well, tell him hi for me. And say I'm learning to say rodeoin', dropping the 'g' so I don't sound Jewish." She laughs.

Foreign Correspondent

2007-05-02T12:20:00.000-04:00

At 11 a.m. on Thursday July 15, 1993, Lisa Beyer, Time magazine's Jerusalem correspondent, starts her weekly staff meeting.

"It was great not meeting last week. I know -- you don't have to thank me," she says with a chuckle. "We've got mucho things to discuss today."

Lisa, 29, is wearing pale orange shirt and pants. A cheery, wisecracking person, she is somewhat subdued in the meeting. The four full-time members of her staff have worked in the Jerusalem bureau far longer than she, and they are a good deal older. She listens hard to what they say.

"As some of you know, we got an O.K. on the Plia Albeck story," Lisa says. "I cabled on Tuesday and it will run in 'Talk of the Streets.'"

Plia Albeck has just been removed from her post as head of the civil claims department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice. For years she had provoked controversy by her insensitive handling of Palestinian suits against the Israeli government. An example: in 1992, a court awarded $333,000 to a Palestinian who lost both hands when an Israeli officer ordered him to remove a Palestinian flag from a live power line; Albeck protested that the award was excessive because the man, a street vendor, could "sell falafel with artificial arms."

Time's "Talk of the Streets" is a series of paragraph-long reports in its international edition.

Lisa says the Time editors in New York need three things. "A picture of Albeck, which I assume we have."

"We will have," says Anni Rubinger. Her husband, David, nods. David Rubinger, Time's staff photographer, is one of Israeli's most celebrated photographers. Anni is the bureau's photo-archivist and -researcher. The Rubingers are in their sixties and came to Israel from Austria.

David photographed Plia Albeck some years ago against the day when she might be important enough to make Time. A smiling image of her will be culled from the files to run, with nice incongruity, alongside the paragraph about her losing her job.

"Great," Lisa says. "They want to know why the Palestinian woman was killed by the Israeli army -- you know, when Plia argued that her husband shouldn't get any money because now he didn't have to support her."

There are groans at the table.

"Do you remember, Jamail?"

The incident happened in 1991.

Jamail Hamad is the bureau's Arabic-language reporter. A Palestinian in his 50s and a well-known writer, Jamail replies after a moment's reflection. "It was an accident. I don't remember how it happened."

"Can you find out?"

"Yes. I can try."

"Finally, they want some pithy quotes about Plia getting sacked. Some happy, some outraged. I'll get those, but if any of you have heard good things, tell me.

"Now, we need to come up with stories we can propose."

Silence at the table.

"Well, the army's moving north," says Jean Marx, Lisa's administrative assistant. "Leaves have been cancelled." Jean, who is in her 50s, surveys the Hebrew press. She came from England.

The table is silent. The army suddenly moving additional troops into southern Lebanon has happened countless times before. Many people hoped it wouldn't happen under the new, liberal Israeli government.

"Yah," says Lisa. "Something's happening up there."

"Shelling," several people say.

"The army's not going to tell us anything yet," Lisa says. "I think I may have to go there. Anyhow, that's for next week."

"There's Demjanjuk," someone says.

"All we can do is an update," Lisa says. "That's next week too -- when the Supreme Court verdict comes out."

"It's done," one of the staff says.

"Why do you say that?" Lisa asks.

"Someone in Justice told me."

"It's written?"

"At the printer's."

Lisa thinks for a moment. "I ought to be able to get a confirmation on that."

John Demjanjuk is the retired Cleveland autoworker whom an Israeli court condemned to death in 1988 for being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" of the Treblinka death camp in Poland. Subsequent evidence has suggested that, while Demjanjuk was a guard at another Nazi camp, he wasn't at Treblinka.

"Everybody think he's going to be acquitted?" Lisa asks.

Everybody does. Israel can't afford to kill a man who might be innocent; that would smack too much of the Holocaust.

"Ivan-the-Not-So-Terrible," Lisa says, repeating a phrase from the papers. "I heard on French radio that the 40th anniversary of the UZI is coming up. That's in a month or so. We'll propose a story."

There is talk about the whereabouts of the submachine gun's inventor.

"I think the best thing we can propose is the 'Fractured Fatah' story again," Lisa says. "They didn't run it four weeks ago, but with Abdel-Shafi's blow-up at Arafat it's bigger than ever. It's really a new story.

Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Palestinian negotiating with the Israelis, has just demanded that Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, cede his autocratic power to a collective leadership.

"I know what they're going to say in New York," Lisa says. "'Aw, this is defrosted fish! Everybody's read it.'

"Yeah, right --" she answers her own accusation, "everybody in the office! Four weeks ago we would have been the first to publish, but we still can be, maybe. Anyhow, it's the best we've got."

There is consensus on this, and Lisa says she'll send a cable suggesting the story and the new angle on it that afternoon.

"Hey, if I do go north," she says, as the meeting is breaking up, "where's that bulletproof vest I heard about?"

There's some laughter. Jean Marx says it's up in the storeroom.

"Good," Lisa says. "Would you bring it out, Jean? We want the chief to be taken care of."

Lisa and the staff chuckle.

Fifteen minutes later, beneath a trellis of bougainvillea in a nearby café, Lisa digs pita bread into a mound of hummus and tells her guest she always wanted to be a reporter. "I'm a very confrontational person. I love being able to pick up a phone and ask questions and have people feel some compulsion to answer.

"I'm a Louisiana Cajun -- proudly. I went to Texas just because they had a better Journalism department. And then I found, more important, The Daily Texan."

The Daily Texan is the University of Texas at Austin's student newspaper. Lisa worked for the Texan as reporter, copy editor, managing editor, and, finally, editor-in-chief.

"I didn't know what I wanted. I guess I dreamed about a conventional newspaper career culminating with The New York Times. If you'd held a gun to my head, I'd probably have said, 'The Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Times-Herald, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and then The New York Times.'

"Red Gibson, famous teacher, neat guy, said -- it's the only thing I remember from the class -- 'If you want to get to The New York Times, be editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan.' So that gave me the goal.

"I had a great time as editor, hobnobbing with the campus administrators and the politicians who wanted our endorsement. I didn't know what would happen when I graduated.

"One night I was walking across campus and I met a teacher I'd had in American Studies. He asked me what I was going on to and, when I said I didn't know, said, 'What kind of grades do you have?'

"Well, no one in Journalism cares about grades, not if they're serious about journalism. A lot of the Daily Texan staff doesn't graduate when they're supposed to -- you know, like athletes -- because they've been doing something More Important.

"But they didn't have my mother. I told my teacher, 'I have a perfect 4.0' and mashed my teeth together in a big smile.

"'My God,' he said, 'we've got to get you a Rhodes!'

"I don't think I said, 'What's a Rhodes?', but I may have. It had never crossed my mind. Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was a finalist but didn't get a Rhodes. And I was a finalist for a Luce Fellowship, from the Henry Luce Foundation, which sends young people with no background in Asia to work there for a year.

"I called up my American Studies teacher and said, 'Should I go for the interview?' I thought I'd probably bomb out again in the interview. He said, 'Why not? If you don't get it, you've had a trip to San Francisco and a learning experience."

"'But what if I don't get it?'

"'Then you won't have to go to Asia!'"

Lisa laughs. "I'll never forget that line. I got the Fellowship, so I had to go. I worked for Asia Week in Hong Kong. It was really tough being away from the States and my friends for the first time, and in Hong Kong, the meanest city of them all. After Hong Kong, New York is a piece of cake.

"It took time -- maybe half a year -- but I adapted. I always loved the work. So when the editor asked me to stay on, I said, 'Where do you need a correspondent?' The answer was Singapore.

"Singapore was another world. New. Clean -- because if you dropped a candy wrapper you got a $100 fine. Waterskiing the whole year round. Remember 'I have seen the future and it works'? Well, I have seen the future and the reason it works is tyranny.

"I was in Singapore for three years having fun and falling more and more out of favor with remarkable Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew. Until I wrote about the detention without trial of a group of Catholic church workers. Lee banned the sale of Asia Week in his happy island republic.

"Asia Week screamed for a while and then sold me out. The magazine would return; I would go.

"They offered me a job in Hong Kong, but I preferred to come back to the U.S. I went through the torture of thinking I wouldn't have a job -- I'd never not had a job.

"But I landed on my feet at Time and in New York. Beat out a Rhodes Scholar, which was sweet. I wrote for the International Edition for a year, then foreign affairs for the domestic magazine. I learned a lot from the people who edited me, particularly a genius named George Church. How to be colloquial but not too colloquial. How to make news a story. How never to create a question in the reader's mind you don't answer right away. How to condense, condense, condense, and then tighten.

"I wasn't getting noticed. The American audience doesn't care about foreign affairs. The glamor assignments in the magazine are everywhere else. I had to wear pantyhose, and I felt my pantyhose wasn't sexy enough.

"Then a big break: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I became a star because of my first sentence in the story: 'In hindsight, it made perfect sense that . . .' In fact, an early version of the sentence had been in a correspondent's story.

"People asked, 'Should a woman be writing the war for us?' But I was a star: a star can do anything. Forget about pantyhose."

After lunch, Lisa and her guest stroll over to the Israeli foreign ministry where she chats with friends about the status of the Demjanjuk verdict. She is told that it has been sent out to a private printer.

Back in her office, she phones a printer on the outskirts of Jerusalem. She greets the person on the other end of the line in Hebrew, and then says, in English, "I'm Lisa Beyer, correspondent with Time magazine. Do you have a spokesman, someone who does press relations?"

She learns that there are Israeli troops outside the building making sure only authorized people enter.

"This is a journalist's dream," she says to her guest. "Important news and a great place to live. Everybody's got an opinion that they put forward very strongly. I found South East Asia hard to take because you can't argue about anything. Everything's hidden to save face. I have a tough time chitchatting, and the Asians think that's what women are for -- keep the conversation going.

The guest asks whether it's an advantage or disadvantage being a woman reporter in the Middle East.

"I don't know," Lisa says. "It's both. The Israeli military are reluctant to have me as a correspondent. Don't want a woman killed on their watch. On the other hand, the officers love to flirt, and interviewing is a kind of flirtation.

"There's tremendous formality in all my relations with the Arabs. Sometimes, like when I interview the fundamentalists, Hamas or other, I have be heavily dressed, with my hair covered, no bright colors.

"It turns me into a wild beast. I can't hear. It's degrading and absurd. I type interviews into my laptop as they're taking place, and the men think I'm the secretary for Jamail or whoever is translating. I'm a non-person. It's awkward, but you can't let it hurt your professionalism. You can't let it affect your reporting.
"
People are always asking me, 'How do you like it here?' What they mean is, 'Which side are you on?' I say, 'I love my job -- and the weather.' I hope that reading my stuff they don't have any idea what my politics are."

Lisa spends the rest of the afternoon (1) phoning to get quotes for the Plia Albeck story ("Small items can be as time-consuming as big ones," she says) and writing them up ("Says a right-winger: 'They're only picking on her because she's not a leftist.' A left-winger responds: 'She's a racist, an abomination. She should have been dismissed long ago'"); (2) writing an update on the Demjanjuk case, which begins with a color sentence about the suburban printer protected by army troops; (3) writing a proposal that something be done for the UZI's anniversary; and (4) writing a proposal for a 500-word story combining Abdel-Shafi's criticism of Arafat with an article she wrote four weeks earlier on conflicts among the Palestinian leadership.

By five p.m., all this is sent via electronic mail to Time's offices in New York, where it is 10 a.m.

At midnight Jerusalem time, Lisa is asleep in her apartment when a Time International editor phones to say they want the Abdel-Shafi story. Lisa has to file it by 5 p.m. the next day, Friday, so that Time will can edit, check the edited version with her, title, format, picture and caption the story by the Saturday press deadline.

While Lisa talks on the phone, the man she calls her "semi-spouse," the writer Ze'ev Chafets, who woke her, returns to a couch in the living room and lies down. He is watching American TV via satellite. Lisa gives him a kiss and returns to bed. Ze'ev is in the throes of the first draft of a novel. During the night he occasionally pads to his study to write more pages. Then he returns to the couch, where he watches The MacNeil/Lehrer Show and part of Larry King Live before falling asleep with the TV on.

The next morning, Lisa has set up a tennis match for her guest, herself, and Richard and Natasha Beston (Richard is the Jerusalem correspondent for The Times of London). One of the Bestons is sick, so Lisa and her guest play singles.

On the drive to the court, the guest protests that Lisa has a big story to write by 5 and probably can't afford to play tennis.

"I write better under pressure," she says. "I'm already writing it in my head."

"Do you have the first sentence?"

"Yep, I think I so: 'It had been clear for some time that Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi was cranky.' That gives me something to unwrap. The difference between a newspaper dispatch and a Time article is that we present the news as part of a process, an unfolding, a story."

Lisa plays a strong game of tennis -- she worked her teenage years in a pro shop -- but she doesn't get much involved in the match. She stops early, drives home, showers, grabs a bite to eat, and is in the office before noon.

"In a way, it's good not to give them a story too soon," she says. "Because then they don't have time to get tired of it or to change it a lot.

"No calls," she tells Jean.

Lisa closes her office door and doesn't reappear for more than an hour. She then drinks two cups of water from the water cooler, an abstracted look on her face. After that, she comes out every half hour or so.

"Others smoke and drink bourbon," she says. "I fret. I have to walk around. I drink water. Which makes me go to the bathroom. Which makes me wash my hands. Which makes my hands chapped. Which gives me something else to fret about."

One time when she appears, she says flatly, "I have to get each sentence right. Arrrg."

Her dispatch is on the wire at 5:25 p.m. Lisa has written so hard that when she gets home at 6 she takes a nap.

Lisa and Ze'ev spend weekends at his house in Tel Aviv, less than an hour away. After her nap, Lisa drives there. On route, she says, "The story used to be that Time had such a thick layer of editors because they never knew how many would be drunk. It's tough, tough work. I always try to put in an extra paragraph so the editors feel they improved the story by cutting."

After dinner, at 10:45 p.m., much later than she'd like it to be, Lisa calls Jamail to find if he's learned how the Israeli army killed the Palestinian woman in 1991. Jamail, it turns out, has just returned from a two-hour drive to a Palestinian village, tracking down the facts. Unfortunately they are too complicated for the Albeck paragraph, and Lisa decides simply to say that the army killed the woman "mistakenly."

An hour later, the fax machine at Ze'ev's receives Time's first edit of the Abdel-Shafi story.

At 12:49 a.m., Lisa sends back her comments, prefacing them, "Nice chopping. A few niggles." She makes nine points about the edited story, offers suggestions on things that can be cut if space requires, and closes: "that's all from me. thanks and I'll be in touch with the saturday staff on updates tomorrow. albest."

High School English Teacher

2007-05-02T11:25:00.000-04:00

It is Nancy Christensen's birthday. She opens a card the other teachers and student teachers put on her desk. The card shows a bunch of friendly wild animals. "One of these animals is like you," the card says. And, when opened: "The giraffe -- you don't hear him laughing, either! Happy birthday!"

Mrs. Christensen, a blond woman in her late thirties, smiles and shows the card to a visitor.

"Now to unpack," she says.

She takes a large stack of typed student papers out of the canvas bag she carries to work. "These are for the newspaper contest," she says. "I didn't put a mark on them. I gave the students feedback on their first drafts. Some of them did a lot better, but there are still verb mess-ups."

Mrs. Christensen teaches eleventh grade honors and regular English in Austin High School. This incarnation of Austin High -- there were several earlier ones -- is a rough concrete building completed in 1975, at the end of the "open classroom" vogue. Mrs. Christensen's classes meet in a huge room, with other classes on three sides separated from hers by bulletin boards, walkways, and, on the west end, hanging from the ceiling, six large American flags from different historical eras. In the class two east and one north of Mrs. Christensen's, the teacher has taped to the lectern Abraham Lincoln's maxim: "We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves."

Mrs. Christensen's first period is free, so she meets with students and her student teacher, Sherry Holt, a senior at the University of Texas. Mrs. Christensen is preparing students for a statewide spelling contest, and she gives 15 "approved" words to a girl who missed the try-out:

anthrax
apropos
bodacious
chicken Kiev
despotical
equilibrium
gazpacho
gossamer
hawser
Ichabod
laudanum
marauder
nadir
oleander
spasmodic

"The words come from the UIL booklet," Mrs. Christensen says. "In the contest, they have to use current words from the newspapers as the tie-breakers.

"The last two years, my students have won District. My trick is just to choose kids who are geniuses."

Ms. Holt has been adapting sentences for a grammar test, and she asks Mrs. Christensen about one that perplexes her: "'In order to be a complete sentence, a group of words must contain a subject and a verb and must express a complete thought.'"

"It's parallel," Mrs. Christensen says. "Do you want it make it unparallel?"

Ms. Holt is concerned that they have too many correct sentences.
Mrs. Christensen frowns. She and Ms. Holt work out a revision: “In order to be a complete sentence, a group of words must contain a subject and a verb and a complete thought must be expressed by it.”

"That's awful," Mrs. Christensen says, "but it's wrong too."

A tall boy in a Doonesbury T-shirt comes to speak to Mrs. Christensen about his newspaper essay. "I think we better use the second one," she says. "The first one is better, but it's not quite on the topic. There are times when you'll be forced to write to a specific prompt. Too, what if it won? They'd publish it in the paper -- they even publish the honorable mentions. How would your father feel?"

The boy agrees to submit the second essay, though he doesn't like it so well.

Mrs. Christensen later explains that the first essay had talked about his father's racism.

She leads her visitor out of the open classroom, into the carpeted hall. There are signs in the classrooms and a large banner in the hall proclaiming "Everyone is someone at Austin High!" Still, when Mrs. Christensen notices the visitor noticing the knots of students sprawled in the carpet, she says, "Sitting in their cliques."

The hall smells of warm muffins. "Yes," Mrs. Christensen says. "More than a quarter of the students get free breakfasts here."

