Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

--Philip Roth

This week's novella for class discussion is Philip Roth's first, Goodbye, Columbus, which is still published with five short stories. It was first published in 1959 and won the National Book Award the following year. Other than this work, I have previously read "Sabbath's Theater" (1995) and I still have "The Plot Against America" (2004) on my bookshelf--a Christmas present I am still wading my way toward.

Here is a summary of the novel provided by enotes.com:

‘Goodbye, Columbus’’ is narrated from the point of view of Neil Klugman, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish man who lives with his aunt and uncle in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, and works at a public library. It concerns his relationship over the course of one summer with Brenda Patimkin, an upper-middle-class Jewish college student staying with her family in the suburbs. Their relationship is characterized by the stark contrast of their socioeconomic differences, despite the fact that they are both Jewish. The summer ends with Brenda's brother Ron's wedding, after which Brenda returns to Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. When the two arrange to meet at a hotel over the Jewish holidays, she tells him that her parents have discovered her diaphragm and have both written her letters expressing their dismay and their disdain for Neil as a result. As Brenda feels she can no longer continue the relationship, Neil leaves the hotel, ultimately achieving a new sense of self-knowledge, which is expressed by the dawning of the Jewish New Year as he arrives back in Newark.

Here is the New York Times May 17, 1959 Review of the novel:

By William Peden

Some years ago, in the vanguard of the Southern literary renascence, Ellen Glasgow commented that what the South needed was "blood and irony." The same might be said of some recent writers who have concerned themselves with depicting the role of the Jew in American society, which is the subject of Philip Roth's collection of short stories and a novella. An English instructor at the University of Chicago, 26-year-old Mr. Roth has published fiction in Harper's, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and other periodicals. "Goodbye, Columbus," a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, is his first book, and an impressive one. There is blood here and vigor, love and hate, irony and compassion.
Mr. Roth's novella is a somewhat incongruous mingling of conventional boy-meets-girl material and portrait-of-the- intellectual-as-a-young-man, narrated with an occasional fondness for clinical detail reminiscent of Edmund Wilson's "The Princess With the Golden Hair." Young Neil Klugman ("Whenever anyone asks me where I went to school I come right out with it: Newark Colleges of Rutgers University") meets beautiful, wealthy Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe undergraduate. Neil pursues Brenda with the determination of a well-trained bird dog, and soon catches her. After a summer love affair, he rejects Brenda and the nouveau-riche Patimkins with the smug self-righteousness of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus.
Such a summary, however, does justice neither to the author nor to his people; out of such hackneyed materials Mr. Roth has written a perceptive, often witty and frequently moving piece of fiction. He is a good story-teller, a shrewd appraiser of character and a keen recorder of an indecisive generation. Although Brenda's family has "moved up" from Newark economically by virtue of Mr. Patimkin's Kitchen-and-Bathroom-Sinks Enterprise, and Neil has made the "migration" intellectually, they are all of them refugees haunted by echoes from a not-to-be-buried past, unsatisfied by the too-tasty viands of a sterile hedonism, and confused by the uncertainties of the future. Characteristically, at the wedding of Brenda's brother, Neil and Brenda are further apart than ever, and in the gray confusion of early morning Neil sees some of the Patimkins "from the back, round-shouldered, burdened, child- carrying--like people fleeing a captured city."
Most of Mr. Roth's protagonists are, like Neil Klugman, adrift in a limbo between past and present. The author seems to know his people inside and out, whether he writes of a boy arguing the Virgin Birth with an exasperated rabbi, ("The Conversion of the Jews"), or, in "Eli, the Fanatic," of a young Jewish lawyer trying to explain suburban mores to the leader of a rabbinical orphanage, or, in "Epstein," of the ludicrous yet pitiable aftermath of an aging man's search for love. These stories, though concerned with universal, archetypal experiences, are somewhat transmuted into that which is at once strange and familiar. "I'm a Jew," one character says. "I am different. Better, maybe not. But different."

It seems that there is little I can say about the author only because there are legions out there in the literary world who are making their living doing just that.

Check out a few of these links:

The Philip Roth Society

CNN/TIME: America's Best Novelist

New York Times Featured Author: Philip Roth
(needs free registration with New York Times)

Vocabulary and Great Lines from Goodbye, Columbus:

dithyrambs
1 : a usually short poem in an inspired wild irregular strain
2 : a statement or writing in an exalted or enthusiastic vein
- dith·y·ram·bic /"di-thi-'ram-bik/ adjective
- dith·y·ram·bi·cal·ly /-bi-k(&-)lE/ adverb

"Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them -- at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them."

"Sitting there in the park, I felt a deep knowledge of Newark, an attachment so rooted that it could not help but branch out into affection."

muscleless devotion

slashing my face with a smile

"His breath smelled of hair oil and his hair of breath and when he spoke, spittle cobwebbed the corners of his mouth."

sententiously
1 a : given to or abounding in aphoristic expression b : given to or abounding in excessive moralizing
2 : terse, aphoristic, or moralistic in expression : PITHY, EPIGRAMMATIC
- sen·ten·tious·ly adverb
- sen·ten·tious·ness noun

"By the light of the window behind him I could see the hundreds of spaces between the hundreds of tiny black corkscrews that were his hair."

At the wedding:
"I stayed behind, mesmerized almost by the dissection, analysis, reconsideration, and finally, the embracing of the trivial."

I smiled as collusively as I knew how.
: secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose
- col·lu·sive /-'lü-siv, -ziv/ adjective
- col·lu·sive·ly adverb
". . . and I did not say a word, afraid what a word, any word, might do."

"I was getting no answers, but I went on. If we meet You at all, God, it's that we're carnal, and aquisitive, and thereby partake of You. I am carnal, and I know You approve, I just know it. But how carnal can I get? I am acquisitive. Where do I turn now in my acquisitiveness? Where do we meet? Which prize is You?"

". . .with just a little body-english"

"And then he exploded into silence."

"I looked, but the outside of me gave up little information about the inside of me."

"What was it inside of me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing -- who knows -- into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn't any longer."

Boston Symphony Orchestra

Tonight we will finally make our first trip (at least my first trip) to the Boston Symphony. Here is the Boston Globe review that convinced me to get my act together:

Passion rules the night in BSO's 'Gurrelieder'

By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff | February 24, 2006

Many in the audience were on their feet, applauding, before intermission of last night's performance of Arnold Schoenberg's ''Gurrelieder" by James Levine the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and by the end of the concert the response was unanimous.

''Gurrelieder" is one of the composer's early masterpieces, composed mostly in 1901 and 1902, although Schoenberg didn't complete the orchestration for another decade. The work is a series of narrative songs that recount the old Danish legend of King Waldemar, his beloved Tove, and his jealous Queen who engineers Tove's death. The King mocks God and is condemned to ride nightly from dusk to dawn for eternity, but the King finds Tove again in the splendor of the natural world.

