WriteOutLoud

MAD MEN: It's Been Long Enough

The 21st century's incarnation of the 19th century novel is the ensemble drama, which had its beginnings in Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and--dare I invoke the sacred?--Star Trek.  Audiences could access the present, the future, even the past (Roots, Lonesome Dove) -- but usually the remote past.

Reality check for Yours Truly: Mad Men is the remote past to most of its viewers. But it's the world I grew up in, came to consciousness in: the transition from the 50s to the 60s, JFK's election to his assassination. In those thousand days, the rough beast that is these United States suddenly broke loose and lurched into its long, slow slouch towards . . .well, we're not there yet, so I don't really know where we're headed. I just hope it isn't Bethlehem this time. We already figured out that wasn't a good destination for government (cf. Henry VIII, separation of church and state, etc.).

Anyway, I've just recently become aware (via Netflix) of Mad Men, AMC's hit series that debuted last season then ran away with all the big 2008 Emmys. Mad Men is the best kind of fascinating--I can barely stand to look at it, and I can't look away. (This reviewer http://www.metacritic.com/tv/shows/madmen nails the reasons--or most of them.) Everything I see and hear--dialogue, set dressing, wardrobe, characters--is so true to my painful memories of that time. If TV could broadcast scent,  Mad Men would get that right, also: wet wool, stale cigarette smoke, body odor, Sea 'n' Ski, Tame creme rinse, Old Spice. When a woman character on Mad Men mentioned Shalimar perfume, I instantly saw the bottle on my mother's dressing table, sniffed the stopper all over again, remembered an emerald-green dress she made for me, remembered her letting me wear just a dab of her perfume with it to 8th-grade cotillion. That was 1961, also the year our history class went to see the newly elected, not yet sworn in President Kennedy speak at the Charter Day ceremonies at UC Berkeley. I remember his hair, being surprised by how reddish it was, by his glowing visibility despite the squad of Secret Servicemen surrounding him, moving him through the crowd to the podium. The first season of Mad Men ends with JFK's election, when I was in 8th grade.

The series also depicts the working world as I first knew it--initially, by visits to my dad's office, where everybody looked like everybody on Mad Men. Then by the working world I entered at 18, before pantyhose, when I squished my teenaged behind into a girdle and stockings, then squirmed all day because the garters bit into my thighs. Wore spike heels with no platforms, no support, just whanged away all day on the balls of my feet, on the concrete of Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Wore missile-launcher bras in an effort to look like I had mammary glands to speak of. Spent an hour or more each morning, getting my hair and makeup Just Right. Including false eyelashes, sometimes more than one pair at a time.

For what?

Those overgrown fratboys in Mad Men are the men in the offices I worked in, the men who could say anything to me, look at me any way they wanted, even swat me on the butt if they felt like it--and call their behavior "a compliment."  I knew it was supposed to be. I knew they wanted me to believe it was. I tried to believe it. I felt like--no, I was--a non-person. I did a lot of stupid things. I had no idea I could stand up for myself, and survive. By the time I saw a woman do so, I was in graduate school. Bigshot Famous Professor came on to one of my friends, who instantly froze him with a look and said, with perfect aplomb (though she wasn't feeling it), that she wasn't interested in the type of friendship he proposed. He was floored. So was I.

So it's very cringe-making for me, watching Mad Men, because I remember what those women are feeling even though I don't feel it any more. I wear a T-shirt and shorts and sandals to work nearly year-round. I bring my dog to the office with me every day. Nobody touches me in ways that give me the creeps. Nobody calls me "the girl" (or "the old broad," more accurately now). Admittedly, all the men in the office are gay (which some of the Mad Men are, too, but they don't know it or are closeted). My coworkers are still men, and they can still be inappropriate--a word that didn't exist in 1961--so they still have to watch it, and they do, mostly. "Do you mind if I tell you a slightly off-color joke?" one or another of them will ask occasionally, and I feel perfectly comfortable replying, "Sure, as long as you come in here and shut the door!"--good sport that I am--which he does, and the joke is very slightly off-color but reasonably funny, and we laugh, and that's that. Nobody gets hurt. Being a good sport doesn't cost anything now. It used to cost women our lives.

