Botticelli’s Athena reaches a recalcitrant student

I’ve just read an article in The New Yorker (May 20, 2013) on the future of higher education, especially with regard to MOOCs. MOOC is an acronym for Massive Open On-Line Course, and the article begins by describing how Harvard Greek professor Gregory Nagy has turned his popular course on The Iliad into a MOOC. With the cost of a collegiate education skyrocketing, colleges are looking for ways to cut costs, and some argue that access to high quality MOOCs like Professor Nagy’s will save students thousands of dollars that they would otherwise spend at schools like—well, like my own St. Mary’s College of Maryland. (And as far as small liberal arts colleges go, we’re one of the cheaper ones.)

But the article is also good at outlining the limitations of MOOCs, especially when they teach the humanities. Reading over Nagy’s description of the multiple choice tests he gives (such tests being necessary once one teaches hundreds—or thousands—of students), I see questions designed to judge only how well people have grasped his lectures. They don’t address individual problems that students may have when engaging with The Iliad in the first place.

I can’t emphasize enough how individualized is each student’s reading of a work of literature. In a class of 25 students, people may enter a particular work in 10-15 different ways. For instance, I never anticipated that a freshman lacrosse player would identify with the wedding guest in Rime of the Ancient Mariner (see Monday’s post), but that point of entry led to a powerful reading. I’m able to see individual response through our seminar discussions and through the individual journals the students write on each work. In addition, I can push them especially deeply in the essays they write for me.

But look at how individual a process essay writing is. For the essays, I first have the students write short proposals, which allow me to anticipate certain problems they will encounter. The proposals, however, are often tangled affairs, so I have to read them closely and look for what I call “energy points,” which are a focus that can lead to a significant idea. But I don’t always see the most promising idea that lies hidden in such proposals, and the subsequent essay the student goes on to write sometimes comes up short of the idea’s potential. So I allow revision and suggest an individual revision conference, and it is at that point at which a student often makes a quantum learning leap. Suddenly I start seeing ideas that are interesting enough to share with readers of this blog.

I haven’t taught The Iliad in years but I could imagine students relating to egotistical fights (Achilles vs. Agamemnon) or deep friendship (Achilles and Patroclus) or vengeful vendettas (Achilles vs. Hector) or grieving the loss of loved ones (Priam over Hector) or any number of other points. Such emotional connections can open them to profound historical or psychological or philosophical or literary insights. Good teachers listen for the points of entry and push them, bringing in relevant information along the way.

Note how MOOCs don’t allow any of this. I must say that I myself would be very interested in Professor Nagy’s lectures on The Iliad. I would devour the deep insights he has to impart. But that’s because I already know how to engage with the work. If one doesn’t know how to develop one’s own framework, then it’s not altogether helpful just to import the framework of another, especially one who comes from an entirely different frame of reference (in this instance, a middle-aged white male Harvard professor).

I do see one advantage of MOOCs that is mentioned in the New Yorker article. Certain lecture courses can be “flipped,” which is to say students can watch the lecture for their homework and do their homework in class, where they have the benefit of professors, tutors, group work, and the like.

But flipped classes don’t have must to offer literature teachers. That’s because we’ve already flipped them—which is to say, we ask our students to read the works outside the classroom and then use the seminar to comprehend what we’ve read. Incidentally, I teach my film classes the same way, regarding it as a waste of time to watch in class a film that students can watch during their own time. But MOOCs for, say, large introductory biology lecture classes might make sense.

Of course, not all literature seminars are taught as well as they could be, and if teachers use their class time only to steer the students to their own interpretations of the works, then they might as well have their students watch a MOOC. But in a seminar taught as it should be, the students find ways to make connection with the work and practice the process of interpretation. The thinking skills they develop apply to tasks beyond reading literature and serve them for the rest of their lives.

It is because of this intensive approach that a college such as Amherst (so the New Yorker article reports) has turned its back on MOOCs. Schools like Amherst offer some of the best education in the world and their students graduate with deep levels of understanding and are very successful. But then again, as the New Yorker article points out, most college students in America do not go to schools like Amherst, which is why we’re talking about MOOCs.

