The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Solstice Sestina: Whiteout on the Whiteboard in Winter

    Whiteout on the Whiteboard in Winter

    The shadowless man in the center of winter
    drew nine snowmen leaving no shadow
    on the boardroom wall size whiteboard
    and sketched one goal as cold as snow
    nine snowmen into one who would wander.
    The snowmen started to wonder

    who in the whiteboard world would wonder
    such opportunity in win win winter.
    The shadowless man began to wander
    here on the whiteboard without shadow
    as quiet as a field of snow
    empty save the snowmen on the whiteboard.

    Whiteout conditions on the whiteboard
    showed a winterland of snowy wonder
    how in the wonderland of snow
    in a whirling passage of winter
    with zero shadow
    one will wield wander.

    The shadowless man wandered
    solo across the clear whiteboard
    concealing all shadow
    not even a digress to address the wonder
    soulful worship of winter
    leaving no metric in the snow.

    Around and around in the field of snow
    the shadowless man wandered
    silent on the stage of winter
    in a whiteout on a whiteboard
    with no edges no wonder
    across the field fell no shadow.

    Lost with no mere mirror shadow
    the shadowless man fell in the snow
    wandering he fell wondering
    why worry about wandering
    in fields of whiteboards
    in the silence of winter

    no shadow with which to wander
    in the snow of the whiteboard
    wondering where the nine 8’s went in winter.

  • A New Lear; or, Daughter Dissed

    We waited last week in an anon umbra for the expectant promise over at Literary Rejections on Display, an entertaining and informative site we visit periodically to check up on the latest trends in rejection slips and attitudes of those on the receiving end. Apparently, Writer Rejected, the hospitable host of LROD, had landed a paper airplane safely somewhere, an acceptance.

    “What Wasn’t Passed On” (New York Times, Dec. 8, 2011) is a familial, personal essay about a daughter who is disinherited by her father. We were reminded, of course, of the mad dad mother of them all, King Lear, and we posted our congratulations to the now somewhat less mysterious WR in a non-puckish comment, for the tone had grown serious, and we also realized a larger context of the personal theme, for the whole country has by now disinherited an entire generation of its young, and it appears to be headed toward disinheriting a generation of its old as well.

    Yet we were also reminded of Faulkner’s Isaac McCaslin, who, in Faulkner’s “The Bear” (see Go Down, Moses), rejects his inheritance, insisting that no one can truly own the land, for the land inevitably has a complex history of giving and taking, of laying claims and laying hands.

    “Nothing will come of nothing,” Lear tells his daughter, and Blake’s road of excess may indeed lead to a palace of wisdom, but what’s a palace emptied of its children and its old people? Where’s a fool when you need one? For maybe something does come from nothing, for “God bless the child that’s got his own.”

  • Women Under the Glass Ceiling: Parity and Power in the Pipeline

    A recent Catalyst project, discussed in the HBR Blog Network post “New Research Busts Myths About the Gender Gap,” calls for action within the MBA corporate community. No one doubts that women’s experience in the workplace has woefully lacked what men have been given; but one Catalyst report, “Pipeline’s Broken Promise,” dispels the generally accepted causes (pipeline, motherhood, choice, mentoring), explanations that have led to disinformation and stagnation. But what are the reasons for continued male-female career disparity, then? How can we change effects if we don’t know the causes? Maybe we don’t need to know the causes – the correlations are enough to warrant action to produce change. But the Catalyst assumption seems to argue that inattention, inaction, and naïve or disingenuous acceptance of the popular explanations all amount to an actionable cause, a controllable root cause, to use some MBO lingo. A major MBO assertion is that we can’t change what we can’t control – ergo the drive to get control. Another Catalyst report, “The Myth of the Ideal Worker: Does Doing the Right Things Really Get Women Ahead?,” illustrates, simply put, the obvious, that women are different than men, and that women should not expect equal treatment and experience when exercising the same strategies as men use to get ahead.

