Confessions of Prof Pun King

Back in the 90s when everything wrong with the world was blamed on something called “political correctness,” I’d pick a day early every semester to rush with alarm into my college freshman classes about a minute late and ask my students:

“Did you hear what happened at the University of Minnesota?”

Immediately riveted, every one of them always stared at me in silence. I spoke as if out of breath: “The faculty has voted to ban the Bible from the university library!”

A collective gasp was nearly as loud as my voice. A few would utter things like “Not again!” Or, “Where does it end?” Or the full version of WTF with exclamation points that scraped the chalkboard.

I began walking back toward the door I had left open: “They can no longer accept that, for all the space given to St. Paul, there’s never any mention of Minneapolis.”

By the third time I pulled this stunt, I learned to close the door behind me so that the reaction would not disrupt other classes along the corridor. I didn’t need to lean into it to hear the mix of laughter and confusion with bait-and-switch rage.

In 2005, Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay team announced that they would be shortening their name, Devil Rays, to simply, Rays. I happened to read this in the Chicago Tribune as I left the windy city via Amtrak to return home.

Stopped in Cleveland where one of my Akron cousins retrieved me from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. With her were two friends, a couple I had never met. The husband proved a most affable fellow who could talk sports past sudden death overtimes, and when the two women went off to find a restroom in the Great Lakes Brew Pub, I mentioned the news from St. Petersburg.

As soon as I said the words “dropped the word ‘Devil’,” his smile dropped into an expression you might make when a doctor tells you, “It is not benign.” Verbatim, I recall only the opening curse: “Goddamn political correctness!” And then the damn dam burst.

I started to interrupt him. He did not know, as I did, that new owners were taking advantage of the one word, “Rays,” to serve as a double-entendre. This allowed them to use rays of the sun as a logo on new uniforms and merch while retaining a devil ray–or sting ray for that matter–logo for what MLB calls “alternative” or “throwback” unis. There is an outline patch of one on the shoulder of all their jerseys.

But I held my tongue. To this day I regret letting him go on and on with unwarranted nonsense, but my not-better angel got the better of me. I wanted to hear him out.

Before it was over, I heard how the all-too-well-known-yet-never-specified “they” are once again spoiling everyone’s fun and excitement. “Why, our new minor league team was going to be the Akron Blast,” he said as if reacting to the cancellation of a fireworks display.

Akron is the home of Goodyear, a leader in the aerospace industry–and also the home of Astronaut Judith Resnik who perished in the Challenger disaster. My new friend wasn’t sure if it was the Resnik family, or neighbors looking to spare them further trauma, who prevailed on the team to find another name.

“So, instead, we are stuck with the ‘Aeros’.”*

Twenty years of teaching taught me how to absorb such complaints without flinching: “Did anyone propose calling them the ‘Akronauts’?”

He laughed at my use of the collective noun by which he and every resident of the city is called: “Now that’s interesting! I think I like that better than ‘Blast’.”

Nor did I flinch at that, but by this time I was afraid to tell him the true story of the Tampa Bay name change. No matter, as I was bailed out by the return of the two women. To this day I do not know if he knows that what he condemned as “political correctness” was a business decision.

Make of those two stories–one triggered deliberately, the other inadvertent–what you want. I offer them as cautionary tales against the immediate willingness to believe anything that reinforces our own prejudice, anything that appears to be more of what we already condemn as wrong. Most worrisome is the crock of vehemence that can boil over before a teaspoon of detail can be put in the mix.

Moreover, we should consider that those stories are from two and three decades ago. Before the internet, before texting, before social media and flash crowds. Today such claims are constant, and we get “threads,” or unlimited numbers of people reacting to the initial claim, many of them ignoring the previous reactions. Hence, any attempt to correct the initial claim will be effectively run-over and then left unnoticed, no matter how many are added.

If there’s any useful benefit from them–or what today is called a “takeaway”–it’s that the dynamic can be put in reverse to serve as a lesson. It’s called “punking.” All you need is a willingness to tell a momentary lie, watch the reaction, then set it straight. At least there’s a chance that anyone listening learns to resist temptations to jump to conclusions.

As for my Akronaut friend, I still regret not doing him that favor.

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*Before the 2014 season, the Aeros changed their name to the Akron RubberDucks, a nod to Akron’s claim to be the “Rubber Capital of the World,” a nickname–pun? double-entendre?–that my cousins and their friends drove for no end of Goodyear and Firestone mileage while they were in high school.

No longer contractually required to keep a straight face, Prof. Pun King laughs at pretty much everything.
Photo by Walt Thompson.

The Deal of the Art

Just what percentage of the American public refuses to hear any talk of politics?

Judging from all that we hear in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and all of our religious holidays, most homes put an absolute ban on any mere mention of it.

For many, the aversion extends into history and literature, which is why we now have citizens’ groups forming to effect bans on school books they fear will make young students “uncomfortable.”

It’s as if the political adage of Keep It Simple Stupid has become an anti-political adage of Keep Ourselves Stupid. Or, to make it as simple as possible: Do Not Think.

I had a rather jolting encounter with it back when I was still teaching in the late 90s. When New Hampshire College, then just a modest business school with a single building in a Portsmouth industrial park, assigned a new class called “Business in American Literature,” the dean asked me to design and teach it.

Apparently my reputation for improvisation–student evaluations credited me with bringing things to life–overrode my socialist tendencies, and so there I was, explaining to prospective students that, no, it will not be about Lee Iacocca, Norman Vincent Peale, and the NYC real-estate guy whose (ghosted) The Art of the Deal had been number one on best-seller charts just a decade earlier.