I add that own college, which is a public honors college (there are only a few of us), tries to use its public status to keep costs down while delivering an Amherst-quality education. But it’s very hard because, while we’re cheap by private liberal arts standards, we’re expensive by public college standards, which is depressing our admissions numbers in ways that are alarming. Really good education is inevitably expensive—even when one tries to deliver it at public prices—and there are inevitable trade-offs. Unfortunately, one of the trade-offs is that students with wealthy parents and a few lower income scholarship students may get the best that college education can offer while everyone else must settle for second or third best.

MOOCs, even when taught by Harvard professors, are second or third best. They may be financially necessary. But don’t think that they can ever make up for lack of individual attention.

Roman sun god from the temple at Aqua Sulis (Bath)

The news has just come in that Tesla, the electronic car company that received $452 million in federal stimulus dollars, is doing so well that it can pay its government loan back, with interest, nine years early. My father wrote a poem 35 years ago cheering for electric cars, and solar power generally, so it’s great to be able to celebrate a success after Solyndra and Fisker. Here’s the poem:

E Is for Everyperson’s Environmental E-Car

By Scott Bates

give me an E
give me an L
give me a Photovoltaic Cell
give me an E
give me a   C
give me a Cosmic Battery
give me a   T
give me an R
give me a Ride on Rainbow Power
give me an  I
give me a    C
give me a Sky full of Energy

give me an  S
give me an  O
give me an Ozone way to go
give me an  L
give me an  A
give me an Aerial Chevrolet

give me an   R
give me a    CAR
give me a CAR that runs on a STAR

give me the Three
give me the Two
give me the One
that runs on the Sun

From An ABC of Radical Ecology (New Market, Tennessee: Highlander Research and Education Center, 1982)

Of course, the nation is far from producing a significant portion of its electricity from the sun, although here also progress is being made. Last year Julia and I installed solar panels and a solar water heater on the top of our house. We had to take out a second mortgage to cover the $48,000 it involved (the price also covered the cost of a new roof, which we needed), but what with low interest rates and favorable tax incentives at the local, state, and federal levels, we figure that it will pay for itself in seven years. This past year we found ourselves paying for electricity only in the coldest months, which is no small thing given the number of students we have living with us. If we owned an electronic car, it would help with that as well.

This in itself won’t stop climate change. But every little bit helps. Think globally, act locally.

W. W. Denslow, “Wonderful Wizard of Oz”

The horrendous damage visited upon Oklahoma by the recent tornado brings to mind literature’s most famous tornado, which is the one that carries Dorothy to the Land of Oz. L. Frank Baum, who saw the country ravaged by drought and depression from his vantage point of South Dakota in the 1890’s, describes the tornado (he calls it a cyclone) striking a landscape that is barren in every sense of the word. Here’s the environment that Dorothy grows up in:

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.

And here’s the tornado striking. One difference is that, because the ground in Oklahoma is so hard, people often don’t have the kind of basement shelters that Dorothy’s family does :

From the far north they heard a low wail of the wind, and Uncle Henry and Dorothy could see where the long grass bowed in waves before the coming storm. There now came a sharp whistling in the air from the south, and as they turned their eyes that way they saw ripples in the grass coming from that direction also.

Suddenly Uncle Henry stood up.

“There’s a cyclone coming, Em,” he called to his wife. “I’ll go look after the stock.” Then he ran toward the sheds where the cows and horses were kept.

Aunt Em dropped her work and came to the door. One glance told her of the danger close at hand.

“Quick, Dorothy!” she screamed. “Run for the cellar!”

Toto jumped out of Dorothy’s arms and hid under the bed, and the girl started to get him. Aunt Em, badly frightened, threw open the trap door in the floor and climbed down the ladder into the small, dark hole. Dorothy caught Toto at last and started to follow her aunt. When she was halfway across the room there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor.

Then a strange thing happened.

The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. Dorothy felt as if she were going up in a balloon.

