Earlier this week, George Saunders provided the NYT a copy of the commencement address he gave this year at Syracuse University:
Here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.
His thoughts on cultivating a more compassionate life:
There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter.
Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition – recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us…
One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish – how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”
Video of Saunders’ speech can be seen here. Recent Dish coverage of the author here, here, here, and here.
Jennifer Phillips, an Episcopal priest, contemplates the reasons that all manner of people – from a curious Jewish woman to an uncertain immigrant family – have slipped into her New Mexico parish to participate in the sacrament of Holy Communion. Why she never turns them away:
All sorts and conditions of people are drawn to the rail for all sorts of reasons conscious and unconscious, in a great variety of states of preparedness and unpreparedness. There’s always lots of teaching going on to help form people in our sacramental life, but the plain truth is that the power of God in the liturgy touches, moves, transforms, and attracts people right then, and at the rail doesn’t seem a good place to question beyond “do you desire to receive the Body of Christ?” At the heavenly throne I’d much rather be explaining why I fed some people inappropriately than why I failed to feed some who hungered and thirsted for God and put their hands out; and I’d rather give an extra blessing with a touch to someone who is drawn forward than explain they should be satisfied with a general blessing at the end. Like grain, in full measure, poured out, spilling over into one’s lap, this love and graciousness of God in the sacrament of the altar.
On a similar note, Rachel Held Evans recently spotted the following passage from Sara Miles’s memoir, Take This Bread:
What happened once I started distributing communion was the truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity:
You can’t be a Christian by yourself….Sooner or later, if I kept participating in communion, I’d have to swallow the fact of my connection with all other people, without exception….I wasn’t getting [communion] because I was special. I certainly didn’t get to pick who else was good enough, holy enough, deserving enough, to receive it. It wasn’t a private meal. The bread on that Table had to be shared with everyone in order for me to really taste it….I was going to get communion, whether I wanted it or not, with people I didn’t necessarily like. People I didn’t choose. People such as my parents or the strangers who fed me: the people God chose for me.
(Painting: Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s The Last Supper, 1896, via Wikimedia Commons)
The HBO documentary series Real Sex, which premiered in 1990, took an unusually candid approach to depicting sexuality on TV. Molly Langmuir presents a tribute and a behind-the-scenes oral history:
By turns bawdy, sexy, hilarious, and simply weird (though never not sincere), [Real Sex] filled in the gaps high school sex ed classes left, which turned out to be vast. Real Sex covered not only sex toys and polyamory, but the vaginal molds of porn stars, squirting demonstrations at swingers’ conventions, and workshops in which participants were prompted to dip their testicles in sprinkles.
Through it all, the mostly female team that produced the show experienced firsthand the almost absurdly vast array of desires that comprise human sexuality. “One of the main things I remember was how much we laughed,” said Katie Smalheer, who worked on the show for nine years. “We weren’t laughing at people; we were just laughing at how silly we can all be when it comes to sex — role-playing, dress-up, sex toys, dirty talk, strap-ons, corsets, striptease, mud play, latex. That was the essence of Real Sex, real people doing what turned them on, and having fun.”
Deb Wasser [street interviewer, segment producer, director]: The lawyers were very careful about what we could show.
They would examine it frame by frame. What a job. Then they’d come back to us and say, remove these three frames. Of course when we were out there filming people really having sex, they weren’t stopping and starting for the camera.
Lynn Sadofsky[line producer, co-producer]: It could feel a bit absurd sometimes. I remember one sex workshop where the participants were in the throes of whatever practice they were doing and I literally had to call lunch because the crew had to stop filming — we weren’t a union set, but we did basically follow union rules. Finally I just called, “lunch time.” I guess [the workshop participants] stopped. I guess they lined up for lunch.
Katie Smalheer [associate producer, coordinating producer, supervising producer]: There were a couple of segments toward the end that I remember clearly. Someone pitched us a story about these sex orgies and at first we didn’t do it because who wants to go to sex party and let you film them?
Turns out a lot of people. We ended up shooting this orgy, which was basically a costume party, or a masquerade, like in Eyes Wide Shut. There was even a woman who looked like Marie Antoinette with one of those skirts with the structure underneath. And they were good-looking people. By the end of the night, everyone had their clothes off and were fucking. At a certain point when you’re shooting vérité, there’s nothing for the producer to do. You just have to let the cameraman shoot. Patti and I ended up hiding behind this bookcase looking at each other, like, “What life are we living that we’re in the middle of someone else’s sex party?” People were getting fucked by other people’s husbands. A woman was in a dentist’s chair with three guys.
