A Dickensian Tangent

 The boy wanted more!

After a long hiatus my wife and I have decided to return to a pleasant custom of our early married years—the setting aside on a regular basis of some time dedicated to reading aloud.  We are returning as well to the most audible of novelists—Dickens, of course.  We have begun with Oliver Twist.  The choice, though not inexorable, was not entirely arbitrary either.  We own no fewer than two complete sets of Dickens’s novels, but Joan possesses as well a prize volume in the “Macdonald Illustrated Classics” series, with a bookplate commending its recipient for meritorious “General Work” in the Lower Third Form in 1949.  Its cover bears in gold stamp the emblem of The Girls Public Day School Trust—the head of Minerva encircled by its early feminist motto “Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed.”

            It didn’t take long for our reading to become “relevant,” bloguistically speaking.  The first chapter of the novel concerns “the place where Oliver Twist was born and the circumstances attending his birth”.  It was an awful place (a town workhouse) and the circumstances terrible (his mother died within minutes of his birth).  The unprepossessing workhouse staff immediately remark upon the babe’s miserable destiny.  As he leaves for the night, “The surgeon leaned over the body, and raised the left hand.  ‘The old story,’ he said, shaking his head: ‘no wedding ring, I see.  Ah!  Good night!’”

            We have long since overcome most forms of Victorian prudery and at least renovated most forms of Victorian cruelty.  Few people would even recognize the literal sense of the word “bastard,” and those few would eschew it for its political incorrectness, which is hardly more tolerable than that of its one-time euphemism,  “illegitimate child.”  Blaming the victim has itself become blamable.  Yet the social problems so vividly explored in Oliver Twist—the inadequacy of our social service agencies, the relationship of child poverty to the absence of parents, and the relationship of both to youthful criminality—are as obvious, and as dangerous, as they were a hundred and fifty years ago.  Dickens is pretty brutal in satirizing the inadequate ways in which his contemporaries faced their social problems; but at least they were usually not in total denial of them.  I sometimes think we are.

            I have several times expressed my opinion, in dealing with “educational” questions, that the crisis in American public education is to a large extent a reflection of a crisis yet more serious, that of the American family.  That is because the education that comes with settled and competent family life is less dispensable than that obtained from a textbook or a problem set.  Whether my view is a hobby-horse to be ridden or a dead horse not to be flogged, however, I shall today leave it in its stable.

            I have learned from my anthropologist son Luke that it is dangerous to posit universal theories of human society; but I still hope for some useful generalities.  One of them is that a viable family structure is a constant feature of successful societies.  In America the rapid social change of the last half century may have revolutionized many young people’s view of marriage without, however, having done much to disprove the necessity for family structures.  The more we deny the social aspect of marriage by imputing to it a purely personal or individual nature, the more we weaken our communal strength.

            Our classical western political theory is based in the idea of contract, a trade-off of rights and responsibilities.  The theorist’s attitude toward human nature may be pessimistic (as in Hobbes’s Leviathan) or optimistic (as in Rousseau’s Social Contract), but there is always some balance of license and constraint, liberty and coercion.

            Looking back over the broad sweep of human history, one can identify two huge and unstable dynamic forces at work.  In the ancient vocabulary of faculty psychology commonplace among Western thinkers and moralists for at least two millennia, they were called the “irascible and concupiscible passions”.  In ancient and medieval literature—an excellent example being Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale--they are associated with the gods Mars and Venus.  Often enough, of course,  Mars and Venus got together with unhappy result.   Witness the Trojan War.  “Nam fuit ante Helenam,” writes Horace, “cunnus taterrima belli causa.”*  Powerful bellicose and libidinous forces might be undeniable, but they could perhaps be channeled, contained, regulated.

            With regard to the irascible passions we get the “warrior codes” that are a feature of many early societies and often enough of their oldest surviving textual legislation.  Only religious dreamers could propose the abolition of violence itself.  Realists invented medieval European chivalry, which is still alive in slightly more modern garb in the Geneva Conventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Such devices by no means achieved social perfection, but they did make things better.