In the music, as the work progresses, you can hear the 19th century pass into the 20th, and Schoenberg evolve from the world of Brahms, Mahler, and Richard Strauss into the world that he both perceived and helped to create.

The work always stirs an audience but it is seldom performed because of its size, cost, and difficulty. Last night the orchestra assembled a world-class team of soloists. It took tenor Johan Botha and charismatic soprano Karita Mattila awhile to warm up and ride their voices over the orchestra in the songs for Waldemar and Tove, but both came through in the later songs which Schoenberg scored more considerately -- Mattila did seem swept away by passion, and rose thrillingly to the great climax of her last song. Botha, who looks like a cross between a scholar and a bounty hunter, surmounted the most strenuous passages with impressive security and he never forced. Given the opportunity, he can also deliver text with sensitivity. The rolling bass-baritone of Albert Dohmen was luxury casting as a peasant; tenor Paul Groves achieved a convincing physical and musical characterization of the fool/jester without quite meeting every vocal demand.

The veteran Viennese tenor Waldemar Kmentt has sung three roles in this work in the course of his 56-year career. As the narrator, he delivered the speech/song with musicality, insight and instinct, occasionally coloring a word with his fondly remembered singing voice. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson was magnificent in the tragic narrative of the Wood-Dove who sings of Tove's death. Wearing a period dress in dove gray, her hair done in feathery style, Lieberson sang with flaring, all-giving tone; tragic splendor; and soul-sharing communication.

The huge orchestra -- 8 flutes, 10 horns -- covered itself with glory throughout. It also covered the men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus too much of the time, but the full TFC sounded like a sunburst at the end. Levine has probably conducted more performances of ''Gurrelieder" than anyone in the work's history; he helped the performers deliver every dimension of the piece -- its roots in tradition and its modernity; its peculiarities and its reassurances; its particularity and its universality.

James Levine, conductor Karita Mattila, soprano (Tove) Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano, (Wood Dove) Johan Botha, tenor (Waldemar) Paul Groves, tenor (Klaus Narr) Albert Dohmen, baritone (Peasant) Waldemar Kmentt, tenor (Speaker)

American Life in Poetry: Boys Are Born To Wander

American Life in Poetry: Column 048

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Every parent can tell a score of tales about the difficulties
of raising children, and then of the difficulties in letting
go of them. Here the Texas poet, Walt McDonald, shares
just such a story.



Some Boys are Born to Wander

From Michigan our son writes, How many elk?
How many big horn sheep? It's spring,
and soon they'll be gone above timberline,

climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys
are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes
with spruce and Douglas fir are home.

He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army
wouldn't take him, not with a foot like that.
Maybe it's in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years

till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles,
too dumb to say no to our son—too many switchbacks
in mountains, too many icy spots in spring.

Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction
like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard,
but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed

his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off
with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband,
leaning into a downhill curve and gone.

First published in "New Letters," Vol. 69, 2002, and
reprinted from "A Thousand Miles of Stars," 2004, by
permission of the author and Texas Tech University
Press. Copyright © 2002 by Walt McDonald.
This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation,
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not
accept unsolicited poetry.

Poetry: Odes

This week I will attempt to write an ode for my poetry class at Grub Street. Here is the assignment provided by our instructor, Morgan Frank:

According to The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (Ron Padgett), Edmund Gosse defined the ode as "enthusiastic and lyrical verse, directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with one dignified theme." While you might find it useful to explore the classical history of the ode, which dates back to the fifth century B.C., the former definition suits our purposes, albeit with a little modification to give you focus. For this assignment, you are going to choose as your subject an object you encounter in your everyday life. Neruda's elemental odes addressed such things as watermelons, maize, and wine, and Robert Pinsky takes on such everyday objects as the shirt and the television as focus for meditation. How might meditation on the thing itself let you unfold larger themes and intentions, and keep you away from sweeping statements and abstractions?

While I will most likely stick to an object, the following poem by Robert Pinksy is an amazing example of a modern ode to a idea, in this case "meaning."

Link to the poem: http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/pinsky/meaning.html

Ode to Meaning
by Robert Pinksy

Dire one and desired one,
Savior, sentencer--

In an old allegory you would carry
A chained alphabet of tokens:

Ankh Badge Cross.
Dragon,
Engraved figure guarding a hallowed intaglio,
Jasper kinema of legendary Mind,
Naked omphalos pierced
By quills of rhyme or sense, torah-like: unborn
Vein of will, xenophile
Yearning out of Zero.

Untrusting I court you. Wavering
I seek your face, I read
That Crusoe's knife
Reeked of you, that to defile you
The soldier makes the rabbi spit on the torah.
"I'll drown my book" says Shakespeare.

Drowned walker, revenant.
After my mother fell on her head, she became
More than ever your sworn enemy. She spoke
Sometimes like a poet or critic of forty years later.
Or she spoke of the world as Thersites spoke of the heroes,
"I think they have swallowed one another. I
Would laugh at that miracle."

You also in the laughter, warrior angel:
Your helmet the zodiac, rocket-plumed
Your spear the beggar's finger pointing to the mouth
Your heel planted on the serpent Formulation
Your face a vapor, the wreath of cigarette smoke crowning
Bogart as he winces through it.

You not in the words, not even
Between the words, but a torsion,
A cleavage, a stirring.

You stirring even in the arctic ice,
Even at the dark ocean floor, even
In the cellular flesh of a stone.
Gas. Gossamer. My poker friends
Question your presence
In a poem by me, passing the magazine
One to another.

Not the stone and not the words, you
Like a veil over Arthur's headstone,
The passage from Proverbs he chose
While he was too ill to teach
And still well enough to read, I was
Beside the master craftsman
Delighting him day after day, ever
At play in his presence--you

A soothing veil of distraction playing over
Dying Arthur playing in the hospital,
Thumbing the Bible, fuzzy from medication,
Ever courting your presence,
And you the prognosis,
You in the cough.

Gesturer, when is your spur, your cloud?
You in the airport rituals of greeting and parting.
Indicter, who is your claimant?
Bell at the gate. Spiderweb iron bridge.
Cloak, video, aroma, rue, what is your
Elected silence, where was your seed?

What is Imagination
But your lost child born to give birth to you?

Dire one. Desired one.
Savior, sentencer--

Absence,
Or presence ever at play:
Let those scorn you who never
Starved in your dearth. If I
Dare to disparage
Your harp of shadows I taste
Wormwood and motor oil, I pour
Ashes on my head. You are the wound. You
Be the medicine.

Roddy Doyle: The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

I am reading a number of short novels this semester for a novel writing class at Emerson College. This week we discussed the Irish author Roddy Doyle's amazing work of voice and dialogue, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1997). Although I had seen the 1991 movie adaptation of Doyle's The Commitments, I had no idea it was an adaptation at the time and since then had not run into any of his extensive work. Among other notable works, he won the Booker Prize in 1993 for a novel called Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which is written from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is told from the point-of-view of a thirty-nine-year-old Irish working class woman who, well, walked into doors (as they say). It is well-crafted and the woman's voice quite believable. It is so well done, in fact, that it is painful to read at times. The story arc gives away much of the climax at the very beginning of the book, a trend in the novels that we have read so far.

