Hildegarde

So, it’s the fourth of July.  I was up late last night, partially because the boys went out somewhere together and didn’t get back until ten thirty, and I find it kind of odd being in a silent house by myself.

And yes, that does  mean I usually go to bed before ten thirty.  In fact, I usually go to bed before nine thirty, because I get up at four thirty in the morning, and earlier on days when I have an eight o’clock class.

But the being weirded out by being along in a silent house thing bemuses me a little.  For most of my young adulthood, that was my favorite way to be in the world.  I had an apartment by myself–several apartments over the years–and no television set.  I had a small stereo, but I played it only very late at night and n ot very often.  Mostly I just like being by myself in the quiet.

In the apartments I had my worktable–my worktable goes whereever I settle for a while; it’s moved continents–but during this same period I took off for Greece several times on my own, and I was the same way there.

I used to stay at this place called the Achilleus Hotel, on Lekka Street, near the Syntagma.  It was cheap and convenient to my favorite parts of the city.

The Syntagma is a square on one of the main traffic arteries in the middle of the city.  There are cafes there with outdoor seating, which I’d use even in the winter.  Winters in Athens tend to be very cold and very wet.

But the best thing about the Syntagma is that you can walk to the Acropolis from there–or I could at 26, at any rate.

The Acropolis is on a steep hill and the Syntagma is at the bottom of it and a bit along into the city.

But only a bit.

The first time I walked up there I did it without a plan and without really much thinking of it.  I left my hotel, walked to Nikkis street to my favorite restaurant, finished eating and walked out again.  Then I looked up and there was the Parthenon,  high above me, and I thought that if I just kept walking in that direction I’d probably get to it.

It was probably a stupid move. I didn’t know the city except as a tourist, and even as a tourist I only knew that one small part of it. Anything could have been in the neighborhoods up there.

As it turned out, what was up there was a section of the city called the Plaka,  the oldest part of the city and the one that has been longest inhabited.

In those days–and for all I know, still–it was a crazy rabbit warren of tiny, narrow streets lined with everything you can think of:  open air market stalls; little restaurants; small apartment houses; high-end art dealers…

I bought a lot of things in the Plaka once I discovered it.  It was a fifth the price for useful household articles, like bottle openers.   There was also a truly astonishing amount and variety of food, with no concessions made to the tastes of tourists, American or otherwise.

On the Syntagma itself there was “Pitsa” (transliterated just like that) and an “American Roast Beef” sandwich place.  In the Plaka there were restaurants the size of postage stamps and street vendors selling goat meat souvlaki and thiplis with so much honey on it you could use what you didn’t eat to take a bath.

(I had one of my Personal Best All Time Embarrassing Moments over the thiplis.  I went out looking for some on the night before Christmas Eve, wanting to have some for the hotel while I sulked.  I had come to Greece that time with a return ticket for Christmas Day itself and then, at the very last minute, was informed by Olympic that of course they weren’t flying that day. This required one of t hose endless conversations, half in Greek and half in English, that leave both parties glad they aren’t face to face and armed.

At any rate, Olympic Did The Right Thing and got me a seat for Christmas Eve, and I was annoyed at having my schedule upset.

So I went out into the Plaka to get some thiplis, and all of a sudden I couldn’t remember which way the conversion from pounds to kilos went.   No matter how often I tried, I couldn’t remember whether pounds were heavier than kilos or kilos were heavier than pounds.

I ended up deciding to be safe, since this was what I was going to eat instead of dinner, and bought two kilos of the stuff.

I had to leave three quarters of it in the room for the maid.)

The point of all this rambling is that I was alone in Greece that December, and I was happy to be alone. 

A friend of mine came through during an early part of my stay and I was happy enough to see her for the couple of days she was there, on her way to Israel, but I wasn’t sorry when she left.

My hotel room had a window facing the very narrow street and just across the way was the barracks for the Tourist Police. My room faced their television room. When I left my window open and they left theirs open, I could listen to the sound of Jimmy Cagny movies dubbed in Greek almost all night long.

Since that was in the days before VHS, I have  no idea how that worked.

Maybe Greek television was having a special Jimmy Cagny Movie Week.

I don’t know what’s happened to me in the years since, but I find that I no longer really like the feeling of being alone and quite in the house. 

