R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Kathy

An avid reader, my dad was a thoughtful, liberal sort. He opposed the war in Vietnam before I did, and he supported the Civil Rights Movement ahead of most white people I knew. Despite his enlightened ways, though, he was teensy bit sexist. Not largely and heinously. He admired the intelligence and insights of his wife, sisters, and mother, and encouraged his three daughters in all their pursuits, intellectual as well as athletic. But, born in 1911, he necessarily carried a burden of the attitudes with which he’d grown up.

My mother mentioned more than once that my dad didn’t read or like women writers, and I recall his sheepishly acknowledging this was so. I’m pretty sure he regarded them as lady authors who lacked the gravitas of the great ones. I trust that if he had lived longer (he died in 1971) his outlook on women’s books would have broadened.

Marilynne Robinson

Since his death, much has changed, and things are better for women and for women’s books. It seems clear to me, however, that women writers, as a class, rest on a lower tier than men. This summer I’ve reread the fictional output of Marilynne Robinson, one of our best, to prepare to review her new book Lila, due in October, and it’s reminded me we haven’t achieved equality yet.

Robinson’s first book Housekeeping (1980) is a Great American Novel. It’s a strange and haunting story about three women—an aunt and her two nieces—living in a small town out West. The aunt’s idea of housekeeping is to wash tin cans and stack them carefully against the walls of the living room. She’s a vagabond and a mystic, almost, who marches to a different drummer. The book consciously addresses themes raised by the greatest 19th century American writers: Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, Twain. Robinson’s gripping story deals with the most profound questions of existence (one of her favorite words) in lyrical prose.

This novel enjoys a stellar reputation among many, including the critics, all male, linked in this post, but is not widely known. Robinson should rank with Updike, Cheever, Roth, Bellow, Franzen, and the rest, but who ever mentions her? I watched a Charlie Rose conversation a while back with the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik about modern American literature, and not one American woman was named. Not Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Not Ann Patchett. Not Anne Tyler. Not Eudora Welty. Not Flannery O’Connor. Not Marilynne Robinson.

Her newest book Lila completes an astonishing trilogy, after Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). As I was reading all three, I kept thinking of John Updike’s prodigious Rabbit series (4½ books, really), cited by the English novelist and critic Julian Barnes as “the greatest postwar American novel.” Updike’s mammoth accomplishment gets its due. I’d assert that Marilynne Robinson’s trilogy deserves comparable accolades.

Robinson’s books deal with injustice, poverty, race, religion, love and relationships, hypocrisy, and American history. I don’t mean to whine, and I don’t blame men. Deep down, I find myself sometimes categorizing women writers as “women writers.”  Robinson wins awards and gets stellar reviews—but consider this question honestly. Do you agree men and women writers are judged differently? Are women writers, great though they may be, resting one step below male writers in your own mental pantheon?

 

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Animal + Music Book Titles

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Kathy

Awhile ago, I reviewed a book for the Plain Dealer called Frog Music* and soon after read a book with a similar title. My reactions to the two were very different, however.

Emma Donoghue, an Irish writer who lives in Canada, scored a big success with her novel Room (2010). It concerned a woman held captive for years by a crazy guy, a la Ariel Castro, and is narrated by her little boy, born in captivity. “Room” is all he knows of the world. Many book groups, including mine, read that book. I liked it pretty well but felt the ending went haywire.

In Donoghue’s new book, Frog Music, a French dancer and prostitute in 1870s San Francisco befriends a vivacious cross-dressing gal named Jenny, who catches frogs for a living–frogs being a delicacy among the French and the source of their derogatory nickname. The disgusting details–salacious sex, slippery frogs, sickening smallpox–overwhelmed me. Lots of other reviewers loved it, though, so don’t go by me.

Then, somewhere, I ran across the title Goat Song: A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese (2009) by Brad Kessler. This attracted me for several reasons: I understood it had a spiritual element, and I like spiritual books. I like to read about animals and also artisanal foods. And when I was a kid I raised a couple of goats. My grandfather had several acres of land, along with a chicken coop and a couple of other buildings. My sister Marge got it into her head to join 4-H and raise a sheep. I followed in her footsteps and then added my own creative twist, with goats: Katy the first year and Daisy the second. I learned to love the playfulness and curiosity of goats.

