With the specter of terrorism, both domestic and jihadist, haunting contemporary life, it’s no wonder that yesterday’s annual Folly Beach, SC, Christmas parade seemed somewhat subdued. For example, no eardrum-shattering Shriner-produced gun battles “betwixt” Revenuers and Moonshiners terrified toddlers. Instead, we baby boomers were treated to this rather melancholy spectacle.
[For those not proficient in Southern US English, here’s a translation: “This gentleman right here is 91-years-old, still working for the burned and crippled children (not the burning crippled children)].
Compare that to this scene from four years ago when all the little Masons and Benningtons were treated to some semi-authentic street drama, a Western tradition dating back to the glorious days of the Hundred Years War and the bubonic plague.
Also conspicuous in their absence were the vintage car clubs, those MG-Bs, Triumph Spitfires, XKE Jags that ascot-wearing playboys used to tool around the countryside in with their scarf-headed mistresses headed to the Timberland Inn for a mid-afternoon tryst.
And, for me, an owner of two late departed VW microbuses, what a disappointment that nary a one puttered past belching clouds of oil-laden exhaust (as opposed to in years past when they appeared in abundance, transforming Center Street into a miniature Beijing).
Nor did the Surf Rider drill team wow us with their shenanigans.
Not that the parade was a complete bust. The James Island band was in fine form.
Plus, the Roller Derby girls are always a welcome addition.
Of course, Santa appeared, albeit with an armed guard:
And, of course, the after-party at Chico Feo never disappoints. Check out these not-exactly vestal virgins preparing to sacrifice this cloven-footed beast to Jah so Mr. Weed back in the kitchen can whip up some of his world class curried goat.
And as Solstice present to all of you wherever you be, a rare photograph of your humble narrator at Chico Feo with his bodyguards.
A couple of posts ago, I channeled the late Joseph Campbell and echoed his contention that myths should be considered deep unconscious poetic projections that embody profound truths rather than as demonstrably false tales from antiquated religions. Echoing Northrop Frye, Campbell believed that myths provide models that help us navigate the progression of our lives through the blooming and withering we’re all heir to, maps, as it were, handed over to us from old Tiresias to help us find our way to our ultimate destination – oblivion.
Tiresias appearing to Odysseus by Johann Heinrich Füssli
For example, the requisite trip to Hades that epic heroes like Odysseus and Dante suffer might correspond to the midlife depressions many of us undergo, journeys that though abysmal provide us with secret knowledge, in Odysseus’s case how to navigate his way back to Ithaca and in our case a deeper perspective on what it means to be human.
Take the Eden myth. It offers many interesting possibilities for interpretation. Given that it is a post-agrarian myth (besides death, Adam’s curse is tilling barren soil by the sweat of his brow), I wonder if the myth harkens back to the simpler and more organic lifestyle of hunting and gathering when our ancestors ran around naked picking berries, spearing rabbits, and living communally.
