Hildegarde

Or something.  I find this all very interesting on a number of levels.  Let me try to sort it out so that it’s not too confusing.

First, nobody taught me to read.  I can’t remember learning.  One day I must have just known, but what sticks in my mind is the day other people figured out I could read.  It caused quite a fuss–that duck billed platypus again–but I was not impressed, which means I must have been doing it for a while.

My father might have been willing to teach me to read, and he was a great reader most of his lfe, but when I  was a child he had one of those make-partner-or-bust jobs that took up seventy to ninety hours a week.   He was never home until after I was in bed and only sometimes home on the week-ends. 

My mother didn’t teach me to read because she neither could have nor would have.  I was considerably older before I realized that she didn’t actually read very well, that she stumbled and struggled with material as simple as articles in the Reader’s Digest.

My guess is that she did read to me, sometimes, but my guess is also that she read to me the way she later read to my children:  seldom, with little affect, and while giving off waves of discomfort and resentment.

Because my mother didn’t just not read.  She hated reading.  She hated people who read, and she especially hated my reading.  I think the only reason I got away with it was that my father loved it, and was enormously proud  of me for it, and she never crossed my father in anything she perceived to be important to him.  But I listened to enough lectures in my chldhood about how I couln’t just “sit and read” all my life, and later I  heard even more about how reading was a luxury not a necessity and if I was short of money I should watch television.

I never saw my mother read a book, except twice, and in neither case did she read the whole thing.  The first was Everything You Ever Wanted  To Know About Sex, which she seemed to skim through for the more shocking bits.   The second was one of mine, called Sanctity, which she also skimmed through but, with that infallible radar mothers have, found exactly the one scene she shouldn’t have.  After which she accused me of being a lesbian, because after all, if I hadn’t done all that stuff, how could I write about it?

I’ve seen the same studies Lee B has seen, and I think they’re accurate enough to an extent, because I do think you have to introduce a child to the possibilities of reading before he will develop a love for it.

My guess is that in my case, I was introduced to books, I loved what I was introduced to, and faced with a mother who wasn’t interested in giving me as much of that as I wanted, I went looking for a way to get it for myself. 

In my own house, both my husband and I were/are obsessional readers, we read to the children nonstop, and my older son read to my younger son.  But my older son is an obsessional reader, and my youner son–who, like me, read before he was three in some process none of us taught him–reads regularly but not with the same passion. 

Anyway, it’s hard for me to address Robert’s experience in elementary and secondary school classes, because they were so very different from my own.

In the very lowest grades, we were indeed given Dick and Jane, and my teachers tended just to let me pick anything out of the school library and read on my own, since I was already several grade levels ahead.

In the older grades, what my schools seemed most intersted in teaching was the American experience–we got James Fennimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain, and even Mark Twain on James Fennimore Cooper. We got Winesberg, Ohio (which I’ve probably just spelled wrong) and a collection of short stories by Edith Wharton that was packaged under the title Old  New York.  We got Melville (both Bartleby and Moby Dick), and a lot of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. We got some Poe (mostly the poems) and Henry  Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier and Trees,   which should have put me off poerty forever, but didn’t. We were not given to understand that these were classics we could not criticize–in fact, far from it.   And, by high school, learning how to analyze the text was the big important deal.

I have never read Silas Marner and don’t know what it’s about.  I’ve never read Ethan Frome or The Yearling.  I do know what The Yearling is about, but only because I caught a few scenes of a movie somebody made of it on television once.  I have no idea why these books in particular were chosen, but I think I can make a safe bet–they were NOT chosen by “English majors.”

Most of the teachers in public schools are not–and especially were not, when Robert and I were growing up–English majors.  They were Education majors, and the curriculum they taught was set by the school board or the school administration, not by the teachers themselves.  The school board isn’t likely to have been  English majors either, and the school administration almost certainly was made up of even more Education majors.  

No English major would survive to a bachelor’s degree treating books as Classics that couldn’t be touched.  She’d have nothing to write papers about, since academic papers in  English on the university level are all analyzing and disecting the work, 

It sounds like Robert had a really terrible set of teachers in a really terrible department that didn’t know what it was doing, and I’m not sure the situation is much better now.  Nobody seems to read Silas Marner any more, but they do somethin I think is worse–they read “problem novels” written especially for adolescents, which are supposed to be “relevant” and therefore interesting to students. 

I’ve seen some of these things.  They’re long on  preachy and fake and short on anything I could stand to read for more than two seconds. What’s worse, for the elemntary and middle school grades, textbook publishers demand political correctness of a kind that would make your head spin–somewhere out there, apparently not on th web, there’s a wonderful essay called “A Perfect Day for Broccoli,” about one woman’s experience having her children’s short story chosen for inclusion in a textbook.  To give you a hint of what that experience was like, her original title for that short story was “A Perfect Day for Ice Cream.”

We’re back to Plato again–if children never seen anybody doing anything “wrong,” then won’t even be able to conceive of doing it.  And if they do see somebody doing something wron, they’re going to run right out and do it, too.

If my earliest exposure to what was out there to read was “A Perfect Day for Broccoli”–not the essay, but the eventual textbook story–I don’t think I would have concluded that books were boring.  I think  I would have concluded that they were stupid.

That said,  I don’t think high school English classes, or middle school ones, are meant to instill the love or erading.  In middle school, the concentration is one building comprehnsion skills.  In high school, the focus should be on learning the rudiments of analysis so that the student can go on to college and actually participate in a college level literature class.