            So far as the concupiscible passions were concerned, the effective constraint proved to be marriage.  Medieval writers quite openly call it an instrument of coercion, along with monarchical power and the “positive” law (meaning written legal codes).  It may not be all that great, but it is definitely better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, which was essentially St. Paul’s attitude: “It is better to marry than to burn”.

            Of course in this conception of “coercion” there was a paradox—just as there is in the Leviathan or the Constitution of the United States.  The voluntary submission to some constraints is the necessary price of the larger social efflorescence.  We still speak of the “yoke” of matrimony, but it can be a blessed one.

In the “Clerk’s Tale” the ruler Walter is counseled thus:

                        Boweth your nekke under that blissful yok…

                        Which that men clepe [call] spousaille or wedlock.

*”Even before Helen [of Troy], cunnus was a most terrible cause of war.”

Getting My Historical ZZZ's

            

knitting up the raveled sleeve of care

The “book segment” of a PBS News Hour a couple of nights ago featured a woman named Melanie Warner, the author Pandora’s Lunchbox.  What a great title!—with or without its clarifying addendum, How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.  I, alas, am among those who devour with relish far too many boxed and packaged goods with wrappers requiring twelve or fifteen lines in minute type simply to catalogue their engineered ingredients

            I am almost afraid to pick up the book, though I do intend to read it.  Perhaps it can scare me into going cold turkey on corn syrup.  But general remarks Ms. Warner made to Hari Sreenavasin have already sent my mind racing.  She pointed out that at least in America there has been a dramatic revolution in eating in the last century, as technology has collided with food production in ways previously unimaginable.  But just as our technological progress has outstripped our moral progress in so many other fields, physiological evolution has lagged far behind the brave new world of alimentary invention.  As Ms. Warner put it, “The way our bodies process food is stuck somewhere in the Stone Age.”

          You are what you eat

            As it happened, I had already been thinking along somewhat parallel lines, though I was thinking less about the way in which my body takes nourishment than about the way it finds rest—or doesn’t.  For the truth is that I don’t sleep all that well any more.  The problem of troubled sleep—I flee from the frank pathology of the word insomnia—has become more acute as I have aged.  I don’t think I get enough sleep, and the sleep I do get seldom leaves me feeling well rested.

             I don’t know whether the way my body seeks rest is stuck somewhere in the Stone Age, but it certainly has not gotten too much further than the early modern period.  I realized this last week, in what has  become almost a recurrent marker of spring’s arrival, when I got a really terrific night’s sleep.  I spent about half of a lovely early spring day in the garden doing a number of miscellaneous chores.  We planned to have a family-and-friends lunch al fresco following the baptism of our grandson John Henry on Sunday—a pleasant ambition perfectly achieved, incidentally—and some cosmetic work was needed. 

            As all property owners know, the discrete, free-standing  household job hardly exists.  Everything invites preparation and demands follow-up.  I gave most of the large yard its first mowing in many months, but that task required the preparatory removal of several barrow loads fallen twigs and a little leaf raking.  I did a bit of heavier whacking, chopping, and pruning around the edges.  None of this seemed particularly strenuous at the time, except perhaps for some of the up-slope mower pushing.  But I wasn’t moving all that fast.  The day was bright but crisp, and I never raised so much as a film of sweat on my brow.

            Next morning, however, I knew I had done some serious work—and for two reasons.  First, in various parts of my body I was sore in muscles I had forgotten I even had.   Second—and the real point in this essay—I had a great night’s sleep.  As for the muscles part, regular and reasonably strenuous artificial exercise (jogging, working out, swimming) can do a pretty good job of maintaining the corporal apparatus, but only because it mimics to some degree the varied exertions of the agricultural labors of the Old World.  Such labor likewise produces what might be called “healthy exhaustion,” very unlike the fatigue born of long airplane flights, hours spent bent over a computer screen, trying to coax a sentence into a stoutly resisted perfection, or simply worrying about domestic finances.