    But Catalyst is talking about a narrowly defined community – the study is of MBA’s, female and male, and of their various experiences and reflections on that experience. But is success a possession, and, if so, can the possession be enjoyed if it needs one’s 7×24 protection? But proximate causes can have long tails, and the problem of the gender success gap is systemic; the Equal Pay Act of 1963 is as old or older than the cohorts studied. But those outside the community of MBA’s might fairly ask what changes an increase to parity of women to men in the workplace might bring. Why should an outsider care if the CEO is a male or a female? Why should the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the unemployed, the poor, the homeless, the Norma Raes of the world, believe that MBA-women, given the opportunity, will bring some improved economic balance to more than their own cohort?

    Will female-male parity in the workplace find homes for homeless families? Will parity help eliminate torture? (Readers might ask how this is relevant, but we are talking about global corporations with the lobbying arms of blacksmiths.) But closer to home, will parity solve the health care crisis? A recent report by the US Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010,” highlights the current female-to-male earnings ratio, but posts even more alarming updates, including “approximately 31.6 percent of the population had at least one spell of poverty lasting 2 or more months during the 4-year period from 2004 to 2007,” and “in 2009, 26.1 percent of all people experienced at least 1 month without health insurance coverage.”

    Catalyst’s “Pipeline’s Broken Promise” report concludes, explicitly, that power and responsibility in the corporate world belong to men, and there are few signs that current initiatives to achieve parity for women will be successful. Implicitly, this means that to men go the spoils and the accountability. The recent financial crisis shows what the men have done with the spoils and how they have shirked their accountability. The question remains: what will be done with the spoils and how might accountability improve financial results in the general civic community if women had parity with men in terms of income, job advancement, CEO and board positions – in short, career success and career satisfaction?

    Yet another Catalyst report provides a persuasive answer to this question. In “Gender and Corporate Social Responsibility: It’s A Matter of Sustainability,” the authors show that corporations with greater female to male parity do serve both themselves and their communities more profitably than organizations with less or no parity. The report suggests serious implications for well-being measurements of both businesses and communities. The concept of corporate goodwill capital is not new, but given the current ills in society and the marketplace, firms would benefit from long-term proactive solutions that would bring parity to female-male workplace experience that would provide benefits to both the firm and the communities in which it operates.

    Support for a positive answer to the question of what women will do with the spoils and accountability might also be found in another source, one outside of the business community. Are women different from men in substantive ways that would make a difference in financial corporate results? But the question must be further refined: are female MBA’s different from their male counterparts? The question is a difficult one for Catalyst to answer, for in an effort to dispel the disparity, the answer must be no; but if the answer is no, then what’s the response to the disenfranchised who would ask what difference achieving parity makes? In “Feminist Perspectives on Power” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Amy Allen argues that women understand and use power in substantively different ways than men understand and use power. The net effect of this different view and handling of power is that women use power to help others rather than to oppress or combat with others. Transferred to the corporate world, this would mean that women should not view business as a survival of the fittest battlefield but as a cooperative opportunity to empower themselves, their firm, and their communities. In Section 4 of her essay, sub-titled “Power as Empowerment,” Allen says, “Most of the feminists who embrace this transformative or empowerment-based conception of power explicitly define it as an ability or capacity and present it as an alternative to putatively masculine notions of power-over.” Allen references to persuasive effect French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, and concludes, “some feminists interpret Irigaray’s work on sexual difference as suggesting an alternative conception of power as transformative, a conception that is grounded in a specifically feminine economy.” What this means for the woman MBA who aspires toward control, spoils, and accountability, and given her current inability to satisfy her aspirations, is to turn away not only from the male strategies for achievement, but to vow that, once she achieves full parity, she will work toward changing the meaning and use of power in the corporate world, a change that would improve both top and bottom line results and change the corporate system, for otherwise, she will simply have become a man, succumbed to his power by marrying into it, a marriage that will still be unequal, for by becoming him, she will have denied herself, and in denying herself, she will have lost the chance to achieve parity with her community.

    Allen, Amy, “Feminist Perspectives on Power”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/feminist-power/&gt;.

