Liberal education

"From our perspective, liberal education is not some roster of required courses to round out the major, but the totality of our students' education," he said. "It encompasses all four years and embraces not only curricula – breadth requirements and courses in the major – but also dorm life, overseas studies, community-based service, and student experiences in laboratories, on athletic fields, in internships and in student groups – all of the places where our students learn and grow."

--Quoting Prof. James T. Campbell (committee co-chairman)

It's a cliché, but young people are the future of our country. The corollary: Their education is one of society's most critical responsibilities.

Therefore, I've been interested enough to at least skim through the 100-page printed report that Stanford released on Thursday, a report analyzing the future of undergraduate education at that school. The report reviews the history of similar past studies and the results of their implementation, and sets forth guidelines for the future.

Stanford has had its share of curriculum battles in the past. The report notes that fact, and attempts to skirt some of those minefields by identifying abilities, and only to a lesser extent the substantitive knowledge, that it believes all college graduates should possess.

Foremost is the ability to communicate effectively -- writing clearly, reading closely and critically, speaking effectively, and listening attentively to the opinions of others, especially when those opinions challenge the student's own most closely held beliefs.

Other abilities listed are critical thinking, aesthetic and interpretive judgment, formal and quantitative reasoning, ability to think historically, facility with scientific analysis, and a "rich capacity for creative expression," in whatever field the student is working.

Stating these goals is easy; how they might be implemented occupies the bulk of the report. The report acknowledges the apparent tug of war between specialization in a major and the breadth of learning required by a liberal education. The writers feel that, rightly conceived, the tug of war is illusory: each complements and strengthens the other.

Most interesting, from my perspective, is the emphasis that the report gives to education beyond the classroom -- in student residences, on overseas campuses, and through engagement in off-campus learning experiences (internships, field studies, performing arts, and, especially, community service programs).

At Stanford, as at many other residential schools located outside of large cities, 98 percent of the undergraduates live in university housing. Life in dormitories provides strong opportunities -- not always fully realized -- to encourage learning in various ways apart from the formal curriculum. When I was an undergraduate, I developed many of my own lasting interests simply from unstructured interactions with other students in my housing unit. But the report goes beyond these serendipitous opportunities, suggesting introduction of additional resident faculty members to live and dine with the students in their living groups, and greatly increased use of "integrated learning environments" where students with similar academic interests are clustered in the same unit for a year.

Living in dorms, students grapple intimately with the meanings of citizenship, leadership, diversity, respect, tolerance, and community, developing capacities that are not only intellectual but also social and emotional. The goal of residential education is not to “academicize” these experiences, but to create opportunities for students to connect their curricular and residential lives, in ways that enrich both.

Every university does studies of this sort periodically. The goals are never perfectly realized. But it's important that faculty and administrators sit down occasionally and ask "what is it we're hoping to accomplish, and what tools do we have to improve out performance." This report seems well thought out -- both in terms of educational objectives and in the means it suggests for accomplishing those objectives.

The Stanford report is of value not only to students and faculty at that school, but also to us, the general public. Reading it reminds me of the importance of education; of the excitement that the availability of appropriate educational tools helps generate in both students and faculty; and, simply, how much fun, as well as hard work, the pursuit of learning -- structured and not so structured -- can be.

And ... let's face it. Reading this report also makes me wish I could go back and do it all over again -- all the anxieties and uncertainties, the deadlines, the term papers and final exams -- and the living from day to day on excessive levels of caffeine -- notwithstanding.

A dervish in Milwaukee

And Allah said: I am with the ones
whose hearts are torn.
--Hadith Qudsi

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ayad Akhtar's novel, American Dervish, begins with a prologue: Hayat, a Pakistani-American college student, is eating his first pork at a basketball game and exulting over his new freedom from the claims of religious faith. The novel then flashes back to Hayat's boyhood, his memories as a 12-year-old, living with his immigrant, but well-off, family in suburban Milwaukee.

I began reading with the expectation that Akhtar was about to give us a Muslim counterpart to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And, indeed, like Joyce's autobiographical novel, American Dervish is a story of an adolescent boy who, after a period of being deeply devout, becomes disillusioned with his faith. Also, like Joyce, Akhtar reveals the beauty and wisdom of that faith, as perceived by the youth, as well as how religious belief can be used to narrow rather than open the mind of a sensitive and intelligent child.