The north and south winds met where the house stood, and made it the exact center of the cyclone. In the middle of a cyclone the air is generally still, but the great pressure of the wind on every side of the house raised it up higher and higher, until it was at the very top of the cyclone; and there it remained and was carried miles and miles away as easily as you could carry a feather.

It was very dark, and the wind howled horribly around her, but Dorothy found she was riding quite easily. After the first few whirls around, and one other time when the house tipped badly, she felt as if she were being rocked gently, like a baby in a cradle.

Toto did not like it. He ran about the room, now here, now there, barking loudly; but Dorothy sat quite still on the floor and waited to see what would happen.

Of the many stories of the Oklahoma tornado, here’s one reported in The New Yorker about a woman having her dog torn from her arms as her home takes a direct hit, only to miraculously find it again afterwards.  It’s almost a version of what happens with Dorothy and Toto:

Once Toto got too near the open trap door, and fell in; and at first the little girl thought she had lost him. But soon she saw one of his ears sticking up through the hole, for the strong pressure of the air was keeping him up so that he could not fall. She crept to the hole, caught Toto by the ear, and dragged him into the room again, afterward closing the trap door so that no more accidents could happen.

Dorothy, of course, ends up in the colorful Oz that MGM captured so well in the 1939 film. Here’s Baum’s description of what Dorothy sees:

 The cyclone had set the house down very gently–for a cyclone–in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of greensward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies.

May a similar brightness enter the lives of the Oklahoma survivors after they dig out of their ruins and mourn their dead.

Have you ever thought that the books we obtain from libraries or bookstores sometimes choose us rather than the other way around? That would explain why a books-on-disk version of Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008) ended up in my possession as I drove down to Tennessee to be with my father as he was released from the hospital. I didn’t know that the book is about two people who return to the family home to be with their own ailing father.

Home is a companion book to Robinson’s Gilead (2005), one of my favorite contemporary novels. Whereas Gilead is told from the point of view of a Congregationalist minister in 1950s Iowa, Home features his fellow minister and best friend, Robert Boughton. The story is told from the point of view of Boughton’s youngest daughter Glory, who has returned home after a traumatic relationship. She begins to forge a bond with the black sheep of the family, Jack, who also has returned in an attempt to sort his life out.

As in Gilead, there are rich interactions between the characters, with psychology and religion playing prominent roles. The primary focus is the family’s attempts to understand and communicate with Jack. But what hits me hardest is how Glory and Jack interact with their father, who is sometimes remarkably thoughtful and sometimes trapped in the past. The children have to be careful not to be patronizing, even though, in another way, they have become the parents. Robinson captures the complicated dance in a way that preserves the dignity of all characters.

My own situation is different in that my indomitable mother continues to run the household and care for my father, even though she lives in constant back pain. Still, Robinson’s novel captures many of my concerns.

Those of you who have enjoyed my father’s poems will be glad to hear that his bladder infections have cleared up and that he is once again suggesting poems for me to use on this blog. Also, for those of you who enjoyed the account of how he carried an anthology of poetry with him through the European theater in World War II, you may be interested in knowing that he has now experienced what he describes as “total recall” of his World War II experiences. He feels driven to share these experiences with anyone interested.

His total recall occurred after he had spent a couple of weeks in incoherence, which may have been the result of his infections. He has started having recurring dreams of being bombed by the Germans while on Omaha Beach (he landed there two weeks after D Day). But he says it’s not a PTSD dream because it doesn’t have that level of trauma and terror. Nevertheless, he says that it is incredibly vivid.

Many of the tales he has to tell about the war, the stories of soldiers’ sexual lives during the occupation, he complains have been suppressed. He reminds me somewhat of “Word” Smith, the narrator in Philip Roth’s baseball work The Great American Novel, who claims that baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn has covered up the truth about a scandalous episode in baseball’s history. Sometimes my father invokes Aeschylus’s Cassandra, the prophetess that no one will listen to.

