Monday, March 29, 2010

Point Omega - Don DeLillo

Whenever you are filled with ennui and are hungering for some heavy irony to lighten the load, no one is better to read than Don DeLillo. Thanks to Andy Sell, I discovered White Noise toward the end of my teaching career. I immediately convinced the department to buy enough copies to cover my CCB classes and started using it to end the year. Seniors in high school, especially smart ones, seem to come pre-wired to think postmodernistically. White Noise, combined with a post modern movie like Wag the Dog or The Truman Show, puts a nice twist on the end of the year. It also set my kids up for the end of the year showing of Waiting for Guffman and the good joke about My Dinner With Andre that I hoped brought the whole year of class full circle.

If I was still teaching, Point Omega would be a nice addition to my curriculum. I don't think plot is particularly important in a novel comprised mostly of cultural one-liners like this one, but I'll bring you up to speed anyway.

An avant garde filmmaker wants to do a one-take ninety minute "interview" filmed with just a talking head in front of a wall--he's already picked out the perfect wall--of Richard Elster, a one-time consultant for the defense department who lent a philosophical perspective to war-gaming before he ended his service. Elster is hesitant about the proposition and spends a lot of time in the desert talking profundities with the hopeful documentarian. Half way through this extended discussion, Elster's daughter, Jessica, shows up adding her own perspective and providing a little potential romance to the proceedings.

Nothing hugely significant happens until Jessica vanishes. DeLillo never definitively lets us know what has become of her, but the whole novel is framed on either end by a performance art thingee at MOMA where they are screening Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in super slow motion so that it takes 24 hours for a full showing. The shower scene, for instance, is strung out frame by grisly frame. With this kind of prologue and epilogue it is relatively safe to assume that Jessica has met with some grotesquely foul play.

But the real reward of this terrific little book (it is only 117 pages long) is the postmodern fun DeLillo has wondering about what makes some things more real than others. Is there any REAL difference between, borrowing from White Noise, the most photographed barn in America and a photograph of the most photographed barn in America, or a photograph of someone taking a photograph of the most photographed barn in America? That's the kind of stuff I love to read and think about. Plots bore me.

I like the way DeLillo makes his readers wade through aesthetic layers. "Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress. . ." "The film made him feel like someone watching a film. The meaning of this escaped him. He kept feeling things whose meaning escaped him."

He goes from this to the larger idea of the effort it takes to see the moments in front of you.

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing.

People now and then casting shadows on the screen.

He began to think of one thing's relationship to another. This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. This was the departure from the departure. The original movie was fiction, this was real.

Meaningless, he thought, but maybe not.


"Meaningless, he thought, but maybe not." That basically describes the worlds DeLillo creates. Come to think of it, it also describes the world I live in.

This kind of SEEING leads to a kind of sanctification of each moment. And this thinking gets its start from Teilhard de Chardin, at least that is what DeLillo says. When I taught I evoked Teilhard a lot simply to get a rise out of my students. He was a kind of renegade priest who spent a good part of his life in China (N.B. I'm not being scholarly here, so don't necessarily trust what I say. Being too lazy to research so as to guarantee accuracy, I am just spouting off the top of my head.). To my way of thinking Teilhard bridged the gap between science and religion when it came to evolution. He postulated that since energy does not dissipate, it must be in a continual act of perfecting itself. In a Jungian leap he suggested that the earth, in addition to a biosphere, stratosphere, and ionosphere, had a noosphere, a gathering point for the collective thoughts of man and that noosphere is what we call God. As simplistic as the explanation is, it is still thrilling to think of.

The Point Omega then is like the noosphere. Because if each thing is in the process of perfecting itself on its way toward the noosphere and Godhood, then each moment is at any given point along that progression the most ideal expression of that moment at that particular time. It is the Point Omega.

Since nothing much happens, at least nothing we can be sure about, in this novel, it is a collection of Point Omegas. Each no more or less significant than the last. It is a fun idea to think about and would make a nifty essay question.

There is one more thing about DeLillo that I love. He writes great sentences.