But where Portrait of the Artist is almost solipsistic in the narrator's focus upon himself, American Dervish's primary focus returns repeatedly to an older woman: Mina, the best friend of Hayat's mother, whom the boy calls his aunt.

Hayat's family does not fit easily into the local Pakistani community. His father is a physician, an unbeliever, and an irritable but loving father. His mother has little interest in religion as such, but clings to the traditions of Islam out of homesickness for the Pakistani Punjab. Hayat himself is a quiet boy, but initially seems totally American -- Midwestern and suburban in his life and interests.

But then, when he is 12, Aunt Mina, a strikingly beautiful woman escaping an abusive arranged marriage, arrives from Pakistan to live with Hayat's family. Mina reveals to Hayat the beauties of Islam, teaches him to pray, teaches him to memorize the Quran. Without understanding his own feelings, Hayat falls in love. Romantic love for an "aunt" clearly being impossible, he instead throws himself into her love of Islam. He abandons former pasttimes, spending all his free time memorizing verses.

"Almighty God," Muhammad said, "let me see you."
And all at once, he saw nothing but the Lord. He looked to the right and saw nothing but the Lord. He looked to the left and saw nothing but the Lord, and to the front, and the back, and above...and everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but the Lord. What the Lord looked like Muhammad would never say, other than that His beauty was so great he would have preferred to stand there gazing at Him forever.

But Mina is unlike other members of the local Pakistani community, Muslims whom Hayat's father contemptuously describes as "sheep." She is intelligent, cosmopolitan, and delights in the freedom of American society. She contantly reminds Hayat that forms of worship aren't important to God, what's important are the intentions of his heart. Memorization of the Quran -- which he's told would guarantee his parents' admission to Heaven -- is worthless if he doesn't understand what he is memorizing. Mina is greatly influenced by the Sufi dervishes, mystics whose orthodoxy conservative Muslims have always considered suspect, holy men who seek to surrender everything that might separate them from God's love.

What the dervish found was true humility. He realized that he was no better, no worse than the ground itself, the ground that takes the discarded orange peels of the world. In fact, he realized he was the same as that ground, the same as those peels, as those men, as everything else. He was the same as everything created by Allah's hand. ... He and Allah, and everything Allah created, it was all One.

Much of the novel's plot describes how Hayat, in his frantic possessive love for Mina, sabotages her engagement with Nathan, a Jewish doctor and his father's partner, forcing her unexpectedly into a marriage with a more "suitable" local Pakistani -- a man so insecure that he spends his life locking her away from all other people and physically abusing her.

Mina dies of cancer, after years of abuse, a woman crushed in both mind and body by events she could not control -- and events for which Hayat feels intense guilt. Shortly before Mina's death, Hayat visits her in the hospital -- where he finds her delighting in the Scott Fitzgerald quotation she'd found in his published letters -- and confesses how he ruined her life. She told him it was God's will:

Faith has never been about an afterlife for me, Hayat. It's about finding God now. In the everyday. Here. With you. Whether I'm living in a prison or in a castle. Sick or healthy. It's all the same. That's what the Sufis teach. ... Every single life, no matter how big or small, how happy or how sad, it can be a path to Him.

Hayat can't agree, can't understand the hold Sufi thought has always had on her. She replies that her pain is how God speaks through her.

"[E]verything, everything, is an expression of Allah's will. It is all His glory. Even the pain ..." She paused. "That is the real truth about life."

In an Epilogue, Hayat, years later and now a college graduate working in Boston as an intern for the Atlantic, runs into Nathan in Harvard Square. The doctor had stayed in touch by mail with Mina, clandestinely, and knew her story. He brushes off Hayat's attempts at apology, kindly, and essentially gives him the forgiveness that he needs.

Hayat walks away from that encounter, strolling along the Charles river, feeling alive and filled with an odd gratitude. He remembers, for the first time in ten years, verses from the Quran he had memorized back when he was a devout boy of 12:

Truly with hardship comes ease.
With hardship comes ease!
And so when you are finished, do not rest,
But return to your Lord with love...

