1968: Hazy Fate of Winter

“The real job of the computer is not retrieval but discovery. Like the human memory, the process of recall is an act of discovery.”
Marshall McLuhan

Knox College winter 1968.  Photo by Kowinski

Before the spring of 1968 there was winter—a fateful winter for me as it happened.

A stranger from northern California who called himself Reverend Jim showed up on campus with a small retinue and a quantity of weed the likes of which nobody there had experienced before. (He probably came from the fertile fields of Humboldt County, just south of where I live now, although ironically enough, in the twenty plus years I’ve been here I have yet to sample the world famous and now-legal local product.)

Tokes and brownies led to long conversations about (among many others) forgotten childhood TV shows and heroes, and contemplation of multiple meanings in the latest LPs. There were those hilarious philosophical conversations when somebody said "presents" and half the group thought the word was "presence," and two parallel and finally intermixing streams of heady talk ensued. A conversation with four or five participants broke down when none of us could remember what we were talking about, but as an experiment in alleged memory-destroying effects, we collectively rewound the conversation we’d just had, backwards and perfectly.

We heard new sounds, saw new sights and seemed to see the old ones more clearly...and saw what we’d blinded ourselves to, for survival’s sake. Perspectives shifted suddenly, as when I was walking to campus on a frigid day and saw the grass below me as if from an airplane over a forest...It could have been a forest in Vietnam, where a B-52 could destroy 50 square miles on a single run.  Recall the chant at protests that year:  Work. Study.  Get Ahead. Kill.

For all the altered consciousness and raw emotions, some of us had been studying Vietnam, the war and the various political and historical contexts, sometimes with more rigor than devoted to course work, for several years. Our texts were the New York Review of Books, Ramparts magazine, the I.F. Stone Weekly and other periodicals, as well as books like Frank Harvey’s Air War: Vietnam and Raskin and Fall's The Viet-Nam Reader. So when the Pentagon Papers were finally made public in 1971, we pretty much already knew much of what was in them.

The war was heavy upon us, although heavier on some more than others. With recent changes in the Selective Service laws, I faced the imminent prospect of being drafted immediately after my senior year concluded. This was before the lottery, and when draft calls were high. There were many reasons for my resistance, but the possibility and prospect of being forced to kill others for no compelling reason was my paramount concern. I wasn’t going to participate, but what the hell was I going to do?

At the same time, I was supposed to be planning my immediate future, which given the lack of other alternatives, meant continuing my education for an at least temporary academic life.  So I was supposed to be applying to graduate schools, knowing that it was unlikely I’d even get to begin.

One of Reverend Jim's acolytes was discussing the wisdom he learned from the heaviest West Coast philosopher he knew, which was: "Life is a shit sandwich, at best."  Given all this, I might have agreed.  But I stubbornly rejected this conclusion as well.

I went to draft counselors in Chicago that year, including one who reacted joyfully when he saw the results of my hearing tests. Being deaf in one ear should disqualify me, he said. But given the high draft calls and the brutalities of the system, it wasn’t a sure thing. Another counselor told me to prepare for the worst.

There’s more to be said about my hearing impairment, which I’ve thought more about in subsequent years. It was not something that I (nor most anyone else) noticed much, but I've realized that it had its effects on daily life. It meant I had to expend more energy in listening, in sorting out sounds, and filling in imaginatively for what I didn’t hear distinctly. I got no rest from this attentiveness except in the assurance of silence, or complete control over my auditory environment. It’s part of what made having roommates so difficult without a solitary retreat, though I had that this year.  It also increased my fatigue, for which substance indulgence also likely played a role.

But day after day, confronting an array of uncertain choices and awful alternatives was forcing itself into my unwilling life. I was just beginning to learn that, even though I had various degrees of support amidst incomprehension and hostility, when it came down to it, absolutely no one around me not faced with this imminent prospect could fully understand it. In this I would be completely alone.

But I did know that my nagging, dragging-down sense of futility was shared by others. Wasn’t this show of dutifully taking courses just a useless farce, given what was to come? I remember the student who said—or howled—what difference does it make if I die with a good head?  (Ironically it was Peter Overton, who later became a pillar of Bay Area Buddhism.)

At times, the only shelter, the only safe harbor, was in the music.  From a Simon & Garfunkel single, "Hazy Shade of Winter":

Hang on to your hopes, my friend
That's an easy thing to say
But if your hopes should pass away
Simply pretend/ that you can build them again...

There was also everything going on around campus. Glancing at what I wrote and said at the time (much of it now looking less than cogent), it’s apparent that I was increasingly sensitive to the pain and confusion of other students, and anguished when nothing effective was being done to alleviate it. Over the years perhaps we’ve forgotten just how hard it all was, as apparently pampered and privileged as we were.  (A situation that is recurring apparently.)

In January I resigned my appointed position as a student representative on the faculty’s student affairs committee. I ended my frustration with those meetings—a kind of frustration that would recur over the years in similar settings—with a flourish, by giving a long interview to the Knox Student. I did so partly because Jeremy Gladstone and Peter Stetson were becoming the co-editors and this provided a “big story” for their first issue.

The interview ran off the bottom of the front page.  Towards the top of the page there is a hazy photo of a small group of us, silently protesting the Vietnam War (says the caption.)  It's very fuzzy but I'm there, wearing a borrowed hat, in my much maligned corduroy coat with dodgy fur collar, cord jacket underneath, shirt and flowered tie.  I was still getting my style points from the Beatles, though my look was more of a melange of Beatles and Young Professor.  I can't make out all the other figures, but I see Bill Thompson peeking out from behind me, Jack Herbig in the background, and Mike Shain standing to the right--I recognize him only by his scarf.  It appears to be snowing.

Leaving aside the question of how much of a jerk I was being in this interview, a key question was revealed. Reading this interview recently, especially between the lines, I notice that my complaints got more focused and emotional concerning Honor Board cheating cases. However I never got around to talking about the case that really distressed me. It would take me probably another decade before it became clearer to me what that was all about.