But  I’ve got nothing against the idea of trying to instell a love of reading i nto children at the same time.  I’m just not too sure that the way to approach it is to concentrate on what we think the students will find “interesting.” 

We do that now, and the result seems to be students who think that the only legitimate judgment of a work of literature is whteher or not they find it “interesting,” with “interesting” being defined as “something I already know I’m going to like.”

Specifically, a link to Erin O’Connor’s blog, the only one I read on a regular basis.  Go here

http://www.erinoconnor.org/

:and look for the post marked titled Poe Prompt.

It’s the January 23, 2009 entry, so if you’re coming on another day use the clickable calender.

It’s a great post on the inherent contradictions of teaching literature, and it links to the original article on Poe that was up on Arts and Letters Daily a few days ago.

So, okay. I’m making a HABIT of posting twice in one day.

My own comments about learning to love to read are in the post directly before this one.

I’m at that stage in the writing of a book where it’s sort of a good thing there are computers, because if this was a paper manuscript I might burn it.   It’s not that I hate it so much, but that the whole thing seems unwieldy and recalcitrant.   Plot may not be what I read for, but novels need them anyway, and mystery novels need them to be accurate and noncontradictory.  So I’m spending a lot of time worrying about whether I changed the name of a jewelry store or gave two different times for the arrival of a set of stock certificates.

So I’m a little distracted, and my mind is jumping around a lot, and what I’m struck by this morning is this:  is it possible to instill a love of reading in students who do not come to the classroom with it already formed?

This isn’t as far from the thing about passive students–and their even more passive friends and relatives who never bother to try for any kind of degree–as it might seem, but for the moment I was to look at the “love of reading” and where it comes from, for all of us.  My passive students don’t have it, but then neither do my better students, and a fair number of people who went to college with me didn’t have it, either.  Their reading comprehension skills were better than those of the students I teach, but they read little or nothing they weren’t assigned to read.

Robert has several times commented, in comments and e-mail, that English departments have a window of opportunity from the 7th grade through Freshman English to instill a love of reading, and if they don’t manage it then the student will leave school without ever wanting to read at all.

I think the time frame is wrong.  What goes on from 7th grade to Freshman English is largely technical–it’s the time frame for teaching students how to read well and not just superficially.

But I think that if the student reaches the 7th grade without a passion for books, nothing anybody can do will ever give him one.

Think about your own personal experience.  I can remember mine.  I remember the first time anybody realized I could read–due to the circumstances s (my mother was pregnant), I know that I could not have been more than  two years and ten and a half months old, and the book was a Little Golden Book about a duckbilled platypus.  I even still have the book.

I remember the first time I found an author I wanted to read everything of–I was six, and I had to go to New Haven for the first of a series of appointments that would result in having my one crossed eye surgically corrected.  As far as I was concerned, this was just a day out in New Haven, which was great.  My mother must have been more nervous, because she promised me that she’d take me to Malley’s after the appointment and let me get something for myself as a treat.

It was one of the classic missed communications of my relationship with my mother.   She took me into Malley’s and showed me the toy department.  The toy department was next to the book department and the children’s books were right next to the toys.  I took one look at The Ghost of Blackwood Hall and simply had to have it.  My mother kept trying to talk me into a doll.

I really hated dolls.  My mother got me one for every Christmas until I was fifteen, but I never played with them.  There’s probably a story in there–a story about her life and the  Great Depression–but I don’t know it.

The Ghost of Blackwood Hall is a book (number 25, I think) in the Nancy  Drew mystery series, and over the next year and a half I read all of them.  Also most of the Dana Girls.  Also a fair number of the Cherry Ames nurse books.  When I ran out of those, I read whatever I  could find in the house, including big hunks of the Funk and Wagnells encyclopedia.  I ended up at Vassar because there was an entry on the good old F and W on the college, with a picture of girls in Bermuda shorts parking their bikes in front of what looked like a medieval castle.  That was Taylor Library.  Years later, I would decide it looked even better in person.

But look at the time frame here–I was a voracious reader before I was seven.  And I went on being a voracious reader.  My father had a policy that I could always have a book if I asked for it, and I had a library card on top of that, so the books kept coming and I kept reading them.  I went through all the Agatha Christies and Perry Masons in the house, and then I bullied the town librarian into letting me take things from the adult section.  Then I started on classics, although I didn’t know they were classics–David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Anna Kerenina, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice.  There was an entire section of the library exclusively for classics, and I went though them 

There was a seres called Best Plays–Best Plays of 1956, or whatever–and I went through those, too, reading William Inge, Eugene O’Neill, Tennesse Williams.  I think I got only about  tenth of the references, and I was so innocent about sex that  I managed to read Summer and Smoke and not catch a single allusion to homosexuality, but I read because I couldn’t stop reading, because I loved reading.

I don’t know what everybody else’s experience is, but I  think that in general a love of reading has to start early if it is going to start at all.  And I think that for most people, that love of reading arises outside the context of school.  I’m sure there are exceptions, people who come from families that do not have books and who therefore encounter them for the first time in a classroom, but in general I think school is a bad place to develop a passion.

The problem with school is that even the best teachers run into the solid wall that is human nature:  we almost always dislike doing what we are required to do.  In this, Mark Twain most definitely made more sense that most modern forms of child psyschology, which seem to perceive a distaste for doing assigned work as some kind of “learning disability.” 

For me, once I learned to read, something just clicked, and I couldn’t stop.  The fact that I was required to read things in school didn’t bother me, even though most of that stuff was boring (and on a reading comprehension level necessarily several grades below what I could do by then).