Struggles in Ireland

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.
--W. B. Yeats

Today, Seattle is immobilized by one of our rare great snowfalls. But last night, the sidewalks were still clear enough for me to walk 1½ miles to the UW campus to attend the first of a three part lecture series entitled "Revenge and Reconciliation in Modern Ireland." The cold and snow outside the hall served as an appropriate metaphor for the hunger and bleakness of so much of Irish history.

The lecturer, Prof. George K. Behlmer of the University history department, discussed in a fast-paced two hours the period from the Rebellion of 1789 up to the end of the nineteenth century. He argued that nothing inherent in the Irish character predisposes them to violence, and that the Irish have suffered from a poor image -- both as harbored within themselves and as revealed to the world at large -- an image of self-loathing, tendency to violence, and adherence to an improbable national mythology, an image that is, to a large degree, one of its own creation. Ireland's greatest writers, such as Yeats and Joyce, have, in their writings, certainly contributed to this image.

Dr. Behlmer discussed specifically the short lives and careers of three Irish revolutionaries -- all, interestingly, themselves Protestant -- Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), Thomas Davis (1814-45), and Charles Parnell (1846-91), and how each had attempted to develop a sense of Irish identity apart from Britain, and to secure independence or -- at least in Parnell's case -- home rule for Ireland.

The speaker also discussed Ireland's greatest socio-economic crisis of the nineteenth century, the so-called Potato Famine of 1845-50. Ireland, already overpopulated relative to its resources, lost 5/8 of its population to starvation, disease, and emigration. But Behlmer -- though challenged by audience members following the lecture -- disagreed with Irish contentions that Britain's response to the famine -- a natural disaster resulting directly from rapid spread of a potato plant blight -- constituted "genocide."

Britain's prime minister in 1845, Sir Robert Peel, made attempts to alleviate starvation in Ireland, which included forcing through Parliament the bitterly resisted repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws. Despite Peel's efforts (which contributed to the fall of his government), Behlmer suggested that the overall climate of the times was opposed to any intervention in the economic realm that might have alleviated Irish suffering more directly -- an early display of "libertarian" philosophy, I suppose. Beginning in 1846, under the Whig ministry that followed the fall of the Peel government, the Irish were left to the mercies of the laws of supply and demand.

If genocide denotes the deliberate killing of a national group, then the British were not guilty of genocide; the sentiment in Parliament at the time was simply to allow the natural laws of economics to work themselves out. Which reminds us of the "modernization" of the ten commandments by Arthur Hugh Clough:

Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive ...

Professor Behlmer's first lecture brought to life the brutal hardships and suffering -- the results of both natural causes and British rule -- from which Ireland suffered in the nineteenth century. Whether these hardships affected the way that Irish children were reared -- making the Irish inclined to violence from early childhood, bearing within themselves Yeats's "fanatic heart" -- remains, for me at least, a question for further exploration in the succeeding two lectures.

Triumph for Robert Bruce?

You can't hike through Scotland, I discovered last summer, without learning to love the Scots. But I do have to admit that, for the casual two-week hiker like myself, it's difficult to distinguish the Scots from the English. Aside from the fact that the Scots speak English that's easier to understand than that spoken by the English themselves. (The Gaelic? Um, let's not talk about that.)

All the more reason to be mildly suprised that the Scottish independence movement seems to be moving ahead full steam. A referendum on independence will be held in 2014, although there's a bit of a tussle as to whether the referendum will be drafted and scheduled by the British government in London, or by the Scottish "devolved" government in Edinburgh.

Why independence? Various economic and cultural rationales are put forth, but the real reason seems to be that the Scots have never got over the sense of being oppressed by the English, both before and after the two kingdoms were united in 1707. (James VI of Scotland had ruled that country for 36 years before also becoming James I of England in 1606, but the two nations weren't formally united for another century.¹) Little incidents like the Massacre of Glencoe, discussed with such relish in this blog last summer, seem to have left a bad taste in a sizable number of contemporary Scottish mouths.

"I'd have a brick wall across the border," the Associated Press reported a Scots woman as exclaiming. At least it's a shorter border than that running from Tijuana to the Rio Grande.

Europe's a funny place. Wonderful, but funny. The trend since World War II has been clearly centripetal -- from the European Coal and Steel Community of the 1940's, to the six-nation European Economic Community in 1958, to the ever-growing and ever more centralized European Community of today -- reinforced by the Schengen agreement, eliminating passport controls between signatory nations, and the Euro zone, adopting the euro as a common currency.