Tim O’Brien’s fine Vietnam novel has given me one insight into my father’s need to tell his war stories. O’Brien talks about the deep necessity of recounting these stories–there is one character, Bowker, who does not and who commits suicide maybe as a result–and my father mentions how he wasn’t able to tell many of his stories when he returned to Carleton College after the war. In fact, one story he wrote for the literary magazine in 1946, about a soldier getting venereal disease, appalled the president of the college at the time, and faculty had to come to my father’s defense. This experience of having the “truth” suppressed (my father keeps talking about the need to “tell the truth”) seems to be part of my father’s need to communicate now. As a result, I am hearing a lot about soldiers and sex.

I now understand how my father’s college story is indirectly autobiographical. The protagonist is a repressed young GI who has a sexual experience in France and then can’t stop himself and begins getting the clap. My father describes himself as so shy that he resisted most of the women who made offers–although he talks of losing his virginity during the liberation of Paris–so the story would have gotten at both his wishes and his anxieties. And then it was suppressed.

As an aside, I’m wondering how much of the repressed 1950s can be attributed to veterans who felt that they had to hide their war stories. Such suppression is the subject of one of John Cheever’s finest short stories, “The Country Husband.”

Anyway, in returning home I find myself immersed in stories of the past.

Gustave Dore, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Today I write about two wonderfully complementary essays written by first-year star student-athletes in my Introduction to Literature class, neither of them an English major. It’s a feel-good story because these are exactly the kinds of conversations one hopes 18-year-old athletes will engage in. Think of stereotypes of the jock and then think of young men drawing on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (the lacrosse player) and Wendell Berry’s “Thirty More Years” (the baseball player) to move past the stereotype to a more mature and reflective view of the world.

The stereotype, I have in mind, is of careless, self-absorbed individuals who are filled with a sense of their own importance, who think they are invulnerable, and who don’t devote much thought to the future or to the consequences of their actions.

Conor has every reason to feel puffed up. Last month, in the most important victory in our college’s lacrosse history, he scored two goals in a minute to help us beat the heavily-favored and perennial national champion Salisbury State to take the conference title. Conor, however, saw Ancient Mariner as an important lesson in humility. He saw both the wedding guest and the pre-albatross mariner as thoughtless young men who think they are invulnerable.  The wedding guest is looking forward to a party and the mariner relishes being cheered as his ship embarks on a grand adventure.

What drew Conor to the poem is the way that the mariner is like fellow first year students. He is at first thrilled to be setting off and then isn’t sure how to handle the trouble the ship encounters:

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.

They are saved from the ice by an albatross, who the mariners befriend and who functions as a supernatural savior:

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name. 

It ate the food it ne’er had eat,And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!

No one has ever been able to entirely explain why the mariner shoots the bird. Conor’s explanation is as interesting as any. If the young mariner, like the wedding guest, thinks he’s in control of his own destiny, then the ship’s dependence on the albatross is an affront. Shooting it is a way of reminding the world who’s in charge. The mariner may not know this is why he is shooting it any more than young men know why they are committing acts of vandalism. He does it bcause he can.

As the poem moves on, Life in Death wins out over Death is taking possession of the mariner, and Conor liked the idea of life-in-death as a metaphor for the depression that one experiences when one sets oneself apart from (including above) the world of nature. The mariner must humbly realize that he is a part of nature rather than superior to it, even if that nature includes “slimy things.” The vision he arrives at is voiced at the end of the poem:

He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

It is not enough for the mariner only to realize this, however, even though it is a necessary first step. He must pass the insight along to others who are versions of his younger self. For Conor, this was a lesson that he and people like him needed to hear.

My baseball player, Ben Goldsmith, is a very promising lefty who has some of Conor’s seriousness. He interprets “Thirty Years Later” in ways that are similar to how Conor reads “Ancient Mariner.” Here’s the poem:

When I was a young man,
grown up at last, how large
I seemed to myself! I was a tree,
tall already, and what I had not
yet reached, I would yet grow
to reach. Now, thirty more years
added on, I have reached much
I did not expect, in a direction
unexpected. I am growing downward,
smaller, one among the grasses.

Young men, Ben said, see themselves as trees gaining more and more control of the world. They don’t not realize that there may be other dimension to growth. Here’s Ben:

As a college student, I can relate to this young man that the narrator once was. That is just the college kid mentality, thinking you are indestructible and that you can do anything without getting hurt. Over time, the narrator came to the realization that he was indeed not invincible, but only a man.