For sometime shortly after I’d joined the committee in my second or third year, we were called upon to decide whether a couple of students should be expelled (or perhaps suspended for a semester) for cheating on an exam. Cheating seemed to me a pretty clear-cut offense, although even the few details I remember about this case suggests it wasn’t so simple. I eventually joined in the unanimous guilty verdict.

Shortly afterward, a letter appeared in the Knox Student taking the committee to task for expelling a male student and exposing him to the military draft. (Even a suspension exposed him.) As a student representative I was singled out for my vote.

My first reaction to this letter by a student senior I knew by sight was anger that he hadn’t made this case to me before the vote. It would have made a difference.

Memory is a tricky thing. For years I was sure that this draft jeopardy wasn’t mentioned or discussed in the committee, but I’m no longer sure about that. I do know that the idea of making a moral choice based on the draft exposure jeopardy simply hadn’t occurred to me. I frankly had not conceptualized that I could (let alone should) make a decision based on this fact.  But once I heard it, I was immediately convinced.  If I had been presented with this argument, I would have argued for it in the committee, and would not have voted as I did.

It’s unlikely that argument would have prevailed in the committee, and my one vote wouldn’t have made a difference. But the consequences of that committee decision turned out to be very serious. One student expelled or suspended was drafted, he was sent to Vietnam, and he returned without one of his limbs.

 I don’t think I consciously faced this as my war crime until years later. But even that winter it’s clear I felt I didn’t want to be even ignorantly implicated in such consequence again. It added to my distrust of institutions: the military-industrial-academic complex.

Meanwhile I was also supposed to be concentrating on my studies of the moment. In particular that winter, I was scrambling to complete my “distribution requirements” in order to graduate.

Knox had extensive requirements in my years, more than it did in later years, or perhaps now. For some reason, requirements for foreign language, science and math requirements were lumped together.

I’d managed a year of Spanish and a year of math. I’d taken two years of Latin and two of French in high school, but I don’t think Latin was offered and I knew my French was inadequate for higher-level courses. So I took beginning Spanish my first year.

Our instructor—a native Spanish speaker from South America who I don’t recall seeing after that year—began the first class by saying that if we came to class and did the work, we would get no less than a C. And any girls in the class who wore short skirts and sat in the front row would get As. Was he kidding? We didn’t think so, but who knows. Anyway there were always girls in the front row.

language lab 1960

I still shudder when I think of that class. It was held in the language lab, and we spent all of our time at partitioned desks with earphone on, either listening to tapes or engaging in “conversation” with the instructor. By second semester I was losing it.  I could feel my sanity under attack.

I’m not qualified to say this system is bad for learning a language, but it was bad for me. The language lab was sterile, without human context. The language was disconnected from any human reason to learn it. I felt I was being indoctrinated, in some ostensibly friendly Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It was made worse because I wasn’t predisposed to learn a new language—as far as I was concerned, I was still learning English. That was enough for me.

Even so, I wasn’t incapable. After all, I learned enough Italian as a child to entertain my grandparents’ friends. My mother thought that I was essentially bilingual at age 4. (And of course, Italian wasn't offered.)  But I hadn’t learned to speak French in the classroom, and this was worse. There was no cultural or human context or motivation in that dark room.

I managed a C+ both semesters, but when I went to my first class in the next level of Spanish my second year—in a real classroom, with students really speaking the language-- it was apparent that I’d learned very little, and I was too far behind the level of other students to survive there. So I dropped that course.

My high school math had been spotty. I did well in geometry, mathematical logic and set theory, but poorly in algebra, and missed trig altogether due to an administrative botched experiment. But I managed to pass two semesters of math my first year at Knox, though barely. I have no idea how. I don’t remember anything about it, other than the mannerisms of the instructor, who I liked.

The only science I had in high school was biology. I wasn’t at all interested in the basic technicalities. I had been deeply interested in astronomy in grade school, and largely taught myself. So in quest of the remaining requirements in the fall of my senior year of college, I took the course known by generations of students as “Stars.”

Largely due to my early fascination with science fiction, astronomy was the one science I liked in grade school.  I kept a brown notebook in the fourth or fifth grade with all the known information about each planet in the solar system.

The Knox course was formally called “The Universe,” taught by the magisterial and well-named Dr. Priestley. I’d been tipped off that the key concept he hoped non-majors would get was that there is order in the Universe. (This was a simpler universe that science now sees.) So I made sure to get the phrase into all my papers and tests.

 And even though I sometimes showed up for class wearing a sign on my Lennon cap that said Captain Space, Dr. Priestley tolerated me, and I knew enough stuff to pass. (It was the first course I took on the new pass/fail system.)

After that, pass/fail couldn't be used for distribution requirements anymore.  However, when I took "Science and Society" in third term, which I believe was also Dr. Priestley. I got an A.

But I needed just one more course to complete my requirements. Unfortunately, several other sciences for non-major courses in the catalog weren’t actually offered. So in between these two, in the winter term, I took the only available course, Evolution.

To be continued...

The Joy of Hoops

I make no apologies: I'm a Golden State Warriors fan.  I love the style they play, I identify with what they represent and the kind of team they are, and of course, I love watching Steph Curry play.  I'm rooting for him to take the Finals MVP.

I had my hometown baseball team from childhood: the Pittsburgh Pirates.  I have my new hometown (sort of) team, the San Francisco Giants.  I've seen several games there over the past few years.  And though I'm distancing myself from football, I'm always going to be checking out the Steelers.

Pittsburgh has never had an NBA team.  (They briefly had a professional team in a couple of ill-fated leagues, but I did get to see what remains my only pro game, and the immortal Connie Hawkins.)  So I've been free to root for a team of my choice.

I chose excellence: the Magic Kareem Lakers, then the Jordan Bulls, then the Kobie Lakers again.  Golden State happens to be geographically closer than other NBA teams, so once they started on their path to excellence, I went with them.

Then once I understood their personality and their culture as a team, I was all in.  I've admired Steve Kerr since he was the Chicago Bulls' sharpshooter, and as a TV game analyst, and now as the perfect coach for this team.

This story is the latest that expresses why.  They play with joy, because Steph Curry plays with joy.  And he--and they--are (at their best) a joy to watch. Joy being in short supply these days.