No, I answered, this will be Mark Twain’s Gilded Age, Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, a few stories from Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House. Many of them groaned, but Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard” proved a perfect appetizer for the substantial meal. In particular, Melville’s “Bartleby” proved cathartic for several adult students in the night class. “That’s my office!” exclaimed one while others nodded knowingly.

Skepticism soon gave way to a hunger to learn more, and a good time appeared to be being had by all, including me, until we got to, of all things, The Wizard of Oz.

Though already impressed by stories of ruinous droughts and storms in the American plains, a few did not want to know that this lovable, colorful children’s story was based on the dominant political debate in the 1890s: Would American currency be based on the silver or gold standard?

My sing-song version of “follow the yellow brick road” quickly won most of them over. And, in keeping with the vernacular of the class, I closed the deal with a reminder that Dorothy wears silver shoes in the book (ruby was preferable for one of the first technicolor films made four decades later).

This is what would eventually lead to Teddy Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” crackdown on monopolies, or the wicked witches, with labor cast as Dorothy’s companions: Farmers as the Scarecrow, factory workers as the Tin Man, anyone fearful for their livelihoods as the Cowardly Lion.

For students who seemed resistant to the ideas of political relevance, it was easy to compare it to animated films made for children and to children’s theater. There are always lines of dialogue, sometimes gestures, or even cameo characters that are over the heads of children but aimed at the adults who accompany them. Call it a reward for being a good parent.

Eventually, however, one married couple well into their thirties in the night class wanted none of it. Before I could get to Toto being the only one able to apply common sense–akin to the young boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes–one practically shouted, “It’s a children’s story, and that’s all we want to know about it!”

The attitude stunned me, not because of what was said, but where. Took a few seconds for me to process this, and I have no doubt that today my answer, if reported to a dean, would get me fired as insulting. I thought of it only as obvious and direct: “This isn’t a nursing home. This is a college classroom. You should know all you can about it.”

That was the last class those two attended. Student reviews of the class at semester’s end were as good as I ever received. But the writing of evaluations in years to come was on the wall, and I found myself chafing in department meetings that emphasized students’ “comfort zones,” and urged us to “meet them where they are.”

Finally came the meeting where I could no longer hold it in, and I asked the dean with about a dozen other adjunct instructors at the round table: “Is this a college or a nursing home?”

Rather than waiting to be “not renewed,” I showed myself out back in 2002. And I still wonder, if such history is being erased in higher education, why are we so surprised when a younger generation appears indifferent to larger national and global issues?

And if politics are dodged in day-to-day life, why are we offended when elections offer us no choice that we deem worthy of our trust?

Or shocked when the personification of self-interest, reducing every possible subject to the simplest terms used with mind-numbing repetition--biggest, most beautiful, hottest, perfect, great again–wins the White House and turns it into his own personal brokerage firm?

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https://www.pinterest.com/pin/129548926751487102/

Cooking on Planet Kitchen

A few nights back, I attended a talk on climate change, the extent of it, and how we might yet bail ourselves out from the inevitable disaster that awaits if we don’t change our wasteful ways.

Sponsoring the event was the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that during any other period in American history would be viewed as non-partisan. That, they still are, except that the federal government is now run by an administration that is openly and aggressively anti-science. That leaves scientists no choice but to contradict the federal agencies that, under any other president, would have depended on them. By default, that allies them with the only nationally viable political party that has not turned itself into a cult of personality.

Granted, the Reagan Administration dismissed solar power and the electric car, favoring an economy that favored Republican donors. However, the debate was always open, and scientists were not publicly demonized as anti-American and “woke.” Moreover, medical and other scientific research funds were not slashed as they were last year. Back then, the label “conservative” and the concept of “conservation” were as compatible as the words themselves. It was the Nixon Administration, after all, that initiated the Environmental Protection Agency following a State of the Union Address that warned:

We have been too tolerant [i.e. careless] of our surroundings and too willing to leave it to others to clean up our environment. It is time for those who make massive demands on society to make some minimal demands on themselves.

Sounds like a call for regulation to me, and the early ’70s were noted by the UCS speaker as a hopeful time for environmentalists. Beaches at lakes across America were reopened for swimming, including Lake Erie that had been declared dead in what may have been network television’s first expose. Ugly orange-brown clouds disappeared from cities from New York to Denver and to the West Coast where Jimmy Buffett “spent four lonely days in a brown LA haze.”

Before us the other night, tracking the advances and set-backs of the environmental movement since the first “Earth Day” in 1970 was Erika Spanger, UCS’s Director of Strategic Climate Analytics. I knew her before she was born, and now there she is with slightly graying hair atop her tall, elegant posture, telling me and an audience more my age than hers about a crisis that her kids and my grandkids will be left to solve.

Amazing how she resembles both of her parents. Both friends of mine back at Salem State, they were likely in the gathering with me when that first Earth Day was observed in the year of her birth, as they were in various anti-war demonstrations. And it was likely the next summer that she was with several of us on a camping trip up by Mount Chocorua, carried along in a picnic basket as we moved between lake and campground. Her dad and I challenged each other to a race up a tree, the same tree, the two of us on opposite sides. Erika’s mom and my girlfriend looked up in horror, while between them the little face in the wicker basket grew smaller and smaller. Chuck and I didn’t stop until we remembered that we were already high.