The goddess Ceres supervises her devotees         

The salubrious somniferous effects on a geezer of a few hours of light lawn work were enough to recall to my mind the results, for a youngster, of a long day’s haymaking in the sweltering Ozark heat.  In speaking metaphorically of the Stone Age, Ms. Warner is reminding us that a human body is designed to be nourished by what a human body is able to catch, kill, gather, or grow.  Chasing down an antelope was pretty strenuous stuff, and you were entitled to a big steak if you got one.  Perhaps there was such a thing as an obese Comanche brave, but I somehow doubt it.

            Likewise the human body is intended to wake when it is light and to sleep, after significant exertion, when it is dark.  In the Middle Ages ninety percent of the population had to “go to bed with the chickens,” just as I still did when I was a kid. Only the wealthy could afford the considerable expense of artificial lights.  Today cheap electric power has done to sleep what Red Dye #2 has done to food.  Medieval people spoke of “first sleep” and “second sleep”—usually punctuated by a urological trip to the bezunkus (read Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”).  The brief wakeful period between the two was not wasted.  It had its own special domestic prayers.  It seems also to have been the time when most medieval babies were made.  But sleepers awoke refreshed with the morning light.

Forty Shades of Scarlet and Gold

           

Fight the power!

Stories of national heroes who defy the imperial power of their oppressors account for some of the great books in our literature.  In ancient times a beautiful young Jewess living in the Persian diaspora, Esther, saved her people from a planned genocide and turned the tables on her chief persecutor, Haman, the sinister vizier of King Ahasuerus. The world got the biblical Book of Esther, and little Jewish kids got a really fun holiday, Purim.  Or in more recent times how about two Chechan brothers willing to take on the might of Russia, with the one desperately carrying on even after the other is slain.  That’s the stuff of historical novels, and in particular Tolstoy’s last novel--Hadji Murat, a wonderful read and in retrospect a timely meditation on the complicated realities of “multiculturalism,” and the difficulties of finding harmony in cultural “diversity”.

            A medieval liturgical manuscript from the Abbey of Sankt Gallen.  The phrases in alium and in alio are both grammatically admissible

The drama of last week’s blog subject (the Boston Marathon bombing) was still lively for several days following the post, and like probably too many other people I spent some hours last Friday following the intense search for a  'teen-aged terrorist who had brought a great city to lock-down and, incidentally, kept a dear friend from visiting us from Boston.

            The next day, Saturday, we went into New York to spend the evening with family members and to be in place for a long-anticipated event on Sunday—an early-afternoon concert of Renaissance choral music to be performed in the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Cloisters—the fabulous medieval satellite of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Our original plan had been to meet up with a group of fellow motet-lovers for a pre-concert brunch, but near the last moment the key organizer had to drop out on account of a domestic emergency.  As it turned out, we would never have made it to the restaurant on time anyway: we had been unaware that the “A” train service would be seriously dislocated on account of weekend work on the tracks, requiring long waits and intermediating shuttle buses.

            The ancient and expertly relocated stone blocks of the Romanesque apse of a medieval Spanish church, San Martín de Fuentidueña, have been on loan to the Met by the Spanish government since 1958.  The reconstituted chapel is one of the most spectacular galleries in this or any other museum.  It is dominated by a stunning period piece, a huge hanging crucifix, in which the sculpted corpus perfectly captures the theological ambiguity of the event depicted.  Is this a triumphant king painlessly reigning from his oddly shaped throne?  Or a tortured and humiliated criminal in his hideous death throes?

            On Sunday last the chapel was transformed by the importation of folding chairs into an acoustically brilliant music hall for a performance by Pomerium, an “early music” choral group directed by Alexander Blachly.  The organizing theme of the concert was “Music for Mary Tudor”.  Though the program avoided the indelicacy, that would be bloody Mary (1553-1558).  The pieces, all in Latin and all liturgical, boasted such composers as Byrd, Sheppard, Tallis, and White.  The concert’s finale was Thomas Tallis’s incomparable Spem in alium.