And later:

Being humble does not mean that his man has shrunken as being a man, it just means that he no longer thinks he is the biggest thing in the world. As more important things have come into his life like a wife and kids, and possibly grandkids, his life has become less important as he cares for more people.

Conor and Ben are both in training to become future leaders. I’m pleased that literature has played a small role.

Albert Bierstadt, “Forest Sunrise”

Spiritual Sunday

Today, in observance of Pentecost,  I offer up a William Longfellow poem (here it is in its entirety) that finds the poet reenacting the Pentecost story as he wanders through nature. Pentecost is the celebration of the moment when the Holy Spirit, the “advocate with the Father” promised by Jesus, enters the disciples after Jesus’ ascension to heaven. The disciples were of course distraught at the prospect of Jesus leaving them, but he reassured them that they would always be with him/

Echoing a number of Wordsworth poems, Longfellow sees the innocence he had as a child also having departed. Like Wordsworth in “Intimations of Immortality,” the poet enters nature with the hope that he will reconnect with that spirit but finds only its absence:

Therefore, at Pentecost, which brings

The Spring, clothed like a bride,

When nestling buds unfold their wings,

And bishop’s-caps have golden rings,

Musing upon many things,

I sought the woodlands wide.

The green trees whispered low and mild;

It was a sound of joy!

They were my playmates when a child,

And rocked me in their arms so wild!

Still they looked at me and smiled,

As if I were a boy;

And ever whispered, mild and low,

“Come, be a child once more!”

And waved their long arms to and fro,

And beckoned solemnly and slow;

O, I could not choose but go

Into the woodlands hoar,–

Into the blithe and breathing air,

Into the solemn wood,

Solemn and silent everywhere

Nature with folded hands seemed there

Kneeling at her evening prayer!

Like one in prayer I stood.

Like the disciples who can’t imagine life without Jesus, Longfellow is depressed over having lost his childhood connection with nature. And just as Jesus reassures the disciples that he will leave behind “an advocate with the father”—the Holy Spirit that will enter them—so the poet is reassured that “the land of Song within thee lies,/Watered by living springs”:

Visions of childhood! Stay, O stay!

Ye were so sweet and wild!

And distant voices seemed to say,

“It cannot be! They pass away!

Other themes demand thy lay;

Thou art no more a child!

“The land of Song within thee lies,

Watered by living springs;

The lids of Fancy’s sleepless eyes

Are gates unto that Paradise,

Holy thoughts, like stars, arise,

Its clouds are angels’ wings.”

The song within is vital because nature, which is entangled with the world, invariably lets us down:

“Learn, that henceforth thy song shall be,

Not mountains capped with snow,

Nor forests sounding like the sea,

Nor rivers flowing ceaselessly,

Where the woodlands bend to see

The bending heavens below.

“There is a forest where the din

Of iron branches sounds!

A mighty river roars between,

And whosoever looks therein

Sees the heavens all black with sin,

Sees not its depths, nor bounds.

“Athwart the swinging branches cast,

Soft rays of sunshine pour;

Then comes the fearful wintry blast

Our hopes, like withered leaves, fail fast;

Pallid lips say, ‘It is past!

We can return no more!”

Therefore, look within as you write about nature:

“Look, then, into thine heart, and write!

Yes, into Life’s deep stream!

All forms of sorrow and delight,

All solemn Voices of the Night,

That can soothe thee, or affright,–

Be these henceforth thy theme.”

Sports Saturday

I suspect that I am not the only fan disappointed by the way that the NBA basketball playoffs have shaken out. Defense is suffocating offense and teams that are noteworthy for their fluid style of play have either been eliminated or are about to be (the Knicks). The victims include the Golden State Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder, who were felled by untimely injuries. The Grizzlies and the Pacers, meanwhile, are playing ugly basketball, and the Spurs seem to have decided that they must follow suit if they want to win.