So do Brad Kessler and his wife Dona Ann McAdams, a photographer, who moved from New York City to a farm in Vermont and started raising goats. Novices, they read lots of books and consulted lots of old hands. They bred their goats and started getting milk and making cheese. One blogger/goat farmer* objected to Kessler’s spiritual meanderings, as well as his literal meanderings with his goats through the woods. But I viewed him as primarily a writer who was using his life experience (and his goats’ life experience) for his work, and his work (writing) to support his rural lifestyle. Although he and his wife grow a lot of their own food and make use of what the goats provide, they don’t pretend to be full-time farmers.

Here’s an interesting footnote about Brad Kessler’s books. He dedicates Goat Song to Annie Dillard, one of my favorite writers, who’s also concerned with nature and spirituality. Then, when I checked out his novel Birds in Fall, I noted that the epigraph which begins the book quotes the beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, another favorite.

*http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2014/04/emma_donoghue_dives_right_into.html

*http://waywardspark.com/goat-song-by-brad-kessler/

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Connecting

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Kathy
He did send his beautiful book.

I’ve written here before about my dad’s experiences at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York City. Brush-Moore Newspapers, the company that owned the Canton Repository, where my dad worked, sent him to the Institute a number of times for surgeries and rehab, after he became a paraplegic in the early fifties.

I’ve noted in other writing his close encounters with Roy Campanella, the Dodgers shortstop who, injured in a 1958 auto accident, became a paraplegic, and his relationship with Alger Hiss, who visited him regularly when he was in New York for a long stint. Dad entertained us in his letters and after he got home in person with stories about these people, as well as Dr. Howard Rusk, the pioneering doctor who founded the hospital, and also other doctors, nurses, aides, and regular folk he encountered there. One of the people he met at the Institute, as we called it, was the artist Mark di Suvero, who had been seriously injured in a construction accident.

My dad would have been in his fifties by the time they met, when di Suvero was a thirty-something young artist. I remember that his real name was Marco Polo di Suvero and that he was born in Shanghai to Italian parents. He had a beard and apparently wore turtleneck sweaters and was already part of the counter-culture as it was then developing. My dad had educated, liberal sensibilities, but was a straightforward Middle American who eschewed affectation and regarded most eccentricities suspiciously. So, he was bemused and intrigued by di Suvero and liked him, too, all at the same time. They continued to exchange letters after my dad returned home. As far as I know, they’ve been lost.

At some point, a couple of decades ago, my sisters and I checked into di Suvero and discovered that he was a prominent artist, with sculptures at museums and public places all around the world, including the nearby (to us) Akron Museum of Art, who owns his Eagle Wheel. A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about Mark di Suvero and realized that in 2014 he probably had a website. Which he does, here.

I ferreted out the contact information and sent Mr. di Suvero a short email, wondering if he remembered my dad and expressed our appreciation to him as someone who befriended (and was befriended by) my dad in far-off New York. Soon after, I received a message, passed along by an assistant.

It begins, “I remember your father from more than 50 years ago. I liked him because he was a good man, intelligent, and he brought something positive to the climate of the room at Rusk.” He goes on to say that he’s still in touch with another roommate, a quadriplegic named Lenny, a name I recall, who played chess with my dad. Lenny recalls that he and my dad continued to play chess after they had graduated from Rusk. It’s true that my dad maintained chess games long-distance. He had a cool cardboard book with little cardboard chess pieces you could fit into slots; you communicated your plays to your antagonist via postcards. Those games, perforce, went on for months.

The message goes on: “I was forced by political conviction (anti-war) to leave the country so I lost contact with your father.” Interesting, this little division caused by the Vietnam War. My dad, too, opposed the war and disagreed with some friends and family and co-workers in doing so. He even grew a modest beard in the late sixties, but soon shaved it off, worried about those affectations I mentioned before. My dad read I.F. Stone’s Weekly and The New Republic and was way ahead of many college students, including me, in opposing the war.