We have discussed in class the tell-all approach in terms of craft. Should you build to a climax using suspense to draw your reading into the story world--the "traditional" approach? Or can you spill the beans on the first page and then lead your reader into the finer nuances of truth and psychology behind the facts of the climax? The answer is: of course you can do both! The question is what subject matter or characters will be best served by each approach?

I am toying with using the tell-all approach for my current project. Toying. In fact, I may play out this approach all the way through the first draft of the novel. That way I will know how the story "ends" and then I can go back and craft the arc with a finer chisel.

Alas. Shop talk.

Read Doyle. It is not "light" or "easy" in terms of subject matter. But I did hear that this particular novel is his most bleak. Then let me know what you think. . . .

Useful Links

biography/themes/publications

Review of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

Roddy Doyle: Audio Reading

Sunday Lunch

Beef Pörkölt
Serves 4

Ingredients
25g/1oz Lard or 2 tbsp Olive Oil and 2 tbsp Butter
3 Onions, chopped
675g/1-1/2lb Stewing Beef, cubed
4 Potatoes, thickly sliced
240ml/8fl.oz. Fresh Beef Stock
240ml/8fl.oz. Sour Cream
2 tbsp Tomato Paste
Salt
Ground Black Pepper
3 Tbsp Paprika
2 Bay Leaves

Instructions
1. Heat the lard (or oil and butter) in a large saucepan, add the onions and meat and fry until the beef is browned on all sides and the onion is softened.

2. Add the remaining ingredients (except sour cream), mix well and bring to the boil then reduce the heat to very low, cover and simmer for at least 1-1/2 to 2 hours, stirring from time to time. Serve hot with sour cream on the side.

Nokedli (noodles)
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup water
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 large pot filled with salted boiling water

Place large pot filled with salted water and bring to boil. Combine eggs, salt, and water, beating well with whisk. Add flour, a little at a time. Add only enough flour to make a soft, sticky dough. Let mixture rest for about 10 mins. Beat mixture again. Using the side of a teaspoon, spoon small amount of dough into boiling water. Dipping the spoon in the hot water will remove the dough from the spoon (if you have a spaetzel maker, that makes is easier as you want very small noodles). The noodles are done when they float to the top. Remove from water with large slotted spoon, and place in colander. Serve immediately or rinse with cold water. You may want to make the dumplings in 2 or 3 batches so they dont overcook. Serve with chicken paprikas (or any dish that has a rich sauce). The dumplings are also nice added to a stew. You can heat the dumplings in a frying pan with melted butter. Do not let the dumplings get too brown or crisp.

Uborka Salata (Cucumber Salad)

1 or 2 large cucumbers
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 Tbs sugar
1/2 tsp salt
pinch of black pepper
1/4 onion thinly sliced

Slice the cucumbers paper thin. Sprinkle with salt and let stand for at least one hour. Squeeze excess liquid from cucumbers. Mix the vinegar, water, sugar, salt and pepper. Add to cucumbers and let stand for at least an hour and better if left overnight. Garnish with dill or red pepper or paprika when serving.

Cuernavaca, Mexico

L. and I visited Chile last year over the winter holiday. The summer sun was intoxicating. We vowed to head South during the winter months whenever possible. So when L. got an invitation to give a lecture in Cuernavaca, Mexico, we booked our flights. We even used frequent flyer miles.

We left Boston last Wednesday and returned Sunday night, flying in just after the huge blizzard that had shut down the airport for most of the day. Good timing.

While Chile is gorgeous, I found Mexico to be even more interesting. The food, the food, the food. Did I mention how good the food was? We ate well. And the tequila was almost too good to be tequila. Our favorite meal was at a roadside restaurant where we ate handmade tortillas cooked right before our eyes, grilled meats, family-style beans, cheese and salsa. We asked our driver to take us there after we visited the Xochicalco ruins.

Cuernavaca may not have a beach, but our hotel was paradise. The city is filled with beautiful gardens, a stunning cathedral, and there are several worthwhile side trips. Our trip to the ruins was outstanding. We even got a tour deep beneath the ruins inside an ancient observatory. Luckily we had a Spaniard with us who could provide translation.

After just a few days, we headed to Mexico City where we spent Saturday afternoon through Sunday morning. We dropped our bags at the charming La Casona hotel and taxied down to the historic center. There we toured the cathedral and then saw the Diego Rivera murals in the National Palace. We ran into a Hungarian tour group viewing the murals and got to listen in to the descriptions. Small world. As it was Saturday and market day, we also got to stroll through the chaotic and teeming outdoor markets near the main square.

After a nap that evening, we again headed toward the historic center. This time we wanted to eat and then find some dancing. Even though the salsa club we had heard about "did not exist" we pushed on through the eerily empty streets toward the Plaza Garibaldi.

It was near 11pm when we arrived and the square was packed with fully decked out mariachi bands. Food stands surrounded the square and smelled divine. People were singing, dancing, eating and having a really good time. We stopped in a club (one of the many surrounding the square) and even did our own special brand of salsa dancing until 2am.

Sunday morning we strolled through the Zona Rosa, near our hotel. It is packed out with a more "refined" crowd and tons of very elegant stores and places to eat. It must have been lively there too Saturday night, but we are glad that we ended up hanging with the mariachi instead.

A few days in Mexico is not enough and I hope to return some day. Preferably during January or February!

A Love Poem

This week I was supposed to write a LOVE poem. A daunting task. Here is the draft I will take to my workshop. I look forward to having it ripped to shreds! But do give me credit for the purposeful lack of heaving breasts and throbbing hearts.

STORM

The downed storm line undid our house that night.

Winds smashed potted plants

while we sat in the tub,

our knees near,

the fear audible.

Our muscles

forgot to breathe. We stared.

Later,

we did not laugh,

or push the tale at dinner parties.

The electric line was restrung.

Pots sat cracked

but became mansions for grateful, lonely spiders.

Poetry: Geology by Bob King

American Life in Poetry

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

We constantly compare one thing with another, or attempt to,
saying, "Well, you know, love is like...it's like...well, YOU
know what it's like." Here Bob King, who lives in Colorado,
takes an original approach and compares love to the formation of
rocks.

Geology

I know the origin of rocks, settling
out of water, hatching crystals
from fire, put under pressure
in various designs I gathered
pretty, picnic after picnic.

And I know about love, a little,
igneous lust, the slow affections
of the sedimentary, the pressure
on earth out of sight to rise up
into material, something solid
you can hold, a whole mountain,
for example, or a loose collection
of pebbles you forgot you were keeping.

Reprinted from the Marlboro Review, Issue 16, 2005, by
permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2005 by Robert King,
whose prose book, "Stepping Twice Into the River: Following
Dakota Waters," appeared in 2005 from The University Press of
Colorado. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry
Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of
English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does
not accept unsolicited poetry.