            To get my own prejudices out on the table, it is my opinion that Mary did one really good thing in her life: she refrained from murdering her half-sister Elizabeth.  If she also was the patron of Spem in alium—the questionable conjecture adopted by Pomerium’s program notes—that would make two.

            Spem in alium is a motet for forty voices—yes, forty.  These are distributed into eight choirs of five each, with the choirs physically distributed for maximal acoustical effect.  The circumstances of the original sixteenth-century performance are conjectural, but in the Fuentidueña chapel the director created a linear arrangement surrounding the audience in a large horseshoe around the chancel and half the nave.  You know the expression “the eye of the storm”.  Now imagine yourself in the eye of a storm of rapture. (I have been alarmed to discover that sales of recordings of Spem in alium have spiked since the appearance of a vastly popular work of pornography in which the piece plays a perverse narrative role—but one may regard this expansion of the Thomas Tallis Fan Club as a gift horse to be spared oral examination, perhaps?)

                 

          We must return, however,  to Queen Hester and the Chechen freedom fighter Hadji Murat.  That turns out to be surprisingly easy to do.  The Latin text of the motet, which comes from one of the old monastic offices, begins thus: Spem in alium numquam habui / Praeter in te, Deus Israel…    (I have never put my hope in any other but you, God of Israel…)  This is not a biblical quotation, but it is nonetheless a biblical text, a paraphrase of the beginning of the penitential prayer of Esther (Esther *14:3): “Dominus mi qui rex noster es solus adiuva me solitariam et cuius praeter te nullus auxiliator est alius” (O my Lord, who alone art our king, help me a desolate woman, and who have no other helper but thee.)  In the Anglican Prayer Book of 1662 this same text is reflected in a passage in the order of daily evening prayer:

            V.  Give peace in our time, O Lord. 
            R.  Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God

God metaphorically “fighting” on behalf of mankind is a lovely if startling poetic idea.  Men literally fighting on behalf of God, on the other hand, has been an utter and dismal historical disaster.  It is long since time that the idea be junked.  As Rodney King said, "Can't we all just get along?"  And as Archbishop Cranmer said, "Give peace in our time, O Lord".   As for “cultural diversity,” Thomas Tallis may have something to teach us there, too.  He takes forty different voices and weaves them into a unified musical textile of dazzling beauty.
           

*The Hebrew text of this book, from which the English Authorized Version was translated, ends in the tenth chapter.  The medieval Christian Bible (the Vulgate)—from which the monastic liturgies were constructed--contains six additional chapters which had been interspersed in the Septuagint (the old Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures).

Run for Your Lives

Shortly after lunch on Friday, November 22, 1963, I was walking with a friend and colleague among a fairly large number of students up the long backside of Bascom Hill toward our shared office in Bascom Hall on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where we both held the exalted rank of Instructor in English.  It was the end of the last week before Thanksgiving half way through my very first semester of teaching.  A good deal has changed since then.  I’m not sure the rank of Instructor still exists, for as lowly as it was, it was at least on the track to the tenure track.  Today’s administrative answer would be to hire an “adjunct”—to be treated as a kind of academic wetback.  Furthermore Friday classes barely exist today, interfering as they are wont to do with students’ social plans and faculty’s travel plans.

            I gradually became aware of a buzz among this pedestrian cohort.  The buzz was about President Kennedy—something serious about him.  Somebody had shot at him.  No, somebody had shot him.  In Dallas.  At the door of Bascom Hall a group of graduate students were in vigorous conversation.  I asked them directly, and they told me just as directly.  President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.  He was dead.  But one of these guys seemed to have a very odd take on things.  The murder of our president apparently had an up side, because the assassin was “a right-wing nut”--a “militia type”, to be specific.  “This will cook their goose,” he assured me.  Quite soon more reliable news appeared.  The president’s murderer turned out to be the only Communist in Texas.  Somehow this intelligence did not make me feel any better—or worse.

