Art deco lobby set for Grand Hotel (1932, dir. Edmund Goulding) Set design by Cedric Gibbons.
The culture that inhabits us - and by us, I mean Christians - is a subtle and seductive one. It tempts us to believe we are free of place. It tempts us to believe that we do not have the time to do what needs to be done, so we must constantly hurry. These temptations are often assumed to be congruent with the gospel imperatives to have no permanent home. But in the process we lose the visibility necessary to be witnesses to the One who made it possible to be Christians.
In the first place, it is true that I turned 40 this year, and it is equally true that, for the 40th time, my writing did not make it into the New Yorker’s “Forty Under Forty” issue, or Granta’s “Forty Under Forty” issue, or the LA Times’s “Forty Faces Under Forty” issue, or the Guardian’s annual “Forty American Writers Under Forty to Watch”, or even McSweeney’s “Forty Writers Under Forty Who Live Near Us in Brooklyn and We Hang Out With Quite a Bit or At Least Would Like To”. There are many reasons for that, not the least of which is that they are all shitty magazines dedicated to the death of writing and literature. Would I like to have been included? Of course. We all want external validation of our years of sweat and toil. But to suggest my exclusion from these lists in the last year of my eligibility for them somehow affected my judging of the Paradigm day school Three Under Three writing contest is not just baseless slander, it is armchair psychology of the very worst kind.
There are more Linux distros on a single Linux Format disc than Microsoft has versions of Windows. But they’re all pretty much the same thing warmed over. Only the clever and cute names distinguish one distro from another. Once a Linux For Dummies book was published I started to lose interest in it.
When I see diversity-casting in commercials—two bland Caucasians waving beer cans at a TV, or at a driving up to a Taco Bell window, accompanied, somehow, by a handsome black guy—the word that pops into my head is “segregation”! I can’t help it. The ruse is so obvious, a counterfactual posing as a home truth. Then I watch the black guy for signs that he shares my disquiet, and sometimes I think I can see it in his eyes, a veiled chagrin at both his company and the bald contrivance that roped him into it. He seems to be asking himself, By what unholy mix of demographic calculation and liberal-wish projection have I ended up wedged in the front seat of a little car between these two pinkish fellows? In their morbidly color-conscious color-blindness, these commercials are like the stereotypical white guy who thinks some slogan has flung him to the magical land beyond race—Peter Riegert in “Animal House,” yelling “Hey Otis, my man!” onto a dance floor packed with the skeptical black people of 1962. By pretending it isn’t so hard, he just reminds you how hard it really is.
We have become accustomed to thinking of educational failure as a function of a teacher’s lack of effort, talent, or training. But sometimes the problem lies specifically in what we train teachers to do. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we teach reading and writing to some of our most vulnerable students.Every day, for two hours a day, I led my young students through Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop. I was trained not to address my kids as “students” or “class” but as “authors” and “readers.” We gathered “seed ideas” in our Writer’s Notebooks. We crafted “small moment” stories, personal narratives, and memoirs. We peer edited. We “shared out.” Gathered with them on the rug, I explained to my 10-year-olds that “good writers find ideas from things that happened in their lives.” That stories have “big ideas.” That good writers “add detail,” “stretch their words,” and “spell the best they can.”
Teach grammar, sentence structure, and mechanics? I barely even taught. I “modeled” the habits of good readers and “coached” my students. What I called “teaching,” my staff developer from Teacher’s College dismissed as merely “giving directions.” My job was to demonstrate what good readers and writers do and encourage my students to imitate and adopt those behaviors.
In short, I presided over the reading and writing equivalent of a Cargo Cult.
The typical Romanian driver is a man of faith. He sees the road as it is — a densely congested, shattered series of uneven concrete blocks — but does not let the sordid reality obscure the promise of what it could be: a ribbon of silken asphalt winding from horizon to horizon, without another car in sight, if only he could get past the moron in front of him. And, he feels, God will reward those who put their faith in Him, floor it and swing out on a blind curve. Look in any truck or taxi and you will find a little icon of a saint dangling from the rear view mirror. This is basically an admission that the driver does not expect to survive without sustained and direct divine intervention, something that I will find easier to believe after returning home from this road trip.
livelymorgue:Dec. 21, 1933: From the Mid-Week Pictorial. Americans visiting Paris celebrated the end of Prohibition in the United States in a “real two-fisted manner,” its original caption stated. Photo: The New York TimesBottoms up!