VOX

Studs Terkel 1912-2008

2008-11-04T15:33:00.000-08:00

1988 was something of a crisis year for me. It was the year that things, to a certain extent, fell apart and I found myself a bit directionless and little more than perplexed about what to do next. Since 1983, I had labored under the idea that a life of social work was for me, as it was for my father (who didn't see May of that year) and my sister. Social work was the family business...or so I thought. A year at the BU School of Social Work (dad's alma mater) coupled with a field placement at the Brockton MSPCC brought into bold relief the idea that I was entirely unqualified for social work. A fervent belief in fighting for the uderdog can only get you so far; likewise for a punk's contrarian, anti-establishment philosophy. I had neither the stamina nor the emotional rigor for such a rigorous career. (Yes rigorous: more rigorous than anyone can imagine. Spend a day with a social worker sometime; accompany them on a 51A home investigation and wrestle with the real possiblity that, in order to save what's left of a child's life will require that child be removed from his parents. And after you've made your decision, go home and look in the mirror and tell me what you see.) When you don't enjoy what you do, when the stress bolts you to your chair, it's time to find another line of work.

But the folks at the MSPCC seemed to like me. Some had worked with my father, who was well-known in Boston's allied health circles, and grafted a little too much of him on to me. Still, they felt the loss when I pulled out of the field, and took time from a late afternoon's work to give me a goodbye party.

One case worker I was close to, a Deadhead named Liz, gave me a copy of Terkel's The Great Divide as a going away gift. I've received far too many books as gifts, but of all them, this one was my favorite. The subject, like many of Terkel's books, was the testimony to Americans at work. Terkel, perhaps not the greatest listener our country has produced (Joseph Mitchell deserves that title), was certainly the most emphathetic. And that empathy brought out the dignity of those engaged in the struggle. One of the things that drew me to social work was the part of the job that required you listen to people tell their stories. I like listening to stories, I like listening to people discus their day-to-day existence. How a person lives his life is what makes all the difference, and no one was better at capturing that than Studs Terkel. Reading this book in that crisis year made feel less alone. It also made me realize that drifitng, such as it is, passes, but dignity remains.

I am obsessed with grandfathers of a certain kind: not blood relatives, neccessarily, but men who have gone on before and paved their distinctive way with their distinctive style. Men who led singular lives, men who gave me to understand that a life on one's terms, not only was possible, but mandatory. Orson Welles is one such grandfather; Bob Dylan another; the retired highschool teachers I presently have the pleasure working with represent several other grandfathers. And Studs Terkel represents one of the finest grandfathers of the lot. Confident, passionate, ebullient, affirming, and wonderfully unassuming, Terkel was a punk before Joe Strummer, a crank before Hitchens, the Nightfly before Donald Fagen sat down at the keyboard, and the historian that the mad Joe Gould envisioned, but could never become.

The world is not colder now that Studs has left us. We are all the more warmer for his having lived among us for so long and so well.

I'm Just Saying...

2008-10-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

I'd like to see Joan Didion take a hard look at the coverage of the Diane Wilkerson scandal, and the Ted Stevens scandal, and then present her findings, much in the way she reported, famously, on the 'wilding' episode in NYC back in the 1980s. The results would be fascinating. Both Mass. state senator Wilkerson and Alaskan senator Stevens have been caught red-handed on the take, although the media is reporting that Stevens will not serve any jail time. Will wilkerson receive a similar public verdict?

What are the respective narratives going to be?

As the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit always said, "It will be interesting to see what happens."

Opinions I'd Love to Hear

2008-10-13T18:24:00.001-07:00

Who is this man?

And what would he think of this person; or this person; or even this person? Of course, this person would possibly bring him to the brink of despair.

Times like these call for a man like I.F. Stone.

Open Your Pie-hole! A Review

2008-10-08T18:02:00.000-07:00

ABC's "Pushing Daisys" is one sufficiently twisted show.

It's All on Beckett

2008-10-06T04:28:00.000-07:00

if...If...IF...If the Red Sox lose this series (and I'm thinking that won't happen), but if they do, then this one, sadly, is on Josh Beckett. Last night, Beckett was a shell of his 2007 Playoff self, slogging through five innings and 106 pitches. After going up 3-1 in the bottom of the second, thanks to a jaw-dropping gaff by Hunter and Kendricks that allowed three Sox runs from an Ellsbury bloop SINGLE that shut off TVs all over southern California, Beckett gave up a two-run bomb to Angels catcher Mike Napoli in the top of third. Had Beckett shut the Angels down, we would have been looking at an entirely different game; the Angels will would have been broken.