The door slid open and there was a stir of mild traffic at the far end of the floor, people getting on the escalator, a clerk swiping credit cards, a clerk tossing items into large sleek museum bags. Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not the movies.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

LINCOLN - Fred Kaplan

I have a little black book--a habit I picked up from Gerry Oehm and my son Nate--in which I write the titles of books I mean to read, cool web sites I've heard tell of, interesting quotes, etc. Whenever I go to The Tattered Cover to check out books--usually the beginning of each month--I bring along my little book. When I buy a book off my list, I check it off. I've learned long ago that while I can remember long passages from books I've read, I can't remember the titles, or much of the content for that matter, and so I end up buying the same books. If I check it off I can guard against that rather expensive habit. After I've actually read the book I usually put in a comment--something as cryptic as a smiley face or as long as a sentence or two.

Occasionally a book will jump off the racks at me that I haven't written in my book. I trust my memory enough to assume that the book has jumped at me because I had read something or heard something about it that made an impression. Therefore, I usually end up buying the titles that fall in this category.

Lincoln The Biography of a Writer is such a book. When I saw the book a month ago I remembered that Obama had taken it with him to Hawaii and I had a vague memory (one that has turned out to be false) that it was featured on "The Daily Show," so I bought it.

Fred Kaplan takes an interesting approach to Lincoln. Following him from his log splitting youth to four days before his assasination, the book single-mindedly looks at Lincoln's life through the prism of his writing. The result is a totally different look at a great man. It devotes as much attention to Lincoln's formative essays, short stories, and poems when he was a young man and fledgling state congressman, as it does to the writings we all know about. You know, the ones that are chiseled over and around his statue.

I'm not sure I like the result of this approach. A lot of Lincoln's writing was sophomoric at best and downright libelous at worst. Kaplan spends a lot of time analyzing many of the young congressman's anonymous satirical pieces attacking his political opponents. It is disturbing to realize that Lincoln's use of spin was no less deceitful and hateful than a lot of the stuff we hear on Fox News.

Lincoln comes away from all of this not so much as a great man as an opportunistic pragmatist who happened to have a way with words. A man who always seemed to be coming out of a severe bout with depression. A man who married into relative wealth and position, but who took every opportunity he could to be away from his bi-polar wife.

Having learned all of this about Lincoln, if I lived in 1860 I'm not sure I could have voted for the guy.

You can tell I'm not wild about this book. It just reads too much like some weird doctoral dissertation analyzing how specific lines from Shakespeare inform Lincoln's published letters, speeches, and essays.

For example, Kaplan examines Lincoln's nearly suicidal reaction to Ann Rutledge's death:

All the self-tormenting demons of depressive melancholy that were deep in his consciousness, the languages of Gothic and Romantic despair from Gray's churchyard to Byron's "Darkness," had to be part of his brooding self-flagellation. He had indeed been reading Byron that autumn . . . Shakespeare's "Hamlet" was an available corollary. . .


The idea that his grief was in part a product of his reading of Byron and that his suicidal impulses were inspired by Hamlet seems something of a stretch to me. I guess now that I no longer make my living by analyzing things to death, I don't enjoy seeing others do it as much as I used to.

I'm going to go read something fun.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Teaching Rosen about logic

Mike Rosen's column, "Teaching teachers about pay," (The Denver Post March 11, 2010)starts with the following paragraph.

A familiar complaint from teachers and their unions is that their compensation isn't fair or right, and that others whose work is far less "important" are paid more.


To illustrate his point he cites the example of a "semi-literate" football player pulling down $10 million per, while a teacher (presumably fully literate) makes only $30,000. The column, in typical Rosen fashion, keeps getting more absurd from there.

Listen Mike, I don't know what teachers you've been hanging out with, but teachers have a multitude of complaints much more familiar than the one you chose to highlight.

In a recent Harris Interactive Poll, over 40,000 teachers were asked to list their concerns. School reform and student achievement headed the list. Compensation came in number three, but not in the same whiny fashion you suggest.

The last time I checked, concern about the off the charts pay for professional athletes is not the exclusive property of the National Education Association. I bet there are a lot of owners who share our outrage.

Like his smugly sophomoric headline suggests, Rosen goes on to explain to all of us greedy educators why this pay discrepancy exists. We live in a market economy he impatiently states. ". . .the forces of supply and demand make these determinations."

Thanks Mike. But then he offers another illustration. Water is necessary for life and can be had relatively cheaply (tell that to some of your readers in the Sahara, or in Nevada), while diamonds have virtually no practical value yet are worth a fortune. It is all about scarcity.

