OF A GOLDEN AGE

nicole krauss’s the history of love is a beautiful book and i love this passage in particular. the context is a fifteen-year-old girl, whose father died when she was young and who keeps a record of just about everything:

“18. MY MOTHER NEVER FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH MY FATHER

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life awy. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a speies namned after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

“My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”

people my age are often surprised to hear that “delbert” is a first name more often than a last name, though today both are fairly rare.

anyway, out of curiosity, i searched on wikipedia. as you can see, it is indeed a first name.

last semester, i often visited a great used bookstore — avol’s — that happened to be right next to the kaplan center where i took a gre review course. the selection there is unbelievable and i bought a collection of mike royko’s columns called like i was sayin’… that i didn’t start reading until recently. this edition came out in the year i was born.

just now, at work, i read this column and it staggered me.

Mike Royko: “Write on, Barbarians”
Chicago Sun-Times, December 12, 1979

Robert Maszak, an English teacher at Bloom Township High School in Chicago Heights, has sent me a stack of angry letters written by his students as a classroom assignment.

The students were reacting to a column I wrote last week about eleven people being trampled to death at a rock concert in Cincinnati.

In that column, I said those who would climb over people’s broken bodies to reach a seat in an auditorium could be called “the new barbarians.”

The dictionary definition of barbarian that I used is “the opposite of civilized.” And I think anyone who tramples someone to death can wear that definition.

In sending me the letters, teacher Maszak, apparently proud of his students’ efforts, wrote: “Some ‘barbarians’ do write.”

Yes, they do. But frankly, if I were an English teacher and they were my students, I’d lock the letters away where no one could see them.

I’d be embarrassed if this many juniors and seniors not only wrote incoherently, but also apparently have not been taught to read or to think. I’d also be alarmed by their tribe mentality.

Almost every letter said something like: “Why are you picking on us teen-agers?” and “What have you got against rock music?”

The fact is, I did not use the word “teen-ager” anywhere in that column.

Nor did I say that new barbarians are found only at rock concerts. I wrote: “Rock concerts aren’t the only mass-gathering place for new barbarians. They’ve become visible at sports events, too.” And I described the sometimes violent conduct of sports fans of all ages.

The point of the column was that in many places we now see more and more mindless mob violence and mob mentality. This behavior isn’t limited to teen-agers or rock fans, although there’s probably less of it in your average nursing home.

I shouldn’t be surprised that these kids didn’t notice that. Any kid who gets to be a high school junior or senior and writes like Mr. Maszak’s students isn’t going to absorb details. An example, exactly as written:

“Dear Tenage hater

“I was disappointed by you written on the Who concert. From what you said I can see you have know so called barbarism. You used some strong words in there with very little fact, you say everyone was numbed in the brain. I will say from concert experience maybe half or three forths were high on something or nether but I also know that theres not one forth to half that weren’t. You say everyone was pushing and throwing elbows, did you ever think that some of the thrown elbows were from people who didn’t like getting pushed. You said something about when you were a kid, well times have changed since then.”

Mr. Maszak, is that the best you can do? If so, have you thought of another line of work?

Another sample:

“In Tuesday Dec. 5th edition of Mike Royko you clearly stated that all teenagers and people who go to rock concerts are barbarians.”

I clearly stated nothing of the kind. You really should try to teach them to read, Mr. Maszak.

Or this: “For one think there were no real big popular bands when you were a kid.”

If you are going to let them babble about music, Mr. Maszak, spend a few minutes giving them a little musical background. Or maybe you haven’t heard of the big band era, either.

Then we have this gem. Mind you, it is written by a young man who has spent almost twelve years attending school:

“When you talked us in your paper you called us barbarians. It is even more rude than when you call us delinquents. You cant compare us to 50 years ago because we don’t wear knickers’ and deliver newspapers. All you Old Farts are the same. At Cominskey Park we were just expressing our feelings about disco, because disco sucks. If you write another column like that you will have to answer to me in person.”

And there was the lad who denied being a barbarian. But he spelled it “barbian.”

I can’t go on. It’s too depressing, and not only because most of them can’t write, read, spell, or think—and it’s getting a little late for them to learn.

It’s depressing because almost none even mentioned the fact that eleven human beings were trampled to death. And none sounded concerned about that grotesque fact.