The independence and borders of individual nations in Europe seem increasingly irrelevant, at least to the outsider. But national sensitivities obviously still set emotional chords vibrating within various European countries. Scotland seeks independence from England. The Flemish and Walloons hardly speak to each other, leaving the future of Belgium in doubt. The Basques want to break away from Spain, and the Catalans are, at minimum, a bit touchy. North and south Italy are virtually two different states already. Greece won't even allow the Macedonians to call themselves Macedonians. And Kosovo? Let's not go there.

As the government in Brussels becomes ever more powerful -- which it will, despite current economic problems -- I suppose it's become safer for the constitutent countries to indulge themselves by working out some of their old disputes under the EC umbrella. If it were still every European nation for itself, with a credible external threat from, say, Russia, or from a newly aggressive Germany, Scotland might not be quite so eager to shed its partnership in the United Kingdom.

Separatism in Europe reinspires my own dreams for that long mooted breakaway nation of Cascadia -- a federal union of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. It will never happen, of course. The world would not tolerate a single country's existing with such a monopoly of rational, liberal thought and politics; extraordinary natural beauty; economic self-suffiency; superlative education and literacy; and widespread human warmth and friendliness among its citizens. Such a star -- a supernova, really -- would so dazzle the eye as to render all other stars in the firmament next to invisible.

The world couldn't handle it. Meanwhile, however, best wishes to our friends in Scotland and England. We love both your countries, jointly and severally, and hope everything works out amicably between you.
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¹Under the independence proposal being discussed, Scotland would return to its status pre-1707, but post-1606. Elizabeth II would remain queen and head of state, as she is also for Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Crippling the leader

South Carolina has picked the Republican nominee in every primary since the Reagan era began in 1980. It will do so again this year. So we were told by the chairman of the UW Communications (journalism) Department on Wednesday night, in the first of a series of five lectures analyzing the 2012 election campaign.

If so, Mitt Romney's looking good. As of now, at least, he seems to be the obvious front-runner in South Carolina. He also appears to be the best hope for the Republicans in the general election -- a conservative who doesn't make the hair of 70 percent of the voters stand on end, one who can perhaps beguile many moderates and independents into casting their votes for him.

The wild card in South Carolina, however, is a specter from past electoral wars - Newt Gingrich. With millions of dollars in a Super PAC fund, Newt has launched a $3.5 million advertising campaign designed specifically to destroy Romney's viability as a candidate.

By all accounts, the television advertising is devastatingly negative. As Krystal Ball [sic] writes on The Atlantic's website:

Newt hopes to scream at the general election voter that Mitt is such an unbelievably heartless, cold, greedy person that the party that calls ketchup a vegetable and wants to throw people off unemployment during the worst recession since the Great Depression finds him heartless.

Ball labels this advertising barrage as "The Newtron Bomb." She suggests that only Newt Gingrich could get away with such vilification -- any Democrat who made the same arguments would be pilloried as vicious, unfair, and mean-spirited.

Newt's advertising is designed to persuade South Carolina voters that Mitt would be unelectable if nominated; in the process, he may in fact be making him exactly that. Why would Newt -- whose hopes for the nomination must seem remote, even to himself -- do everything possible to cripple the party's front runner? Ball has an answer to that question as well -- Newt's motive is not the good of the country or the success of the Republican party. His motive is, simply, personal revenge.

Early on, Gingrich asked Romney to agree to a campaign free of negative ads. Romney declined. Gingrich got burned by Romney's negative advertising. Gingrich's hostility is now implacable.

A Gingrich TV commercial made available today ties Romney to other Massachusetts public figures -- ones presumably not popular in the Palmetto State. Most devastating of all, the commercial shows clips of both former Democratic candidate John Kerry and Mitt Romney speaking in French. The voice over: "And just like John Kerry -- he speaks French, too." How elitest can a candidate get? How appalling is fluency in French by a presidential candidate in this year of Republican populism?

As a Democratic partisan, I have to admit to a certain pleasure in watching the opposition tear itself apart for as long as possible, and especially in watching Republican attempts to destroy their most potentially successful nominee. On the other hand, it's frightening to watch one of our two major parties systematically eliminate every presidential candidate with any sense of moderation, sophistication, and complexity of thought. After all, the Republicans might always win, even with a pathetic candidate, if the economy stays bad. The normal tendency of the American voter is to blame discontent with the nation's direction on whichever party happens to occupy the White House.