Perhaps knowledge here means the knowledge of agriculture, and if you want to fault anyone for that, why not women, who probably through their foraging discovered that seeds can be cultivated, which led to settled communities, caste systems, factories, ghettos, and ultimately reality television shows like Boy Meets Boy, Megan Wants a Millionaire, and Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
Sarah Palin and Offspring
In the mid-90’s, I took two graduate anthropology courses to satisfy certification requirements. For my midterm take-home exam, I had to provide my opinion on an essay claiming that agriculture has been disastrous for most of humankind. I can’t find the essay, but here’s the first paragraph of my test essay, which summarizes the argument:
In his essay “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Jared Diamond argues that agriculture is responsible for a diminution in the quality of life for the majority of humans who have lived since its inception. Diamond argues that food foragers enjoy a healthier diet procured with less labor and that the population explosion that accompanied the agricultural revolution has given rises to epidemics of infectious diseases. Furthermore, agriculture is directly responsible for class stratification and the subjugation of women. In essence, Diamond’s essay is the Eden myth revisited: food foraging Adam takes up the hoe, and paradise is lost. Diamond could have taken it even further, I suppose, and argued that agriculture, which gave rise to industrialization, can also be traced as a root cause of an ensuing ecological disaster as cultural evolution outstrips biological adaptation. The ultimate balance of life is being destroyed as holes appear in Gaia’s ozone umbrella, oxygen-producing rain forests are slashed and burned, and the water supply disappears.*
*By the way, I received an A- on this essay, the minus probably attributable to its last paragraph: “The question of whether or not agriculture was humankind’s greatest mistake, like most questions, ultimately ends up being an existential one. If I were huddled in an inner-city tenement or wielding a pick in an Appalachian coal mine, I might prefer non-existence and rue the day agriculture came into being. Indeed, food foragers possess a oneness with nature I truly envy. However, at the present moment (which is ultimately all we ever have), I’m off for the summer, preparing to end this essay and grab my surfboard. The agricultural revolution has been kind to the people I love. Jared Diamond would, no doubt, brand me an elite, but then again, I am just a high school English teacher and have never voted for a Republican. Everything is relative. Diamond has probably never been writhing in the Kalahari Desert with an abscessed tooth. [Instructor’s only comment: I get your point, which is indeed elite by world standards].
yours truly surfing in the mid-90’s
To return to the Eden myth, Adam and Eve run around naked, pick berries, in essence live off the great bounty that Yahweh has provided, but that damn woman who always has to stick her nose into everything upsets the divine plan by discovering a way to produce food differently. Humankind now possesses the knowledge of how to cultivate the land, but it takes hard work. Eating the apple symbolizes the shift from relying on natural food to being dependent on cultivated food. Hunting is more fun than plowing, making clothes is labor, etc. We have abandoned meaningful communal simplicity for complex stratified world of civilizations.
“Cain and Abel” artist unknown
As it happens, a very rarely encountered non-agrarian Peruvian tribe upset by incursion into their territory confronted park rangers this week. In investigating the tribe, the Mashco-Piro, I found video of another tribe, this one from Brazil.
These folks are essentially naked and so far off the grid that they don’t even have immunity to the common cold. Perhaps, Diamond was right after all. Perhaps in the very long run humanity might have had a longer lease on survival if Eve had just left well enough alone.
I’ll leave you with a passage from Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Story Teller as a shaman-like wanderer from tribe to tribe who relates myths to various clans that explain their origins and ways of life:
Thanks to Tsaurinchi, the firefly seripigari, I’m never bored when I’m traveling. Nor sad, thinking: how many moons still before I meet the first man who walks? Instead, I start listening. And I learn. I listen closely, the way he did. Go on listening, carefully, respectfully. After a while the earth feels free to speak. It’s the way the way it is in a trance, when everything and everyone speaks freely. The things you’d least expect speak. There they are: speaking. Bones, thorns. Pebbles, lianas. Little bushes and budding leaves. The scorpion. The line of ants dragging a botfly back to the anthill. The butterfly with rainbow wings. The hummingbird. The mouse up a branch speaks, and circles in the water. Lying quietly, with closed eyes, the storyteller is listening. Thinking: let everyone forget me. Then one of my souls leaves me. And the Mother of something that is all around comes to visit me. I hear, I am beginning to hear. Now I can hear. One and all have something to tell. That is, perhaps, what I have learned by listening. The beetle as well. The little stone you can hardly see, it’s so small, sticking out of the mud. Even the louse you crack in two with your fingernail has a story to tell. If only I could remember everything I’ve been hearing. You’d never tire of listening to me, perhaps.
For all the blah-blah-blah about how killer it is to live in Charleston, the Lowcountry of South Carolina lacks the beautiful season of autumn. This deficiency is especially heinous to us poetical, metaphor-embracing non-haters of Biden, because autumn represents harvest, fullness, and [sigh] impending decline.