Mr. di Suvero’s email message ends like this: “I am sure that he was one of the bright citizens and has made me think in a deeply positive sense of Canton, Ohio.” It’s a great thing to encounter someone who knew my dad, who was born in 1911 and died in 1971. Not many such people left.

At the end of his message, Mark di Suvero offers to send me a Dreambook, a collection of photos of his work, which I’m waiting for, with great anticipation, now.

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A Dog, Ovid, and Poetry

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Kathy

Prologue

Sometimes things connect. I find this frequently in my teaching life, my reading life, and my life life. Suddenly lots of themes and ideas keep recurring. I can’t connect the dots among the areas I’m about to describe. I’ll just describe them, and we can all reflect on the uncanny connections.

The Dog

In the midst of a February snowstorm, we found a little dog darting around in traffic on a busy street near us. I coaxed her to me, sent my husband on to the movie we were en route to, and took her home. She had no identification. Her fur was covered in ice, and she was shaking badly.

In the subsequent days (after warming her up, of course), we looked for her owners, to no avail. I bathed her and took her to the vet (7-pound Maltese mix, 1-3 years old, unspayed, possibly a breeding dog from a puppy mill, healthy), followed up leads, passed out flyers, talked to neighbors. No one claimed her.

To sum up, though we didn’t want a dog (that’s the topic for another post), we have a dog, a sweet, well-behaved, affectionate and tiny dog. We took many weeks to name her, because we didn’t know we were keeping her. And we’re not good at making decisions.

Ovid

We’re reading some of the mythological stories from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses this semester in my upper-level Latin class. I love Ovid and first fell in love with Latin while reading him in my third-year high-school Latin class.

My students are a little suspicious of poetry and are not fans of love-related, nature-related, prettified subjects. One of them told me bluntly, “I’m not lying. I want violence.” Ovid has that aplenty, and so I assigned them to read the story of Actaeon, who accidentally witnesses the goddess Diana bathing in a forest glade. She punishes him by turning him into a stag. His own hunting dogs then turn on him and tear him to bits. That’s what you get for looking at a naked goddess.

In the course of the story, Ovid picks up the epic tradition of the catalogue, a long list of proper names. Scholars debate the purposes of these lists, which slow down the story for modern readers. They probably are intended to preserve some history and, in fact, to entertain the listeners (because ancient epics were recited) with the poet’s virtuosic skill in incorporating these names into a rhythmical poetic line. Homer catalogues ships’ names, and Vergil catalogues warriors’ names. Ovid, whom I often describe as a smart ass, catalogues the names of the dogs who attack Actaeon. He’s carrying on the epic tradition–I call it an epic meme–and playing with it at the same time.

Ichnobates, Pterelas, Harpyia, Dromas, Tigris, Leucon, and so on–the names go on for about 30 lines, all fitting in Ovid’s artful dactylic lines. Translators have lots of fun. Sometimes they retain the names (mostly from the Greek), or sometimes they translate them into related English words when possible. My favorite translator, Charles Martin, uses Blackie, Shag, Yipper, Brownie, and Buster, among others.

Naturally, my students suggested I borrow one of Ovid’s dog names for our little Maltese mutt. Melanchaetes or Therodamas. anyone?

Poetry

In March, my book group had decided to depart from our customary novels and nonfiction and try some poetry, coinciding with a visit to Cleveland by Robert Pinksy, former poet laureate and current advocate  for poetry, on April 8th. Someone suggested we read a new Pinsky book, called Singing School, which purports to introduce readers to poems.

In fact, the book turned out to be a sort of handbook for would-be poets. Its offerings were difficult, and Pinsky’s brief comments obscure for everyday readers who want to understand and enjoy what they read. For example, Pinsky includes Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” which goes on for thirty pages. Even the English teacher in the group, i.e., me, didn’t get through the whole thing.