    Update at HBR Blog: Why Boards Need More Women

  • The Glass Guitar Ceiling: Rolling Stone’s “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”

    The women’s glass ceiling, that invisible, clandestine barrier that separates any upper economic echelon of men from their connected but not equal women counterparts, apparently extends to guitar playing, as evidenced by the latest Rolling Stone list, “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” (Issue 1145: Dec. 8, 2011). There are only two female guitarists on the list, Joni Mitchell (# 75), and Bonnie Raitt (# 89). Joni Mitchell was # 72 in the 2003 RS draft, Joan Jett # 87 (Jett didn’t make the 2011 cut). Lists, of course, are made for argument, so why aren’t there more women guitarists on the list?

    But it should come as no surprise to find that one woman’s floor is not another man’s ceiling, for the disparity in nearly every correlation shows women living on floors far below men in the economic castle. The gender income gap has narrowed in recent years, according to US Census data (see chart), but the disparity that still exists can no longer be attributed to causes like the so-called pipeline factor (that women MBA’s, e.g., relatively new cohorts, need more time to assimilate into the system):

    Source: DeNavas-Walt, Carmen, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-239, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2011.

    A recent study in Catalyst dispels the pipeline and other myths that would explain male-female, gender-income disparity. Worse, the Catalyst study shows that playing louder, faster, or more power chords isn’t likely to increase the struggling female guitarist’s chances to enter the ranks of the top 100. According to the Catalyst study, women fall behind men in job advancement regardless of what promotional strategies the woman employs. In other words, these are women who know how to play the game, but playing the same chords as the men play doesn’t seem to garner the same audience. A 2010 Catalyst census shows that 92% of Fortune 500 company top earners are men, and only 14% of women are executive officers. So what’s a poor girl to do? To make matters worse yet, the Atlantic on-line just posted that “68% of the sons of the top 1% work at their Dad’s company.” The Atlantic post links to a recent study, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Employers,” and a blog post by Miles Corak, one of the study’s authors. Says Corak, of the elite nepotism, one with harmful potential, in the conclusion to his blog post: “If the rich leverage economic power to gain political power they can also skew broader public policy choices—from the tax system to the education system—to the benefit of their offspring. This will surely start eroding the belief that labour markets are fair, and that anyone can aspire to the top.”

    So what women guitarists in particular did we feel were unfairly excluded by the RS list? Here are some suggestions: Emily Remler, Mary Osborne, Ana Popovic, Elizabeth Cotten, Sharon Isbin, Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ida Presti.

    And the ladies were not the only slighted guitarists omitted from the RS list. We would be remiss if we did not augment the argument with some of our favorite male guitarist no-shows: Gabor Szabo, Bill Frisell, John Williams, Leo Brouwer, Herb Ellis, David Rawlings, Leo Kottke.

    No doubt you have your own greatest list: “God bless the child that’s got his own.”

    Related: Women Under the Glass Ceiling: Parity and Power in the Pipeline

  • A Literary Thanksgiving Feast

    "Hard Times for These Times," Charles Dickens (1854). Drawing: "Mr. Harthouse Dining at the Bounderbys'."

    On a big platter in the middle of the full table sits the fat novel, its dust jacket a cracking bronze, peeling at the edges, its pages sliced and curling, its story stuffed with, well, stuffing: characters mixed with plot in a warm, moist setting, everyone talking at once, voices waxing, then waning, then waxing again, still louder.

    A bowl of essays is passed around the table; there’s plenty for everyone. There’s a new dish, something called “creative non-fiction.” I try some, but find it’s not so new, after all, for isn’t all writing creative? And anyway why would we want to read writing that is not creative?

    “Pass the poems, please,” someone at the other end of the table says. Poems are like olives. Some have pits, putting your teeth at risk; others are pitted, hollow. Some poems are saltier than others, and may be filled with white almonds or cherry red pimento peppers. If you squeeze a poem you get cooking oil.  And like olive oil, the oil from poems might be extra-virgin, refined, or not potable.