In the high school's office, Mrs. Christensen tears 12 large pieces of white paper from a contraption loaded with six rolls of poster paper of different colors. On the paper Mrs. Christensen will have her students, in groups of four, make lists comparing the parties in the first three chapters of the book they have begun reading, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

At 9:55 she begins an honors American Studies class by describing the Advance Placement English test many of the students will take in the fall. "You'll be given a passage to analyze. You won't recognize the passage, but it wouldn't matter much if you did, because the assignment will say something like 'Analyze how the author's use of tone, diction, and syntax works to achieve the passage's effect.'"

She speaks about Fitzgerald's "West Egg" and "East Egg," and compares them to the actual Great Neck and Manhasset Neck. "That's the American imperative," she says, "to want to move up the ladder: from West Egg to East Egg."

She points out how the high-class Daisy and low-class Myrtle are alike in their shallow values. "Didn't take much to seduce Myrtle, did it?" she says. "Wait and see about Daisy."

Eugene, an African-American boy who read the book two years ago, announces that Daisy once had an affair with Gatsby.

The class groans.

"Eugene!" says Mrs. Christensen with amused exasperation.

She breaks the class up into groups of four to outline the similarities between Daisy's and Myrtle's and Gatsby's parties.

Mrs. Christensen and Ms. Holt circulate among the groups commenting on the students' work. Mrs. Christensen has asked Ms. Holt to prepare a class on the Black Sox Scandal and 1920s gangsterism alluded to in Gatsby. "You have to let student teachers do things their own way," Mrs. Christensen says, "and fall on their faces if they need to learn that. Sherry will do fine."

At 11:06, at the start of the next class, school announcements pour out of a loudspeaker. Rushed and muffled voices speak of upcoming "mandatory" and "emergency" meetings and "important" sports events. After this, a television hanging from the ceiling comes on, and an African-American boy gives the "Austin High headlines on Channel One." These include peer mediation for ongoing disputes and anchor tryouts for the TV service. An African-American girl and a white girl speak about Black History Month.

Following the Austin High broadcast, the day's Channel One transmission occurs. "Yesterday, the United Nations voted to set up a war crimes tribunal," says the young Hispanic woman announcer. Then there is a four-minute interview with a gray-haired man who is an expert on war crimes trials. He says that most of the precedents for trying people for war crimes come from the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.

Then there is a Reebok advertisement.

Then Channel One does a story on President Clinton's proposal that young people do national service. There is gray footage of Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps and slightly brighter footage of former soldiers attending college on the G.I. Bill.

Then there are ads for a candy bar and Pepsi.

Channel One closes by answering its question of the day. The average college graduate earns how much more than the average high school graduate? Ninety-six percent more.

Third period, Mrs. Christensen teaches The Great Gatsby to another honors American Studies class. "There are similarities between West Egg and East Egg," she says. "You may see that Daisy and Myrtle are alike and see why Fitzgerald put the first chapters next to each other."

At lunch, several teachers speak to Mrs. Christensen's visitor about the difficulty of maintaining order in the "regular" and "remedial" classes. "Students don't care because their parents don't care," a math teacher says. "We're bringing up a generation that doesn't have good work habits and doesn't want them."

The State of Texas is going to do away with remedial classes next year and move remedial students into regular classes, the belief being that the remedial students will learn more and be better behaved if they are with regular students.

Mrs. Christensen is silent during this conversation because she teaches mainly honors classes, with highly motivated students. These classes have 40 students -- five more than usual classes -- but they have an extra teacher (Mrs. Christensen works with Rosemary Morrow, who teaches history), which means, in practice, that the class is usually split in two. "That gets it down to a size you can manage," Mrs. Christensen says.

Of Mrs. Christensen's 100 honors students, only two are African-American. "But the number of Hispanics is increasing," she says.

The push toward a multicultural curriculum is strongly felt. "The editor of the paper, one of my students, wrote an editorial about what he hadn't learned at Austin High," Mrs. Christensen says. "This was directed at me. I'm reading women's and minority literature as fast as I can. But who am I going to cut out? Hemingway? Faulkner? Fitzgerald? Steinbeck?"

Her honors classes read The Grapes of Wrath, the whole thing. "And they just love it," she says.

As Mrs. Christensen leaves the lunchroom, she mentions to another teacher an upcoming drama club performance to establish a scholarship in the name of the former drama teacher, a young man dying of AIDS. "It's very hard on the kids," she says.

•

A week later, Mrs. Christensen's classes have gotten to the climatic chapters of The Great Gatsby.

"Where does Gatsby meet Jordan Baker?" Mrs. Christensen says.

"In Louisville," several students say.

"Yes, she's in Daisy's car," Mrs. Christensen says.

"In --- What's she doing there?" a red-haired boy asks.

"Just sitting," Mrs. Christensen says. "You don't sit around in your car, David?"

"Hours on end," David mutters.

"Canute!" calls a boy down the row. "Tell her not in the front seat."

While drawing a moral about the lack of loyalty in Gatsby's world, Mrs. Christensen says, "Those of you who have finished the book know how many people come to Gatsby's funeral."

"You told us!" says a girl. "He dies!"

"That's in Chapter 8, Melissa," Mrs. Christensen says. "You were to read that for today."

Mrs. Christensen says that Fitzgerald, as he began Gatsby, wrote his editor that he wanted to write "something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned."

"What are some of the patterns in the book?" she asks.

Students mention the parties and violence. "Yes," says Mrs. Christensen, "we talked about those things, didn't we? What else?"

The students seem puzzled, so Mrs. Christensen says, "How about the colors in the book? Fitzgerald calls a lot of attention to them. Jana, name three things we know are green."

"The light on the end of Daisy's pier," Jana says.

"Yes, that Gatsby looks at so long and hard. Pretty important symbol for him. What else?"

Jana thinks for a moment. "I really like that light," she says.

A boy says the Gatsby's hydroplane is green.

"I don't remember that," Mrs. Christensen says. "Are you just making that up? Don't make it up."

Mrs. Christensen has her students write a paper on every book they read in class. She gives out the mimeographed Gatsby assignment, which will be due in a week: "Analyze one of Fitzgerald's patterns in The Great Gatsby. You will find repetitions of certain scenes, symbols, relationship between characters, settings, images, and social groupings. Explain how one of the patterns reinforces a theme of the book."

"Any questions about the assignment?" says Mrs. Christensen. There are none.

"Now, let me read you something I saw on a plaque at the U.S. Pavilion at Epcot Center. How many of you have been to Epcot?"

Three hands go up.

Mrs. Christensen reads from a page of her notebook, which is marked "Gatsby -- the 1920s" on the spine. "'There are those I know who reply that the liberation of humanity -- the freedom of man and mind -- is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.'"

Mrs. Christensen pauses for a moment. "Let me read that again," she says. She does. "That was written by the poet Archibald MacLeish, who knew Fitzgerald and was a close friend of Hemingway.

"Now, we've spoken about the American dream and The Great Gatsby. The American dream is based on the freedom of the individual. Our country gives the individual more freedom than any other nation on earth. But great burdens come with this freedom -- or they should. Freedom shouldn't mean that we have the right to injure other people. Or buy automatic weapons anytime we like."

The news that day is full of David Koresh and his group of religious fanatics who are in an armed standoff with federal agents outside of Waco, 100 miles up the road. Two days earlier, Koresh's group killed four Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents.

"Fitzgerald's people are free, but what is he saying about them?" Mrs. Christensen asks. "They are careless, corrupt people. They show the danger of the American dream."

Performing Arts Administrator

2007-05-02T11:10:00.000-04:00

Roxalene -- "Call me Pebbles" -- Wadsworth is a slender, mild-looking woman in her early 40's who prefers casual clothes: blouses, pants, crepe-soled flats. She looks like a librarian or a scholar of medieval illuminations. In a large meeting, she listens with an abstracted air, legs crossed and eyes on the ceiling. When she speaks, though, her whole body comes alive, her arms gesture forcefully, and her eyes seek the eyes of everyone present.

As Director of the University of Texas' Performing Arts Center (which commonly goes by its initials, the PAC), she oversees seven theaters and recital halls, has a budget of $4 million, and programs more than 225 events a year. The crown-jewel theater for which she is responsible is Bass Concert Hall, the largest and the best-equipped stage between the coasts. When the English National Opera brought its production of War and Peace to America, only two stages could accommodate it: Bass and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

On April 19, 1993, the comedian-pianist Victor Borge performed in Bass to a full house, 3000 people. Pebbles and her husband were in attendance, and they and the rest of the audience got even more of a show than Borge usually gives.

"If the piano is good," Borge's son told Tom Dwyer, Bass' House Manager, who told Celeste Tanner, Pebbles' Administrative Associate and alter ego, who told Pebbles, "the performance will take about an hour and a half. If the piano is great, it will go longer."

Borge loved the piano, a Bosendofer Imperial Concert Grand, and the program lasted two hours and fifteen minutes.

The next morning, Pebbles was at work for two hours of Mad time before a lunch with the chairman of the University's Radio-Television-Film department. She divides her work day into scheduled appointments, Mad times and Quiet times, she explains, "because Celeste went to a meeting on how to run an office, and she learned this trick, which has saved my life -- kept me from going home every night at eight or later."

During Mad time, Pebbles welcomes walk-in visits from anyone on her 110-person staff and all phone calls. During Quiet time, she works -- reads, writes, thinks -- by herself and accepts only certain phone calls.

This morning, no one comes to her office right away, so Pebbles starts writing letters in plum-colored ink on a yellow legal pad. "I'm going to give you a bunch of stuff to type," she tells Celeste. "I'm clearing my brain."

Celeste, a stately, well-dressed, smiling woman in her fifties, smiles even more. Then she says, "We had a call this morning from a woman who was in the tenth row on the keyboard side last night and couldn't hear the piano."

Pebbles thinks about this. "Odd," she says. "That's just where I was. I heard splendidly. Phone her back and ask what can be done to make her happy. But tell her I was also sitting there and heard fine."

A few minutes later, Matt Hessburg, the PAC's Marketing Manager, comes by to get Pebbles' input on a problem they are working on.

"Have Herb fax a copy of the contract," Pebbles says. "I don't have a copy. We have a copy, but we can't find it right away. I'll be here for a couple of hours working quietly."

Matt explains that the problem is complicated because not only is a second airline involved but comp tickets to performances and advertisements that must soon be set in next year's program.

"I better call him," Pebbles says. "No, stay here," she says to Matt.

"Herb, I'm here with Matt and I hear we have a little problem. It's a failure of communication, and I take full responsibility for it."

Herb says something.

"I know that," Pebbles says. "I know we can work it out. You and Matt need to meet and renegotiate that contract so that both parties are happy. Chevy" (Chevy Humphrey, Pebbles' Development Officer) "is in tears in the trunk of her car because she didn't go to the meeting this morning. Again, I take full responsibility."

After hanging up, Pebbles asks Matt if he's happy about negotiating with Herb. "I'd be there," she says, "but I think this is something for you to work out."

"Right," Matt says. "I'm glad to do it."

Pebbles turns back to her letters. Meanwhile, down the hall in her office, Celeste is meeting with Connie McMillan, the Box Office Manager. "I thought you'd be dying to talk with this person," she says, handing Connie a piece of paper. "She attended Victor Borge last night in the eighth to tenth row on the keyboard side and couldn't hear a thing."

Connie gives a slight groan.

"Yes," Celeste says. "We want to make sure we respond to her concern. Tell her, though, that other people were sitting nearby and heard just fine."

"We don't have anything more coming up at Bass," Connie says. "Nothing anywhere, except the Dance Repertory. She'll want tickets to Cats."

"Which, you can tell her, was unfortunately earlier this month," Celeste says.

Back in her office, Pebbles has gotten far enough into her letters to slow down for a moment and talk about her job.

"I got into this by accident," she says. "When I got out of college, I taught on an Indian reservation and then took six months out to paint. I discovered I wasn't going to be the next Picasso.

"There was a remarkable woman who headed the UCLA performing arts center, Frances Ingalis. She had been the executive secretary of Sam Goldwyn, and she was tough. People were terrified of her, but I wanted to work for her.

"The only job open was as clerk-typist. Now, I can't type very well. I couldn't learn to play piano, either. There's something wrong in my eye-hand coordination. In order to apply as clerk-typist, I had to pass the personnel office test.

"I went in with a splint on my finger and said, 'I can type 90 words a minute, but I can't take the test now because of this.'" She waggles an index finger in an imaginary splint. "They gave me list of all the other things I had to do, machines to run. I checked them all off 'yes, yes, yes, yes.' And got the job.

"I threw myself into everything going on the office, but I kept wearing the splint so I wouldn't have to type. After a while I realized I had to take the splint off. Frances gave me a dictaphone cartridge, and told me to type up what she said. Later, she came by my desk and saw me fumbling with earphones and foot pedals.

"'Miss Ingalis,' I said, 'you're going to fire me, and you should fire me. I was hired under false pretenses. I can't type 90 words per minute.'

"She stared at me. She was famous for her typing. She could type 120 words a minute.

"'Then we will have to find you another job,' she said."

Pebbles folds her hands in her lap, grinning.

"The press assistant had just resigned, and I got that job.

"I kept moving around, and I was finally assistant to Miss Ingalis, who became my mentor. When she retired, the Chancellor -- the president of the University -- appointment me Acting Director. I was 28.

"I asked him why he appointed me, and he said, 'Well, you've done everything here. And you always tell the truth, particularly about how much things are going to cost. And when someone else isn't telling the truth, you always look at the floor.'

"Well, when I got that job, I discovered who my friends were!" Pebbles laughs. "There were people waiting for me to fall on my face."

The phone rings -- it's Mad time, after all -- and Pebbles talks with an old friend. "Really! How wonderful!" she says. "When is it to be? . . . In North Carolina? That's her home? . . . May you be as happy as Christian and me. "Are your children coming?"

She says hmm and nods.

The conversation turns to finances.

"I'm very conservative by nature," Pebbles says. "Robert, let's have a Reality Check. An $85,000 cut is nothing in this time."

She discovers that Robert is coming soon to Austin. "Certainly the piano faculty will be intrigued -- interested. Could you spend time with students? . . . Do you know what you want to play?"

Pebbles scribbles down a few words. She and Robert agree to be in touch when she has scouted out local requirements.

She hangs up and shouts, presumably to Celeste down the hall, "Robert Blocker's getting married!"

She explains that Blocker, an excellent pianist, is Dean of the School of the Arts at UCLA and that the School had been having a bad time until, after a four-year search, he was brought in. "Film and theater, especially film, are what count at UCLA. And they were cut away from Arts and made a separate school in hopes that Hollywood people would give more money to a clearer target."

Pebbles came to Austin less because of the remarkable performing facilities, though they counted, than because of the plans of Jon Whitmore, the University's Dean of Fine Arts. "I had been offered other jobs, including Carnegie Hall," Pebbles says. "But they wouldn't let me do what I want. I knew what Jon was trying to do -- build a prototype school of the arts for the twenty-first century -- and I absolutely agreed with his program.

"When I took over at UCLA, all we programmed was Western elite culture. There we were in one of the great immigrant cities of the world, and we showed only a sliver of its art. I began reaching out to any ethnic group that would listen to me, saying 'How can we help you get your music and dance and drama before the whole community?'

"I knew that Jon wanted to do exactly that with the Performing Arts Center, have a facility where the old barriers were down, and was looking for someone to head it. He asked me if I'd do it, and I said, 'No, but I'll help you find someone.'

"I came to Austin and was amazed by what was here, performing arts facilities already built for next century. Facilities that could be a resource for both the College of Fine Arts and the University community and communities beyond the University."

Pebbles is talking now in her full-persuasion mode. She leans forward in her chair, her arms and hands opening up.

"You see, culturally we have failed. That's what the Los Angeles riots showed us. We aren't paying attention to each other. Peter Sellars -- you know, the director -- has said that Los Angeles is an experiment that didn't work.

"My hope is that here in Austin we can pioneer a new pattern. This year we collaborated with La Peña, the Mexican-American art organization, to bring in Tish Hinojosa and Mercedes Sosa. Wonderful! A whole new audience in Bass. I felt my husband and I were practically the only non-Spanish speakers. We gave the profits to La Peña so they can continue their work, and this next year we'll collaborate with them again.

"I'm working also with the Black Arts Alliance. We're bringing in Wynton Marsalis. We had the Ghanaian National Dance Company this year, and we'll have the Ballets Africains and Kodo Drummers in November and January.

"I sought out people in the Austin music scene, and we're going to start a collaboration, the Country Knights-Broken Spoke Series. I think it's horrible that Willie Nelson has never performed in Bass and, come September, he will. With Alvin Crow and the Geezinslaw Brothers. In November, we have Jerry Jeff Walker.

"All of this, and plenty of elite art -- Itzhak Perlman, the Royal Ballet of London, Marilyn Horne -- and musicals and family shows."

The phone rings and Pebbles is brought back to earth. Lee Smith, a vice-president for business affairs at the University, is calling to continue a conversation about the 8 percent state tax Pebbles now has to collect on all performances that aren't student productions.

"I'm so frustrated," Pebbles says, though she speaks with perfect calm and good humor. "Spike Lee speaks to thousands of paying customers and doesn't have to pay tax. A dance performance for a 100 people has to pay tax."

The vice-president explains.

"Well," says Pebbles, "maybe we'll have somebody stand up before each event and give a two-minute lecture. I'm a bit desperate, really. We figured this year it will cost us $87,000. And next year, when we try to explain to our audience . . ."

Mr. Smith responds.

"Yes, I know, Lee. I will pass this on to Matt" (the marketing manager) "and he'll be in touch to be sure what we can say and can't say in our subscription promotion."