Thus Nixon won in 1968, in voter reaction to the "hippie movement" and anti-war demonstrations. And we all know how that turned out.

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," as Newt Gingrich would never say. Let's hope history does not repeat itself -- not this time.

Indiana boy

Back in 1995, while browsing through magazines at Barnes & Noble, my eye was caught by a magazine I'd never seen before called Strings. On the cover was what appeared to be a teenaged violinist. Not only the cover article (actually, a lengthy, in-depth interview), but the entire magazine looked interesting, and so I bought a copy. Which I still own.

The violinist was not a teenager, however. He was a young man of 27 by the name of Joshua Bell. Today, Bell is perhaps the best known violinist in the United States, if not the world. Last night, I heard him in concert for the second time in my life, this time playing the Bruch Violin Concerto with the Seattle Symphony.

The Strings article noted:

The identifying traits of Bell's playing are a honeyed yet not overly viscous tone, uncompromising beauty of sound without a favoring of tone quality over musical rhetoric, a keen attention to local detail within a firm sense of overall musical architecture ...

I'm no music critic, obviously, but insofar as I can judge, these remain his characterists today, and were well displayed in his performance of the lush, hyper-Romantic Bruch concerto.

In his Strings interview, Bell sounded American in a way that no performer born in Europe could ever sound. He grew up a Hoosier, the son of an Indiana University professor. He was a fan of tennis and basketball. He rambled on for a paragraph, extolling the joys of golf, which he claimed was "really more than a sport -- it's almost Zenlike, the focus in every shot." And he proudly admitted to ranking fourth in the nation in a computer pinball simulation called Crystal Caliburn. He said he was eager to beat the No. 1 score "which is by some guy from Eugene, Oregon."

Last night, Bell walked onto the stage, dressed informally in black, a mop of dark hair falling down his forehead, and greeted the audience with a seemingly shy smirk. He was called back by thunderous applause for approximately seven bows before finally returning with his violin to play a solo encore. I didn't catch the name of the encore selection, but it was a short piece, well post-Romantic, that revealed the many sounds that Bell can generate from a violin -- and the speedy tempo at which he is capable of bowing.

Joshua Bell is now 44. He's the father of a four-year-old son, but still looks like a kid from Indiana himself. His name is known to anyone with the slightest interest in symphonic music.¹ Since 1995, I've collected most of the CD's featuring his playing, including all of the major violin concertos. Despite obvious sophistication, he still looks like a guy who, when he gets the time, shoots a few hoops and challenges a few unsuspecting victims to on-line pinball. And probably lets out a whoop when he wins.

One post a year about a concert is probably all most readers can tolerate. My apologies for two of them in one week, but last night's concert was an exceptional event.
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¹But in a famous experiment in 2007, he spent 45 minutes playing six Bach pieces unannounced in the Washington, D.C., subway. Video cameras caught 1,097 riders walking past him. Seven stopped to listen, and only one recognized him. He collected a total of $32.17 from 27 passers-by. Two days earlier, concert-goers had spent an average of $100 each to hear him play in a sold-out Boston concert.

Peeping early from its bower

Thy smiles I note, sweet early Flower,
That peeping from thy rustic bower
The festive news to earth dost bring,
A fragrant messenger of Spring.
--Coleridge, "To a Primrose"

"Sweet early flower," indeed. The primrose each year is one of the earliest of blooms. Its English name itself means "first rose." (Its Latin name, less poetically, is Primula vulgaris.)

A few primroses dwell in my front yard, resident there since time immemorial. They make their usual appearance in early to mid February, providing me the first reassurance that winter lasts not forever -- that the sun already hasteneth his way northwards. That Spring is on her way.

Today is only January 9, and yet my young primroses already are in bloom. Three flowers fully open: deep purple with yellow centers. Three more peeping forth as purple buds, flowers inchoate. Mine are Primula vulgaris sibthorpii (native to the Balkans and southwest Asia), distinguished by their purple color from the yellow and, well, more vulgar Primula vulgaris vulgaris (native to western and southern Europe). Like Iowa and New Hampshire Republicans, in 2012 my primroses seem to have tripped all over themselves, in their impatient eagerness to rush the season.