Ideally, outside our windows would blaze a burst of colorful foliage that rages against the dying of the light. You could sit there by the window and read Wallace Stevens —
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
You could look up from Stevens and out of the window and see for yourself.
photo by WLM3
Down here, though, with our loblollies, live oaks, and palms, most leaves don’t change colors, and the ones that do go immediately from green to brown. Autumn down here is like moving aging summer from your house into the nursing home, an extended decline with its good days and bad days, mostly hot and humid, or to shift metaphors, like an older person not aging gracefully, sporting lurid inappropriately tucked-in tropical shirts when tweed blazers with elbow patches are in order.
But, on a more positive note, you could argue that autumns do occur down here but are much subtler. Look closely at the marsh; without your noticing, it’s gone from green to gold, like that Japanese maple you kidnapped and planted in the front of the house. Migrating birds flap their way overhead, like a checkmark, a positive sign that things are in motion the way they should be, and let’s not forget that the impending winter will undoubtedly be mild.
photo by WLM3
No, Thanksgiving, is not a time for whining about imperfection, but a time to be grateful for what we have, a time to engorge ourselves, to watch professional football players in their glory years before the CTE sets in.
We have a Thanksgiving tradition of inviting friends who can’t make it home for Turkey Day to share a meal with us at our house. When he was in graduate school studying linguistics, our younger son Ned invited colleagues whose families live abroad, and, of course, their presence made the holiday more interesting for us, and it provided them with an anthropological peek into some of our American cultural peculiarities, for example, grown men whooping and hollering and dancing around a table to celebrate a game winning interception. Nonjudgmentally, our foreign guests tolerated these absurdities with good humor.
Two years ago Ned brought with him a young woman from Syria. In pursuit of a PhD in linguistics, our guest Manar found herself cut off from her homeland, unable to return to see her parents and siblings, professional people trapped in a maelstrom not of their own making. I could only imagine the anxiety she must have suffered knowing her loved ones were trapped in a civil war in a world where bombs rain down on civilians as well as military targets. How hard it must be to concentrate on your studies when you’re bracing yourself for bad news at any moment.
Yet, except for one point when she wept in front of my wife Judy Birdsong and another female guest, Manar was vivacious, outspoken, generous, and open-minded. Indeed, she’s much more open-minded than many of the xenophobic Facebook feeds I’ve seen in the days following the Paris massacre.
Of course, we can attribute much of these paradoxically un-American outbursts to fear and ignorance. Certainly, these xenophobes don’t realize that the Syrians slated to emigrate to the United States consist of families who have been thoroughly vetted, who have undergone extensive background tests conducted by various agencies and who undergo one-on-one interviews, the entire process taking 24 months according to the State Department.
Certainly, my neighbors writing to Nikki Haley demanding that no Syrians enter Dylan Roof’s home state don’t realize that only 2% of the Syrian refugees are military-aged single males. Forty percent are children, and twenty-five percent senior citizens. Less understandable is that many governors have declared they’ll be no Syrians moving into their states, even though governors lack the power to enforce such an edict. If they possessed that power, I suspect we’d have fewer Ohioans settling in the Palmetto State.
C’mon, Nikki, this isn’t the old Soviet Union where a traveller needed a visa to visit individual republics. Thank goodness, our vehicles aren’t stopped and searched at the North Carolina border when we head to Asheville. I thought we were the home of the brave and the land of the free, not the home of the paranoid and land of the constrained.
What really depresses me, though, are presidential candidates suggesting we close our national borders to Syrians, or more, liberally, to limit admission to only Christians. (Agnostics and Buddhists need not apply). Just today, Jeb Bush blamed President Obama for “creating a quagmire in Iraq” a remarkable act of chutzpah considering it was his brother (and enablers like Hillary Clinton) who created the mess in the first place by scapegoating Saddam Hussein for 9/11 and destabilizing the region by misjudging the Iraqis’ desire for freedom and democracy’s potency in a region unfamiliar with the concept. People on Facebook are actually blaming Obama for the Paris carnage. One of my Facebook friends cited Reagan as a model for the type of leader we need to fight terrorism — never mind that after 241 military personnel were killed in Beirut in 1983 when terrorists blew up their barracks, Reagan removed our soldiers from Lebanon and never launched a retaliatory attack.