Pebbles hangs up. She doesn't sigh about the taxman; she doesn't revert to multicultural speculation. A woman of the moment, she glances at her watch and sees that the next thing on the plate is her lunch appointment. She nips into Celeste's office, where Celeste is talking with Maria Aleman, Matt's administrative associate, about outreach to primary and secondary schools. The PAC is sponsoring Jacques d'Amboise's "Believe in Me" program to build self-esteem in children, particularly those at risk of not finishing school, through teaching them to dance; the next day, Pebbles and Maria will visit an elementary school to watch a final rehearsal of Austin's "Believe in Me 1993."

"I'm running to lunch," Pebbles says. "I have an appointment with Jerry at 2, and then Quiet time."

Celeste smiles and nods, and Pebbles is gone.

Movie Translator

2007-05-02T11:02:00.000-04:00

Ruth Shek-Yasur subtitles English-, French-, and German-language movies into Hebrew, and, less often, Hebrew-, French- and German-language movies into English. An emotional person, she spends much of the day doing work as precise as an accountant's at a computer like a tombstone.

When the words aren't coming right, she pushes back from the machine and unwinds by dancing about her fifth-floor Tel Aviv apartment, sweeping the terrace, washing dishes, watering plants, making tea, or feeding her cats and making sure neither has fallen into the toilet whose seat they use to jump onto the windowsill and then up to the roof.

"You should see them get down from the roof," she says. "They cling by their claws to the shingle and drop inwards to the sill, twisting in mid-air. It makes me perfectly dizzy.

"Well, what can I tell you? Here's a script I'm going to do."

She turns several pages of a mimeographed script with sections of dialogue bracketed in red pencil.

"It's already 'spotted,'" she says. "The dialogue in each of those marks goes into a subtitle. As well as it can!

"Not infrequently the speeches have been cut or changed in the final print we get here. Before I work on a film I have to screen it, often more than once, to check that the dialogue list corresponds to what the audience will see.

"Also, there's a special problem with Hebrew because I must know who is being addressed in every speech to get the verb form right."

Ruth is a vibrant woman of 41, with an expressive face and thick dark hair into which she frequently thrusts her hands.

"First rule: you can't use all the words they say in the film. The eye reads slower than the ear hears. There's not enough time to write out all the words spoken; you must condense. Sometimes you have to let whole sentences go -- sometimes a joke, because it would take too long to tell and distract from the main path of the story.

"Then too, there's the size of the screen to take into account. A movie subtitle has lines of no more than 38 characters, including punctuation and spaces. A TV subtitle has 27 characters, because the screen is smaller. You have to get what is said in that patch of film into that subtitle; otherwise, the audience will be behind where the movie means them to be. And you'll have trouble catching up, because you need the following spots for whatever's said there. It's a bit of a challenge. I used to find myself counting letters like a crossword puzzle. Now the computer tells me when I'm taking too many spaces.

"Rule two: you generally can't translate word for word, because it would confuse the audience. The characters are making references to things in their culture the audience doesn't know about or they are talking slang. Slang is very difficult.

"Slang's lovely. I adore it. It is always acceptable when spoken because it's spoken to people who understand it. But slang in a foreign language seldom makes sense translated literally, word for word.

"Furthermore, slang is time-bound. There's twenties' slang and thirties' slang -- who says 'Yes, we have no bananas' today? If you translate using slang that belongs to an earlier generation, you make the characters sound weird.

"You can do the same thing if you use slang that comes from a specific subculture. Here in Israel I can draw from Yiddish slang, Russian slang, Arabic slang, as well as Hebrew. Well, if I do so, am I going to mislead the audience?

"Rule three: what matters is the point of the words, not the words themselves. The spirit and tone of the conversation. The social class of the people speaking.

"The object is to serve what's happening on the screen, so the audience will always know the plot, what really counts. Basically, movies use dialogue to say things that can't be shown. It's your responsibility to get those things across to the audience if they have to know them to understand the film; if you can get more than this across -- and you can, you always can -- so much the better."

Asked which movies are most difficult to subtitle, Ruth says, "Comedies! Movies with specific jargon, like Top Gun or baseball movies. When I do a baseball movie I spend half my time on the phone to local fanatics who know the Hebrew words for sinker ball and I don't know what -- Texas Leaguer!

"Well-written movies are easier to work on, even if the language is difficult. Because the movie hangs together. I just did The Lady Eve, which was tough because everyone talks on top of one another. But it was such fun and had so much energy that you couldn't go wrong keeping to the story.

"Bergman is easy to translate. You can speak elliptically in all languages. And he's full of . . . significant . . . pauses," Ruth laughs and bats her eyes.

"Hitchcock is generally easy because there's not much talk -- he's into showing.

"What I type in my computer is copied directly onto the film print. That's why I get ulcers. I'm the first draft, the editor, and the publisher.

"I learned all my languages before I was eight. I was born in Czechoslovakia, where my parents came from. Immediately I was brought to Israel, where I spent my first four years, so I learned to speak Hebrew. My father was in the diplomatic service, and from age four to eight I spent in London; my first schooling was in English. Then from age eight to twelve, we were in Paris. Every summer from age four to eleven I spent with my brother and sister on my great-grandmother's farm in Austria -- another language: German.

"Father didn't want us speaking German for reasons you can imagine. He told our grandmother not to speak it to us, but Great-grandmother didn't speak anything else. Besides, that was what the neighboring kids spoke. We'd forget it every winter and pick it up next summer.

"A diplomatic life is very hard on children -- very dysfunctional, though we didn't have the word then. You keep being torn away from everything you know, and your parents are out every night doing their job. It's hard on the wife, too: she is left holding the house together in a foreign country while her husband does the interesting work.

"A small child realizes very fast that it may not be worth it to put herself into making new friends because she'll soon be gone.

"Languages can a problem. Often the servants spoke another language: Spanish or Portuguese. 'There are too many languages in this house!' my brother said when he was three or four. It became a catch phrase in the family. He is now a diplomat in Paris.

"I learned the languages, but I missed all the explanations of how they work. I know no grammar at all. I go by my gut. All I know is when something sounds right.

"From age 16 to 19 I was in Vienna -- German was no long verboten. I didn't know where on earth I belonged. I remember at 17 driving through Paris in a convertible, with the wind gushing through my hair, smoking, talking philosophy, and wondering, 'Who is this girl?'

"Well, at 18 all Israeli women have to begin two years of military service. According to law, I could have my service postponed until Father was posted back to Israel. In fact, I did get a six-month postponement.

"Then I did something smart. I stopped asking myself 'who am I?' because I got too many answers. Instead, I asked, 'Who do I want to be? Where do I want to make my life? What language do I want to speak?' These were probably the first adult questions I had asked.

"I went to my father and said, 'I want to get myself in synch with my society. This is my one chance. I'm going back and enter the army.'

"My father was a clever guy. He said, 'You're doing useful things here, but . . .' And he smiled and shrugged and gave me a hug.

"Even in Israel I was an outsider. I was much more adult than the other recruits. I had met all kinds of interesting and important people. Further, I was so shy that I was a great snob. But I had a goal in mind, and I was exactly right.

"Our army takes people from every background. Everyone's an outsider when they join. I was scared stiff. I was alone, following an intuition I'd had.

"And I got just what I wanted: I was treated like nothing special, like everybody else. I became like everybody else. I became what the army wanted me to be. I wound up working with journalists -- my languages again -- but as a cog in the organization. I was home.

"After the army, I went to design school for three years. I came out and designed all sorts of things -- leisure wear, lingerie, women's outer wear, children's wear, even men's wear. Always, though, I felt a tug toward words, those languages I had up in the attic." She ruffles her hair.

"My husband was translating movies, and one day he needed my help with the French. That was it!"

Robert M. Crunden

2007-04-16T17:16:00.001-04:00

Bob Crunden, delicious malice in his eyes. The picture was probably taken in the late 1980s. It's being faded and black-and-white are appropriate, since Bob was a Luddite when it came to technology, didn't have a TV or CD, and, though there was a computer on his desk, did his serious writing on a typewriter.

I made the following remarks at the March 7, 1999 memorial service for my University of Texas at Austin colleague Robert M. Crunden, who had died at age 58. I was speaking to members, graduates, and friends of the American Studies Program (later a department) in which Bob and I had spent our careers. The names I mentioned needed no footnoting for the audience; none needed to be told for example that Bill Goetzmann had won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for history.

The American Studies family is broken--long live the family!

Bill Goetzmann, the father of us all arrives in 1964 or 5 or 6 (the date is shrouded in myth) and starts the Program in a wilderness of bureaucratic inertia and hostility, with the help of now-almost-forgotten faculty sympathizers and, even more, of Mewes, his wife, our secret mother.

Then, in 1967 or '68, comes Bob Crunden, the first son, a Goetzmann disciple at Yale and the one chosen to enforce Bill's vision. Like most firstborn, Bob internalizes his father's standards and ambitions--indeed so well that, to a degree, he becomes another Goetzmann, a counter-Goetzmann building things of his own on the side.

Then, in 1969, comes Elspeth Rostow, adopted sister to Bill and Mewes, consort and mother to other campus families, bountiful aunt and enabler to our Program.

Then I come, in 1971, because Goetzman's Pulitzer wins him the right to hire two new faculty. The guy who comes with me, a semi-anthropologist twin named Tim, doesn't last. Not everyone lasts in the family; some pass into legend, others oblivion. But I, the second son, am favored, indulged, encouraged to be a peacemaker-diplomat, allowed to be a clown.

Bob is always gentle with me, however exasperated. He knows I am a weak reed but he appreciates even me standing with him.

And there we are: the first family. Our descendants--some of you here--inherit from us. We see Bob in, for example, Jeff Meikle's stubborn self-assertion, though it came a whole lot easier to Bob, and in Mark Smith's curmudgeonliness, though Mark is of course a sweet curmudgeon.

And Bob and Bill and Mewes and Elspeth and me--we are spread across the country now, around the world. And our descendants now have other parents, too: Jeff and Mark and Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Bob Abzug and Desley Deacon and, we gratefully acknowledge, Janice Bradley Garrett and Cynthia Frese and the excellent women who came before them. All of us affecting eternity, as teachers do--as Henry Adams promised in a rare sentimental moment.

So, though Bob's death breaks the family, yet we live and will live on--as he will, in his books and children and friends, and in us and those who come after us and in the new lives we and they promote.

But this is not all I want to say. Bob taught me a great deal. I loved him like a brother (which means of course ambivalently), and I will miss him deeply and always.

One thing I'm still trying to learn from him is to speak boldly, even on occasions like this.

Were Bob here, at this lectern, memorializing me, as he would have been had the genetic roulette come up different, I imagine he would have talked about what we all feel at his untimely passing: life's injustice, absurdity, tragedy. Because he felt these deeply--inconsolably, I'm tempted to say.

I suspect Bob's dark view came from his cool birth family, his boyhood in boarding school (boys only) and all-male Yale. There may also have been a chemical component, as I--my life transformed at age 52 by antidepressant chemicals--tried to convince him.

He knew he was depressed ("Why do you think I keep writing?" he once said to me) but he accepted his fate--accepted it as fate, his necessary condition, the shell in which he lived.

I wonder whether Bob ever considered his and my depressions in the way that he and Bill and the American Studies gurus before them--Henry Adams. for example--encouraged us to see so much of life: in cultural terms, as a personal symptom of national history. He and I, born six months apart in 1940, I as France fell, he during the Battle of Britain, were children of war and Cold War. We were brought up to expect tragedy, responsibility, sacrifice, a long twilight struggle that, we believed, would never end because that was what life was like.

He and I, Yalies 1962, were taught to privileged the power of darkness, ambiguity, paradox, ambivalence, restraint, complexity that the New Critics found in the canonical literature whose words became our words. We believed that tragedy was the Truth, as of course it partly is, and that, as Melville said, the "mortal man who has more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped." And Bob and I, married at 22, fathers at 27, embraced being old, responsible, and narrow of expectation, without, alas, having ever been young, irresponsible, and grandiose.

"The world has changed, Bob," I wanted to tell him these last years, though of course he knew this. "We're at peace. We don't need to tend the ramparts or be so unyielding. We're free!" And, I might have added, free not in the bitter, cheated way Linda Loman says "We're free!" over Willy's grave in Death of a Salesman, our central play, Bob being Biff, me Happy. "Bob, we really are free."

To which I suspect Bob, bitter and beautiful, would have chuckled and said, "Oh, yeah, Bill. Isn't it nice to think so."

UT's faculty memorial about Bob and a biography of his writing are at http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2000-2001/memorials/Crunden/crunden.html

Stewart Granger

2007-04-15T10:48:00.000-04:00

Scaramouche (1952) keeps popping up on cable channels. I mean to see it again. It’s the first movie I liked enough to see twice. A friend and I, both 11, went to see another movie at the Pix Theater in White Plains, New York, and the other movie wasn’t playing; Scaramouche was. “I’ve seen it,” I said. The ticket lady said she’d let us in for free, because of the mistaken newspaper ad, which made my choice easy.

Scaramouche is lots of fun and sword fighting. I get it mixed up with King Solomon’s Mines (1950), another movie starring Stewart Granger. There’s a scene in one of the pictures where the hero, the girl, and you are in an underground river in a cave, and you have to swim under the rock roof, not knowing how far the roof runs, not knowing if it lets you come up for air before you drown. But you have to chance it because there’s death coming up behind you. When I read about Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, I knew what he meant, only for me it was a dive.

I think of the girl as Rhonda Fleming, who turns out not to be in either movie. I see her arching her head back to let fall her cascade of fiery hair, which is brilliantly clean and untangled despite her having been underwater, in the jungle, and on horseback riding through the woods. Needless to say, she is less a protagonist in the action than the prize the hero takes along to enjoy when the battle’s won.

Stewart Granger, I see now, I’ve undersold. I had thought that, like all suburban boys of the 1950s, I took my selves from rebellious Marlon Brando and James Dean. But no. There’s a lot in me of the Henry Fonda of Twelve Angry Men (1957) and Gregory Peck of To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962)—the quiet fellow in glasses who can be counted on to do his duty. But I realize I was on my way to becoming that fellow before either of those movies, thanks to unflappable Stewart Granger, who, I just now found out, hated playing the upright hero and was married for a decade (1950-60) to the sexiest and most infuriating girl in all cinema, Jean Simmons of Great Expectations (1946). “I don’t know which I chose worse,” Granger was to remark late in life, “my roles or my wives.” Say it ain’t so, Stew; your roles were ideal.

Kurth Sprague

2007-04-12T13:32:00.000-04:00

Kurth in the kitchen of his home in Sandy, Texas. Photo by
Janice Bradley Garrett.

Bill Stott:

Kurth Sprague was an associate professor in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin from 1988-95, teaching seminars on the influence of King Arthur and medievalism in American literature, art, and films, and “How to Write about Culture.”

Among the qualities that made him such a special teacher were his fearlessness in expressing enthusiasm for good student work—in fact, good work done by anyone (no academic reserve for him)—his gentleness, his sense of humor and explosive laughter, and his reverence for and encouragement of clear prose. A master of prose himself, he saw no reason that others shouldn’t become as competent as he, and he was willing to do all the coaching students would work to take in.

He was a close friend of American Studies faculty and staff—very much one of our team. When Bob Crunden died suddenly in 1999, Janice Bradley Garrett, our Administrative Associate, arranging how we dealt with death just as she did our teaching lives, had him MC the memorial service.

A great bear of a man, enthusiast and life-lover, Kurth was also, as I knew him, a cynic who saw the truth behind most shams—but a cynic of such sweet heart, that, knowing the truth, he did his best to protect those of us who shouldn’t see it—even at the cost of his having to play straight man, even the buffoon. If he was Falstaff, as many have suggested, he was the gentleman Falstaff never was.

The newspaper obituary:

A poet, novelist, popular professor of English & American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, horseman, and bon vivant, Kurth Sprague lived an eclectic life with gusto. He died March 18, 2007 in Fort Worth at the age of 73.

Kurth was born March 11, 1934 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He grew up in Manhattan and went to St. Paul's School and to Princeton, and later moved to West Lake Hills, where he and his second wife, Bushie, owned and operated Blackacre Stable. Their home on the top of a hill above a hunt course drew students and scholars, medieval musicians, writers and riders, and English ecclesiastics, often in overlapping categories, sometimes to the astonishment of their children, Mark, Quin, David, and Charlotte.

Falstaffian in his exuberance, Sprague was a large and imposing but gentle man. The workings of his mind were as colorful as the medieval Celtic art that he loved. He received his doctorate in English from UT-Austin, writing his dissertation on T. H. White, the British author of The Once and Future King. A revised version of the dissertation is in press, prompted by the renewed interest in medievalism. It will be published under the editorial supervision of Dr. Bonnie Wheeler of Southern Methodist University.

Related to his dissertation are collections that he edited of White's poetry (A Joy Proposed, 1980) and short stories (The Maharajah and Other Stories, 1982). These books followed his first edited publication in 1977, the poetry of Ruth P. M. Lehmann, his teacher of Old English and Old Irish at UT-Austin.

Sprague's own published writings include three volumes of poetry: And Therefore With Angels (1970), My Father's Mighty Heart (1974), and The Promise Kept, which won the Texas Institute of Letters poetry award for 1976. His deep knowledge of the American equestrian scene is displayed in his 470-page history of The National Horse Show, 1883-1983 (1985). Two of the strands of his life, academe and horses, are brought together in his murder mystery, Frighten the Horses (2003).

Oddly enough, the two strands had been brought together years earlier during his service in the Army, when he was assigned to the Department of Publications and Non-Resident Training at the Artillery and Guided Missile School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. As Sprague said years later, it was his writing ability in that assignment, rather than any athletic prowess, that caused him to be appointed to the United States Modern Pentathlon Team, which trained at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

Sprague taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1977 until his retirement in 1996. In 1983 he served as the editorial director for the Centennial Commission Report, and afterward he wrote the charter for the Texas Foundation on Higher Education.

The courses that he taught in the English Department and in American Studies included "King Arthur in English Literature," "Medieval Literature in Translation," "American Medievalism," and "American Chivalry."

