Book Review: California by Edan Lepucki and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

If anything distinguishes this era in literature, in the way that ennui amidst opulence marks the works of the Jazz Age or restless rambling marks the Beat Generation, it would be the fear of the collapse of civilization.  This fear has spent the last several decades permeating all of popular media, bleeding over from the front page of the newspaper to our books, our movies, and our television.  Can you still call it entertainment when what we read and watch stokes the fires of fear within us?

I have days when I think that we are really done for - that climate change (or war, or disease, or whatever) will hit a tipping point and then right and wrong, right and left, and even science and politics, will no longer matter, just the floods, the fires, and the famines.  Then I think, Pshaw, we'll figure it out before all that happens.  Then I think, But what if we don't.

Perhaps the best realization of these fears in literature and popular culture are the zombies, who are essentially us killing us to stop us from killing us.  Colson Whitehead's Zone One captured this fear perfectly, and somewhat humorously, in his depiction of a last-ditch effort to contain the evil we create within ourselves, an evil that gradually externalizes and envelopes humanity in death.  But sometimes the zombies aren't zombies, though they engage in that darkest taboo, cannibalism, as in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  If humanity makes it long enough to look back on this era, we will look back and herald McCarthy as the one who gave us a singularly unsurpassable portrait of post-apocalyptic survival and what it means to those who figure themselves (as we all do) the "good guys."

Two recent novels, California by Edan Lepucki and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, carry that dark fire onward.  The works bear some striking parallels: both switch back and forth between the survival and pre-apocalyptic periods, both are more about what happens to relationships under strain than simple survival methodologies (two traits they share with The Road, and in which they differ from other popular stories in the genre).  Both feature prophet figures (unlike The Road).  And both hold up moral ambivalence to the light, turning it about in the hand like an object picked up on the shore, some strange object one tries to identify and comprehend.

Reading these works, I have to keep reminding myself that they are actually about how we are now, rather than how we will be in some poorly defined future (the apocalypse in Station Eleven comes by the "Georgia flu," which we need to know is highly contagious and incurable, and remains - again, as in The Road - unspecified in California).  Not in the future, but now we are killing each other for convenience.  Not after the apocalypse, but now we are simply surviving without really living.  Not someday, but now we are destroying relationships with the people closest to us.

So all the zombie-slaying fun in popular culture misleads us, these works reveal.  The apocalypse is now.  The apocalypse will be televised.  But it's not the Launcelotish romp with machete and rifle of a century hence we imagine, rather, it's the Quixotic foolishness of today.  Looking at how these works end provides several insights as to whether we should hold out any hope for humanity.  Whitehead finishes with imminent destruction; McCarthy with a small kindling of promise for those who "carry the fire."  Station Eleven provides minor revelation and a slow shuffling on.  But perhaps California is truest to human nature.  Its heroes end up selling out, compromising themselves to death, a sort of carbon credit-trading of the soul.  Is that where we're headed as a species?  Maybe.  But Lepucki is not so much concerned with that landscape.  She's saying that we are already there now.

Book Review: 100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith

     100 Sideways Miles revels in all the stock characters and plot elements of the contemporary young adult novel the way politicians are sure to promise better schools and more jobs.   In this election season, it gets to the point where you'd love to hear a candidate admit that his policies will have little effect on the economy, and that market forces are beyond the control of any one person or set of regulations.  Similarly, I'd love to read a young adult novel that isn't The Fault In Our Stars Yet Again.
      We have it all here: the main character who is perfectly ordinary, because we know, in our hearts, that we are perfect only in our ordinariness.  However, we wish to be pitied, so the main character has some tragedy hampering his soul.  That helps us feel misunderstood in our ordinariness (they just don't know how extraordinary I am).  All you need then is a situation which thrusts the young person toward the fulfillment of his wishes.  Oh, and he should get the girl and have an awesome best bud, because we'd like those things, too.
     I could be describing anything from Star Wars to Harry Potter to The Hunger Games to TFIOS to this little YA outfit.  At least two of those have redeeming qualities - J. K. Rowling, in particular, thrives on squeezing herself into a genre (witness her recent forays into pulp detective procedurals) and bursting out like that Mentos and Diet Coke thing.
     So our mini-hero here is named Finn, and he is plain.  He distinguishes himself in no way and is passionate about nothing.  But, his mother was killed by a horse that fell off a train from a bridge and landed on their boat (really), an accident which also left him emotionally damaged and epileptic.  He obsesses over the distance earth travels in space in its evolutions around the sun, and the relation of that distance to time as experienced on earth, which comes off as a heavy-handed and tiresome metaphor for, eh, um, something, I think.  But all the parts of this pendulous clockwork are in place.  Godlike best friend - check.  Gets the girl.  Loses the girl.  Does something heroic.  Gets the girl back.  Check, check, check, and check.
     100 Sideways Miles has some deeper elements which drove me to finish all 273 pages of its otherwise vapid drivel.  The main character, Finn (not Huckleberry, by the way), has a dad who wrote an classic sci-fi novel loosely based on Finn's heterochromatic eyes and spinal scars, and Finn forever feels trapped in his father's book.  That's a fascinating theme - the idea of a son feeling confined by his father's creation (which is, in a way, himself) - but the author is too busy dropping f-bombs, getting his characters drunk and explosively vomiting, and detailing their adolescent sexual misadventures (one of which is utterly ridiculous and even offensive - a German exchange student who lives to provide the godlike best friend with one-way gratification on a daily basis), much too busy with this mush to develop the one interesting thread in the book.
     Then again, this book is merely indicative of what is wrong with YA fiction nowadays, and perhaps even of what is wrong with some (yes, some, only some) young adults: the distinctly modern self-centeredness that resembles living as if one were on a reality show.  Some defects of adolescence are ingrained in our DNA, such as the foolhardy sense of invulnerability, but today's young adults - and the stories crafted for their demographic - reveal not only a staggering navel-gazing that permeates the culture, but also an awareness of this narcissism, which is shrugged off.  Why bother caring about anything but your own desires?  I suppose that's a question for us all.