So most people didn’t read much of the book. I was glad we used it, though, because I learned a few things and had fun deciphering the challenging poems, looking some of them up online for extra help. I worked my way through “Church Monuments” by George Herbert, whom I studied in grad school.

These efforts reminded me that great works are not always accessible immediately. Frequently, they require some labor, which frequently pays dividends. Understanding how things are made explicates their meaning. One appreciates the work that goes into an Emily Dickinson poem by discerning that her lines alternate between four iambic feet and three iambic feet. Unraveling the grammar of Herbert’s dense sentences helps clarify their intent.

This principle applies in all the arts. Knowing that Michelangelo took four years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling (not really all on his back, but still) helps us appreciate it more fully.

Summary

Dogs need to be named. Our dog’s name is Roxie.

I learned to love Latin poetry by plowing my way through Ovid’s gnarly dactylic hexameter lines, day after day, when I was a teenager. Sometimes you want to tear your hair out, but you have to love a guy who names a dog Oresitrophos.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, Frederic Wheelock!

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Kathy

I am a teacher blessed with terrific students.

It has not always been so.  Through many years, I sometimes struggled with unkind, arrogant students, annoying ones, and lazy ones. I’ve had extremely unpleasant encounters with parents. I’ve been accused of racism. Sometimes, hatred of a teacher’s subject matter—English or Latin, in my case—bleeds over into hatred of the teacher. (“I didn’t make this up!” I plead. “I didn’t invent the passive periphrastic! I’m just the messenger!”) I’ve been told I’m too easy or too hard, too formal or too casual, and too many other things. This is a teacher’s lot. You’ll never please everyone.

In recent years, however, I’ve landed in an ideal niche, which I’ve written about before. At Cleveland State, my students are exceedingly nice, exceedingly interesting, exceedingly hardworking, and, often, exceedingly smart. I’m exceedingly lucky to know them.

They work full time and go to school full time. They raise children. They come to school sick and tired. They have had a variety of jobs and have lived in a variety of places. Even the “traditional” undergraduate (i.e., eighteen years old, just out of high school) usually has a pretty special story to tell.

Because my classes tend to be small (because, for some reason, masses of students do not study ancient languages), and because at least some of my students continue with Latin beyond the first semester, I often get to know them pretty well. We develop in-jokes. One class focused on chiasmus, my favorite rhetorical device. When we would find it in a reading, they’d resolutely cross their arms in front of them (signifying the “x,” or “chi,” formed by the words). In another class, we connected everything to the actor James Franco–all our sentences, all our examples contained a James Franco allusion. Some classes fixate on a particular writer to scorn and disdain, frequently Cicero. The history majors often teach me more than I teach them. In one of my current classes, the students most often provide the historical context for our readings.

They all, however, share one thing in common, our classic text, Wheelock’s Latin, first published in 1956 and now in its seventh edition. Frederic Wheelock (1902-1987) developed it from the lessons he prepared for his students at Brooklyn College, a text he intended to be “mature, humanistic, challenging, and instructive.”  He hoped it would not “break the spirit” of students attempting to master Latin.

In his thoroughness and attention to detail, Wheelock breaks the occasional spirit. Writing in 1956, he assumed that the mature student using his book would have a firm grounding in English grammar. When he writes, “The relative pronoun qui,quae,quod, as common in Latin as its English equivalent who/which/that, ordinarily introduces a subordinate clause and refers back to some noun or pronoun known as its antecedent,” he’s really presuming a lot of knowledge on the part of students. In 2014, some students have a flimsy grasp of what a noun is, let alone a pronoun, let alone a relative pronoun and its antecedent. Today’s students have, by and large, studied very little grammar. As I have frequently said, the teachers of today’s students never really studied English grammar.

This is all to say that my students like to give Wheelock a hard time. Sometimes they complain bitterly about him, but most often they regard him, almost affectionately, as a cantankerous old grandfather who blathers on about i-stems of the third declension and obscure uses of the subjunctive mood. We refer to him as Wheelock, or sometimes Frederic, and often our task is to tease out exactly what he’s trying to teach us.  What does he mean by saying most ablatives function adverbially, and why, oh why, does he include twelve different pronouns and all their endings in Chapter 9?