And it wasn’t horrible, either. There was something sexy about this.
According to Gary Shteyngart, wearing Google Glass makes you seem more appealing to strangers:
My friend Doug and I hit Bushwick and Williamsburg. Everyone at the bar at Roberta’s restaurant wants a piece of me. “Ah, future!” a German man cries. “We saw you have the Google,” a girl from a group of visiting Atlantans drawls. “Can we try it awn?” And then, without warning, I’m talking to young people. We’re all squealing, full of childish zeal. We are rubbing up to the future, hearing the first gramophone playing scratchily in the distance. Doug knows a movie producer who recently got Glass and said, “This is as close as I’ll ever get to being a rock star.” When the velvet-rope hostess at the of-the-moment Wythe Hotel bar in Williamsburg stops to take a photo of me with her iPhone, I know exactly what the producer meant. This is the most I will ever be loved by strangers.
But:
Wearing Glass takes its toll.
“You look like you have a lazy eye,” I’m told at a barbecue, my right eye instinctively scanning upward for more info. “You look like you have a nervous tic,” when I tap at the touch pad. “You have that faraway look again,” whenever there’s something more interesting happening on my screen. To awaken Glass, one must tap at the touch pad or jerk one’s head; otherwise the device remains inactive, conserving its limited battery supply and allowing the user to remain perfectly human. At breakfast, I jerk my head up theatrically, and then use a new function which allows me to move around Web sites by holding two fingers to the touch pad and moving my head about, in effect turning my skull into a cursor. “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto,” my wife says.
After a full day of Glassing, of constantly moving my eye up and down as if in preparation for the bifocals I will need when I’m older, I fall into bed exhausted. I want to take my Glass off, but there’s a tweet from Joyce Carol Oates in response to a tweet I posted of myself wearing Glass. Oates is more concerned about my choice of shirts in the photo I tweeted. “Did Rasputin wear a button-down collar?” she asks, questioning my identity. “Not the actual G.S., possibly.”
A video of Shteyngart experimenting with Glass is here.
Joan Marcus comes to terms with her childhood crush on Caligula, the Roman emperor famed for his cruelty:
In childhood I was conditioned early to empathize with suffering, and Caligula certainly suffered, but he was also dangerous; I suppose that combination was the real source of his seductive power over me. Volatility without pathos wouldn’t have moved me. A man who dominated without showing some vulnerability would have been repulsive, and a gentle soul who got crushed to a pulp would have been pathetic. It was the wounded man simmering with barely-contained energy that fascinated me — passion or violence, it all felt the same.
This is the same quality, I imagine, that draws some women to incarcerated killers — that they smolder, chastened by the system and in need of sympathy.
Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez both had flocks of groupies. As of this writing, Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dhokhar Tsarnaev has thousands of fans on social media sites, many of them young women, many thoroughly smitten. Behind bars these men are immobile love objects, captives suffering bravely under the weight of justice.
Perhaps their fans imagine them wrongly accused, or remorseful, or working through the trauma of childhood. Perhaps, in some strange way, they believe them to be empathetic. These are men who know suffering intimately and would relate to our own. They hate the power structures that hurt them but could share a deep bond with an insightful woman if only they had the chance. News outlets provide plenty of images to feed this fantasy. That aerial shot of nineteen-year-old Tsarnaev shortly after his capture, the one where he’s on the ground face up with his arms locked behind and his abdomen exposed, that’s wounded man porn right there, grist for all those girls who confuse pity with love and violence with passion.
The recent letter you published in (qualified) defense of Tony Bennett relies on some claims that are pretty well debunked in this Slate article by Jordan Ellenburg. The state already had a system in place for dealing with the “non-traditional” schools in Indiana, one that would not make the grade for Christel House inherently unfair. As Ellenburg writes, Bennett intervened after the odd “grade 3-10” issues of measurement had been worked out, and he created an entirely new loophole for the school. Basically, rather than using a different weighting system, Bennett just got rid of the bad scores of 9th and 10th graders, and then gave the school an A even though with these scores removed it STILL earned a B.