            Fast forward roughly half a century to Monday last.  It’s late afternoon, and we are on the train to New York on the way to have dinner with one of our dearest friends—in town from Texas, of all places.  When I telephoned my daughter to try to arrange at least a sighting, she warned me that we might find Penn Station in lock-down.  “There’s been a bomb at the Boston Marathon—lots of casualties.”  Our friend Jim had not yet heard this news when we met him, and it caused him no small alarm.  He has a son in Boston, and the son’s friend had been planning to run in the marathon.  Any parent of any child of any age will understand.  Fortunately, a phone call was able to put him at ease—at least to such ease as is available when some of your compatriots have just been blown to pieces.

            It was well after my routine bedtime when we got back to Princeton, but I wanted to catch up on the bombing story.  Two things struck me about the Internet coverage as it had already taken shape.  The first was its unreliability.  There was a definite report that an eight-year-old girl had been killed.  (In fact it was a boy.)  There was an equally definite report of a third bomb at the Kennedy Library.  (There was no such bomb.)  The gossip among graduate students is one thing, solemnly pronounced misinformation from supposedly professional journalists another.  The second was an odd and unseemly scramble for political cover or political advantage. 

            In his first public statement about the matter President Obama was calm and measured, rightly refraining from prejudicial judgment.  But he wouldn’t even use the word terrorism.  The word he used was tragedy.  Oedipus Rex is tragedy.  Randomly blowing the limbs off spectators at an athletic event is terrorism, whether committed by a Muslim Brother or an Aryan Brother or anybody else’s brother.  Surely the man knows that.  Candidate Al Gore became notorious for the infantilizing tone of his public addresses.  I suppose the president is an improvement in this regard.  He at least treats us as though we were fourth-graders.

            The following day the Internet coverage was split between the attempt to convey information and accusatory conjectures and counter-factuals.  Of actual information there was precious little, inviting the supplement of various specious but nonetheless viral Facebook and Twitter offerings.  Of hypothesis and suppositions contrary-to-fact there was of course an abundance, as always.  What will the liberal/conservative press do if the perpetrator turns out to be a jihadi/anti-tax libertarian?  Several commentators strained at analogies with the press coverage, or press blackout, surrounding the current criminal trial of a Philadelphia abortionist.  The supposition seems to be that this will really cook their goose, whatever this and whoever they might be.  There is a very depressing tendency in the present political climate for journalists’ stories about events to become stories about other stories rather than about the events.

            The passage of fifty years has not entirely silenced fantastic speculation about the Kennedy assassination.  It would be absurd to expect fifty hours to still speculation about the Boston bomber(s).  It should not be too much to ask, however, that our pundits and talking heads might distinguish between their fellow citizens with whose political ideas they disagree and real Enemies of the People—the ones who blow up little children, I mean.

Read It, and Weep

           

           Last Sunday evening, on the first truly spring day of the year, I found myself sitting amid a circle of auditors on folding chairs on the Albert E. Hinds Memorial Plaza just outside the remarkably busy town library of Princeton, New Jersey.  We listened to (among others) a gospel singer, a professor of elocution, a prison chaplain, and a poet as they sang, read, spoke, or recited from a makeshift dais in the center of the square.  The crowd was—well, diverse is the word that comes to mind.  There were well-scrubbed suburban ladies, young black kids, a sprinkling of clerical collars.  I even saw some seriously long hair, also cool hats.  The best in that category was atop an imam who had come all the way down from Newark for the event.  I might describe the vibe as counter-cultural, could I any longer identify a common culture worth countering.  In any event it was by no means my usual scene.  I prefer classical music concerts, indoors.