Book Review: Hold the Dark by William Giraldi

     Reading Hold the Dark is like taking a trip back through your seventh-grade literature class, when you first discovered the mechanics of fiction.  We have the gripping first line: "The wolves came down from the hills and took the children of Keelut."  We have the heavy symbolism of wolves for all the evil inside us:

          "They have the spirits of the damned."
          "They're hungry wolves, hungry animals.  Nothing more."
          "I don't mean wolves."
          "I'll go now," he said.
          "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly
     they are ravening wolves."
          "That's the Gospel of Matthew."

And so on.  Also, Giraldi treats us to the classic Man vs. Nature theme which, in the spirit of Jack London, that seminal lover of the cold and stark setting, morphs into a Man vs. Man which in turn transfigures into that most human of conflicts, Man vs. Himself.
     That brutal landscape (again, in the fashion of classic literature) expands into a character, a presence, a mysterious god whose force unleashes the primal violence and desire seated deep in our seemingly-civilized souls.  The village itself is unbelievably named for a terrifying mythical demon dog.  Besides the three children taken by wolves in the first paragraph, we have the story of a "girl mashed inside the digestive tract" of a wolf, the revenge killing of a wolf, and this surprisingly cheery, poetic description of wartime violence all within the first few pages:

     When the .50-caliber rounds hit them they tore off limbs or else left dark blue holes the size of plums.  He fired into those on the fuel-damp sand and those still crammed inside the truck's flattened cab.  Their blood burst in the wind as wisps of orange and red.  Curious how orange, how radiant blood looks beneath a desert non, in the dull even tinge of its light.

And the body count and blood flow does not abate through the succeeding chapters.  Giraldi appears to want to position himself as the Cormac McCarthy of the tundra, another sparse landscape and lawless terrain where the distinction between man and beast blurs in a stain of blood and brilliant sunsets.
     The book turns on two unexpected plot twists, one regarding the supposedly wolf-taken boy from the first line, and a second involving the nature of the relationship between the boy's parents.  That first twist is beautifully gruesome and breathtaking, but the second, coming in the final pages of the novel, is disappointingly corny and needless.  It was a shame for Giraldi to end the story with a plot twist straight out of soap operas, after successfully painting such a lovely, stark image of love, evil, revenge, and desire.  It would be as if "To Build a Fire" ended with the writer revealing that the main character had dreamed the entire story, or if 1984 had ended with Orwell explaining that Winston and Big Brother were actually brothers (a lá the ridiculous familial revelations in Star Wars).
     However, Hold the Dark redeems itself in the person of Vernon Slone, a man's man who simultaneously attracts and repels us.  Upon encountering one of his army buddies in the middle of raping an Afghan girl, Slone saves the girl.  Such a hero, eh?  Ah, but he does so by stabbing the soldier through the ear, a grisly salvation Giraldi depicts with his characteristic staid horror:

     He stabbed this soldier through the right ear.  A centimeter of the knife's tip poked through his left temple and Slone felt the body go limp on the blade.  He held the man's drooped form upright with the knife so he would not topple on the girl.  He then thrust him quickly back and yanked free the blade in the same even motion.  The serrated side of the knife was crammed now with bone and brain.

Yikes.  The book, and Slone, rolls on in this manner, with stretches of snowy tension punctuated by storms of extreme violence.  I found myself in the end, however, wanting to love this story as much as I loved those gems of seventh-grade literature - "The Necklace," "The Call of the Wild," "The Gift of the Magi" - but sadly, could not.  I just wish some editor had talked Giraldi into polishing up the ending.  Then his book, too, might have become assigned reading in schools, though likely not for seventh-graders.