A lover of English poetry, he would continue his conversations outside the classroom with friends, students, and former students. He was happy to spend hours passionately reciting and discussing the magic of Sir Thomas Wyatt's "The flee from me, that sometime did me seek," Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, Robert Herrick's "Delight in Disorder," or Swinburne's "When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces."

After Bushie’s death, Kurth lived in the Texas Hill Country in a house that reflected his epicurean hospitality and his love of books, horses, tweeds, England, Der Rosenkavalier, art, food, drink, and good friends. In recent years, he enjoyed the company of traveling and entertaining with Martha Hyder of Fort Worth.

Tom Cable, the Jane and Roland Blumberg Chair in English at UT and Kurth’s good friend:

If all the world’s a stage and if each man in his time plays many parts, Kurth’s multifaceted personality could populate a whole gallery of Shakespearean and Chaucerian characters.

From that gallery here are four: Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation, Sir John Falstaff, and from The Tempest, the wizard Prospero; and two from Chaucer, the Franklin and, less obviously, the young Oxford scholar.

Falstaff, of course, was always getting into trouble, in his high-spirited and irrepressible way, and getting his friends into trouble too, including the future king of England, Henry V. Well, I am not Prince Hal, nor was meant to be, but I know this, that during the 1970s and 1980s, I got in the doghouse more than once through what might be called dissolute behavior in the company of Kurth.

I’m amazed to think back on some of those Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. The Sunday afternoons were spent watching the Dallas Cowboys, either at Blackacre or on my hilltop facing Blackacre across the valley.

I really have no interest in football. But Kurth, like a Jupiter of a planet, pulled me into the gravitational field of Sunday afternoon NFL, and for the only time in my life I talked as though I was on familiar terms with Roger the Dodger, Tony Dorsett, Randy White, Danny White, and somebody named Hogeboom.

Part of it was the simple joy of seeing Kurth jump up from the couch with “Hot damn!” when Roger Staubach passed for a touchdown. I think Quin, David, Charlotte, and Amory must have wondered why grown men act that way—not to mention what Bushie and Carole thought.

Aspects of the Falstaffian side of Kurth extended into the normally placid English Department. Each year at the Department holiday party, to the delight of Miss Rattey, Kurth would bring a fifth of Wild Turkey, in flagrant violation of all university rules.

I don’t mean to say that Kurth violated rules.

Maybe I do mean to say that. Oh Lord, yes, he violated rules.

He once told me he went four years without paying income tax because it depressed him. That struck me as reasonable. The next April I told Carole I was too depressed to file income tax that year. She was not amused.

Another obvious side of Kurth is the hospitality and generosity represented by Chaucer’s Franklin, with a touch of the host of the Tabard Inn, Harry Bailey. Of the many moments one could name when Kurth presided at a sumptuous table, among the most recent and most brilliant were when he teamed up with Martha Hyder in Forth Worth or Sandy or San Miguel de Allende.

Chaucer wrote about the Franklin, these lines:

A Frankeleyn was in his compaignye.
Whit was his berd as is the dayesye;
Of his complexioun he was sangwyn.
Wel loved he by the morwe a sop in wyn;
To lyven in delit was evere his wone,
For he was Epicurus owene sone.

Or to continue in a modernized version:

Such hospitality did he provide,
He was St. Julian to his countryside.
His bread and ale were always up to scratch.
He had a cellar none on earth could match.
There was no lack of pastries in his house,
Both fish and flesh, and that so plenteous
That where he lived it snowed of meat and drink.
With every dish of which a man can think,
After the various seasons of the year.

The last two characters, I’ll name together, and they make an unlikely pairing, the young thin, Oxford scholar riding a horse as thin as a rake, and Prospero, the mature sorcerer, living on his magic island.

Kurth’s magic island in his last years was his hilltop in Sandy, Newbold Revel, named after the home of Sir Thomas Malory, the author of the Morte D’Arthur, published by William Caxton in 1485.

On that hilltop he was both the wizard Prospero and—although many may find it hard to imagine—the ascetic scholar, or clerk, because he loved being alone with his books.

Chaucer said that the Clerk would rather have at his bed’s head, twenty books clad in black or red, than to have rich robes. “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”

If these various aspects of Kurth seem contradictory, we can say, in paraphrase of Walt Whitman, “Very well, then, he contradicts himself. He is large. He contains multitudes.”

Or, what Kurth says of literature one could say of the man, Kurth Sprague, himself: “Literature resists and eludes our best efforts to reduce it, to take it to bits, down to the last infinitesimal hairspring, and to say, authoritatively, this is what it means and no more—for its variety is immense, its scope immeasurable, its profundity limitless.”

The Dying, Damaged, and Old

2007-04-10T23:10:00.000-04:00

The New York Times science writer Jane Brody had a column yesterday (March 6, 2007) about doctors predicting how long someone with a fatal condition--metastasized cancer, Alzheimer's, congestive heart failure--has to live, and whether they should be told of their condition.

In the article's last paragraphs she said that what is most important to dying people is feeling the doctors will "stay with them until the end." They fear being abandoned--and in fact sometimes are because "doctors see themselves as healers, trained to cure or ameliorate illness, and typically view the impending death of a patient as a personal failure. Rather than face failure, they abandon the patient." As a consequence, Brody put forward a surprising suggestion:

Patients may be able to help themselves in this respect by reassuring the doctor. “I know you tried very hard and I appreciate all you did for me,” they might say. “It’s not your fault that I won’t survive this disease. It would help a lot, though, if you stay with me for the long haul.”

In this suggestion Brody echoes the sad central idea--as I take it--of Erving Goffman's Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Goffman argues that those who are visibly different from the norm--cripples, the wheelchair-bound, those with birthmarks or scars, Tourette Syndrome, the hugely obese, the ragged poor--so upset us normals that we have trouble responding to them as human, and so they, in addition to suffering their handicap, must also try to find ways to make us feel better about it and them.

I know of only two "authentic" ways for us normals to behave toward the visibly damaged. The first is exemplified for me by Bob Hope, who used to enter hospital wards of wounded G.I.s, calling out, "Don't bother to get up!" The second is exemplified by Gary Trudeau, who recently--working on his comic strip, yes, but also for personal reasons--spent a lot of time in the wounded ward in Walter Reed Army Hospital. He learned that the first thing he should say to the soldiers he met was "How did it happen?" He told a reporter they couldn't wait to tell him.

These thoughts come to me because in the last week I've learned of the death of a former student, Hal Rothman, at 47, of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. Hal, who had made himself the historian of Las Vegas (he taught at the University of Nevada there), generously, heroically, tried to make us feel better about his suffering, short life, and demise. "Truthfully, I got 47 perfect years," he told his university's magazine last summer, soon after he taught his last course. "Everything broke my way. That's a hell of a lot more than most people get. The gods reached down and put ideas in my head. Even better, they let them come out my fingers--and at a pretty good clip. Not everybody gets that."

President Franklin Roosevelt was crippled by polio, a fact he worked mightily to overcome and, when this wasn't possible, to hide. At least once, the Secret Service men standing at his shoulders and helping him move forward in a slow approximation of a walk while onlookers cheered didn't prevent him tripping, and he fell, like a tree, unbending, right on his face. Everyone gasped in horror. The sound that broke the spell was Roosevelt's bitter voice: "Clean me up, boys." In this instance FDR, unlike Hal, didn't make people feel better about his fate.

The fate I’m lucky enough to suffer now is age. I give a smile and greeting to the children I see, hoping thereby to encourage them to think that life is good, even for the old, and that there is nothing to fear. I think this one of the few useful things we old get to do.

Hal Rothman and his wife, Lauralee

Thinking about Hiroshima

2007-04-10T22:56:00.000-04:00

According to a 1995 Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans approve of our dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The younger the people, the less they approve: among people 18-29, approval was 46 percent, with 49 percent disapproving. The students I taught in the late 1990s almost all disapproved.

I do too, intellectually. I know the Japanese were giving signs, albeit ambiguous, that they might sue for peace. I think there must have been some way to demonstrate the power of the bomb without killing 80,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimate you prefer. But that’s my intellect talking.

Another me speaks when I read about the bombing in Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II’s No High Ground (1960). The Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb, was accompanied by another plane, the Great Artiste, which parachuted equipment to record the blast.

The anti-aircraft gunners on Mukay-Shima Island in Hiroshima harbor could now see two planes, approaching the eastern edge of the city at very high altitude. As they watched, at precisely seventeen seconds after 8:15 [a.m.], the planes suddenly separated. The leading aircraft made a tight, diving turn to the right. The second plane performed an identical maneuver to the left, and from it fell three parachutes which opened and floated slowly down toward the city.

The few people in Hiroshima who caught sight of the two planes saw the parachutes blossom as the aircraft turned away from the city. Some cheered when they saw them, thinking the enemy planes must be in trouble and the crews were starting to bail out.

When I first read this, I thought, “Ah, gotcha, you bastards!” rather as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf did in the 1991 Gulf War when he realized the Iraqi air force and thus the enemy’s eyes were wiped out and so couldn’t know what he was cooking up on the western flank. “You think our guys are in trouble,” I thought. “Sorry, Charlie! It’s you.”

I believe this is a useful response for an American to have, even if one quickly despises it, because it shows us--shows you, reader, if you're an American--that, had you had the authority, you might have dropped the bomb to protect the lives of our soldiers or at least been among the 85 percent of our citizens who told Gallup in August 1945 they approved of the bombing.

Now an embarrassing confession. I thought this insight of mine important enough to share with John Hersey, who wrote Hiroshima (1946), the classic account of the bombing. In 1970, he was the Master of Pierson College at Yale College, and I sought him out during his office hours. He was tall, thin, and immaculate looking in blue slacks and white sweater; he reminded me of a Greek column with a capital of gray hair. What I was saying, as I trust I understood then, was that his book told only one side of the story--which was of course all he intended to do. I said that American students at that time (Vietnam!) needed to know the other side. He said he had told that story in his novel The War Lover (1959). He also said he agreed that it was wrong to draw a moral equivalence, as some on the left were doing (and do), between Hiroshima and Auschwitz. He also told me how touched he was by the mail he got from young people all over the world thanking him for informing them about the horror of nuclear bombs.

I didn’t bring up the question of our bombing Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima. I don’t think that can be justified.

Pensées

2007-03-16T15:59:00.000-04:00

Saki: "Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me. They remind me of one's childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like -- and during the rest of the meal one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres."

Leon Trotsky, several months before his assassination: "Natasha has just opened the window wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full."

William James: "The true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent me which I seek. . . . Optimism leads to power."

Freud: "In our innermost soul we are children and remain so for the rest of our lives."

B.F. Skinner: "The object of life is to gratify yourself without getting arrested."

John Cleese, twice divorced: "I don't regret any of the time I've spent in my marriages or other relationships. So if I finish up being married five times for seven years each time, that for me will probably be more interesting than once for 35 years. I know you're not supposed to say that, but why not?"

T.S. Eliot: "Teach us to care, and not to care."

Geoffrey Graham, 42, Austin artist and Gay Rights activist dying of AIDS: "I have no fear of death. It's a natural part of life. I trust the universe enough not to be fearful."

S.I. Hayakawa: "We are so enamored of words that we forget that the magic of words in the great writers comes from the fact that they thought earnestly, felt deeply, and observed accurately, the world of not-words. We, however, often give our students the impression that literature has less to do with representing human life and experiencing truly than with dressing it up for show."

Lérmontov: "He in his madness prays for storms, / And dreams that storms will bring him peace."

Donald Barthelme: "Art is not difficult because it wants to be difficult, rather because it wants to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are not longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens."

Maya Angelou: "Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without it we can't practice any other virtue. I wish I had said that first. Aristotle said it."

Mike Reid, teary after blowing his lead in the PGA: "That's O.K. I cry at supermarket openings. . . . Sports is like life with the volume turned up."

Emily Dickinson: "The Brain is wider than the Sky."

Robert Penn Warren (1962): "If you aren't a crook, you ought to give up writing. . . . Never do anything [in writing] for one reason only."

Frederick Pottle: "Wordsworth had too vocational an attitude toward his talent."

Walpole: "Life is a tragedy to the man who feels and comedy to the man who thinks." [see way below for a French source.]

Wallace Stevens: "Nobility is a violence from within. It is imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."

Sidney(?): "I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse."

Charles Peirce: "Not to beat about the bush, let us come to close quarters. Experience is our only teacher. How does experience teach? As a series of surprises."

Freud: "The meager satisfaction we can draw from reality leaves us starving."

Ezra Pound: "The trouble with being an American is that one has a tendency to overvalue Europe."

Robert Frost: "Poetry lifts suffering to a higher plane of regard."

Caryn James: "Weapons of the Spirit is not one of the best-made films about the Holocaust, but the astonishing story it tells and the memories it preserves are beyond value."

Bill Stott: "I don't have to live up to an ideal, even if it's mine. . . . I am alive now, and I will never be frightened again."

Alfred North Whitehead: "Unless society is permeated, through and through, with routine, civilization vanishes. . . . Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness."

Frederick Wiseman: "If you hang around long enough, you stumble onto sequences that are funnier, more dramatic, and sadder than anything you can find, except in really great novels. You're not inventing them. You're just lucky enough to be there when they happen."

Aaron Copland: "Agony I don't connect with. Not even alienation."

Richard A. Shweder, NYTBR, 9/21/86: "By the time we finish reading a good ethnography, adroit rationalization has made familiar what a first seems strange, the other, and has estranged us from what we thought we knew, ourselves."

Samuel Butler: "All of the animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it."

George Stoney: "Forgiveness is far easier to obtain than permission."

Carl Jung: "The great thing is here and now, this is the eternal moment, and if you do not realize it, you have missed the best part of your life. . . . Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other. . . . All excessive purity lacks vitality."

Harry Wilmer: "Our personality is a compromise between what we wish to be and what the surrounding world will allow us to be. . . . Both intuition and sensation are ways of perceiving. On the other hand, thinking and feeling are ways of evaluating."

Ortega y Gasset: "Life is fired at us point-blank. Where and when we are born, or happen to find ourselves after we are born, there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim."

Virgil Thomson: "I can describe things and persons, narrate facts. But I do not assemble my pictures and my people into situations where they take on memorability, which is what storytellers do. Nor can I make language change its sound or words their meaning, which is the faculty of poets. Language, to me, is merely for telling the truth about something."

Harry A. Wilmer, Practical Jung: Nuts and Bolts of Jungian Psychotherapy, Chiron Publications, 1987.

"Falling in love is the unreal idealization of the other, / a marvelous enchantment, a spellbinding fascination / with the image of the other. /
Falling in love is conceptualized as reciprocal anima-animus projections. /
It is this which draws people into relationships / by creating a fantasy relatedness. / [45] The inner image carried by the psyche is / projected onto a real other person and never quite fits. / But it is a good approximation. / As time goes on and the glorious idealization / begins to be seen in the light of the real other person, / the projections are withdrawn. / Some people pretend this doesn't happen, / and a sham love relationship results, / but for others the withdrawal of projections / is the beginning of a real relationship -- / affinity instead of infatuation, / deep caring instead of blind adoration. / This is the beginning of individuation and growth / in the relationship."

[46] "A middle-aged man was telling me a hassle / over making his adolescent son's lunch. / I asked him why he didn't let his son make his own lunch. / He turned on me with condescending hostility: / 'And when did you start making your own lunch?' / 'Not soon enough.'"

[46] Jung: "Try to live without the ego. Whatever must come to you, will come. Don't worry. . . . The realization of stillness, which is truly the Self."

[Jung, CW, 7:111] "We should never identify ourselves with reason, for man is not, and never will be, a creature of reason alone, a fact to be noted by all pedantic culture-mongers. The irrational cannot be and must not be extirpated. The gods cannot and must not die." [Jung, CW, 5:581] "The best is most threatened with some devilish perversion just because it has done the most to suppress evil."

[Jung, Dream Analysis, vol. 3, page 26] "One's greatest foolishness is one's biggest stepping stone. No one can become a wise man without being a terrible fool. Through Eros one learns the truth, through sins we learn virtue. Meister Eckhard says that one shouldn't repent too much, that the value of sin is very great."

[129] "This moment is the only reality / we will ever know. / Fully lived it is our whole life."

[Jung, Letters III, Feb. 17, 1961, four months before his death] "In judging my writings, I can only remark that I have written every book with the utmost responsibility, that I have been honest, and that I have pointed out facts which remain valid. I would not want to withdraw any of my publications and I stand by all that I have written."

Dorman David, a former drug addict, ne'er-do-well, and convict, speaking of John Jenkins's early days as a poker player [NYer, 10/30/89, pg. 96]: "He was up and coming, but he was always overplaying his hand. It was his ego problem, which is the only reason you lose at poker or anything else. The ego problem is all there is to deal with in life. First you have to be able to see it, and then you have to be able to deal with it."

Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain, Knopf, 1989, p. 66. "If I misbehaved, my parents simply acted as though I were not their child but a stranger. They would inquire civilly as to who I was and what I was doing on Coorain, but no hint of recognition escaped them. This treatment never failed to reduce me to abject contrition. In later life my recurring nightmares were always about my inability to prove to people I knew quite well who I was. I became an unnaturally good child, and accepted uncritically that goodness was required of me if my parents' disappointments in life were ever to be compensated for."

Edward Fitzgerald, Omar Khayyám, lxxii: "Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire / To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, / Would we not shatter it to bits -- and then / Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire."

Blaise Pascal, Pensées: "That we are in ourselves hateful, reason alone will convince us; and yet there is no religion but the Christian which teaches us to hate ourselves; wherefore no other religion can be entertained by those who know themselves to be worthy of nothing but hatred."

Aristotle: "To think like a wise man, but to express oneself like the common people."

Eric Hoffer: "It is safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem."

Goethe: "Everything has been thought of before; the difficulty is to think of it again."

Jacquelyn Small: "There is nothing that has to be done -- there is only someone to be."

General Jaruzelski: "One must finally draw the line between creativity and artistic trash."