    A gravy bowl of APA-style sauce spills across the tablecloth and an argument ensues as to who is at fault, an argument of causation. “Why is that nasty stuff even on the table?” someone asks. A short scene flashes into a drama that quickly subsides with a denouement of dessert: The Emperor of Ice Cream appears with chocolate covered couplets.

    But that’s not all, for then Sestina rolls in a six-layered, short story torte. It’s a literary feast, and in these hard times, we are thankful, at least, for literature.

    Addendum: My sister Barb’s comment reminded me that I neglected to include beverages in the literary feast post, and I suggested she pick up a six pack of Ballads and maybe a couple of bottles of Memoir. Limericks might be served for pre-meal cocktails, unfermented satire for those who like less bite, but large jugs of stream of consciousness should be kept full and within reach, for readers will surely be thirsty.

    Update, Nov. 24: Thanks to Berfrois for joining us at the table!

  • Happy 50th, CSUDH

    My alma mater, California State University at Dominguez Hills, this past year celebrated its 50th anniversary, 1960-2010; they celebrated through commencement 2011, and had invited on their website alumni to share memories. The invitation limited submissions to 200 words, a detail I initially missed (ever the perspicacious student). But while I did eventually whittle my college memoir to the requisite 200 words, I was a little late with it, so I thought I might as well post the whole hog here.

    What do I remember about Cal State Dominguez Hills? I was a student there in the 1970’s, first for a Bachelor’s in English, having transferred from El Camino, then, after teaching for a couple of years, for a Master’s in English. It’s been a wonderful world, as Satchmo sang, but those years as a student were the best.

    Many days I rode my bicycle to school from my folks’ place in El Segundo, winding my way through the small towns, finding new routes to avoid traffic, no helmet, no bike lanes – I know, sounds like the clichéd story of how Grandma walked five miles through five feet of snow to get to the school bus stop, then rode the rickety old school bus another seven miles to the one room schoolhouse.

    Actually, CSUDH in the 1970’s had a program something like a one room schoolhouse, called “The Small College.” Students in the Small College created their own, interdisciplinary curriculum. The program was experimental and well suited to the student population at the time. We were a small school yet, no football team; we won the national badminton championship one year when I was there.

    The campus in those days, the rise from the west particularly noticeable if you happened to be approaching the school on a bicycle, was a peaceful, quiet, lovely place, full of open spaces and views of the surrounding South Bay areas. The campus never felt crowded. In the courtyards below the library, one could sit under trees and listen to the music students practice their instruments, the silences filling with breeze. Many of the books in the library were still marked “Cal State Palos Verdes,” the first planned site, before reconsideration following the Watts riots called for a campus nearer the south central inner cities.

    Raleigh Super Course I rode to campus and 9' 2" Hobie – hanging from joists in basement.

    I still have that bike; it’s hanging in my basement, an old Raleigh Super Course, with decals from Redondo, Hermosa, and El Segundo. Between the Bachelor’s and the Master’s, I rode it occasionally (when my VW was down) from El Segundo to Venice, where I taught junior high grades. It’s not been on the road in awhile (the 9’ 2” Hobie surfboard also hanging from the joists hasn’t been in the water in awhile, either).

    CSCDH Catalog, 1977-78, next to stack of books I read for classes.

    I also still have my CSCDH 1977-78 catalog (upright in photo next to a stack of books I read for classes), and perusing it now I realize what I remember and miss most from my days on campus: my instructors. My favorite teachers included Abe Ravitz, whose American lit. exams we wrote in “blue books” (the Huck Finn at the top of the book stack in the photo is the copy I used in one of his American lit. classes – his own worn copy was held together with rubber bands); Marvin Laser, whose bearing as a scholar and a gentle man was unmatched; the lovely and sensitive Violet Jordain – hello Dr. Jordain, if you’re reading this – I still have the big Shakespeare book we used in your class; feisty and energetic Agnes Yamada, who encouraged me to become a teacher; Joyce Johnson, still an assistant in those days, a local prodigy; and my good friend Mike Mahon, whose interests in reading and music, in Cage and McLuhan, Joyce and Beckett, put me on an intellectual path that still interests me today.­­

    With Dr. Mahon in backyard on Mariposa, circa 1978.