Book Review: The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein

     I’ll be honest: now is not the best of times to be a teacher.  When I see the inane dictates foisted upon the profession from the local, state, and federal level, or hear the vitriolic blame-gaming that passes for educational discourse in this country, it’s as if I’m underwater, holding my breath until a long storm above passes and it’s safe to surface.

In a strange way, then, Dana Goldstein’s book The Teacher Wars offers some comfort, cold though it may be.  The book reassures us that insanity and inanity have long served as the guiding forces in American education.

     Take one of my favorite policies to hate: merit-based pay.  A mere thirty years ago, within memory of today’s policymakers yet oddly forgotten, the seminal A Nation at Risk report created a sense of panic which spawned some idiotic and fortunately short-lived educational reforms, including merit-based pay.  And here we are - in the galvanized 21st Century - seeing this corpse of failure resuscitated.  Goldstein notes that, back in the 80s:

Twenty-four states claimed to have implemented some sort of “career ladder” rewarding teachers with merit pay, but by the end of the decade, almost all of those ladders had collapsed, weighed down by low budgets and lack of teacher buy-in (174).

Our own school district this year rolled out a merit-pay plan that offered an impressive-sounding (yet truly paltry) million dollars to be paid not to all teachers who hit a pre-defined educational target, but rather just to the top couple hundred (based on evaluations and test scores).  So teachers can have near-perfect evaluations and lead all their students in passing the state test … and get nothing.  Haven’t we learned?  Back in the 80’s, this type of system undermined morale more than it raised test scores.

There were several merit pay plans that were popular with teachers, and they had one major feature in common: Bonuses were available to every high-performing teacher in a school district, regardless of the grade level or subject they taught … [whereas] just 15 percent of teachers in Tennessee under Governor Lamar Alexander’s widely celebrated plan, and 10 percent of teachers in Florida [received bonuses] (176).

Assuming for a moment what is not true - that bonus money can buy you test scores - why on earth would you only buy a random percentage of teachers off instead of every one who could make the grade?  Well, I guess because money is expensive.

     Always in such things, when you have politicians (some of the deservedly least popular people in the country) determining what happens in classrooms, the law of unintended consequences kicks in and makes a mess of things.  And this cause and effect, Goldstein has found, rules the currents of American educational history and reform.  In the 1830s, reformers brought more women into the profession to, eh, save money, because, eh, women work for less than men.  We male teachers (and our sisters-in-arms) are just beginning to peel off the hair shirt of this legacy.  As Goldstein recounts the influence:

Yet during an era of deep bias against women’s intellectual and professional capabilities, the feminization of teaching of teaching wrought by the common schoolers carried an enormous cost: Teaching became understood less as a career than as a philanthropic vocation or romantic calling (31).

Even efforts we all support, such as integration, can wreak havoc for those meant to benefit from it.

Half the southern states passed laws revoking the teaching license of anyone who joined an organization that supported school integration, including the NAACP. …  Then, during the frustrated decade after Brown, desegregation was the law, but not the reality (112-113).

At least with desegregation, there was a cause worth suffering for.  But how about the race effects in recent and today’s reforms, where corporatizing efforts in the 1980s are being repeated today, with the same ill results?

This painful episode in American education history has generally gone unacknowledged by today’s accountability reformers, as they pursue policies, such as neighborhood school closings and school “reconstituitions” as charter or magnet schools, that lead disproportionately to the loss of teaching jobs held by African Americans. … When the [Chicago school] district reconstituted ten schools in 2012, 51 percent of the teachers dismissed were black, although black teachers make up only 28 percent of teachers citywide (122).

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) could easily be crowned King of unintended consequences.  The law meant to remove any opportunity for making excuses for failing students, but ended up harming exactly those it most intended to assist.

Teachers showered attention on so-called “bubble kids,” those right beneath the proficiency threshold, while ignoring the needs of high-ability students who would pass the tests no matter what, or low-ability ones who had little chance of rising to the proficiency bar (187).

And it wasn’t only teachers gaming the system during the troubled reign of NCLB.  States and school districts, too, played the numbers game like Fast Eddie Felson:

As a result [of a lack of the means to manage underperforming schools], many states followed the letter but not the spirit of the law and made their new tests absurdly easy for kids to pass.  In Texas a student who scored 13 percent was declared proficient (186).

One more example.  The biggest buzzword in the corporatizing of education today is “value-added,” which basically posits that a good teacher can be identified by measuring the value added to her students.  What it comes down to is using standardized test scores to evaluate the worth of teachers.  And how’s that working out?  Goldstein tells us.