Kennedy Fraser (NY, 11/6/89; pg. 154): "Honest personal writing is a great service rendered the living by the dead."

John Berger: "Most unhappiness is like illness in that it too exacerbates a sense of uniqueness."

Byron: "I cannot exist without some object of love." [11/9/1812] "I will promise not to make love to you unless you like it." [6/8/1814]

JFK: "I wonder how it is with you, Harold [Macmillan]? If I don't have a woman for three days, I get a terrible headache."

Duc de la Rochefoucauld: "If we hadn't been told about love, we never would have discovered it." [approximate] "If they hadn't told us about love, we would never have discovered it."

Fra Giovanni: "There is nothing I can give you that you do not have, but there is much that, though I cannot give it, you can take. // No heaven will come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven. // No peace lies in the future that is not hidden in the present moment. Take peace. // The world's gloom is but a cloud; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy. // And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the days breaks and the clouds fly away."

Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton visited the first Nazi concentration camp, Ohrdruf, west of Leipzig, liberated by the U.S. 4th Armored Division on April 4, 1945. The commanding American officer forced the mayor of Ohrdrug and his wife to tour the camp; they went home and committed suicide by slashing their wrists. Bradley writes about the visit in his memoirs: "A guard showed us how the blood had congealed in the coarse scabs where the starving prisoners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food." Patton got sick. Ike insisted on seeing the entire camp and then ordered soldiers of the nearby military units to see it, saying, "We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against."

Jerome Miller, The Way of Suffering, p. 106: "Generally, we might say that, in order for shame to get through to a person, it must persuade him to take the worth of something Other than himself so seriously that the wrong of not reverencing it becomes devastating."

William James: "I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: 'This is the real me!'"

Cyril Connolly: "Infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator. . . . In spite of our decreasing charms we sweep young people off their feet, for young people do not understand themselves, and fortunately for us, can still be hypnotised by those who do."

Ben Franklin: "What one relishes, nourishes."

V.S. Pritchett: "Nothing in this genre [autobiography] lasts unless it is done with art. . . . There is no credit in living; the credit is being able to specify experience."

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: An "'unending conversation' . . . is going on in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you . . . The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the conversation still vigorously in progress."

After the Civil War, Robert E. Lee was asked by a woman to hold her infant son so that he could tell his grandchildren he was held by Lee. Lee held the infant. The mother asked what advice he would give her to bring the boy up better. "Teach him to deny himself," Lee said.

The suicide of David Rappaport, a 3-foot 11-inch dwarf and TV character actor, was reported in the NYT 5/4/90. In a 1988 interview, Rappaport said he was discriminated against because of his height. "I want to be treated like a regular, boring, normal person. I look at boring people every day, and I say, 'God, I wish I could be like that.' But my lot is to unique, special, so I have to put up with it. It's a hard life."

Edmund Burke (1775): "All protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a form of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in New England is a refinement of the principle of resistance: it is the dissent of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion."

Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel, English trans. 1961: "Hitler had the great merit of producing a simplification of the emotions, of calling forth a wholly unequivocal No, a clear and deadly hatred. The years of struggle against him had been morally a good era."

New York Times obit for "John Bowlby, Psychiatric Pioneer on Mother-Child Bond," 9/14/90: "In his major work, a three-volume exploration of the bond between the mother and child, Dr. Bowlby argued that the origins of many emotional problems in later life were a result of children's being separated as toddlers from their mothers, with no adequate substitute. // The problems such separation could lead to, he said, included depression, 'anxious attachment' or clinginess in relationships, chronic delinquency, and pathological mourning. . . . Dr. Bowlby saw emotional problems in later life as arising from actual childhood events, like being deprived of mothering, rather than from unconscious fantasies."

Frederick Wiseman says his films are "subjective 'fiction' based in 'reality.'"

Margaux Hemingway: "You can't argue with a sober person."

Robert Bly: "Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us."

Fats Waller, on how to make women happy: "Find out what they want and how they want it, and give it to them just that way."

Cary Grant: "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."

Paul Monette: "I know men who are HIV positive and who don't care about their careers anymore but desperately want to find a real relationship. Before they get sick they yearn to find someone who will know them to the core."

Thomas Carlyle: "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness."

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh: "One just has to be oneself. That's my basic message. The moment you accept yourself as you are, all burdens, all mountainous burdens, simply disappear. Then life is a sheer joy, a festival of lights."

Oscar Wilde: "The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered."

Saul Alinsky: "He who fears corruption fears life."

Lin Yutang: "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."

Eudora Welty: "All serious daring starts from within."

Albert Einstein: "I now bask in that solitude which was so painful to me as a youth."

Maxim Gorky: "In Chekhov's presence everyone felt a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself."

Angelus Silsius, a Protestant mystic: "I know that without me God can't live a moment."

Jung: "The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful." [He was writing Freud, which he did in a tone of amazing servility. That accounts for the "it seems to me."] "It is not I who create myself; rather I happen to myself." "So long as the Self is unconscious, it corresponds to Freud's superego and is a source of perpetual moral conflict. If it is withdrawn from projection, however, and is no longer identical with public opinion then one is truly one's own yea and nay. The Self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psychologically possible to imagine."

Admiral William J. Crowe, NYT 11/29/90): "It's curious that some expect our military to train soldiers to stand up to hostile fire but doubt its ability to occupy ground and wait patiently."

Lisette Model: "The most mysterious thing is a fact clearly stated." "It is not the students who are young; I have to teach them to be young."

Gide: "It's strange, not to say disconcerting, how my entire being is determined by the opinion someone else has of it." [Gide was already in his 50s, maybe 60s, when he wrote this.]

Howard Korder: "The basic dynamics between the sexes are essentially unchanged. Men pursue women and, having conquered, pursue other women. Women stand there and wonder why."

Freud: "Life, as it is imposed upon us, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, insoluble tasks."

Albert Camus: "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

Philip Roth, The Counterlife: "He is in crazy flight, I thought, from the folly of sex, from the intolerable disorder of virile pursuits and the indignities of secrecy and betrayal, from the enlivening anarchy that overtakes anyone who even sparingly abandons himself to uncensored desire. . . . Certainly a life of writing books is a trying adventure in whch you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way."

Diana Arbus: "The very process of posing requires a person to step out of himself as if he were an object."

Joe Sparks: "If it flies or floats or fucks, rent it."

Pirandello: "One cannot choose what he writes: one can only choose to face it."

Philip Glass, who came to Austin in 1988 after having just spoken in Laramie, WY: "After you get to be well known, you get to play in really small places."

Alice Miller: "Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self."

NYT 1/15/90: "Asked how he felt about the possibility, even the likelihood, that he would soon be at war, Corporal Connor took the notebook out of a reporter's hand, stared out the gunner's window, and wrote, 'Like I want to return to my wife and make babies.'"

Bill Stott: "How easily we might have escaped! The door was always unlocked. We were holding it closed and screaming that we wanted out." "Be whatever feels right."

Valery: "An artist chooses even when he confesses. Perhaps above all when he confesses."

Staff Sgt. Hattie Brown, a radio operator who relays battle reports to headquarters from the field (NYT 1/22/91): "I've confronted the idea of death and I try not to be scared. If I die, though, I hope I do it with pride, trying to get the enemy."

C.S. Lewis: "The Unicorn said as he entered the real Narnia, 'I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Come further up. Come further in!" (Presumably from The Last Battle; engraved on a bench near the grave of Cory Daniel Dennis 10/11/73 - 6/29/83)

Natalia Ginzburg, "My Vocation," The Little Virtues: "We are constantly threatened with grave dangers whenever we write a page. There is the danger of suddenly starting to be flirtatious and of singing. I always have a crazy desire to sing and I have to be very careful that I don't."

Sam Shepherd, of the NY avant-garde art scene of the 1960s, quoted in Kroll, pg. 71: "Most of these people had a self-destructive streak. And it was very contagious, this feeling that in order to be a true, honest, heroic artist you had to do yourself in or go bananas, so that your insanity became a badge of honor. Why was it necessary to be insane or self-destructive in order to be creative? I knew guys who walked off roofs. I didn't want to go that route."

Elie Wiesel wrote a review of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird for the NYT. "I thought it was fiction, and when he told me it was autobiography, I tore up my review and wrote one a thousand times better."

George Delacorte, publisher who died at 97, NYT obit 5/5/91: “Mr. Delacorte was an avid storyteller in his later years. One day, however, when he was in the middle of an anecdote he lost his train of thought. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘at 92 the memory is the first thing to go.’ He paused for a moment and said, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, the first thing that goes is sex. Then you memory goes. But the memory of sex never goes.’”

Bernard Holland, NYT, 6/11/91: "Mr. [Burton] Lane played the piano and sang, interweaving 'Wunderbar' and 'It Was Just One of Those Things.' ¶ It was perhaps the evening most potent moment -- the voice scratchy, cracking and incomplete but supported by a sophisticated fervor and a timing that grasped the music whole. Ms. [Patricia?] Morison [sic] gave us this same sense of vulnerability, of passionate souls that reach for vocal effects just beyond their reach and lay their shortcomings hopefully at the listener's feet. It is one of American popular music's great gifts to musical culture."

Lord Byron, Oct. 26, 1819 letter to friend: "As to Don Juan, confess, confess -- you dog -- and be candid -- that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing -- it may be bawdy -- but is it not good English? -- it may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing? -- Could any man have written it -- who has not lived in the world? -- and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? -- and under it?"

Glenn Gould said that one could learn to be a concert pianist in a matter of hours if one could concentrate sufficiently.

W.S. Di Piero, on Gustave Courbet, in Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Art: "For a long time Western artists expressed their sense of the sacred by depicting the shared subject matter of Christendom, which connected them to their audience. [Mircea] Eliade says that the sacred, in all times, is 'the revelation of the real, an encounter with that which saves us by giving meaning to our existence.' The emergence of nature, I mean of the natural sublime, in eighteenth-century painting, by which time traditional scriptural subject matter had dissipated into mannered pieties, was a reclaiming of the sacred. For Courbet and later realists, the purest revelation of the real was in the physical world, in what Courbet called the concrete, especially in human toil, in the material fastness of landscape, in the luminous sexual gravity of the female form."

Fritz Perls, from In and Out the Garbage Pail:
Quoting a "distinguished, patriarchal" Austrian psychoanalyst, Paul Federn, in the 1920s: "You just can't fuck enough" ("Man kann gar nicht genug vögeln").
Another analyst, asked by Perls what he thought of the various Freudian schools, replied: "They all make money."
"Compulsive repetition ... remains a constant source of attention and stress just because the gestalt has no closure, just because the situation remains unfinished, just because the wound will not heal. // The compulsive repetition is not death-directed, [as Freud claimed] but life-directed. It is a repeated attempt to cope with a difficult situation. The repetitions are investments toward the completion of a gestalt in order to free one's energies for growth and development."
"The tension arising out of the need for closure is called frustration, the closure is called satisfaction. Satis - enough; facere - to make. Make it so that you have enough. In other words, fulfillment; fill yourself until you are full.
"Don't push the river; it flows by itself."
Satori.
Friend, don't be a perfectionist. Perfectionism is a curse and a strain. For you tremble lest you miss the bull's-eye. You are perfect if you let be. // Friend, don't be afraid of mistakes. Mistakes are not sins. Mistakes are ways of doing something different, perhaps creatively new. // Friend, don't be sorry for your mistakes. Be proud of them. You had the courage to give something of yourself. // It takes years to be centered; it takes more years to understand and be now. Until then, beware of both extremes, perfectionism as well as instant cure, instant joy, instant sensory awareness.
I am holding on to my credo: "I am responsible only for myself. You are responsible for yourself. I resent your demands on me, as I resent any intrusion into my way of being."
I think the pursuit of happiness is a fallacy. You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage. . . . It is impossible by the very nature of awareness to be continuously happy.
Do we identify with our true self or with the demands of otherness, including the demands of a self-image? These demands from the environment put us into a a position of reacting rather than acting, expressing, outgoing.

Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, Real People Press, 1969.
Epigraph: "To suffer one's death and to be reborn is not easy." "The prayer in Gestalt Therapy": 'I do my thing, and you do your thing. / I am not in this world to live up to your expectations / And you are not in this world to live up to mine. / You are you and I am I, / And if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. / If not, it can't be helped.'"

John Keats, writing a friend after a severe illness: "How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us. Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy -- their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our Lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see again."

André Malraux, quoted by Anna Quindlen, NYT 5/2/91: "The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell."

Carl Rogers: "What is most personal is most general."

William Carlos Williams: "Marriages tend to become incest. A wife is nine-tenths a sister or a mother without adulteries on both parts."

Charles Morgan, on Verlaine: "No arrow grazed him. They all went to the heart. Other men distinguished among the arrows, avoiding some, raising a shield against others. Verlaine did not distinguish, because, as an artist, he desired intuitively to be struck again and again."

Picasso: "To imitate others is necessary. To imitate oneself is pathetic. . . . It takes a long time to become young. . . . I'd like to live like a poor man with lots of money."

Terry Jenkins, Charles Laughton's last and best lover: "He wanted to live as all people do when they're in love, to live their life all over again with their loved one. . . . He wanted to go to Japan, because it was a country that he'd never been to."

Rilke: "How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."

Hubert Humphrey: "Life's unfairness is not irrevocable. We can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves."

André Bresson: "A movie is born first in my head, dies on paper, is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but which, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again."

Samuel G. Freedman, book review, NYT 6/16/91: "A powerful book dwells within this manuscript, and the tragedy is that neither Ms. Gaines nor her editor could extract it from the surrounding self-indulgence."

Richard Rhodes in his Making Love quotes a comedienne who shouts, when she sees a 50-year-old man drive by in a sports car: "Sorry about your penis!"

Jean Sexton, an Orphan Train rider in 1914, speaking of her arrival in the Midwestern town where she was "chosen": "They marched us across a stage in the opera house. First, my two brothers got chosen. And then it was time to make my stage appearance. I was only three, and my mother tells me that I was wearing a little white dress that by that time was terribly wrinkled. So when I came out on the stage I was smoothing the wrinkles from my dress. And she called out, 'I want that one.'"

Mary McCarthy, quoting Orwell: "An autobiography that does not tell you something bad about the author cannot be any good."

Emerson: "Let us all be new-born Antinomians."

Jim Harrison: "The hardest thing for me to accept was that my life was what it was every day. This seemed to negate notions of grandeur necessary for an interest in survival. The bird that passes across the window is a reminder of the shortness of life, but it is mostly a bird flying past the window."

Brian Winston, "The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary," in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal, p. 284: "The fifty-year parade of the halt and the lame has patently done more good to the documentarists than it has to the victims."

Gunter Grass, NYT, 19/29/92: "What is deadly dangerous to literature is that in politics you have to repeat yourself, and literature and art are about the new and the innovative, about the undiscovered and the unvoiced. We must find ways to show responsibility to both."

Coco Chanel: "How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone."

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: "The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well."

Katharine Hepburn: "Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then."

Isadora Duncan: "The whole world is absolutely brought up on lies. We are fed nothing but lies."

First song from Juno: "They'll be gone, we'll survive, / Though they leave us half dead. / We're alive, we're alive / As the Old Woman said."

Dennis Byrd, a 26-year-old Jets lineman paralyzed in a game on 11/29/92, NYT 1/13/93; Byrd is a practicing Christian: "Asked if he had ever wondered, 'Why me?' Byrd replied: 'I know why me. Because of the strength on the inside. I know I can handle this.'"

Arthur Ashe: "I try to dangle on the court. The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight."

Louis Begley: "Certainly since Proust and Joyce, nobody who writes serious fiction has written anything that is not a sort of confession. Nobody has made a real character without there being to some extent an autoportrait."

Dennis Miller: "There's nothing wrong with being shallow so long as you're insightful about it."

Freya Stark, travel writer, died 5/9/93, age 100; her NYT obit 5/11/93: "At 93, as she was planning a trip to Spain, Dame Freya was asked about death. She replied, 'I feel about it as about the first ball, or the first meet of hounds, anxious as to whether one will get it right, and timid and inexperienced -- all the feelings of youth.'"

Marian Woodman, a Jungian: "The body is what makes us human. Those of us who have been brought up in a patriarchal world tend to stay in our heads. We want to stay with ideas. We want to put spirit ahead of body . . . We try to push all the parts of ourselves that we don't like into our bodies: our greed, our jealousy, our lust. All the darkness we don't want to accept, we push down into our muscles and bones and heart. We pretend we have no shadow and try to escape into our heads. Powerful energies are locked into our bodies; eventually they rebel, usually in illness."

Peter Ustinov: "Doubt is what connects us; certitude separates."

Shiva Purana: "Anyone who goes though life without honoring the phallus is truly pitiful, guilty and damned. If one weighs up on the one hand phallus worship and on the other charity, fasting, pilgrimages, sacrifices, and virtue, it is the worship of the phallus, the source of pleasure and liberation, offering protection against adversity, which is to be preferred. . . . The phallus . . . is the prime cause, the source of consciousness, the substance of the Universe."

Ze'ev Chafets, when told how lucky he was to be able to write fiction: "Everybody's got to have something. I wish I was 7 feet and could play in the NBA."

Schopenhauer: "If we weren't all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting we couldn't endure it."

Garrison Keillor: "My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at the time."

Tallulah Bankhead: "I have been absolutely hag-ridden with ambition. If I could wish to have anything in the world it would be to be free of ambition.'

Carol Burnett: "I liked myself better when I wasn't me."

John Maynard Keynes: "I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal."

Virginia Woolf: "Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them."

Kurt Vonnegut: "I'd rather have written Cheers than anything I've written."

Eugene V. Debs: "While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Margaret Mead: "I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce."

John Cage: "I have nothing to say and I am saying it."

John F. Kennedy: "If I had my life to live over again, I would have a different father, a different wife and a different religion."

Alexandra Rheault, a life model (NYT 9/6/93): "When you model, the focus is completely on you, and some people really appreciate the attention, especially if they didn't get it growing up. You're being drawn; you're being looked at. There's a sense of acceptance that comes from that."