Why so early? Mildness of weather? We haven't had many sub-freezing temperatures this year, but the weather's been otherwise -- as usual -- cold and wet. Have my primroses been prematurely aroused by the strength of the political winds? Or are my plants eager to stage one final show for my benefit, saddened with foreknowledge that this coming December brings to an end the Mayan world cycle?

Who knows what's in their pretty little heads? But their arrival is welcome. And if their arrival should augur an early end to winter, I'm all for it. I'm all for it, even should their appearance -- like melting glaciers and overheated polar bears -- be but additional evidence of global warming, that bête noir of my political adversaries.

The primrose was Prime Minister Disraeli's favorite flower. It is the county flower of Devon. It is edible. Its leaves can be used to make tea, and its flowers to make primrose wine. It's a loveable flower, and I do love it. I greet with warmth its early appearance.

Welcome again for yet another year, O Primula vulgaris . Bring us peace in our time, an early spring, and a Happy New Year.

Music from Trinity

I'd never heard of John Adams. No, not the president from Quincy, Massachusetts. I'm talking about the composer from Worcester, Massachusetts.

At least, I didn't think I'd ever heard of him until last night, but now I see that he's famous for his 1987 opera Nixon in China, which I guess I have heard of at one time or another. But certainly never seen.

Anyway, last night the Seattle Symphony concluded the evening's program with the Doctor Atomic Symphony, orchestral music adapted from John Adams's 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic. The program notes admonish me that Adams is "widely recognized as the pre-eminent American composer of his generation." So, there you are, my own ignorance notwithstanding.

Despite the extreme conservatism of my musical tastes, I found the symphony -- maybe more a tone poem than a symphony: a single movement, 23 minutes in length -- to be dramatic and gripping and worth my attention. The score was loud and dissonant and heavy on the percussion, as one would expect from a modern work, but also rich in melody in the woodwinds and brass. The conductor -- a visiting conductor from the St. Louis Symphony -- gave us a short and witty pre-performance synopsis of the opera's plot, and explained how the symphony tracks that plot and introduces the major musical themes of the opera.

The opera takes place in 1945 -- the first act occuring shortly before the testing of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, N.M., and the second act immediately before detonation of the Hiroshima bomb. The focus is on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father" of the atomic bomb, whose ambivalence about what he was creating -- and later, what he had created -- eventually led to the government's yanking of his security clearance.

Oppenheimer was a poet as well as a theoretical physicist. It was he who famously recalled his feelings while observing the initial bomb test in New Mexico with a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He gave the code name of "Trinity" to the Alamogordo test site, after his favorite sonnet by John Donne: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God."

Oppenheimer, the "Dr. Atomic" of the opera's title, has always fascinated and impressed me. At one time, back when I had personal heroes, I guess I considered him as such.

The symphonic derivative of the opera that we heard last night combined breathtaking musical elements of fear, anticipation, and explosive violence, with an overall sense of poetry and awe. It was not "easy listening," compared with the Mozart piano concerto that had immediately preceded it, but it was moving and thought-provoking.

If the opportunity ever presents itself, I might actually persuade myself to attend John Adams's opera itself -- just out of curiosity and, perhaps, as my own personal tribute to the life of Dr. Oppenheimer.

Didion at 75

The first time I read an essay by Joan Didion, one published in a weekly magazine, I was dazzled. In a few paragraphs, she said everything I had been feeling about generational differences (in her case, between "silent" and "hippie" generations) in how people dealt with life and with politics. She threw in thoughts about growing older, and about whether it was possible, or even worthwhile, for groups of citizens to effect societal change through angry demonstrations.

I later read more of her writing, and was especially impressed by her two early books of essays, books about which it has been written:

Her books of essays -- Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album -- represent, to me at least, some of the best and most evocative writing of its kind of the past half century.

--Me, actually, in my 2009 posting "Slouching towards darkness".

(In that 2009 post, I reviewed a dramatization of Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking.)

Imagine my discomfort today, therefore, when I read Caitlin Flanagan's essay, "The Autumn of Joan Didion," in the February issue of The Atlantic. Flanagan's essay, which purports to review Didion's latest book, Blue Nights, proclaims that Didion is a writer for girls, especially young girls "on the cusp of womanhood." Flanagan herself recalls -- and much of the review is devoted to Flanagan's memories of her own childhood at Berkeley, where her father, as an English professor, gave Flanagan the chance to meet the young Didion -- how her father exclaimed one night, "There's something weird going on with Joan Didion and women."