When value-added is calculated for a teacher using just a single year’s worth of test score data, the error rate is 35 percent - meaning more than one in three teachers who are average will be misclassified as excellent or ineffective, and one in three teachers who excel or are terrible will be called average.  Even with three years of data, one in four teachers will be misclassified.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to compute an accurate value-added score for teachers who work in teams within a single classroom … or for the two-thirds of teachers who teach grades or classes not subject to standardized tests (206-207).

Goldstein is the first I’ve read to point out something I have long griped about - what if we fired all the low-scoring teachers?  Who is lining up to take their places?  “Good” teachers?

Even if test scores were a flawless reflection of student learning and teacher quality, there is no evidence that the new teachers who replace the bad teachers will be any better … (230).

The upshot is teachers, students, parents, and administrators with whiplash as reform after reform fails, and the new thing is ushered in as the, well, as the new thing (better than the old thing).  Meanwhile, generations of students pass through schools without any attention to what actually could be done to better their educations and life chances.

     So what is the ever-elusive fix?  Goldstein finds that, too, buried in the past, in the words of an unheeded social scientist of the 60s.

[Sociologist James] Coleman’s message was that although family income might be the biggest factor in student achievement, teachers and schools also mattered, especially for poor kids (121).

This whole-child approach echoes those espoused by Diane Ravitch and other independent reformers of today, who have no theory or party or politics in the game but only, genuinely, want to see America’s children receive the best possible education.  We have to fix poverty, health care, and … um … everything, kind of.  Yet even this realization is nothing new.  Witness Goldstein’s account of Johnson’s war on poverty as applied to schools in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:

[President Johnson] signed ESEA in his hometown of Johnson City, Texas, with his own elementary school teacher at his side.  “By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children,” he said.  “And we rekindle the revolution - the revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance (114).

The path to real and effective and lasting reform may be tricky and even treacherous, but the way is mapped out for us.  Teacher preparation programs, for instance, have historically been more a part of the problem than the solution.

Today only half of teacher candidates undergo supervised student teaching in a real classroom, and most teacher education programs have no mechanism for making sure mentor teachers are themselves successful or trained in how to coach an adult peer (248).

And what is the plan to better prepare teachers for the realities of the classroom?  Apparently, plenty of “blah, blah, blah,” but nothing significant.  And the wheel of history goes round and round.

     That repeating chorus of failure throughout the history of American education sounds at the heart of Goldstein’s book.  She maintains a professorial tone, but the occasional cracks in her journalistic veneer let shine through a witty light well worth waiting for.

The hope that collecting more test scores will raise student achievement is like the hope that buying a scale while result in losing weight (232).

Ultimately, Goldstein holds out hope that we can get our act together and see American education live up to its promise.  And, fortunately, she does see who will lead the way:

Effective teachers can narrow, but not close, achievement and employment gaps that reflect broader income, wealth, and racial inequalities in American society (208).

She also has gleaned, as in this quote from Larry Cuban of the Cardozo Project, how exactly teachers can turn the ship.

Simply stated, effective teaching is intimately related to how well a teacher knows who his charges are and the nature of their surroundings.  If he doesn’t, his perceptions will continue to be shaped by TV, newspaper, social science formulas, and fear - not by first-hand experience (128).

The book does - wisely - stop short of prescribing any cure-alls.  After all, Goldstein is a writer, not an educational expert.  (Though such lack of credentials fails to stop Bill Gates and even dabblers like M. Night Shyamalan from diagnosing and meddling in reform as far as their riches allow, which for Gates is pretty darn far.)  Reading this reform-minded history of American education, however, will inform your mind for the educational debate sure to accompany the next presidential race.  God help us.

Book Review: The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim

We own little real estate in the small towns of our psychologies but two central ironies of modern life, like the post office and police station in our minds.

First, we think better of ourselves than we should.  That's an understatement, perhaps.  Second, we think we know ourselves, but we don't.  Donald Antrim's stories play on these ironies like a San Francisco busker on an two-stringed erhu, sawing away at the awkward and self-defeating behaviors that resonate from our overestimation and ignorance of self.
Sometimes the effect is comic, as in this description of the genesis of an ill-fated outing in "Pond, With Mud."

     He had taken the afternoon off from his job at the printing press and gone with the boy in tow to catch the two o'clock train to the zoo that had recently opened on the outskirts of town, on marshlands that had been home to a chemical-solvent extraction plant that had burned to the ground.  Immediately following the zoo's inaugural ribbon-cutting ceremony - or relatively soon after, to be more precise - strange things had begun to happen to the more esoteric wild animals. Why was it that the rare and endangered species, the ones you'd never heard of, all seemed to have compromised immune systems? At any rate, it had been reported in the papers that the board of governors and the director of the zoo were soon to come under indictment for cruelty to animals and for various misappropriations of municipal funds. The zoo's future was in question. The time for a visit was now.