George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi": "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."

Carl Rogers: "Through accepting my own individuality, which I can't expect everyone else to recognize and pat me on the back for, I shape my goals and desires. I am not compelled to be a victim of unknown forces in myself. I am not compelled to be simply a creature of others, molded by their experiences or shaped by their demands."

Susan Froemke, a principal at Maysles Films Inc. in New York, "one of the oldest, best-known documentary film and reality-based commercial production companies" on their ads showing actual people using their own words ("Advertising," NYT, 11/26/93): "People will give you things a copywriter could never come up with. It's what we call the real golden moments. . . . Sometimes clients are afraid it's a little too real." Sam Telerico, executive producer at Maysles: "This involves an education process for clients, agencies, everyone. Often they don't realize what reality is and want to modify it, make it a little nicer." Henry Corra, a principal at Maysles: "A lot of commercials are unscripted, unmanipulated, but obviously, you have to manipulate to make it work in 30 seconds. Fiction is so a part of reality."

Stanley Diamond: "The issue is not one of going native, but of understanding the native in oneself."

Clifford Geertz: "All ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession."

E. Jean Carroll (NYT, 1/24/94): "The only reason men have been put on earth is to shoot sperm at women. And because men are programmed this way, it's killing us. We have to stay tight, juicy and succulent because after we lose our eggs, no one is going to look at us. That's it. It's over. Forget it.... It's not O.K. to be older. We should just all blow our brains out."

Margo Jefferson (NYT, 9/15/93): "Memoirs are becoming the folk and fairy tales of our age. Where else can we record our quest for love, truth, honor or beauty so artfully and so nakedly?"

Harold Brodkey, NYer, 2/7/94: "Optimism. Hopefulness. . . . Franklin Roosevelt's speeches -- if you compare them with Churchill's, you can see what I'm talking about. You can see it in the rhythms and in the imagery and in the statements. Roosevelt proposed the four freedoms, and Churchill offered blood, toil, sweat, and tears."

Henry James: "The artistic lie is always preferably to the inartistic truth, except in journalism."

Gregory Bateson: “Objectivity means that you look very hard at what you choose to look at.”

John Henry [Cardinal] Newman: “In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to change often.”

Grace Paley, of Kay Boyle: “People will full sex lives don’t have regrets.”

Wallace Stevens: “The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but, on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception. . . . If we were all alike; if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi in unison, one poet would be enough. . . . But we are not all alike, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.” (OP, 266-67)

Erich Fromm: “Love is not primarily a relation to a specific person; it is the orientation of a person’s character toward the world as a whole.”

Oscar Wilde: “One should always be in love. That is why one should never marry.”

Margo Jefferson, NYT 6/22/94: “Unhappy families may not be alike, but they do have this in common: The parents tend to wish they had never married and the children tend to wish they had never been born. No one has to say it, they just live it.”

James Thurber: “Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.”

Norman Mailer, “The White Negro” (1957): “One is Hip or one is Square. One is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”

Jorge Luis Borges: “I, too, if I may mention myself, have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny -- that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.”

Oliver Stone, of O.J. Simpson, after the murder of Simpson’s wife (NYer 8/8/94): “The fact is, anybody who can cut through left tackle like he used to, you gotta have an aggressive demon. And he was the minority who made good. He was making too much of an effort all the time, being a salesman for Hertz. And that NBC is the worst, I mean those guys are so fake. If you do that your whole ife, eventually your demon is going to come out. If you don’t let it out on a regular, healthy basis -- you gotta blow some steam. O.J. was too nice all the time. So one night he blows. You can’t repress it.”

Jules Feiffer: “One of the things that has always provoked my interest is that all the women I’ve known have this problem of low self-esteem, which men don’t have nearly as much, if at all. Some of the most poorly equipped men I know have never had a moment’s doubt in regard to their abilities, while some of the most talented women I’ve known will recoil if you praise them and will deny that they’re good. It’s something that I’ve never really understood. ¶ I’m not sure how connected to depression this is, although it may well be. It’s a field that deserves a lot more study that it’s been given. Most of the women I know are smart, intelligent, and in many cases a hell of a lot more interesting to be with than the men I know. And none of them are as certain of themselves in what they do as the men, even when they are infinitely more talented and brighter.”

Bill Stott: My motto used to be “There is always something more to do.” Now my motto is “There is always something more to notice.”

Paul Valery: “God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.”

Jesus, in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

Jung: “In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embrace that, life is wasted.”

From Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, 1994: The neo-Darwinists believe that we humans, like all animals, choose behaviors “that get our genes into the next generation. . . . It is the behavioral goals -- status, sex, effective coalition, parental investment, and so on -- that remain steadfast while our view of reality adjusts to accommodate this constancy. What is in our gene’s interests is what seems ‘right’ -- morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order.
“In short: if Freud stressed people’s difficulty in seeing the truth about themselves, the new Darwinians stress the difficulty of seeing the truth, period. Indeed, Darwinism comes close to calling into question the very meaning of the word truth. For the social discourses that supposedly lead to truth -- moral discourse, political discourse, even, sometimes, academic discourse -- are, by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles. A winner will emerge, but there’s often no reason to expect that winner to be truth. A cynicism deeper than Freudian cynicism may have once seemed hard to imagine, but here it is.
“This Darwinian brand of cynicism doesn’t exactly fill a gaping cultural void. Already, various avant-garde academics -- ‘deconstructionist’ literary theorists and anthropologists, adherents of ‘critical legal studies’ -- are viewing human communication as ‘discourses of power.’ Already many people believe what the new Darwinism underscores: that in human affairs, all (or at least much) is artifice, a self-serving manipulation of image. And already this belief helps nourish a central strand of the postmodern condition: a powerful inability to take things seriously. . . .
“Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn’t -- not because it’s optimistic, but because it can’t take ideals seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is absurdism. . . . There’s no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show. . . . The question may be whether, after the new Darwinism takes root, the word moral can be anything but a joke.”

James Carroll, NYTBR, “In What I Lived For, Joyce Carol Oates has written a vivid and continuous nightmare: a savage dissection of our national myths of manhood and success, a bitter portrait of our futile effort to flee the weight of the past, a cold-eyed look at our loss of community and family, a shriek at the monsters men and women have become to each other and a revelation of our desolate inner lives. What I Lived For is an American Inferno.”

Clifford Geertz: “The concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

Donna Boguslav, a registered nurse who specializes in eating disorders (nyt, 2/7/96): “If your self-esteem depends on your parents, peers or anyone but yourself, you’re in trouble. You’re vulnerable if your identity is defined through someone else’s eyes. Your sense of self-worth must come from within and not rely upon external appearances.”

David Grossman, Israeli writer: “When we start to recover from childhood, we are already on the edge of death. Life is so condensed: the crises of adolescence, living with someone, having your parents die. These are such profound traumas, and to document just one of them you need a whole lifetime.”

Mark Twain: “Always tell the truth. It will gratify some and astonish the rest.”

Fats Waller: “Find out what the woman wants, and give it to her just that way.”

Jesus, in Luke, in (I suspect) a recent translation: “Love what is before you. Do not discriminate.”

Milan Kundera: “Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.”

Anne Deveare Smith (nyt 2/1/97), as southern preacher: “‘Gawd . . . Gawd can heal you in an instant of a minute.’ There is a moment when most people can talk and they say something that nobody else can say. They didn’t hear it on the news or read it in the paper, and it’s gorgeous.”

Anonymous: "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not jealous. It does not put on airs. It is not snobbish. Love does nothing rude. It is not self-seeking; it is not prone to anger; it does not brood over injuries, but rejoices along with the truth. . . . Love never fails."

William Blake: "It is not that angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God alone."

Sister Wendy Beckett: “If you talk to people, you want them to understand you. You don’t have to use long words and tie your sentences up. I hope people will say, ‘That’s a wonderful picture, but I don’t agree with what she’s saying. This is what I think.’ That is what I want, everyone realizing they can look at a picture and have their own views.”

The minister-writer Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets, 1991: “I not only have my secrets. I am my secrets. And you are your secrets. . . . Our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human.” Telling a secret “makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.”

Drew Pinsky (“Dr. Drew” on MTV’s Loveline): “You’re only as sick as your secrets, the saying goes, and you’re only as healthy as you can be honest. And if you’re not honest in your relationship, you’re not in a relationship.”

J. Anthony Lukas: "All writers, I think, are to one extent or another damaged. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves." [Committed suicide.]

Bertrand Russell: “In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.”

Don Hewitt: “The secret of 60 Minutes is so simple I can’t believe that the formula hasn’t been followed by others. It’s four words that every kid knows: ‘Tell me a story.’ I look at things in screening rooms and I say, ‘That’s an interesting guy and those are some great scenes you’ve got, but what’s the story?’ . . . The other secret to 60 Minutes is another four words: ‘I didn’t know that.’ Don’t tell me about acid rain; tell me about somebody whose life was ruined by acid rain.”

"Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful heart will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away."

Samuel Johnson, asked what the greatest pleasure in life is: “Fucking. And the second is drinking. Therefore I wonder why there are not more drunkards, for all can drink, though not all can fuck.”

Henry Scott Holland: “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

Franz Kafka: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and detached. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Quentin Crisp, British homosexual who, at 72, moved to NYC, loved Americans, he said, for "their belief that personality is the greatest power on earth."

Samuel Johnson: “I found your essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.”

St. Augustine: “Everyone becomes what he loves. Do you love the earth? You will be earth. Do you love God? Then, I say, you will be God.”

Elias Canetti: "One must visit the dead and localize them; otherwise they slip away with astonishing speed. As soon as you join them in their proper place, they return to life. In a flash, you remember everything you thought you had forgotten about them, you hear their words, stroke their hair and see your reflection in the brightness of their gaze. Once upon a time you might never have been quite sure of the colour of their eyes; now you recognize it immediately. Perhaps everything in them is more intense than when they were alive; perhaps the dead await complete self-fulfillment in the resurrection that one of those they have left behind will offer them."

Penelope Fitzgerald (1998): "I have remained true to my deepest convictions. I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"

Emily Dickinson: "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

Reinhold Niebuhr: “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.”

George Eliot: "It is never too late to be what you might have been."

Oliver Cromwell in 1650 to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland: ''I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.''

A friend: “The things that bore me are whatever I’m not doing.”

Sydney Gaines (age seven): "Dad, real friends are frontstabbers."

John (3:13): “No man hath ascended up to heaven, but that he came down from heaven.”

Don Quixote: “Knights errant have to know everything, so, eh, trust my judgment.”

Chuang Tzu: "The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It regrets nothing. It receives but does not keep."

Virginia Woolf said she liberated herself by having a "room of her own," but couldn't liberate her writing imagination. She speaks of the problem as though all women artists face it. Writing freely, as though in a dream, "her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, and depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers--they are impeded by the extreme conventionally of the other sex. For thought men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women."

Janet Malcolm, NYer, 2/ 21 & 28 /2000: "Chekhov’s privacy is safe from the biographer’s attempts upon it--as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letter and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity and death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography."

Newton Arvin, on Emerson (written in the late 1950s or early 1960s): "How can he be read with respect, or perhaps at all, in a time when we all seem agreed that anguish, inquietude, the experience of guilt, and the knowledge of the Abyss are the essential substance of which admissible literature is made?"

Philo of Alexandria: "Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."

Alan Watts: "The purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. . . . [T]he purposeless life misses nothing . . . for it is only when there is no goal . . . that the human senses are fully open to receive the world."

Louis Kahn: “The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.”

Soprano Renee Fleming (NYer 11/12/01): "I was so much the good girl that I didn’t know what I wanted to have for lunch. I only knew what I should have for lunch."

Gwyneth Paltrow (Talk, Dec 2001): "It never ceases to amaze me how difficult life is. How it is just endless suffering, even when something of the magnitude of September 11 doesn’t occur. People are just always suffering in the own lives—unhappy and discontent and sad and lonely. Life is just such a struggle."

Lee Siegel, Harper’s (10/2001) review of Louis Menand, THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB. "Holmes is no comfort here: ‘If the will of the majority is unmistakable, and the majority is strong enough to have a clear power to enforce its will, and intends to do so, the courts must yield.’ The jobbist’s ideal of doing your duty and ‘touching the superlative’ is a stirring one. But what if your duty is to kill innocent people, and your superlative lies in killing them as efficiently and clandestinely as possible? When does, in Menand’s admiring words, Holmes’s ‘belief that nobility of character consists in doing one’s job with indifference to ends’ become the by-now proverbial brutality of simply ‘following orders’?"

Woody Guthrie: "Let me be remembered as the man who told you something you already knew.”

Edwin Shneidman: “Suffering is half pain and half being alone with that pain.” [My hunch: Suffering separates us; joy joins. That is the difference between tragedy and comedy.]

When asked life’s greatest pleasures, Samuel Johnson said, “Drinking and fucking. Therefore I wonder that more are not drunkards, since all can drink though not all can fuck.”

Carl Van Doren, of Sinclair Lewis: “What Red doesn’t realize is that in order to have friends, one must be willing to suffer a little boredom, and Red has never learned that, and he has almost no friends left.”

MARCEL PROUST: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Unnamed woman, on hearing the NYC Metropolitan Opera’s “Moses und Aron” by Schoenberg (NYer, 2/18 & 25/02): “I survived Auschwitz--I don’t have to sit through this.”

Virginia Woolf, contrasting the English and American peoples: "While we have shadows that stalk behind us, they have a light that dances in front of them. That is what makes them the most interesting people in the world--they face the future, not the past."

Adam Gopnik, NYer, April 1, 2002: “We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament. Rousseau wrote of the feelings of the heart and the beauties of nature while stewing and seething in a little room. Dr. Johnson pleaded for Christian stoicism in desperate fear of damnation. The masters of the wry middle style, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell, were mired in sadness and confusion. The angry and competitive man [James Thurber] writes tender and rueful humor because his own condition is what he seeks to escape. The apostles of calm reason are hypersensitive and neurotic; William James arrived at a pose of genial universal cheerfulness in the face of constant panic. Art critics are often visually insensitive--look at their living rooms!--and literary critics are often slow and puzzled readers, searching for the meaning, and cooks are seldom trenchermen, being more fascinated by recipes than greedy for food.”

Franz Kafka, 1/27/1904 letter to Oskar Pollak: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. . . . We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

Emerson, Nature, chapter 1: “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. . . . I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes)—which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Philip Roth, The Dying Animal [father to son who has gotten a girl pregnant and now thinks he must marry her]: “I reminded him that nobody could make him do what he didn’t want to do. I said what I wish some forceful man had said to me when I was on the brink of making my mistake [and marrying his mother]; I said, ‘Living in a country like ours whose key documents are all about emancipation, all directed at guaranteeing individual liberty, living in a free system that is basically indifferent to how you behave so long as the behavior is lawful, the misery that comes your way is most likely to be self-generated.’”

Debra Winger, answering the question “what would you say if your daughter told you she wanted to be an actress”: “I would ask myself where did I go wrong.”

Last month, a survey was conducted by U.N. worldwide. The only question asked was “Would you please give your most honest opinion about a solution to the food shortage in the rest of the world?"
The survey was a HUGE failure. In Africa they did not know what "food" meant. In Western Europe they did not know what "shortage" meant. In Eastern Europe they did not know what "opinion" meant. In the Middle East they did not know what "solution" meant. In South America they did not know what "please" meant. In Asia they did not know what "honest" meant. And in the USA they did not know what "the rest of world " meant.

Yelena V. Kozlova, whose daughter, Darya, a ninth grader, died in a plane crash over Germany (July 2002) in which 45 Russian children, mostly high school honor students, died on their way to a vacation in Spain, speaking to her daughter’s grieving schoolmates: "Dig into life and be joyful."

Bill Stott: “i think i've always had the feeling that i was living among gods--which is to say among people who represented nearly all the potentials we humans have--and that, if i could simply recount, perhaps with a light dusting of analysis--what the people i knew did and said and felt, i'd have written something valuable.

John Eldredge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul: "What else is it we are seeking from women...? What is that ache we are trying to assuage with her? Mercy, comfort, beauty, ecstasy.--in a word, God. I'm serious. What we are looking for is God.. . . We do not know how long it lasted, but there was a moment in Eden when Eve was fallen and Adam was not; she had eaten but he yet had a choice. I believe something took place in his heart that went like this: I have lost my... soul mate, the most vital companion I've known.... I know I cannot live without her.
“Adam chose Eve over God. If you think I exaggerate, simply look around.... Watch the powerful obsession at work. What else can this be but 'worship? Men come into the world without the God who was our deepest joy, our ecstasy. Aching for what we know not what, we meet [a woman] and we are history. She is the closest thing we've ever encountered to God, the pinnacle of creation, the very embodiment of God's beauty and mystery and tenderness and allure. And what goes out to her [is]...our longing for God."

Barbara Cook, NYT, 8/15/2002. To the last pupil, Wendy Lane Bailey, who sang "Time After Time" with a bouncy pop intonation that slid up to notes instead of attacking them squarely, Ms. Cook said, "I'm sure people tell you all the time that you're real good, because you are." But she added, "I'd like to see you take more chances." In the end, Ms. Cook suggested, that is the big paradox, and perhaps the big secret. "To be as authentic as we know how to be at the moment, so that we can be more and more present in what we do. The more we can do that, the safer we are. The problem is it feels most dangerous, because what I ask people to do is in effect undress emotionally, so that's very frightening and new. But this very thing that seems most dangerous is where safety lies."

Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán (NYT 10/3/02): "A documentary can play a role in the preservation of memory. A country without documentary films is like a family without a photo album. When you see the photo, you remember your past, but the same photo also redefines your past. So there is a to and fro with memory. You return to a forgotten story, and in the process you rewrite that story."

Economist Vilfredo Pareto: “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.”

Paul Schrader: "The secret to the creative life is how to feel at ease with your own embarrassment."

