Ubi in mundo est blogator?

The easy answer would be “Nowhere near Carmen Sandiego,” but if my matter has any chance of doing justice to my circumstances, I shall need a considerable elevation of style. For I am composing this at an altitude of 35,000 feet as my airplane sprints Paris-ward over Newfoundland and its chilly schools of codfish miles below.

The Cloisters and Looking Westward therefrom

New York, on a beautiful crisp autumnal day, is hard to beat; and my last two days there were of that sort. On Friday I accompanied a local mini-reunion of the Princeton class of 1970 to the Cloisters, which is a special medieval colony of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, placed amid the spectacular grounds of a great old estate (now Fort Tryon Park) in upper Manhattan. From its pathways and parapets one looks westward across the Hudson to the New Jersey Palisades, where the leaves have begun to yellow. The museum is called the Cloisters on account of its cloisters, natch; a very wealthy medieval buff of the early twentieth century scooped up a few old monasteries from southern France and northern Spain and re-assembled them in New York. The idea was that a tour of medieval art would be more, well, medieval, if undertaken in the presence of an aging medievalist. And so it proved.

Today was no less beautiful, and I spent half of it scuttling to and fro the East Village post office at Fourth Avenue and Eleventh Street. I was trying to ship some weighty books to my house in Princeton, as my Paris-bound suitcase is plenty heavy already. The books were much-appreciated tokens of esteem laid upon me in gratitude for a little after-dinner talk I gave following the Cloisters tour. There were other challenging trophies of my brief American tour. A part of my book prize is a lovely tchotchke, a piece of crystal art memorializing in a small lake of carved glass the names of the book and its author and other particulars. To call this thing a paper-weight would be to commit an act of linguistic lèse-majesté, though it might hint at the useful purpose to which it will be put in my study at home, making sure that one of the composing stones doesn’t blow away. Other purposes it would serve less well. It is not the sort of thing, for example, that one would want to add to the weight of one’s transatlantic luggage just for sport; so I had to search out a suitable temporary home for it pending an opportunity to visit the city in a Mack truck. A brain wave struck, and it has now found temporary shelter in one of my daughter’s currently underutilized offices.

Mention of my dearest daughter brings me to the true purpose of this post. I have bragged about her plenty in the past, but I left out some purely personal parts, such as how solicitous she is of her aging parents. She is aware that hanging out for months on end in Parisian parks, museums, libraries, and restaurants really takes it out of you; and she has decreed that we need a mini-vacation. We all leave early tomorrow (Monday). I am not at liberty to disclose the destination. That’s for you to figure out, but here’s a big hint:

Another hint is that there is no Internet connection at Mystery Mountain, an implication of which fact being that your bloguiste will next resurface on the third of November. That is the day on which the Church remembers the great Richard Hooker, usually called “the judicious,” who died on November 3, 1600. If you’re starved for reading material before then, you could do worse than dip into Hooker’s masterpiece, The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie. That's what I always do if I get bored. I hope you enjoy the week as much as I intend to do.

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ADDENDUM, Wednesday morning, 27 October

As the WiFilosigkeit of my mystery destination--which was, incidentally, correctly identified within an hour of posting by a well-traveled Princetonian of the Class of 2010--seems to have been considerably exaggerated, I take the opportunity to append a photograph taken from my balcony window five minutes ago:

Suprized

Since returning from Arkansas I have been enjoying a stay in New York, punctuated by a very brief visit to Princeton for some necessary domestic business. It hasn’t been a particularly touristy visit, more like a busman’s holiday. I have spent many hours in the Bobst Library of New York University, polishing footnotes. Polishing footnotes surely approaches the acme of pointy-headed professordom, and it hardly requires the world’s greatest city for its backdrop. Still, I have had some fun. I went with good friends to see a fascinating exhibition at the Morgan Library, before going back to their apartment for a magnificent meal. I made an honest blogger of myself by attending a showing of “Waiting for Superman”. (In this I imitated my sainted father who once built a fire-place and then, when it was finished, sought out a book about how to build fire-places.) Last night I had a delightful evening over dinner with my “conversation club” at the Century.

But mainly I have been waiting—waiting for today. For I have just returned from Montclair, New Jersey, where I took part in an elegant evening “celebrating the humanities” with the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Furthermore, I myself was a part of the celebration; for an important moment of the evening was the presentation of the annual NJCH book award to the author of The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War.