Meanwhile, for the sake of making political hay, Cruz, an immigrant, has introduced a bill banning Syrians. Rubio, another immigrant, is also against thoroughly vetted families seeking to escape a repressive regime to start a new life.
Of course, all of this Islam-bashing delights ISIS. Certainly, our stigmatizing all Muslims as terrorists paints us in a bad light with the vast majority of law-abiding moderate Arabs. What would make ISIS even happier is if the West sent ground troops into the region, which is a prerequisite to their theory of the Apocalypse. However, you never hear hawks like Lindsey Graham talk about how we could finance such a massively expensive endeavor. Maybe the Koch brothers might be willing to underwrite it?
Coincidentally, I’m teaching To Kill a Mockingbird now, and today, we dropped in on the lily-white Christian ladies of Maycomb at Aunt Alexandra’s tea party, a get-together orchestrated to help the horrid living conditions of an African tribe. The irony is a bit heavy handed – innocent Tom Robinson has recently been convicted of rape and sentenced to death by an all-white jury – but I beginning to doubt our ability to appreciate irony, much less subtlety.
In the Brit Lit high school survey course I teach, around Halloween we do Macbeth with its witches, shrieking owls, and rooky woods. I’m fortunate enough to have available a projector and stream-able copies of Orson Welles’ 1948 movie, the 1979 Trevor Nunn PBS production, and the more recent 2010 Rupert Gould Great Performances movie starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood. Alas, we don’t possess Polanski’s psychedelic 1971 Macbeth, but you can cop clips from YouTube. Anyway, I thought I’d share my approach as an offering to novice teachers because even though I’ve been in the business for thirty plus years, I still remember all too well not having a clue that first year as I improvised my way through my classes without a scrap of sheet music.
And believe me, brothers and sisters, I ain’t no Miles Davis, not by a long shot.
Anyway, here’s what I do.
In the 8th and 9th grades, students have read Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, so they’re already hip to triangular plots and blank verse.
Before the first reading assignment, I offer a bit of background: The Queen is dead, James has arrived — he who has written a book on witches — and, oh yeah, Guy Fawkes has just attempted to pull a 9/11 on the British Parliament. Thanks to both our excellent history department and V for Vendetta, most of my students are hip to the 5th of November. In short, the dark clouds of the Jacobean Period have blotted out the Elizabethan sun.
To whet their appetite, on the day I assign the first reading, I show them the Polanski version of 1.1.
Of course, there’s a lot to discuss: language, paradox, the nature of evil, patriarchal views of women, dramaturgy, cinematography.
Day 1 (45 minutes): The next day, after a reading quiz[2], perhaps over accentuating an iamb here or there, I read aloud the wounded Sergeant’s recap of Macbeth and Banquo’s battles.
Once we’re all on the same page action-wise, I mention paradoxes, a major motif. I tell them that every time I run across a paradox, I’m going to make the ah-ooh-ga submarine sound. Over the course of the play, clever students chime in with their own ah-ooh-gas, and whenever a paradox appears, I see most of the other students writing in the books (which they own).
I pick up the action with “Scene 3” “Enter Macbeth and Banquo” and ask for volunteers to read the various parts. Sometimes, I stop a reader and ask, “Can you hear the iambs marching?” I do so throughout the entire play whenever I think the meter is especially worth noting.
“The queen, my lord, is dead.”
Of course, during 1.3 the ah-ooh-gas come fast and furious.
I try to elicit via Socratic questioning the thematic implications of the twinning of “foul” and “fair.”
Then I introduce the “garment motif” and employ the sound of Parisian siren to signal when garment images occur.
I ask for new reading volunteers and have then start with [Enter Ross].
From there, I read Duncan’s “There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face./He was gentleman on whom I built/An absolute trust.”
“What are the next two lines of the play?” I ask.
“Enter Macbeth,” a couple of students say. Bubble light bulbs flash over a few heads.
Their homework is to finish reading Act 1.