The 2017-18 Finals start tonight.  Go Warriors.

The Truth About Lies

The antipresident has increased the number and outrageousness of his lies, which already were of unimaginable proportion and quantity for anyone in any kind of authority.

Dana Milbank's Washington Post column on Tuesday is headlined "Trump's not a liar, he's a madman."  But in essence it's a false choice.  The antipresident is a madman in the sense that the Mad Men were.  It's called advertising, public relations.  You repeat something over and over, until it's true to your target audience, or even to everybody.

Does a certain detergent give your shirts a "whiter white?"  Who the hell knows?  But a lot of Americans of a certain age still remember that phrase, that claim.

Advertisers spread their claims with money, by buying space in print media and on the internet, and air time in electronic media.  The felt need to make an argument in favor of the claims has been largely absent from advertising since the 1960s.  The whole point is to make a claim, and repeat it endlessly.

When everybody in the world is subjected constantly to the words of the antipresident, it's the biggest advertising platform in the world.  Does it matter if anything he says is true?  Not really.  If you buy him, you buy what he says.  If you don't and you argue, it just repeats his message to his target audience.

The antipresident may be delusional, he may be a pathological liar on top of this.  But his mode of speech alone shows that he makes the major lies strategically, because he repeats his key lie, his key phrases, over and over, in the same brief statement.  He uses simple words to make large claims.  It's classic advertising technique.

Right now, says Politico, he's using his lies to motivate his voters for the midterms.  Repeating lies has become a key component of Republican electoral politics.  But that's not even the most sinister function.

Lies built Hitler's Germany.  And lies are building Homegrown Hitler's America. Politically, the way to dictatorship is incremental.  As Jonathan Chiat noted, he is deploying strategic lies to force compromises with basic principles within the Justice Department in order to subvert the Mueller investigation, and turn the R electorate against it.  All to institutionalize his belief that the antipresident is above the law.

Big lies force little surrenders.  Big lies energize racism, dehumanization of nonwhite immigrants.

"Hungarian communist leader Mátyás Rákosi invented the phrase “salami tactics” to describe how his party established a dictatorship," Chiat begins.  It's destroying democracy a slice at a time.

But it was also the tactics of the Nazi Party and Hitler.  And that's more apt than comparison to a small eastern European country, because Germany was a world power that plunged the world into the most destructive war in human history.

 Nobody wants to say that because the liars of the rabid right have deployed the Hitler charge so wildly that Hitler is effectively gone from the historical record anybody can cite.  Another very effective use of strategic lying.

These techniques are not new, they are not mysterious.  And yet we keep falling for them.

Vietnam Plus 50

There are several more posts on my experiences at Knox College in the 1967-68 school year coming in the next few weeks. (The first was What's Happened, Baby Jesus?)  A big part of my life that year had to do the war in Vietnam and related matters.  So I first wanted to make a few comments that go beyond that year.

The early baby boomers who were in college in the late 1960s are usually portrayed as war protesters and hippies.  It's a lazy, easy act to find some provocative photos to represent an entire, very complex generation that way.  But while war protesters and hippies did come from our generation, we were a minority of that generation.

In sheer numbers, we were impressive.  We could fill the Pentagon parking lot and Golden Gate Park.  But as a proportion of our generation, we were small. It's just that the baby boom was so big, even a small percentage meant large numbers.

So at Knox there were students who protested the Vietnam war, and many more who did not.  There were students who actively or passively supported the war, and there were students who may or may not have supported the war but felt a responsibility to serve in the armed forces, either as volunteers or draftees.  I mean no disrespect to them in what I relate about my own feelings, conclusions and commitments then or now.

It's been 50 years since that tumultuous year.  But whether all wounds have healed, or are beyond being reopened, is a question to which I do not know the answer.

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of "The Woman Warrior and other
books including "The Fifth Book of Peace."

In 2003 I reviewed a book by Maxine Hong Kingston titled The Fifth Book of Piece, for the San Francisco Chronicle.  (Later I met the author who told me that my review was one that "got it.")  Part of this book is about the writing workshops that Kingston and others created for a group of veterans.

 The group also learned and practiced meditation, particularly through workshops with the revered Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. (Their writings were later collected in the volume Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, edited by Maxine Hong Kingston, and published by Koa Books.)

Though mostly Vietnam veterans, this group later included veterans of other wars as well as veterans of the peace movement.  Eventually the American Vietnam vets were able to meet veterans of the Vietnamese forces that fought against them, and to reconcile.

But as Kingston's book relates (and I mentioned in my review), in what was to be their final session together, the American Vietnam vets asserted that they could not reconcile with American anti-war protesters, because they considered them betrayers.  They felt this way even about activists in the peace movement that were part of the group.

Whether these vets really felt that way, or continued to feel that way, or how general this feeling might be even now, I do not know.  But I took note of this as a possibility.

It's become something of a cultural impression that antiwar protesters were hostile towards returning veterans.  The imagery of protesters spitting on returning vets still recurs.  In 1998, a Vietnam vet and sociology professor named Jerry Lembcke reported on his research into this idea in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam.  He could not find a single contemporaneous media report of such an incident.  While it is impossible to prove that it never happened, other scholars agree that it was not widespread or organized.

Dealing with this subject requires tact, but there is fairly ample evidence that the stories didn't take hold until years after the war, and especially became publicized as the Gulf War began.  Political motives for spreading these stories are likely.

My own experience with vets and those on active duty was different. I remember Christmas vacation in 1967, when I talked about our impending exposure to the draft with one of my best friends from high school--who remains my best friend now.  His decision was to accept the draft, and I supported him. The following year he was drafted, and eventually he was posted in Korea. We corresponded and Joni and I (during our couple of years together) sent him at least one care package.

The administrative part of my own first draft physical in Chicago was managed by a young lieutenant, who kept good order as we filled out our forms.  But when we were finished, he closed the front and back doors to the room and told us what a horror Vietnam had become.