            But every now and then one stumbles upon some great unpleasantness that one has up until then been able actually to ignore, or to keep so far on the periphery of meaningful consciousness as to be insulated from its implications.  Unfortunately once having stumbled upon it—bumped into it on the street, so to speak—further complaisance is impossible.   It seems rather unfair to me that I must add to the significant number of things I already have to worry about a new one: the implications of the huge incarceration rate among young black men.  But I must.

            A book is the catalyst of my distress.  It’s called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, a lawyer-professor who teaches at Ohio State.  It is not unlikely that you have heard of it, as it has sold very well and been widely reviewed, but it was forced upon my attention by my wife.

            Professor Alexander’s subject is the mass incarceration of youth of color in the United States, a phenomenon directly related to the “War on Drugs” so vigorously pursued for the better part of a generation now.  Her title reflects her thesis that the actual social effects of the mass incarceration of young black men is to impose upon the community crippling disabilities not entirely unlike those that obtained under the legal discrimination of the old “Jim Crow” regime in the south.

 bully pulpit?

            I am a law-and-order kind of guy.  I also believe in, and preach, individual responsibility.  I favor neither  the dismantling of the criminal justice system nor a general amnesty for criminal offenders.  Naturally I am leading up to a “but…”  What has overwhelmed me about The New Jim Crow is not its legal or political arguments but its mind-boggling statistical information.  A good deal of this information has been printed on one side of a card bookmark, two inches by five, that some kids were handing out among the crowd on Hinds Plaza.  Item, the United States, with five percent of the world’s population, has a quarter of the world’s prisoners.  There are considerably more than two and a half million inmates in American prisons!  Item, the average annual cost for the maintenance of an American inmate is $60,000.   There may now be some college or university with a higher annual comprehensive fee, but if there is I don’t know about it.  In 2012 the median family income in the United States was $45,000.  Whether looked at in terms of human capital or simply those of the efficient use of financial resources, there is here a shaming extravagance of waste. 

           Deborah Ford, Director of Music at Trinity Cathedral, Trenton

           The racial sociology of American prisons, which is of course the focus of the book, is extraordinary.  A white male child born in 2001 faces a 1:17 chance of eventual incarceration.  When I hear a number like that, my literal mind tends to form a picture of some concrete cohort—a classroom, a subway car, a church congregation, the swimming pool when it gets crowded.  One in seventeen seems shocking enough to me, but it practically melts into insignificance when one considered the statistical odds for Latino and black boys.  For Latinos it’s 1:6 and for blacks 1:3!

          I surely cannot be alone in finding that these and other facts border on the incredible, while the complexity and intractability of the whys behind them seem to invite paralysis.  That is why my wife Joan joined with a group of local citizens, mostly women, to come up with the idea of a week-long “New Jim Crow Read Out”.  Ours is a college town with lots people who read books.  The courtyard in front of the public library has a lot of people moving through it.  So from five to six each evening this week there is a simple public program that features a reading from The New Jim Crow, a thematically related musical presentation, and a mini-lecture or testimonial from a speaker with personal knowledge of some aspect of the prison system.  The program concludes with poetry, mostly composed by inmates, and a few minutes to browse the petitions on the display tables.

          

Sent to Test Us

 Cora (foreground) with sister Lulu, print ex-libris labels for Lulu's library

            A week ago we were among the numerous guests at our son-in-law’s Passover seder, which was the usual combination of moving solemnity, family hilarity, and strange but mostly delicious things to eat.  We all took our turns in reading from the haggadah liturgy.  This was a little tricky.  Not only did readers around the long table alternate between Hebrew and English according to ability and inclination, but there were two versions of an English text so different the one from the other that it was not easy to follow along. 

            One of the stars was my eight-year-old granddaughter Cora.  She read beautifully (in English) a rather complex passage in which Rabbi So-and-So opined that God’s goodness to the Hebrews was way more than the necessary minimum for their salvation.  God repeatedly granted great favors when smaller favors would have sufficed.  Cora had pretty clearly not encountered the English word sufficed before, but she confidently kept going, pronouncing the word as Chaucer would have done, giving it three syllables and the vowel values of the French ça suffice.