The talk was as informative as it was sobering. She spoke of a 2030 deadline for a significant reduction in emissions, but that was already established when we still had ten years left to meet it. Little has happened to help the cause. To the contrary, the anti-science government of the USA has taken us out of the Paris Accords and gutted most all regulations of the energy industry. Now, she holds out hope for a strategy ironically called “overshoot,” but she realizes that we are stuck, for at least another year, with a government that will not shoot at all.*

My apologies for the lack of quotes, but the swoon of nostalgia didn’t allow me to take notes. Whitman famously wandered out of a talk on astronomy to behold the night sky’s stars; my mind wandered from a talk on our future to go living in the past. Not just Erika standing before me, but her uncle seated next to me, a ringer for his late-brother, and my cousin’s high school basketball coach at Pentucket High School where he also taught Earth Sciences. Could say that stewardship of the Earth runs in the Spanger family.

But I can offer a good idea of her talk by quoting last July’s entry in her UCS-endorsed blog, “The Equation,” in which she declares:

“If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” loses its bite when the whole planet is the kitchen, and we’re just starting to cook.

Yes, she’s one of those writers I’d much rather plagiarize than quote, but science, her long suit, is nowhere in my hand, so here’s the conclusion of her blog which serves as a fair summary of her talk last week, a conclusion titled, “If you can’t take the heat, organize the kitchen”:

What can we do? The list is long and—let’s be clear—needs to be part of a longer-term transformation of our society and economy. But there are things we can do today:

Practice heat safety for yourself and those around you.
Protect vulnerable people by pushing Congress to pass legislation to protect workers from dangerous heat.
Defend and restore federal climate science by holding members of Congress accountable…
Stop the climate gaslighting. We are already struggling to cope with climate change. When people with power deny and downplay the dangers of climate change—while we’re suffering from those very dangers—don’t let them get away with it. Don’t refute the bogus science that they point to, that only gives their bogus science attention. Just point out what they’re trying to do: distract, deny, delay, and keep on profiting.

We’ll obviously need to get ourselves some worthy, qualified leaders first chance we get, lean hard into mitigating and building resilience to climate change, and do more, better, faster.

Ah, there’s that attempt at impartiality when it just isn’t possible to be impartial. Those who are undoing all of our climate agreements and regulations for clean air and water are on one side of the Congressional aisle. They call themselves “the Republican Party,” but they are far from anything that ever included Lincoln, Eisenhower, or either George Bush–nor are they a party, but a cult.

If by “worthy” and “qualified” she means those willing to consider the Green New Deal in whole or even in part, and if the verb “need to get” means candidates who have a chance to win elections, then that leaves the one remaining, viable, national party.

Am I not “impartial” enough to forecast what we need after we get through what will likely be yet another record-breaking hot summer? We’ll see. As Erika Spanger writes:

In the meantime, try to stay cool.

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*A Primer on “overshoot”:

A *USA Today* report from 2019 of school walkouts around the globe. This photo was taken in Vienna.
https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/world/2019/03/15/friday-future-students-protest-global-warming-inaction/3178535002/

A ‘Tight’ of Passage

Every few months when I take my copy of Emblem from my mailbox, I immediately turn to the class notes and find my way to “Class of 1968.”

As usual, it is blank in this new issue of Central Catholic High School’s alumni magazine except for the name of one of my classmates back in those turbulent days and his edress for the rest of us to send him any news we would like to report. Apparently, we don’t have any.

Class of 1967, however, appears quite active, and it ended with an entry that caught my eye:

Teacher Joseph Madigan of Andover, Maine, continues to enlighten us and his local newspaper with his monthly poetry lyrics.

While immediately calculating that he must be in his late-80s, I pounced on my Rand McNally to find a town I’d never heard of despite having lived in three of the four corners of that raggedly rhomboidal-shaped state. Sure enough, Andover is in the fourth corner, way up near the borders of New Hampshire and Quebec.

Joe Madigan was the first person to tell me I could write. He was my English teacher in senior year when those of us who did well took two English classes, the other called “college prep,” or something like that.

That other class was taught by the legendary Warren Hayes whom we all had in junior year and were the better for it. Hayes was strict but dynamic, a combination that made us want to surpass the standards he set. Leaving literature to Madigan, Hayes’ college prep class was much more nuts and bolts, but even that Hayes taught with what one student eulogy in 2021 called “pep, rhythm, and vitality.”

Most memorable was “Vocaball,” a game played one day each week for which the class was separated into five teams of seven to define words, with synonyms, antonyms, etymology, roots, prefixes, suffixes, all in response to rapid-fire questions. By putting us in teams, he made us not want to let each other down. No doubt many CCHS grads who watched Dead Poets Society 35 years ago wondered how Robin Williams knew of Warren Hayes.

While Hayes was the wily veteran, Madigan joined Central while I was there. A few years later he would teach at the Essex County Training School for truants with behavioral problems. My father, a social worker there known for his rapport with the kids, noticed the trait in Madigan and befriended him. For that reason, my father took him into a rough neighborhood in Lynn when a kid ran away from the school and returned home. The two arrived at a house, and Madigan went to the rear while my father went to the front door. Don’t recall how many Lynn police arrived at that moment, but my father told me that two went to the back. Very soon, they returned with Madigan between them, securing both his arms. My father, according to his account, was so stunned that he couldn’t get the words out until Madigan begged him to speak.

Not long after that, Madigan taught at the Greater Lawrence Technical School where my CCHS ’68 classmate Dave Bodenrader had a career as a guidance counselor. When I learned that the two became friends, I couldn’t help but re-imagine my father’s story. If the Lawrence police had been called to the school to stop an altercation and arrested Dave by mistake, I don’t think Joe would have stopped them. I think he’d have smiled and enjoyed the show.