In other words, while your education-employed correspondent may be right in general, in this case Bennett was intervening after the statistical work had been done to account for the factors that made Christel House “unique.” This is a pretty clear-cut case of politically motivated intervention, not just an accident of a complex school accountability scheme. These systems may have honest problems, but Tony Bennett is a dishonest one.
Another:
NPR yesterday had a fairly good report on Tony Bennett. Showing “both sides”, as they do, they gave Bennett’s side of the story:
After his system gave the friend’s charter school a “C”‘ he quietly ordered corrections (the school doesn’t graduate students, since it only handles two grades under 12th grade). With the “fix” made, the system upped the grade to an “A”. Good story, but it doesn’t cover everything. NPR then got a rundown of the situation from Mike Petrilli, VP at Thomas B. Fordham Institute who’s been critical of Bennett policies in the past. Petrilli slammed the school and Bennett, saying the school was failing Indiana’s state standardized tests.
Another reader, who agreed to forgo the Dish’s default anonymity policy, writes:
My name is Lili Lutgens and I am President of the Board of Directors of Community Montessori Charter Public School in New Albany, Indiana. We are a pre-K through 12th grade charter public school that uses Montessori teaching techniques to offer families in our community an alternative to traditional public education. Like Christel House Academy, we added one grade per year until 2010 when we graduated our first class of seniors. We also take children who have struggled academically in the traditional public education environment and so we take a lot of kids who are not very good test takers.
But unlike Christel House Academy, our accountability scores have never taken any of this into consideration. Instead, we are judged solely on our students’ test taking performance and graduation rates. Never mind that we are offering an alternative for kids struggling in a traditional academic setting and that historically in any given year we have had a significant number of new students.
I guess we just don’t have the kind of money to donate that it takes for the state to give us the benefit of the doubt.
By the way, if you want more info on exactly why the standardized tests underlying these accountability scores are problematic, you may want to look at the work of W James Popham, professor of academic testing at UCLA. In a nutshell, the tests do not measure instructional quality but are used to judge it anyway. Popham delivered an important paper at the annual meeting of the National Council on Educational Measurement last year, and it can be found here [pdf].
Eric Benson takes a look at Professor Borges, a new book compiling the transcripts of a survey course taught in 1966 by Jorge Luis Borges, the famed Argentine writer:
The twenty-five lectures that make up the book are ostensibly introductory, but they’re only masquerading as English 101. Instead, this is Borges’s highly idiosyncratic tour of his favorite authors and most revered myths, a view of history and literature as filtered through his capacious, whimsical mind.
The book begins with the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain in the Fifth Century AD and ends with Robert Louis Stevenson’s death on the Samoan Island of SavaiʻI in 1894. Vikings, mythical Old English heroes, and Icelandic historians dominate the first third of the course. James MacPherson, a literary forger who composed an anachronistic epic called Ossian and tried to pass it off as ancient Scottish verse, is credited as a key founder of the Romantic movement. The writings of nineteenth century poet William Morris are the topic of the three classes. The works of John Milton and William Shakespeare are the topic of none.
Instead of hallowing the English tradition’s most acclaimed texts, Borges offers the proudly non-academic thoughts of an erudite enthusiast. He narrates the events of largely forgotten battles. He goes on tangents to discuss arcane linguistics. And he tosses off historical theories based on the scantest shreds of evidence (Beowulf’s setting in Denmark and Sweden is definitive proof that “after 300 years of living in new lands, the Anglo-Saxons still felt homesick”). It’s hard to imagine these lectures will end up as required reading for any serious English-literature course. It’s also hard to imagine any serious reader failing to discover pleasure in the joyful digressions and virtuoso distillations of this strange, wonderful book.
Mark O’Connell marvels at the man’s immense learning – and peculiar prejudices:
The “Borges” who is revealed, or perhaps performed…seems like the Platonic ideal of the man of letters: a man who taught himself German because he wanted to read Schopenhauer in the original, and learned it, moreover, by reading the poetry of Heine; a man who taught himself Icelandic in order to pursue his interest in Norse sagas. His loss of sight seems strangely appropriate; in the interviews, he speaks of the “luminous mist” of his blindness as though it were a kind of blessing, a removal of all distraction from what was most important, most real—the life of the mind. (And there was never any shortage of people willing to read to the great writer in his old age.)