I have found, in my life, very few people who share this experience, but more than I expected existed when I was six.  I don’t think I have ever found anyone who developed such a love for reading as last as twelve years old. 

I think Matilda–both the Roald Dahl book and the (better) Danny DeVito movie–has it about right.  For some people, finding books is practically like finding heroin.  You start and you just can’t stop.  You read because you feel compelled to read, and only reaelly happy when you’re reading.

When I was in elementary school and high school I used to think the dividing line was intelligent. Smart people liked to read, and stupid people did not.  Later, I met lots of smart people who didn’t like to read, and even people who were good at reading who didn’t much like it.  If there is a way to instill a passion for reading into people, I don’t know what it is. 

Now you’ll all probably write in saying that your passion for reading arrived in your freshman year of high school at the hands of the most wonderful teacher in the world, and another one of the things I thought I knew about human nature will go right into the trash bin.

Theodore Dalrymple is a pseudonym.  When he’s at home, he’s Anthony Daniels–yes, yes, like C3PO, it must make him nuts–and sometimes he writes under his real name.

Here he is

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Guarding-the-boundaries-3979

at The New Criterion, making uncommon sense about moral relativism. 

And Robert will just have to forgive him for quoting Matthew Arnold.

Yesterday, I virtually shredded the skin on the tip of the middle finger of my right hand, and today  I’m finding it  very hard to type. 

But let me get started.  Robert commented on yesterday’s post:

>>>Barring religion and multiple personalities, we are each of us alone in our own skulls, and I have only working hypotheses about what’s going on inside the others. That’s all any of us have<<<

And I couldn’t disagree more.  Some of us do indeed have much more than this, and they don’t just “imagine” themselves as something extrinsic like a 19th century cavalry officer.

Ages ago  I did a couple of posts on characters that write themselves–that do things writers do NOT decide to make them do, that do things that even surprise the writer who is supposed to be “inventing” them.

When this goes on, what is happening is not the writer inventing in any conscious or deliberate sense, and it is not the writer imagining what it must be like to be this person.  Instead, it IS a kind of multiple personality event.  You don’t become “a 19th century cavalry officer.”   You DO become someone whose mind functions entirely on visual cues, although in your everyday life you never notice visual cues at all.  You may even be blind.

This is the reality of point of view–the ability to step out of yourself and into somebody else’s skull, the ability not to be alone in your own skull.

If you can do this AND  replicate it on a page, you’re a good writer.  If you can do this and replicate it on a page for a broad range of human personalities and minds, you’re a great writer.  It is the job of fiction, and the job of writers of fiction, to allow people who cannot do this to step inside other people’s skulls and actually experience how they operate.

That’s what it means to write a character from the “inside.”  And no character written from the inside can be entirely invented, because the fact that that character is written that way is proof positive that at least one human being (the writer himself) is capable of thinking that way. 

You can complain that such characters are not representative of their class–that your run of the mill carpenter or jewel thief or police oficer does not think and feel the way this character does–but you cannot say that such minds do not exist, because the proof that at least one does is there in front of you on the page.

Characters written from the outside, on the other hand, can be entirely false, and usually are.  They’re the ones we tend to think of as silly and artifical whenever we don’t share the political/moral/social/cultural/whatever views of the writer who hammered them into being.  They’re the fictional equivalent of those people in the studies Mike Fisher posted the link to the references to.  We laugh at Topsy and Little Eva and Uncle Tom thes days.  We still step right into the skin of Bigger Thomas. 

Robert goes on to say:

>>>But we now know why our fiction reading barely overlaps. I’ll accept a fairly broad range of thinking and behavior from characters. The last time I can remember insisting that real people just don’t behave like that, it was Princess Amadilla in ATTACK OF THE CLONES. (I was OK with Yoda.) But I accept the posited thinking or behavior so the author can get on with the story. If guessing at someone’s thought processes IS the story, the book goes back on (someone else’s) shelves.
>>>

Well, I’ll say this.

I say plot is negligible in fiction.  There are only a few dozen plots and people do them over and over again.  They’re not particularly important in a book, although the underlying narrative arc may be important in a culture.

Nor is “guessing” at a character’s thought processes the point.  If you have to guess, the fiction has failed.

The point is EXPERIENCING those thought processes, getting into that other head yourself and actually being that other mind for a while.  It’s a matter of actually being able to think like that, of stepping out of the prison of your own blood and skin and bone and taking up somebody else’s. 

The best fiction is a kind of induced multiple personality event.

The (temporary) ability to do this, and the experience of the broadest possible range of human minds, is the great gift of the arts as they have been conceived and executed in Western culture.  And it is the payoff, so to speak of the serious study of the Humanities. 

It is virtually impossible for any one of us to be fully, completely and consciously human on our own.  Each individual human being is too limited, and there are too many altneratives out there in the form of other individual human beings.   To understand what it means to be human, we have to know ourselves, but we have to know a lot more than ourselves.

This is what all the arts are for, in the West, but it is especially what fiction is for.   And it is on the basis of whether or not a book does this kind of thing that it gets serious consideration as part of the canon. 

If it was political considerations that determined what a “great book” was, Isabel Archer and Daisy Miller would have been drummed out of the club decades ago, because Henry James may have been gay, but he was a stalwart social conservative especially when it came to the role of women.  Feminists tear their hair, and the kind of academic feminist who is tone deaf to fiction tries to drive The Portrait of a Lady off the curriculum in favor of The Women’s Room, but any feminist who is not tone deaf knows that The Portrait of a Lady is a great book, even though it’s telling her a lot of things she doesn’t want to hear, and The Women’s  Room is not, even though it’s so politically correct it hurts.

