Matching Tracksuits

Month: January 2010

Open Sesame

Sunday 31 January 2010

I’d left it on the counter as I’d cooked dinner earlier tonight, and as I picked up the bottle of sesame oil, I suddenly fell back through the years and found myself standing in my kitchen in Lipnica Wielka in the late mid-90s, holding the bottle of sesame oil I’d inherited from Roy, an American returning to the States. Standing here in Greenville, I closed my eyes and for a few moments, I could almost feel myself back in that odd kitchen: the little refrigerator in the corner; the old wood-burning oven that I’d covered with a tablecloth and pressed into service as a dish-drying counter; the overhead light hanging from a wire, casting a harsh yet dim light throughout the room.

I imagined myself putting the sesame oil back in its place. I’d been so happy when I realized, a few weeks after moving into the apartment, that everything in the kitchen finally had a home. It was another sign that the small village in southern Poland was becoming my home. The rice lived a shelf up from the herbs and seasonings, which also housed the sesame oil. Everything had its place, including me.

I imagined myself putting the sesame oil back in its place and wandering into the living room, sitting down to look over lesson plans for the next day. My rock star status mitigated many of the challenges of being a new teacher. I had an advantage over every other teacher: I’d crossed an ocean and half a continent to teach the kids. I was from the land of 90120, Coca Cola, and highways. The honeymoon lasted longer than one might have expected: although I was soon just another teacher, I never became just another Polish teacher. “I learned how to be a different kind of teacher from you,” my Polish counterpart English teacher told me when I left. I enjoyed what I was doing; I was teaching by choice. The kids recognized that.

I imagined myself putting the sesame oil back in its place and wandering around the apartment, feeling lonely. Despite the incredible friendships I developed in Poland, I often found myself alone, and that solitude sometimes bore down upon me.

I imagined myself putting a bottle of sesame oil in a box to give a Polish friend before I left in 1999, thinking I’d never return. A vegan in a land of meat and potatoes, she appreciated different cuisines and figured she could do something with the oil.

I imagined all these things tonight, and for a moment, a familiar nostalgia and longing slid up beside me, brushed me, and moved on. Such an experience ten years ago would have sent me into a depression that might have lasted the evening. It eventually sent me back to Lipnica. Tonight, it brought a smile and chuckle at the power of sesame oil.

Ice

Saturday 30 January 2010

We’ve lived here long enough to learn through firsthand experience that the Greenville area doesn’t get snow; it gets ice. Still, the ground becomes white, and it’s inviting to a little girl.

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The driveway became a skating rink. Or, more accurately, a slipping-and-sliding rink.

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Photo by K

But L’s great dream was to make a snowball and throw it. She made a valiant effort, scraping the ice from the ground, forming it into a little ball

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Photo by K

and giving it a toss.

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Photo by K

 

Adolescent Dhammapada

Wednesday 27 January 2010

In “The Childish Person” from the Dhammapada we read:

Childish, unthinking people
go through life as enemies of themselves,
committing detrimental actions
that bear bitter fruit.

Glenn Wallis, in his notes about his translation of the Dhammapada, explains that “childish” in this context as several meanings: “childlike” is certainly relevant, but the Buddha also meant a “person who ambitiously pursues material fortune, being pushed along by an ever-strengthening current of “I, me, mine.” (125) (Other translations render “Bāla-vaggo” simply as “the fool”, but I prefer Wallis’ less vitriolic “the childish person.”)

Later, in “The Practitioner”, we find a similar notion:

Do not carelessly swallow a copper ball and,
burning, cry out, “This is pain!”

All too often, we cause ourselves the pain we’re certain has exterior source. And nowhere is this more evident than the middle school. In that setting, it might sound like this:

TeacherYou display your buttons for anyone to see. You don’t hide anything, and so if teachers wanted to pick on you, you make it easy for them. I know exactly what I could say to get you upset, and so I virtually control you.
Student (in a very disrespectful tone)Oh no! No! Let me just tell one thing. You don’t control me. You don’t. Ain’t nobody in the world controls me. I control me.
TeacherI just did it. I got you angry. I just got you to mouth off. A teacher would be justified for writing you up for the tone you used with me. If you were really in complete control of yourself, you would have sat quietly, thinking, “Right. Let me show this joker who’s in charge of me.”

Fraud

Tuesday 26 January 2010

In France last October, a court determined that the Church of Scientology guilty of fraud. It was only through a loophole, the BBC reported, that the organization didn’t get banned outright.

The case came after complaints from two women, one of whom said she was manipulated into paying more than 20,000 euros (£18,100) in the 1990s.