For more poems, check outWrite Now: Poems: Salty and Sweet

Malcolm Gladwell Fan Club (that's me)

The Gladwell Effect
By Rachel Donadio
Published Feb. 5, 2006 in the New York Times

"PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor," the writer Malcolm Gladwell said recently. "People who are busy doing things — as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops — don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them." [MP3 audio clip.]

Slight, shoeless and sporting the large head of curly hair that's become his trademark, Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was sitting at the kitchen table of his apartment in a West Village town house. In tones at once laid-back and precise, he was discussing his best-selling books: "The Tipping Point" argues that small actions can spark "social epidemics" — a term he gives a positive connotation; and "Blink a paean to intuitive thinking, makes a case for "thin-slicing," paring down our information intake so we can tune out the static and make fast, sound decisions. Gladwell said his goal in those two books was simple: In a culture with too much information and not enough time, he offers "organizing structures" for people's lives.

Readers seem grateful. "Blink" has remained on the best-seller list since it first came out in January 2005, with 1.3 million copies in print in North America. It has also been translated into more than 25 languages. That compares with 1.7 million copies of "The Tipping Point," which was originally published in 2000 but returned to the paperback best-seller list when "Blink" first appeared.

Their success has given Gladwell an active, and extremely lucrative, second career as a public speaker. Much in demand, he is paid in the neighborhood of $40,000 per lecture. He's also on the recommended reading list at many companies and business schools, and has spoken at West Point and the National Institutes of Health, among many other institutions. Last year, Time magazine named him one of its "100 most influential people." Fast Company magazine called Gladwell "a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud." Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of multiple-thread narrative movies like "Traffic" and "Syriana," is developing a movie based on "Blink." That book is also the subject of a clever sendup, "Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All," by the pseudonymous Noah Tall, which will be out this month.

Gladwell has become an all-out international phenomenon — and has helped create a highly contagious hybrid genre of nonfiction, one that takes a nonthreatening and counterintuitive look at pop culture and the mysteries of the everyday. In the past year, several other books in the Gladwell vein have appeared. They include the best-selling "Freakonomics," a breezy collection of case studies by Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and the journalist Stephen Dubner (the pair write an occasional "Freakonomics" column for The Times Magazine); "The Wisdom of Crowds," a business book for thinking people in which the New Yorker writer James Surowiecki argues that groups are collectively smarter and more innovative than individuals; and "Everything Bad Is Good for You," Steven Johnson's case that pop culture is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

But Gladwell has a far wider audience than these other authors. With a writerly verve and strong narrative powers, he leavens serious social science research with zany characters and pithy, easily digestible anecdotes. Gladwell selects his anecdotes from a wide range of sources — the military, business, food, music, romance — and diverse locales, a tactic that broadens his books' appeal.

In "The Tipping Point," he discusses everything from the drop in crime in New York in the early 1990's to the retro return of Hush Puppies, the rise of the Aeron chair in the dot-com era, and how "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" became a best seller through its popularity in small reading groups. His point is that social epidemics can spread with the right context and the pull of certain influential people: "connectors," in touch with different groups of people; "mavens," experts in one area; and "salesmen," who can win customers over.

Similarly, in "Blink," he introduces a range of case studies and experts, including art historians who can tell within seconds that a statue is a fake and a psychologist who can predict whether a couple will get divorced after observing them for only a few minutes. His message is that we should trust first impressions — except when we shouldn't. Gladwell, who is multiracial, said he became interested in first impressions when he grew his hair into an Afro and then was repeatedly pulled over for speeding, and stopped once by the police looking for a rapist with similar hair. In an era of increased specialization and niche thinking, Gladwell himself is the ultimate "connector," bridging disparate universes: the New York literary world and corporate America; liberal and conservative; men and women; high and low.

Without slackening his reporting or losing his New Yorker-writer street cred, Gladwell has risen to the top of the A-list in the vast subculture of gurus brought in to penetrate the isolation chamber of the boardroom, to speak truth to power and tell executives what it's really like in the outside world. Or at least in the West Village.

He's long cultivated the persona of the outsider. Gladwell, 42 though he looks younger, was born in England and grew up in rural Canada. His English father taught mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and his Jamaican mother is a psychotherapist. Gladwell studied history at the University of Toronto and wanted to go into advertising, but said he couldn't find a job and became a journalist instead. After a stint at The American Spectator, a conservative political magazine, he joined The Washington Post in 1987. He covered business and science, and spent three years as New York bureau chief before Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, hired him in 1996.

Gladwell, a self-described "right-winger" as a kid — he had a poster of Ronald Reagan on his wall during college — notes that his politics have changed over the years. When he was growing up, Canada was "essentially a socialist country" so "being a conservative was the kind of fun, radical thing to do," he said. "You couldn't outflank the orthodoxy on the left the way that people traditionally did when they wanted to be rebels. There was only room on the right." Now, he plays the flip side: "I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it's just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don't believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We're pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other," he said. "And it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical." [MP3 audio clip.]

On his Web site, Gladwell offers an apologia pro vita sua: "If I could vote (and I can't because I'm Canadian) I would vote Democrat. I am pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage. I believe in God. I think the war in Iraq is a terrible mistake. I am a big believer in free trade. I think, on balance, taxes in America — particularly for rich people — ought to be higher, not lower. I think smoking is a terrible problem and that cigarette manufacturers ought to be subjected to every possible social and political sanction. But I think that filing product liability lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers is absurd. I am opposed to the death penalty. I hate S.U.V.'s. I think many C.E.O.'s are overpaid. I think there is too much sex and violence on television."

While his views may be conventionally liberal, Gladwell takes an unconventional tack in reporting. Omnivorous in his interests and brilliantly attuned to every level of today's conversation, Gladwell is one of the most inventive journalists now writing. In articles on everything from personality tests to ketchup, he doesn't offer a sweeping theory, but rather a counterintuitive way of looking at things.

When Time magazine and other media outlets declared an attention-deficit hyperactivity epidemic in America, Gladwell argued that people were no more distracted than they'd ever been, but that Ritalin had replaced nicotine as a socially acceptable focusing stimulant. While others were vilifying the pharmaceutical companies over the cost of prescription drugs, Gladwell's New Yorker article on the topic mapped out a broader codependency. "It is only by the most spectacular feat of cynicism that our political system's moral negligence has become the fault of the pharmaceutical industry," he wrote. And in an article on intelligence reform published when the country was in a furor over the failings leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, Gladwell proposed that free-market-style competition between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. might actually be good for intelligence gathering. Lately he's been investigating racial profiling. At first, "I had a reasonably benign attitude toward it. I felt that under certain circumstances it was justifiable — like looking for terrorists. But now I think that's wrong," he said. "I think it's never justifiable. And not on ethical grounds but on pragmatic grounds. I just don't think it works."

