Breakfast with Pandora

More on Boys Adrift and American myth

Tonight I watched "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader," the new game show hosted by Jeff Foxworthy, and thought about Boys Adrift.

Now this show is about humiliation, in a fun way, if possible, but humiliation nonetheless. Contestants are given ostensibly easy questions-- those typically given to elementary school students-- and if they mess up they are supposed to say, "I am not smarter than a fifth grader." Along the way, they can cheat off of the papers of the real fifth graders who are regulars on the show.

The difficulty in the questions is subtle. If you got them as multiple choice, as in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," they would not pose much of a challenge. But often the contestant must come up with the answer on his or her own. Do you trust yourself, all pumped up with adrenaline and dazzled by lights and sound, to remember that the sun rises in the east? Or to be able to multiply 7 x 5 in your head?

Tonight the contestant was a 21-year old college student and member of a fraternity. Fraternities, of course, have always been famous for being "meatheads," a term that Foxworthy got the contestant to say about his own group. So it would be fun to see the meathead fail.

But that wasn't enough for the entertainment-satured American audience. The show also brought in five extra possible cheat resources-- the contestant's frat brothers. Now the stage was set for plenty of humiliation, and the guys were fine with that.

It started with one of the frat boys saying that the second line of the song "America" ("My country 'tis of thee") was "The beautiful oh gracias."

I laughed long and loud, all the while understanding that this instance of men behaving badly, being seen as lazy, stupid, beer-drinking louts was just another log on the pile for the torching of American manhood.

How often do boys have to see men confirmed as foolish before they themselves believe that this is their destiny, too?

Near the beginning of the show they asked the contestant what he would want to do with the money he had already won-- $25,000 for answering a few simple questions. He said he wanted to to buy a car and go to Vegas. Foxworthy also prodded him into admitting he would throw a kegger for the brothers.

Then they showed a video of the contestant as a fifth grader. The contestant said, in effect, that if he had a lot of money he would give it to his parents, "so they wouldn't have to work."

What happened to that generous, respectful boy?

Well, lest we become too morose, I do want to say that young men have been ne'er-do-wells for some time now, as early as the comedies of ancient Greece. And Thomas Wolfe, who wrote in the 1930's, had a great throw-away riff in his You Can't Go Home Again:

When one observes a youth on a city street and sees the calloused scar that has become his life, and remembers the same youth as he was ten years before when he was a child of eight, one knows what has happened though the cause be hidden. One knows that there came a time when life stopped growing for that youth and the scar began, and one feels that if he could only find the reason and the cure, he would know what revolutions are.

So we have been worried about boys becoming men for some time now.

I just wonder,  has American myth ever milked the, shall we say, Homer Simpson effect as much as it is doing now? And what will be the effect?

Americans, Phaeacians

Back from Thanksgiving in California and into the daily grind, I had a conversation today with a co-worker who read my review of Boys Adrift in the local paper.

He said that he had grown up on a farm and learned a number of the basic skills of adult responsibility by being part of that family concern. He was surprised by the lack of those skills among some young folk he knew.

There's nothing like adversity or pressure of some kind to make a human being more tensile. As long as the pressure doesn't crush. But it seems as if today the adversity is not the kind produced by honest work. Everything is much more jangly and off-putting than it used to be.

Then I was reminded of something my friend Mary (who has a brand-new blog called Cactus Juice) told me recently in an email:

I'm sure you've seen that there is a lot of hand wringing that my generation is more likely to treat people as things.  Of course, there is stuff like match<.com>, that encourages a mindset of "clicking through" people that expands into real-world interactions.  But also with the texting and the Blackberries and the hyperconnectivity, no one will commit to anything because they could get a better offer at the last second. 

In the middle class we have gotten a lot of choice. Choice seems to be a big deal nowadays. Especially in marketing. And we can choose to be responsible or not. That's what I mean about jangly. Sometimes it's stressful to have the whole world open to you.