I understand, but his analogy breaks down. I guess the teachers are like the water, necessary for life, and the diamonds are like the football players, of no value. But this is not analogous to the situation in public education. Teachers aren't the product of education, students are. So wouldn't the water really be like students and the teachers really be like the civil engineers who create the means to deliver the water? Would you like that water delivery system to be ruled by the laws of supply and demand?

Rosen adds fuel to the fire when he says that there is a surplus of teachers waiting to step into one of the 7 million teaching jobs in this country and virtually tens of millions of people who would be capable of taking over a classroom; therefore, since there are precious few people who could be pro quarterbacks, we have a perfectly understandable pay discrepancy.

If this argument were valid CEO's of the largest investment banks should be making approximately the same salary as, say, a high school advanced placement teacher. I mean there must be plenty of MBAs out there just waiting to fill in the next vacancy at Goldman-Sachs and judging by CEOs' performances the last couple of years, there are also tens of millions of us who could step in and screw it up just as badly.

So why doesn't it work that way? BECAUSE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WON'T WORK IF THEY ARE GOVERNED BY THE RULES OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND! Neither will fire departments, police departments, or public works departments. Would anyone really like to live in a society where the fire department sets up charges based on supply and demand? I'm not an economist, but it seems to make sense that for the marketplace to "set the rates" for public education there must be some variability in supply and demand and the ratio between the two. It doesn't work that way in public schools. Educators have no control on demand and even less on supply.

Rosen leaves his argument at this point and sets out to prove that when it comes to pay, teachers have nothing to complain about. In Jefferson County for example, the salary schedule tops out at "more than $81,000." As much as that? I can't imagine why a Ph.D. with over thirty years of professional experience would be displeased with a salary like that.

Yeah, Mike. I know we have good health insurance and a wonderful retirement plan (a plan that Rosen attacks every chance he gets). On the other hand if the most I can look forward to after thirty years is "more than $81,000," I need a great retirement plan. After all, I'll bet my 401K looks piddling compared to Goldman-Sach's compensation package for top executives.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Great Coffee and Pizza Scandal

Within a week's span The Denver Post went from extolling the heroism of the Deer Creek Middle School teacher who risked his life disarming a deranged shooter to being aghast at the information that school districts in the Denver area were being profligate with tax payers' money by lavishing their teachers with things like coffee and pizza ("Extracurricular costs," February 28.2010). Three of the districts combined spent $8,300 at Starbucks. Another $113,000 was spent on pizza. The Post ended an editorial on the subject a few days later by affirming that "taxpayers are rightly tired of waste, and even abuses at the margins can hurt efforts to govern responsibly."

What do you want to bet that at the inevitable district get together honoring the Deer Creek hero the taxpayers will get soaked for cookies and lemonade?

Speaking of which, Post columnist Tina Griego wrote recently about Denver businessman Charles Lerch who had set up annual cash awards for the best teachers in Denver Public Schools. According to Griego, the reception honoring the 52nd consecutive class of nominees was held in the ad building with, in lieu of champagne and caviar, lemonade, sandwiches, and cookies. Each winner would rake in $800 with another $650 for the school. Since it was such a special occasion, there was even a photographer present to take individual portraits.

Isn't that about the most depressing thing you have ever heard? The winners will probably get photo packets in their mail boxes along with a form asking how many wallet sized snapshopts they'd like.

How do you get great teachers into the profession and how do you keep them? I don't think it is by tempting them with more money, especially in increments of $800. I think it is by somehow affording them the kind of professional respect that would move shocking revelations about Starbucks and pizza from the front page to the back of the paper where they belong. It is by admitting sometimes in schools there are many triumphs, heroic and otherwise, that warrant champagne and caviar--at least something classier than plastic cups filled with Crystal Lite and trays of cookies from the local Safeway.

That's why I am skeptical of pay for performance plans and merit pay and any other attempt to use market principles to improve education. Don't get me wrong. I would love to have been better compensated. I hate the fact that my 401K is not as big as I deserve, but that has little to do with why I became a teacher.

When I played school on our porch in Estes Park, Colorado, I was much more concerned with getting Ricky and Peggy Carmack to behave themselves than I was with compensation. And when I was student teaching for Frank Phelps at Alameda High School my attitude hadn't changed much. I was twenty-one years old and I just loved the way it felt to be in front of a classroom talking with a bunch of kids who seemed to find me fascinating. What could be better than that? As for the money? That, like everything else in my life, would take care of itself.

