Under the Influence

This morning I got a Facebook comment/question from Bob (he was "Bobby" then), a student from years ago ... okay, decades ago. And here it is ...

I've always pondered ... who was your most influential colleague?

Well, that's a good question (as I replied to him) because I had all kinds of colleagues in my 45-year career. In my earliest days at the Aurora Middle School (1966-74, the year we moved to a new building, Harmon School) there were a number of veteran teachers (hah! they were about 30-40 years younger than I am now!) from whom I learned different things.

• Jim Wright (math), Wiletta Thomas (reading), Eileen Kutinsky--all showed me that you can have fun while you're doing your job, an insight I was not really prepared for.

My younger colleagues were important too.

• Judy Thornton (who shared the 7th graders with me for English and Amer history), Gale Peck (math), Marty Klipec (science)--all showed me different ways of coping with the difficulties of being a first-year teacher: all the new preparations, finding time for grading, etc., dealing with misbehavior, etc. And they were my first friends in the profession. So important.

Later, some other wonderful teachers joined our faculty (and I'm going to insult some by forgetting--but give a 72-yr-old some sympathy!).

• Andy Kmetz (art), Ted Clawson (instrumental music), the Brookharts (ditto), history-teaching wizards Luckay and Balbach, English-teaching colleagues Fayth Shirkey, Jerry Hayes, Tim DeFrange, Penny Wolfe. Again, from each of them I learned different things. From Fayth, for example, I learned that there is no necessary correlation between being demanding and being liked. There were kids who adored her--despite her insistence on standards, on behavior, on working. 

And I was blessed, throughout my Aurora years, to have excellent building principals, men who supported me (when I deserved it) and made me feel that this was something I could do. Ray Clough (first year), Lino DeAnna (second year), Mike Lenzo (many years), Jerry Brodsky (final years)--I never had the experience of, you know, Battling with a Boss--or hating one of them. Hard to imagine: thirty years of working with men whom I respected--and who respected me. Not many people--anywhere--have that kind of good fortune.

When I retired from public-school teaching and worked at Western Reserve Academy about a dozen years, I had some other magnificent models to learn from.

• Tom Davis (the English department chair who hired me and became a dear friend; he had a ball in class--loved reading brand-new books with the kids, both teaching and learning at the same time); James "Mac" McClelland (who also had so much fun with the kids in class), Eric Gustavson (a scholar in every way), Bob Pryce (French) was a great intellectual example for me. William Appling (vocal music--perhaps the most talented man I've ever known; our son, later, adored him), John Haile (valued colleague and deeply supportive administrator), Diccon and Donalee Ong (he had been a student--then a gifted colleague; she is one of the best play directors I've ever seen). Midge Karam (vocal music--and still on the faculty) is a wonder, too: She does so much for her students, in and out of class. She has often left me dazzled by what she's able to accomplish.
• There were some younger ones, too, at WRA--three young men (Nick Lewis, Kevin O'Brien, Jason Gough)--all have moved on elsewhere). They were bright, dedicated, determined, effective. Jeannie Kidera (who's also moved on) was the creative writing teacher who had a devoted and grateful Band of Followers. And my final year at WRA (2010-11) there was an intern with us, Walter Klyce, who, all-around, is unbelievably talented (music, theater, literature--whatever the hell he wanted to do he could do). After a couple of years at WRA he left ... and got his M.D. at Brown Univ.

Oh, there are so many others, Bob--and I'm embarrassed (in advance) for (a) not remembering them, (b) not including them.

But--now that I've evaded your question about the most influential, well, that one's actually easy.

It's Joyce Dyer, whom I met and married in 1969. We met in a summer-school graduate English course at Kent State, and I'd never known anyone remotely like her--someone who was so similar to me in some ways, so delightfully different in others.

But, oh, what a teacher she has been (she retired a couple of years ago from Hiram College). We taught together for a couple of years at WRA and one at Lake Forest College. I've never known anyone who worked so hard for her students, who was so absolutely devoted to them and to her subject. She reads all the time, has written many articles and books, has taught me so much about writing and literature and, well, about just being a person. Watching her work and play with our son was an education in itself. The best mother I've ever seen.