Montclair is a fine old nineteenth-century town that is today half dormitory for New York executives and half multicult suburb. For a very particular reason it has always seemed to me one of the most romantic places on earth. The only school play in which I ever got a role was Cheaper by the Dozen, a comedy about an eccentric fellow with twelve children. It was set in Montclair, N.J., a place I therefore thought must be as exotic as Shakespeare’s Illyria, or Elsinore Castle.

The Montclair Art Museum

And indeed there was something castle-like in the elegant venue for the event, the impressive Montclair Art Museum. There is on its lowest level a large multi-purpose room that served equally well as cocktail lounge and lecture theater. In it was gathered an impressive cohort of supporters and abettors of the humanities in the State of New Jersey. Among them I was delighted to discover a number of personal friends and three former students. One of them was a man whose dissertation I had helped to direct forty years ago, and whom I had not actually seen in all that time.

Bloguiste, Leach, and Katz in ideological conversation

The “main event” of the evening was a staged conversation—meaning in this instance a conversation that took place upon a stage. The interlocutors were yours truly and Jim Leach, the Chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, moderated by my friend and colleague Stan Katz, the former president of the American Council of Learned Societies. I found Leach, whom I had not before met to be a particularly impressive and attractive fellow. He is an Iowan and a former college wrestler. He spent thirty years in Congress. One of his principal initiatives as Chairman of the NEH has been a “civility tour” throughout the country, a kind of intellectual pilgrimage devoted to the quaint notion that it is possible to exchange and discuss conflicting ideas, even passionately invested ideas, without sounding like the Kentucky senate race.

The announced topic of the conversation was “Ideologies and American Ideals from the Cold War to the War on Terror”. Naturally we mainly talked about other things, though with valiant feints toward “ideology”. Should you be really curious, you can judge for yourselves. The conversation was recorded, and will soon be posted on the NJCH website.

I left the evening with such a deep sense of satisfaction that you might think this was the only prize I had ever won. It isn’t.

And so, as old Pepys used to say, to bed.

Return of the Native

As a boy in school I memorized quite a few poems. They were naturally such poems as appealed to the vestigial Victorian tastes of my earliest English teachers, most of whom had been born in the nineteenth century. They have stuck with me, and “when in idle or in vacant mood” they often return to my mind, less colorful than Wordsworth’s daffodils, but hardly less pleasurable.

There is, for example, the great “Ode” of Arthur O'Shaughnessy. What? Not on your ipod? Shame on you. “We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of dreams…” That poem is the origin, I believe, of the now clichéd phrase movers and shakers. Another favorite was James Russell Lowell’s prelude to The Vision of Sir Launfal--“And what is so rare as a day in June?...” That is a lovely poem with many sweet phrases and images, though it does have one line that schoolboys are likely to apply in a context probably unintended by the poet: “Every clod feels a stir of might.” There were quite a few clods in that particular class. Also, lines from The Lay of the Last Minstrel by the great Sir Walter Scott, so unread and undervalued today:

BREATHES there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
‘This is my own, my native land!’
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand?

Fog along the Buffalo River, Marion County, Arkansas

Such a man perhaps does breathe somewhere, but not within my mortal frame. Even without the prerequisite foreign strand that’s the way I always feel as through the small, square window of an airline cabin, I catch my first glimpseof the Ozarks. Such glimpses have been infrequent for the last thirty years. They are bound to be rarer still now that my last two remaining Fleming aunts are gone. But just now my own, my native land is particularly vivid in my memory.

I arrived at Newark from Paris in the middle of the afternoon last Wednesday. Less than twenty-four hours later I was back at EWR to catch a flight to XNA. As O’Shaughnessy is to English odes, so perhaps XNA is to airport codes: insufficiently known. It stands for “Northwest Arkansas Regional,” and by rights it should have a “W” (for Walton) in it. Mr. Walton was of the opinion that if a manufacturer, distributor, or importer wanted to sell things to Wal-Mart, he ought to be willing to come out to Arkansas for a little chat. Soon there was a handsome airport, with daily direct flights from the East Coast, rising among the cattle ponds and the scrub oak.