But there were things that Borges didn’t see whose invisibility had nothing to do with his physical blindness—things he didn’t see because he wasn’t interested in looking at them. The lecture course in “Professor Borges” doesn’t feature anything written by a woman. It’s a history of English literature that includes no Austen, no Shelley, no Charlotte or Emily Brontë, no Eliot, and no Woolf. He was a great admirer of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, but even that admiration is not without its strain of condescension: in an interview with the collection’s editor, Willis Barnstone, he describes her as “the most passionate of all women who have attempted writing.”
Hardcore fans can check out this Borges lecture on Johnson and Boswell, excerpted from Professor Borges in the New York Review of Books.
Shirley Jackson lived a life fraught with paranoia, alienation, and cruelty – experiences she was able to channel into her fiction:
The six novels she wrote, and the attendant short story collections, all shared the same theme, Jackson said, “an insistence on the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behaviour.” She excelled at writing narrative that went through the looking glass and found beyond it not simply absurdity but malevolence. The switch happened in an instant, a lightning strike that turned a colour image into its negative. “It was Shirley’s genius,” [biographer] Judy Oppenheimer claims, “to be able to paint homey, familiar scenes … and then imbue them with evil – or, more correctly, allow a reader to see the evil that had been obvious to her all along.”
Her most famous story, “The Lottery,” is the most perfect example.
It tells the story of ordinary townspeople gathering together to draw lots according to a long-held tradition. When one housewife holds up the piece of paper with the single black spot, her neighbours, with deliberate and eager intent, turn upon her and stone her to death. The story created outrage on publication in 1948 in The New Yorker, described in letters to the magazine office as “gruesome” and “a new low in human viciousness.” But Jackson preferred to quote the letters she received from readers who “wanted to know where the lotteries were being held, and if they could go watch.”
Jackson’s audacity was to suggest that the terrifying face of evil was part of ordinary people and small town life. She knew what she was saying: “everything I write,” she told her publisher, was concerned with “the sense which I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction.” Her advice to writers that “so long as you write it away regularly, nothing can hurt you,” makes it likely she knew whereof she spoke.
The New Yorker has published a previously unreleased story by Jackson, “Paranoia,” available here (subscription required), along with an interview with her son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, who offers a glimpse into her sillier side:
In real life Shirley had a wonderful sense of humor, and had a jovial laugh she got from her father, counter-balanced by the polite, proper persona she learned from her mother. There were always jokes in our house, especially at meals, where we each had to tell one. Both my parents were great jokesters. They would leave funny notes and drawings around the house, literary puzzles, playful poems on doors.
Starting July 21, when his mother entered the ICU of a Chicago area hospital, until she died eight days later, NPR’s Scott Simon live-tweeted her passing to his 1.3 million followers. Meghan O’Rourke believes the outpouring of interest in the public grieving “suggests a hunger on the part of Americans for a way to integrate death and mourning into our lives—a hunger that is being met by social media”:
Simon’s Twitter feed was not an imposition of his mourning on others, not some kind of gruesome exhibitionism. It was simply a modern version of what has always existed: a platform for shared grief where the immediate loss suffered by one member of a community becomes an opportunity for communal reckoning and mourning. As the novelist Marilynne Robinson once said, suffering is a human privilege. Grief is the flip side of love. Mourning has become an all too isolated experience—but Facebook and Twitter have become a place (strange as it may seem) where the bereaved can find community, a minyan of strangers to share their prayers. Yes, it might seem strange to stumble upon announcements of death or the intimate details of dying amidst updates about summer trips to Costa Rica, Anthony Weiner’s escapades, and the arrival of a new puppy. But this strangeness is the strangeness of the real.
Will more and more people tweet from hospital rooms? It’s possible. It’s already common on Facebook, where people often announce that a loved one is in the hospital or has died. While some have bemoaned this—the Social Q’s column, in my recollection, once pronounced that Facebook was not the place to announce a death—it doesn’t feel morbid or inappropriate to me. It’s our equivalent of the ringing of church bells in the town square, for better or for worse.
Dreher, who blogged his sister’s Ruther’s fight with cancer, and then wrote with brutal honesty about their relationship in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, wonders when a writer who deals with such intimate matters crosses the line into “mawkish exhibitionism”:
I don’t think Simon crossed the line — I loved his tweets, actually, and think they honored his mother artfully and compassionately. I hope I didn’t cross the line either, but it’s a hard line to discern, especially when you are in the middle of intense emotions. This is a particular risk for writers and journalists, like Simon and me, who tend to process experience through writing. Often I don’t know what I think about something until I have written it down. If a tree falls in the woods and I fail to write about it, at some level I think it hasn’t happened.