And so, Bob, I was blessed: I've gotten to live in the same house with my greatest influence--for more than 47 years now.

Short question, long answer--that's what you get with an Old Guy!

Frankenstein Sundae, 284

About the time that William Godwin, Jr. died of cholera in September 1832, young Percy Florence Shelley (about to turn 13), the only surviving child of Bysshe and Mary, entered Harrow School (where the young Byron had also gone). Initially, he was a boarder, but when Mary received a stiff bill for his first term—much stiffer than she’d expected it to be—she applied to the boy’s grandfather Sir Timothy Shelley for help; he refused. So she resolved to move to the area, about a dozen miles northwest of London, so that Percy could become a day student—saving considerable funds in the process.

And in January 1833, she had nearly finished her new novel, Lodore, but it did not appear until April 7, 1835, more than two years later. Much had gone on in those two intervening years—but we’ll return to that a bit later. Let’s take a look at Lodore, her penultimate novel, published not under her name, initially; no, it was By the Author of “Frankenstein”—a designation that lingers in popular culture to this day. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein and … Most people probably cannot supply anything after the and.

According to editor Fiona Stafford (who prepared the novel for The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, 1996), the novel was very well received. The critics approved of her decision to move into a more conventional story—a love story, at that. (No more mad monsters killing children!) Sadly, as Stafford notes, Mary’s original manuscript is lost.[1]

---

[1] (London: William Pickering), ix.

Screen Time

I'll confess: I like my screens. My laptop, my Kindle, my iPad, my iPhone. Just a day or so ago, using one of my screens, I was able to find--in about five minutes--the name of the ship my mom, age 10, had taken late in 1929 from Southampton to NYC, returning from a year-plus in Scotland, where her father had done his residency for his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh. Google quickly found for me some pictures of that vessel--pictures which I sent to my mom, now 97.

I have myriads of other stories about how screens have aided me in research and writing. Joyce, I think, has even more ...

But ...

She and I were talking yesterday about the ubiquity of screens today--about how addictive they are. And I immediately thought of that old film of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Directed by François Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451 premiered here in the USA in November 1966, the month I turned 22. I had graduated from college back in June and in November was in my first year of teaching 7th grade Language Arts and American history (conjoined and called "Core") at the old Aurora Middle School (Aurora, Ohio). (Link to film trailer.)

I don't remember when I first saw the film, but I remember this. It depicted a future not too far removed from our present, a time when books were both banned and burned (book paper supposedly ignites at 451F). And in the film, the wall of the house of our protagonist, Guy Montag, features a huge screen--see image below, fresh from Google. These screens were everywhere in this new world.

We were, of course, supposed to view this as a horror. Nineteen-sixty-six was in a time when many viewed television (pre-cable) as an Evil, as a waster and corrupter of youth, a glowing symbol of the Great Decline of America. (Sound familiar?)

Now ... I have two monitors about that size, one in our family room (where we watch The Daily Show via Hulu, a day after its original broadcast), the other in our bedroom (where we stream Netflix, etc., and where Joyce endures my endless repetitions of The Rockford Files, whose 100+ episodes I've seen, oh, 100+ times).

So ... I do spend some time with screens during the day. I'm on the laptop a lot; I probably spend a half-hour a day on Facebook; I send/receive email (nothing much these days, really); I have two hungry blogs I feed every day (DawnReader and Daily Doggerel). On my Kindle each morning I read the New York Times. I check other news sites, too.

But most of my "free" time I'm reading and writing. I read 100 pp./day for Kirkus Reviews and review a book/week for them. I'm reading my way through Richard Ford right now (nearing the end!), reading the Faulkner novels I've never gotten around to; upstairs, I have a stack of a half-dozen books I read from each night (currently: The Dark Secret by Wilkie Collins (whose complete novels I'm reading), essays by Francis Bacon, Ta-Nehisi Cates' Between the World and Me, Tim Radford's The Book That Changed the World (about Darwin's On the Origin of Species), Charles Johnson's Longmire novel As the Crow Flies, and the latest John Grisham, The Whistler). I read about 10 pp in each every evening ... okay, most evenings.