Tempted though I am to pause in admiration of the superior powers of the law of supply-and-demand in creating useful infrastructure (what you might call Bridges to Somewhere), I must move on to Fayetteville, one of the towns principally served by this airport, the home of the University of Arkansas. For I was on my way to that institution to deliver an address before the Arkansas Philological Association. This was an experience delightful to me in every way. The weather was beautiful. My hosts were gracious. The conference itself offered many engaging papers and fiction readings, but at a pace sufficiently leisurely to allow opportunity to walk about the burgeoning town. Fayetteville has become a happening place, with all the funky evidences of a vibrant student culture that one would find in Madison or Ann Arbor.

If you absolutely must have an animal mascot, and of course you must, go for baroque. What Styrofoam badger or cardboard wolverine can compete with a really gross razorback hog in vermilion plastic? On the fresh autumn morning of Saturday, as I was preparing to leave, they set up a bountiful farmer’s market around the county court house, complete with scruffy or languid musician at each corner. Listen! I’ve been to the Farmer’s Market in Santa Monica, and if the Arkansans can just cultivate a little more pretension, they’ll be there.

J. William Fulbright (1905-1995)

The newish liberal arts college at the University of Arkansas is named in honor of J. William Fulbright, who had first been a law professor and then the young president of the institution in the late 1930s, before he began his distinguished career in Congress. He played a role in my own life. He had been a Rhodes Scholar. His experience of study abroad was a major factor behind the legislation he sponsored in 1946 establishing those international study grants that bear his name. It also encouraged some private philanthropy. He took a personal interest in any young Arkansan elected to the Rhodes—an event that happened perhaps every three or four years. That is how I came to spend the summer of 1958, before going to Oxford, in Washington in a high-paying sinecure in his patronage gift, filling orders in the Senate Document Room. That whole operation has doubtless disappeared in the computer age, but it offered me a uniquely educational experience. It was probably a similar arrangement that first brought Rhodes Scholar-elect William Jefferson Clinton into Fulbright’s orbit a decade later. The rest is history.

Though we have politicians galore in Washington, you’ll be hard pressed to find a statesman. But Bill Fulbright was, in my view, a real statesman. Since people come in packages he was also, perforce, a few other things as well, a southern politico among them. But history, which seems so soon to have forgiven Teddy Kennedy Chappaquiddick, and Robert Byrd the Ku Klux Klan, will probably turn a blind eye to Fulbright’s signature on the Southern Manifesto.

I had no commerce with the Senator after Oxford. But once about 1990, before XNA had opened, I was on one of the old Ozark Airlines propeller flights to Harrison, with only about a dozen passengers. Senator Fulbright and his wife were aboard, to be taken by a plane yet smaller from Harrison on toward Fayetteville. I don’t like fame-chasers, but I spotted him and struggled up the bouncing aisle to speak to him. It frequently happens in life that what is a plausible idea in theory turns out to be an impossible to achieve in reality. I murmured a greeting, but one close glimpse revealed an ill and confused old man with trembling jaw and uncomprehending, vacant stare. I returned to my seat. Perhaps this little memoir can belatedly convey my gratitude and admiration.

I am overwhelmed and embarrassed to have received so much public and private encouragement in response to the unseemly grumbling with which I began my last post. You can expect another essay next week, sans grumble. It may, exceptionally, be posted on Thursday, since I’ll probably want to report on what happened on Wednesday night. There’s a big hint.

Waiting for Robin

I am flying back to America later this morning, where I’ll be occupied on business for a couple weeks. This means I’m a little pressed for time just as “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” approaches a possible crisis. I long ago sensed that I would be dipping into the danger zone if the number of blog postings overtook the number of registered Followers. That is just about to happen. Furthermore, the blog has not elicited any readers’ comments for a month. It’s one thing to lecture to students you suspect are not listening, quite another to write essays for readers who aren’t there. Maybe it is true, as one trusted friend tells me, that the blog is such a debased form that its only audience is one whose favorite genre is the political rant. I don’t really believe that, but as ranting requires little time and less thought, I’ll rant away.

One of my birthday presents was a copy of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read. Perhaps I’ll have something to say about it when I’ve read it, but just holding it in my hand has empowered me. I now feel confident about talking about a film I haven’t seen: Waiting for Superman. It’s a little hard from abroad to tell what is really big at home in America even from faithful visits to a few trustworthy websites, but Waiting for Superman pretty clearly is or ought to be big. As I do not know from experience, Waiting for Superman is about a group of kids trying, by lottery, to get out of their dreadful public schools and into supposedly much better charter schools.

I spent a career in education, with more than forty years of classroom experience. I am well aware that one size does not fit all, but I do think I know how our schools could be improved. I have three suggestions. But only one has to do with Superman (the teachers), the other two with Robin (the pupils).