A Scientology spokesman told the BBC the verdict was “all bark and no bite”.

France regards Scientology as a sect, not a religion.

Prosecutors had asked for the group’s French operations to be dissolved and more heavily fined, but a legal loophole prevented any ban.

Instead, a Paris judge ordered the Church’s Celebrity Centre and a bookshop to pay a 600,000-euro fine. (BBC News)

It seems to me a little like suing a casino for fraud. Indeed, “fraud” charges could be leveled against most religions: all believers are able to interpret religion’s promises (its product) as they wish, and thus they are able to claim fraud.

The difference in Scientology and other religious groups is the payment system. Scientology requires payment before rendering its services: teaching followers how to deal with their engrams and eventually reach the clear state with its accompanying realization that they are Thetans. Most Christian denominations work on a different model. They provide the service and hope you’ll pay at the end. It seems to indicate traditional Christian churches have a greater confidence in their product.

This analogy doesn’t go very far, though, for while religions might have differences in their payment plans, there is one commonality: they all lack a money-back guarantee. But that’s simply because all organized religions are a gamble. Theists call that gamble “faith,” but it’s still essentially a bet: if I live my life in this way, constantly seeking advice from fellow travelers and ministers, I will get something for it in the end, or even in the present.

And so from that point of view, the ruling in France is ridiculous. All religions are open to claims of fraud, because all religions have disillusioned apostates.

All of this begs the question, though, of whether or not religion is a product. A commodity. Watch Benny Hinn and others warning about the dangers of necromancy, and it seems like they’re simply dealing with the competition, especially when you then watch Derren Brown do the ultimate cold reading. (Very much worth watching is Richard Dawkins’ interview with Brown, in which Brown explains exactly how to do a cold reading.)

What would be the nature of the product being sold? Security. We know what happens when you die, and with our help, you can control that. You don’t have to be caught in a cycle of never-ending rebirths; you don’t have to spend eternity writhing in agony: we can offer you a way out.

Religion is the ultimate, inverted COD: pay now, take delivery upon death. In that sense, it’s fraud-proof.

Post-Post-Democracy America

Saturday 23 January 2010

Twenty-four hours and I’m changed. Not radically, and not necessarily in a more optimistic direction, but thoughts have settled and I’ve reached some conclusions, as well as realized additional concerns.

If the issue was purely freedom of expression, the court had no choice but to make the decision it did. The First Amendment is just that — the first. Prima. It’s the basis of all the other amendments and freedoms we enjoy. If one is going to shut down a corporation’s right to free speech, what about newspapers, which are also corporations? There’s no sensible way to draw the line.

All of this leads me to a deeper concern. The idea has crossed my mind before, but Citizens United is making it seem all the more relevant: our eighteenth-century constitution is not always ideally suited to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

One of the most famous, if not most eloquent, pleas for freedom of speech is Milton’s “Areopagitica,” yet that excellent example of persuasive writing is deeply flawed. I’m not simply referring to the narrow freedom of speech for which Milton argues: “Papists” are denied the right as if it were as natural as denying free speech to boulders. Instead, I’m referring to Milton’s contention that there was no censorship in classical times. He’s right, but what was there to censor? There was absolutely no means of mass communication in Socrates’ Athens: he was many centuries removed from a printing press. Thus, it is disingenuous of Milton to make a comparison between the age of Socrates and seventeenth-century England. Regarding communication and potential censorship, there are almost no similarities between the two ages. Specifically, there was virtually nothing to censor in classical Greece compared to Miltonian England.

Similarly, there are very few similarities between twenty-first century America and colonial America. Communication with the entire citizenry now is instantaneous; in the Framers’ day, it took days. There was nothing like the “too big to fail” corporations that exist today, and with the possible exception of some trading companies, multi-national corporations were nonexistent.

Had such things been the eighteenth-century reality, would the Framers have created the same constitution? Most probably not. And it might be a good thing that the internet and General Electric were not the reality: the Constitution is remarkable for its brevity, and I highly doubt modern politicians could match it, or even come close.

Still, that brevity is due in large measure to the relative simplicity of the times. Occasionally, I think it comes back to haunt us.

We have an option: the Framers were wise enough to see the need for an evolving document. We can pass new amendments but those are few and very far between. Peter Shane at the left-leaning Huffington Post has already created a first draft for just such an amendment:

Sec. 1. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Constitution, Congress may prohibit or otherwise regulate political contributions and expenditures by commercial, for-profit corporations for any federal office.