    We understood that we were in on the beginning of something, that someday there would be more buildings, more students, that the campus would grow into a cultural center, and there would be different teachers, and new students. What a remarkable time and opportunity, to be among those who helped start and build a college. It was a beautiful place and time, not without conflicts, external and internal, but no regrets; we had a good time, and learned to stay true to literature: Happy 50th, Dominguez Hills!

  • On Shoes: A Barefoot Existentialism

    Another summer unfolded like a dirty sock, stiff and hot. Baseball fell to football, and I kicked off the boat shoes. What to put on? If you’re a ballplayer, you may have uncommon shoe choice, as evidenced by reports of a Fall skirmish, in a bar down in Louisiana, which resulted in the police confiscating 49 pairs of shoes belonging to one of the college athletes allegedly involved in the melee. I’m still a surfer at heart, and a minimalist when it comes to shoes, so I look askance at that number, 49, but one must be a barefoot existentialist to throw the first block.

    The idea of the shoe is really old. In 2008, archeologists found what is thought to be the oldest surviving leather shoe in Eurasia. The shoe, found stuffed with grass, presumably to maintain its shape during the off-season, was radiocarbon dated to the 4th millennium BC (1). Other types of shoes have been found that are even older, shoes made of fibers, sewn or woven, or made from animal skin, and sandals made with different kinds of technology and apparently for different purposes (2, 3). One study suggests that the idea for the shoe may have come from basketry, the shoe conceived as a basket for the foot, the shoe made with basket weaving technique (4).

    An inventory of my own shoes harbors the story out of Louisiana from a sea of hyperbole. Maybe the athlete had never thrown out an old pair – a youthful hoarder of shoes. Still, we might argue that access to more shoes than we need suggests overindulgence, but is this a case of moral relativism? And no doubt athletes are not the only shoe collectors. Besides, in shoes begin responsibilities, to improvise on the Delmore Schwartz theme.

    Perhaps my parents tried to prepare me for athletic success requiring extra closet space by ensuring an early shoeful habit, but it seems unlikely. I’ve two old photos in which I appear to be wearing the same formidable Buster Browns, and if my parents were trying to prepare me for anything, they must have been thinking of circus lion taming. In any case, assuming one new pair of shoes per year, I went from shoeless to ten pairs of shoes by the time I reached Little League.

    The Buster Browns were worn at Churchill Downs; Little League was a mile from the Pacific. I don’t know how many shoes my parents packed, with everything else they owned, into their Plymouth sedan with their four children for the move out west, and no doubt what shoes we had comforted our Westward Ho! feet, but the adventure must have been riskier for our having no spares in the trunk.

    In Little League I preferred sneakers to cleats. I spent three years playing ball for the El Segundo Major League Red Sox. Add another three pairs of shoes, but I’m sure I still owned only one pair at a time, and wore that pair everywhere, to school, church, baseball. I also wore rubber go-aheads, wore them down to the skin of my heels before tossing. Should these be counted as shoes? If so, add a pair every year, from the age of ten, when I started Little League, to 18, when I left home for the Army.

    In boot camp, at Fort Bliss, Texas, we were issued two pairs of Army boots, comfortable and substantial, and we wore them for every purpose save the few, formal occasions when we wore our dress greens with low quarters. Add another three pairs of shoes. I wore those same Army boots for six years, in and out of uniform. In barracks, we displayed our surplus shoes on our footlockers at the end of our bunks. The South Central boys displayed their spit shined cowboy boots along with their G. I. shoes. I put out my Jack Purcells, wiping clean the blue stripe.

    I left my low quarters in my usher’s locker at the Paradise Theatre one Saturday morning, soon after my military discharge. I had reflected too long on my chore of the day: chipping the gum off the bottoms of all the theatre seats. I couldn’t recall a detail as absurd from my Army experience. I snuck out of the dark theatre into a solid gold South Bay weekend, not my first existential decision, nor my last, wearing my Purcells, leaving my low quarters to an unknown successor, heedless of the shoe choices in my future.