So maybe the rough beast is slouching in the right direction, after all! What if that's the case? What if it's actually going to be OK? What if the beast slouches right over Caribou Barbie and Grampy McSame on its way to wherever it's going? I have the audacity to hope so. I hope it grinds them to bits.

FINALLY, A SPELLING PROBLEM SOLVED!

Spotted on the 126 bridge over the San Pablo Estuary, this license plate:

                                                                                                RED SWOX

I've been trying to get that right for  ages: how to spell the name of my team in the language of its home, the land where every third male is named Bwobby.

Even Here, Eurotrash Has Its Day

The local newsrag shows up in my office every day, and once in a while some headline will catch my eye.  Otherwise, I don't touch it--no time, and it really is such a travesty, it makes The New York Post look like The Federalist Papers.  I respect the Post though, sort of, because (like the British mass-market press) it never pretends to journalistic excellence.  It's fishwrap, it knows it, and it makes plenty of money for whoever owns it (wild guess: Rupert Murdoch).  It's also in New York. City.

The fishwrap to which I refer here, however, is headquartered in Palm Springs, California, a resort community that got its start in the 1930s and 1940s when Hollywood was looking for a place to play, not too far outside its own back yard but far enough to elude the press (anyone who remembers "movie magazines"--Photoplay, for instance--raise a withered claw!) and the "moral turpitude" clauses in their studio contracts.  It's always been a sandbox, has Palm Springs, a beautiful, warm, clean, sweet-smelling place where the locals live in chicken coops (however splendiferously designed and decked out), and nobody takes anything very seriously because it's too hot or the weather's just perfect for whatever you want to do--play golf, play tennis, hike, ride a horse, ride a person . . . whatever. 

But lately, Palm Springs (and environs) has begun to take itself way too fucking seriously, as if it were an actual place and not just a figment of everybody's imagination.   Apparently, a woman who lives here was a flight attendant 14 years ago (how many of us can say the same?  hoist those withered claws again, please!) and in the course of exercising her offduty recreational options as such,  got one thrown into her by some guy called Al, whose mother was a movie star and married a prince from somewhere in Yerup, so this guy Al is a prince, too.  As a result of this impulsive behavior (on both sides), a child was born--surprise!  Which makes the girl a princess, sort of.  Or it would if her progenitor acknowledged her.  Which at first he refused to do but now he did, just the other day, in the same week he acknowledged her half-sibling, who lives in Africa, apparently.  (I may have some of the details wrong, here.)

Anyway, this poor kid with the Eurotrash old man she's never met lives in my neighborhood.  The international press is all over her--or is trying to be, but is being fended off by (1) personnel at her local, unpretentious private school, and (2) local law enforcement (trespassing, etc.).  News trucks parked in front of the school, lying in wait for a 14-year-old girl.  And, as you see here http://www.thedesertsun.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060601/COLUMNS23/606010310 , paparazzi camped out under the trees across the street, interviewing each other while lying in wait for a 14-year-old girl.

The local "journalists" find the paparazzi exotic and fascinating.  Need I say more?  Need I use the word "pathetic"?  No?  I suspected as much.  Thank you.

Oh, by the way, it's not like there's no news around here:  we're expecting a race war any day now.  The Mexicans want their country back, and I don't really blame them, but yikes, it's scary!  And it's everywhere around here, would make great copy for a journalist who could (1) think and (2) write.  Remember:  you heard it here first!

Work: I Hate When I Hate It

I'm told by experts that one of the pitfalls of competitive endeavor is the tendency of the better team to play down to the level of the lesser team.  Pit a virtuoso against a piker, and the virtuoso will go slack and beat him/herself, underestimating the capacity of the opponent, who will seize its opportunity and thrash the better team, strike 'em out looking.

My students are not my opponents; they're my co-conspirators, is how I look at it.  We are all conspiring for their betterment, their enlightenment, their facility with the language, the literature and its culture.  Is generally how I look at it.

But then sometimes I get a batch who aren't into it for the right reasons, and somehow I feel like I'm a shitty teacher because they want a pass, they want the credits, they are full of excuses about why they haven't done their homework--chiefly, dead friends and relatives.  "I had to leave at the break last week because my friend passed away."  "My grandfather in Australia is on his deathbed."  "I just came in to find out what the homework is [without turning in tonight's homework] because my cousin is in the emergency room from a accident."