The only team that excites me at the moment is the Miami Heat. Watching Lebron James is like watching Michael Jordan in the olden days: one never knows when he is going to uncork an astounding play. I was fervently hoping to see him matched up against Kevin Durant in a replay of last year’s championship series, but we will have to wait until next year for the possibility of that happening.

In the meantime, we have only our memories to fall back on. Which is what this B. H. Fairchild poem is about:

Old Men Playing Basketball

By B. H. Fairchild

The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language
of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot
slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love
again with the pure geometry of curves,

rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away.
On the boards their hands and fingertips
tremble in tense little prayers of reach
and balance. Then, the grind of bone 

and socket, the caught breath, the sigh,
the grunt of the body laboring to give
birth to itself. In their toiling and grand
sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love

to their wives, kissing the undersides
of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe
of desire? And on the long walk home
from the VFW, do they still sing

to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock
moving, the one in army fatigues
and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll,
and the phrase sounds musical as ever,

radio crooning songs of love after the game,
the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat
as her raven hair flames in the shuddering
light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,

gliding toward the net. A glass wand
of autumn light breaks over the backboard.
Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout
at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.

From The Art of the Lathe (Alice James Books, 1998)

The economy may be slowly clawing itself back from the 2008 recession, but the stock market has been soaring as though there’s no tomorrow. Particularly discouraging are reports that most of the country’s wealth gains have gone to the very wealthiest Americans. In other words, so much for trickle down economics.

If you ever find yourself longing for the one percent to get their comeuppance, even as they appear to always end up on top, here’s a revenge fantasy from the Great Depression. Use it to vent your spleen.

Dirge

By Kenneth Fearing

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;
   bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow— 

O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
   O, fellow with a will who won’t take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails— 

Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
   but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke, 

And twelve o’clock arrived just once too often,
   just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
   just one too many, 

And wow he died as wow he lived,
   going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
   zowie did he live and zowie did he die, 

With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who
the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not, 

Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T., 

Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;
   Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.

Mulligan, DiCaprio in “The Great Gatsby

With the release of the new Great Gatsby, I turn to what appears an excellent review in The New Yorker. Although I haven’t seen the film, I know the novel and I know the film director Baz Luhrmann, and the author of the article makes a convincing case that the two belong together.

Certainly what he says about the novel’s focus on fantasy is on target. The tragedy of the novel, as the following passage from the novel’s conclusion reminds us, is that our dreams can never live up to our expectations:

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion.

I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

I’m convinced that, more than anything else, it is the American Dream that holds us together as a nation. Our capacity for wonder, for dreaming, may help explain why we act so badly when grim reality sets in. Perhaps that’s why our politics are so nasty at the moment. Perhaps we are acting out all the rage of our disenchantment.

Here’s reviewer Joshua Rothman:

The real achievement of Gatsby, in other words, is that it shows us a state of mind. It’s a state of spiritual hunger and dissatisfaction, of restlessness and curiosity, of excitement and anticipation, in which one is, as Nick puts it, “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” All this unfolds beneath that disillusioned surface. This is how you feel when you understand that there is no obviously right way to live, but find that you must choose anyway. It’s pessimistic and ironic, in the sense that you are always only half-committed to your way of life. But it’s also exciting, because you are always on the edge of discovery. There’s always something at stake. The main thing is that you are never settled. You are always hungry, always searching, always throwing feelings away in order to make room for new ones.

It’s possible to believe, as many critics do, that this is a uniquely American state of mind, and there’s a sense in which Gatsby is describing what it’s like to be young in America. Youth is when we do the most weighing and choosing, when we try out new personalities until they become exhausted or destructive. And in a consumer society, youth is extended. We’re increasingly free to pursue our fantasies, to buy the costumes and accouterments of the lives we’d like to have. The result is a kind of national carelessness that realizes itself economically, ecologically, and politically. Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” gestures toward the link between our period and Fitzgerald’s. Our pop hits take place “in the club,” and, Luhrmann shows, so did theirs. We love cocktails and speakeasy bars, and so did they. As in the twenties, we tend to admire wealth, no matter how it’s made.

But the real strength of Luhrmann’s movie is that it turns inward—not toward psychological realism, exactly, but toward fantasy. Gatsby is, to the end, defiantly unrealistic.