Now, the faulty logic at the paragraph's end does give us a chuckle, but it also gives us pause when we recall that the man will be visiting the zoo "with the boy in tow."  Yet the details Antrim assembles generate an air of exaggeration that accentuates the humor: the incinerated chemical plant, animal cruelty at a zoo, embezzlement.  Antrim's stories stand out from the trend among modern fiction writers to torture their poor creations precisely because he grants them some lightness to accompany the characters' unbearable being.  The situations - grim, somewhat shocking - seem not so dark because of the dark humor Antrim wraps the plot in, like organ meat in clean butcher's paper.

In "Another Manhattan," the simple act of bringing flowers for his girlfriend at a restaurant date creates such abominable little tragedies that we feel for the poor sap who thinks flowers can fix relationships.

     He parted the curtains.  "Pardon me," he said to the people seated near the entrance.  Long- and short-stemmed flowers alike had snagged on the drapes. ... Jim spun left then right, enshrouding himself - and the bouquet - within the folds of drapery fabric.  There followed a flurry of petals.  The rose thorns came loose; the bouquet's topmost stems sprung free. ... "You're bleeding," Lorenzo told him.  Jim saw the blood spotting Lorenzo's handkerchief.  Lorenzo said, "You have a lot of scratches.  You look like you've been in a fight with some squirrels or something." ... He explained to Lorenzo that the flowers were a gift for Kate ... He clutched the vase.  His pants were wet from water that had sloshed over the rim.  Water stained his shoes.  He could see tiny snags marking the sleeves of his overcoat and the front of his suit.  How frustrating, after having labored so hard to avoid the thorns.  His clothes would have to go to a reweaver, he thought.  Then his thinking disintegrated into bitter resignation.  Everything he touched was ruined.  The flowers were almost destroyed.

The scene plays like something out of Chaplin - indeed, most of Antrim's antiheroes smack of the Little Tramp, drained of any sentimentality.  The antagonist in each story is none other than the man himself, the woman herself, and they all end up sounding like the Apostle Paul:  "I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."

Antrim is also a master of the storytelling craft. specifically in his use of details that make an entire world real for his readers.  In the title story, the main character starts out his debacle with a simple garbage run:

     ... he was on his way to the dump to throw out the drawings and paintings that Julia had made in the months when she was sneaking off to sleep with the man she finally left him to marry, along with the comic-book collection - it wasn't a collection so much as a big box stuffed with comics - that he'd kept since he was a boy.  He had long ago forgotten his old comics; and then, a few days before, he'd come across them on a dusty shelf at the back of the garage, while looking for a carton of ammo.

How perfect a string of beads: the artwork, the infidelity, the comic books, a collection that is actually a pile, a forgotten childhood, a dusty search, a box of bullets.  In two complex but ordinary sentences, we see deeper inside this man than he sees into himself.

And that, ultimately, is the hypothesis of these stories: if we comprehend these people better than they know themselves, are we the same way?  Do the people we know see through our masks?  Are we all a bit like the emperor who was so sure not only of his clothing, but of his superior intelligence, while the children stand by laughing at our ridiculous bareness and barrenness?  Can we not see beyond our noses because of that shimmering emerald light in the air?

Book Review: Why Teach? by Mark Edmundson

No one does bitterness and scorn quite as well as old white guys, and no old white guys are so well equipped to express their discontent as college professors, hurling scrolls of invective from their ivory towers.  For most of this book, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, Mark Edmundson does his pitch-perfect impression of the angry old white professor dude, but, then, the tone turns and becomes unexpectedly tender and personal.  For a short while.

Edmundson's main gripe is with what his beloved liberal arts university has become in the modern age.

In the old days, when the university was a quasi-churchly institution, the professors largely called the shots. ... But in the new university all this changed.  Now the professors were the people who gave the grades, period. ... anyone who revered them for their wisdom or wanted to emulate them was tacitly understood to be half-cracked (x).

As you'd expect, Edmundson is a university professor, and he dislikes his loss of prestige and power, to put it plainly.

Who's to blame?  The easy demon: society.

To me, liberal arts education is as ineffective as it is now ... [because] university culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images (6).

Well, then, we only need reverse the prevailing trend of American culture over the past three generations.  And a nice little book like this (ranked #396,984 in sales on Amazon) might just turn that tide (See?  I can be sarcastic, too!)

But Edmundson also blames the university itself, which in America (as we do all know) has become nothing more than a diploma mill where those who pay their tuition bills receive credentials in exchange, which they can then parley into money-making careers.  Still, he holds out hope for those little pockets of genuine education secreted throughout the country.

If you want to get a real education in America, you're going to have to fight ... against the institution that you find yourself in ... you'll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people (52).