Plots will never change much.  They’ve been around for millennia, and it’s seldom that a new one enters the landscape.  One of the great advantages of genre novels, if they’re otherwise well written (see definition above), is that they make it possible to ignore plot more or less completely. 

The detective will dicover the murderer and in all likelihood the murderer will be caught.

Good.  Glad we got that over with.  Now show me what you’re offering that will let me live in somebody else’s skin besides my own.

I spent half the night thinking about how to make this coherent, because it all ties in.   So let me give it a try.

First,  you have to understand the situation  I am in with teaching.  I do most of that teaching in a special program for “remedial” students, which is a polite way of saying “backwards” ones.  I didn’t just make up that second descriptive word.  It’s a one a lot of the teachers in that particular program use, and it’s not completely inapt. 

These are not just kids who did poorly in high school and landed in a low-level community college.  I’ve taught those students, too, and they’re light years different from the kind in my special program.  They’re motivated, they’re often older, they’re bright and they know what they want.   They may have blown off school a few decades ago or received a poor foundation for college work, but they’re not stupid and they’re not passive.

The students in my special program courses are different at base.   For one thing, they’re mostly young.  They’re just out of high school or only a few years past it.  Lots of them have GEDs instead of regular graduation credentials, and among the men a high number of those  GEDs were earned in prison.   Among the women, I’d guess the average age at first childbirth was around fifteen, but I may be being optimistic here.   They’re eighteen or twenty when they come to my classroom and they all seem to have multiple children.  A fair number of them have multiple children that have been taken away by the state because of their drug use or hooking.

Note what I haven’t said here–I haven’t said they’re poor, and I haven’t said they’re minorities.  A lot of them are both, but by no means all of them are.   The middle class students who end up in my room have different life stories, but they all have that single characteristic that shocked me so much when I first ran into it and that I still don’t understand:  they are still terminally, embeddedly passive.

Embeddedly.  I don’t even know if that’s a word.  It doesn’t look like a word.

I want to point out that not all my students in this program are passive in this way.  Every once in a while–and it is only every once in a while–I get the exception, the one who’s going to makeuse of what’s on offer.  Those are the bright spots in my day, but they’re few and far between, and I’ve gone for several terms without getting even one of them.

I also want to point out that I have no reason to complain here, and that it wasn’t me who suggested that the administration ought to send me different students.  I signed on to teach THESE students.  On purpose.  I knew what I was getting into, and I  had options.   Sometimes when this stuff gets to be too much for me,  I even use the options–teach other students, in higher level classes, with more “potential.”

But when  I  first started doing this, the issue wasn’t the money I could make from it but getting out of my house after Bill died and the boys were both in school and it was suddenly empty.  And I thought that the least I could do was to try to do some good, and this looked like a path in that direction.

It’s very difficult to find people with academic credentials like mine to teach students like my special program ones.   Most of our teachers in that program are ex-high school teachers with master’s degrees in education from local colleges, older women who need to supplement their pensions and their Social Security.   The good ones are decent enough.   The bad ones hate what they do and hate the students they teach, and it shows.

I found Theodore Dalrymple because I was looking for some explanation for why my students behaved the way they behaved, why their constant and unending approach to life was always to shrug their shoulders and say “can’t do nothing about it.”  I had never met people like this before, in life or in art. 

Note that I am not claiming that these students are “stupid.”  Some of them are certainly not very bright, but I’ve met profoundly stupid people in all walks of life who do not have this passivity.  It’s the passive-ness, not the innate intellectual talent, that is the problem here.

I  went looking for books that would explain it, for fiction or nonfiction, for memoirs, for anything.   I found Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom, which was a brilliant exposition of the problem I look at every day.  It describes the situation beautifully, and in detail. 

But.

It still doesn’t give me what I’m looking for, which is a way to understand how my students think and feel.  What I learn in Life at the Bottom is twofold:  first, it’s not just me and I’m not imagining things; and second, what Theodore Dalrymple thinks and feels and how he deals with what’s been set before him. 

If I had had a fictional example to give you, I would have given it.   I don’t know of one.  The closest example I can think of is Mailer’s portrait of Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song, and precisely because he claims to be writing from inside Gilmore’s head he calls the book a “nonfiction novel.”  The book is sort of halfway between fiction and nonfiction, based on a real case and real research but written from inside the heads of its various characters as if Mailer had “invented” all of them.

But here’s the thing–I don’t think any decent writer of fiction ever “invents” a character.  Nor do I think that people reject characters as “not the way real people would behave” because those characters don’t suit their prejudices.  In fact, fiction is one of the greatest sources we have of making behavior that initially seems bizarre or wrong seem understandable instead.

When we say that characters aren’t believable, we almost always mean they’ve been written from the outside, with a particular agenda, social or political or religious or whatever, forced upon them. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t “invent” Hester Prynne and Herman  Melville didn’t “invent” Ishmael and Henry James didn’t “invent” Isabel Archer, they lived them.   Our brains work the way they work, but some of us are capable–to one extent or another–of slipping the reins of our own personalities and allowing aour brains to enter into another groove and work that way for a while instead.

What results when that happens is not just a matter of characters with minds of their own–which we discussed before–but a laying-bare of the process of thought that, as I’ve also said before, can’t be found anywhere else.   The very best of this sort of thing makes it possible for the reader to slip his own groove and enter into that of the character, so that he actually experiences a different way of thinking. 

He isn’t just told that the character felt this or that, or thought this or that, or did this or that.   He takes on the character’s blood and skin and bone and feels and thinks and does it all along with him.  And in that way, and only in that way, can any of us ever understand  the full range and scope of human nature.