    In college and in my early teaching assignments, I wore sneakers or the old Army boots, still wearing well. Few judgments, in those days, seemed shoe-based. It wasn’t until I abandoned teaching for the corporate world that I purchased a pair of wingtips, ignoring Thoreau’s advice to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” (5). I wore the wingtips stiffly into the office on my first day, spit shined; I was the only guy in the office wearing wingtips.

    Twenty-five years in a carpeted corporate world doesn’t wear out many shoes. Add another six or seven pairs. The story of my corporate career might be told in cordovan loafers, some with tassels, or boat shoes. Add a few golf shoes, slippers under the tree most years, then suddenly some cranky Dr. Martens, shoes I wore in the yard, on walks, and to work; and perhaps it was the insidious Martens that put me on the track to an Indie early-retiree lifestyle. I began to wear, like Eliot’s Prufrock, “the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” but with little regret (6).

    So I have owned more than 49 pairs of shoes, but never that many at once. I recently purchased some new Dr. Martens, made in China; my original pair, which I finally wore out, was made in England. One can’t fully appreciate new shoes until one has worn out old ones. For an athlete in sneakers, the shoe precedes the foot, and wearing the shoe out is not the essence of the game. Whatever legal tackles our contemporary athletes end up breaking, no shoes will be worn out, and any thoughts about going existential must wait for the off-season.

    Shakespeare’s bumbling Polonius might have offered another aphorism for Laertes’s consideration, though probably not putting the Western world on a new footing: treat each new pair of shoes as your last; perhaps then they might be worn more wisely, and one may more fully realize one’s barefoot potential, for the more shoes we have, the more schemed and distracted our purposes, but the closer we go to barefoot, the more deliberate and sure-footed our steps.

    Footnotes:

    1. Pinhasi R, Gasparian B, Areshian G, Zardaryan D, Smith A, et al. (2010). First Direct Evidence of Chalcolithic Footwear from the Near Eastern Highlands. PLoS ONE 5(6): e10984. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010984
    2. Ravilious, Kate. (June 9, 2010). World’s Oldest Leather Shoe Found—Stunningly Preserved: “Astonishingly modern” shoe preserved by sheep dung and dryness. National Geographic News: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100609-worlds-oldest-leather-shoe-armenia-science/
    3. Connolly, T. & Cannon, W. (1999). Comments on “America’s Oldest Basketry.” Radiocarbon, Vol 41, Nr 3, 1999, pp. 309-313.
    4. Berger, R., Bendat, M., & Parker, A. (AMERICA’S OLDEST BASKETRY: RAINER BERGER, MILLIE BENDAT and ANDREA PARKER) Isotope and Archaeometry Laboratory, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1567 USA. ABSTRACT: We have determined the earliest calibrated dates on three types of basketry from the Great Basin & Proceedings of the 16th International 14C Conference, edited by W. G. Mook and J. van der Plicht RADIOCARBON, Vol. 40, No. 2, 1998, P. 615-620. This is publication number 5084 of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UCLA.
    5. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, (New York: New American Library, 1960), chap. 1.
    6. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” poem.

  • The Way We Don’t Age Now: Unhappiness and Hunger in the Land of Plenty

    Hunger is a condition of life: no hunger, no life. The spider spins her web, hungry for the busy bee dancing by hungry for blues. The cactus patiently awaits the coming of a distant, dithering cloud. The salmon swims against the current, hungry to finish its ritual. A homeless man wanders into a soup kitchen, hungry for food, and stays for the writers’ workshop, hungry to tell his story (Frazier). When we are hungry for something, are we happy or unhappy? Yet when our every hunger is satisfied, we are dead. Do we grow less hungry with age?