His pastiche of the "corporate city" type of university, bent solely on commerce and credentialization (yes, not really a word, but Mark will get the joke), is worthy of Mencken:

Universities that have made themselves into corporate cities are not hard to spot.  Most of the students - and many members of the faculty - are buzzing from place to place, always feeling a bit self-important, always feeling a bit behind, like that poor rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (107).

And the values they promote stand for similar biting review:

Why is excellence a bad word?  It's not, in and of itself.  But people around universities who use it are people who want to talk about worldly distinction without talking about ethics.  Excellence means we're smart, we're accomplished, we're successful - and we can be these things without any obligation to help our fellow human beings. ... Why is leadership so bad?  In itself, it's not.  But what people usually mean by a leader now is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all of the values of the people who are in charge (109).

But no one falls in line for harsher rebuking than the students themselves, in whom ever positive qualities betray an underlying stupidity.

... the reason that the kids are so open and appealing is that they're innocents.  Their naiveté is what's beguiling.  And part of what creates that innocence is ignorance.  They don't go from place to place pressed to the ground with the burden of the past - in part because they don't know much about that past (101).

Keep in mind that we are talking about college students at a prestigious university, "kids" who aced AP history courses, and Edmundson's depiction of them as grinning buffoons is all the more damning.  These "kids" are incapable of any intellectual discourse altogether.

It's this kind of dialogue, deliberate, gradual, thoughtful, that students immersed in the manic culture of Internet and Adderall are conditioned not to have (45).

So culture, the moneyed university, and the ignorant, complacent, drug-addled students have turned higher education into a sham, in Edmundson's view.

Then - and I know I've made you wait a while for it - the book turns.  Edmundson recalls the high school teacher, Mr. Meyers, who woke him from his unintellectual torpor and taught him that education is an act of rebellion.

Before Meyers arrived, I never rebelled against the place, at least not openly.  I didn't in part because I believed that Medford High was the only game there was.  The factories where my father and uncles worked were extensions of the high school; the TV shows we watched were manufactured to fit the tastes for escape that such places form; the books we were assigned to read in class, Ivanhoe, Silas Marner, The Good Earth, of which I ingested about fifty pages each, could, as I saw it then (I've never had the wherewithal to check back into them), have been written by the English teachers, with their bland, babbling goodness and suppressed hysterias (122).

Perhaps Edmundson's students, whose laptops are no longer welcome in his class since he discovered they were watching booty-shaking videos and emailing during class rather than taking notes, are a reflection of his younger self?  Maybe they see his book choices as he saw his teachers'?  Shockingly, this possibility does not occur to Edmundson.  But if, as he posits, education is an act of rebellion, then his students are rebelling effectively, against him and his worldview.

Verily, Edmundson seems to turn his firehose of vitriol on everyone but himself.  While on the cusp of self-discovery he backs away and returns to his comfortable weapons of sarcasm and high dudgeon, facetiously advising the imagined straw man of a new humanities professor:

... students believe it is up to the teacher to describe the book so appealingly (to advertise it, in short) that later in life, given leisure, they might have a look.  The summary and description should be carried on in a diverting way.  There ought to be copious reference to analogous themes and plots in recent popular culture.  Jokes ought to be offered at the expense of at least some of the characters, preferably all. ... In no event should the instructor hint that the author or the characters in the book are in any way superior to the students who have condescended to encounter them (145).

Indeed, Edmundson's greatest enemy appears to be the professor who does exactly thus, who tolerates a lowering of intellectual standards and embraces the familiar demon of pop culture.  He openly acknowledges his need to demonize.

Every essay on education needs a villain.  There has to be someone or something preventing the liberal arts from being the world-changing enterprise we all suspect they can be.  And I suppose so far I have supplied a few (203).

Ah, yes, Professor, you have supplied a few villains.  But I'm giving your book a C+ in that you propose no other hero than yourself, and you, Professor, cannot save education because education does not need saving.  Popular culture has always been a bane of lowbrow, mindless entertainment, but it is the intellectual's job to elevate these things by seeking to understand them rather than dismiss them, to write about baseball like Roger Angell, to write about Madonna like Camille Paglia, and to write about drug addicts like William T. Vollmann.

So I'll answer the book's question: Why teach?  We teach because we believe in deep thinking and the power of deep thinking and writing and reading to change the world in lasting, positive ways.  And we realize that we cannot do so by ourselves, and so we teach to train an army of thinkers - not to spurn and scorn them as dimwits, but to grab them by their souls and give them a good drubbing, saying, "Wake, sleeper, wake!  Wake and see what the world truly is!  See what you truly are!"

Book Review: Notes from the Internet Apocalypse by Wayne Gladstone

An internet apocalypse isn't really an apocalypse, is it?  I mean, think about the book of Revelation:

When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

Now, that's an apocalypse.  But the worldwide loss of the internet - especially as this novel conceives it, without any effect on international commerce - would primarily mean - as this novel conceives it - a loss of mindless entertainment.  But wouldn't we treat it like an apocalypse?  Our first world problems comprise a sort of daily apocalypse (my favorite is "My inflight movie was longer than my flight.").