Today is Valentine’s Day, and my six lovely Latin 102 students gave me a few gifts. In the photo above, you’ll see among the gifts a picture of the man himself, Frederic Wheelock, gazing wisely and a little eerily on me, trying in a new century to translate his love of Latin to a new generation of students. You have to be a Latin student or teacher wrestling daily with Wheelock’s Latin to appreciate the hilarious perfection of that little gift.

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Joe Update

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Kathy

I wrote about my GED student Joe back in November, when I recounted our travails in trying to get him some extra time for the test, due to a learning disability originally diagnosed when he was nineteen. We weren’t able to get that accommodation. Joe retook portions of the test in December, without that time accommodation, hoping to bring his overall score up to passing. He needed 450 points. He earned 448 points.

Consequently, Joe is starting over this month. He needs to take all sections of the new, “improved” GED test, because none of his previous passing scores carry over. The new test is online, so he and our other students need to work on their computer skills, in addition to the academic and test-taking skills they need.

For example, the new test includes an essay portion, as did the old test. But the new test no longer requires the old five-paragraph essay, for which our students have practiced. Instead, it provides a reading of several paragraphs and then asks the student to analyze the reading. The student constructs a response of a couple of paragraphs agreeing or disagreeing with what he or she has read and types in this response. For the reading, the pre-writing, organizing, and the writing—for the whole process, in other words—the student gets 45 minutes.

Once again, these are by and large people who never learned to type and rely on public computers in the library for their email and other internet needs. Often they have learning disabilities and reading deficits. The students at the universities where I teach, in contrast, almost all grew up with computers in their homes and have owned their own computers for years. They have been typing essays and homework since they were little kids. Their reading, writing, and computer skills were handed to them as a birthright.

By the way, I never hear complaints like this among my GED students. They focus on their own failings and poor decisions beyond the most rigid and moralistic critic. They put their heads down and plow ahead. Fortunately, Joe is a determined and poised young man. “It wouldn’t make any sense for me to quit now,” he told us calmly. He’s planning to attend GED classes every day and begin all over again, from the beginning.

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I Am Beset by a Grammatical Dilemma

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Kathy

In the winter semester (they call it “spring,” but, um, no), I teach a writing seminar at an institution I’ll call the More Prestigious University, or MPU. It’s a choosy place, which selects students carefully based on grades and high SAT scores. A few years ago, before I started teaching there, I chatted with an MPU professor at a holiday party. He was complaining about a colleague who encouraged students to use the passive voice in their writing, of which he disapproved. He advised his students against the passive voice and was chagrined that they didn’t heed his advice. When I suggested that maybe his students didn’t understand the term, he sniffed,  “Of course students at MPU know what  passive voice is.”

Before I continue my story, let’s take a timeout to review passive voice, because I don’t expect every adult who’s been out of school for twenty years immediately to recall every grammatical construction. Here’s active voice: I teach a class at MPU. Here’s passive voice: A class at MPU is taught by me.

In active voice, the subject (I) is performing the action of the verb. In the second, the subject (class) is not performing the action, but is passively sitting around waiting to be taught. I hope you’ll notice a couple of things about those sentences. The first one is direct and clear, and the second is wordy and awkward. Moreover, passive voice lends itself to mealy-mouthed equivocation. You’ll frequently hear craven politicians say Mistakes were made (passive voice) instead of I made mistakes (active voice). Though passive voice isn’t incorrect and fits certain situations, it can become a bad habit.

Back to the story. Now that I’m teaching at MPU myself, I find that MPU students are inclined to this sort of thing: Students are expected to spend countless hours on homework and extracurricular activities, and for this reason their own interests are put aside in the hope that a higher grade will be attained and a more impressive resume will be created. Every verb in this unpleasant sentence is in passive voice: are expected, are put aside, will be attained, and will be created.