The overwhelming majority of the world isn’t like that, and finds that sort of thing weird and alien. As my wife often reminds me, for writers, everything is material, but it’s not like that for most. Truman Capote was genuinely shocked when his closest friends dropped him after he repeated, under a veil of fiction as thin as onion skin, scandalous gossip he’d heard over lunch. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t realize that he was a writer, and this was material for him. That was inhuman of Capote, but I understand his confusion, and have to fight it in myself. Perhaps I don’t fight it enough, I dunno.
Rosa Brooks surveys the reasons that Americans join the military:
Some people sign up because — reared on old World War II movies, or maybe just on first-person shooter video games — they want to “go to war.” (It’s an unrealistic aspiration for many military personnel: Even in the post-9/11 era, many military personnel never deploy, and even fewer see combat.) Others dislike the idea of going to war, but believe that a strong military will prevent war by deterring potential adversaries and want to be part of such a deterrent force. Others still join up for reasons that don’t really have much to do with the nature of the military: They’re attracted by the military’s educational benefits and free heath care, they’re looking for opportunities to travel and learn, or they simply view the military as a stable job with benefits during economic hard times.
A 2011 Pew survey asked post-9/11 military veterans to list the most important factors that had motivated them to join the military.
Nearly 90 percent listed serving the country as an important reason for joining, and 77 percent listed educational benefits as important. Upwards of 60 percent said they wanted to “see more of the world,” and 57 percent said that learning skills for civilian jobs was an important factor. In contrast, only 27 percent said that difficulty finding a civilian job had been an important factor in the decision to join the military.
She also notes a common misconception:
The perception that “the military is right wing” probably stems from studies that focus on senior officers. Although senior officers make up only about 6 percent of the Army, they are substantially more conservative (and more Republican) than junior officers, and dramatically more conservative than enlisted personnel, whose views tend to more closely track those of the general population.
Update from a reader:
I joined the United States Air Force, serving from 1984-1992 as a Security Policeman working in Law Enforcement. My family had a rich history of serving this country, from my great-great-grandpa, who at 10 years old ran away from home to serve as a drummer boy in the US Army during the Civil War; three uncles who served in both fronts during WWII, and one who was onboard a cruiser during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and my father who served during the Korean War. So for me, it was a family tradition.
In fact, all through high school I wanted to join. But it wasn’t just a patriotic calling; I also wanted to see the world. I grew up in a small town in central Illinois and I shuddered at thought of attending college locally. I just wanted to get out. My folks didn’t have the money to send me to school, so being able to get funds via the GI bill was another reason I served.
So off I went, and after completing Basic Training and Law Enforcement school, I was stationed at Clark AB, Philippines. That was in 1985, just one year shy of the People’s Revolution in the Philippines. Here I was just a 19 year old, witnessing the overthrow of President Marcos while most of my friends back home were partying in college.
I worked Town Patrol later on and saw a lot for a young man (we had something like 100 bars packed into a two-mile radius with US Airmen, Navy, Marines, Army, as well as several other allied countries enjoying the Angeles City night life). It was wild and I saw a lot of tragedies: murders, decapitated heads, stabbings, prostitution, shootings, corruption, robberies – you name it. Then in 1987, a good friend and K9 handler was brutally shot to death, along with several other Airmen and Naval personnel. That had to be the worst thing I ever experienced. I rushed to the hospital and was allowed to see his body. I had seen people shot before, but this was so different. It’s hard to imagine a friend (he was only 21) and fellow Airmen lying there dead with his wife next to him. Hell, we had only been out partying a couple nights before and now he was gone. To this day I can still see his body lying there in the hospital emergency room. Nothing prepared me for that.
Then in 1991, Mt. Pinatubo erupted and all hell broke loose! I have never seen such a powerful natural destruction and was never scared more in my life. I lost everything in that disaster and was reassigned back to the US. I got out in 1992 and attended college locally with the GI bill money I received.
I will never forget the experiences I encountered during my service. I guess I was able to see a lot more since I was working Law Enforcement. Some great memories abound, but there are other horrible ones I just can’t forget.
The Dish 