Bill Stott: “Being with a grandchild one feels much closer to one's childhood self than one did with one's children. I suppose because as a parent one was struggling to escape one’s child self, be ‘adult’ and in control.”

Harold Bloom: “Individualism, whatever damages its American ruggedness continues to inflict on our politics and social economy, is more than ever the only hope for our imaginative lives. “

Herbert Butterfield, religious toleration was "the last policy that remained when it had proved impossible to go on fighting any longer."

Woody Allen (NYT 11/11/2002): "I regret that my muse was a comic muse and not a dramatic muse. I would rather have had the gifts of Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams than the gifts I got. I'm not kvetching. I'm glad I got any gifts at all. But I would like to do something great. I feel I had grandiose plans for myself when I started. And I have not lived up to them. I've done some things that are perfectly nice. But I had a much grander conception of where I should wind up in the artistic firmament. What has made it doubly poignant for me is that I was never denied the opportunity. The only thing standing between me and greatness is me."

William Ellery Channing (1780-1842): “To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never; in a word to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common, this is to be my symphony.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi: "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

Pittman McGehee, Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst: "What I've found is that for most of us, the first half of our lives is biography. We unconsciously wrap ourselves around our family histories. The second half of our life has the potential to be autobiography, provided we take responsibility for our own choices." (TX MONTHLY, Jan 2003, p. 87, in Jan Jarboe Russell’s “Jung at Heart.”)

Robert E. Lee (after the carnage of Fredericksburg): “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.”

Pat Moynihan (when he learned J.F.K. was dead): "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually."

Gordon Stott: “Life makes a lot of ugliness. We need to make a lot of beauty to make up for this fact.”

Last two paragraphs of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:
“Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent his squad to the settlement; he’d swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that big of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned a favor from Tsezar that evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fall ill. He’d got over it.
“A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.”

Michael Kinsley, of George W. Bush: “He has the unreflective person’s immunity from irony, that great killer of intellectual passion. Ask him to reconcile his line on Iraq with his line on North Korea and he just gets irritated.”

U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr., ambassador to Turkey during the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915, to Talaat Pasha, the Turkish interior minister who was leading the genocide and who didn't see why Morgenthau, a Jew and an American, was concerned about the death of Armenians, who were Christian and Turkish citizens: "I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion but merely as a human being." [Samantha Power, "A PROBLEM FROM HELL": AMERICA AND THE AGE OF GENOCIDE, p. 7.]

Jonathan Lahr: "We don't always read a memoir for historical truth. We read it to find out how the author escaped the bonds of family and became the hero of his or her own life."

Genghis Khan: “The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him—to ride their horses and take away their possessions!”

Marcel Proust: "Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."

Adam Nicholson, Daily Telegraph, 6/24/2003: "Henry is a simpler figure [than Hamlet, Lear, Othello, or MacBeth], whose drama is less spiritual and universal than political and social. His great question is not ‘Who am I?’ but ‘How should I behave?’ ‘What does a leader do?’"

Czeslaw Milosz, “Gift”:
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over
honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did
not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea
and sails.

Annie Sullivan: “I doubt if life or for that matter eternity is long enough to erase the terrors and ugly blots scored upon my mind during those dismal years from 8 to 14” spent in the poorhouse in Tewksbury, MA, among diseased prostitutes and the insane.

Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides, chapter 5: “I had lost nearly thirty-seven years to the image I carried of myself. I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents’ definition of me. They had defined my early on, coined me like a word they had translated on some mysterious hieroglyph, and I had spent my life coming to terms with that specious coinage. My parents had succeeded in making me a stranger to myself. They had turned me into the exact image of what they needed at the time.”

D.H. Lawrence, in a 1915 letter to Ottoline Morell: “At the bottom one knows the eternal things, and is glad.”

G.K. Chesterton, last lines of "The Rolling English Road”: "For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, / Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green."

Quote I read in July 2003: “Grieve not nor speak of me with tears, but laugh and speak of me as though I were beside you. I loved you so. It was heaven here with you.”

William Blake: “Everything Possible to be Believed is an Image of Truth.”

Elvis Mitchell, the New York Times (Aug. 6, 2003): "A foreigner judging the United States by its films would think Americans spend more time running from exploding fireballs than having sex."

Alan Ayckbourn claims that the age of the internet, e-mails and text messages is isolating people and that this makes theatre more important than ever: "I hope that theatre will always be with us. I think that it becomes more important, not less important, as we lose our sense of community because of the technology around us. Soon people will get married by text messages. We need spaces in every town in the country where we can discuss what it means to be human and to share ideas."

Christa Carvajal: “Art is dispensable because it's renewable."

Colin Rowe: "We depend on the world's broad indifference to our designs, its capacity for surprise, and its resistance to our touch for our very sanity. We can find the world inescapably meaningful and real precisely because of and not in spite of, its obstinacy."

Edmund Burke: "Men are qualified for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”

Joan Acocella (NYer 10/13/03): “The yearning for love is, in part, a desire to become visible as one really is to the Other, though every time one dares to let oneself be seen one risks being seen through.”

Joseph Conrad, in excellent fiction: "One may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world."

Talleyrand: “He who did not live in the years before the revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is.”

Melville: “Sailor or landsman, there is some sort of Cape Horn for us all. Boys! beware of it: prepare for it in time. Greybeards! thank God it is passed.”

al-Qa'eda: "You're engaged in a war with people who love death as much as you love life."

A Russian politician (fall 2003): "We have to have someone to do the dirty job of keeping [the world] together. And that's the United States. And although you [Americans] do stupid things, the United States is the only steamboat we can hitch ourselves to and go in the direction of modernity."

Verna Hobson: “If there is an afterlife, won’t we be surprised!”

Billy Connolly: “The more you come into the daylight and tell the truth, the happier you become, the more your shadow goes away.” (New Yorker 11/17/03)

John Updike, “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”

Boswell: “Speaking of the inward light, to which some Methodists pretended, he said, it was a principle utterly incompatible with social or civil security. ‘If a man (said he,) pretends to a principle of action of which I can know nothing, nay, not so much as that he has it, but only that he pretends to it; how can I tell what that person may be prompted to do? When a person professes to be governed by a written ascertained law, I can then know where to find him.”

Samuel Johnson, when asked why people meet at table when generally there is not “one sentence of conversation worthy of being remembered”: “Why to eat and drink together, and to promote kindness; and, Sir, this is better done where there is no solid conversation: when there is, people differ in opinions and get into bad humour, or some of the company who are not capable of such conversation, are left out, and feel themselves uneasy. It was for this reason Sir Robert Walpole said, he always talked bawdy at his table, because in that all could join.”

Samuel Johnson: “All censure of a man’s self [i.e. all self-censure] is oblique praise. . . . It has all the invidiousness of self-praise,”

Spaulding Gray, in his 1980 Point Judith: “It’s very hard for me not to tell everybody everything.”

Kristian Wilson, Nintendo VP, 1989: "Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

Peter Ustinov: "Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit."

John McWorter, linguist: “When society values the impulsive spoken outburst over the reasoned elegance of the written word the implications for an informed citizenry are dire.”

Archie Hobson, of his sister and him after their parents’ deaths: “No one but us knows the things we know. After us, no one will know anything we haven't translated for them.”

Thoreau, diary, May 6, 1854: "All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love."

Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty Of All" (1877): “If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men.... What right have you, sir, Mr. Clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.”

John Waters: "There is no such thing as a bad movie if you go to a movie watching detail only. If you really hate the movie, just look at the lamps and pretend that the movie is about lamps. And then it can never be boring -- you can even see continuity mistakes within the lamps."

Melville: “That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.”

Melville: “Wherever we recognize the image of God let us reverence it; though it swing from the gallows.”

John Duckworth, after reading my article on heaven: “The longer I dwell on the subject the greater my desires of what I would want included. Really though another chance at my life without the fears and self-doubts that kept me from always believing in heaven on earth the first time. Well then too I would love to experience all of the past ages and finally I’d like to end up where all the dogs go so they could pet me all the time.”

Walter Kerr, Thirty Plays Hath November, p. 31: traditional plays such as Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes are too "beautifully sealed," with "no loose ends left lying about, no moral ambiguities. . . . In our new state of mind we distrust what is orderly because we are now sharply aware that in everything ordered there is something extremely arbitrary."

New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, 47 and the married father of two, announcing that he was gay and would soon resign his office (8/12/04): "At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is."

Dr. Sheenah Hankin, a psychotherapist in New York City: "The age of privacy is over and with it the ability to sustain denial."

Inversions of meaning, a la Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (“You came late! How nice”), an old love: “My sister and I love each other terribly.” “X suggests that we visit it, but it might be nice to see.” (Having cleaned a tub and drawn a bath for us two) “I’m waiting on you.”

Frederick A. Pottle, “Readable and Promising,” YALE DAILY NEWS, 12/8/1960, p. 2: “Among the poets, I shall venture no comment on Mr. Joseph Harned (‘From Songs of Mirth’) and Mr. Neil Goodwin (‘The Sky Passed in Lines’), because I don’t yet understand their poems. Mr. Bill Stott’s ‘Follow the Piper’ has a first stanza good enough for a major poet:
A bonfire claws the winter’s night
On Devil’s Moor, so wet and wide.
What phantoms reel in dark and light>
Old men are dancing, stand aside.
But the two following stanzas pretty much repeat the first and have not achieved the same transparent fusion of sense and form.”

Algernon Sidney Crapsey, The Last of the Heretics (1924): “When I am asked in these days what my religion is, I hesitate and stumble, and men go away thinking that I have no religion. But I have a religion and if asked to give it a name I should say I am a Pantheistic Humanist, and if one were to ask, ‘What is a Pantheistic Humanist?’ I should say one who believes in the divinity of a telegraph pole. . . . When I thought on these things I said if my Christ has in Him the divinity of a telegraph pole, then he is divine enough for me.” (pp. 292-93)

Adam Gopnik, NYer, 5/10/04, p. 90: “I once said something fatuous to him [his dying friend Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the MoMA] about enjoying tonight’s sunset, whatever tomorrow would bring, and he had replied that when you know you are dying you can’t simply ‘live in the moment.’ You loved a fine sunset because it slipped so easily into a history, yours and the world’s; part of the pleasure lay in knowing that it was one in a stream of sunsets you had loved, each good, some better, one or two perfect, moving forward in an open series. Once you knew that this one could be the last, it filled you with a sense of dread; what was the point of collecting painting in a museum you knew was doomed to burn down?”

Arthur Miller, NYT, 9/19/04: “It used to be that a play seemed to resonate into the society a lot more, and now it's simply one more entertainment. Maybe the competition has ground down moral and social meaning. Publicity and advertising are the major arts today. They shape the consciousness of the people far more than actual art does.”

Virginia Woolf: “Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

Isaiah Berlin: “It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no skeptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.”

Germaine de Staël: “What man, exhausted by the passions of life, can listen with indifference to the tune which enlivened the dances and games of his tranquil infancy? What woman whose beauty time has at last ravaged can hear without tears the song that her lover once sang for her?”

Richard Avedon: “There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."

“I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the human mind! Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mind deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."

Izumi Shikibu, a 1000-year-old poem: “It is true the wind blows terribly here--but moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.”

Robert Byington, of me: “You have found the courage you've been seeking by loving indiscriminately.”

P.S. [a 2004 movie]: “Some guy broke your heart, and I get that—that’s traumatic. But that happens to everybody. It’s called . . . high school!”

THE NEW YORKER, Oct. 18, 2004: "John Sperling, an octogenarian businessman who in 1976 created the for-profit University of Phoenix, . . . is also the co-author of a recent book, The Great Divide:Retro vs. Metro America, which suggests that the 2004 election is a contest between '"God, Family, and Flag' folk'--who live in the South, the Great Plains, the Rockies, and Appalachia--and forward-thinking metropolitans who support 'economic modernity,' 'religious moderation,' and 'excellence in education and science.'"

Goethe: “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.”

E.B. White: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Karl Rove: "I run all my campaigns as if people were watching television with the sound turned down."

John Patrick Shanley, NYT 11/20/04: "Doubt has gotten a bad reputation. People who are utterly certain are vulnerable to a brand of foolishness that people who maintain a level of doubt are not."

Eric Frank Russell: "For years we have been making triumphant retreats in the face of a demoralized enemy advancing in utter disorder."

Dwight D. Eisenhower: "All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."

Nkosi Johnson, South African boy who died in 2001 of AIDS at age 12: "Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are." [Newsman Jim Wooten did a 2004 book on him.]

Ty Burr, in the Boston Globe, of a film called something like The Kranks’ Christmas: "It nails a curiously widespread contradiction in modern American pop culture - the desperate, self-negating need to be both cynical and sentimental at the same time.”

David Brooks, 12/14 (?) /04: “When Democrats open their mouths, they try to say something interesting. If the true thing is obvious and boring, the liberal person will go off and say something original, even if it is completely idiotic. This is how deconstructionism got started.”

Mark Twain: “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

Mark Twain: “I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.”

A.N. Scott, film review of Phantom of the Opera (NYT 12/23/04): “Lord Lloyd Webber's thorough acquaintance with the canon of 18th- and 19th-century classical music is not in doubt, but his attempt to force a marriage between that tradition and modern musical theater represents a victory of pseudo-populist grandiosity over taste--an act of cultural butchery akin to turning an aviary of graceful swans and brilliant peacocks into an order of Chicken McNuggets.”

Mark Russell, off-Broadway theater producer who discovered or fostered the careers of Eric Bogosian, Karen Finley, Blue Man Group, John Leguizamo, Meredith Monk and Spalding Gray (NYT 1/22/05): "The key to a good theater moment is a certain transgression that opens it up. And that can be anything from Elevator Repair Service or someone taking off their clothes, or someone telling their own story without changing the names, like Spalding. These little fissures open us up into something new."

Reinhold Niebuhr: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary."

David Brooks, NYT column, February 26, 2005: “As Claus Christian Malzahn reminded us in Der Spiegel online this week, German politicians ridiculed Ronald Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech in 1987. They "couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany." But if there is one soft-power gift America does possess, it is this tendency to imagine new worlds. As Malzahn goes on to note, "In a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change.... We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow."

Daniel Henninger, WSJ, 3/4/05: “Writing in this space recently, I suggested that a world made too fast by computers and too harsh by 24-hour news more than anything needed its artists and architects to provide it with respite, rather than the emotional or visual pistol-whipping of too much recent art.”

Francine Prose, NYT (3/13/05 review of Jeannette Walls, “The Glass Castle”): “Memoirs are our modern fairy tales, the harrowing fables of the Brothers Grimm reimagined from the perspective of the plucky child who has, against all odds, evaded the fate of being chopped up, cooked and served to the family for dinner. What the memoir writer knows is what readers of Grimm intuit: the loving parent and the evil stepparent may in reality be the same person viewed at successive moments and in different lights. And so the autobiographer is faced with the daunting challenge of describing the narrow escape from being baked into gingerbread while at the same time attempting to understand, forgive and even love the witch.”

Elizabeth I: "Had I, my lords, been born crested not cloven, you had not treated me thus!"

Jean de la Bruyer: “Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.”

Wong Lon Sin See: "Every day you feel joy, happiness, and light in your heart is the Day of Enlightenment."

Jon Roberts: “When two or more are gathered in His name, He won’t be present.”

Peter Kramer, Against Depression: “Depression, the self as hollow shell.”

Zen quote: "Drinking my green tea, I stopped the war."

Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

George Orwell: “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

Emily Dickinson: “I like a look of agony, because I know it’s true.”

C.S. Lewis, last chapter "An Experiment in Criticism": “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissent in Abrams et al v. United States (1919): "When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

Robert Bly, 2/6/2003 letter to me: “Dear Bill, Thank you for trusting me with your book. I’ve found many good things in it, and I like the openness with which you talk about your own life. At the same time, I don’t think it’s concentrated enough to be a book. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but it’s as if you would need to distinguish more precisely what is new in your thought and commentaries from what others have done in a similar memoir. That’s a hard job, I know, and maybe a book of that thinner sort is not what you intend. Forgive me if I’m way off. With warm wishes.”

Mickey Owen, who passed the notorious passed ball in the 1941 World Series, maintained that he was not bothered by the barbs over his miscue. As he put it long afterward, "I would've been completely forgotten if I hadn't missed that pitch."

George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992: "Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched."

Maude, in Harold and Maude: “L-I-V-E! LIVE! . . . Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room."

In January 1863 the great Italian-American soprano Adelina Patti gave an interview to Le Figaro that appears to have been one of the first conversational interviews in all journalism. Musical World and New York Musical Times ran a translation of the interview in its issue of January 17, 1863 (p. 43), after which it editorialized: “The . . . depicting the character of the great singer of the day through an ordinary conversation, well arranged, appears to us an immense improvement on the old-fashioned memoir. . . . In future, when this method has become generally known, ladies of celebrity, instead of being asked to sit for their portraits to photographers, will be asked to talk for their portraits to writers, and the great art will be to make them talk characteristically and well.” I found this reference in John Frederick Cone, Adelina Patti: Queen of Hearts, Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 1993, pp. 60-61. In addition to citing Musical World, Cone cites Herman Klein, The Reign of Patti, New York, Century, 1920, pp. 117-18.

John Kenneth Galbraith: “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.”

Robert Frost: “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

Brian Greene, professor of physics at Columbia, NYT 9/30/05: “In the far, far future, essentially all matter will have returned to energy. But because of the enormous expansion of space, this energy will be spread so thinly that it will hardly ever convert back to even the lightest particles of matter. Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos.

Joyce Carol Oates used the word “pathography” in the NYTBookReview in 1988; see NYTBR 7/10/05.

Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Glasgow Evening News: “There must, for instance, be something very strange in a man who, if left alone in a room with a tea cozy, doesn't try it on.”

Mayor Frank Hague, Jersey City, 1938: “You hear about constitutional rights, free speech, and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, ‘That man is a Red, that man is a Communist!’ You never hear a real American talk like that.”