Homer (you did know I would get to the ancient world eventually) had a little something to say about that. The ancient Greeks tended not to have a lot of choice, leisure, and security, as we have today in the middle class in America. But there was one group of people that did have that, and that was the Phaeacians.

In a previous post I called the Phaeacians a fantasy kingdom. They are in the Odyssey, and they live on an island far away from other human habitation. As a result they have no enemies, except for the Cyclopes, who do not have ships. Because they have no human enemies, they are not so much warriors as they are lovers: of hot baths and music and athletics.

We've become like the Phaeacians, despite what our president says about the threats to our nation from outside our borders. We don't feel threatened. We haven't had to sacrifice for this war. We are busy making choices for ourselves. And we have never loved hot baths, music, or athletics more.

Are we ripe for a fall? The Phaeacians helped Odysseus get back home, because they enjoyed his story and were happy to have a celebrity in their midst. But Poseidon was still angry at Odysseus, and when he got off the boat of the Phaeacians, Poseidon turned it and its occupants into stone.

And that's what passes for wisdom from me after the daily grind.

Thanks on the day, 2007

This morning I woke up and thought it was Sunday. Finding that it was only Thursday, I gave thanks.

There are times when I want time to go faster, such as near the end of the school year when everyone is burned to a crisp from way too much teaching and learning.

Or when I'm going to see a friend I have missed.

But in general now I give thanks for time that goes slowly. Not just because I'm older than I used to be, and I see my life as a finitude of unknown but definite length. Also because I am learning to live and enjoy my life now, as I was not able before. Health helps, of course. Family helps. But wisdom is good, too.

I am reading You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe, sort of a random paperback pickup in the last week. No spoilers, because I haven't read the whole thing. But it is a pleasure, because it is set in an era-- the late 1920's and early 1930's-- that is far enough away from the present to seem exotic, but close enough that there are markers of familiarity.

One of those markers is the train ride sequence near the beginning of the novel. I don't know what it is about writers and trains. There is this alchemy that occurs when we get near a locomotive. The hero, George Webber, has to go back for his foster mother's funeral to his native Libya Hill (Asheville, NC, though his Asheville is a very different place from that to which I am used!) from New York, where his first novel has just been accepted for publication. He gets on the train at 1:35 PM and gets off in Libya Hill at 11:20 AM the next morning.

11 hours of time, just spent waiting-- sleeping, some of it, if one can. Yes, we drive that far by car very often. But that is taken up by a sense of activity. Driving, getting off the highway to get food or go to the bathroom, making sure of directions.

11 hours in a plane now takes us to Rome, Italy. 11 hours is an eternity nowadays if you are in a hurry to get somewhere. George Webber, on this long trip, had neither cell phone nor laptop nor Blackberry to keep him company. It was a wholesome time. And, if you read the book, a time of unexpected interest and excitement caused by people interacting with each other.

(Of course I will always be interested in a good katabasis, regardless of the means of transport).

(Also, guilty as charged, I spend a lot of time on the computer, too, though not on trips. I haven't figured out this wireless Internet thing yet, and a laptop seems heavy to me to lug around.)

I hope to give thanks, some time in my lifetime, that, for the sake and health of this frenzied, global-economized earth, something shocking happens that causes us to step back from the Rejection of Downtime, and allows us to do the kind of meditation that trains once used to induce in at least some of us.

Slow down, world. Time is precious.

Healing Knowledge Chapter 10 posted

Go here to see the first update in many months of my online first draft, Healing Knowledge.

And tell me how you like it.

Are you smarter than a graduate student?

On our walk tonight we saw nine point one dogs (cats count for point one) and discussed the show, Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, which is even more fun now that daughter is in the sixth grade.

I thought it would be a grand thing if someone produced a show called Are You Smarter Than A Graduate Student? All the questions would be answerable only by the one dissertation advisor who's interested in the topic and his or her advisee who had to choose something-- anything-- to write about.

Here is the 5th Year Ancient Greek Religion question:

What is the term for the two wooden posts surmounted by another post, forming a door, and symbolizing the duality of the Spartan Dioscuri?