    Sometimes, we are hungry to forget. Senility may satisfy that hunger, but the hunger to interfere with memory can occur at any age – consider the days spent on our many varieties of smack, dementias of the soul. Our culture inconsistently values certain kinds of hunger while frowning on other kinds of hunger: healthy hungers might include hunger for money, attention, or success in a chosen field; unhealthy hungers might include greed, fame, or the trappings of success. The poet is hungry for a new word, the salesman for an easy client, the surfer for an empty wave, the injured for revenge, the soldier for peace; we can be hungry for anything. Maslow suggested a hierarchy of hungers, but that seems too easy, for hungers can strike with surprise, while we often don’t recognize the source of our hunger, and self-actualization can lead to complacency, smugness in one’s work, for example.

    One thing we don’t seem to be too hungry for is old age.  Maybe that’s because, as Atul Gawande has said, “We are, in a way, freaks living well beyond our appointed time. So when we study aging what we are trying to understand is not so much a natural process as an unnatural one.” One consequence of the newness of aging longer, Gawande suggests, is that “we give virtually no thought to how we will live out our later years alone.” And not only are we unprepared to stop our fall, “most of us in medicine,” Gawande says, “don’t know how to think about decline.” A geriatrician could help, if we could find and afford one, but doctors don’t like working with old people, so there’s a woeful shortage of geriatricians, while what we need when moving into old age isn’t medicine and a rest home but a purpose for living, a hunger.

    But we value youth; wrinkles are a bummer. A recent article in Forbes (Barlow) indicated men in increasing numbers are undergoing cosmetic surgery because business prefers good looks, in spite of studies that show beauty used as a gauge for skill lacks credibility. We value youth, good looks, and money; where does this leave old folks? “You wonder too much for a Sandman,” Logan 5’s partner, Francis, tells him. “When you question, it slows you down” (Logan’s Run). No one is hungry in Logan’s plastic city, a truncated Shangri-La. But that’s not quite right, for the Runners are hungry, hungry for Sanctuary, though they are not quite sure where or what that is, and no one finds out, since no one lives past the age of 30. Life has become a limited Internet access contract. “Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents – seeing that – have no desire to become adults” (Bly viii).

    Why are Americans not happier? At the Becker-Posner blog, Becker, the Nobel Prize winning economist, confesses, “I admit I do not know why average degree of happiness has not risen in recent decades in the US as incomes rose.” But happiness, in the economist’s world, seems to having something to do with having something to do: “…perhaps utility has in fact not improved over time, or perhaps more likely happiness statistics are deviating from unmeasured increases in utility.” Posner, the Federal Judge, trying to explain why, while income has risen in recent decades in the US, happiness has fallen, reminds us that “Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that people fooled themselves in thinking they would be happier with more money. Maybe so; but as long as people do have this strong preference, economics can explain a great deal of human behavior.” Yet one thing may be certain, as evidenced by the results of psychoanalysis: explanations alone don’t make us happy.

    Recent studies on happiness agree that money does not buy happiness: “…a half century of escalating consumption has not brought Americans increased satisfaction” (Kolbert). As we buy and throw away, and buy and throw away again, the problem seems to be that we do not know what will make us happy. In the absence of hunger, the only thing left to do seems to be to take a nap. But we awake, hopefully, from our naps. In Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Mirror,” old age is the face of a “terrible fish” that rises daily from a dark lake of sleep and gradually molts with the face of one’s memory. Yet in Logan’s Run, when the young people discover the first old person they’ve ever seen, they are fascinated by the wrinkles in his face, marvel that he not only knew his parents but also was raised by them, wonder what the words “beloved wife husband” on the tombstones mean. “That must be the look of being old,” Jessica says, touching the “cracks” in the old man’s face. Meanwhile, Francis, Logan’s ex-partner, catches up with the Runners, and says in anger to Jessica, “He was a Sandman; he was happy.” The Sandman does not hunger to question, and Logan’s answer that there is no Sanctuary, no opposing viewpoint, “does not program” on the inside.