Day 2 (45 minutes):
The last motif I distinguish with sound effects is darkness, which is signaled by a melodramatic bum-bum-bum-BUM, the clichéd tension builder of many a bad movie.
We begin by talking about Lady Macbeth’s character, what various critics have to say, and jump to her “unsex me” speech, which I read.
I then have a female read the “Oh, never/Shall sun that morrow see” speech.
I then ask the students to reread Macbeth’s soliloquy, show them Ian McKellen’s rendition, and we dissect the soliloquy.
We end the class with a screening of Dame Judi and Sir Ian bringing the Act 1 to a close.
Assignment: read all of Act 2.
Day 3 (85 minutes)
I break the students into groups of three and have them “story board” the “Is this a dagger I see” speech. I encourage them to visualize the scene and then to create 15 to 20 panels depicting how they would choreograph the action providing quotes on the panel. Then we reconvene as a class, and the students present their visions. Here are a view examples from this year.
After the presentations, I show then Orson Welles’, Roman Polanski’s, Trevor Nunn’s, and Rupert Gould’s renditions of the scene.
We discuss.
Homework assignment; Act 3.1 – 3.3
Day 4 (45 minutes)
I have students read 2.2 aloud, and we discuss Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s post-murder behavior, especially noting the dichotomy between bloody hands making “the multitudinous seas incarnadine” and a “little water” clearing them of the deed.
They’re familiar with comic relief, and I skip the Porter’s monologue and head straight into the dialogue with Macduff, pointing out that essentially it’s a “penis joke.”
(At the end of the Macbeth unit, we watch the entire Gould/Patrick Stewart film, which transforms the Porter scene into a heightening of tension as he obscenely spits out the jokes in front of Lady Macduff and her children).
We don’t spend much time on the rest of the scene, but I do highlight the irony inherit in Macbeth’s “Had I but died an hour before this chance” speech.
After the students are clear on plot info – the somewhat confusing murdering of the grooms, the flight of Malcolm and Donaldbain — we shift to Act 3.
I draw a triangle on the board with Act 3 at the apex. We use Aristotle’s term “peripetia” instead “climax,” and I ask them about the turning points of Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. We draw rising action parallels among the R & J’s marriage, Caesar’s assassination, and Duncan’s murder.
I read the “To be thus is nothing soliloquy,” and we discuss it.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
I don’t spend much time on the murderers but do point out that the canine catalogue reflects the Chain of Being concept so near and dear to the English back then.
Rather than analyzing the banquet scene, I show them Nunn’s version. I do a little stand-up, depicting the scene in modern terms using whoever is President as Macbeth (Reagan was my first victim; Hillary will be my last)[3].
Class ends with the “blood will have blood speech.”
Reading assignment Act 4.1 – 4.2
Day 5 (45 minutes): Although my students are rhythmically challenged, we attempt a hip hop reading of “double double toil and trouble.”
Despite it’s full-frontal geriatric nudity, I show them Polanski’s version and then Nunn’s.
That leaves the butchering of the Macduff family.
Day 6 (85 minutes)
While I’m critiquing rough drafts, I assign students speeches to paraphrase: Malcolm’s “I grant him bloody,” Malcolm’s “With this there grows,’ Malcolm’s “But I have none,” and Macduff’s “Fit to govern,” and Malcolm’s “Child of integrity.”
In paraphrasing, I ask students to provide 3 alternatives for every significant word, e.g., “sudden” might be rendered “impulsive, spasmodic, non-reflective.”
I hand back their rough drafts, and we look closely at the speeches.
We end the class with Ross’s entrance and the delivery of his horrid news.
Reading assignment: Read Act 5
Day 7 (45 minutes).
I show them Nunn’s rendition of 5.1 featuring Judi Dench’s blood-curdling shriekscream, certainly the greatest scream in the history of “moving pictures.’
Afterwards, I read “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” and we analyze it as poetry. I mention nihilism, read the first paragraph of The Sound and the Fury and then show the Nunn version featuring Sir Ian.