If you know the answer, you are, indeed, smarter than a Graduate Student.

Answer in a comment tomorrow.

Indo-Europeans, Part II

In a previous post I argued that the study of so-called Indo-European mythology holds little interest for me, because of the way it has been used in the past to justify racial superiority.

After I wrote that post I was reminded that I had a concrete example of how Indo-European ideology was used to brainwash students.

A General History for Colleges and High Schools was written by P.V.N. Myers, A.M, Professor of History and Political Economy in the University of Cincinnati. It was published by Ginn and Company in 1898.

On page 2 of the 1898 edition we find this statement:

Distinctions in form, color, and physiognomy divide the human species into three chief types, or races, known as the Black (Ethiopian, or Negro), the Yellow (Turanian, or Mongolian), and the White (Caucasian)... Of all the races, the White, or Caucasian, exhibits by far the most perfect type, physically, intellectually, and morally.

Myers goes on to explain that

Africa is the home of the people of the Black Race, but we find them on all the other continents, whither they have been carried as slaves by the stronger races; for since time immemorial they have been "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for their more favored brethren.

Similarly, concerning the Yellow or Turanian race:

Although some of the Turanian peoples, as for instance the Chinese, have made considerable advance in civilization, still as a rule the peoples of this race have made but little progress in the arts or in general culture. Even their languages have remained undeveloped. They seem immature, or stunted in their growth.

Of course, for the Latin teacher, this is the determining flaw of the Turanians:

They have no declensions or conjugations, like those of the languages of the Caucasian peoples.

On the other hand,

The White Race embraces the historic nations. This type divides into three families,-- the Hamitic, the Semitic, and the Aryan, or Indo-European (formerly called the Japhetic).

Whites, it turns out, are responsible for the pyramids of Egypt (Hamitic family), for the great monotheistic religions (Semitic family), and for the great transformation of the world then in progress:

Everywhere the other races and families have given way before the advance of the Aryan peoples, who have assumed the position of leaders and teachers among the families of mankind, and are rapidly spreading their arts and sciences and culture over the earth.

It could be argued that any excuse for justifying European colonization would have been-- and probably was-- used. But the fact is that this theory of Indo-European, not language only but essence, constituted for students a scientific basis for the justification of brutal colonial repression.

Enough said on Indo-European myth.

November: National Novel Writing Month

In the Sunday paper today, a notice that November is National Novel Writing Month, and a website that wants to inspire you to finish one.

The website, nanowrimo.org, is here. Among many other writing education resources, it includes an opportunity to sign up to write a 50,000 word novel in one month, specifically by midnight November 30.

The Nano people are not interested in reading your stuff, however. All they want is for as many people as possible to write as much as possible, on the premise that it is a healthy thing for all of us wannabes to finally and actually put something long-format down on paper.

79,000 people signed up last year, and almost 13,000 uploaded a 50,000 word text to Nano.

There are no prizes, except the feeling of accomplishment one gets from writing a book-length manuscript.

All of which reminds me that Healing Knowledge, my online first draft, has languished since last March. The other night at dinner a friend asked if I could print the whole thing out and give her a copy. Fair enough, I thought, and cut and pasted the whole thing into a Word document.

Turns out the text is almost 25,000 words already, and 67 single-spaced pages long.

I don't even have that much paper in the house.

So maybe in honor of National Novel Writing Month, I will commit to putting down another 25,000 words before November 30, and join the other ten thousand or so folks who can say they are crazy enough to tell stories.

Unfortunately, Healing Knowledge will not nearly be finished at 50,000 words.

But who's counting?

The Classical Theater of Harlem: Romeo and Juliet

The first time I saw Romeo and Juliet, it was a movie, and the thing I remember most was Juliet's breast.

I was in the eighth grade. We field-tripped up to the Elmwood Theater on College Avenue in Berkeley, where a thousand other eighth graders packed the place. It was Zefferelli's version, and it had about one second of female nudity in it (and about 5 of Romeo's rear-- yay for those who like that). But for me, it could have been an eternity.