America has always been a land of dreamers and probably always will. That’s both the good news and the bad news.

There’s a great article in the recent on-line New Yorker applying classic Greek literature to issues that have arisen over the burial of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. I provide a short version here but recommend that you go read the piece in its entirety.

The article’s author Daniel Mendelsohn sums up the burial drama as follows, noting that the

cadaver [was] seemingly so morally polluted that his own widow would not claim it, that no funeral director would touch it, that no cemetery would bury it. Indeed, even after Peter Stefan, a Worcester funeral director, had washed and shrouded the battered, bullet-ridden body for burial according to Muslim law, the cadaver became the object of a macabre game of civic and political football. Cemetery officials and community leaders in the Boston area were concerned that a local burial would spark civic unrest…While the state’s governor carefully sidestepped the issue, asserting that it was a family matter, other politicians seemed to sense an advantage in catering to the high popular feeling. “If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried on our soil,” declared Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, “then it should not be.”

And so it went until late last week, when—due to the intervention of Martha Mullen, a Richmond, Virginia woman who’d been following the story, a practicing Christian who cited Jesus’s injunction to “love our enemies” as her inspiration—Tsarnaev’s body was finally transported to a tiny Muslim cemetery in rural Virginia and interred there in an unmarked grave.

Mendelsohn than goes on to talk about burial beliefs and practices in classical Greece and mentions their appearance in various works of literature. For instance, he notes how even Achilles, driven so mad by the death of Patroclus that he desecrates the body of Hector, in the end is brought around to respecting the dead, giving up the body to Hector’s father, King Priam:

The gigantic epic ends not (as some first-time readers expect) with the Wooden Horse, or the Fall of Troy, but with the all-important funeral of the greatest of the Greeks’ enemies—a rite of burial that allows the Trojans to mourn their prince and, in a way, the audience to find closure after the unrelenting violence that has preceded.

Likewise, the suitors at the end of The Odyssey are allowed a ritual burial. And in Sophocles play Ajax, Mendelsohn notes that Odysseus makes a passionate plea to Agamemnon to bury the traitorous Ajax.

But the most famous work on this subject is, of course, Antigone. The plot, as I’m sure you know, involves Creon’s order to leave unburied the traitorous brother Polyneices, who attacked the city, and Creon’s niece Antigone choosing to administer funeral rites, even though it means her death. I love how Mendelsohn’s applies Antigone to the Tsarnaev situation:

[W]hat preoccupies Antigone, who as we know is attracted to universals, is simply another “absolute”: the absolute personhood of the dead man, stripped of all labels, all categories—at least those imposed by temporal concerns, by politics and war. For her, the defeated and disgraced Polyneices, naked and unburied, is just as much her brother as the triumphant and heroic Eteocles, splendidly entombed. In the end, what entitles him to burial has nothing to do with what side he was on…This is why, during her great debate with Creon, while the king keeps recurring to the same point—that Eteocles was the champion of the city, and Polyneices its foe, and that “a foe is never a friend”—such distinctions are moot for Antigone, since the gods themselves do not make them. “Nonetheless,” she finally declares, putting a curt end to another exchange on the subject, “Hades requires these rites.” The only salient distinction is the one that divides gods from men—which, if true, makes all humans equal.

The alternative is to label certain humans as monsters—and once we refuse to see the humanity in another, we put our own humanity at risk. Thus Antigone, along with Homer’s epics, becomes a powerful argument as to why we should accord Tsarnaev a ritual burial:

Whatever else is true of the terrible crime that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is accused of having perpetrated, it was, all too clearly, the product of an entirely human psyche, horribly motivated by beliefs and passions that are very human indeed… To call him a monster is to treat this enemy’s mind precisely the way some would treat his unburied body—which is to say, to put it beyond the reach of human consideration (and therefore, paradoxically, to refuse to confront his “monstrosity” at all).

This is the point that obsessed Sophocles’ Antigone: that to not bury her brother, to not treat the war criminal like a human being, would ultimately have been to forfeit her own humanity. This is why it was worth dying for.