Central Catholic was likely Madigan’s first teaching gig. He ranged from lively to relaxed in front of a class, as if it was second-nature to him. He had a passion for American literature–for Poe and Melville, Hemingway and Steinbeck, and many writers among and between them. That passion was contagious, catching the curiosity of teenage boys far more inclined toward girls, cars, sports, and the shiniest new object of all at the time, rock-and-roll.

Not much older than my Class of ’68, Madigan had an instinct for making inroads with his hormonal audience. Most memorable was one of his descriptions of Romantic poetry. Though far from R-rated, his calling it “making love” years before we knew what the euphemism meant had us reading more by John Keats than the assignment called for. His mischievous smile while saying it was the suggestive sound of John Lennon’s “you know what I mean” in “When I Saw Her Standing There.” A nice echo came two decades later in Dead Poets Society when the teacher played by Williams–named John Keating–tells his all-male class that the purpose of poetry is “to woo women.”

My class at Central numbered 222, a number easy for me to recall only because I graduated 22nd. Call it deuces wild, and I was wild with classes that didn’t appeal to me. A few I loved, but English was never one of them. My interest was in Math, Geometry, Physics, Geography, and History. Anything with numbers, and I guess the endless dates allowed History to qualify.

We had perhaps ten out of 222 who excelled at everything. I was in the second tier of about 20 who excelled at a few. By the time we were halfway through sophomore year, there were never any surprises at who took the top awards in each subject. At least I don’t recall any until about six weeks into senior year when Joe Madigan held a lottery to match each of us, about 25 in that class, with 25 American novels, assigning a book report to each.

My luck was to draw the longest book in the lot, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. I made an effort with it, but couldn’t make sense of Wolfe’s stream of conscious narration or his mountainous Carolina setting. And so, by page 50 of about 500, I got myself a copy of Cliff Notes. To be fair to myself, I did not do any plagiarizing, but I did rely on the CN analysis before returning to the book and finding passages that applied to it. That was for the sake of a few quotes from the novel that made some point with which I agreed. Maybe I’m just rationalizing, but I didn’t dodge the assignment. I just made it easier.*

I turned in my 500-word report expecting to gain my usual B- or C+ for an essay. I figured Madigan would recognize that I skimmed it but would realize that some honest effort was made on a book as long as Of Mice and Men, For Whom the Bells Toll, Red Badge of Courage, and Billy Budd combined–meaning that I was to have done as much as four classmates combined. As we say today, I expected to catch a break.

Back in class after a long weekend, not only did I catch a break, I hit the jackpot. Madigan plopped the papers on his desk, snatched the top one off and held it in the air. He stepped toward us with a wild smile and said something like, Listen to this! This is how it’s done! and then, in a line I still hear, clenching a fist I still see, “This is tight!”

Despite that excitement, my mind drifted. No doubt it was on the next Red Sox World Series game against the St. Louis Cardinals when I realized that I was hearing my own words. Seems now that I had to be elated at the time, but I recall that I froze. There were at least six kids in that class who had been the best at this for three years, and I was not one of them. Was this encroachment? Would I pay a price in the schoolyard? On the other hand, I was, like many others in that class, wondering what I might do about the military draft and bothered by American casualties in Vietnam that had started hitting close to home. That day in that class was the first indication I had that there was something I could do, and do well.

Central Catholic did assign all of us, even as incoming freshmen, a reading list of seven or so books to read by Labor Day. In the summer of 1967, our senior list included James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) set in apartheid South Africa. So you could say that my pump was primed for putting opinions in writing. Baldwin’s treatment of race was a model for my treatment of the draft, and later of the anti-war movement. But I still entered Salem State College as a math major looking forward to a lucrative career as an accountant.

That didn’t last long. By the start of second semester, I was an English major, and I had joined the staff of the student newspaper, The Log, an unlikely combination of upperclassers who couldn’t hide their amusement at my jacket and tie. Those didn’t last long either.

If Baldwin’s Fire pushed me in the direction my life took, it was Madigan’s “tight” that sent me down that road with confidence.

Twelve years later, I became a English teacher myself and spent the next 22 years channeling Madigan and Hayes, as well as Pat Gozemba–whom I still see at No Kings rallies–and the late Jay McHale at Salem State who both impressed upon me the need for critical thought, and Chuck Woodard at South Dakota State who steered me toward ironic vision. Every now and then, a student would tell me or write in an evaluation that my class recalled Dead Poets Society.

All that and I haven’t even mentioned what Joe Madigan in a poem calls “sweet music as I soon began to drift.”

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A note for those of you who live outside New England: “lewis-TUN” is Lewiston, about 50 miles southeast of Andover, and the closest city of any size.

Poem to accompany Dixfield Fuel Business Profile

Mar. 6, 2017

By Joe Madigan,
Andover, Maine

The heat had gone out
The water tank too
I called for some help
From a skeleton crew.

In snow-covered lanes
He made the long drive
Within a half hour
His van had arrived.
His fevered approach
Quickness and glee
Helped to alleviate
Worry in me.
With tool bag and light
He worked with a hum
Later he smiled and
Raised up his thumb.
I waved at his van
As he started to leave
With the heat coming on
And a propane reprieve.

On the left, Warren Hayes (1937?-2021) who retired in 2001 after 41 years of teaching. On the right, Chris Sullivan, recently retired President of CCHS and son of Mike Sullivan, one of my history teachers and manager of the school’s baseball team who did not select me for his roster.

Photos from the Central Catholic High School Class of 1968 Yearbook, courtesy of Dave Bodenrader, fellow CCHS Class of ’68.