So ... what? So, I've been in love with chick lit all these years? But I don't watch vampire movies. While Jane Austen's ok, I don't moon over it. I don't grow faint reading of tender virgins finding themselves clasped in the strong arms of a manly embrace. Why Didion?

Flanagan points out that no real gal can resist Didion's allusions to "the smell of jasmine," or the "packing list" Didion allegedly kept by her suitcase. Huh? Didion, Flanagan contends, knows how to describe her own wardrobe and that of others in detail. She knows the differences in styles of flatware. She knows about good and bad floor plans for houses. She [gasp!] writes about hanging "yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better."

Us guys, on the other hand, we don't care about all that stuff. We want to read about getting high with Hunter Thompson, while speeding on a highway somewhere out of Barstow. Says Flanagan.

Flanagan -- and maybe millions of women, as she suggests -- apparently read Didion differently from the way I do. I'm sure the yellow silk, the flatware, the crepe-de-chine wraps, and [sigh] the jasmine are all there in Didion's writing. I'm willing to admit that her attention to such feminine details may be an attractive feature to many. But to me, the essence of Didion's appeal -- in her essays, which are the concern of both Flanagan and myself -- has been her ability to see the world from a different angle: to see the normal, routine world with which we are all familiar through a broken or distorting mirror, revealing a scary image of things flying out of control.

The title to her first book of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, calls to mind words from Yeats's poem that seem to inform all of her essays.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, ...

Didion's essays repeatedly show worlds spinning apart -- her personal grip on her own life, and our civilization's grip on civilization.

As an example of Didion's acute sensitivity to female concerns(according to Flanagan) -- Didion understood that the traditional governor's mansion in Sacramento was superior to Ronald Reagan's new mansion "because it had big, airy bedrooms" in which one could spend time reading, or writing, or "closing the door and crying until dinner." No wonder girls loved Didion! But that 1977 essay was only superficially about the livability of the Reagan mansion. She saw the Reagans and their nouveau mansion as representing an unfortunate, and already passé, 1950s-ish interlude between two eras -- the old rural Californa of orange groves and quiet good taste and a coming post-70's California of austerity and simplicity, represented by the then governor, Jerry Brown. Brown was famous for his monastic lifestyle, for sleeping on a futon on the floor of his apartment, for refusing to live in the Reagans' overbuilt governor's mansion.

One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center. It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.

--Didion, The White Album.

Ultimately, after talking about her own childhood and Didion's appeal to the female gender, Flanagan's review gets around to its nominal subject, Blue Nights. She regrets that it is not a good book. The language is clichéd, Didion's thoughts are no longer original, her insight is lacking. In summary, Didion's problem is that, at 75, "she got old."

Blue Nights deals with Didion's parallel concerns: the death of her daughter, and her own aging and eventual death. As would any grieving mother, she lingers repeatedly over memories of her daughter throughout the young woman's short life: happy times, sad times, puzzling times, disheartening times. To Flanagan, it's clear that Didion just can't read between the lines. Didion can't see that many of her daughter's problems resulted from the way her parents reared her, from their overriding concerns with their own careers, from their selfish narcissism.

My freshman English teacher wrote a warning on one of my early essays: Be cautious in believing that you understand an author's writing better than he does himself. To me, reading Blue Nights before I read Flanagan's review, it was clear that Didion was all too aware of how her own "weaknesses" as a parent affected her daughter. These weaknesses, many of which were unavoidable considering the careers pursued by Didion and her husband, are set forth clearly in the book, and her "where did I go wrong" questions are rhetorical. Didion did not do a clinical self-analysis, it's true; she left it to the reader to connect the dots. But Joan Didion, whatever her age, is never clueless.

Rearing a child, watching the child grow into independence, growing older oneself, losing one's loved ones, and facing one's own eventual death are all part of the human predicament. They are neither male nor female concerns alone. Joan Didion has been thinking and writing of these problems, among many others, throughout her writing career. Her writing may have had a special appeal for young girls, but she's never been a "women's writer." She may now be aging, but she has not lost her sharpness of thought, her turn of phrase, or her ability to see the "strange" in what others find commonplace.