At times like these, I feel like I hate teaching.  I think, "What a load of crap! and how can you look me in the eye and say it?  Have you no pride?  Do you think I'm stupid?"

I have to act stupid, don't I?  I have to say Oh yes dear me that is dreadful yes of course you can turn your assignment in ten days late because of course you are so ill and your cousin is dead and far be it from me to infringe on your pain.

Just when I'm about to grind my back teeth to powder, I remember a raquetball game I played years ago, when I was teaching remedial composition at Berkeley.  As I bounced the ball, warming up for my serve, I told my opponent (and dear friend) that I didn't want to teach any more, I hated what I was teaching, it sucked, I wanted to go to law school, I didn't care whether anybody ever learned to punctuate anything as long as I lived no matter what.

She never missed a beat.  She returned my serve and asked me, "If you were teaching Paradise Lost, would you feel the same way?"

Uh, no.  Not at all.  What does that make me?  "Am I A Snob?" Virginia Woolf asked herself publicly in 1934.  She didn't think she was, and I really don't think I am; I just want the people I'm trying to connect with to meet me halfway.  Is that so wrong?

Stuck on the Wrong Coast? Can't Get to Fenway?

What with everything, and Everything, it's been over two weeks since Pica and I had our Excellent Adventure at SBC Park and points north.  That's me, wearing the Coke bottle on my head, which turned out (bottle, not head) to be a play structure for kidz, so I was less offended by it in person than I expected to be.  You probably can't make out the west tower of the Bay Bridge behind the bottle, but it's there.  Oy, the sunshine!  The boats in the lagoon!  The view from our seats in the nosebleed section:  the Oakland hills beyond, Hayward down there somewhere, the players practically in our laps, not a bad seat anywhere, plenty of room, beautiful design inside and out, great food.  The rumors I had heard of vendors prowling the aisles, calling "Chardonnay!" and "Sushi!" turned out not to be precisely correct, but you can get those things there.  I settled for a $6 hotdog plus lemonade.

It was just Heaven, that's all.

Laissez Les Bontemps Roulez!

Numenius is right.  Or I share his sense that, thanks to a host of evils political and historical, New Orleans was particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack, particularly unable to withstand such an attack. 

It's as if someone turned a firehose on a fragile, elegant old woman who hasn't smelled too good for the last forty years (Faulkner's Miss Emily?) but no one would dare say so to her face because she is such a cultural icon.  I have never been to New Orleans but have always wanted to go, and I confess that my first reaction was entirely selfish:  "Oh damn, now it's gone, I'll never see it the way it was, I'll never find Storyville like I wanted to, I'll never see Bourbon Street or the French Quarter as they were."  I have been through a natural disaster or five, so I know from experience that whatever survives is never, ever the same.

Everyone I know who's passed through New Orleans as a tourist says the same thing--"It's fabulous!  SO much fun!"  whereas everyone I've ever known who's lived there has told me some version of  "Yeah, it's got character, but there's fuckin' bugs everywhere, and it's hot and wet and rotting and smells bad, it's like the Third World down there once you get into it, really nasty, I could hardly wait to leave."  New Orleans natives have described their home town to me the same way: a culture with no infrastructure to speak of, days numbered, running on fumes like Miss Pittypat and Miss Havisham:  scratch the fragile baroque surface and find rot, like Versailles.  They told me that New Orleans was an exoskeleton of Mardi Gras and music and gumbo and oyster po'boys and Jax beer and  laissez les bontemps roulez! with nothing much inside.  No safety net:  you're on your own with the booze and the food and the women and the music because it all burned out long ago but left its husk behind. 

So that's why, this time when the Universe turned on the firehose, the Big Easy and most of the Gulf Coast were gone with the wind.  And the water.   

Leaving only the poor and Fats Domino and Harry Connick Jr. behind.  Ask yourself WWLAD?: What Would Louis Armstrong Do? and what would we do for him?  HUH?

This isn't all I care about, about this.  It's just all I can stand to think about.