I don’t think any character so written can every be completely false.  He might be a minority in the class or category in which he is situated–an unusual thief or mother or priest–but the very fact that a writer and a reader can do what I’m talking about means it is, by definition, possible for such people to exist.  If it wasn’t, our brains wouldn’t be able to do what they do in this process. 

We could, of course, invent characters from the outside and simply tell readers what they’re supposed to be like, but that isn’t the same thing, and that’s when we get complaints that the characters aren’t “real.”

I don’t know why there are no examples–or so few that I haven’t run across them–of people like these in fiction.  I know I’ve tried several times to create such a character myself, and in every case fallen flat on my face.  My mind simply will not work the way their minds seem to. 

That defines the limit of my talent, obviously–and my talent is very limited–but, again with the exception of the Mailer, I don’t know anybody else who’s tried it, either.  And even the Mailer is a half-try, because Mailer chose what seems to have been the one incident in Gilmore’s life when he was not mired in passivity to focus his story on. 

Maybe there is something genetic, or innate, or deeply environmentally planted that marks such people off from the rest of us, so that once we pass a certain point we just can’t think that way anymore. 

But the fact that we don’t understand it, that we have no fiction from the inside of it, means that we also have virtually no knowledge of how to cure it.  And it could use being cured.  People who are passive in this way do not lead happy lives, or productive ones.   If they start out poor, they stay that way.   If they start out middle class, they drift through jobs and relationships incoherently and end up vaguely resentful and confused in an old age defined, again, by a listless resignation to “fate.”  They win lotteries and blow the money.  They leave the scenes of accidents and can’t explain why.   They watch television and don’t understand most of it.  They sit.

We could use somebody who could understand this, who could get inside it and write from inside it.  Before I started teaching in my program, it would never have occured to me that so many of these people existed.  Here they are, though, and I’m not in favor of letting them starve, so it seems to me that we ought to be able to do something.

For some reason or other, these people have been left outside the Western imaginative framework, they are not part of any canon on any level I can think of, nor are they part of any of the forms some of you like to call “popular.”  Nor do they exist in the literature of any other country I have come across.  If the purpose of literature is to present us with the full range of human experience, this is a place where literature has let us down.

But  I will guarantee you, “nonfiction,” whether it pretends to be “science” or not, has not only done no better, but has mostly generated ideas that are downright and probably false. 

I sent you to Theodore Dalrymple because he’s the best write I know of what it looks like from the outside.

I don’t know anybody who can tell you, or me, what it looks like from the inside.

When I was a child, my father used to take us to Florida every winter for three months.  That is, he’d take us, come back north himself, and then see us on the week-ends or whenever possible until April, when we’d all come home.  We had a house there.  He would make arrangements with our schools.   Sometimes he would hire tutors when the schools insisted, although that tended not to work that well.  I always thought I was smarter than the tutors.  In at least one case, I was absolutely right.

This was before the interstates went through, so in order to drive from Connecticut to  Florida we had to take a lot of those two-lane blacktops people thought of as “highways” before we had real ones.  On one of these trips, going South, we stopped at a small gas station-cum-convenience store in Florence,  North Carolina.  I was standing in the convenience store part, straining to find some suitable kitschy stuff to talk my parents into buying for me, when my father appeared at my side, grabbed me by the wrist, and said, “Come with me.”

I came.   We went outside and around the back of the station.  He turned me so that I faced the building’s back wall, pointed at it and everything that was there, and said, “Look at that.”

What I was looking at was a fountain next to a toilet with a door that would not properly close.  Both of them were marked with big printed signs that said, “COLORED.”

I was seven years old.

It’s inauguration day, and I’ve been sitting around all morning thinking about the day after the election.  On that day, I went looking for a copy of The New York Times. a copy with  The Headline on it, just to have.   Every newstand in three towns was sold out, so I headed for the one place I was sure would have copies untouched:  my campus, where close to half of the students are African-American, and where nobody seemed to care.

Nobody did, either.  I found a huge stack of the things in the free bins in the classroom building where I teach, and I picked up a couple just for me.

I have a class today just after the swearing in ceremony.  The university has brought in several large-screen TVs and put them in strategic places on campus, including in the dining hall, so that people can watch.   I will watch, but I’m willing to bet that that cafeteria will be half empty, that almost nobody would notice.

I know, I know.  I was in the middle of a stream of consciousness thing about characters and whether they’re “invented” or not (I don’t think they are, in the sense Robert seems to mean it).  I’ll get back to it later.

Right now, what I can’t seem to wrap my head around is the fact of what I’m sure is coming, a campus full of African American students the majority of whom will not be willing to rouse themselves from their usual lethargy to see the first African American in history be sworn in as President of the United States.

I’m not saying my African American students are particularly lethargic, mind you.  My white students are equally lethargic, if not more so.  They just express it differently.   My white students whine that they’re “bored.”  My black students just shrug.

Back to the victims and victimizers thing here–I’m sure that there are places where students are taught to think of themselves as victims, and where African Americans and other minorities are especially given reason to focus on the historical wrongs done to their ancestors because of race, but that really isn’t what I’m about to go into here.

My minority kids seem to be taught nothing.  I taught a section of Literature and Comp a couple of years ago.  L and  C is the second semester course on the program that leads to regular admission to a four year degree.  It consists not just of learning how to write, but learning how to write English papers specifically.  Which means we have to assign some actual literature for the students to write about.

I often assign a lot of poetry by Langston  Hughes, both because he’s a good poet and because he’s an interesting man, and that year I fave them a poem called “Theme for English B.” 