Nowadays (I feel the curmudgeon rise within me, just using the word "nowadays" ... mmmmm ...) we can't just say something pithy.  We tweet it.  We aren't just proud of our children.  We post their accomplishments on Fakebook, uh, I mean, Facebook.  We can't just make a nice dinner for our family.  We have to post it as food porn on Instagram.  And I judge not, or at least I chuck the first stone at myself (which is just as difficult as it sounds) - I participate in this online solipsistic egofest.  But, hey, I mean, like, hey.

So the main joke of this novel is how people would adapt to a world without Reddit and Twitter.

     Tobey took a step closer.  "First of all," he said, "I resent the implication that making up funny one-liners about how fat Jennifer Love Hewitt has gotten is not a real job.  But more important, are you serious?  Being a desk jockey for the Workers' Compensation Board?  That's a real job?  Judging from the amount of beer in your fridge and the fact that you're wearing jeans on a Tuesday, I'm guessing you haven't been there for a while." 

     "I'm working remotely," I lied. 

     "Working remotely or not even remotely working?"  He smiled. 

     "Wow.  That's a good one." 

     Tobey was the best two-paragraph blogger there ever was. 

     "I know.  I just wrote that.  And now it makes no sense because there's no Internet."

That's just it.  What is the point of being clever if not to be appreciated, and to be thus valued by the largest audience possible, which has evolved to become a main function of the online world.  Remember when the internet was new and everyone was flush with how it would change our lives?  But no one predicted that LOL cats would rule and 6-second stop-motion animations on Vine would be hailed as high art.  But this is the world we created, and we are stuck with it.  Probably.  Unless the internet stops working (or is stolen, by the government, of course).

Right.  Which brings me back to this book.  Three unlikely comrades go out in search for the internet as if it were a thing to be found.  Which is the point.  The internet is not a thing. In a sense, it's nothing.  But here I am blogging about it.  On the internet.  Or blogging about the book (print on paper) about the internet on the internet.  The snake chokes on its tail and takes a selfie while doing so (without hands, quite a trick).

Do they find the internet in the end?  I don't know - does it really matter?

Book Review: Getting Schooled by Garret Keizer

I never could bring myself to read all the way through books by alleged super teachers like Ron Clark and Rafe Esquith.  While they offer some sound advice (and their tomes are nothing but a patchwork quilt of pithy recommendations, often enumerated and always emphatic), their primary example of how a classroom should look and operate was their own, and at times the pointless bragging about going to the White House or having the president namedrop them in a State of the Union speech grew tiresome.  To be honest, it wasn't "at times" or "grew tiresome."  It was as consistently annoying as trying to lie out in the hammock on a pleasant day only to be pestered by mosquitos (a common occurrence here in Savannah).

Imagine, then, my relief at Garret Keizer's testimony to the triumphs and trials of teaching, where right on the first page he lays naked his shortcomings and aspirations:

It's fair to say that I have never gone to work in a school with what might be called purity of heart, though much of what I know about purity of heart I learned there.

Keizer second guesses not only local and federal policies and procedures, but turns his bitter, geezerly, cynical eye mainly on his own soul.  When he does stab at policy, however, it is delightfully mordant:

... throughout the school year, I will repeatedly be struck by the sense that the professed goal of creating 'a level playing field' through education is little more than the goal of sorting winners from losers with a steady hand and a clear conscience.  The single greatest expression of the American project, American public education is also its most cynical lie. ... I'm still straining to keep my mouth shut ... 

He also does not spare his students this raking analysis and dry commentary:

I have a small, highly cooperative lunch-period study hall, and a most delightful girl on the list, someone whose studiousness and affability seem to rub off on her neighbors.  One day she has nothing to do ... I ask her if she likes art.  Yes, she likes art very much.  Music to my ears - among several of the books I've brought to school for browsing is an expensive coffee table compendium of painting and sculpture by three Italian masters ....  The girl glances at the book without opening it.  'Thanks,' she says, 'but I guess I'll just draw,' by which she means penciling in the scribbled loops on a torn-out page of lined notebook paper.  So much for the Renaissance.

The running theme, then, is hypocrisy and the disappointment it engenders.  But, again, Keizer rifles through no one's corrupt morality more than his own.  When he mentally criticizes a troubled student for her sloppy work ethic, he immediately pulls out the whip for a round of self-flagellation:

     Not that I would say such a thing, and I'm not exactly pleased with myself for thinking it.  Even in this funky little tutorial I am reminded of how hard it it to predict when and how a girl or boy is going to catch fire. ... I'm reminded as well of how hard-won an achievement a kid's mere attendance can be relative to the forces keeping her down. ... And, perhaps, who knows, my greatest contribution to her life may be the remembrance of a single late afternoon when she glimpsed what it means to be part of a community of scholars.  It will be my fondest remembrance too: I know even as I'm sitting here that the year will hold nothing better than this.