For all their resonance and success, Gladwell's books have also been criticized, most often for demonstrating, or encouraging, lazy thinking. In a scathing review in The New Republic, the judge and author Richard Posner found "Blink" full of banalities and contradictions, "written like a book intended for people who do not read books." Some social scientists have also been unimpressed. "I think what he leaves people with is not that scientists are doing some interesting work, but that Malcolm Gladwell has a couple of good ideas," said Thomas Schelling, who shared last year's Nobel in economic science and did pioneering research on the "tipping point," a formulation that originally referred to the point at which white families would leave a neighborhood after black families began moving in.

Translating academic work for a popular audience is "very explicitly" his mission, Gladwell said, though it might not be what readers take away from his books. He said he owed "enormous debts" to academia. [MP3 audio clip.] In an endnote in "The Tipping Point," Gladwell cited Schelling's "Micromotives and Macrobehavior" (1978). In "Blink," he cited "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious" (2002), a lucid, readable book by the noted psychologist Timothy Wilson, which he called "a real inspiration" and one of his favorite books.

Gladwell has had the most pronounced impact in corporate culture. His "mavens" and "connectors" have become a working vocabulary for marketers desperate to reach consumers though calculated word-of-mouth campaigns. In 2004, he helped Simmons Market Research create consumer surveys based on "The Tipping Point." (He resigned after questions were raised about a conflict of interest with his New Yorker journalism.)

Gladwell, who rose to prominence during the dot-com boom, when the economy became the big story, rhapsodizes about things that intellectuals often dismiss but most people living on earth have to contend with every day. Advertising, for instance. In many ways, his work is reminiscent of that of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and father of modern public relations, whose 1928 book, "Propaganda," made a positive case for manipulating public opinion through advertising as the operative arm of psychology. "I get genuine delight from ads, if they're clever," Gladwell said. "The idea that you can tell a story in 30 seconds is amazing." He finds the business world "rarefied and fascinating," and said running a company was "just about as interesting a challenge as there is out there."

Small wonder, then, that business executives invite him to speak: he's entranced by their world, and they by his attentiveness and aura. He has spoken at Google, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, among many other companies. He's one of nine people invited to address the World Business Forum, a conference for executives, next fall, where he's expected to share the stage at Radio City Music Hall with Rudolph Giuliani; Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric; and Colin Powell, who Gladwell believes may be a distant cousin on his mother's side.

"I'm simply there to explain my ideas," he said of his public speaking. But he also delivers what he calls "homilies," drawing on his books to urge companies to provide better training and create fertile environments for innovation. Gladwell's 2002 New Yorker takedown of McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm then much in the news for its involvement with Enron, ended with a zinger: "They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing."

Business audiences eat it up. "Thank you for a fantastic speech," someone identified only as the chief executive of a health insurance company wrote in a letter reprinted on the Web site of the Leigh Bureau, which organizes Gladwell's speaking engagements. Moreover, the executive wrote, one colleague, "not faint of heart — indicated that you brought her to tears with the message about how valuable each and every individual is. With a polarized political situation, that's a refreshing message!"

And that is because beneath the social science data, Gladwell is selling something for which there's always a market. "I'm by nature an optimist. I can't remember the last time I wrote a story which could be described as despairing," he said. "I don't believe in character. I believe in the effect of the immediate impact of environment and situation on people's behavior."

Thus, he concludes "The Tipping Point" with the hopeful assertion that "what must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus." In "Blink," Gladwell argues that we pay too much attention to "grand themes" and too little to "fleeting moments." "Making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis," he writes.

Although pitched as descriptive, Gladwell's books are essentially prescriptive. Trust your instincts! You too may be (or can become) a connector, maven or salesman! Gladwell's dazzling arguments ultimately offer reassurance. Indeed, he seems a contemporary incarnation of a recurring figure in the American experience, one who comes with encouraging news: You can make a difference, you have the capacity to change. Gladwell may be the Dale Carnegie, or perhaps the Norman Vincent Peale, of the iPod generation. But where Carnegie in his 1936 book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," instructed readers how to understand their customers and flatter people into liking them, and Peale in his 1952 "Power of Positive Thinking" offered watered-down Christian palliatives, Gladwell offers optimism through demystification: to understand how things work is to have control over them.

Or if you can't understand the complexities of today's world, you may still be able to make profitable use of them. Of all the people he's profiled for the New Yorker, Gladwell said he most identified with Nassim Taleb, who ran a hedge fund that traded on rare events, like disasters. Taleb was "doing something about the possibility of disaster as opposed to simply turning a blind eye to it," Gladwell said in our conversation. And that, too, is part of the secret of Gladwell's success: pragmatism over ideology, optimism over pessimism, colorful human-interest anecdotes over gray shades of data. "To be someone who does not believe in the power of the situation is to be a defeatist about the world," he said. "And that I can't abide."

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

Good to Hear

"You can't have three people looking over your shoulder, and you have to make sure not to censor yourself. You have to be willing to be wrong and you have to be risky. You have to take a certain amount of abuse, and the reason you're willing to do that is because you love the truth."

-- Grace Paley

Carson McCullers: Reflections in a Golden Eye

I just finished reading my first Carson McCullers novel: Reflections in a Golden Eye. I had never heard of her work before (which, of course, reveals how much I have yet to read). I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this slim little novel.

This is her first sentence: “An army post in peacetime is a dull place.” And then she goes on to disprove this very notion. True, the post is all about routine and drill. But she takes us into the homes of the officers and their wives and into one enlisted man’s head. The horrors are there just behind the picket fence and inside the otherwise stark barracks. The characters fall in love with the wrong people (most often ones to whom they are not married) and take out their inner angst with garden sheers used on their own nipples, in one ghastly example. Those Southerners. Cukoo. McCullers gives every single one of her characters a lobotomy.

The insanity and despair of the characters is made even more compelling by McCullers extremely tight prose style. The sentence structure and diction are militant—no lyrical episodes to take a trip into metaphysics or provide enough words for a soft landing. These characters are doomed to fit into their little sentences.

colorful vocabulary, phrases and some sentences too

sward
the grassy surface of land

mufti
ordinary dress as distinguished from that denoting an occupation or station ; especially : civilian clothes when worn by a person in the armed forces

“He had a sad penchant for becoming enamored of his wife’s lovers.”

slattern
an untidy slovenly woman; also : SLUT, PROSTITUTE

fractious grace

termagant wife
an overbearing or nagging woman : SHREW

grim vivacity

badinage
playful repartee / banter

cerise curtains
a moderate red

merriest malice

cynosure
one that serves to direct or guide / center of atrraction or attention

frippery
something showy, frivolous, or nonessential : LUXURY, TRIFLE

"The sun and firelight were bright in the room."

"Like all very stupid people she had a predilection for the gruesome, which she could indulge in or throw off at will."