From June, 2020, three months into the COVID shutdown:

Look Homeward, Devil

At Least the Least I Can Do

When anyone asks why I’d make a 200-mile round-trip in the dead of winter to read for ten minutes in the Moby-Dick marathon, I throw a punch-line:

I’ve been plagiarizing Herman Melville for 45 years. It’s the least I can do.

Almost always gets a good laugh, although it surprises me how nervous some people are with their own laughter. I wonder if it may be due to how suddenly aware people are of AI and the possibility of being fooled by it. Anything I write–indeed, anything anyone writes–is now suspect.

There are some who just don’t get the joke. A newspaper reporter assigned to preview the event this year went silent over the phone at my answer to the question. Finally, as if slowly coming out of hiding: “You mean you quote without giving attribution?”

While setting him straight, I could sense a memory surface after years out of mind. Over fifty years ago, it may well have been clouded over as soon as it happened in a room filled with the smoke of marijuana. Now that the statute of limitations is well past, and now that I can find no trace of the two college friends who took part in this crime, it is time to confess.

No, not a civil or criminal case that might call for a courtroom trial, much less time in jail, but an academic crime. The kind we hear of every few years that might knock a candidate out of, say, presidential primaries, as it did a young Delaware senator named Joe Biden in 1988.

The stakes for Rick, Kitty, and me were far less. A failing grade in a class, or maybe suspension from Salem State College (now University) back in 1970 or ’71, maybe ’72, whichever came first.

Time was a blur back then. The anti-war movement was at its height on college classes, and those of us in it barely cared that we were delaying our degrees a year or two. I went in as Class of ’72, finished my last class in December ’73, and graduated with the Class of ’74.

But we attempted to complete what we could of our requirements at the end of each semester. And it was within weeks of one when I found myself with Rick and Kitty seated in the corner of a room adjacent a large kitchen where a dozen of us had been planning a demonstration on campus. Planning done, it was time to “alter our consciousness” as we said back then.

Rick, a quintessential history buff, or a “nerd” decades before the word was coined, worried over a paper he had to write for a psychology class. One of those liberal arts requirements he had no feel for.

Kitty, a child psychology major, lit up: “Wish that was my assignment. I loved that class!” She took a hit and slumped back in the chair, “I have to write a book report. Charles Dickens! Hard Times! I can’t even look at it!”

A huge fan of Dickens at the time, I lit up: “I read that during spring break. That’s a damn good read. So relevant to now!” I took a hit, “Mine is a history essay. I have to cough up something about the role of Thomas Paine in American independence.”

Rick lit up, “I could write that paper right now.” He took a hit and raised his eyebrows.

It all unfolded like a round of bidding at a card game. Though not one of us was a math major, all three of us immediately did the math. And all three of us took hits getting higher and higher on the pact we made.

Rick proved he wasn’t kidding when he handed me his, or rather my paper on Paine the very next day, footnotes and all. That prompted me to compile what I had already written of what may be Dickens’ most focused novel and turn it into essay form. Delivered to Kitty that night, it may have pushed her into dusting off a paper she had already handed in and re-writing it with different examples before handing it to Rick for his psychology class just two days after our illicit academic and high-as-kites tryst.

Three students terrified of a looming deadline, we all handed in papers a week ahead of time. And we all received As for our, or rather each other’s efforts. Kitty admitted that she toned some of my vocabulary down, such as changing “famished” to “very hungry” to “make it sound more like me.”

“And a good way to increase the word count!” I added. Rick, however, was so put off by the whole subject, that he merely checked the spelling of his name on the title page and handed it in. Read it? He didn’t even scan it.

For my part, I streamlined some of Rick’s phrasing. But only after a careful and fascinated read. That paper taught me as much about American history as any single class or chapter in a history text that I’ve ever seen.

Maybe that helped me rationalize my one slip into plagiarism over fifty years ago. That and the fact that it wasn’t as if I did nothing. I did write a paper, and it did get an A.

Or I could just chalk it up to all those hits of marijuana.

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To Where We Once Belonged

Any chance the new Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, is adapted from a college course? Doubtful, but I did ask the same question four years ago about the eight-hour Beatles documentary, Get Back. Why not try again?

Back then I heard that Suffolk University in Boston offers a Beatles course, and I already knew that one Prof. Richard F. Thomas tuned up his Harvard seminar for a witty and most enlightening book titled Why Bob Dylan Matters.

Tangled up in the controversial choice of Dylan for the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, Thomas plays the Memphis blues quite well.

From me to you, none of this comes as a surprise. For years, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan have appeared in the course listings of colleges from coast to coast. Nor is it surprising that a magical mystery tour would be offered at a law school. At all colleges, no matter the money-that’s-what-I-want major, all bachelors’ and masters’ degrees still require some can’t-buy-me-love credits.

I don’t want to spoil the party, but the surprise is the course name. In my life as a college writing instructor, the constant reminder for every student was to be specific.

Tell that to the prof who titled the course, “Here, There, and Everywhere.” Must be a relief for him or her following professional she-said-she-said workshops offered by the Newburyport Bar Association such as “Grey Divorce: Special Issues in Middle Age Misery.”

Do you want to know a secret? I’m envious.

For years I chafed at concocting required syllabi, something always in the way of an organic, got-to-get-this-into-your-life, 16-week experience. Wish I taught at Suffolk where a song title-turned-course title would allow me to plug in any Beatles song to any day on the schedule with any number of honey pies, glass onions, and blackbirds across the universe:

“And Your Bird Can Sing” before Thanksgiving, “Here Comes the Sun” before spring break, “Taxman” for mid-April.

Not only that, but the very name would allow me to satirize the whole nowhere man notion that there should be a syllabus for any course open to creativity. Baby, can students drive a car with their eyes glued to your pre-fab plan? Or would they be getting better all the time looking through you at a long and winding road?