“He’s living at the  YMCA,” I said.  “He’s doing that even though Columbia has dorms.   Why do you think he’s not living in the dorms?”

Blank stares.  Lots of shrugs.  Several people looking out the window.  I tried it again.  And again.  And again.  Finally, I just told them. 

“He’s living in the dorms because he’s black,” I said.  “He’s the only black student at Columbia in his year and they won’t let black students live in the dorms.”

There was a stirring at the back of the room.  A kid, a black kid, poked his head up.  “Wait,” he said.  “They wouldn’t let him live in the dorms because he was black?  Just because he was black?”

I could go on at length about this particlar scene, because it stretched through long minutes, but the upshot is this:  this kid, eighteen years old and the product of twelve years of public education, had no idea that there had ever been a time when black people in the United States were prevented from doing things because they were black.

Oh, he’d heard about “segregation,” sort of.  He’d heard about the  Civil Rights Movement, too.  He’d really heard about “racism.”  The problem was that none of these things connected to anything solid for him, or at least anything solid in history.

And he wasn’t the only one.   I had one young woman who had really managed to look into all this, who knew something not only about the standard history but about the history of ideas, who had read not only Hughes before but W.E.B. Dubois and Frederick Douglass and  Alice Walker.  She went on to graduate from a four-year degree program at the top of her class, and I sent her a card on the occasion.

But the rest of my students, and definitely the rest of my African American students, didn’t have a clue about any of this.  “Racism” was when I gave them a  D on a paper two pages too short for the assignment and having nothing to do with it, or when their math professors had them administratively removed from her course after they’d missed seven classes in a row.

I said this at some point near the beginning of this blog, but this seems a good occasion to say it again:  sometimes I wish some of these kids had been given the kind of “victims education” that drives conservatives wild.  It’s not that I think such education is necessary, or even accurate, but at the very least it would have acquainted them with the history of what is going on here. 

My kids know so little of the history of their own country, or of the world, that they don’t see anything remarkable in the fact that we are about to have an African American President of the United States.  They know so little of the history of their own county, the history of the world, or the realities of human nature that they don’t realize that this event is so unqiue on so many levels, it’s mind-boggling. 

So I’ll go in today, and I’ll ask for a writing sample, and I’ll use the inauguration for a prompt because it’s going to b what’s on my mind.

And I’ll get back twenty essays out of twenty-two that say, “I don’t like politics.  It’s not interesting to me. It’s just boring.”

I will go to those big bins where they put out copies of The New York Times for free and make sure I get myself one.

And  I’ll go back tomorrow and get one with the picture of the swearing in on it, because the Times will do that.

Sometimes I think that that passivity I’ve been talking about goes a lot deeper than just not doing anything.

And tomorrow I’ll get back to business, and why Theodore Dalrymple is not an example of me going to nonfiction for how people think and feel.

A hundred or so posts ago now, I started this blog by saying that I wanted to talk about a number of things–including harpsichords, which I haven’t gotten around to yet–and that one of them would the tendency of too many people in too many places to assume that “science” is the only posible valid mode of inquiry into anything. 

When Robert sent me an e-mail over night headed “the limits of fiction,” my first impulse was to let it ride and send him a private answer, but then John chimed in with puzzlement about the state of social “science,” and it occurred to me that this might be the place both for the e-mail and the reply.

What Robert said was:

>>>

So, I’ve been thnking about Janet’s’ post, and actually I’ve been thinking about the whole “victim mentality” thing for much longer than that.  It’s also  Sunday, and we’re in the middle of yet another snowstorm.  But it’s warmer than it was yesterday, which can’t hurt.

Anyway, here’s the thing.  I know the victim mentality, and I’ve seen it work, but I think that what Janet’s students and mine are really possessed of is something else–it’s the rock-solid conviction that they have a right to certain things–a happy life, to start with.

Every semester I ask all of my students to take that ‘literacy quiz” I posted here back in December, and on question 92, which ask them to pick all the rights granted to them by the US Constitution, the most common mistake is to choose “the right to be happy” as one of them.

This isn’t an unusual mistake to make about what is, after all, something in the Declaration of  Independence and not in the Constitution, but the mistake is now so widespread and on so many different levels and so many institutions, that it’s become one of the principle “social problems” of the era.  We just don’t acknowledge it as such.

For most of the time that humanbeings have been on this earth, the assumption has been that life will not be happy, or comfortable, for almost anybody.  Some very few people at the top of the social scale got general comfort most of the time, although comfort was limited even for them. 

As for happiness–the Greeks thought it was so rare that they instinctively distrusted the appearance of it.  Call no man happy until he is dead, Aristotle said, and he meant not that we’d all be better off as corpses but that circumstances change on a daily basis and what is “happy” on Tuesday can descend inot misery by Friday afternoon.

If we’ve lost the sense that death is natural and can happen to anybody at any moment, we’ve also lost the sense that life is naturally prone to miseries.  The difference, though, is that something real has changed for us in regard to death–we do really die less often, and are really less likely to die young; we have conquered many of the things that used to kill us off in childhood and childbirth and beyond.  Antibiotics mean safe Cesarian sections and cured cases of tuberculosis.

The problem with happiness is that nothing at all has changed in any fundamental way for human beings.  Happiness is not our default mode.  The same Greeks who didn’t trust the idea of happiness, or the experience of it, saw human beings as creatures halfway btween beasts and gods, and because of that continually and inevitably in conflict inside themselves.