To address this issue, I always assign George Orwell’s powerful essay “Politics and the English Language,” which rails against verbosity, unnecessary euphemisms, equivocation, and passive voice. I spend a little time reviewing passive voice, cautioning my students to avoid it. They seem to catch on in class, but usually, to my frustration, continue to rely on it, padding their essay with unnecessary words.

This semester, I tried a new tack. After our discussion of George Orwell and a thorough (I thought) lesson on active and passive, I asked them to underline the passive voice verbs in their own first essay before they turned it in. As you’re probably guessing, they were unable to do this. They underlined bunches of active voice verbs while overlooking bunches of passive voice verbs. They don’t know the difference. That MPU prof at the holiday party was making a big assumption.

This brings up bunches of fascinating questions. I expect my students to explain, when we discuss this next week, that it’s much harder to find your own passive voice verbs (or comma splices or sentence fragments) than to identify them in a class exercise. How to move students from comprehending a concept in class to applying it? How often do we “cover” something in class, with no actual learning going on?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these and other questions. Should I spend more valuable time in class trying to teach them the grammar they should have learned in high school? Or, should I just mark the offending verbs in their papers, hoping that they’ll catch on? Should I lower their grades every time they slip a passive voice verb in their essays? Or, should I stop worrying about it because it’s A. a lost cause, or B. not really important?

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Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Snow

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Kathy

Dick Goddard

Here in Ohio we’re in the midst of an arctic vortex (they’re calling it), producing temperatures far colder than we’re accustomed to. It was around 10 degrees below zero most of yesterday. Schools and workplaces, including my husband’s, are closed today.  John views a day off, of course, not as an opportunity to kick back cozily at home, but to (what else) see a movie. He and my grownup son are soon to brave the cold in order to see Martin Scorsese’s new movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

Which reminds me. I recently ran across a poem I wrote for John one frigid evening thirty years ago, when our son was a baby. John had set out to see Raggedy Man, starring Sissy Spacek, sixty miles north to Cleveland from our Canton home. I am about to share this poem with you. You should know that at that time John worked at the Canton library, that he loves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches almost as much as movies, and, if you’re not from northeast Ohio,  that Dick Goddard is a legendary weatherman, who, at age 82, still forecasts regularly on Cleveland TV.

 

The weatherman Goddard said twenty below

with a dozen or two cubic inches of snow.

Al Roker agreed. (His opinion’s less credible,

but concurrence confirmed that the weather’d be dreadable.)

 

Our John’s heart was set on Raggedy Man,

but this movie required a trip to Cleveland.

It’s a city located on Erie, the lake,

And sometimes the weather there’s no piece of cake.

 

For Cleveland is girded by several snow belts,

And the snow that falls lingers, where elsewhere it melts.

The driving John dreaded; the snow and the ice

Make Route Double Seven not so very nice.

 

Still, Cinema called.  To see Sissy in 70,

Dolby, and Cinemascope just would be heavenly.

So he put on his hat and galoshes and gloves

and kissed Kath and Dougie goodbye, whom he loves.

 

On the way up to Cleveland, a town called The Plum,

of precipitation he saw not a crumb.

But departing the theater, a shock was in store:

The sidewalks, the streets, and the cars dressed in hoar.

 

On the slush-covered streets John’s Chevette forged ahead.

Wife Kathy, at home, to be nice, changed the bed.

In a cozy dry diaper Doug silently slept,

And Daddy instead while he slipped loudly wept.

 

Visibility nil, and traction without,

the driving so bad, it gave John some doubt.

For was it all worth it, the sixty-mile drive,

through which in foul weather, he may not survive?

 

For Cinema’s muse, for Sissy and Jean-Luc,

and Feddy and Rainer and Werner and the Duke,

he could lose it all:

the treats on the table and B. Village Mall,

 

R. Newman, and Dougie,  the rest of the family,

the Palace and orange juice and sandwiches (p.b.)?

But then John remembered—there’s also the laundry

and crying and spit-up and work at the library.