My Beatles course would have eight days a week, with “Tripperday” placed between Saturday and Sunday to give students an extra 24 hours for valuable research while partying with Lucy in the Sky, Polythene Pam, Bungalow Bill, and all the lonely people.

All while allowing more time for this boy’s professional development by—now that it’s legal—getting high with a little help from Sgt. Pepper, Dr. Robert, Father McKenzie, Mr. Kite, The Walrus, and Rocky, my old roommate back at South Dakota State.

Or to flirt with Sexy Sadie, Eleanor Rigby, and Lovely Rita, maybe woo Lady Madonna or Penny Lane. (Is she related to Lois?)

All that would justify a syllabus printed sideways to further aggravate fools on the ivory hill who fail to realize what goes on in the hearts of artists. As John Lennon let it be: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Oh, is there anything more deserving of spoof and goof than the syllabus in what should be the strawberry fields and yellow submarines of liberal arts? Give me a once-a-week, three-hour seminar, and I’d even label the 15-minute break on the helter-skelter document with “Through the Bathroom Window.”

Now that I’ve followed the sun into yesterday, I can only say I want a revolution in how the arts are taught and pass ideas to those far closer to just seventeen, you know what I mean.

Courses such as:

          “Over Troubled Water,” architecture.

          “Say a Little Prayer,” divinity.

          “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” business management.

          “Get It While You Can,” economics.

          “Followers of Fashion,” marketing.

          “Sympathy for the Devil,” history.

          “Fooled A-ga-ga-gain,” political science.

          “Eve of Destruction,” meteorology.

          “Thick as a Brick,” freshman classes that really are (but which no one wants to admit are) remedial.

My examples betray my age? Get back! All things must pass.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDbzB0jRH_8

Effect Without a Cause

Far more attention must be paid to a line Republicans are using to discredit Kamala Harris.

True, we hear and see it often enough in conversations and on social media posts. But that’s simply repetition to reinforce a point, a repetition geared to hide a non-existent foundation for that point. This is why the Republican presidential candidate makes the charge in his rallies–and made it in the debate–without ever mentioning the cause of the effect that Republicans want us to accept.

In the debate, it sounded like this:

She’s had four years to do all the things she says she’s going to do. Why didn’t she do it then?

Downtown yesterday, overheard:

If it was Trump in the White House, they’d be whining about why he never got anything done!

On social media:

I’m not going (in) the direction of someone who isn’t fixing the issues while they are IN OFFICE with the POWER to FIX the issues right NOW!!! They have had close to 4 years….

I’ll estimate that the latter two quotes are from people in their 40s, maybe 50s, although the all-caps emphasis on “right NOW” might suggest someone younger. Was civics erased as a subject in American elementary and high schools that long ago? Have we already raised two, maybe three generations of Americans who are completely unaware of the relationship between the three branches of government.

Or do some people just fall for this because it is so simple? Legislation is complex, demands attention, demands an attention span. And it is hard to grasp compared to the superficial ease of seeing prices go up and blaming the guy in charge, oblivious to any complications such as war, a pandemic, corporate price-gouging, diminished crops due to climate change.

Just how unaware or gullible can the American public be? Well, back in May, a New York Times/Siena poll revealed that 17% of us blame Biden for the overturn of Roe v. Wade because he was president at the time of the Mitch McConnell-stacked Supreme Court’s decision.

We might wonder what percentage of the American public is aware that a Republican-controlled House of Representatives has blocked much of what the Biden-Harris Administration attempted to do. This is most of what Harris is now offering–and what she could accomplish if the Democrats pick up a few House seats and hold the Senate.

The claim’s implied effect without a cause also ignores how much the current administration has achieved regarding infrastructure, job creation, and higher wages. Republicans making the claim want us to ignore how they themselves show up for the photo-ops when factories open or a bridge is about to be built or repaired after they themselves voted against the funding that made it possible.

In the debate, Harris reminded us of the bi-partisan immigration bill that satisfied almost all Republican demands–moreso than it did progressive Democrats–that would have passed if not for phone calls from her opponent instructing Republicans to kill the bill. Chaos is more useful as a campaign issue, what’s right be damned.

When you hear any version of “Why didn’t she do it already,” you are listening to someone who either pays no attention or who expects you to pay no attention.

Of the three quotes above, the last two are from people who have been fooled, people who have forgotten the most basic lessons in American civics–if they ever knew them. The first quote is from someone who is out to fool you, and with control of the House or Senate, Republicans will continue to play this game even if Harris is elected.

Only solution is to start emphasizing the Democratic candidates for the House and Senate. Both Harris and Tim Walz need to be making more appearances with them, which means campaigning in states that are not considered battleground, such as Texas where Colin Allred has a shot at unseating Ted Cruz if the national party put more effort into it.

Wherever they campaign, winning the Senate and House should be as prominent an issue as restoring Roe v. Wade. Why, a good 17% of the American public might wake up to the reality of cause-and-effect relationships if those two issues were mentioned together.

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https://sharemylesson.com/collections/civic-participation-youngest-citizens

To Quench Our Thirst

In a city that prides itself on support for the arts, especially for local artists, many might jump at the chance to attend a world premiere play penned by a local guitarist long-known for his flamenco, Spanish, and classical performances in downtown Newburyport.

Fuente Grande, based on the persecution of Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca and steeped in the music played around town all these years by John Tavano, plays just twice at the Firehouse this weekend: Saturday at 8:00 pm, Sunday at 3:00 pm.