    Perhaps one source of our current unhappiness is similar to that of the Cumaean Sibyl’s, whose immortality, like a new washing machine sold without a warranty, did not come with eternal youth. She aged and aged, increasingly unhappy, until nothing was left but her voice, and after a thousand years of withering life, her last wish was to die. If we could live without pain or stress, all of our needs provided for, as in Logan’s Run, able to buy a new face or even a complete body any time we tired of the old, the only catch though that we could not live beyond a certain age, what age would we select? The source of our unhappiness may be our unwillingness to grow old, the inability of our youth obsessed culture to value the wrinkles of old age as beautiful, desirable. In a culture so hungry for youth, people die earlier and earlier. We need to develop a hunger for old age.

    Works Cited

    Barlow, Tom. “Loving that Face in the Mirror.” Forbes 27 October 2011.
    Becker, Gary. “Happiness and Wellbeing.” Becker-Posner Blog 10 January 2010.
    Bly, Robert. The Sibling Society. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
    Frazier, Ian. “Hungry Minds.” The New Yorker 26 May 2008.
    Gawande, Atul. “The Way We Age Now.”  The New Yorker 30 April 2007.
    Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Everybody Have Fun.” The New Yorker 22 March 2010.
    Logan’s Run. Dir. Michael Anderson. 1976. Film.
    Plath, Sylvia. “The Mirror.” Performed by Natalie Clark, Radio Theatre Group, August 2011.
    Posner, Richard. “Why Aren’t Americans Happier?” Becker-Posner Blog 10 January 2010.

    also note: “Pastures of Plenty,” a song by Woody Guthrie; “Land of Plenty,” a film (2004) by Wim Wenders; and the song “The Land of Plenty,” by Leonard Cohen (2001).

  • James Joyce Occupies Wall Street

    Par for the course has changed, and Finnegans today must hit from tees so far away they can’t see the green, let alone the flag. They move to the park, where the fruit rusts, but the green is real. In Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce juxtaposes Wall Street with Phoenix Park, foreshadowing Occupy Wall Street:

    “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner
    ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.” (para. 3)

    Off the wall, Wall Street, in Finnegan’s retail-priced nighttime view, fall the archetypal financial partners, the “oldparr,” finding themselves now in dire straits, closed streets. The short notice is the layoff, the cancelled contract, down the shoot, out to the park. The fat egg Humpty Dumpty is enjoying a baseball game when he gets the news. A ball is knocked out of the park, and Humpty, once a solid egg, looks to the West for an answer, but is hit in the head and knocked out. The rest is a dream.

  • Ere Words Were

    Woe were we when once we wooed
    wowed with words we would vow
    to wed where naught
    taught to tie the knot
    a language log in front of us saw
    how it was on a woeful wordful sea.

    To whoo in the waves of a spelling sea
    to whit her way through a sea wrack wood
    while I too hooed to walk saw
    you to a vowel moon owling
    out of a wood worded knot
    a sentence fraught with naught.

    Yet we should not
    set sail on too prim a prescriptive sea
    wear not too tight the knot we tied for the knot
    does not mean our days of wooing
    must turn to stone washed vowels
    that we might say how we saved how we sawed.

    Woe the night full of guttural saws
    silver dreams of wordscaped naught
    woah the mirror that burns not its own vow
    merely reflects what it hears
    in a dark forest a bearingless wood
    of articulated knot.

    Woe to valor that ties a knot
    for one side up the other not this seesaw
    giddyup and stop of hooah and woah
    she loves me she loves me naught
    how it was on the woo worn sea
    ere we enjoined the corseted vowels.

    Whoa the abode that constantly vows
    to daily renew a woeful knot
    or be chastised to sea
    for what we were for what we saw
    for what we heard and what we could not
    before we verbally wooed.

    Now down to the sea words borne of vows
    set sail to keel whit to hoo but not
    with a saw set wode with naught.

  • Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Humanities!

    For more Liberations and Humanities in Crisis Revolution, see “Strangers on a Train: A chance encounter provides a lesson in complicity and the never-ending crisis in the humanities,” at Academe Online, by Cathy N. Davidson.

    Photo to left is cover of Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution, edited by Ihab Hassan. Wesleyan University Press, 1971.
    See Richard Wasson review of Liberations in boundary 2, Duke University Press: Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 242-244. Duke University Press or JSTOR Stable URL