What’s happened in the post-World War II West is that we have acquired a belief that happines is in fact the default mode, as is perfect and flawless functioning, and that any deviation from these things is either “disease” or oppression.  If we are causing our problems for ourselves, we must be in the grip of “disease.”  If we can find no way in which we are causing these problems, then somebody else must be causing them.  The idea that some of these problems–laziness, for instance, or a strong sexual attraction to the kind of men who like to cut and run when they’re asked for commitment–aren’t “caused” at all but simply a part of our nature, isn’t an idea that’s even on the radar.

Robrt suggested a couple of posts ago that I could go to fiction to understand people if I wanted to, but the “scientific” people had data and that would be safer–but I don’t agree that the “scientific” people do have data, at least not if the “scientists” involved are what populates so much of clinical psychology these days.

What these people have is an assumption that starts with Jean  Jacques Rousseau and makes its way through every Utopian scheme in the eras since and that has now come to rest as the therapeutic society–the assumption that men and women are “naturally” good and that they ar also “naturally” and infinitely malleable. 

According to Best Social  Work  Practice, as one of my students put it, being  well-organized, focussed and diligent is the default mode.  People who are disorganized, scatterbrained and lazy are either sick (ADHD, maybe) or in some way damaged (bad parenting, child abuse).

My students–and, I’m willing to bet, Janet’s–come to school convinced that not just academic work, but everything else, should be easy.

And by easy, I don’t mean “not difficult to understand.”  I mean that academic work should come naturally.   They should be naturally interested in it.  They should naturally want to do it.   It doesn’t ocur to them, or to their parents, or to their therapists, that there is anything “natural” about just hating the idea of writing a paper, or memorizing Latin declensions, or hacking away at the times tables until they become second nature. 

Life is supposed to feel good, and so many of the things we must do to achieve anything in the world do not feel good.  The students I was ranting about the other day, the good ones who take responsibility and get the job done, are almost never “happy” about doing it.  Studying is a chore for them just as much as it is for their classmates who don’t do the work.   Taking responsibility is difficult and often unpleasant and even oftener requires them to forgo something they would like to do better.  

Here’s a good reason to read–to read difficult books, too, including “old fashioned” fiction–and that’s that it will present to us the circumstances and interior lives of people who choose not to chase happiness, who choose to do what they are obligated to do intead, who do not expect that happiness is something they are just supposed to have.

I feel like I’m putting this badly.  What keeps coming into my head are all those diet commercials on television–try our diet!  the pounds will just melt off!  you’ll never be hungry!

But the truth of the matter is that, in the early stanges of any diet that’s going to b successful in the long run, you will be hungry.  You just have to put up with it until you’ve trained your body to behave the way you want it to, and you may never actually be able to do that.   Some people may “control their weight” only by constant vigiilance and never-entirely-conquered discomfort.

I don’t think that the students I teach–the passive ones, that we’ve talked about before–think of themselves as “fictims” in the sense that the various Victims Rights and Victims Studies movement define that term. 

I do think that they look on themselves and the world as a place were what is “natural” is ease and happiness, and when the world is not that way–and it neverhas been, annever will be–they think that there must be something “wrong” that somebody else must fix.  Because the bottom line in a therapeutic culture is that everything can be fixed.

I think my students are passive because the world they believe they live in does not exist.   They do not just require just being made to do their homework, but to somehow be rendered capable of wanting to do it.  They are sure that the mere fact that they don’t want to do it means that something is wrong–the teacher is boring, or the work is, or they’ve got a learning disability, or whatever.

It takes a lot of pseudo-science, complete with charts and studies and data, to conclude that ten  year olds who won’t do their homework or sit still in class have “attention deficit disorder” and that fifteen year olds who defy their parents have “oppositional defiant disorder.”  Sane people call these things “childhood” and “adoslecence,” but then sane people don’t believe that diligence, obedience and common sense are the default modes of human personality.

And it seems to me that at some point, we’re going to have to have a corrective arc here, another acknowledgement that life is not easy and often isn’t either comfortable or happy, that some suffering is unavoidable, that nobody has a “right” to be happy or even a reasonable expectation of it.

The term is about to start in a couple of days, and I am once again going to face classrooms full of students who…just sit.  Some of them come to class and some of them don’t, but the ones who do won’t have done the reading.   They tried, but they couldn’t get into it.  They’re not interested in any of this stuff.  They don’t care and they don’t see why they ought to care.  Besides, this hasn’t got anyting to do with their major. 

What I do insist is that I will not, now or later, gve in to the presumption.  I assume that every single one of the excuses they give me is absolutely true.  I also assume they don’t matter.

Do it anyway, I tell them.

They aren’t interested.  If it has to feel bad, there must be something wrong, they must have a learning disability or I must be a bad teacher. 

Because as far as they’re concerned, nobody is supposed to feel bad or bored, ever, and the only legitmate “difficulty” is the kind of thing that happens when it takes four tries to beat the next game level. 

Here’s one thing that literature will tell you the truth about, and science will not.

The title of th is post comes from a bit of French (possibly faux French) from something that may or may not be an actual French poem, called La Belle Homicide.  I admit to not having the patience to read through the conversation on the list I saw this on, mostly because  it’s about four degrees below zero where I live and my office, where my computer is, is in a sunroom.  Meaning it’s really, painfully cold.  That said, I like the term–The Good Murder–and I can even think of half a dozen ways it could be meant.

