Month: March 2014

Walter Kirn’s new book Blood Will Out is an account of his friendship with the conman and murderer Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who charmed many in high society under the alias Clark Rockefeller. In an excerpt from the book, Kirn considers the place of the impostor in the American imagination – and his own complicity in “Rockefeller’s” deception:

The kidnapping, which made international news and later inspired a TV movie, exposed Clark Rockefeller as a fraud, the most prodigious serial impostor in recent history. It also connected him to a lineage older, and in a certain fashion richer, than that of the founding family of Standard Oil: the shape-shifting trickster of American myth and literature. In Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, this figure takes the form of a mutating devil aboard a riverboat who feeds on his fellow passengers’ moral defects. In Huckleberry Finn, he again stalks the Mississippi River as the Duke and the Dauphin, flamboyant mock aristocrats whose swindles are cloaked in Elizabethan claptrap. In The Great Gatsby he’s a preening gangster sprouted from a North Dakota farm boy. In Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels he’s a murderous social-climbing dilettante. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 he’s Milo Minderbinder, the blithe wheeler-dealer who’d blow up the world if he saw a profit in it. He’s the villain with a thousand faces, a kind of charming, dark-side cowboy, perennially slipping off into the sunset and reappearing at dawn in a new outfit.

But if Clark was all that (I’d learn after the trial that he understood his literary provenance and took great pride in it), then what was I?

A fool. A stubborn fool. When his story began to unravel during the manhunt, and the Rockefellers claimed not to know him, I told a fellow reporter that they were lying, a family of cowards running from a scandal. I only backed down when his German name was published and the word Lebensraum echoed through my head. The disclosure unsettled me but it also softened me, especially when more facts about his background trickled out in the days after his capture. I too had a German name and German blood, and I’d spent a summer during college living in Bavaria, his home province. I was 18 then, about the same age he was when, in 1979, two years before my stay in Munich, he left the small town of his youth for the United States. I’d left my own small town that year, for Princeton. I knew the yearning. No wonder we’d been friends.

Laura Miller calls the work “an absorbing spectacle of self-surgery,” detailing the psychology of the mark as well as that of the con man. Meanwhile, Meg Wolitzer shivers:

[T]he way Kirn tells it all makes me feel it’s entirely possible that I too might’ve allowed Clark Rockefeller to stay in my life because of a kind of lazy vanity and the pleasurable, ongoing thought that a really rich and powerful person likes me – despite the fact that I don’t like him at all. Even as the absurdities mount up, I could still imagine passively allowing a joyless friendship to continue. Life can feel so ordinary. You get up in the morning, you go to work, you pay taxes like all the other poor schlubs. The idea that someone in your midst doesn’t have to do any of that opens up a little fantasy door in the brain, a door unlocked by a pathetic magic key.

J.D. Tuccille considers the effects of having too much work outside the classroom:

A study, published last year in the Journal of Experimental Education, takes a dim view of the heavy workloads under which high school kids in “10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class communities” stagger. Results indicated that students in these schools average more than three hours of homework per night. Students who did more hours of homework experienced greater behavioral engagement in school but also more academic stress, physical health problems, and lack of balance in their lives. Which is to say, even if you think that homework can be a good thing, there’s a limit. More is not better, say researchers from Stanford University, Lewis and Clark College, and Villanova University.

Granted, those “upper-middle-class communities” may not be the most broadly representative; the average American high schooler spends about an hour and a half on homework per day. But as Misty Adoniou points out, even modest amounts of homework may widen achievement gaps:

Research finds that homework doesn’t improve learning outcomes in primary school, and has a weak link to improved outcomes in junior high school. Those improvements are connected to parental involvement – but parents who are keen supporters of homework may be disappointed to hear that their positive contribution is largely just ensuring their children hand in their homework. …

There are many parents, dedicated and desperately interested in their children’s education, who cannot involve themselves in their children’s homework. They may not have had schooling opportunities themselves, they may speak English as an additional language, they may work long hours or shifts, or they may just be like most of us, and simply can’t remember what a quadratic equation is. Those with spare cash buy the homework support, in the form of after hours tutoring. In high school, where homework tasks contribute substantially to the course grade, homework is the great unequalizer.

What an amazing portrait of San Francisco! http://t.co/oSK0Iz6R

— Zach Klein (@zachklein) July 25, 2012

In New York magazine, Kevin Roose suggests that “in many ways, San Francisco is the nation’s new success theater”:

It’s no secret that New York is having a bit of an identity crisis these days. Wall Street lost its swagger during the crash and hasn’t gotten it back despite the market’s broader recovery. Big banks are adding employees in Bangalore and Salt Lake City while cutting them in Manhattan. New York City’s budget wonks expect the city to add only 67,000 jobs this year, a sluggish number that faster-growing cities like Denver and Austin will look upon with pity. The city’s culture seems to be changing, too: Greenpoint and “normcore” are in, stilettos and pinstripes are out; junior bankers now get Saturdays off; “work-life balance” is no longer a euphemism for sloth.

Meanwhile, certain pockets of San Francisco have become the sort of gilded playground that New York once was. Brand-new Teslas with vanity plates like DISRUPTD drift down the streets of the Mission District, where pawnshops and porn stores used to be. Paper millionaires spend their nights at the Battery, a members-­only club with a tech-heavy roster and a $10,000-per-night penthouse suite. … It’s the city where dreamers go to prove themselves – the place where just being able to afford a normal life serves as an indicator of pluck and ability.

In SFist, Jay Barmann retorts:

I’m still not clear on the part about how we “don’t quite know what to do with [our] wealth,” apart from the digs about how SF men don’t dress up very much. We clearly spend all of our money on rent, food, and booze, and many of us do buy nice clothes and cars and things, and those with lots of money go buy houses in Napa or in Tahoe. But it’s true, we are less inclined to embrace asshole behavior, unapologetic displays, and the giddy capitalist fervor that has made Manhattan a bohemia-free retail Disneyland where no one ever thought twice about bulldozing a building to build something newer and bigger.

It’s hard if you’ve lived in both cities not to compare them, but I would argue that while most San Franciscans might long for the nightlife of certain eras of New York’s past, they’ve never wanted the city to become New York. And while many a trapped New Yorker who has visited or lived here dreams of an easier life in the west, they usually resign themselves to the fact that economically, and career-wise, there isn’t enough happening here. If that changes permanently, and there are more and more opportunities here, what excuses will they have left for staying in New York?