I read three newspapers a day--the Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Akron Beacon-Journal.

But I've told Joyce countless times that I am so glad I grew up in the pre-screen generation. I don't think I could have resisted the allure of it all. Even now, I force myself (The Dyer Rule) when I'm doing my reading in the coffee shop not to check my iPhone until I've read twenty pages. I'm pretty good about sticking to that. So ... p. 20 (check iPhone), p. 40 (check iPhone), etc.

But it's pretty obvious, isn't it, that pages are losing to screens? And badly so--like, oh, the Hiram High Huskies (my basketball team) vs. the Boston Celtics in 1962. I hardly see anyone reading in coffee shops now--and those who are doing so are usually students--and most of them have a far more latitudinarian Dyer Rule. But ... a few dogged readers remain.

I don't know where all of this is going--but I'm certain we will not be returning to the days when people would line up in hordes at the NYC waterfront when the latest installment of the latest novel by Charles Dickens was arriving.

No, our Screen World will just become even more ... screeny. And those screens will enable us to do even more than we do now--and more quickly, too.

**

Back in February 1981 I was teaching at Western Reserve Academy--my first stint there. Each marking period the English teachers had to assign an "outside reading' book, and that winter I picked, for my frosh, Fahrenheit 451. The image below shows the copy I used.

In the novel, the wall-sized screens are called "parlor walls" (and they are somewhat interactive); the Montags have three entire walls covered. Guy's wife, Mildred, wants a fourth--though Guy says it's too expensive--$2000. She doesn't care: She wants it--and counters with this: If we had a fourth wall, why it'd be just like this room wasn't ours at all, but all kinds of exotic people's rooms (22).

In the edition I used is a brief Afterword by Bradbury. In it, he talks about how people are always changing his stories (without permission, of course). People who want to make them more PC, people who want to remove things that offend them, etc. And he was fed up.

And he wrote this: The point is obvious.. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches (182).

Indeed, they are. And many of them pause in their burning only to check a text. Or to Like something on Facebook. Some will do so only every twenty minutes or so ...

Schoolhouse Rocked

I'm not sure what I can add to this debate about the recent confirmation of Betsy DeVos as the head of the U. S. Department of Education. Dudgeon is high on both sides. But I'm going to try.

First, a couple of things are pretty obvious.

• She has no (or, probably more accurate, very little--negligible) experience with public schools. As just about everyone knows--she did not attend public school herself--nor did her children. Moreover, she is in favor of charter and religious schools--in favor of for-profit schools. Yet, her task is to oversee a federal agency whose very purpose is to deal with something with which she is patently unqualified and inexperienced. (See below.) I don't think I know too many people in other professions and occupations who would happily accept as their leader someone as ignorant about that enterprise as DeVos is about public education.
• She obviously has had success in her family business. She's rich. But what has bothered me for a long time is the insidious notion that's been growing and flourishing in dark soil here for a long, long time--that if you're a success in business, then, ipso facto, you're qualified to oversee any sort of enterprise, whether or not it resembles in any fashion your own business. It's the hey-I'm-rich-so-I'm-right-about-everything fallacy. And haven't we learned over and over and over again that this fallacy is actually a Bizarro Midas Touch: Whatever gold the hand touches turns to dross?
• Her willingness to accept the nomination--and to endure all the humiliation and disdain that have ensued--must raise another question: Why does she want the position? Is her goal to be the nation's chief advocate for public education? Or is it to be the chief termite in the floor joists?

So many other things bother me about this appointment, as well--principal among them--How does a President look around the country--a country brimming with people who have devoted their careers to the public schools, to improving them and the lives of the families they serve--and say Betsy DeVos is the one!? She is the most qualified?!!?

How does a Senate look around and agree?!