Sec. 2. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Constitution, States may prohibit or otherwise regulate political contributions and expenditures by commercial, for-profit corporations for any state or local office, or for any state or local referendum or initiative, within their jurisdiction, and may delegate such regulatory. (Huffington Post)

Amending the First doesn’t seem wise or even feasible. But what about a 14th-Amendment style definition of personhood? The Fourteenth Amendment was designed, in part, to overrule the Dred Scott decision of 1857. It sets forth the very broad conditions of citizenship:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Couldn’t we do something similar? After all, every contract in America begins by defining all the terms in the contract. Shouldn’t the Constitution have something similar?

Post-Democracy America

Friday 22 January 2010

It might be a little too early to begin carving the tombstone, but SCOTUS made a valiant, naive effort to destroy American democracy and prove everything George Carlin said about corporate America absolutely valid.

Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission might very well go down in history as the most significant change to American democracy since the ratification of the Constitution.

Elections will soon become a shower of cash and attack ads. Candidates will be unable to keep up with corporate spending, and in an act of self-defense (the name of a populist political party in Poland, ironically enough), campaign spending limits will disappear and an election, even more so than now, will be a question of capital.

How many Americans know about this decision? “Who won last night?” “What happened on Idol last night?” “Have you seen that new iPhone app?” These are the concerns of the average American; SCOTUS rulings generally go unnoticed by everyone but law school professors, academics, and attorneys. We pay attention to the tube, and while we might notice an increase in political ads, who is going to notice who is paying for those ads? Who is going to think critically about what the advertisement’s financial backer gains by our buying into that interpretation of this or that politician’s stance or legislative plan? Swift Boat showed how effective an ad campaign can be. We’re sure to see more of it — exponentially more.

The SCOTUS has sold us out, in short. Our voice is no longer heard because our fiscal contributions — and let’s face it: that’s what gets you heard today — are insignificant compared to Big Tobacco, Big Insurance, Big Unions, Big Everything.

Big Capitalism; Little Us.

It’s not just the outcome that’s disturbing: equally troubling is how this case played out.

The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation. (NYT Editorial)

There is hope for remediation: the legislature could require share holders to approve of a corporation’s political activities, for example. Whether that would that survive an inevitable challenge is a question I’m in no position to answer.

I do know that I haven’t felt this pessimistic about this country’s future in a very long time. Crony-capitalism and democracy went head to head: our democracy has one knee on the mat, and corporate America is sitting in a dark corner of the arena with a smug grin.

Smile

Thursday 21 January 2010

Walking down the hallway, I try to smile and acknowledge students as we pass each other.

They say it takes more muscles to frown than to smile, but I’m not convinced. Smiling is not always easy: sometimes I want to scowl because of some frustration; sometimes I want to have a blank expression due to exhaustion; occasionally, I don’t want to hide my anger. In spite of all of these competing emotions, though, I still try to smile.

I know I must be doing something right when students smile back at me. It means that we have, at the very least, a pleasant working relationship (though frowns don’t always mean the opposite). And a good relationship is an important part of the foundation for learning.

Oh, whom am I kidding? I’m a mean ogre…

Knobby Knees

Wednesday 20 January 2010

A Monday trip to Cypress Gardens.

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I’m obsessed with cypress knees.

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I would have asked the guide about them,

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about what causes them, about whether they appear in other species,

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about their function.

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But I was sick in the car.

Nice pictures from K, don’t you think?

Waterfront

Tuesday 19 January 2010

There are two parts of downtown Charleston, according to tour guides. It’s not a question of “The Haves” and “The Have-Nots” but rather “The Haves” and “The Have-a-Hell-of-a-Lot-Mores.” That’s where the houses along the battery lie.

After all, who else could pay the property taxes of such houses? The annual rate for most of these houses equals a solidly middle-class salary.

If driving a $100k Mercedes is a conspicuous sign of wealth, these houses make tourists scratch their heads in wonder. “Who could afford such a house?” we ask. Apparently, plenty of people.

Just a few blocks away is the prison. It closed in the 1940s, never having had electricity or running water. The last execution was in the 1930s: the state had changed its method of execution to the electric chair, and having no power, the Charleston prison was unable to continue executing criminals.

The Girl was impressed, but more so with the birds that were flying around her

and the waves splashing below us. We weaved among the tourists, and on one occasion became an object of tourist fascination: an Asian couple saw L marching down the street, giggled, and took a quick picture. A local, out walking his dog, observed that L was “all wrapped up” and thus “cute as a button.”

We continued on our way, though it was difficult not to look up. It’s not quite like being in a Gothic cathedral or Manhattan, but the impulse too look upward is undeniable.

And look back: I noticed a placard announcing that we were in “Rainbow Row” and it struck me: “All the houses we’ve passed have been different colors.” It made me wonder if there is a similar tract in San Francisco.