As for veterans, my first inkling of the future came when I was hitch-hiking, probably in 1968.  I was at a quiet spot next to an on-ramp when I saw a figure running towards me from the opposite off-ramp.  He was in uniform, on his way home.  He'd obviously seen my long hair etc.

I braced myself for possible unpleasantness.  I'd already been sucker-punched in a Galesburg bar for a stray antiwar remark (I'll never forget my brave classmate, Mary Azer, who immediately stood up to defend me.)

But it turned out this ex-soldier was excited to see me. Perhaps it was partly the life he had missed, but he also had something he wanted to tell me.  "I just got back," he said, "and you guys were right."

By 1970, many leaders of the peace movement were Vietnam veterans.

Later, when the war was over, I had friends who were Vietnam vets.  I don't want to get into a long discussion here of the effects of the war, but I will say that antiwar protesters are not primarily the folks who have been responsible for the scandalous treatment of veterans of Vietnam and the wars since.  Not in terms of praise but in terms of pay and medical services and real support.  This is what President Obama called "a national disgrace." The Obamas expended considerable effort to support veterans in real ways, though politics may distort this fact.

I'm not saying that things didn't get hot in antiwar activities in the 60s.  That was true at Knox in the controversy over ROTC on campus.

But in the spring of 1968--probably near graduation--classmate Cleve Bridgeman saw me sitting alone at a white wrought iron table on the Gizmo patio.  We didn't know each other well, but he wanted to talk about a moment earlier in the year when I responded to seeing him in ROTC uniform in a way I meant to be at least partly humorous.  But he didn't take it that way.  It surprised him, but it made him think about things a little more, and he wanted to talk about it--about why he'd been in ROTC and why he was going into the armed services.  We sat on the Gizmo patio and had our only meaningful conversation. Then we shook hands and wished each other well.

Cleve Bridgeman was not in Vietnam long, and he didn't come back.  So I'm grateful for the one moment we had, and that we parted with mutual respect.

If America Really Cared

If America really cared about its military veterans, it would insist that every member of the military be paid a living wage, and no military families would need food stamps or food banks to eat.

If America really cared about its military veterans, it would insist that the full range of medical care and health care be made available, quickly and at little or no cost.

If America really cared about its military veterans, it would insist that veterans receive training and jobs commensurate with their military responsibilities.

If America really cared about its military veterans, it would not knowingly elect leaders who will sacrifice the lives and limbs and mental health of military personnel by sending them to fight less than necessary wars, prosecuted primarily for ego, reputation and to enrich the few.  And it would use lawful means to get rid of such leaders whenever and however they arise.

History of My Reading: Portrait of a Reader As An NCB

In my previous posts on childhood and adolescent reading, I was guided by musings on the books as artifacts and how I came to read them--childhood books at home, then from the public library, then my own paperback purchases.  But I neglected (or forgot) some other books that were important to me, that can also be viewed in light of a few personal characteristics and circumstances.

For example, I might have given the impression of being a particularly serious reader, perhaps a prodigy.  I wasn't.   I may have read often, but I had far too much physical or nervous energy to stick with reading for very long at a time.  I was an active, "free-range" kid.  I had bouts of childhood illnesses to thank for some of those reading experiences--even beyond comic books.

I had particular trouble with long narratives.  The worst were in high school, when our English courses included Silas Marner by George Eliot and Great Expectations by Dickens.  Even though they were probably abridged versions, they were excruciating.  I especially didn't enjoy being forced to spend so much time with such an awful and scary person as Miss Havisham.  That drudgery put me off nineteenth century English novels for a very long time.

But it is also true that I got some exposure to a breadth of literature, especially English and American, in high school English classes.  We were not assigned individual novels or poetry anthologies.  We were required to purchase sets of paperback collections, approved for Catholic school students.  But even though there was the usual Catholic slant in descriptions of authors and works, and Catholic authors like Cardinal Newman were raised to equal rank with more recognized writers, I did get a taste of a range of writers, including many not covered in any of my college literature courses.  In particular, I recall we read a lot of essays, by the likes of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith (in fact, I recall one of the volumes was entitled "Shakespeare to Goldsmith:), William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb,  Thomas De Quincey and--yes--John Henry (Cardinal) Newman.

Especially in my public library reading before high school, I got through other books if the story was exciting, even if I didn't understand all the other stuff.  I read some awful stuff, too.  I had a paperback copy of Strive and Succeed by Horatio Alger.  I think this is when I was a hotshot paperboy and fancied myself a businessman (even if my profits went largely to snacks at the neighborhood stores along my route.)  I now have a paperback reprint of that exact edition, and it is truly a terribly written book.

Sometime before high school I enjoyed reading Tom Sawyer which encouraged me to go on to Huckleberry Finn.  That was a bit more difficult, though it was episodic enough to keep me going.  I may have tired a bit in the middle, until it got exciting again.

One author I recall reading on my own, probably in high school, was William Saroyan.  I got his books out of the library: The Human Comedy, My Name is Aram (short stories), probably one or two more.  I may have seen on television the James Cagney movie adapted from his play, The Time of Our Lives.  I really liked Saroyan, his small town stories about growing up, learning tolerance and integrity. I did not have the same kind of experiences but I could imagine them, and some of his characters were like some of the older people I encountered.

Saroyan was a popular and prize-winning author from the 30s to the 50s, but has largely been forgotten.  He was never mentioned in any of my lit courses at college.  Probably judged as too sentimental.  Even Steinbeck (who I also read at this time, though sporadically) was a bit suspect.

As was Sinclair Lewis, for stylistic reasons I suppose. I read Main Street or Babbitt on my own in high school, after I tried to read Kingsblood Royal, which was about racial prejudice.  It was one of his more obscure novels, which I read because a girl I had a crush on said she liked it.  I was excited by the satiric edge--satire was big in the early 60s, particularly political satire-- and the ideas, but I didn't follow the story lines of these novels completely. 

 Possibly for the same satiric reason, I read George Orwell's Animal Farm, as did some of my high school friends.  We knew enough about Nineteen Eighty-Four to talk about it, although I'm not sure I read it.  I probably tried to.  I know I saw the 1956 film version on TV, which graphically presented the basics.  We couldn't miss such elements of it as the thought police in regard not only to totalitarianism we studied, but tendencies of the Catholic school environment we existed in. 