"And having given up life, the Captain suddenly began to live."

hauter
arrogance, haughtiness

sluggish grace

repressed agitation

hobbledehoy
an awkward gawky youth

lazy tenderness

velleity
the lowest level of volition / a slight wish or tendency (inclination)

sough
to make a moaning or sighing sound

some useful links

Biography of Carson McCullers

The Carson McCullers Project

Audio Recording of McCullers

The Tragicomic Vision in McCullers (literary criticism)

Dance: Keigwin + Company

I will head out in the rain to do some errands and see this show tonight:

http://www.larrykeigwin.com/company.php

3 Word Lines and at least one question Poem: First Draft

“I love you,”
answers the physicist at sundown near the edge of the back yard in spring.

Tell me, why
is grass greener
twenty steps beyond
our lawn across
the thicket fence?

Let’s see: Yes,

You look down
at our lawn
and see bare
spots of earth.

Yes, let’s see:

You look over
there and see
grass blades tall.

In short, you
see the forest
over there, dear,
and here see
only sparse trees.

In fact, grass
is always greener
where you can’t
see raw earth.

Is it not?

Narrative Poem: First Draft

July 16, 1990: Election Day for Pope Michael I of Kansas

Superman grew up there.
His heavy denim rugged,
his letter jacket torn by sheer
velocity when he took flight, unexpectedly.
He learned the truth about home, and left for the Big Apple.

Kansans tilted chins when he joined the East Coast liberal Media Machine.
After all, he was alien, kryptonite-sissy,
lily livered freak
in blue tights and red speed-o, not to mention
his cape. So long sissy, those New Yorkers need your bleeding-heart ass.

Dorothy risked her curls and Toto’s too,
she faced the Wicked Witch of the East
to get back home there.
Miss Kansas herself wanted two things:
to get home and to love her dog.

The Witch—green tight-lipped, single, magic mistress, femi-nazi—
sizzled at Dorothy’s humble bucket toss.
She desired to extinguish the Eastern Witch,
not kill. And see the thanks she gets
from those who trembled under the witch? Not a penny.
The Ozites sent her home and forgot her, entirely.

Superman’s first home, Dorothy’s Ithaca,
this is the land where John Brown killed to fight slavery,
and Pizza Hut was born.

In Wichita, the “Summer of Mercy” clenched
prairie souls and recruited soldiers for the unborn,
back in ’91. Christian agape flushed the Ar-kansas river banks,
cartoon babies pled from hand-lettered signs along the highways,
Save the Children! Choose Life! Your mother did!

Pope-fearing Catholics
simmered on the hard-scrabble plains,
took flight and turned to home, the Vatican way off in Rome,
for guidance when the protests turned violent.

Some Catholics there, in Kansas, just sneered:
We don’t have super powers or Dorothy’s glass slippers,
wouldn’t click our heels anyway to see the Pope and kiss his fat gold ring.
If we could see the Holy Father, we’d say:
You, all do respect, are a scoundrel and a fraud, a victim
of sociology and hand-holding guitar-strumming new-age professor types.
Latin is God’s tongue.

Pope Michael had reigned already a year,
when civil protests exploded,
but as far as the record goes,
he didn’t have much to say or
no one listened.

Deborah Eisenberg: Twilight of the Superheroes

What I am reading now: Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes.

This collection of short stories is as "hot" as such a thing can get. I keep hearing/reading about it everywhere I go. So far, it deserves the good press.

Useful link:

'Twilight of the Superheroes' Explores the Senses
NPR Book Review by Alan Cheuse

Ethan Frome

I am currently taking a novel writing course at Emerson College. We will read several short novels to examine the author's craft as we go along crafting our own first novels. We just read Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. A terrible story, worth reading.

Below I collected some colorful phrases,
vocabulary and even a few good lines:

careless powerful look

degenerate
having declined (as in nature, character, structure, or function) from an ancestral or former state / having sunk to a condition below that which is normal to a type; especially : having sunk to a lower and usually corrupt and vicious state

rich Irish

exanimate
lacking animation : SPIRITLESS / being or appearing lifeless

declivity
downward inclination / a descending slope

fatuity
something foolish or stupid : STUPIDITY, FOOLISHNESS / archaic : IMBECILITY, DEMENTIA

rill
noun : a very small brook
verb: to flow like a rill

a growl of rapture

white and scintillating fields
scintillate: to emit sparks / to emit quick flashes as if throwing off sparks , sparkle
scintillating: brilliantly lively, stimulating, witty

"His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty." (Chapter 3)

"Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being." (Chapter 4)

aver
to verify or prove to be true in pleading a cause; to allege or assert in pleading /
to declare positively

ebullition
a sudden violent outburst or display / the act, process, or state of boiling or bubbling up

adjure
to urge or advise earnestly

Trip to the Boston Public Library

I will return the following Young Adult books:

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

and

the perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Both books are extremely popular for high school students. I can see why. Both worth a read, especially if you want to hear voices from that netherworld of adolescence.

The library has the following books on hold for me:

Consider the lobster, and other essays by David Foster Wallace

and

From beginning to end: the rituals of our lives by Robert Fulghum.

I intend to read only selected portions of the above books.

I just finished reading Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (for my novel writing class)

and

I am currently reading for book club (even though they already discussed this one!) The Writing on the Wall: a novel by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

and

I am working my way through The Kenyon Review and Special Handling, a book of poetry by Mark Pawlak.

What's on your shelf?????

Michiana Chronicles: Vagina Monologues

April Lidinsky, one of the five local writers who write
"Michiana Chronicles" for the local (South Bend, Indiana)
NPR station, broadcast this yesterday.

http://www.mchron.net/ee/radio/the_plays_the_thing/

Friday, January 27, 2006

The Play's the Thing

Ok, folks – time for a literature quiz that should take you back
to, oh, maybe your Sophomore language arts class.  So: Who said the
following line:  “The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the king.” Anyone?  Ah ... I see lots of hands.
And yes, “Hamlet” is correct.  But with that line, Shakespeare
illuminates something larger than Hamlet’s desire for revenge.
That line reminds us that the best theater catches everyone’s
conscience, and makes all of us shift a bit in our seats. 
Art is political– it’s about power.

A friend once gave me a t-shirt, decorated with Andy Warhol
images and the jaunty motto, “Art can’t hurt you.” I wore it a few
times, feeling pretty bohemian-hip, until a colleague said, “You know,
that t-shirt is totally wrong! It can too hurt.” And ... he was
right.  To say art can’t hurt us is to say it doesn’t have any teeth, any
power– that art doesn’t matter. A quick reflection on the long
history of censorship reminds us that art has always been under suspicion
for blasphemy or sedition.  Art makes arguments we don’t always want
to hear.

But unlike editorials or ranting TV commentators, art rarely
presents one single perspective, which might be its greatest virtue.
Perhaps you, like me, have stood in front of a painting, or in a theater
lobby at intermission, muttering darkly, “Huh ... I don’t get
it.”  Art, at its best, reminds us that we should never assume we
“get” anything at first glance. Even those pastel-pretty landscape
paintings by Claude Monet say to us, “You think you know what a
pile of hay looks like?  Think again.  Look at a haystack in this
light. And now late in the day.  And again in a storm.
And again in wintertime.” First impressions are always partial, imperfect.