Blue Nights is worth reading.

Dealing with abstractions

Last night was a bad night in the Rainier96 household. It started out nicely enough, watching a bowl game that was being played well by both sides. It ended, however, in tears. And in screams, thrown objects, and bewildered cats scrambling for cover.

My team lost, of course. Lost by a missed field goal, a seemingly easy kick by a seemingly competent (albeit freshman) kicker, with two seconds left on the clock.

A good night's sleep, followed by a vigorous piano lesson this morning, restored my will to live. But my volcanically emotional reaction interests me. Why did I care so much? I don't know anyone currently in school at Stanford, my alma mater. And I certainly don't know anyone at Oklahoma State.

And yet, for an hour or so, I felt devastated, as though my own personal worth had been cheapened, my character attacked, my entire way of life insulted. I found myself hating the entire state of Oklahoma and all its inhabitants -- even though a quick glance at the faces of the school's players and student body made it obvious that they were every bit as wholesome, exuberant, playful, and good-natured as their opposites from my own school -- or rather as their opposites from my school had been, up until two seconds before the end of regulation play.

Competitive sports everywhere is based on the fans' willingness and ability to identify with an entity -- a school, a club, a professional team. Thus, I "love" the Seahawks; I "hate" U.S.C. But "Seahawks" and "Trojans" are just abstract entities. The players on those teams and their coaches, change constantly. The U.S.C. of today is composed of an entirely different cast of characters from that of ten years ago. I'm loving or hating a fictitious entity that is incapable of loving or hating me in return.

Sports fans are merely a less virulent version of a nation's "true patriots." When an American says (as they often do) that he despises Iran (or France), it's difficult logically to understand what he means. He may, of course, simply mean that he strongly disagrees with the policies pursued by that nation's government. But when the words "hate" or "despise" are used, the user generally has passed beyond logic. Despite not knowing a single person living in Iran (or France), he sincerely feels hatred and contempt for an entire nation, a nation that has no idea that he even exists. Iranians are "evil and barbaric fanatics." French are "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." These patriots' own America, on the other hand, is "a shining city on a hill," a "beacon of freedom," and an "exception" amongst nations.

My short-lived emotions following the bowl game remind me of a dialogue between two infantrymen that I read in a novel a long time ago. I suspect the book was Remarque's All's Quiet on the Western Front, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. One soldier asks another (all quotes are paraphrases from my memory): "Why are we fighting, anyway?" The other replies that they are fighting because another country had insulted theirs. The first asks in reply, quite sensibly, how one country can possibly "insult" another. "How can we be killing and getting killed for such an "insult"?" he asks. "Do you feel insulted? I certainly don't feel insulted."

Our minds seems hardwired to use such abstractions when we think. But as I watched the faces last night of the winning Oklahoma State players and students, it was obvious that they were no different from players and students at my own school. I obviously didn't hate them, anymore than I actually felt that my own school's victory or defeat would be a personal victory or defeat for myself. It was just a game, as our parents used to remind us.

When I visited Iran last spring, I looked at the faces of the Iranian people, the Iranian children. In all but superficial respects they seemed pretty much like Americans. However irresponsible their government's conduct might have seemed to me, I didn't "hate" the Iranian people, or wish them harm. And I feel no desire now to "punish" them by backing sanctions that would cause more harm to them in their daily lives than could be justified by any effect the sanctions might have in persuading the Iranian government to modify its policies. Nor, more profoundly, can I support an actual attack on them by our government's military forces. I certainly won't support "bombing them back to the stone age."

Foreign affairs is not "just a game." Affairs between nations affect real people, people who rarely have much control over those affairs. I take the conduct of foreign policy seriously. But I won't "hate" people in other countries, laugh at their customs or religious beliefs, disrespect their natural love for their own country, or remain indifferent to the effects of my own government's conduct upon their lives.

I'd recovered from my temporary insanity by this morning, no harm having been done to anyone, including my cats. Let's hope our government can handle in a rational manner the challenges posed in dealing with Iran, realizing fully and at all times that however much Americans oppose certain policies by the Iranian government, we recognize our brotherhood and common humanity with the people of Iran.

As for Stanford's football team -- well, there's always next year