So the drive to change lives and teach, to be a teacher, to teach students, lets go the accelerator and drifts off to settling for a single moment of semi-successful after school tutoring.  Keizer's honesty allows his greatest insight, that we cannot really be those plastic Ken doll National Teachers of the Year, hailed by presidents, book publishers, and motivational speaker bureaus alike.  We try, and we fail.  We cannot change every life with which we intersect, after all, but we do well enough to try, and to have those occasional moments of epiphany when we realize that Bob Marley was right, that we don't have to worry about a thing, because every little thing is gonna be alright.  Even if it really won't.

Book Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

We've all experienced it: you have a dream so vivid and affecting that you wander all day in and out of recollections of the dream and marveling at how perfectly it dovetails with your waking life.  The sensible part of you reassures the speculative part that dreams don't really mean anything, that Freud has been largely debunked, and yet you can't shake the fog of dreams misting up before your eyes and making the air you breath a bit heavier.

Reading Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is much like that waking dream.  Even the piece of music Murakami selects as the novel's theme (he always does, whether it's The Beatles or Janacek) is a murky piece oscillating between dream and life.  The plot is simple: a middle-aged man seeks to discover why his four high school friends renounced him shortly after he left for college.  The overarching theme seems to be the idea of reconciling with one's past, and yet Murakami cannot leave things so simple.

When your girlfriend gives you a tie, is it just a tie?  After all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  But Murakami is a master at imbuing exchanges which appear dull with terrific meaning:

     "Thank you.  It's beautiful."
     "Some men don't like to get ties as gifts."
     "Not me," Tsukuru said.  "I never get the urge to go out and buy a tie.  And you have such good taste."
    "I'm glad," Sara said.
     Tsukuru removed the tie he'd been wearing, one with narrow stripes, and put on the one Sara had given him.

It's just a tie, right?  However, their relationship ends on a strange note, unresolved, with Tsukuru suddenly overwhelmed by desire for her but Sara asking for a three-day break from their relationship.  It's just a tie, right?  Everything in this novel is a mysterious quasi-symbol subject to interpretation, as if we were at a Freudian dream-reading seminar.

Early on in the book he introduces a little mystery:

     After trying out the piano, Midorikawa took a small cloth bag from his shoulder bag and gingerly placed it on top of the piano.  The bag was made of expensive cloth, the opening tied up with string.  Somebody's funeral ashes, maybe? Haida thought.  It seemed like placing the bag on top of the piano was his habit, whenever he played.  You could tell by the practiced way he went about it.

Having caught our interest, Murakami has his character ask about the bag:

     "What is that bag?" Haida's father ventured to ask.
     "It's a good-luck charm," Midorikawa said simply.
     "Like the guardian god of pianos?"
     "No, it's more like my alter ego," Midorikawa replied ... 

It turns out that Murakami is building dreamlike layers of storytelling, taking us both further from the main story and deeper into it.  The bag is a talisman, a "token," which grants the possessor a costly metaphysical "true sight."  But this story belongs to Midorikawa, told to Haida's father, retold to Haida, retold to Tsukuru (and then, of course, retold to us by Murakami).  These retellings lend the tale a folksy status, like Rowling's tales of Beedle the Bard, or, more significantly, like the retelling of a dream.  This story-within-a-story (within a story, within a story) casts Tsukuru's otherwise pedestrian odyssey in a different light.

He is not simply searching the dim corners of the past for meaning, looking to turn a bad ending into a good one.  He is trying to discover what is in the bag, and if it really allows the bearer to see the truth.  Murakami ingeniously makes his main character a builder, but a builder of train stations, a man who creates the in-between places, the spots we do not really seek out but only pass through, the way places of life.

So we cannot trust the pat ending Murakami offers for the cursory reader, as when Tsukuru parts from one of his former friends:

     "Thank you for coming all this way to see me," she said.  "I can't tell you how happy I am that we could talk like this.  I really feel like a great burden has been lifted, something that's been weighing me down forever.  I'm not saying this solves everything, but it's been a huge relief."
     "I feel the same way," Tsukuru said.  "Talking with you has helped a lot. ..."

We end not with this seemingly happy ending, but with a whisper of doubt, a wind of wondering what's in the bag: is there a way to possess understanding of the truth in life, or will life always be like a dream we can't interpret?

     He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep.  The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths of the night, where it disappeared.  All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping through a stand of white birch trees.

What a perfect image of ungraspable nature of reality and dreams: a wind slipping through white birch trees.  In the end of the book, then, as in life, we do not gain a peek into the bag.