Art usefully undermines our assumption that we know it all; it keeps
us from thinking simply, and from simply taking sides.

In my college classrooms, sometimes students feel sopassionately
about ideas they want to pick a fight with everyone who disagrees
with them.  Not so fast, I urge them – if you tell people
they’re full of hooey, you’ll only get an “Am not!” for every one of
your “Are too!”s.  So how do you invite someone to try on a new
perspective?  Well, reach back to your childhood, and remember
how those interactions with friends went.  Something like: “Ok, now
you play like you’re a such-and-so, and then I’ll play like I’m a
something-or-other, and then let’s play like ...” and on and on.
Remember?  Yeah – the play’s the thing.  Trying on new roles is
a skill that weakens, sadly, with our harrowing passage to
adulthood.

But art reminds us to play with ideas. To empathize with
perspectives that stretch us, however uncomfortably.

And that is why I teach plays like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina
Monologues, and why college students everywhere have found power
in producing the play themselves, despite the controversy that
often surrounds it.  The Vagina Monologues is a response – a creative
response – to a terrible truth about power, and that is that
women worldwide suffer – and resist – the mental and physical effects
of sexism in ways that are both readily apparent and everywhere
ignored.

But instead of dashing off a rant in the face of gruesome
statistics, Ensler wrote a play, with a multitude of perspectives
for us to try on.  Now I’m not comfortable, myself, with every
voice in that piece.  But when I watch students practicing for
the production, I see the power of art at work as they inhabit
these different roles, empathizing with an amazing range of
human experience.  I test myself by the students’ brave example:
How could I become a person who wouldn’t leave a battering husband?
How might I live a life in which fear or belief led me to
inflict violence on others?  What would it be like not to
feel vulnerable in my own body?  And I wonder,
why are these questions threatening to ask right now?

I think of a playwright controversial and censored in his own
time, Molière, and the pleasure I get every year when I attend the
exuberant undergraduate performance at Notre Dame, all in
French, and this year coming in February, just like some productions
of The Vagina Monologues.  While full of humor, Molière’s political
satires still leave tooth marks, thanks to talented student performers
who inhabit his hypocritical, unjust, and foolishly lovable
characters so fully they feel familiar to us, despite the period costumes.

The cliché says that, “Life is not a dress rehearsal.” But how
much better off we’d be if we acted as if it were. Art strengthens
our atrophied empathy muscles.  It says, play like you’re born into
a Bangkok slum and sold into sexual slavery.  Play like you’re a
president.  Play like you’re a person who lets someone tape a
bomb to your chest, and really feel the power of your belief, the
strange weight of metal and wires, the pull of the duct tape on your
skin.

What is your life like?  And what powers of imagination might
revise your story?

The play is the thing.  And the conscience that needs catching
is always our own.

Lecture: James McBride

Last night L. and I went to see James McBride lecture and play a little jazz at Northeastern University. I taught McBride’s memoir, The Color of Water, to my sophomore class last year. It is an amazing story that tells of his heritage: his mother was a Polish Jew and his father was African American. It is a book that I highly recommend.

Last night McBride took the stage and began to speak. His manner was so relaxed and witty and fun. He spoke about his childhood and young adulthood. He was careful to tailor his remarks for the college students in the crowd, many of whom were writers and musicians themselves. He spoke at length about his experience writing his memoir and how its success has impacted his life.

He is a gifted speaker. I can easily say that it was one of the best lectures I have attended by an author. I just wish my students, and other students could hear him speak.

A few interesting things I learned: He did write the chapters in his mother’s voice first and only when an editor suggested that he tell his own story did the memoir as it stands take shape. Also, his mother and her long lost sister did reunite after the book was published, although it was not the Hallmark moment you might see in a made for TV special.

McBride spoke passionately about being politically aware and active. He supported liberal arts education and independent book stores. He played a little jazz.

Afterwards, we walked a bit on Northeastern’s campus for the first time. I saw my first rat scurry across an open sidewalk. The cafeteria must have been near. Ugh. We grow rats with tails in Indiana.

Thomas Frank and Kansas

What’s the Matter with Kansas?
How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank

I first heard about this book from Garrison Keillor. Keillor was in my home town, Hutchinson, Kansas for a live taping of his radio show The Prairie Home Companion. He worked the title into his opening monologue and got a good laugh. I had to ask my sister about the punch line. I haven't lived in Kansas since I was in high school and had missed the stir the book must have caused there when it was published in 2004.

Then a few weeks ago I was browsing at the Harvard Book Store and couldn’t resist adding the title to my small collection of purchases. If this book was about Kansas, then this native Sunflower State girl should see what Frank had to say.

Frank details Kansas political history and how it began as radical—fighting slavery and the evil of drink—but has turned reactionary. Kansans today look at American culture piped in by satellite and react with disgust. The country’s soul is perverted and those damn East Coasters/Hollywood types are trying to cram their perversions down their honestly parched throats.

Kansas’s have a history of fighting to protect their way of life on the prairie. The battles they choose today are still the stuff of moral righteousness: abortion, evolution, feminism as a curse on the family, etc. What they have lost (or perhaps never fully had?) is a concern with the economic forces that drive the cultural issues for which they wage life-or-death battles.

At times Frank’s narrative lost me, I have to admit. I couldn’t tell if he assumed his reader would be more of a political insider or if his logic went a bit askew here and there.

At any rate, I can say that his characterization of Kansas culture hit home with me. As a fairly self-reflective person, I have often tried to put together my own personal narrative. I often use the forces of family and faith as literary devices. Frank’s book, however, made me realize that I am a product of Kansas culture as well.

Even though I was the typical teenager wrapped up in my teenage issues, I was busy soaking up the special angst of Kansas as well. I was sixteen during the “Summer of Mercy” when abortion protesters descended on Wichita for a summer of civil protest and arrests. As I read Frank’s account of that summer, memories began to take form in a haze.

It’s no wonder that the “Summer of Mercy” is a blur. That was the same summer that I stepped out of Kansas and into the heart of Moscow, Sochi and St. Petersburg. With little trouble I can still roll the bubbles of caviar across my tongue and feel the slick butter slathered on the slightly sour bread of my host family’s breakfast table. Yet somehow the details of that summer of protest in Wichita and the role I played in it are suppressed. I know that I was pro-life. It was the moral high road. And in those days, it was only road worth traveling.

Even my trip to Russia on People to People was sanctified as by its diplomatic nature. I didn’t sit in my father’s bedroom and plead for him to send me “on this once-in-a-lifetime” trip because I planned to pleasure in exotic foods, foreign tongues and the liberty of being a Kansas girl of sixteen half-way around the world from her plains. I wasn’t doing it for my own pleasure. No, I was going as the Kansas Student Ambassador for the United States. I would be a peace-maker by virtue of my American youthful presence on Russia’s soil. I was trying to be a citizen, a very grown up thing to do, I thought.