Some of that must be having lived so long now with children.  No noise at all no longer feels natural to me. Instead, it starts to feel like something creepy, as if Jason or Freddie might be wandering around the house.

Of course, the boys eventually came home, since they’re both here for the week-end, and there was noise in the house again, mostly about how one of them is mad at the other for not liking some movie they’ve both seen that I’ve never heard of.

This is what their conversations are usually about.

Of course, by then it was only ten thirty or so, and I could have gone to bed and gotten some sleep, except…

There was too much noise.

Around eleven, our road erupted in fireworks–unplanned, incoherent and decidedly loud.

They made fireworks illegal in this state a few years ago, but that seems to have had no effect on teen-aged boys with decent wheels and enough gas money to get them to and from North Carolina.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

 

So,  here it is, a couple of days late.  With notes, too, of a sort.

 

JUNE

 33) Henry James. Washington Square.

 34) The Rig Veda. Edited and translated Wendy Doniger. Penquin Classics.

          k) Camille Paglia. “The Joy of Presbyterian Sex.”

 35) Joan Hess. Strangled Prose.

 36) C. Northcote Parkinson. East and West.

 37) Dorothy L. Sayers. Strong Poison. (rr)

 38) Bruce Catton. The Coming Fury.

 39) William L. DeAndrea. Killed on the Rocks. (rr)

 

As usual, I’ve commented on some of these before, so I won’t go into them again. 

I didn’t care for this Parkinson as much as I did the last one.  It’s heavy on prediction and the predictions are often–now that we’ve reached the time when they’d either be actual or not–just plain wrong.

He has a particular kind of British disdain for the United States that leads to a lot of nonsense, particularly the thing about “Britain was Greece and America is Rome” leading to “the United States doesn’t actually invent anything it just builds on what others have invented.”

Those aren’t direct quotes.  I was just trying to find a way to set them off.

At any rate, that last thing had to have been demonstrably untrue even when Parkinson said it, and by now it’s downright ludicrous.

I found a lot of the things he said very interesting, especially the one about how declining societies tend to go in for gambling and superstition, but it was hard to take the  man seriously in any global way when he handed me things like the don’t-invent-anything line.

When I think about what may or may not happen to us in the next fifty years, the one thing that always strikes me is that we are probably the most inventive society the world has ever known–and inventors from elsewhere often pull up stakes and move here.

I don’t think that will save us from Western Civilization’s descent into the insane, but if we have to settle for something less than getting it right the first time, this is the second best I would pick.

Other than that, I just want to do something I don’t very often–recommend a book and a writer and shill for them for all they’re worth.

William L. DeAndrea was, of  course, my husband, but I knew him as a writer before I ever met him face to face.

And he’s a very, very good writer, with a commitment to the kind of light mystery favored by Nero Wolfe (also a big Wolfe fan and a long time member of the Wolfe Pack).

Killed on the Rocks is from his Matt Cobb series, and about halfway through.

The first in the series, Killed in the Ratings, won the Best First Novel Edgar.  The second, Killed in the Act, is my very favorite one.  Killed on the Ice is, very beautifully, dedicated to me.

Bill  had a lot of the kind of bad luck that can sink a career, and ended up winning three Edgars anyway.  He had even worse luck in the realm of hereditary predisposition to disease, and that he didn’t survive.

Before the coming of the e-reader, I thought bringing Bill back to the notice of the wider public was going to require waiting for the boys to grow up so that they could do something, but e-readers are here, and Otto Penzler over at Mysterious Press has brought out a whole set of Bill’s books, the Cobbs and the Benedittis and the Philip DeGraves and the one shots, available for download.

I hope some of you, sometime, will try them.  They’re worth the bother. 

Now it’s the day before the fourth of July, and I’m getting that distinct feeling that I should be off somewhere doing something.

I finished the course of antibiotics for the tooth problem yesterday, and I woke up this morning expecting to be less tired and floaty than I’ve been since I hit the emergency room last week.

Instead, I woke up just as washed out as I have been for days, and with more to do, and it’s interfering with the one thing I can’t have it interfere with:  proofreading.  I’m not good at proofreading at any time, but today I’ve been a positive menance.

What I was going to do today was put up the June reading list, but I find I can’t concentrate on it at the moment. 