The title translates into English as “big fountain,” a reference to Lorca’s prominence as a poet who “awakened a nation.” As the Firehouse also tells us:

The feel is 1936 Granada, Spain, on the brink of civil war. It was a time of great social upheaval and people were being intimidated and, in Lorca’s case, murdered.

Produced by The Actors Studio, this is dual effort that is local on both sides. The director has staged all kinds of plays for young and old at Newburyport venues as diverse as the Firehouse and Maudsley Park for some forty years and counting. If that’s not enough, Rhina Espaillat and Alfred Nicol, two local poets who seem to share the mantle of Newburyport laureate, will be there to add their voices.

Guitarist-now-playwright Tavano took his first dramatic effort to Actors Studio director Marc Clopton as soon as he thought it ready to be fashioned by someone who actually knew what he was doing. Turns out Tavano was closer than he thought, as Clopton’s changes were minimal.

Or so I hear. In the interest of full disclosure, I count myself a good friend of Tavano, the only wind-musician in his weekly coffee-klatch of guitarists who tolerate me while I pretend to know what they are talking about. But I do know the dramatic process Tavano described, having been through it more than once, and I suspect that Clopton, like any good director–or editor, teacher, parent, executive of any stripe–made Tavano think that all the new ideas were his (Tavano’s).

All I know for certain is that Fuente Grande tells a compelling and timely story in a day when debates over what is taught in schools are based on the “comfort zones” of students and parents rather than the truths of history and science.

With the participation of no less than four of Newburyport’s foremost and long-term artists, Fuente Grande can’t help but be both entertaining and satisfying.

Drama. Poetry. Music. For those of us who take pride in our support for local arts, what better chance could we have to distribute it?

Mucha suerte!

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L2R: John Tavano, Rhina Espaillat, Alfred Nicol. Photo: Newburyport *Daily News.*

https://firehouse.org/event/fuente-grande/2023-10-07/

Weeding Shakespeare

Sounds like a statewide lobotomy.

Shockwaves continue to ripple north following reports of Florida teachers censoring Romeo & Juliet to comply with the recent mandates of Gov. Ron DeSenseless to whitewash and dumb down history and literature taught in the state’s public schools, K thru Post-Grad.

Most reactions do little more than exclaim two words that should never be heard together: Censor and Shakespeare. But I wonder if liberal reaction is due more to the choice of play.

Romeo & Juliet, fair to say, is the English-speaking world’s ultimate love story–which masks the fact that it is also the ultimate statement against vengeance. For both reasons, it has had countless adaptations to fit various nations, ethnic groups, and as many generations as have been since 1595 when it first appeared on a London stage.

That includes, of course, West Side Story, as American a tale as any, which itself has spawned a healthy, colorful, vibrant share of adaptations for both stage and film. Conceived and written by my Lawrence homeboy, Leonard Berstein, its songs have lives of their own, something that British rocker Keith Emerson noted when he compiled his “America” pastiche.

His band, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, included everything from the theme of the classic television westerm, Bonanza, to the opening of Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” from “Camptown Races” to clips of John Philip Sousa. For the warp and woof holding it all together, we keep hearing “Maria” and “I Want to Live in America.”*

To most Americans since 1960, those songs and others from West Side Story–“I Feel Pretty” and the “Jet Song”–are like the very names, “Romeo” and “Juliet,” known even by those unfamiliar with the full story.

Which is why I wonder: Would we be so shocked if the reports from Florida named one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, say, Titus Andronicus or King John, or even Twelfth Night or Love’s Labor’s Lost? Would our reaction be mixed if it were a play now deemed tainted by “political incorrectness” such as The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice?

Forgive me. My perception has been warped by recent trips to public libraries well north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Up here, “censorship” is a dirty word, and “dumbing down” a crime against humanity, as they should be. Problem is that, when you call them by a harmless sounding name and give them the veneer of technology, the result gives you the very thing you profess to be against.

That name is “weeding,” and it is now a term of art for librarians nationwide as they depend on the algorithms to tell them the frequency of circulation of each book to determine what they keep and what they discard, no thought required.

If you doubt this, here’s a challenge for you: Pick the writer you consider the most consequential in American history (say, pre-1970), walk into a public library, and count the number of volumes by that writer. Then pick a present day author who caters to pop culture and count his or her volumes.

Here, for example, in this northeast corner of deep blue Massachusetts, Danielle Steele wipes the floor with Herman Melville every time: Ipswich PL, 88-6; Newburyport PL, 82-4, Methuen PL, 65-5; Topsfield PL, 62-4; Newbury PL, 49-1.

That one, of course, is Moby-Dick, the only title of Melville’s nine novels that you can count on finding. Likewise, if you pick Willa Cather, you have a fair chance of finding My Antonia, but Death Comes for the Archbishop? Forget it. Steinbeck? Good chance you’ll find Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, but you’ll likely need interlibrary loan to get In Dubious Battle or The Winter of Our Discontent. So much for browsing.

That last title, coincidentally, is a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III, which brings us back to the question. Good chance that DeSenseless and his thought-police might back off from, or at least distance themselves from that particular play. Far more than any chance of libraries bringing back Cather’s Archbishop, Steinbeck’s Battle, or Melville’s Redburn, the most eloquent, humane, and irrefutable description, explanation, and defense of immigration to America I’ve ever read.

So the question remains: What is the difference between sanitizing Florida schools and weeding American libraries?

The answer, my friend, is negligible, but the implication is huge. Call it a national lobotomy.

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*I first heard ELP’s “America” played by Jethro Tull in a concert in Connecticut 16 years ago. Tull added several quotes that are not in the original. Here’s a recording of it on the same tour, followed by ELP’s own much wilder, hyperventilating version made longer by a drum solo.