The Kennedy campaign of 1960 plunged me into politics, so in addition to the paperbacks I've mentioned (by and about JFK as well as the James Baldwin books that largely led me to the March on Washington in 1963) and the Reader's Digest Condensed Books version of the Washington novel Advise and Consent, I read two other novels about politics: All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's fictional portrayal of Huey Long, and The Last Hurrah, Edwin O'Connor's evocation of old style Boston politics. If I couldn't follow them completely, they left definite impressions.

I read a number of popular novels with topical and political themes that got widespread media attention at the time, some after they were made into movies (The Ugly American) but some before (Fail-Safe in 1962, Seven Days In May in 1964, both of these likely as condensed books.)

So by the end of high school, the recognized literary works I read (as opposed to tried to read but failed) were mostly poems, essays, short stories, short novels, or episodic novels, as described in my post on paperbacks: Updike, J.D. Salinger, etc.

 I read the classic poems and essays mostly as school assignments (I was much taken with the few poems by William Blake included in the school anthology), but once I discovered The College Survey of English Literature (Harcourt Brace 1951) that had belonged to my uncle Carl Severini, I read poems and essays in that volume. In the winter of 1963 I found solace there when President Kennedy was assassinated, in two poems by Shelley: the long poem "Adonais" he wrote on the death of Keats, and a short poem, "Mutability."  I read Robert Frost and I was intrigued by E.E. Cummings, but for awhile "Mutability" became my favorite poem:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
    How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
  One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest--a dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise--one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
  Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;

It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
  The path of its departure still is free;
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
  Naught may endure but Mutability.

 Mutability, but I copy this poem from the very volume I read in high school.

In trying to remember which classic adventure stories I actually read when young, as distinguished from encountering as movies or comic books, I only recently recalled The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.  Once I remembered it, the experience of reading it came back to me.  I read an old hardback from the library, which added to the thrill.

That book had a feature that leads me to my second point about my pre-college reading: I was the model of an NCB (Nice Catholic Boy.)  I went to Catholic schools for 12 years.  By high school I was starting to see the Church a bit more objectively, and eventually I was troubled by hypocrisies and lame rationalizations for activities like the Inquisition.  I remember being both uneasy and thrilled that the villains of The Three Musketeers were the Catholic Cardinal and his men.

In high school I read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in paperback, with just enough comprehension to get the basic story and mood.  The idea of being ostracized for dissenting behavior, being literally marked for going against the dominant beliefs of the community, was haunting, given the doubts I was starting to have.

I was also fascinated with Joseph Conrad. I must have read Lord Jim because I took a paperback with me to college, but the story I remember in particular was "The Secret Sharer." I felt a certain closeness to that.

Many of the questions I had in high school questions came from actual Church history, and from applying principles we were learning in, say, Problems of Democracy class, to what we were analyzing in Religion. Many of the questions I had in high school questions came from actual Church history, and from applying principles we were learning in, say, Problems of Democracy class, to what we were analyzing in Religion. I was attracted to the subject of individuality versus the conventional wisdom, and of the liberty to dissent. This led me to books like David Reisman's Individualism Reconsidered, Edgar Friedenberg's The Vanishing Adolescent, and the work of John Stuart Mill. I write more about these books in a subsequent post.

Where did I read?  Though I no longer have specific memories of this, I'm sure I replicated the parties that adolescent readers throw themselves: stacking up snacks, like peanut butter on Saltines, next to the couch or chair where I sprawled to also devour a Hardy Boys mystery or a Winston science fiction novel.  I read outside in the sun or the shade of the front porch.  I also recall being so excited reading J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories that I couldn't sit still to read the last one ("Teddy") so I just started walking in a frenzy, striding fast up the last hill of Hamilton Avenue while trying to read the bouncing pages.

  But my specific sense memories are almost all of books I read reclined on my bed, or actually in it at night: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, All the Kings Men,  and biographies of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

   My interactions with classic literature were partial at best. But there was one extraordinary reading experience, one literary novel, that became formative for me in a number of ways.  How I got my hands on it was perhaps the most extraordinary element.

My sophomore year of high school I joined the Speech Club and began going to tournaments at other schools, giving extemporaneous speeches ("Extemp.")  My junior and senior year I participated in Debate.  My partner Mike and I won district championships our senior year in both the National Forensic League and Catholic Forensic League competitions.

The speech club advisor was Sister Ronald.  Almost all of our teachers were nuns, of various denominations.  I believe she was a Sister of Mercy, which (along with the Sisters of Charity who taught me in grade school) were begun and/or headquartered in our local region.

GCCHS

I had a complex relationship with another of the Sisters of Mercy, who at first championed me--made me editor of the high school newspaper as a freshman (not quite as radical as it seems--we were a new high school with only two classes at the time, first and second years) and promoted me into the first bunch of the National Honor Society inductees.  Later she fired me from the newspaper and tried to get me thrown off the NHS, after lecturing me about my lack of humility.  She also seemed particularly bothered by observing that I talked to too many girls.

Her fixation on me even became a source of embarrassment for the school administration, as I learned when the principal asked me to "forgive and forget."  I answered with a quote from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, whose biography I had recently read for some unknown reason.  "I can forgive, but if you ask me to forget, you ask me to give up experience."

Anyway, Sister Ronald must have known about this situation, and my ongoing emotional turmoil.  She was a bit of a mercurial character as well.  One day out of the blue she slipped me an old, hardbound copy of a book.  She suggested I read it and return it to her, with the clear implication that I should not tell anyone else about it.

The book was A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce.  I knew pretty quickly why it had to be kept secret.

Our Catholic high school strictly controlled what we read.  Our textbooks, even the literature collections, all displayed the nihil obstat and imprimatur indicating the contents were free from doctrinal and moral error.  James Joyce, while not on the official Church Index of forbidden books, was not exactly approved either.