 

He realized quick when compared to a movie,

that life, sometimes good, isn’t always so groovy.

So now we all know, like the old postman poem,

Not rain, sleet, or snow will keep Ewing at home.

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Happy Childhoods

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Kathy

A couple of questions to consider:

What constitutes a happy childhood?

Did you have one?

How many people in the world have happy childhoods?

I was recently talking to someone who believes that he had an unequivocally happy childhood and that, moreover, “most people” have a happy childhood.

I said I probably didn’t. That is, I was happy some of the time, and I was certainly lucky compared to many millions of people on earth. But, seriously and honestly, I couldn’t say my childhood was happy overall. My household was too tense, too many people were mad or miserable at any particular time, and I was usually anxiously observant, trying to predict the next explosion or worrying about the last one.

Furthermore, I believe that since 80% of the world’s population earns less than $10 a day, most of the children of the world are not having a happy childhood. That is, they’re way worse off than I was, in that they’re likely hungry and thirsty a lot of the time and have little access to education and other advantages in life.  About half the world’s population lives in what is called “absolute poverty,” on less than $2.50 a day. (These dollar amounts, by the way, refer to buying power. You can’t use that “But it buys so much more in their country” argument.)

I know that people who are poor can have happy lives. That is, while doing without material goods, they can enjoy their families and their work. But lacking food, water, healthcare, shelter, and meaningful work precludes happiness. Moreover, living in dire poverty frequently also implies violence and humiliation and danger.

My happy childhood guy disagreed. While compassionate toward people suffering from malnutrition, war, and extreme poverty, he stuck to his argument that “most people” are happy and had a happy childhood.

I know it’s a stupid argument, because who can even define “happy”? I still want to know what you think, either about your own childhood or everybody else’s. Let me know.

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Documentaries and Delights

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Kathy

The Cinematheque offers unusual and interesting movies this weekend, which is, of course, its mission.

Frederick Wiseman

A documentary by Frederick Wiseman, At Berkeley, shows Thursday at 6:45 pm and Friday at 7:30 pm. Every year I teach a class on education reform at Case Western and show Wiseman’s brilliant 1968 doc High School to my students. Wiseman, now 83, sets his camera up and lets it roll, catching the quotidian doings of people and the institutions in which they operate: e.g., a state hospital for the insane, Titicut Follies (1967); Hospital  (1970); and Ballet (1995). Then, he edits down the footage ingeniously and lets the audience members draw their own conclusions about, in this case, the University of California at Berkeley—no Michael Moore proseletyzing here. Wiseman is brilliant, sardonic, and uncompromising. The down side is that, as in so many Wiseman films, the running time is long. 244 minutes long. There’s also a slightly higher admission price.

Niven, Cooper, Colbert

The Ernst Lubitsch films shown so far in the Cinematheque series have been delightful. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (Saturday at 5:15 and Sunday at 8:35) promises more delights. With stars Claudette Colbert, Gary Cooper and David Niven, and Billy Wilder as co-screenwriter, you can’t go wrong.

A third unique choice is another documentary, 1967’s Portrait of Jason. The biggest selling point for this film, in my book, is that director Ingmar Bergman called it the most extraordinary film he’d ever seen. That’s quite a testimonial. The Cinematheque flyer says the film. . .

“. . . was shot by indie giant Shirley Clarke in her Chelsea Hotel apartment during one marathon, 12-hour session that started at 9 pm on 12/2/66. Jason Holliday, a flamboyant, gay, 33-year-old African-American hustler and aspiring cabaret singer, recounts his tortured, troubled life for Clarke’s camera. He is drinking. Clarke continually goads Jason for more stories, more songs, more truth (was he making this stuff up?). Eventually his grandly theatrical façade shatters. This new restoration of Clarke’s cinéma vérité classic has a 100% ‘fresh’ rating on RottenTomatoes.com. ‘Says more about race, class, and sexuality than just about any movie before or since.’ -Village Voice.

See it on Saturday at 9:25 pm or Sunday at 6:30 pm.

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