Cheryl says that the civilized murder, like the handsome young detective investigating it and the half dozen suspects with interesting motives who may have committed it, is a fantasy.   I don’t think I agree.   Oh, the handsome young detective is fantasy enough, but I can think of a whole raft of cases off the top of my head that fit the definition of “civilized murder” the way  I used it in the last post.   There are even a fair number of cases out there that read like murder mysteries.  In the early days of shows like American Justice,.those were the cases they concentrated on.

Consider the three most prominent examples of spousal murder over the last ten or fifteen years, the three  Petersons, Scott, Drew and Michael.  In at least two of these cases (Drew and Michael) there’s the possibility that the man in question murdered one or more wives before the one he became notorious for.   In one case (Michael) the accused was a best selling writer of thrillers.  In all three cases, the victims and murderers and suspects were all solidly middle class or better. 

There are more cases, if you want to look.  There’s Barbara Suger of Durham, North Carolina, who also managed to get away with one spousal murder before she got caught in the replay, who was also solidly middle class and whose story sounds like something out of a Marple, at least, complete with fraud, publishing and really complicated forensics.

But I don’t have to go that far afield.  I have one of these, more or less, in my own family.  I say more or less, because it concerns the mother of the husband of one of my cousins, who murdered her own mother and sister for the insurance money. 

“Civilized” murders, murders of the kind that make the basis of many traditional murder  mysteries, do occur, they just don’t occur as often as murder mysteries make them seem to.  So the question remains, is there a difference in kind, or only in degree, between this kind of thing and the mob of idiots who bludgeon homeless tramps to death for the hell of it?

Robert says it’s only a difference of degree, and in fact the underlying assumption of the traditional murder mystery is just that.   In fact, by the omission of any kind of acknowledge of “regular” murder in the traditional murder mystery, “civilized” murder is left to stand in for it. 

I think though, that looking at the two kinds of crime makes the issue a lot less clear.   Certainly the people who commit the two different kinds of crime have very different kinds of personalities.  Maybe there’s a kind of continuum, beginning with that mob of idiots who kill or maim because they’re bored,.moving up through the deliberated violence of organized thuggery, and ending up on the doorstep of these two little old ladies who murdered half a dozen old men to get hold of their monthly social security checks.  I wish I could remember their names.  It was one of  my favorite true crime documentary stories, and I’ve misplaced it.

Robert suggests that fiction is a bad place to go for information, and several other people have said that they read to “relax” or to “escape” or for “fun.”  I’ll go on record and say that I agree with  Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren, that there are three levels of reading:  for entertainment, for information, and for understanding.  I am, with books, the way a good skiier is with slopes.   The easy stuff doesn’t entertain me, it just bores me.

But I don’t read for information, either, although it’s a plus if I get something that.  I read for understanding.  What I go to fiction for is help in understanding people, and a book is “good” for me to the extent that it gives me a view into the way people very different from me think and feel. 

And, in case you’re about to ask–yes, I do think fiction is the best place to go for such understanding.  In fact, at the moment, I would say it’s the only place we can go.  Psychology does a fair, but only fair, job of giving us the general patterns of  characteristics in wide categories of people, and it can describe the symptoms of diseased minds, but as soon as it gets near individuals, or attempts to describe the functioning of normal minds, it falls apart.   Or worse.

We bring psychologists into courtrooms and parole hearings to predict the future behavior of criminals, and their predictions are less accurate than chance.  This is, after all, a group of people who vote on what is to be classified as a disease, and who are unable to distinguish between an “addiction” and a “habit.”  The result is a multibillion dollar rehab industry with a 97% failure rate and story after story in the papers about axe murderers released from prison as no longer a danger to the community only to hack up their landladies in the first week.

The other result, of course, is the wholesale ditching of Constitutional protections for anybody ever labeled a “sex offender,” no matter what he did to be handed that appellation.  In some states, anybody who has ever been accused of a sex offense–even if he was never charged, or acquitted–is labeled a “sex offender” and registered and tracked.  Apparently, peope accused of sex crimes are not innocent until proven guilty.

So,  yes, fiction is where I go to understand people.  Theoretically, both biography and true crime should offer much the same kind of understanding, but for some reason I don’t understand, they don’t, usually.  My best guess for biography is that it usually takes in too much of a person’s life, tries too hard for the big picture, rather than zeroing in, as fiction does, on one particular arc in the personal narrative.

With true crime, I think the fault may be true crime writers, a lot of whom come from either law enforcement or psychology and who have therefore been trained to look at people from the same kind of theoretical perspective that makes so much psychology so lame. The two true crime books I  can think of that did excellent jobs on the understanding people front–In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song–were both written by first-class novelists. What’s more, they both called their books “nonfiction n novels.” 

But the question remains, or returns, as to whether there is something fundamentally different between the kind of violence committed by all those Petersons and that committed by those random thugs on the street–and, unfortunately, fiction as it exists so far doesn’t really help. 

Traditional mysteries don’t deal with ordinary violent crime.  The more realistic kind of “crime novel” does, but almost all of these are written almost exclusively from the points of view  of their detectives, with only minimal exposure to the points of view of the perpetrators.   And the perpetrators are often stereotypical, more excuses for the plot than attempts to explain and explore real human individuals.  

Mailer and Capote are better, but the didn’t go all the way to the bottom of the barrel, either, although Mailer’s Gary  Gilmore came closer than any character I’ve ever seen to being a type of mind completely and utterly foreign not only to me, but to what I can undestand of the Peterson boys, too.  Mailer’s Gilmore lives in a world of dotted lines, where nothing connects to anything else, where picking up cigarettes can lead to murder because, well, it was Tuesday, and…I don’t know..things just happen.

In civilized murders, things do not just happen.  They have to be planned, and no Gary Gilmore could commit one.