We discuss the play in the context of tragedy, the dissolution of Macbeth as a human, the metathesis of his sinning, the moral implications.
Days 8 – 11.
We view the Gould/Stewart/Fleetwood film in its entirety, stopping the action whenever necessary for commentary. This full viewing, of course, is time-consuming, but these students face a very demanding test, and seeing the complete play performed I think is crucial. It is, after all, great art.
Of course, if you plan using any of this, you’ll need to adjust it according to your students and schedules, and in my case, the days have not necessarily been consecutive. For example, a day of Wordly Wise vocabulary might be utilized to align an 85-minute class.
It’s up to you to pull it all together in discussion.
At any rate, keep fighting the good fight.
[1] Note, our classes meet three times a week for 45 minutes and once for 85 minutes.
[2] These reading quizzes are frequent, one for virtually every assignment.
The “concert series” Porchfest originated in Ithaca, New York, in 2007 as a means for musicians to share songs with their communities in informal settings. Not only has the Ithaca Porchfest grown from 20 performers to more than a 100, the concept itself has spread across the country all the way to Folly Beach, SC, the so-called Edge of America, and yesterday (8 November 2015) Folly held its second iteration of what I hope will become an annual event.
Here’s a list of yesterday’s performers and their locations:
122 East Ashley (Home of Chico Feo)
2pm-Jim Crow
3pm-Charlie Stonecypher
4pm-Jess Strickland
204 East Ashley (Home of Omar Colon)
2pm~Riddle & Bartlett
3pm~Podunk
4PM~A Martini with The Olivettes
306 East Arctic Ave (Home of Noelle and Campbell Brown)
2pm~Gaslight Street
3pm~Noelle Brown & The Troublemakers
4pm~Danielle Howle
120 West Arctic (Home of Teresa Parrish and Mat Nelson)
2pm~Sweet T- Teresa Parrish
3pm~Eddy Boston
4pm~Slaton Glover and friends
Danielle Howe (photo by Fleming Moore)
Alas, I couldn’t take it all in, but to give you a taste, here’s a six-minute clip featuring my next door neighbor Jim Crow and my youngest brother Fleming. I wish my battery had lasted long enough to add Charlie Stonecypher, but you know what they say about the plans of mice and men.
Last Thursday, I was at one of my favorite Folly Beach oases, the Jack of Cups, talking Halloween with the Jessie, an impressively sophisticated twenty-something bartender who double majored in philosophy and theater in college, a young woman who can expound on Kant and Hegel as well as Kurt Cobain and Patti Smith.
I confessed that I rarely indulged in dressing up for Halloween, but that perhaps the most creative costume I put together was in grad school when I decided to transform myself into the personification of a libido. After I described the costume (black tee and jeans, white pancake makeup, red-laced fringed Lone Ranger-like mask, phallic walking stick), Jessie said that coincidentally she had been talking to three of her friends about doing Halloween as the chorus of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – you know, a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, a libido.
She went on to say that when she had mentioned the idea to someone else, the person had made a sour face and declared the concept “offensive.” What was really cool, Jessie claimed, was that her friend who originally had come up with the idea was biracial and loves the word mulatto and that she, Jessie, has been diagnosed with Ocular Albinism, Type 1, so coming up with a mosquito and libido would have been all they needed to pull it off.
I said, “Go for it. How humorously inappropriate for the politically correct crowd to chide, given the ironic brilliance of the concept.”
Naw, she had abandoned the idea for an easier one. She was going as David Bowie from his Ziggy Stardust days and her fiancé was going as the mid-70’s David Bowie a la the Young Americans album. She said she and her fiancé were going to make out at parties, which, I said, made delicious narcissistic sense.
Anyway, last night I decided at the last minute to wander down to Center Street on Folly to see what was out there, hoping against hope that I might run into twin Bowies sucking face. No such luck, but I did run into Thomas Ravenel and Kathryn Dennis.
