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Subject: (news)letter 1:11
Date: 9 Apr 1994 19:05:26 -0400
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Here's the eleventh issue of the (news)letter. Comments are welcome,
as are submissions. I hope you enjoy it.

ChrisP.

(news)letter

"Say the thing with which you labor."

Thoreau

from the porter micro.press

Volume 1, Number 11 April 6, 1994
_________________________________________________________________

Please send suggestions and submissions.
To get on the mailing list, send your name and address to:
CTPorter 117-A S. Mendenhall St. Greensboro, NC 27403
or e-mail [email protected]
Your input is appreciated.

A friend was in town last week and we talked some about the art
of reading. Why aren't students taught to read better at a
younger age, we wondered. We thought about the books that we
loved, that we knew acquaintances would enjoy if only they would
read them. These books might be so complex that an average reader
would have no patience with them, they would be quickly cast
aside in favor of a better "story." We launched into a diatribe
bemoaning the fact that high school students are not taught the
existence of such elements in a novel as "structure." I think now
that we miscalculated the difficulty of teaching complexity to a
student who is convinced that something is simple.
Take for example Richard Powers' _Gold Bug Variations_.
Johann Sebastian Bach's "Goldberg Variations" provides a
structure for the novel: for each variation there is a chapter.
And each chapter, if I'm not mistaken, takes its tone from the
dynamic of the variation to which it corresponds. (Don't ask me
to back that up, it's just gut feeling combined with educated
guess.) Further, there are two love stories in the book, one
taking place in the late 1950s, the other in the mid 1980s, and
there is a correlation between the different couples. The events
that drive one couple apart are told in the same chapter as the
events (twenty-five years later) that bring the other couple --
temporarily -- back together. I still haven't figured out how the
fortunes of one couple address those of the other couple, but
that relationship is there. The point is that there is a complex
structure to the narrative that makes the book extremely rich,
much more than just a story. The problem is, how to teach the
average students to be aware of such elements in writing? How can
a teacher instill in a student the idea that a good story can be
something more, a complex work of art?
I'll go very far afield, here, to give an example which
stems from a memory: I'm fifteen years old and playing summer
league baseball. By some fluke I'm on second base. I take the
lead off the bag, large enough of a lead so I think I'm daring,
as if I'm going to steal third. My mind starts going over the
implications of my stealing a base -- what it would mean for the
team, how great I would look, hey it might break the game wide
open. All of a sudden I wake up, there, ten feet from the base,
the pitcher looking right at me with an exorbitant glee in his
eyes, another fellow (where'd he come from?) standing on the base
waiting to put me out. There was nothing I could do except rather
pathetically dive back to the waiting tag. Picked off of second
base, what a disgrace!
Now I loved baseball when I was that age. It was as much my
life then as reading and writing are my life now. And it crushed
me to realize that I couldn't play the game. I failed at baseball
because I didn't recognize that there were some basic
fundamentals of the game. For one thing I could not abide
concentration. In football the action is furious but limited:
when the ball is snapped the players have at it until the play is
over, then they prepare for the next play. In basketball the
action is consistent until the whistle blows. There is no time to
let up while the ball is in play and you adapt to the actions of
others. In wrestling you go all out until the match is won or
lost. Baseball is different: you have to be able to turn on --
and sustain -- your concentration, your focus on the game. You
even have to do that in spite of others trying to lull you to
sleep. Being a good baseball player demands mental discipline,
something I have only begun to learn later in life. Roger Angell
writes, in _The Summer Game_:

It all looks easy, slow, and above all, safe. Yet we know
better, for what is certain in baseball is that someone,
perhaps several people, will fail. They will be searched
out, caught in the open, and defeated, and there will be no
confusion about it or sharing of the blame. (285-5)__

That, in a nutshell, is what drove me out of baseball. I couldn't
grasp the fact that there was more to the game than the freedom
of the playground.
Could somebody have taught me better? Certainly. Was I ready
to learn better? No. The most important lesson I learned in my
high school years was that listening in class paid dividends, and
I didn't learn that until my senior year. Put that together with
the lesson that fools can be popular and you have my high school
education in a nutshell. To expect the average high school
student to be aware of structure in a book is a bit absurd (I was
an average student). Where do we fogeys get off making criticisms
like we did?