Joyce's novel Ulysses had been notorious, even banned in the United States until a landmark court case.  His collection of short stories, Dubliners, was mostly considered acceptable--one of the stories may even have been in our paperback collection of modern authors.  A Portrait of the Artist was somewhere in between, but it soon became clear to me why we weren't encouraged to read it.

The novel follows the childhood and adolescence of Stephen Dedalus in and around Dublin in the very late 19th century.  The early set piece scene of a Christmas dinner exposes the tensions among Stephen's elders regarding the Church's treatment of a hero of Irish independence.  Stephen goes to a Jesuit school, where he is bullied by students and clergy, but also supported by other students and clergy.

from the 1977 film of A Portrait

At 16, Stephen becomes obsessed with sex and on one of his long feverish walks finds himself in Dublin's red light district.  He returns to prostitutes often.  Then his school holds a retreat: several days during which ordinary school work is suspended and students are expected to concentrate on spiritual contemplation when not attending lectures by a priest brought in especially for the retreat.

This priest gives several sermons--fulsomely reproduced--describing the physical and mental torments of hell in great detail.  Stephen subsequently repents and becomes a saintly figure.  But when he is invited to consider whether he has a vocation for the priesthood, Stephen just as suddenly recoils against it.  By the last few chapters, he has rejected the Church and is preparing to leave Ireland, for a life of "silence, exile, cunning" to artistically "forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

Anti-clerical diatribes, sex with prostitutes (though at best I only vaguely understood this section), rejection of the Church--no mystery as to why this book wasn't approved, or was treated like it didn't exist.  Why did Sister Ronald give it to me?  I'll never really know.  I remember that I just as secretly returned it to her.

The Viking Library annotated edition of Portrait notes that the sermons on hell were very similar to those the Jesuits gave from the 16th through the 19th centuries.  Well, it didn't end there.  Sometime after I'd read this book, in my junior year of high school, we had the first of our retreats--and the priest engaged to give the lectures devoted one of them to an exact echo of these graphic descriptions of hell.

I had my spells of being especially devout--I was an altar boy for several years--but I don't recall being particularly moved by this lecture.  Perhaps I'd been immunized.  But while the hell sermons stood out--I recall reading them at night in bed, my cold arms holding the book outside the bed covers--the influence of the book was probably subliminal, suggesting that I wasn't alone in questioning the immediate world pressing around me.

A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man was the only book I read in high school that I subsequently read again for a class in college.  It had more of a direct impact that time, the fall term of my junior year in a course on modern novels with Howard Wilson.  James Joyce became a literary hero and model in the years immediately following.  As for "silence, exile, cunning," I never got the silence quite right--I was a loudmouth, though I yearned for silence around me.  I was soon to learn that when necessary, I could engage the cunning--with mixed success.

But exile I understood.  It was the future I saw for myself with increasing definition over those late 60s years.    

The Big Drops

I've noted here some items in the daily onslaught of the antipresident's reign that violate the norms of presidential behavior and human decency, as well as the law.  For example, the recent posts Going Too Far and Going Too Far Continued.  While some of the instances those posts cited continued to be scandalous for awhile longer, none have so far led to serious consequences.  So, so far, not too far.

And the onslaught continues.  Jonathan Chait notes one that has gone unnoticed: the relatively technical violation committed by Hillary Clinton that Republicans blew up into the phones scandal is being committed routinely by the antipresident to exactly nobody's notice.  And his use of insecure phones is much more dangerous, given his office.

But Chait also notes the general response to the now routine outrages:

"There is no chance that Trump’s parallel sloppiness could play remotely as large a role in shaping public perception. There would be no reason for it. Trump has done so many consequential things, both in terms of his policy agenda and in his degradation of governing norms, that a myopic focus on his unsecured phone would serve no public interest. It does not rank as one of the 100 worst things Trump has done so far.

That is to say, nobody wants to live in a world where Donald Trump is held to the same standard as Hillary Clinton. Nor can anybody imagine what such a world would look like. It already feels like we are numb from the sensory overload of endless sirens directing us to the latest unprecedented outrage. No human could generate the mental space to process Trump’s firehose stream of offenses calibrated at Clinton levels. The political system couldn’t function at such a standard. He would have been impeached his first week in office."

Others have noted the unendurable drip drip drip of demeaning disaster.  But while we look away to save ourselves, we may not be noticing the big drops. Right now, there are at least two ongoing (if we put aside the actual policy disasters that normally would be of immense importance.)

First, there is the relentless effort by the antipresident supported by congressional and R party minions to place the antipresident above the law.  Right now it's a race between the law's workings (mostly but not exclusively through the Mueller investigation) and the antipresident's efforts to make himself dictator in chief.  The law is long.  But the antipresident's fuse is short.  We're always a minute away from constitutional chaos.

Second, there is the threat to the integrity of our election system posed by a growing number of suspects, with the Russian government as one known perpetrator.  And because of the antipresident's hostility to the idea, not enough is being done to safeguard future elections.

The antipresident doesn't want to hear about the Russians because, for one thing, it might call into question the legitimacy of his own election.  With the release of his book on Tuesday, and his appearance on the Rachel Maddow show, former Director of National Intelligence and career intelligence officer James Clapper has uttered the words of the antipresident's nightmares: his assessment that the Russian interference campaign  " swung the election to a Trump win." 

I've maintained that the 2016 election results were due to a perfect storm of evil and negligence: Democratic voter apathy leading to lower turnout, the refusal of some voters (mostly male but some female) to vote for a woman for President, the FBI director's announcements on Hillary just before the election, strategic and tactical mistakes by the Clinton campaign, the saturation media coverage and inflation of illegally obtained emails, and a racial backlash from whites after 8 years of an African American President, among other factors.  Prominent on the list is the Russian interference on social media, the dimensions of which are still being learned, as is the nature and extent of its coordination and collusion with the antipresident's campaign.

But Clapper is likely right about this: the number of votes that changed the results was so small, and so coincidentally clustered in the same few states that happened to have been targeted by the Russians, that this interference by a foreign power alone was enough to change the results.  For Hillary Clinton got several million more votes than her opponent, who won the electoral votes of those key states by a total of about 80,000 votes.