That game should never have gone 12 innings; it should never have been 3-3, 4-3, or 4-4; the Sox had little offense last night, while the Angles stranded sixteen runners. At the beginning of the playoffs I said it was the Angels World Series to lose. In the meantime, they have shown themselves to be quite soft.

High Art...for the People!

2008-10-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

Harvard polymath, Marjorie Garber, has an interesting article in the Ideas section of today's Boston Globe. In it, Garber made a considered and persuasive argument for universities to step up and become patrons of the arts. In this visual age, the visual arts need more representation in our colleges through the development of academic programs, artists in residence, and the general display of visual arts across our campuses. In other words, Garber calls for our univeristies to court artists much in the same way that they currently court physicists, biologists, political scientists and mathematicians.

She may very well be right on this point, and I'm in general agreement with her. I was particularly keen on her statement of current partnerships with other colleges. As Garber states, "Increasingly, universities and colleges have developed partnerships with conservatory programs, as both Tufts and Harvard have done with the New England Conservatory of Music, offering programs that combine dedicated training in the arts with some elements of a broad general education. While terrific for those students who choose them, in effect these programs still outsource advanced work in the arts, rather than integrating it into the central life of the university." Partnerships, however, can go further than this. If universities like Harvard and Tufts move forward and become full-fledged patrons of the arts, why couldn't they then turn arouond and establish partnerships with the state's community colleges?

Harvard would be well served by granting community college students access to their patronage by providing these students with an opportunity to view the sculpture displays, or attend a lecture given by Pedro Almodovar. Many community colleges have art programs. Partnering with institutions like Harvard with give our students to expand their base of knowledge, and let a little more light into their lives.

Drewnesia

2008-10-04T06:08:00.000-07:00

I can't be sure, but wasn't there something about J.D. Drew that pissed everyone off this summer? I have this vague feeling of hostility coming from my car radio, above-average hysteria bleeting from the mouths of sports radio hosts, but I can't quite place the exact reason for the anger. Hmm...let me see...nope: I got nothing. I don't know what it is, but I just can't seem to remember anything about Drew's 2008 regular season performance. In fact, all I can remember about him is the two-run homer he hit in the top of the ninth early this morning.

Which is funny because I can only remember Drew's grand slam in game 6 of the ALCS LAST October. The rest is trivia.

Odd what we remember; or how quickly we forget.

A Wink's not as Good as a Nod

2008-10-03T18:12:00.000-07:00

Of course Sarah Palin exceeded expectations in last night's debate. She was too crammed full of over-rehearsed talking points not to. No surprises there. The surprises came after the debate, from the throngs of pundits who were generally nonplussed by her performance. Most responsible conservative talking heads had trouble generating any enthusiam over her upbeat and folksy nonanswers.

That's all well and good, but it was her winking to the camera that bugged me. Who in God's name wants a Vice President that looks less like a stateswoman and more like the local Amway rep?

Is the Second Time Sweeter?

2007-10-31T18:29:00.000-07:00

Well, yes, of course it is. Now you have something to compare it to.

Nice to have an angst-free season for a change. I'm not one of these martyrs looking to fill my life with undue suffering and misery, believing that we MUST play the Georgie Boys EVERY playoff, else the season means nothing.

Basta with the Yankees. Keep the rivalry; KEEP MIKE LOWELL!; lose the inferiority complex.

More obvious observations:

Tim McCarver is the all-time worst color man. He makes Joe Morgan look like Hawk Harrelson. Let Remy an Announcer Boy call the game, and have Lenny Clarke report from Canvass Alley.
Interesting that FOX did not put the camera on Stephen King after he slammed them for their excessive commercial time that allowed him to read 27 pages during game breaks, as opposed to his standard 18 during NESN broadcasts.
I thought Travis Hafner was supposed to be good. No? Did I not get the memo?
Dig the videoblogs posted by the Globe columnists after every playoff game.
I could do Tom Caron's job. Three-quarters of Red Sox Nation could do Tom Caron's job.
The Dropkick Murphy's are the Mighty Might Bostones, without the humor.
A-Rod: that's some premium scumbag right there. Isn't that right Matt Noyes? "Yessir, No doubt about it, you better believe it!"
We'll never see Papelbon dance with the empty Bud Light case on his head.
Is there a more shrill, hysteria-filled, inadequate morning drive show than Dennis & Callahan?
Did I mention the SOX must SIGN Mike Lowell? No? Well, HEY THEO: SIGN MIKE LOWELL, WILL YA!? FER CRISSAKE!
Yahoo! Yahoo! Go big time, Go Sox!