Opera: A Test of Character?

Strange pair of brainfellows, huh?  Iris Murdoch, British novelist, and Luciano Pavarotti, Italian tenor.  Welcome to my head, today.

At this very late stage in my so-called career, I am reading Murdoch for the first time, at the behest of a dear friend.  The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978.  (I spent many Friday nights that year baking in a sauna with another dear friend who raved on and on about Murdoch, but somehow I never got around to actually reading her.  I think I was saving her for emergencies, like I'm saving Mansfield Park and I forget which other Austen novel I haven't read.)

The Sea, the Sea is ostensibly the autobiographical ruminations of a celebrity, a fabulously successful theater playwright and director who has recently retired to a ramshackle house on the remote northern coast of England.  In his journal, he reflects on his professional career, his relationships with women, his family, and on his present location, its charms, its drawbacks, and the creepy things that are starting to happen.  Murdoch's writing is dense, intricate, and hypnotic.  As is always the case with any first-person narrative, the reader's initial task is to evaluate the character of the storyteller, whether s/he is reliable, and--most important--whether we like him.  I'm only about 100 pages in, but last night, I began to suspect that this guy is an asshole--possibly of epic proportions--owing chiefly to his record with women:  he never married, never wanted to, isn't gay, but blithely exploited an astonishing number and variety of women throughout his life, starting when he was 20 and got involved with a 39-year-old actress, which relationship carried on in various configurations for years until her death.  She and a few of her successors interested him, so he studied them rather like someone might study bugs or birds, and he notes their feelings and behavior but doesn't seem to care about them much; toward the feelings of the others, he is complacently cavalier.

So I'm just getting ready to wring his neck when he mentions that he hates opera.  "OK, that does it," I think.  "People who hate opera are--"  And then I remember that I don't like it, either.  I've only been to about three actual performances.  The plots were stupid, the costumes ludicrous, the makeup likewise, and if I wanted to read (supertitles--clumsy translations), I'd stay home.  I stood through two acts of Figaro (eugh, SO silly!) outdoors in Santa Fe before my aching feet sent me whimpering off in defeat.  Best thing about that experience was the visuals:  the stage itself seemed to disappear as dark fell, so the performers appeared to be floating; behind them to the south, a thunderstorm lit up the sky over the Sangre de Cristos, and to the north, the lights of Los Alamos blazed.

Another time, in San Francisco, Pavarotti gave a free concert at the band shell in Golden Gate Park about ten blocks from my house, so I thought I'd drop by.  But the crowds were so huge, I couldn't get anywhere near him--could barely get into the Park at all--so turned around and went home and pouted.  Told myself I wasn't asking much--it wasn't like I wanted to go to an opera--an expensive proposition, way beyond my means--I just wanted to see/hear Pavarotti because he's arguably the greatest ever, and I'm always interested in anybody who's the greatest at whatever they do.  Pitching a baseball, lecturing on Picasso, blowing bubbles--I don't care.  If they're really good, I want to see them do it. I'm scuffing around my backyard, muttering about this when all of a sudden I hear something.  It's a crisp fall day; the air is perfectly clear; I hear a voice.  Or I think I do.  It's faint, but it sounds like--but it can't be, he's ten blocks away, and there are trees galore between here and there, big ones.  I listen, though, and it is.  It's him.  The crescendo of the Nessun Dorma aria, floating out of the Park and down the block right into my back yard!  Goosebumps?  OH yes.  Almost tears, even; those notes pulled something out of my chest even from ten blocks away.  (And later I heard he hadn't been miked, but I never believed that.)

Now it's this morning, and there's no way around it, I HAVE TO do some housework, which I can't do without music.  LOUD music.  I think about the aria,  I put in the Favorite Arias CD, I crank it up, Luciano's blasting away, I'm shoving the mop back and forth (like the Sorceror's Apprentice?), loving it all and wondering, "Does this mean I like opera?"  Because it's not just Nessun Dorma on this CD, it's some other stuff, a couple of Verdi duets where he's going "rrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!" and she's going "twitterTWITTERTWITTER!" and I realize oooooh, this is sexy stuff!  Is this why people like opera?  Do I like opera?  I don't know. I never really thought so before.  But here just lately. . . . 