I spent my entire professional life in schools--public (for about thirty years), private (about a dozen), higher education (public and private), and I have experienced firsthand, over and over, the sadness of having imposed upon my colleagues and me some daffy notion from some Daffy Duck (or Cluck) who knows a lot about, oh, widget-making, but not a thing about teaching-and-learning. The kids invariably suffer. It used to drive me mad, having to implement something from the far-from-fecund brain of someone who wouldn't survive ten minutes in an 8th grade classroom.

I've written here before--and recently, too--that what our public schools need is a vast infusion of money and talent and imagination. We have too many schools that are direly underfunded, that offer crumbling classsrooms, a dearth of supplies and technological possibility, depressed teachers, too few teachers, kids who lose hope with every tick of the clock. We still adhere to this insanely elitist notion that only wealthy communities can have good schools (this is what happens when local property taxes compose the largest chunk of funding).

If we're truly democratic--if we truly believe in equal opportunity, no matter where you're living--then we have to prove it, not just jabber about it. And I'm not at all sanguine about Betsy DeVos' commitment to any of this. So ... I would suggest that she spend half of every day in a District of Columbia public school, teaching a few classes about, oh, math or English or biology or whatever school subject she has mastered. Then I might take her words a little more seriously.

I could go on. I could wax eloquent about how the public schools (despite their many problems) have been the great engine of progress (and hope) in this country, about the dismal performance of most charter schools in my state (Ohio), about the short-sighted and insane notion of making schools for-profit, about the many disadvantages of on-line education, about the separation of church and state, about ...

Enough. I'm starting to sound more and more like a guy becoming  a Grumpy Old Man--which, to be honest, all of this DeVos stuff has accelerated.

***

Just now I got on the Department of Ed webpage and found this as their "mission statement" (a term I abhor, by the way--link to the page):

Mission                 

                           

 ED's mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.

Congress established the U.S. Department of Education (ED) on May 4, 1980, in the Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88 of October 1979). Under this law, ED's mission is to:

• Strengthen the Federal commitment to assuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual;

• Supplement and complement the efforts of states, the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the states, the private sector, public and private nonprofit educational research institutions, community-based organizations, parents, and students to improve the quality of education;

• Encourage the increased involvement of the public, parents, and students in Federal education programs;

• Promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education through Federally supported research, evaluation, and sharing of information;

• Improve the coordination of Federal education programs;

• Improve the management of Federal education activities; and

• Increase the accountability of Federal education programs to the President, the Congress, and the public.

Self on the Shelf, 3

Oops--almost forgot to finish this little series of posts about a weird shelf in my study. Here we go ...

At the right, in the back, is a small framed photograph of my maternal grandfather, G. Edwin Osborn (1897-1965). The G stands for George, a name he so thoroughly disliked that I don't think I ever heard anyone use it--in his presence or not. He was Edwin to everyone. Actually, he was Dr. Osborn to most people. A minister of the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), he had gone to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he studied in 1928-29, when my Mom was nine. She still--now at 97--loves Scotland and talks fondly about what she considers one of the best times of her life.

Thanks to Ancestry.com, I just found the date they arrived in England: September 11, 1928. They arrived back in NYC on December 23, 1929, aboard the Lapland--and I was able to find several photos on Google. Here's one.

I knew my Osborn grandparents so well because when I was born (Nov. 11, 1944), my mom, older brother (Richard), and I were living in the apartment above their house at 1609 E. Broadway; Enid, Oklahoma. Dad was overseas for the Big One, and I would not see him for quite a while. When he returned, we lived near them most of the time (with exceptions: a year and a half in Amarillo, TX; a year in Norman, OK) until I was about twelve, at which time we moved to Hiram, Ohio, where my father would teach at Hiram College. We saw the Osborns only occasionally after that.

Grandpa Osborn served as minister of the University Place Christian Church in Enid--and on the faculty of the Bible College at the now-defunct Phillips University there. He published books and pamphlets (all on Christian subjects); his son, Ronald, would follow in his footsteps. (Grandpa's books you can still buy, used, online (link to list and prices).

Grandpa was a great supporter of all three Dyer boys. He got Richard interested in opera and classical music (Richard, who would go on to become the classical music critic for the Boston Globe for many years); he came to my baseball games and cheered as if he knew what he was seeing. He adored all of us. And we, him.