My suggestion about teachers is this. Teachers ought to be real experts in an actual field of study: mathematics, biology, physics, English language and literature, Spanish, whatever. If teachers are going to be required to have advanced degrees, let those degrees be in a real subject and not in “Education”. During its golden age, the old German Gymnasium was staffed mainly with Ph.Ds. Lord knows we need all the thoughtful and innovative education experts we can get; but actual teachers ought to know a lot about what they teach, and they ought to have the opportunity to continue to learn more throughout their careers. Everybody knows that deep knowledge of a subject matter is not a guarantor of good teaching. Unfortunately many educational administrators seem to think it is an impediment.

In my career I taught many well-received special seminars for high school teachers, and it was clear to me that what the teachers most appreciated about them was their serious scholarly content. Naturally this evidence is valueless to the educational establishment because it is impressionistic and anecdotal. The only evidence worth having is evidence supported by “research models” and “studies,” most of which will then “show” something counter-intuitive. When the anecdotal strays across the frontier of the politically correct it becomes the stereotypical.

Thus if an academic sociologist publishes a book full of tables showing that 82% of Middle-Patagonian speakers live in mud huts, that 73% of them are functionally illiterate, that 78% eat Pringles at least four times a week, that 92% percent wear sarongs, and of that number 98% percent wear them back to front, that is a work of social science. If an observant novelist creates a fictional Pringle-chomping, sarong-wearing Middle Patagonian speaker who lives in a mud hut, that is a negative stereotype. And if Middle Patagonian speakers were in any way to be a racial group—instead of being, as they are, entirely imaginary--it would then be a doubly damnable racial stereotype. Someday I may write an essay on the utility of stereotypes, but not today.

Having established the first pre-requisite for high-achieving teachers, let me eschew both anecdote and stereotype in proposing in abstract terms the two first pre-requisites for high-achieving students. They both involve the necessity of distinguishing what is a reasonable role for the public schools and what is not. The first is that the student before he or she ever steps across the school threshold be provided with two loving parents with whom they live in reasonable tranquility and regularly take their adequately nutritional evening meals, at which occasions they frequently hear and/or participate in conversation of a general nature, often including words of three and four syllables. Let there also be a few books, magazines and newspapers around, and let the children see their parents reading them from time to time. These conditions should prevail throughout the entire period of primary education, and indeed beyond. There will always be exceptions to an ideal norm. But if on a massive scale it proves impossible to provide such conditions, we have indeed discovered a grievous and heart-rending social failure, but it is not a failure of the school system, and certainly not a failure of those children’s teachers; and it will not be remedied by any conceivable policy or program emanating from the Department of Education. Heroic teachers will do their level best to overcome such huge obstacles, but they will succeed only very rarely and, so to speak, anecdotally.

The second and closely related pre-requisite is that Robin really has to want to be Superman’s sidekick. Students from an early age should really want to learn, to do well in school, and to work hard to do so, both in and out of the school buiding. They should be encouraged, directed, and indeed disciplined by their parents toward high-achieving goals. Any good teacher will try to be “engaging” and make a serious effort to “meet the students where they are”; but contrary to anything you might have picked up from The Dead Poets’ Society, teachers are not actually entertainers, shamans, or thaumaturgs. We have so greatly “defined deviance down” in Pat Moynihan’s fine phrase, that student laziness, vulgarity, chronic indiscipline, recalcitrance, physical and intellectual slovinliness, and general yahooism have become the accepted platform upon which our teachers are expected to work in many of our urban schools. Many teachers have known no other context. These are not, however, features of a universal human nature, but socially learned and socially tolerated behaviors. You will not find schools or school children like ours in Iceland or South Korea. You didn’t find many of them here fifty years ago.

There is a great deal of talk these days about unfairness and inequality in our society. The alternatives as I see them are to embrace the truly failed efforts that the last century came up with to establish a fictive equality of results, or to work to restore the means of a genuine equality of opportunity. The great engine of social mobility in America is education and the opportunities that flow from it. I know this from intimate experience. Those who are sincerely concerned about the grievous problems we face will start by talking frankly about the chronic ailments of which our failing schools are merely grotesque symptoms.

At a rally against violence, Chicago IL

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

&

THE STUDENTS HOLDING THEM

Math Olympians, Dayspring Christian Academy, Attleboro MA

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