Anyway, I DO know that that guy in Murdoch's novel is a jerk for being a theater director who says he hates opera.  And I hope something terrible happens to him, which will make The Sea, the Sea a very good book!

"So How Come I Have to Learn This Stuff, HUH?"

One of the "orientation" seminars I attended today was actually interesting.  Imagine my surprise.  (The other one was pitiful, made me sorry for the students of these disorganized, none-too-bright, middle-aged, well-meaning but pathetically self-important teachers.)

The good one was about "General Education"--formerly known as Basic Requirements, I think, though not everybody was completely clear on the definitions or its attendant assumptions:  what they should be in the 21st century (if different than before), and what the subjects each of us teaches has to do with Gen Ed and with each other.  Or something. 

Well, I was off to the races.  Silently, of course.  What's the socioculturalintellectual interface of, say, nursing and fine arts?  Should a nursing student have to study Matisse?  Far more to the point for me: how the flaming hell are math and English related?  Just then, the math teacher at my table pipes up (I haven't said anything) about how he requires his students to frame math problems verbally--what we used to call "word problems." 

"And then do you do it the other way?" I blurt.  "Do you give them an equation and have them write a story about it?"  "Oh yes," he says as if this weren't a miracle, "three different stories, actually.  To pass my class, they have to be able to write three different verbal extrapolations of the same problem."  He gives me a quizzical look.  "Have you never enjoyed thinking about numbers verbally?"

"Um, gee, actually, no.  Until recently, it never occurred to me to do so other than the 'Dick has four candy bars, Jane takes two of them, how many does Dick have left?' model which never interested me at all because I'm a girl who likes a complicated narrative.  I thought words and numbers were mutually exclusive--UNTIL"--uh-oh, I'm off to the races--"I just recently read this fabulous book, Moneyball, about how Billy Beane almost singlehandedly rebuilt the Oakland As and possibly rescued the entire MLB by thinking outside the box about numbers, and I couldn't believe I was having such a good time reading a book about numbers because--"

I dwindle off because I've lost them.  They're glazing over.  I'm the only woman at the table, and they are reacting as if they'd answered their doorbells only to find JoWits on the porch.  Not everybody is a baseball fan; I keep forgetting that.  It seems so unnatural, why would it occur to me?--she said in self-defense.

But my point--and I do have one--(as Ellen DeGeneres would say) is that I felt a whole bunch of potential going on.  Which is, after all, way more than anyone has any right to expect who's been to more than three of these "seminars."

"Hey! Wait a Minute!" or How You Can Tell For Sure When Summer is Over

The envelope arrives from the school where you seem to remember you've signed up to teach somebody something, in some far-off time called "the fall."  You stare quizzically at the envelope, and then you open it.  Inside is a big fat packet called WELCOME BACK TO ALL FACULTY! that includes a schedule of two solid days of nonstop back-to-back seminars (starting tomorrow) in various aspects of how the school (ostensibly) runs, how to teach in it, who everybody is, where their offices are, blahblahblahblah.

If I could reclaim every hour I've wasted being dutiful at these orientations over the past 25 years,  I would be a much younger, happier woman, and possibly a better teacher because I would not have started every fall term with my teeth clenched.  Some of the preliminaries can be kinda fun--sometimes, if you're at a rich school, the food's good.  Some of the people are funny.  A girl like me can make a pal or two (and a passel of enemies if she's not careful).  I cemented a lasting friendship with now-famous fiction and film writer Tom Perrotta as he and I dragged folding chairs across a steaming lawn somewhere in the wilds of Massachusetts late one August afternoon.  Apropos  the endless bullshit pedagogical "discussion" (read: lecture) we had just endured, he grumbled, "I just don't find this stuff endlessly fucking fascinating, know what I mean, Doc?"  I barely knew Tom at that point, but I knew exactly what he meant; he endeared himself to me forever with that one wry remark.

Likewise a woman I sat across from at a seminar table while the then-director of the program rambled on and on about how much fun he'd had in New Orleans the weekend before and how hungover he still was.  This woman across from me managed to give the impression of rolling her eyes without actually moving them.  I was nearly in stitches.  Ran into her in the bathroom later and announced, "I don't know who you are, but if you don't stop doing that thing with your face, we're going to be in trouble!"  thereby making another great friend.