So let me go into some details instead.

1) My students don’t learn that  not everybody is in it for the money by seeing people around them choose professions like teaching or social work, because they think people who choose professions like teaching and social work are in it for the money.

Given the socioeconomic status that most of my students come from–especially  my deep remedial students–these are “good jobs” that are stable, pay more than anybody they know of has ever earned, and promise both stability and benefits.

Even those of my students from slightly better off families–often families in which the parents are teachers and cops themselves–look on these jobs this way.

Of course, nobody is going to make a million dollars doing that kind of thing, but–

2) My students also tend to consider these the best of the options they’re going to have. 

If their luck had been different–and they do think it’s mostly luck–and they’d been able to go to Harvard instead of Little Noprestige U–they’d definitely have chosen to be a doctor or a lawyer or something that raked in a lot of cash.

But it’s not this kind of thing that’s the real problem.

The real problem is

3) They truly believe that everyone, everywhere, make decisions maximizing their immediate and obvious self-interest and nothing else.

Last year, we had a number of scandals, including one in the small city where the university is located, involving teachers and principals in public schools falsifying answers on the state and federal competency tests.

They do–or say they do–understand that this is “wrong,” but at the same time they assume that anybody stuck in the situation (jobs and funding depend on test scores, school not going to make minimum) would do what the teachers and principals in the scandals did, and that it is somehow “not fair” for  people to get upset about it and punish the perpetrators.

But the real kicker comes when I give them stories like the one about Jonas Salk refusing to make money on a polio vaccine because it was more important to him that all children in the country could have access to it. 

This kind of thing doesn’t shock them so much as it puzzle them.  If they were in Salk’s position, they’d have sold the formula to a big drug company and made a pile they could live on without working much for the rest of their lives.

To them, that only makes sense.  Why else would you do all the work to invent such a vaccine if not to make money from it?  And why would you live the rest of your life in relative poverty if you didn’t absolutely have to?

The whole thing is even more confusing to them because there don’t seem to be the kinds of possible off-explanations that would cover it.

Most of them haven’t  heard of Mother Teresa, but when I explain her to them they brush it off with “oh, that’s religion,” in much the same way they would explain somebody else (Adam Lanza, maybe) as “mentally ill.”

4) If I gave the impression that they don’t like stories or can’t get into them, I was wrong.

They love stories, and spend most of their time pursuing them–in television and movies, admittedly, but still.

What they don’t do is see stories as in any way saying anything true about real life.

A story is, by definition, made up.

You can have unicorns in stories, and creatures from black lagoons, but those things don’t appear in the world they live in, because they don’t exist.

Give them a character that is, say, Jonas Salk, and they just assume the writer made him  up–like unicorns, such a person does not exist in the real world. 

The very fact that the character has appeared in a story is proof positive for them that he doesn’t exist outside of stories. 

And it doesn’t matter what kind of story the character appears in. Science fiction, fantasy, romance, mainstream,  literary–it’s all the same to them.

It’s “just stories.”

 I do think there’s a lot of value, at this point, to introducing them to real people who have lived by principles they have seen nowhere around them, on the (very optimistic) assumption that such examples will result in at least a couple of them realizing that there is another way to be in the world than the one they’re used to.

But–

5) They won’t get introduced to different ways of living and thinking by things like Jersey Shore.

Snooki and friends provide them no alternative to the way they live, because Snooki and friends operate on exactly the same assumptions they do.

They may be  more in  your face, or less well organized, or seemingly outside the day to day grind, but they still inhabit a world in which money and stuff are the only standards of value.

They also present a world in which it doesn’t matter how you get your money and stuff–curing cancer and dropping the F bomb 40 times in 30 minutes on national television are all the same thing.

In fact

6) If you’re not really working at it, the chances are that you can grow up in this country these days without being aware that any other standard of value has ever existed anywhere at any time for any reason.

You can certainly miss the fact that there are  people in the world around  you right now who are actually living out other standards of value.

I think that is partially due to the fact that there are fewer people around these days who do live by other standards of value.

But it’s more than that.

7) Since no society anywhere could exist in this kind of moral void, we get more and more pseudo-moralities and irreligious religions to fill in the gaps.