Again, we have a long game going here to protect this essence of democracy: the vote.  Courts in PA have reversed Republican gerrymandering, and a ballot initiative in Ohio ordered their courts to do the same.  Meanwhile, other courts have upheld racially biased voter ID laws in other states.  So it's a battle.

We have elections in November.  The special elections and primaries held so far this year suggest that a Blue Wave is entirely possible.  But will it come?  That's largely up to voters who didn't vote last election.  They will need to vote in numbers that can withstand the effects of continuing Russian disinformation and disruption...  And if the Blue Wave comes, will it come in time? That alas is up to fate.

History of My Reading: The Comic Book Era

Since I've posted recently on the 80th anniversary of Superman, who appeared first in a comic book, I'm going to continue the "history of my reading" series with this post about comic books.

Comic books influenced the art world most conspicuously in the 1950s with American Pop Art (although Gertrude Stein maintained that Picasso loved newspaper comic strips which she said influenced Cubism.) They became subjects of literary speculation if not yet actual acceptance as literary products in the 1960s when Marshall McLuhan started talking about them as emblematic of the new media.  The Batman TV show, with its interpolated "Bif!" and "Pow!" derived from comic book panels, reflected the comic book's sudden status as fashionably hip.

Later the countercultural Zap Comix became an integral part of the hippie scene.

The late 60s also saw the beginning of the Marvel characters that reinvigorated and revived comic books, especially Spider-Man, enthusiastically introduced to me in college by fellow Knox student Erica Overberger.  Since then, apart from becoming the source of major movie empires,  comic books have morphed into the literary form of the graphic novel.



But my major comic books period was earlier in the 1950s.  My first exposure was to the newspaper comic strips, which historically also preceded comic books.  These black and white comic strips of maybe five horizontal panels appeared on a page in the daily newspaper, accompanied by single panel vertical comics, and perhaps a crossword puzzle and the daily horoscopes.

The Sunday newspaper however had an entire section of perhaps 6 or 8 pages of full color comic strips with many more panels each.  In my childhood, I saw the local Greensburg paper (the evening Tribune, until it merged with the morning Review to become the Greensburg Tribune-Review) but it did not then print a Sunday edition.  Instead we got the Sunday Pittsburgh Press.  Despite the difference, many of the comic strips were the same, though there were more on Sundays.

Usually leading the page in both papers in my 1950s childhood was the very basic art and story of Nancy, with her friend Sluggo.

One of the most famous comic strip lines
often applied to other subjects but originally
to environmental destruction.

Then I regularly saw many of the well-known newspaper comic strips of the time, including Peanuts, Archie and Jughead, Blondie, Pogo, Terry and the Pirates, the Phantom (one of my favorites), Dondi, Prince Valiant (Sundays only), Dick Tracy, Steve Canyon, Joe Palooka, Gasoline Alley, Dennis the Menace, Beetle Bailey, and the one panel Family Circus and Our Boarding House...Among the detectives, fighter jocks and soldiers of fortune there were Rex Morgan M.D. and intrepid reporters Brenda Starr and Scoop Mallory.

But there were others, particularly in our daily Tribune, that aren't as well known.

For example, I read Johnny Hazard for the jet airplane flying scenes.  Curly Kayoe was an obscure strip about a fighter. He once had an opponent called Phil O'Dendron who always wore a black t-shirt in the boxing ring to cover up some dread secret on his chest.  I kept waiting for it to be revealed, and felt cheated when the strip announced that the secret had been told to people who had written in, but the strip itself never said.  It remains a mystery in my life (though I can now pretty much figure out what it was.)

Historically, the first comic books were crude compilations of a particular newspaper comic strip.  Very soon they featured their own characters, and then their own stories for characters established in the newspaper strips.

Superman was a creature of the comic books, just four years after they began.  When it came to new current comics, Superman was not only my favorite but almost the only character I followed.

That's partly due to the way I consumed this comics.  New comic books were a dime, which was not nothing in the 1950s, when a loaf of bread was 20 cents and a quart of milk was a quarter (at least at the neighborhood stores where I was sent to buy them.)  Fortunately I had a way to read comic books for free.

My grandfather's tailor shop was approximately half of a long, narrow building on Depot Street in Youngwood, about six miles from my Greensburg home.  My grandparents lived on the same street a couple of blocks down from the shop, towards the train tracks (and the depot.)  The other half was a barber shop, opened by Dominick Gelfo, who had offered my grandfather the space his shop still occupied. Dominick's son Sam ran the shop in the 1950s, and the Gelfo family and the Severinis were neighbors and friends.  So I was welcome in the barber shop.

My grandfather's tailor shop was relatively dimly lit, especially in the back where he worked the steam press.  The barber shop however was very bright, with white walls and those black and white checked floors.  Three or four barber chairs facing a wall of mirrors, with many colorful bottles and other containers on the marble shelf.

In the window that looked out onto the street there were chairs and benches for waiting customers.  There were magazines--and comic books.  Lots of comic books.

So when I visited my grandfather's shop I usually managed to spend some time in the barber shop, invariably reading as many comic books as I could.  Since my time was limited, I stayed mostly with the Superman titles.  And there were a lot of them: Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Superman comics and separate comic books for Superboy, Supergirl, Jimmy Olson and Lois Lane, plus the World's Finest featuring Superman and Batman.

I read them in great gulps, in a frenzy of red capes and blue-black hair.  The barbers got interested in how many I could read in an hour and often asked for a running count.

An entirely different set of comic books would come my way when I got sick and had to stay home from school.  Colds and their variations, plus measles, mumps and chicken pox--it added up.  Sometimes I could read actual books but often--especially with colds--I was too drowsy to do any more than follow a comic book story.  I would ask my father to bring some comic books home.

My father worked for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and drove a Singer panel truck.  When he wasn't in the store, he was out on "calls" doing repairs and sales.  On his travels he might stop at the little stores that were everywhere then--they sold some grocery staples like bread and milk, soft drinks, candy and baked goods, cigarettes--a bit of everything.  Some sold comic books including the kind they weren't supposed to sell.