Now, though, the good news here, at the end of this particular summer, is that unlike every place I've ever taught, this public community college doesn't frogmarch its whole faculty through the welcome-back phase, thereby infantilizing and infuriating them.  Instead, it offers about 30 different seminars, requires that we attend at least six hours, for which six hours we are paid (never happened to me before), and lets us pick what we want to attend.   So I will go to a reception for new adjuncts (even though I've been teaching there since January, I came skidding in right at the beginning of last spring term, didn't even know where the bathrooms were), a session on building instructional websites (I've always meant to learn), something called Positive Attendance (required), and some free feeds of the meet-and-greet variety.  I will not be attending What To Do When Your Projector Doesn't Light Up although I probably should.  I refuse to PowerPoint my students.  I'd rather give them lobotomies.

So the Summer I Thought Would Never End is about to.  In many ways, it was the worst ever.  But I got a lot of reading done, and it was productive in other ways.  Overall, I'm grateful and hopeful.  Now let's just hope nothing happens in these seminars to fuck that up!

Crying in Baseball

Figures it'd be baseball would bring me back.

Not MLB—as one might expect, what with recent events (the As; dope; more dope; Pedro). Nope.

Little League. Specifically, the Western Regional Championships played in Waco, Texas, last Saturday and televised live on ESPN. Happily for me, I missed the first pitch, thrown out by Dubya (who shoulda stood in baseball, where he wasn’t so dangerous). I got to the game in the third inning, and they only play six, these little guys.

Funny thing: they’re little, all right, but they don’t play "little." The pitcher is throwing what looks remarkably like heat —and he’s 12 years old, 5’5", 135#. The beautiful Little League swing is beautiful in all the same ways as the beautiful MLB swing, and the sound of the ball on the sweet spot, and the trajectory of the ball—out of the park—are all the same. These 2/3- scale models throw as accurately, turn double plays as fast, and make as few errors (none that I saw), as the big boys.

The story develops: teams are Bryant, Arkansas vs. Lafayette, Louisiana. This is Bryant’s second straight year in the playoffs; they got snookered last year, so they’re super-double-determined, this year.

Their luck has been especially bad, though: while they were at a Rangers game on their way to Waco, all their equipment was stolen from the motel parking lot—all their bats, balls, cleats, helmets, 10 cases of Gatorade: everything, gone. When the good people of Bryant, Arkansas, hear about it (one assumes, right away), they instantly donate replacement Everything, which the Bryant Little League Commissioner loads up and drives like hell for Waco. He makes it in time. The boys play; they make it to the finals, which I am now watching and which the President of the United States showed up for (driving blithely past Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan and the other antiwar protesters outside the gates of his ranch), and threw out the first ball. Both teams are playing like pros now, though, no signs of nerves or fear or even much excitement.

But the boys of Bryant, Arkansas, are looking a little glum; they are almost shut out; then, in the 5^th inning, the leadoff batter hits a homer. The dugout erupts with delirious little boys jumping straight up in the air and all over each other—just like the big boys do. There is hope! This is baseball! Anything can happen!

But it doesn’t. Bryant loses. Six innings, it’s over, they lose 4-1, and I’m bouncing on my couch in California, yelling, "No! NO! Let ‘em play three more! They’ve got it in ‘em! Let ‘em do it!" But that doesn’t happen, of course. The little boys of Lafayette, Louisiana, scramble all over each other in a fountain of happiness—they’re going to Williamsport, PA, for the World Series!

And then the two teams line up for high-fives, and the looks on those faces—! Lafayette is gracious in victory, and Bryant almost stony in defeat. Almost, but not quite. Many of those little Bryant chins tremble; a few cheeks glisten with tears; nevertheless, they march in a straight line and do their high-fives just as if their hearts weren’t in smithereens.

I know, I know: it’s a learning experience. Losing is as important a lesson as winning—in some ways, more important, life being what it is for most of us. But it was excruciating, watching those little men of Bryant, Arkansas, learn that hard lesson. I wish I could give every one of them a hug.