Morality becomes that bullying Puritanism from the post on Paula Deen I gave a link to yesterday, where  no redemption is to be had, because we are all stained with an original sin that can never be washed away.

We are to be judged decent only by living our entire lives in agonizing and unrelievable guilt, apologizing for our very existence.

They don’t actually swallow that sort of thing, of course, but it’s all they know of “morality,” so they’re fairly sure they don’t want any part of “morality” no matter who’s talking about it.

The meaning of life is, to them, unmistakeable.

He who dies with the most toys wins.

I knew almost as soon as I hit the “publish” button yesterday that I was going to be misunderstood, but I’m still on antibiotics, and I was tired.

Okay, that’s no excuse.

But let me untangle some things.

First, when I used the word “aristocratic,” I was NOT talking about professional snobs like Edmund Wilson who seemed to make a career insulting everybody else’s taste and sneering at just about anything.

Wilson was even distinctly left-wing. 

And I suppose it wouldn’t be surprising if somebody like that,  starting out vaguely “right” wing, switched sides and became a Marxist, because his commitment is to the sneering, not to the work.

I can’t recall Allen Tate ever sneering at anyone.  I can’t recall T.S. Eliot doing it, either.

Second, when I used the word “aristocratic,” I was NOT talking about people with lots of money and servants who go hunting and that kind of thing.

I do find that particular misinterpretation to be very interesting, though, because what I was thinking of was specifically examples of ways of thought and being where the standard of value was NOT money.

I am old enough to remember a time when some very prestigious and socially important things relied on something other than wealth–when the richest man in Philadelphia couldn’t get his daughter an invitation to come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies if his money was new, while the daughter of a greengrocer in Wayne was welcomed with open arms because she was a one-l Cadwalader with seven generations of Assembly debutantes in her family tree.

My guess is that this sort of thing died out some time ago, but it was amazingly persistant for longer than you’d think, and it was especially persistant in the South.

Most of the aristocratic intellectuals I know anything about were not rich, and some of them–like Allen Tate–were downright poor for most of their lives, and proud of it. 

Their poverty was proof positive that whatever it was they were committed to, it was not about the money. 

And entrance into the group was not about the money, either.  There were lots of rich frat boys at Vanderbilt who didn’t find their way into the Southern Agrarians–but Tate, whose father had gone bankrupt a couple of times and left the family destitute in the end, did.

I was not presenting this way of living, or the attitudes represented by people like Tate and Eliot, to be admirable, or something I want my students to admire.

I was just point out that “hating commerce” does not lead automatically to an embrace of Marxism. 

It’s not something we’ve “come to,” either.  It’s one of the oldest prejudices in human existence.  The Greeks and Romans looked down on people who engaged in “trade,” and so did the ancient Chinese. 

Again, I’m not advocating this, I’m just pointing out it used to exist, and it now seems to have disappeared.

As to the real–my students don’t want stories with realisitic settings rather than fantasy or science fiction ones.  THEY DON’T WANT STORIES AT ALL.

To my students, stories are just “made up,” and have no relevance to how anybody does or should live.  You can imagine all kinds of things, but that doesn’t mean that they relate in any way to the way they  live their own lives in the world.

What my students need is BIOGRAPHY–examples of actual people who have lived actual lives that are actually different from theirs.

My guess is that they don’t believe that any such places have ever existed in the world, and that no people have ever existed.

Sure, they exist in stories, but that’s just made up.

No real people would ever turn down lots of money if they were offered it, no matter what for, except maybe sometimes if the thing was illegal and they thought they might get caught.

The fact that this is how they think may make them provincial or unimaginative or intellectually limited–and in fact probably makes them all three.

But no amount of bemoaning their limitations will make them other than what they are.

And that brings me to the other thing, and to the title of this post.

Because it’s related, I think.

I only think because the whole Paula Deen Mess went right by me in its first few days. 

I’m still not entirely sure what happened, or in what order, and googling it has only made me more and more confused.

At first, I th ought she had actually used the N word, apparently on Twitter.  Then it seemed as if she had only admitted to having used the N word, some time in the past.  I couldn’t find out how long in the past.

There was, however, an enormous fuss, and Deen’s empire came crashing down as Target, the Food Channel and others dropped their deals with her.