I have no idea how deeply my father pondered my request. Did he worry about the cost? It was a significant sum. Did he worry about my safety? Would he miss me? In our household of six kids and a rotating cast of dogs, I never gave the latter a moment’s consideration. I don’t remember how much I bothered him about it. But I do know that I set my heart on it. I decided that it was possible for me to go. And that made it almost imperative in my mind. I still have that streak in me. If a thing can be done, and it is a worthy cause, then it should be done. I do remember using the “once-in-a-lifetime” logic. He gave his permission.

Suddenly I was part of something much bigger than the irregular rectangle of Kansas State. Students from across the country converged on Washington, DC, where we gathered at George Washington University before we flew out to Moscow. The few days we spent in DC were a whirlwind of new faces and accents. I was one of the youngest students in the program and I was thankful to have this excuse. The others were urbane and well-traveled for the most part. They had never been to Kansas. My sixteen years and Kansas roots, not to mention my perfect hair and blue eyes added up to a kind of self-assured glow. I was a Kansas girl, going places.

I was so caught up in the excitement of sleeping in a college dorm and joining forces with my fellow ambassadors that I barely had time to think of my family already so far away even though I had yet to leave the country. I did manage to call them just once before leaving for the three-week trip. In my exhilaration I had exhausted myself before we even arrived to Dulles airport. It is no wonder then that I somehow I got my hand pinched in the luggage conveyer belt as I tried to retrieve my things from the security screening. It must have smarted, and my pride must have been wounded too. Here I was about to embark on a world journey and I carelessly pinch my fingers. Suddenly I was lonely and I gave in to my tiredness. I cried as I dialed home. I cried as I left a garbled message about my hand getting pinched and goodbye and it really hurts. I did not call my parents again while I was abroad.

At the time, I didn’t find it strange that I never called. My friends took advantage of weekly or even more frequent opportunities to phone. I always refrained out of a kind of self-discipline. It was expensive to call. I would not indulge myself in such an extravagance. My parents had sacrificed to send me and I didn’t want to cost them any more than necessary. My parents never told me not to call. I am sure they assumed that I would. In my way I was trying to be grown up do the right thing by saving on the expensive call. I was trying to be frugal with their money. Now I see that my failure to call was really the product of a teen’s callous self-absorption. I only thought of their financial, not their emotional needs. Oddly, it made me feel “grown up” to restrain myself from calling.

The buildup and the experience of spending three weeks in Russia at the age of sixteen go a long way to explain why my memories of the “Summer of Mercy” in Kansas are vague. I do know this: I spent at least several hours on a busy thoroughfare near Dr. George Tiller’s clinic. I held a sign in my hand that was pro-life. I wanted the drivers to honk to show solidarity. I believed that it was honorable to stand up for the unborn. I do remember that I was scared. Their had been violence and protests all over Wichita that summer as legions of pro-lifers flocked there to rally for the cause. Dr. Tiller’s clinic was the center of the fray. He performed late-term abortions and thus earned a special place of hate in the pro-lifer’s quest to end abortion.

I was young. I had seen the world. I was eager to be grown up. Abortion was a grown up issue. The Pope condemned abortion; so did I. It was grown up to accept the teachings of the church. It was puerile and pathetic to rebel against the wisdom of the Holy Father. I did ask questions about abortion: but not the kind that ever considered a non-canonical viewpoint. I wanted to know more about what the church taught, not why they taught it or why other people (who were those people?) had different ideas. It wasn’t about ideas anyway. It was about babies being killed. I thought that I was being grown up by taking the moral high road. I thought that I was joining a noble fight, a fight that made my own life more worthwhile and more sophisticated. It gave me character. Instead of being a kid, I was a teen with a cause. Some kids drank beer and had sex to rebel against their parents; I never drank or had sex to rebel against a world that used such distractions to get young people like me to waste our lives.

I was a Kansas girl with blue eyes back from a trip around the world and ready to take on the world here in Kansas. I had been places and now I would step up into the world of adult issues with a voice that could clearly articulate: I am Pro-Life, and then punctuate that credo with a deftly executed toss of long honey blonde hair.

My memories of that summer are a tangle of Russian folk dancers, dark tea and fresh raspberries in the mountains of Georgia, all night gab, basketball games with kids from Spain (who drank red wine afterward!) and coming home to a Kansas on fire with a moral crusade.

Frank comments that his experience growing up in Kansas roughly the same time as me (though in the “big city” part of Kansas). “What mattered most were the ideals; everyday reality was too degraded to count” (145). I know that my ideals as a sixteen-year-old coursed through my veins. They still do. And I think this held true and holds true for many Kansans today. Yet the primary way Kansans know the world is through entertainment—movies and sitcoms. I have known the world on my intimate terms. For me, everyday reality has not been degraded. It is the stuff of life—in Kansas, on the shores of the Black Sea, in my steaming cup of tea on my desk—that can filter the bitterness that results from too much cable television and rap music. I can have my ideals and live with a world that doesn’t always conform to my standards, as long as that world is a democracy. And as long as people and not ideals remain at the center of the democracy.

Quotes
(page numbers from paperback edition)

“The [conservative] movement’s basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern—that Values Matter Most, as a one backlash title has it.” (6)

“What divides Americans is authenticity, not something hard and ugly like economics.” (27)

Kansas is: “where Dorothy wants to return. It’s where Superman grows up.” (29)

“Kansas may be the land of averageness, but is a freaky, militant, outraged averageness.” (34)

“The people who were once radical are now reactionary.” (76)

“All claims on the right, in other words, advance from victimhood.” (119)

“Indignation is the great aesthetic principle of the backlash culture; voicing the fury of the imposed-upon is to the backlash what the guitar solo is to have metal. Indignation is the privileged emotion, the magic moment that brings a consciousness of rightness and a determination to persist.” (122)

“Conservatives are only able to ignore economics the way they do because they live in a civilization whose highest cultural expressions—movies, advertisements, and sitcoms—have for decades insisted on downplaying the world of work.” (129)

On growing up in Kansas in the 80s and 90s: “What mattered most were the ideals; everyday reality was too degraded to count.”(145)

“Ignoring one’s own economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move to you and me, but viewed a different way it is an act of self-denial; a sacrifice for a holier cause.”(168)

Colorful Vocabulary

deracinate (uproot)

patois (provincial speech, local dialect)

puissance (strength, power)

bonhomie (good-natured friendliness)

mulct (v. to defraud of money; swindle)

sedulous (accomplished with great perseverance; diligent)

calumniate (to utter maliciously false statements, charges)

quislings (traitor—Vidkun Quisling died 1945, Norwegian who collaborated with Nazis)

adulate (flatter excessively)

proles (proletarian)

breast-beating underdoggery

filigree

mansard (a type of roof: http://www.m-w.com/mw/art/roof.htm)

doppelgängers (double, alter ego)

anomie (personal unrest, alienation comes from lack of purpose or ideals)

depredation (plunder, ravage)