Grandma and Grandpa retired in Columbia, MO, where they lived in a stages-of-care facility, the Lenoir Memorial Home (at the time, a Disciples of Christ facility). When he died on September 30, 1965, I was about to turn 21, in my senior year at Hiram College, and I knew I had sustained one of the greatest of losses: a man who loved me without reservation. People who feel that way about you are among life's greatest rarities.

Memorial Park Cemetery
Columbia, Missouri

And, by the way, as I type these words, I am sitting in Grandpa's old desk chair that once was in his home-office. And, of course, my middle name is Osborn--as is our son's.

In front of Grandpa is a ceramic piece of I acquired in Amsterdam when I went there during my spring break in 1992 because I was teaching The Diary of Anne Frank to my eighth graders, and I wanted to visit the Franks' hiding place--and as many other relevant places around Europe as I could. It is a piece of Delftware, and it sits on my shelf, a reminder of what we are capable of: great horror, great beauty.

In front of that is a small ink bottle which I acquired ...? Can't remember. But I'm pretty sure I got it during the years I was teaching Shakespeare, and I would show students how people had to write before ballpoints and word-processors. Somewhere is a quill pen ...?

Finally, at the far right are novels by Tom Perrotta, one of my favorites. My first awareness of him came when Joyce and I saw the film Election in 1999. (Link to trailer for that film.) Since then, I've read all of Perrotta's novels with great pleasure (got to review The Abstinence Teacher (2007) for the Cleveland Plain Dealer). So ... Perrotta titles fill out the rest of the shelf (there are some signed ones, there--including Election!) ...

... and so ends my over-long journey along one of the oddest shelves in our house ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 283

Transfusion; or, The Orphans of Unwalden (1835), William Godwin, Jr.’s posthumous novel, begins in the Swiss village (fictional) of Unwalden. The narrative camera shows us long and wide shots of the village, then zooms in to a death-bed scene: It’s the mother of two of our main characters, Madeline and Albert Schvolen. Albert (who’s deaf) runs out to find his sister—but can’t—and when he returns, he finds a strange man kneeling beside the bed. Albert hears his mother call the man “Henry”—and ask him to care for her children. So … Godwin explains the title early: We know who the “orphans of Unwalden” are.

Later, a young man—Wahrend—tries to court Madeline, but she’s reluctant, wary. Then a letter comes, explaining the children’s mysterious biography. They go looking for an uncle, who has left Unwalden without notifying them, and so the mystery unwinds.

There’s some supernatural stuff going on, too. Albert, it seems, has learned the power of “transfusion,” the ability to exchange minds with another. At one point he speaks about it to Madeline: “. . . the great mystery I have buried deep in my breast, enables me to transfuse one man’s mind into another’s receptacle for that undefined and immaterial essence.”[1] (172). Near the end, his sister is dying, and Albert desperately tries to apply this skill to save her. But the novel ends in great darkness.

Godwin, Jr. had some talent. Every now and then he pops up out of the narrative for a comment. There are two sorts of love, he writes. One—pure, exquisite, and lovely; founded on affection for a single and invaluable object, and resting its whole hope on that object’s happiness; the other is single and insidious, built only on self-gratification and the desire of indulging at all hazards and unsharing principle.[2]

So we have to agree with William Godwin that if his son (only 29 when he died, remember) had survived the cholera epidemic, he might have had quite a literary future.

---

[1] (New York: Wallis & Newell, 1836), 172.

[2] Ibid., 47–48.

Sunday Sundries, 129

1. AOTW--Okay, this one is not egregious--but annoying. I was walking across the Hudson Green the other afternoon--bitterly cold, lots of snow--and coming toward me on the sidewalk: a group of 4-5 young women. Four or five abreast. Covering the entire sidewalk. As far as they were concerned, I was not there. I stopped; they didn't; no one moved to give me a little sidewalk room; I had to step out in the snow and wait for them to pass. Muttering grievous execrations ....