Tonight the Classical Theater Company of Harlem did its best to reanimate the whole of Romeo and Juliet, to renew its near-unintelligible language and its pure, essential drama for an audience that was admirably filled with teenage heroes as well as the highbrows who always come to plays like this.

This was a Romeo and Juliet ripped from the headlines. The costumes, the music, the swagger, and the weapons (guns and knives, not swords) come from the Harlem of 2007. It was to the company's credit that the language did not seem more out of place than it did.

And it was a crowd-pleaser, especially in the scene where the drunken revelers attempt to find Romeo after the costume ball where he meets Juliet for the first time. Bottles of wine in hand, the actors waded into the audience and "fell out." Everyone screamed with delight.

My favorite was the Friar, the country priest who decides that bringing Romeo and Juliet together in marriage will unite their feuding families. I had forgotten how much he engineered the whole plot from the very beginning, how he had a plan for every eventuality, until circumstances conspired against him.

He was mostly comic, and so was much of the production. We are saturated so much with life-and-death nowadays, extremely realistic, and of course with the war in Iraq, real. Actors stage-fighting and shooting pop guns and wielding plastic knives seem comic by comparison to a news show with a bloody, body-parts-filled bomb scene the top story. Nervous laughter from the audience punctuated almost the entire play. This seemed strange to those of us who think of R&J as a tragedy, and who think that tragedy should make us cry rather than laugh.

Afterwards my friend Michael said that in a world where movies and TV-- video-- has taken over our mythological consciousness, theater needs to do and be something different. It needs to focus on its natural gifts. Part of that is the ability to come out into the audience and let people see that this is a story happening in real time, with real human beings.

This is part of it. But there also comes a question: at one point does a play like Romeo and Juliet become, not a classic anymore, but a curiosity? I suppose hand-wringers of all types have been asking that question for centuries. I wouldn't put it past Shakespeare to keep people hand-wringing for several more centuries.

A classic by definition is that which mirrors for its audience all the momentary, particular and personal world-views of the individual members of that audience. It is effective for everybody, and for a myriad of reasons.

In the eighth grade, I was one large eyeball, and when I saw what looked like another large eyeball, that was Romeo and Juliet being a classic.

This time I focused on the Official Christian Part, the part which wants everything to come out okay and for there to be a happy ending. Of course, the Official Christian Part is so often disappointed, because the world is not ideal. I have only recently learned that. So the Friar mirrored for me where I am now.

Maybe the nervous laughter from the crowd mirrored our unfamiliarity with this most immediate of storytelling methods. Maybe it was saying to us that we need to get back to these storytelling roots. Or maybe it was an Elizabethan-era play becoming a curiosity.

Romeo and Juliet will be at Duke again tomorrow, and then it's on to Pittsburgh February 15 and 16, and Purchase, NY, the 22nd and 23rd of that same month. It is worth going, to see if it will meet you where you are, too.

Prison Break: TV for women

First it was 3:10 to Yuma, now it's the Fox series Prison Break.

Both stories mainly concern men in stark, violent situations having to make hard choices on fundamental issues. Very traditionally masculine.

Photo: Buy this one at AllPosters.com.

And I was turned on to both by women.

No sociological analysis to be attempted here, except that maybe this Chick Flick Phenomenon that people talk about so much isn't really as widespread as people think.

Or maybe these women are just unusual.

In any case: I have come into this series in the middle, and so don't know anything about it, except that there are some handsome guys locked up in a horrific prison in Panama run by some very sweaty, ugly guys, and the handsome guys are trying to bust out. There is another handsome guy on the outside who is the father of another handsome guy who has been kidnapped by someone, whose henchwoman is a gorgeous black-haired, blue-eyed devil lady who may have human feelings somewhere around there. The father of the handsome guy who has been kidnapped wants to spring one of the handsome guys on the inside in order to hand him over to the devil woman and ransom his (the handsome father on the outside's) son.