It’s the beginning of the spring semester of 1973, and my best friend, my roommate Warren, has quit school, has split to go on tour with a band called Wormwood. My other suitemate George, who prefers to be called Bo-Syph, is a full-blown alcoholic who disapproves of pot smoking. After he first moved in, he ruined my Rolling Stones poster by peppering it with darts, which, of course, also marred the walls beneath.
All day and night George/Bo-Syph sits in his matchbox of a room drinking 16-oz. cans of Busch Bavarian beer while watching a black-and-white TV the size of a cafeteria tray. The floor of his room doubles as a closet and a depository for empty beer cans, fast food wrappers, and yellowed newspapers. His main source of exercise is walking to Burger King and emptying ashtrays in his room once they have sufficiently overflowed.
One night before Warren split, George developed the DTs, and Warren and I had to escort him, wounded-soldier style, to the infirmary. George doesn’t go to class, doesn’t purchase textbooks. In fact, he only has had one social encounter that I know of. A girl from his hometown came to visit him, and they fucked robustly for two straight days, rarely leaving the room. She could have been cast as the lead in The Mama Cass Story, though she wore elastic pants, not tied-dyed mumuus, and had an upstate South Carolina accent so caustic I was afraid it would rust the radiators.
When I arrive at my room after Christmas break, the first thing I notice is that someone has affixed a cross on the wall over Warren’s bed. There’s also an altar on a shelf with two white candles. It turns out that my new roommate is named Charlie, a graduate student working on a Masters degree in music. Short and plump, with thinning blonde hair and a pinkish completion, he could be Truman Capote’s first cousin.
Like Warren, he plays keyboards, but unlike Warren, he wears pajamas to bed. Each night before retiring, in his pale blue pajamas, he lights his altar candles and gets on his knees to pray. Five minutes later, after audible amens, he rises, snuffs out the candles, crawls into bed, and starts snoring like a bronchitis-ridden wildebeest.
The setting of the story; the downstairs window on the far left is our suite
Given my nocturnal habits, I rarely witness Charlie’s prayer ritual, but on the brick walkway leading to our dorm, I can sometimes hear his snoring as I return from bar hopping or studying in the library. When I open the door to the suite, both inner bedroom doors are closed. My bedroom is dark; blue light flickers from beneath George’s.
The snoring begins with a harsh, hellish, rasping intake, and then there is a slight pause that offers the false hope of cessation – only to be shattered by an exhalation that roars like a phlegm-powered flame-thrower.
This Dantean progression loops all night long, over and over and over, over and over and over.
By Valentine’s Day, I’m at the end of my rope, so desperate that despite my fear of bureaucracy, I make an appointment with University Housing. Well washed and wearing a collared shirt, I tell a nice youngish woman that I’m desperate, that I’m living the Southern Gothic with two antithetical freaks right out of Flannery O’Connor, one a 30-year-old closeted religious fanatic with no apparent friends, the other the 20-year-old a racist alcoholic gun-fetishist, the equivalent of a stereotypical Mississippi sheriff in a ‘60’s movies.
I beg. I plead. “You got to get me out of there,” I say. “Look,” I say, “if you don’t move me out of there, I’m going to hang myself, not only that, but I’ll tape a sign to my shirt that says, ‘I have hung myself because the Housing Department wouldn’t move me.”’
The attractive young woman smiles and assures me that I will be hearing from them, but I never do.
Ultimately, though, living with George and Charlie made me revaluate my place in humanities’ continuum. Maybe I wasn’t as fucked up as I had thought. Compared to Charlie and George, I was practically Wally Cleaver. Maybe there was hope for me after all.
In my youth, parents, principals, teachers, den mothers, filmstrips, and preachers taught that every action was a reflection of your character.
In fact, it probably went deeper than that: your very thoughts needed to remain pure, ideally never straying from avenues of indoctrination, but at the very worst, if you found yourself hankering to do bad, tempted to wander across the tracks to the dark side of town, that thought had to be doused, snuffed, strangled, eliminated.