Gordon Stott, of the money his grandparents gave him and his sister and cousins: “Sometimes that money, for all the ‘good’ it has done, reminds me of a liquor store on an Indian reservation. There was no good way to put it into the hands of us Indians.”

Skitch Henderson (AP obit, 11/2/2005): "I watch the public like a hawk. If I see boredom, I worry. You can tell by the applause: There's perfunctory applause, there's light applause, and then there's real applause. When it's right, applause sounds like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce."

Hunter S. Thompson, on meeting George W. Bush at Thompson’s Super Bowl party in Houston in 1974: "He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humor. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub, then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away."

Rev. Martin Niemöller, a German pastor imprisoned in World War II: "First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

William Blake: “He who would do good must do it in minute particulars; general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.”

Kherry McKay: “Forgiveness gives its greatest gift to the forgiver.”

Cowboys defensive tackle La'Roi Glover, of his coach, Bill Parcells’ younger brother’s death (NYT 12/24/05): “Once we all found out what it was [what was troubling Parcells], we kind of understood and said, 'Hey, let's just focus in and do our jobs and try to take some of the pressure off.' "

Kurt Vonnegut, “In These Times,” March 2006: “When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.
“Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
“I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.
“Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: ‘Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.’ So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

P.G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money: “At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.”

Marshal Hermann Goring liked the quote “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun,” but the quote was coined by another German, Hanns Johst, in his play Schlageter, 1933.

Charles McGrath, reviewing Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories, NYT 4/9/06: “His book is also preternaturally alert to what Bennett, in discussing his favorite paintings, calls ‘the glow,’ by which he means not just light but the small graceful touches, the odd details that catch the corner of the eye — the accidental vantage point, he says, that is also a shortcut to the back of the brain.”

Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), Protestant pastor and social activist: “When the Nazis arrested the Communists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Communist. When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Social Democrat. When they arrested the trade unionists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a trade unionist. When they arrested the Jews, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Jew. When they arrested me, there was no longer anyone who could protest.”

R. Buckminster Fuller: “Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.”

Stanley Kunitz, in his poem “The Long Boat”: “Peace! Peace! / To be rocked by the Infinite! / As if it didn't matter / which way was home; / as if he didn't know / he loved the earth so much / he wanted to stay forever.”

Robertson Davies: “Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”

Lincoln Steffens, to his protégée John Reed: “Each editor is to regard himself as the whole world. Whatever will interest him involuntarily (not as an editor, but as a human being) will interest the rest of us human beings. That’s S.S. McClure’s rule for his manuscript readers, and it is founded on sound psychology.”

Pablo Neruda, “All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.”

Tom Robbins, according to Garrison Keiller, “says that when he starts a book, he has no idea of what the story will be. He never outlines and never revises. He just works on each sentence until he thinks it's perfect, sometimes for more than an hour, and then he moves on to the next one. He said, ‘I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.’”

Ernest Hemingway, when starting out in Paris, tried simply to write what he called "true sentences. . . . I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'" Between January and April 1922, Hemingway composed only six sentences he was proud of.

Edward Hopper: "Maybe I am slightly inhuman.... All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."

Seneca: “Death is the release from all pain and complete cessation, beyond which our suffering will not extend. It will return us to that condition of tranquility we had enjoyed before we were born. Should anyone mourn the deceased, then he must also mourn the unborn. Death is neither good nor evil, for good or evil can only be something that actually exists. However, what is of itself nothing and which transforms everything else into nothing will not at all be able to put us at the mercy of Fate.”

Kim Masters, Slate, 8/31/06: “Some in Hollywood argue that artists must be forgiven their excesses. Even after Roman Polanski went on the lam after he was charged with drugging and sodomizing a child, many in Hollywood's top ranks were prepared to welcome him back. And these are not simple questions. How many Gauguin canvases would you give up if the artist in exchange didn't abandon his wife and five children and knocked up fewer young girls in the Third World? What if you were responsible for chatting Gauguin up as you financed and promoted his disease-spreading adventures? Once you've got all that figured out, how do you think Mel Gibson stacks up as an artist against Gauguin, and what bargain would you make there?”

Ronald Reagan: “Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But the Marines don’t have that problem.”

Andre Dubus: “"We don't have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we've got."

Roger Kahn: "Writing from the heart and gut and succeeding makes life sweet."

Mother Teresa: “I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.”

Nicanor Parra: “The tree says ‘tree’ whenever its leaves move.”

Sally Vickers, Daily Telegraph, 8/13/06: “Linking ourselves to our losses is what makes them cease to be unspeakable.”

Jorge Luis Borges: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

David Brooks, “Nonconformity is Skin Deep,” NYT, 8/27/06: “middle-class types have been appropriating the symbols of marginalized outcasts since at least the 1830’s. This is no longer a way to express individuality; it’s a way to be part of the mob. Today, fashion trends may originate on Death Row, but it takes about a week and a half for baggy jeans, slut styles and tattoos to migrate from Death Row to Wal-Mart.
¶What you get is a culture of trompe l’oeil degeneracy. People adopt socially acceptable transgressions — like tattoos — to show they are edgy, but inside they are still middle class. You run into these candy-cane grunge types: people with piercings and inkings all over their bodies who look like Sid Vicious but talk like Barry Manilow. They’ve got the alienated look — just not the anger.
¶And that’s the most delightful thing about the whole tattoo fad. A cadre of fashion-forward types thought they were doing something to separate themselves from the vanilla middle classes but are now discovering that the signs etched into their skins are absolutely mainstream. They are at the beach looking across the acres of similar markings and learning there is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk-free than rebellion, nothing more conservative than youth culture.
¶Another generation of hipsters, laid low by the ironies of consumerism.”

Faust’s bargain with the Devil: "When to the moment I shall say,/ ‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’/ Then mayst thou fetter me straightway/ Then to the abyss will I depart!"

William James, “A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.”

Jean Paul Richter: “God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald: "What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."

T.S. Eliot: "This last part of my life is the best, in excess of anything I could have deserved."

Winston Churchill: "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. . . . A modest little person, with much to be modest about."

Moses Hadas: "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."

Groucho Marx: "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."

Mark Twain: "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."

Oscar Wilde: "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."

Samuel Johnson: "He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."

Walter Kerr: "He had delusions of adequacy."

Robert Redford: "He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."

James Reston, about Richard Nixon: "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them."

Count Talleyrand: "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."

Andrew Lang (1844-1912): "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination."

John Hodgman (comedian, Yale 1994), of Harold Bloom's teaching style: "Floridly affectionate while totally dismissive."

David Brooks (NYT book review 10/22/06): “Oakeshott was wise, but Oakeshottian conservatism can never prevail in America because the United States was not founded on the basis of custom, but by the assertion of a universal truth - that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain rights. The United States is a creedal nation, and almost every significant movement in American history has been led by people calling upon us to live up to our creed. In many cases, the people making those calls were religious leaders. From Jonathan Edwards to the abolitionists to the civil rights leaders to the people fighting AIDS and genocide in Africa today, religiously motivated people have been active in public life. They have been, in their certainty and their willingness to apply divine truths, fundamentalists - if we want to use Sullivan's categories. You take those people out of American politics and you don't have a country left.”

John Keats: "Nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel."

Will Blythe, review of Ralph Steadman’s Bruised Memories: Gonzo [which Steadman defines as “controlled madness”], Hunter S. Thompson, and Me, NYT, 11/19/06: “For a few years in the 1970s, it did appear that insanity was a great career move, that a deranged journalist might fruitfully subvert tired conventions that kept a writer from injecting himself into his work.

Poet Sharon Olds, who published her first book of poetry at 37: "I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky."

Joe DiMaggio: "You start chasing a ball and your brain immediately commands your body to 'run forward, bend, scoop up the ball, peg it to the infield,' then your body says, 'Who me?'"

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327): “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘Thank You,’ that would suffice.”

Woody Allen: “My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.”

Groucho Marx: "Horatio Alger's books conveyed a powerful message to me and many of my young friends—that if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance would eventually come. As a child I didn't regard it as a myth, and as an old man I think of it as the story of my life."

David Brooks (NYT 1/14/07): “In his American Exceptionalism (1996), [Seymour Martin] Lipset pointed out that 78 percent of Americans endorse the view that ‘the strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business.’ Fewer than a third of all Americans believe the state has a responsibility to reduce income disparities, compared with 82 percent of Italians. Over 70 percent of Americans believe ‘individuals should take more responsibility for providing for themselves’ whereas most Japanese believe ‘the state should take more responsibility to ensure everyone is provided for.’”

Michel de Montaigne: "The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness."

Dennis Dutton, aesthetician, NYT 2/27/06: “Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense. If you think an interpretation is by a 74-year-old pianist at the end of her life, it won’t sound quite the same to you as if you think it’s by a 24-year-old piano-competition winner who is just starting out. Beyond all the pretty notes, we want creative engagement and communication from music, we want music to be a bridge to another personality. Otherwise, we might as well feed Chopin scores into a computer.”

Emerson: “I am always insincere, as knowing that there are other moods.”

Charles Feidelson, Jr.: "Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns."

Kathryn Harrison: "We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are."

Kris Kristofferson: “The desire to be fucked up probably leaves you, but the desire to be high never does.”

Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia, spiritual leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Islamic organization of some 40 million members (WSJ April 7, 2007): "’Young people like to kiss each other,’ he says, throwing his hands in the air. ‘Why not? Just because old people don't do it doesn't mean it's wrong.’"

Abdul Munir Mulkhan, Indonesian Muslim moderate (WSJ 4/10/07): “Islam is not just for the Muslims. There are many teachings in Islam that are very beautiful but they are being covered over by this black-and-white way of thinking. For instance, there is a hadith [teaching] that says that smiling at other people is a form of charity.”

Malcolm Muggeridge: “When mortal men try to live without God, they infallibly succumb to megalomania or erotomania or both. The raised fist or the raised phallus; Nietzsche or D. H. Lawrence.”

Simone Weil: “One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God ... one is worshiping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of Divinity in them.”

Kurt Vonnegut: “If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”

Julius Erving: “Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

Dorothy Parker, on Aimee Semple McPherson’s 1928 autobiography: "It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario."

Chilean poet Raul Zurita, who has Parkinson’s, asked if he fears death: “What happens is that when I write, life hangs in suspension. Seriously. If you’re screwed because they kicked your son out of school for your not paying tuition, you can’t write. If you write, it’s because you kept that out of your head. And if life hangs in suspension, so does death. In that instant that you write, it’s the same instant that it was for Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Neruda, Parra, and Maquieria, your own contemporary. This is the fundamental simultaneity of all writing, where death is totally suspended.”

L. P. Hartley, first sentence of The Go-Between (1953): "The past is a foreign country—they do things differently there."

Anthony Lane, Review of "Pirates of the Caribbean: At the World's End," NYer, June 4, 2007: "At the climax, two vessels get their rigging entwined on the rim of a whirlpool, which sounds impressive, but give me a hot bath, an open plughole, and a pair of rubber ducks and I could have laid out the situation more efficiently."

Norman Mailer, NYer, 5/21/07: “If you’re writing a novel, you try to keep the navigator going. If it veers off course, you’re in trouble. . . . On a given day, if you take the wrong turn you can lose six moths. You try to steer it out of instinct.”

Woody Allen, “Getting Even”; a man asks his uncle: “Could it not be simply that we are alone and aimless, doomed to wander in an indifferent universe, with no hope of salvation, nor any prospect except misery, death, and the empty reality of eternal nothing?” The uncle replies, “You wonder why you’re not invited to more parties.”

David Brooks, 7/10/07: “When Americans face something that’s psychologically traumatic, they invent an autonomous Lone Ranger fantasy hero who can deal with it. The closing of the frontier brought us the hard-drinking cowboy loner. Urbanization brought us the hard-drinking detective loner.”

Charles Krauthammer, 8/17/07: “Ronald Reagan, I was once told, said he liked The Natural except that he didn't understand why the Dark Lady shoots Roy Hobbs. Reagan, the preternatural optimist, may have had difficulty fathoming tragedy, but no one knows why Hobbs is shot. It is fate, destiny, nemesis. Perhaps the dawning of knowledge, the coming of sin. Or more prosaically, the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether--and how--we ever come back.”

Chilean sex-talk radio host Roberto Artiagoitía (a.k.a. “El Rumpy”): "Women are going to fuck whoever they want, and men are going to fuck whoever they can."

China: Its English = Chinglish

2007-02-24T09:30:00.001-03:00

The hegemon's idiom has prestige, so people try to use it though they don't really command it. I remember being reduced to happy convulsions when E.M. Forster's Muslim hero in Passage to India encouraged himself by saying, "One can but die the once!" Throughout our China trip we found instances of English misused in the effort to add panache to a product. The motto of gated multiplexes going up near Guilin: "Still excellent Manor So Scenery Life."

The most astonishing testament to our language's prestige I found in a business magazine, Expression, published for airline travelers and hotel guests.* The magazine, handsomely laid out and with sharp color photos, is printed on coated paper finer than any American magazine's. Except for article titles, which are given in Chinese and English, and article synopses and parts of a few ads, all the magazine's text is in Chinese. But so great is the aura of our language that China's most glamorous people, its economic superstars, have to be sprinkled with it. Here, seven synopses:

In the globalization progress, the Chinese business enterprise is awarding social responsibilities in the shoulders. This is the inevitable process of growing up, also the good choice if Chinese business enterprise to do spring.

Liu Wui Heart Farming in Seasons. By experienced China economy changes for several years, Liu Wei more and more thinks himself is a very tiny, because facing the world too abstruse, proposed question too formidable, there upon one become more adore and honest.

Jiang Jun Decisive Kick. To portrayed Rong Wei as a mid- to- high brand marketing, he moves it in a car, have the exquisite surgical.

Hun Jun Controls Second and Third Front. One week a month to run around outside, the average one-half to one day run a city. Eventually more than 50 county towns throughout the country.

Guo Jihong Dancing in the World Dreaming. A woman who attempts to melt herself into Television Arts and life is not lonely, not complains what is gain or less. She will be happy as well.

Zou Qifang BDS with Two Hands to Grasp. 8 years marketing management experience, and two years manages theories from The Wharton School, all finding out to use in start a business of 7,8 years of ground.

Pure and Pretty Concretion in West Pond. Peacefully sit in the afternoon west pond, this is the living appearance which looks forward endocentrically, don’t need prosperous, don’t need extravagance, needs pure river water and a wisp of sound in the boughs and feelings is slim to the utmost in the very tiny breeze.

And three ads:

Cheer Jagermeister Up High. The Jagermeister effect blended the feelings of tasty Jagermeister in the bar, expressing a happiness, wild, relax, brave, share with friend topic.

TAG Heuer World Cruises Exhibition of Beautiful. The images deduce beautiful, the moment touch the abyss of time. The watch of TAG Heuer expects to a kind of more emollient, more vividly way to express the brand fine wishes that establish a fairer and equal world through their hard work.

Have a good reputation in Sanya, can be Comparable to International Standards.

*“This periodical is designated for flight passengers of the Hainan Airlines Co., Ltd, China Xinhau Airlines Co., Ltd., Chang’an Airlines Co., Ltd, Shanxi Airlines Co., Ltd. and Deer Jet Co. Ltd[,] Luckyair Co., Ltd. This periodical is designated for room guests by Hainan Xinguo Hotel, Hainan Kangle Garden HNA Holiday Inn, Sanya HNA Hotel, Hainan Bo’ao HNA Hotel, Hangzhou Huagang HNA Hotel, Hainan Meilan HNA Hotel, Beijing Yanjing HNA Hotel, Shanghai HNA Hotel, Shenzhen HNA Hotel.”

China: Guilin*

2007-02-19T16:43:00.002-03:00

The China most Westerners carry around in our heads comes from the province of Guilin, where views like this occur at every turn.

Why do they? Whence the scenery, the mist, the absurdly beautiful mountains?

From what I understand, the mountains are the result of volcanic activity under limestone domes. The mist is due to the (non-rainy) season of our visit, sand blown from Tibetan deserts, and illegal surface mining and subsequent burning of soft coal.

Chinese art work has taught tourists that the place to see Guilin's landscape is from, or alongside, the Li River. Today, tourists go by motorboat, and the trip includes a meal cooked at the back of the boat.

While a meal cooks below them, Irene, Nettie, Lucy, and our tour companion Ester Martinez agree to pose.

On the Li River also is a famous rock anomaly, Elephant Trunk Hill.

For the tourists who come here, the Guilin elders understand that the ambient motif has to be elephants. The children's playscape

the bridges

and the benches

For tourists unexcited by elephants, the elders, knowing from their youth that the island facing Elephant Trunk Hill is a hangout for neckers, call it Love Island and fill it with embracing statues.

In Love Island's parking lot gather the trinket and fruit sellers and three young women from "ethnic minority" groups in their native costumes. For pocket change you can have your picture taken with them.

Guilin's limestone mountains are full of caves and grottoes, and we were taken to the most famous, Reed Flute Cave, so called because the reeds used for making flutes grow, or grew, by the cave mouth. I'm not a big cave lover, but this one is spectacular, a fact only hinted at in my pictures. (For overlit views of the cave, go to http://www.molon.de/galleries/China/Guanxi/Reed/).

The photo I'll keep is the one everybody takes well: a stone city across an unrippled black pond that perfectly reflects it.

China: A Visit to the Wall*

2007-02-08T20:03:00.002-03:00

Our second day in China we climbed the Great Wall at Badalling, its highest point. The Wall there runs beside the logo for China’s 2008 Olympics: “One World One Dream.” (Look hard.)

Here are Lucy, Nettie, and Irene as we started to climb in the blustery cold. Nettie and Irene made it to the Wall’s highest point, which is, they tell me, beyond the farthest tower at the left of the photo above. I got only as far as the second tower in the same photo.

While waiting for the women to come back, I took an emblematic picture in which the river apparently winding through the rugged hills is in fact a highway.