 When comic books didn't sell out, a store could get its money back on unsold copies.  The owner tore off the top part of the front cover off (with the title and issue date) and returned that to the distributor for cash or credit.  He was supposed to throw the rest of the comic book away.

But some didn't.  They kept the mutilated comic books and sold them for five cents each, or maybe three for a dime.  These were the comic books my father often found and bought.

They were sometimes titles and characters I'd never heard of.  And once, out on some country road somewhere, he unknowingly found comic books that were years old--perhaps decades.

There were multiple issues, for example, that featured the Little Wise Guys.  Sometimes three, sometimes four kids and their adventures.

There were comics about a baseball player called Swat Malone, and the various nefarious ways opposing teams would try to cheat and keep him from hitting home runs, which he always did anyway.

But the most amazing set were vintage issues of the original Captain Marvel.  Billy Batson, SHAZAM!  His sister, Mary Marvel. I was completely enthralled and wanted more.  But eventually I realized there were no more.  There hadn't been new Captain Marvels for years.  I'd even sent away for membership in the Captain Marvel club, but got a card back saying the club had been "discontinued."  Did that mean it might start up again?  I couldn't believe there would be no more Captain Marvel.

Part of Captain Marvel's specific appeal was that he was an ordinary pre-adolescent boy (Billy Batson) who could transform into this superhero by saying the magic word given to him by a wizard.  Better than Clark Kent and Superman any day!

The original Fawcett Publications Captain Marvel stopped publishing in 1953 but based on the drawing style some of the issues I saw may have been from the 1940s. I was drawn to the drawing and the specific colors and look of it. The character was later revived in different forms by several companies--for awhile the two biggies, DC and Marvel both had versions.  But none of them stand up to the original.

According to this video I ran into on YouTube,  in the early 1940s the original Captain Marvel was the most popular superhero, superseding Superman.  Because of that, Fawcett spun off related characters: first Captain Marvel, Jr. and then, notably, Mary Marvel, one of the first and most prominent female superheroes.  She was created by Fawcett writer Otto Binder. The Marvel Family, separately and together, were enormously popular.  So DC Comics sued them for copyright infringement of their Superman character.

The suit dragged on for more than a decade but before it was decided, Fawcett was drained and dropped all their comic books in 1953.  DC then hired former Fawcett writer Otto Binder to write stories for--who else?--Superman.  He wound up creating both a number of classic super-villains who challenged Superman, and a female counterpart in Supergirl.  Ironically, she was a perfect copy of his creation for Fawcett: Mary Marvel. (He'd been so proud of creating Mary Marvel that he named his own daughter after her.) Mary Marvel was also a model for Isis, the first female superhero to star in her own TV show, in 1975.

In the years I was reading new comics in the barber shop, the superhero comics were beginning to get convoluted and fanciful. But the old rationale was often still there: they fought for the weaker, for fairness and justice for all.

It didn't take long for me to want to do more than read the comics--I wanted to write and draw them, too.  We got magazines in school, some with cartoons accompanying stories, and one that was pretty much a comic book.  In the back of at least one issue I remember a little tutorial on drawing cartoon figures.  I used these instructions to draw my own strips.

My father was also a member of the county Democratic committee and before elections he would get what were then called "specimen ballots"--sample ballots with the approved candidates' boxes checked, to be given to prospective Democratic voters.  They were long pink sheets of paper, with blank backs. I would get the ballots left over from the ones he was supposed to distribute.  I grew my cartoon strips on the back.

One of my characters was based on Captain Marvel.  Another was a comic character called Flatso.  Along with my ongoing drawings of an imaginary map--changing the borders of the countries to reflect the outcome of wars-- I was absorbed in these comics for awhile, usually in bed just before sleep.  But I wasn't very good at it, so eventually I stopped.  Still, there was a certain magic about doing those strips that I recall fondly.

Eventually I began acquiring and reading other kinds of comic books.  I liked science fiction ones--not just space adventures but actual science fiction, usually anthologies of stories with separate characters.  Stories might hinge on ultraviolet and infrared light, or the acidity of certain plants.

But I also read war comics, suspense stories, and even horror comics, including the notorious one in which a husband, annoyed that all his wife did was eat chocolate from those Whitman sampler boxes, chopped her up and distributed her body parts in a similar sampler.  These led to stricter standards for comic books, many of which displayed the Comics Code of approval.  This is when my neighborhood friends and I passed comic books back and forth.  Some probably were inherited, like that horror comic.

Not to be neglected were the Classics Illustrated comic books.  I read my first Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stories this way.  Classics Illustrated offered a wide range of stories: from the Iliad, Treasure Island, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Moby Dick to several Shakespeare and Dickens' stories.

 I don't remember which ones I read, outside of From the Earth to the Moon, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.  I do remember I was limited by the higher price--15 cents--and the fact that they were not readily available either from my friends or at the barber shop.  But I remember those three vividly, as comic books, apart from the movies and the original stories.

Comic books were sort of midway between books and the animated cartoons I saw on TV and at the movies.  The drawings didn't move or talk but, like characters in books, they spoke in your head.  There was a visual vocabulary and language peculiar to comic books.  Mastering that was a skill that suggested that mastering the skills of reading print-only books was possible.  Comic books also could be collected, displayed, lent out and traded.  But they were over pretty quickly. They didn't have the sustained worlds you could live in for weeks that books had.

Eventually comic books in my life went the way of baseball cards and model airplanes--until that fit of Marvel mania in the late 60s and early 70s, with Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk.  Apart from that, I never got deep into the world of comic book mythologies, comic book collecting and so on.  Still, they furnish these memories.

Postscript: Another direct offshoot of the comic book are books that illustrate academic or otherwise complex subjects.  Probably the most prominent practitioner of this has been Larry Gonick, who I worked with on the Boston Phoenix in the early 70s.  His books like The Cartoon Guide to Physics and similar treatments in science, history and economics look to me like Zap Comix colliding with Classics Illustrated.  His most recent is a collaboration with Tim Kasser, professor of psychology at ye olde Knox College, titled Hyper-Capitalism (New Press, 2018.)