Publish and Perish

2007-01-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

Christopher Shea writes on this subject in the Ideas section of today’s Sunday Globe. According to the findings of the Modern Language Association, colleges and universities want faculty to publish books. Not journal articles, not critical reviews, books. So junior, überambitious faculty are forced to crank out the pages in order to obtain that brassiest of all brass rings, tenure.

As an undergraduate, I squeezed my profs dry trying to find out what I had to do to secure such a college-level teaching position. Publications, I’d ask, What’s that all about? “You’re granted a sabbatical and you go off and research an something in Dickens you’ve always been interested in. Hopefully, you can take all that work and turn it into an article.”

In other words, if you published, great! But if you didn't, it wasn't the end of your career. At least not at the state university I attended. Also, sabbatical time could be devoted to something as impractical as developing a new course, or visiting other writing centers in order to come up with a plan to revamp yours. Twenty years ago, the drive to publish was no way near as rabid as it is today. In fact, two of my greatest professors deliberately chose a career paths in which publishing was not the intent. For them, the real work went down in the classroom.

The emphasis on book-length monographs is excessively absurd. Today we have English departments rife with jumpy-nervous thirty-somethings scrambling to convince some university press to print their 400-page exegesis on the ontological significance of footwear in The Wings of the Dove. A treatise, by the way, that no publisher has the slightest interest in publishing, no library the funds to buy, and no student, not one, the time to read.

Embedded in this trend is an ugly truth: flooding the market with critcal dreck is more important that what goes on in the classroom. What matters is for a university to have a crop of neophytes with X-number of books to their credits. The page count goes up and the quality of classroom instruction risks going down. Many students now realize they are low priority for Professor Sunshine. There are many causes to why our colleges are producing woefully under prepared students, but this seems to me to be the most unneccesary.

Once upon a time, I had dreams of teaching at a university. But after ten years of adjunct hell I felt damn lucky when I landed a job at a community college. To many of "The Priests of Academe," that makes me some kind of intellectual humunculus. Sadly, those jumpy-nervous thirty-somethings do not realize the reason I look so distorted is because they can only see me through the confines of their Habitrail.

Here's Hoping...

2007-01-05T10:05:00.000-08:00

For the first time in, say, sixteen years, I feel optimistic about our state government. I choose to be optimistic and hope that Patrick grabs hold of some of those goals he's been reaching for. I hope that he will prove the cynical talking heads wrong and bring about effective change. I hope that he will breathe life into the public education system. I hope he will encourage new businesses to set up shop in the Commonwealth. I hope that the thousands of our citizens he brought in from the cold will engage with civic life in a meaningful way. I hope we all stop kvetching about our problems and start talking about solutions.

Here's to hope.

Who is this Man?

2006-12-27T20:54:00.000-08:00

And what is he writing?

Old, but not in the Way

2006-12-27T20:47:00.000-08:00

Today’s Boston Globe has this article on older college professors “clogging the pipeline,” that is, preventing younger faculty with new perspectives and fresh ideas from being hired at the elite schools. This is an interesting explanation for the lack of job opportunities in the academy, but it’s only part of the picture.

Bostonist responds, speculating that this issue may have serious implications for the economic future of the state. If you take a look at how the lack of hiring effects the state colleges and universities, you get a starker glimpse of what’s to come.

The lack of new hires is a problem that extends to all colleges at all levels. I’ve confronted it at all the schools I’ve worked at, which run the gambit from prominent four-year universities, to smaller state colleges down to the vital and woefully under funded community colleges.

While it is true that the some of the older members of a given faculty can stay on past their allotted forty years, many more do retire. And these retirements create openings, right?

Wrong.

Consider this: When I was part-time, I taught at a state college where it was mandated, by the state, that for every four full-time faculty that retire, the college could hire one new faculty member. One. That leaves three full-time slots unfilled, three full-time course-loads broken up and divvied out among adjunct faculty who are paid less per course than the full-timers, and who receive no benefits.

So there are fewer full-time members in any given department to handle the bulk of the tedious but necessary committee work and academic governance. This has a direct effect on the growth of an institution and the quality of education the students receive. And this will have an effect on our state in the long run, given that most students who graduate from state institutions remain in state to work and raise families.

What kind of future are we looking at if our state colleges and universities are forced to do more with less?

A Good Move on Patrick's Part

2006-12-20T04:46:00.000-08:00

Today's Globe has this article on Deval Patrick tapping BSC president, Dana Mohler-Faria as his education advisor.

Smart move.