            I naturally thought of this episode when I read that Beverly Hall, the former superintendant of schools in Atlanta, Georgia, surrendered to the police a couple of days ago.  She faces charges of cheating on her final exams in a rather sensational way.  That is, she is alleged to have encouraged and participated in a large conspiracy to falsify, on a massive scale, the results of the standardized tests administered to the schoolchildren of Atlanta.  The immediate aim of the conspiracy was to fake the results of standardized tests in such a fashion as to suggest that her pupils were far better than they actually are at reading and math.  The secondary aim was probably to enjoy the psychic and material rewards connected with perceived “success” and “improvement” on the tests.  So outrageous was her crime, in the view of her accusers, that it was at first proposed that she be held against bail of $7.5 million.  (This was later reduced to a mere $200,000).

            Ms. Hall’s case and the cases of many others are now entering the judicial system, and the accused persons deserve the usual protection against premature journalistic judgment.  Specific individuals aside, however, it is obvious that there has been massive fraud within the Atlanta public schools system.  To me the most surprising thing about this scandal is that so many people seem surprised.  Any teacher at any level surely knows that if important real or imagined material rewards are linked to test results some people will cheat to attain the rewards.  Why should it amaze us that teachers themselves might cheat?  It turns out that if cheating is made easy enough, Harvard undergraduates (among the world’s more privileged demographics) will cheat on a massive scale.

            So many dubious assumptions lie exposed in this episode that I hardly know where to begin.  The first misprision is that it is reasonable to expect that any elementary teacher, human or angelic, could overcome in an hour or two a day the massive educational deficit inflicted by an inadequate, culturally impoverished experience in the home, let alone one that is actively malign.  It is all well and good to “hold schools accountable,” but it is futile to hold them accountable for the crisis of the American family. 

            A second confusion seems to hold that the way to get rid of cheating on standardized tests is to get rid of the tests, since they are worthless anyway.  This is an argument seriously held by numerous education professionals and social science experts, who are inclined to attribute to “cultural bias” in the tests the persistently poor performance of certain groups who take them.  This is a bit of a sore point for me.  I spent some years as the chair of the committee that makes up the Advanced Placement test in English Literature, and I know first hand the heroic, and often enough comical efforts made by test-makers to overcome “cultural bias”.  A standardized test is a mighty feeble curricular foundation, and teachers who “teach to the test” must be in my estimation a pretty feeble lot.  But the idea that standardized tests don’t tell us anything is absurd.  They just don’t tell us what we want to hear.

Reading the AP English test         

          No child ever became a concert violinist by limiting his practice to an hour-long school class.  No child ever got to Wimbledon by limiting her time on the court to a daily hour-long gym class.  The way to become a good reader is to do a fair amount of good reading on a regular basis.  I shall risk the opinion that that is the only way.  Among the literate there will always be a wide range of reading skill, just as there will be among violinists and tennis players.  But the statement that a person can read the English language has a common-sense meaning that even the greatest experts cannot distort.  If you want to know whether children can read, hand them a page or two of text and listen to the results.  I insist upon neither Shakespeare nor Tupak Shakur.  Almost any page of the daily newspaper will suffice.

Gaudyamus

Jesus College, Oxford: the front quad, looking back from the dining hall steps

A week ago today I flew to England to attend a gaudy at Jesus College, Oxford, where I arrived in the autumn of 1958 as a Rhodes Scholar to begin an undergraduate degree.  In America we denominate academic classes by year of graduation; the Oxford convention is to use the year of matriculation.  The college had invited the extant members of the classes of 1957 and 1958—along with cohorts from the much more recent classes of 1965 and 2005. Twenty-nine of us oldsters signed up.  I considered that not merely a good show but a good omen, since Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales long ago established nine-and-twenty as the proper number of felaweshipe.