They became highly indignant that someone would be less than worshipful about rock music. They became emotional—even menacing like the above writer—in their hatred for disco music. Some became obscene over imagined slights against teen-agers.

But that eleven people were trampled by a music-hungry mob?

One of the few who mentioned the deaths saw it this way:

“If there were someone yer looked up to and yer went to see them in person and thier were thousands of people just like you and wanted to see him up close would you fight yer way in?”

And as another breezily put it:

“People die every three second. What would you do if you paid $15 for a ticket?”

You’re no barbarian, kid. But try zombie.

from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark:

“Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were only the squares on the other two sides.”

about a half hour ago, i handed in a paper on race relations between blacks and jews. it was a fascinating topic to research and this passage from james baldwin in particular is staggering. actually, the whole essay it comes from is amazing. i was reading it and actually exclaiming aloud at things he was saying.

“Of course, it is true, and I am not so naive as not to know it, that many Jews despise Negroes, even as their Aryan brothers do. It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of six million by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots — or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew.

“One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.”

cynthia ozick in another essay refers to a black reaction to Jewish sympathy as a perception of “greenhorn uppityness,” another really fascinating phrase, but one which baldwin seems to have explained pretty well in that passage.

for steve we are reading the years and it is a glorious, substantial book.

“When, she wanted to ask him, when will this New World come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave? He seemed to have released something in her; she felt not only a new space of time, but new powers, something unknown within her. [ . . . ] We shall be free, we shall be free, Eleanor thought.”

“But what do I mean, he wondered — I, to whom ceremonies are suspect, and religion’s dead; who don’t fit, as the man said, don’t fit in anywhere? He paused. There was a glass in his hand; in his mind a sentence. And he wanted to make other sentences. But how can I, he thought — he looked at Eleanor, who sat with a silk handkerchief in her hands — unless I know what’s solid, what’s true; in my life, in other people’s lives?”

in my statistics class we are studying hypothesis testing and how to determine if two samples (i.e. pools of data, in this case life expectancy and heights of presidents: i like presidents! i like height! it’s pretty sweet, though they do not include abraham lincoln because his life ended in an early and unfair fashion) are statistically comparable.

having recently completed a problem in which i decided that two variances were close enough to be considered equal, i wondered: at what point did we decide to declare equal things which are NOT equal? 86.9 and 73.6 are not the same, though apparently they can be used this way when making additional calculations.

this is weird, and a little scary. i need more information.

after scheduling three appointments and feeling really excited for our apartment search, nathan and i felt mixed toward all three places. the one i fell in love with, and that we are going to try to get, we found from a sign on a building in a neighborhood where various people i care about have lived over the years.

we called the number and the woman came over a half-hour later; we saw this apartment first. her name is dagmar; her father owns the building and they handle all repairs themselves. it’s a six-flat less than a block from the apartment where my dad lived when he went to law school. two blocks from the el.

after the hunt was over, nathan directed me to belmont and clark, where we had dinner with his sister and her boyfriend. before that happened, though, we drove down the street where my grandmother used to live. i stopped in front of a blonde-brick building that looked so familiar it made my eyes mist over a little, and i called my dad. “where did grandma patty live?” i asked; “i’m looking at this blonde-brick place and it seems so familiar.”

“are you on cullom?” he asked.

“yeah,” i said, “a few blocks from the place we’re looking at.”

“that’s it,” he said.

the other day, my favorite professor told our class that he generally disapproves of outlining because it can limit a thinker’s ability to spread out and really inhabit an idea wholly.

today, another professor told our class that she highly recommends outlining and does not like when she senses a paper has no cohesion.

mixed messages from the english department at such a tiny school! how on earth will i split the difference in the “Real World”?

the smartest kid (by FAR) in my math class said today that he thought the second part of the course could be better — he thought that he would have more time to devote, and be able to teach himself the material, since the professor certainly is not. like me, this kid has an enormous project that has grown into an out-of-proportion monster. somehow, my three and a half credits have grown into twenty.

as the good folks at mastercard might say: getting to use the word lousiness in your most serious academic project?

“They neither understand his quest for greatness nor comprehend their own hypocrisy in convicting him when they, too, exhibit great lousiness.”

priceless.