Of Paradise & Parking Lots

Once or twice a month, two women, one who barely qualifies for a senior discount and another with but a year or two to go, arrive at the Screening Room for a Wednesday matinee.

Since that’s my day as a projectionist, we’ve been on a first name basis since about a year ago when they first made a habit of spending a day in Newburyport and taking in a movie. They have always remembered my name after I made it easy for them by pointing out that I’m in the trunk of every car.

That would include the car that takes them the 30 or so miles back and forth to where they live. I’m not going to name the town, nor am I going to use their real names in what I’m about to report. Not because they asked to remain anonymous, but because it wasn’t until the show was over and the lights were out that my own light went on.

This past Wednesday was very slow. When Nikki and Liz arrived some 20 minutes early, I was in a chatty mood, telling of the Nao Trinidad, the replica of Magellan’s ship that had been docked in Newburyport during the week of the 4th. They saw it with their husbands, and Nikki mentioned a conversation about history that included an aside, “I’m a librarian.”

Couldn’t help but file that away until the subject of Magellan had sailed out the door of the Screening Room lobby and was safely onto State Street. I gave the pause a three-count and looked at Nikki:

“You’re a librarian?”

“Yes! In X——, and Liz is on the board of the X—– Public Library.”

Looking back and forth at both: “I’m about a decade older than you. My introduction to the Lawrence Public Library would have been about when you were born. I’m sure I was assigned certain books to find, but overall, those grade-school visits were more like discovery than anything else, like Magellan sailing round the Horn into an ocean full of islands unknown and unimagined.”

They smiled, no doubt thinking they were in for a pleasant, nostalgic trip into their own profession. I paused, keeping eye-contact, one to the other: “May I ask what might be a contentious question?”

They glanced at each other and both said yes.

“Does the word ‘weeding’ mean anything to you?”

Both women registered mild surprise that a non-librarian would know what is now a librarian’s term of art, though I’d say “artlessness” would be more honest. Nikki’s explanation was consistent with what I’ve heard from librarians, what few I know, from here to the west coast, citing a computer program that lets librarians know just how often a book is checked out. She looked over at Liz who nodded agreement, and I could see that both were reading skepticism on my face.

I hoped to soften my response with a brief laugh: “That suggests that some algorithm decides what books remain and what get tossed out.”

They seemed to speak at once: “Well, no, we do look at it.” Liz went on, “We also have to consider the condition of the book, and whether it’s in or out of print.”

Sounds to me like an urgent reason to keep older volumes, but I couldn’t tell if being out of print was considered a strike against them. I told the two that such was the case in Newburyport where, among other literary and historical treasures, a two-volume collection of John Greenleaf Whittier’s letters and journals published by his family in 1894 is no more.

Nikki seemed to commiserate: “But I bet there’s plenty of Danielle Steele!”

“That’s my point. Something already well-known, safe, expected. Don’t let Magellan round that Horn!”

Liz noted that the concern was for shelf-space, and Nikki nodded, adding that X—— has a very small library. I don’t doubt that’s true in X—–, but in N-port there is no lack of empty shelves. A day after this conversation, I happened to be in the Ipswich Public Library where entire rows were empty.

Nikki turned the tables on me: “What do you think weeding is?”

I kept making eye-contact with both of them: “I think the word is a euphemism for ‘dumbing down’.”

The two women looked stunned.

“And I mean that literally! You’re paving a paradise of literature and history, and putting up a parking lot of pop-culture. Is there no difference between a library and a bookstore? And what’s the difference between weeding and what the governor of Florida has ordered for public schools?”

Liz: “That’s a total ban. We might weed books, but you can still find and read them”

Me: “No! That’s just what DeSantis says, anyone in Florida can still find and buy and read those books. That rationale is identical whether the reference is to bookstores, to interlibrary consortiums, or to websites. So much for libraries as places of discovery!”

Nikki: “But we aren’t stigmatizing books the way these right wing groups are.”

Me: “No, not at all, but you are erasing them. So the result is the same. We’re erasing history at the same time we accuse others of suppressing it. And we wonder why they laugh at us? Only real difference is that right-wingers claim credit for and boast of what they erase. Algorithms allow us to wash our hands. Who’s in denial now?”

Again, they seemed to speak as one, as well as glancing at a clock on the wall approaching showtime: “Well, yes, we do need to keep an eye on that!”

“And I thank you!”

They slid into the theater as another customer approached to buy a ticket. What I have recorded above is but an extract of a longer conversation far more in agreement than debate, and the quotes are approximate. I was glad that I mentioned my involvement in the annual marathon readings of Moby-Dick in New Bedford and my recent, public feud with the N-port Public Library without getting lost in the (forgive me) weeds of controversy. That ensures that, if they want to know more, it’s all there, a matter of public record. (As well as covered in recent blogs.)

My one regret is that my stop in Ipswich was a day after rather than a day before this conversation. The IPL at the time had just four volumes of Herman Melville at the end of a shelf of over a dozen by pop-fiction writer Brad Meltzer. Recalling Nikki’s crack, I wandered into the aisle marked by the letter S. Danielle Steele had 82.

At that moment, I hoped I had made it clear to them that my argument isn’t about any contest, or any score, or lessening anything for the sake of anything else. Beyond the aisles with S and T was just one that offered everything from U to Z.

Past that were two rows of of stacks, I think five shelves each, top to bottom, perhaps twenty feet long, completely empty.

Don’t know about X—–, but like Newburyport, that’s quite a parking lot.

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