Having worked at BSC for six years, I've witnessed Mohler-Faria's committment to state higher education. As far as college presidents go, I found him to be the most accessable and earnest. I've worked for too many colleges that had remote, silent leaders at the top and have witnessed the effect that has on the college as a whole. But under Mohler-Faria, BSC has a clear purpose and direction. The joint effort between BSC, UMass Dartmouth, Bristol CC, Massasoit CC and Cape Cod CC referenced in the article is called CONNECT - a project that points toward a positive future for the way state colleges will work in the future.

Of course, while the jury is still out on Patrick, I've been encouraged by the appointments that he has made so far.

Paul Nelson and Writer's Silence

2006-12-19T18:01:00.000-08:00

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone , (1016/1017), Neil Strauss contributes an excellent profile of the writer and rock avatar, Paul Nelson. Nelson, who I first read in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, was arguably the genre’s greatest critic. To know Nelson’s work is to understand where Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus come from.

Nelson died this past July at the age of sixty-nine. Strauss gives us a clear portrait of a man who lived for art. But here’s the part of his life that fascinates me - as adamant and passionate a writer he was, for the last fifteen years of his life, Nelson produced almost no new writing. After leaving Rolling Stone in the early 1980s, he produced a handful of pieces before going to work at a Greenwich Village video store, opting for a job where he didn’t have to think. It’s this decision that puts him in line with another quagmire of a writer, Joseph Mitchell, who, after submitting “Joe Gould’s Secret,” never published another word in The New Yorker or elsewhere. And like Mitchell, Nelson often told friends that he was writing a screenplay, (in Mitchell’s case a novel) - a work that no one ever saw.

What is it that causes a writer to go silent? The cheap answer is that he has run out of things to say. For people who buy into that theory, suicide is often the next step, as Mishima demonstrated with impeccable theatricality. But unlike one former colleague, I do not find any nobility in taking one’s life. Mitchell mustn’t have either, since he lived into his nineties. Also, there is evidence that both continued to write…it’s just that they stopped submitting work for publication. Nelson kept on accepting offers to write for various magazines. Some pieces he finished others he didn’t. Perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to complete a project, or, like Orson Welles, he developed a deep-seated anxiety about how the new material would fare when compared to the great works that came before.

But this is all speculation on my part.

As someone who does not believe in writer’s block, I tend to search for a reason that is less Romantic. Strauss finds an apt metaphor of the gunslinger, the person who knows the world is changing and opts not to go along with the changes. As far a Nelson is concerned, the tipping point may well have been the editorial edict for shorter album reviews that became the standard form in the mid 80s. If that’s case, then it’s not a question of having nothing to say, it’s a matter of integrity. For Nelson, it seemed to be more about sticking to his principles than conforming to the latest trend. And while one can argue the self-destructive aspect of that action, you have to admire the guy for taking a stand.

You can read some samples of Nelson’s writing for Rolling Stone here.

Finally, in honor of Mr. Nelson, no semicolons were used in this post.

War is over, if you want it

2006-12-17T20:19:00.000-08:00

This time of year, there are plenty of trinkets and impulse items that I refuse to buy; most of which sit upon the shelves of my neighborhood Shaper Image. People have attempted to sell me on all kinds of devices and fad gadgets over the years, but when it comes to me and what’s in my wallet, let’s just say that it’s a bit of a trick to separate one from the other.

The same can be said for certain ideas that various people trundle out during the holiday season, ideas meant to provoke you and me into buying a round trip ticket on their bandwagon. The War on Christmas is one such idea. Over the past two years, too many people have offered me this idea at bargain basement prices. But I won’t go for it. Not last year, not this year, not next year, not ever. No way, no how.

When it comes to this War on Christmas, consent is not only manufactured, but the entire idea is pure invention. Other people, in other forums have covered this issue fairly well. Since this is my little corner of Blog World, I will add a brief comment.

Now, I confess that I am one of those people who use the phrase “Happy Holidays” from the end of November to the end of December. And I have used this phrase long before I ever heard of a war on Christmas or political correctness or the need to be respectful of other traditions. My reason for using “Happy Holidays” is simple: I say it to friends and colleagues who I see for the last time around December 20th and I won’t see again until, say, January 20th. By my count, two holidays will have come and gone by the time I see them again, hence, “Happy Holidays.”

Simple as that.

Besides, I can’t get that worked up over a little positive interaction with a fellow human being. I can’t download moral outrage for someone who wishes me happiness. There are too many people out in the world wishing all of us all sorts of mean and nasty things. I’ll take any moment of kindness, no matter how fleeting or half-hearted, I can get.

Another Voice...

2006-12-17T14:40:00.000-08:00

...of reason?

Or more white noise to feed the frenzy?