2. I finished two books this week ...

     - The first was William Faulkner's first novel--A Soldier's Pay (1926--first published in England, with the help of Sherwood Anderson). It is the end of WW I, and the army has discharged a number of our principals before they ever saw any action. The opening scenes are on a train, where they meet a severely injured soldier (with a horrendous scar on his face), a young man who is not expected to live, a young man returning home. Several of them take care of him on the train--including a young woman, who becomes a principal, as well.

The "bad guy" is Januarius Jones, a fat, horny guy in Georgia (where they're headed) who makes moves everywhere--hanging around a young woman's house sniffing for dogs in heat. There's also a young (superficial) woman engaged to marry the wounded soldier, though she cannot abide the sight of him now and begins to look elsewhere.

Complications accumulate ... and I ain't tellin' how it all works out.

Faulkner does a couple of cool things, technically. Most of the characters' thoughts are hiding in parentheses, and every now and then he inserts a sort of "overview" of what's going on by writing pages as if they were in a play script.

And, of course, his language ...  "Nine day, or ninety day, or nine hundred day sensations have a happy faculty for passing away, into oblivion, where pass sooner or later all of man's inventions" (Lib of Amer ed, 224).

I'm embarked on a (slow) voyage through the novels of Faulkner I've never read before ... this was the first. His and mine.

     - The second--The Nix (2016)--was actually the first book I finished last week. It's the first novel by Nathan Hill, and if this is any indication, he is going to have quite a career. It's a story about a son (now a college teacher) discovering the story of his mom, who was involved in the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago--that violent one. We swirl around in time--back and forth and forth and back--and learn that, well, lives are complicated.

There is a devastating scene near the beginning: Our prof encounters a young woman who has patently cheated on an essay--taken it from the Internet. But--clever young thing--she's capable of turning tables. And does. I laughed, cringed, grieved as I turned those pages.

And then--near the end--something with startling contemporary relevance; one character say ...

"What's true? What's false? In case you haven't noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it's way easier to ignore all data that doesn't fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we'll agree to disagree. It's liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It's very hip right now" (601).

Yikes.

3. Followers here know that Joyce and I have been slowly working our way through the films of the Coen Bros.--in the order they released them. Last night (Netflix DVD) we watched, oh, the first third of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), a hoot of a film about three escaped convicts (in 1937) from a Mississippi chain gang (one, Geo. Clooney, has an obsession with his own hair style--very amusing). John Turtoro--a Coen Bros.' favorite--is one of the others). Lots of country music and satire about the rural South. We saw it when it originally came out--but neither of us remember a lot about it. More next time ... ! (Link to film trailer.)

4. Final words. Some words from my sundry online providers of a word-of-the-day ...

     - from dictionary.com

ataraxia \at-uh-RAK-see-uh\ noun

1. a state of freedom from emotional disturbance and anxiety; tranquillity.

Quotes

Remember that the goal of the great Epicurus was not an earthly he-done (Hedonism), or pleasure, but a lofty ataraxia, or freedom from cares and trivial thoughts.

-- H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1965–1976

Origin of ataraxia

Ataraxia “impassiveness, calmness” is best known from and associated with the ethics of the Athenian philosopher Epicurus (341–270 b.c.). It is acquired by shunning politics and obnoxious people, by paying no attention to the gods or an afterlife, and by devoting oneself to trustworthy friends and a simple life. Ataraxia was important to the Stoic philosophers, also, but for them the final goal was apatheia, which means not “apathy” in the modern sense but “calmness,” imperturbability gained from the pursuit of virtue. Ataraxia (spelled atarxie) entered English in the early 17th century.

     - from wordsmith.org

camorra (kuh-MOR-uh)  noun

MEANING: A secret group united for unscrupulous purposes.

ETYMOLOGY: After Camorra, a secret organization in Naples, Italy, engaged in criminal activities. From Italian, possibly from Spanish camorra (fight). Earliest documented use: 1865.

USAGE: “Flaubert had poured a stream of corrosive irony on this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Führer, a camorra of commissars?”

Albert Jay Nock; Memoirs of a Superfluous Man; Harper & Brothers; 1943.