The rest of Charleston went about its usual business. Cadets from the Citadel were out, walking in packs, strolling with their girlfriends, or harassing random girls (at least that’s what some of my captures look like).

Locals stood talking.

And everyone made their way here and there on a lazy Sunday.

Boone Hall

Saturday 16 January 2010

Today at Boone Hall plantation, an experience I haven’t had since visiting Auschwitz several years ago: to stand in the center of a hell-on-earth and wonder how it’s even possible. We wandered around the plantation while waiting for a tour, weaving in and out of slave quarters.

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The irony of America has never been more palpable. We are country that, from its inception, was about freedom. Yet our wealth was created on the backs of slaves. When people exclaim that, as twenty-first century whites, they are not responsible in any way for the actions of their ancestors, they are absolutely right. But for three hundred years, whites in America have built upon the foundation of those very slave holders and, until very recently, had a clear advantage for being on the lighter side of the color divide. Our free country was built, in the first century of its existence, at the expense of others’ freedom.

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The fruits of that brutal labor still exists. At Boone Hall, the number one product was bricks. Those bricks went into many of the houses in Charleston and so provide a literal foundation for at least one American city.

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And so we made our way through the house and grounds, seemingly free individuals in a seemingly free country. Our chains are less obvious, and less insidious. In fact, I would say most of us don’t even realize we’re shackled to our way of life, our point of view, our idiosyncrasies, our ambitions. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing: after all, this kind of slavery can hardly be called such in comparison. Yet we saw sixteen or so months ago that when our way of life, our point of view, our idiosyncrasies, our ambitions start to sink, we feel the weight.

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Breaks

Friday 15 January 2010

The thing about breaks is that they are the epitome of entropy:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Breaks encourage cessation.

As a teacher, I experience this every single Christmas break and summer vacation. “As soon as I rest for a short while, I’ll accomplish so much.” It never happens, for breaks — in my experience — encourage mere anarchy to be loosed upon my world. At least for a brief moment.

With a blog, it’s the same. For two weeks, I’ve done virtually nothing here, and the break has been almost unnoticeable: with the end of the semester, I’ve been so busy that grading and more grading has filled any break I might have convinced myself I was taking.

Through the break, though, there have been pictures:

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Quotes from Yeats’ “The Second Coming”

Ladies and Gentleman, May I Introduce William Shakespeare

Saturday 9 January 2010

I have the privilege of introducing a group of twenty eighth graders to the unabridged, unadulterated Shakespeare. We began Romeo and Juliet this week, and it is the highlight of my year.

I began preparing a foundation earlier in the year by having the kids write sonnets and wrestle with iambic pentameter. I mentioned that Romeo and Juliet is, for the most part, in metered verse. “You mean he wrote the WHOLE play in iambic pentameter?” they asked incredulously. I got my Riverside Shakespeare, large enough to use in the gym as a free weight. “Not only that — most everything he wrote was in iambic pentameter.”

They were, in a word, terrified.

That’s understandable: the Bard does have quiet the reputation for being inaccessible to many casual modern readers: long sentences that sometime contain clauses with convoluted, inverted structure, and vocabulary that can make one’s toe nails curl.

We took it slowly.

In fact, we took a whole lesson on the prologue:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

The next day we spent an entire lesson on the opening fight scene. With some group work, class discussion, and multiple readings, they actually began to find Gregory and Sampson to be, amusingly, “losers.” Laughter in the classroom while reading Shakespeare is musical.

The result: comments like this on our online forum:

  • The language isn’t as hard as I anticipated.
  • Now that we have taken the time in class to discuss the play in normal language, I find it rather challenging but yet understandable.
  • I was scared at the beginning because i didn’t think i would get any of it. Now that we have started i actually understand most of it.
  • At first i figured the language would be extremely difficult to understand and read like words such as “tis” or “thy” or “ay,” but if you read the words you can figure them out over time.

The most enjoyable will be observing their reaction as they watch Romeo + Juliet, the Luhrmann version of 1996. Not the best version in cinematic history, but I show it to illustrate the timelessness of the story.

It’s going to be a fun month.Photo by shizhao

Reflection

Saturday 2 January 2010

Every single blog in the Western world has been reflecting lately on the significance of starting a new calendar year. I, for one, elected to abstain.

It’s probably a good idea. I suppose there too much reflection is almost an oxymoron, unless you’re facing a life-and-death situation. Which few of us ever face, thankfully.

So I’ve taken the start of a new year as an opportunity to do the opposite: stop reflecting. At least here. A short break. A breather.