            We don’t have the word gaudy (n.) in American English.  We have only the  adjectival form, which is nearly as unpleasant as its cousin tawdry.  Both words will serve to exemplify one theme of this essay—lugubrious decay.  Tawdry stuff was the kind of cheap glitter or textile bling you might buy at Saint Audrey[Ætheldreda]’s Fair.  The original meaning of gaudy was rejoicing, from Latin gaudere, and by the sixteenth century the English noun gaudy denoted a celebrative or ceremonial college feast.  So I flew to England to attend a reunion banquet.

            Academic gaudiation (why not?) has ever been associated with the heedless hedonism of youth, alas so transitory, as in the pseudo-medieval academic anthem par exellence:

            Gaudeamus igitur,

            Iuvenes dum sumus.

            Post iucundam iuventutem,

            Post molestam senectutem,

            Nos habebit humus.

(Therefore let us rejoice while we are young.  After our happy youth, after our painful senility, the earth will have us.)

            Despite the advances (or depredations) of modern educational theory, much of education remains what it has been since time immemorial, a cultural transfer from seniors to juniors, from those who are supposed to know something to those who are supposed to need or want to know it. Yet anyone who has spent a lifetime in the business, as I have done, will be aware that the first requirement of being a teacher is to be a learner.

            I suppose it hardly needs saying even to my blog’s youthful audience that the aging process is by no means uniformly pleasant.  Quite a few people, as they experience it, may find nothing pleasing in it.  How could there not be a sense of constriction, diminishment, and shrinking horizons?  We are all headed, after all, for the “seventh age,” that state of living decay so unequivocally characterized by Shakespeare: Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.  Under these circumstances there must be measurable consolation in the discovery that even learning about decay and loss has its unique fascinations.

            One deeply satisfying pleasure that it is literally impossible to experience until you are ripe in years is to reconnect with old college friends after half a century.  With three or four of my Jesus College contemporaries I have had continuing contact over the years.  We see each other periodically, here or in Europe, and we talk on the phone now and again.  But at the gaudy I reconnected with comrades I had not seen since 1961 and in some instances probably not brought to mind since then.  It is one of the marvels of the intensity and energy of youthful friendship that its embers seem unquenchable.  The old bonhomie can blaze up again in an instant, and with it comes a flood of long-dormant happy memories.

Jesus College, Oxford: the dining hall

            Jesus College, Oxford, was founded in 1571.  It is in fact the only college at either of the old universities to be founded by the Great Elizabeth.  Its old dining hall, modest in size in comparison with the halls of some more opulent neighbors, is a Jacobean gem.  The Fellows’ Library, another jewel, is a miniature version of the spectacular library at Trinity College, Dublin.  I was never allowed near it as an undergraduate, but either because of an optimistic assessment of my eminence as medievalist or one yet more optimistic of my potential as donor, I was singled out for a private guided tour just before dinner.

The Fellows' library           

          Almost anybody can look pretty good in a dinner jacket and dim light, and I thought our group of geezers, crowded around a long high table presided over by the College Principal, made a handsome picture.  You may suspect me of partiality.  The dinner was sumptuous, with several exotic courses, the main one being a piece of duck—tasty, indeed, though oddly quadrilateral in shape, as though the fowl had been long confined in a rebus cube.  The evening’s sole blemish, unfortunately a serious one, was acoustical.  The wine flowed freely, and as it flowed the bibulous braying of the youngsters on the lower benches, echoing through the hall, elevated the decibels to life-threatening levels.  There is a special scientific unit of measure for gaudy noise: the heorot.  It takes its name from Hrothgar’s mead-hall in Beowulf.  One heorot is the amount of noise made by one hundred and twelve drunken, cheering Geats as Wealtheow goes about distributing gold rings.  In the Jesus College dining hall last Friday the noise level averaged 4.3 heorots, and at its crescendo it reached 6.1.  But if the dinner conversation was perforce limited, the good will was boundless.

high jinks in Heorot