And what about the money? How much are we talking about? Most of the merit pay plans and pay for performance schedules end up doling out something like $2,500 on the top end. Are you seriously trying to tell me that I would have been a better, harder working, more efficient teacher with the promise of an extra twenty-five hundred bucks? It wouldn't have impressed me. After all, I thought the $6,300 I was going to earn at my first official teaching job was all the money in the world.

The idea that the deciding factor in choosing a career in teaching could be the promise of an extra $2,500 is depressing at best and horrifying at worst. I mean if you are going to be mercenary you should try setting your sights a little higher, like maybe on the credit default swap department at Goldman-Sachs.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Juxtaposition

Yesterday was nothing if not an exercise in juxtaposition.

I'm back to doing my handyman thing, so yesterday found Bud and I busily remodeling a basement furnace room for the Purvis family. The bulk of our time was spent framing a couple of closets, putting up dry wall and puzzling over how to get an overhead flourescent fixture to work when you flip the wall switch. We will both spend a goodly amount of time this weekend pondering that one.

I could tell I have finally arrived as a handyman because I shared in Bud's enthusiasm over a new gizmo that will strip wires like a breeze. Not only that, but I have become a two driver worker. I put a drill bit in my Milwaukee driver and a phillips head bit in my DeWalt and happily screwed two-by-fours together into frames without having to keep changing bits. It was great.

I knocked off early because Kathie and I had to be at her mother's place by four-thirty for the March Birthday Extravaganza. Ruth Ellen even reminded Kathie not to wear her usual tattered jeans for the occasion. Evidently the residents at River Point are not aware that tattered jeans are high style nowadays. Oh well, soon enough we will all end up wearing shiny jumpsuits if we live long enough.

First we had dinner in their lovely dining room. The salad was crisp, the chicken dish with angel hair pasta was better than I expected it to be, and this nice lady kept walking around refilling our wine glasses.

Since all the birthday celebrants and their guests were seated at the front table, I was able to look out over the array of old people eating dinner. A lot of them were bent over and it took them an awfully long time to eat, being careful to chew every bite. The overall level of conversation in the room was interrupted from time to time by coughing spells and an occasional "excuse me" when a walker butted into someone's chair. In a sense it was a preview of things to come. In fact I remember commenting to Kathie on the way over that we were becoming a cute older couple. Basically, it was a terribly depressing view from the front table.

After awhile though it began to take on the feeling of college dorm life only without the messy hair and all nighters. There were two guys at the table adjacent to ours and I could tell right away that these two were the stars of the whole joint. One of the gentlemen wore a crisply starched white Gatsby shirt with a gold chain and as he walked around the room tables would stop what they were doing to say hello and engage in repartee. We found out about the other gentleman's talent when we went up to Ruth Ellen's place after dinner to rest up before the flute concert at 6:45. See, I told you this was an extravaganza.

The main reason we went to Ruth Ellen's apartment was to see the two foot tall Michelle Obama doll dressed in her inaugural gown that Ruth Ellen bought through some mail order place. I think the same place that sells civil war figurine collectables. In addition, she ordered a glass case from some internet company Kathie found for her. As we walked in, there was the miniature first lady standing tall in her hexagonal glass case on the middle of the coffee table. Ruth Ellen's original plan was to give it to Franny to display, but we convinced her Franny probably didn't want a miniature of her boss haunting her house. We were afraid she was then going to give it to us, but it looks like she has become quite attached and the doll will permanently be in the way of anyone trying to talk across the coffee table.

Of course the perfect accompaniment to all of this was a CD that other star I was telling you about made of old standards for harmonica and organ. He evidently regales the folks at River Point from time to time with impromptu concerts, so his CDs are quite hot there.

It was finally time for the flute concert. Ruth Ellen wanted us to get there early so we would have good (read: comfy) seats. I think we were the second group of people to arrive, but we did score some easy chairs in the back of the room. By the time the floutist stepped up to the mike the place was three quarters full. She had a few breathing issues, but overall she killed for 45 minutes. After the concert Ruth Ellen had to stop by to tell the floutist that she too used to play the flute. We beat a fast retreat.