Hmmm. Maybe it has something to do with all the handsomeness?

I like this show. I don't like the violence. It does seem to be written well, though it has many implausibilities. There are also metaphorical possibilities here, galore. Maybe for another post.

The prison is called "Sona" for some reason, and I kept thinking of a local business around here called Sona Med Spa, which is a place you go for hair removal. Probably some of the sweaty guys on Prison Break need to go there to get their backs worked on.

Indo-European myth: a myth?

M.L. West is a household name to classicists, but I would put money on his not being known by 1 in 1,000 educated laypeople.

That's one of the reasons why I abandoned specialized scholarship a long time ago. If the work of the best known names in your academic field is known by at most 10,000 people in the entire world, and even a moderately successful novel sells 20,000 copies, well, by sheer numbers there is no contest. My own writing was bound to be known by about 3 people in my field, which is fewer than read my blog regularly.

Nevertheless.

M.L. West has written a book called Indo-European Poetry and Myth, published by the august Oxford University Press, which was reviewed favorably in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, the only digital book review journal in the field of classics. The review appeared the other day and the book came out this summer, a lightning-fast turnaround time in a field where print journals take much longer to put out book reviews.

I would recommend that everyone interested in myth take a look at IEP&M on Amazon.com's "Search inside" function. At $145 a copy, you might want to take a long look before whipping out plastic and typing in your number. Thank the weak dollar for this whopper of a price, although at 80 British pounds sterling, it's no bargain however you slice it. Unfortunately, you will find that the Introduction has been blocked from search, which is what you really want to read. Still, give it a try.

What is Indo-European poetry and myth, anyway? Let's start with the Indo-European language family: a group of languages ranging from Ireland to Central Asia which all share common grammar and vocabulary roots. Words for "hundred," "father," and "milk," among many others in these languages, show similarities that could stem from their being more or less one language a very long time ago, as many as 7,000 years. Most of our most-studied modern languages, from Irish to German to Russian to Greek and Latin to Sanskrit are all linguistically related in some way.

Given unified language it is a very short leap for scholars to unified culture. From the beginning of Indo-European scholarship in the 19th century, many were sure that there was a deity named *Dieus or *Deiw in the Indo-European pantheon, based on the common vocabulary in I-E languages for the word "day." This would be the "sky" or "day" god, and Zeus would be the Greek descendant of this being.

But very little can be certainly understood about Indo-Europeans, because there is no one place or culture that can certainly be called Indo-European. You can't do archeological digs at Indo-European sites. There is no Indo-European art to look at. Most importantly, there are no written records in the supposed language. To some this is just a big wild goose chase.

To others it is a morally questionable wild goose chase. That's because Hitler seized on the idea of the Indo-Europeans to legitimate his idea of the Aryan Master Race. He followed German scholars who believed that the homeland of the Indo-Europeans was in Germany, and that therefore all the descendants of the Indo-Europeans-- which included the advanced civilizations of India, Greece, and Italy-- were originally German.

Hitler and others also used the putative superiority of the Indo-Europeans to argue for the inferiority of the Semitic and other language families. Thus, scholarship, that supposedly pure and impartial pursuit, contributed to the condemnation and genocide of the Jews before and during World War II.

Even today, charges are being made that neo-fascists are funding Indo-European studies.

All this is found, among other places, in the book Theorizing Myth by Bruce Lincoln, which I reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and I commend you to it.

I see why students of myth want to investigate the Indo-Europeans. It's a big puzzle. Why not? But the results are so speculative, so full of mays and mights (I did a search of "may" and "might" in West's book: almost 400 instances total, not counting the Intro) that continuing on in the face of its tainted history becomes a bit nauseating to me.

I wonder if it is significant that BMCR used N.J. Allen, an anthropologist, to review the book. Usually it is first-come first-served with book reviews, and Allen may have simply volunteered first. But I wonder if classicists ducked because they recognized political dynamite when they saw it.

Indo-European language tree found here, along with a nice criticism of the methods of I-E scholarship.