Reputation was a commodity of immeasurable worth, more precious that bullion. One misstep could obliterate a lifetime of probity, sullying forever your once good name and by association tarring your otherwise innocent family with the pitch of ignominy.
The public elementary school I attended that taught these lessons blithely ignored the separation of church and state. We prayed to Jesus every morning, were served fish sticks in the cafeteria every Friday. However, the teachers weren’t so much saying that your eternal life was on the line, but that bad habits metastasize like cancers, and the progression downward could be precipitous, a lie begetting a theft, a theft begetting a life of crime, and the next thing you know, you’re wearing stripes in Sing Sing, or in my case, at the Columbia Correctional Institute.
Well, as Mr. Dylan predicted, the times have changed.
Half a century later, at the Episcopal School where I teach, we don’t condemn students’ misdeeds as character flaws but refer to them as “bad choices.” Just because you cheat on a test and get caught doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll cheat one day on your taxes. Impulsiveness is no longer the prompting of Satan but, more plausibly, the product of pubescent chemical imbalances, and even premeditated malfeasance can be attributed to immature brains still in the process of growing, a process that science now claims is not completed for most people until the age of 25.
Although I disapprove of the cliché the phrase “making bad choices” has become, I do think it wise not to declare someone ultimately a bad person for making even a serious moral mistake. If someone thinks he’s inherently bad, like Cal Trask in Elia Kazan’s film of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, he might conclude that fighting his immoral inclinations is a lost cause and use his self-assessment as an excuse to do whatever the hell he wants.
Poor Cal had adopted the persona of a self-romanticizing narcissist, a very bad choice indeed.
How did Orwell and Huxley not predict this dystopian commonplace of Late Empire America – a generation of highly gifted, hypersensitive students in higher education who jolt into Viet Nam vet flashback mode at the mere mirroring in fiction of a situation that once traumatized them? We’re talking situations as insignificant as garden variety bullying, students who police speech the way the KGB policed Solzhenitsyn.
It’s gotten so bad Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld won’t play college campuses anymore.
It only takes two generations. The progeny of grandparents who heaved across the Pacific in malodorous, un-air-conditioned steerage take grand mal umbrage if you assume they’re good at math. According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “a student group at UCLA staged a sit-in” during a class of an education professor and “read a letter aloud ‘expressing their concerns about the campus’s hostility toward students of color’” because the professor “had noted that a student had wrongly capitalized the first letter of the word indigenous” and “[l]owercasing the capital I was an insult to the student and her ideology.”
I wrote about one instance of this hypersensitivity last February [The Delicate, Censorious Damsels of Wellesley] after reading that outraged students had gotten up a petition to remove a statue that they found offensive (a pasty, slightly overweight bald man sleepwalking in his briefs) because of its “triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for many[1] members of our campus community.” The key word here is triggering – you see the statue, it flips on a memory of a sexual assault you suffered, so your personal trauma demands that public artwork be censored.
Nagasaki c. 1946
Okay, I’ll go ahead and admit my prejudice. My old man was a tough guy. He was stationed at Nagasaki right after the bomb blast when he was 17. He didn’t talk about it at all, but he did tell me one story when I was in college and he was drunk [trigger warning: depravity] involving a prostitute, a chest of drawers, and a baby’s corpse. I suspect this incident didn’t contribute to the mental health of a seventeen year old, but it didn’t prevent him from watching WW2 movies nor did he demand the world make accommodations for that mischance.
On the other hand, I don’t disagree with Kate Manne’s contention in her Times’ editorial that a voluntary “heads-up” to students on potentially shocking content makes sense — it seems like good manners to me. On the other hand, mandatory warnings on novels like The Great Gatsby are worthy of Swiftean scorn. The reactionary Scots-Irish-English mongrel me says, “If college’s so scary, why not join the army?”
Wallace Steven wrote in “A High-Toned All Christian Woman,” “This will make widows wince. But fictive things/Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.”[2]
Nowadays, it’s the most elite of the younger generation doing the wincing. Doesn’t bode well. A wave of fresh immigrants just might do us a world of good.
You Do Hoodoo 