Then somebody posted this to FB, and I found myself–well, bemused.

http://www.stonekettle.com/2013/06/a-certain-kind-of-hate.html

Now, reading through this, I’d like to head you off at the pass on one item.

Some of the misreadings here are so blatant that it’s hard not to wonder if the writer is misreading on purpose. 

I’m no fan of Pat Buchanon’s, but the writer manages to get the sense of his comments exactly backwards.  Buchanon isn’t holding up the Third Reich as a moral example.  He’s saying that even the Third Reich, the most evil government in the history of the world, didn’t practice the particular evil (women in combat) that he’s deploring.

And that misreading is not a small thing, because it’s part of what’s being used here to brand an awful lot of people–in fact, most of the country–as racist, sexist homophobes who really want to go back to the age when “those” people “knew their place.”

The assumption seems to be this:  if you indulge in nostalgia for some era, the Fifties, the Antebellum South, Greece in the age of Pericles or whatever, then you’re automatically nostalgic for all the policies of those eras. 

If you sigh over the elaborate, stylized weddings of plantation-era Virginia, you must also want to bring back slavery, whether you admit it to yourself or  not.  If you like to immerse yourself in icons and imaginative works of the Fifties, you must also want to return to the days when abortion was illegal and women were systematically required to stay in the home and put up with sexual harrassment.

Is this true?

I’ve actually written about this, on this blog, on and off, because I often find myself in the exact dilemma–I do get nostalgic for the Fifties, at the same t ime I intellectually know that  (on most counts)  I didn’t like living there at the time and wouldn’t go back there if I were offered the chance.

The answer to the dilemma is, I think, in that “most.” 

When we are nostalgic for a period in the past, we are not nostalgic for its totality, but for some small part of it, and that small part is almost always emotional rather than intellectual.

It is certainly not the case that I can wish to live for a few hours in a world where people were less cynical and less attached to judging all things by money only if I also wish to live in an era of back alley abortions. 

The implication, of course, is that such worlds existed as they did only because the evils in them were present.  As soon as the evils are abolished, all of  the rest of it comes crashing down.

That’s a matter for investigation–it’s hard to tell what is or isn’t necessary in such cases, because we know what we got, but not if we would have gotten it differently under different circumstances, or sequences of events, or different cultural conditions.

But the other assumption the writer makes is much more serious. It’s also got wider implications for life as we know it.

To wish for a quiet life, the writer says, to just not want to be tense and on guard any more, is in itself “a certain kind of racism.” 

It means that you want to go back to a time when minorities “knew their place” and kept their mouths shut.

But, again–does it?

Because the underlying assumption here is that racial and sexual equality ARE NOT POSSIBLE without making people (or maybe white people) tense and on guard all the time, making them live in a state of constant wariness.  This will be true whether the white people are “racist” by the writer’s definition or not.  Racist white people will be tense and on garde because they’re racist.  Anti-racist white people will be tense and on garde because they’re racist too, they just realize they  have to do their penance for it by being made to feel bad by nonwhite people, gay people and women.

I’ll  leave aside the other issue here–which is  that the implied definition of “not racist” in this essay represents a mental and emotional state not possible to any human being anywhere, ever–and just point out what should be obvious.

IF it is true that racial and sexual equality REQUIRES the majority of people to live in a constant and unrelieved state of tension, then racial and sexual equality are doomed.

This is not because people are racist and evil, but because nobody really likes feeling bad, and nobody will put up with it for long unless they have a strong motive to endure it.

There are certainly some people (apparently, this writer) who do have such strong motives, but those motives are essentially religious.  They put on “dialogue” and “listening to the silenced” much the way–and with  much the same emotional charge–as Medieval monks put on hair shirts.

But just as most people in the middle ages did  not put on hair shirts, most people now will not willing adopt a life of perpetual penance, whether the priests of our church think they should or not.

Most  people put up with it now only sporadically, and only on the unstated assumption that we’ll work through it in the end, that a day will come where we’ll reach some kind of equilibrium and we can all relax.

Of course, that day would come a lot faster if we stopped trying to read people’s minds and emotional states and based our judgments not on what they may or may not think but on what they do–but nobody listens to me, so whatever.

In the end, though, I think we can choose to live for a while in other eras without automatically (if unconsciously) willing their worst parts.

Some of us like to live in other eras most of the time.