_Opening Day Redux_
I've been thinking quite a bit about baseball, what with Michael
Jordan trying out for the White Sox and Opening Day and reading
my newest Roger Angell book. It seems that every spring I dig out
a new Angell to pore over in another ill-fated attempt to regain
some love for America's Game. Angell writes a column for the _New
Yorker_ and his books are collections of columns spanning
different periods: this particular book, _Late Innings_ covers
the 1977-1981 seasons. Each year is treated with the same format:
one column covers spring training; one column might appear during
the year about a player or a team; and the season's recap details
the Playoffs and World Series.
It is in Angell's prose that I delight. He is the Loren
Eiseley of baseball and often his descriptions of a play or a
game seem more vivid to me than my own memories of what he
describes. Whoever watched Roberto Clemente destroy the Baltimore
Orioles in the 1971 World Series must joy in Angell's depiction
of a defensive play: "Two Orioles were stranded in their half,
after Clemente unfurled a peg to the plate that sent the runners
scurrying like mice back to their bases" (_Summer Game_, 274). I
love that "unfurled" because it gives a sense of Clemente's
prowess: such throws from deep right field weren't foreign to
him. That's exactly how it happened, too, I can still see it!
When I was so into baseball as a youngster I could not stand
Angell: I wanted statistics, I wanted baseball cards, I wanted my
make-believe games. Only later could I spend a day reading him,
enjoying his insight into the complexity of what can be an
extremely boring game.

_"You Light up My Life!" (Gag!)_
Donna Tartt has a memoir in this month's _Harper's_ magazine
about her days as a high school cheerleader ("Team Spirit," 37-
40). Ms. Tartt was certainly a more complex student than I, as
she could relate her high school reading (George Orwell) to her
experiences as a cheerleader: "[_Animal Farm_] upset me a little,
especially the end, but the statement ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT
SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS echoed sentiments that I
recognized as prevalent in the upper echelons of the cheerleading
squad" (38). The author does well in this short memoir conjuring
images to which most high school athletes -- male or female --
can relate. There is the jealousy of her cohorts when she is
singled out for kudos by the mean old basketball coach; the dark
drives home, four to a car, each young lady afraid to fall asleep
in front of the others ("we might drool, perhaps, or
inadvertently scratch an armpit"); the everpresent chill of the
enemy auditoriums; the divisions which undercut the cheerleading
squad. The full version of this essay will appear, along with a
selection by Angell, in an upcoming anthology of the best
sportswriting of the year. The young cheerleader wrote in her
diary one night, and you can just feel the sarcasm, "Freshmen won
the spirit stick. Rah, rah" (40). I'm glad I didn't realize
cheerleaders were real people too.

_Blowin' in the Wind_
I am really enjoying a small book by James Edinger called
_Watching for the Wind: The Seen and Unseen Influences on Local
Weather_. I was influenced to read this book when watched with
fascination as a co-worker flew a kite during lunch break. As
soon as he pulled the kite out of his car I set aside my reading
and was hooked. I have never enjoyed a kite so. I found myself
watching not the kite, but imagining the wind that affected it.
Why did the wind change direction so? How did the presence of the
big building alter the flow of the wind?
Once upon a time I was an engineer, and I miss it. I learned
about such things as the properties of fluids (air being a
fluid): for example, fluids will always flow from a higher
pressure towards a lower pressure. There is something profoundly
attractive in reducing the world we see to the simplicity of
scientific principles; it is the same beauty that comes from
solving a geometric theorem using only the basic axioms. I
imagined, with this wind I didn't see, the pressure systems
between which it moved. And though I didn't solve any problems
that day, I must say that I returned to work as relaxed as I have
been in a long time. __

_Follow Up_
In issue 1:8 I mentioned the Margaret Brown essay in the March 7
_Newsweek_. Ms. Brown, you might remember, decried the laws which
allowed sperm donors to keep their anonymity. This robs those
children who are the product of an artificially inseminated
pregnancy of one-half of their heritage. Last week on the
newsmagazine "Now" there was a feature of a man who found out he
was the product of artificial insemination. He determined to find
his father by hook or by crook: with dogged perserverance, old-
fashioned research and breaking into a doctor's office to peek at
records, he did discover who his father was and confronted him.
It didn't turn into a storybook reunion -- the father was
uncomfortable with the stranger before him claiming to be kin --
but it did uncover some larger issues. In his research, the son
found out that there were other children of his home community
who had been fathered by this man (also through artificial
insemination), including a young lady he grew up liking. They
might conceivably have gotten married without even knowing that
they were so closely related, all because the sperm donor can
elect to remain totally anonymous.

_Who'll Follow This Leader?_
I have finally found an account worth reading of Pope John Paul
II's visit to Denver last August. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's
"Arguing with the Pope" in this month's _Harper's_ (41-56), is
one reporter's thoughts of the week's events that culminated in
the Pope's sermon on World Youth Day. Ms. Harrison had a stake in
this appearance by the Pope because she very much wanted him to
extend a welcome to those American Catholics who do not believe
that they sin by using birth control, being homosexual, or
supporting the idea of women priests.
I was interested in the Papal visit for another reason
entirely. The day before he reached Denver, there was a segment
on the ABC Nightly News about the purpose of the visit. Viewers
were told the Vatican considered this journey as the Pope's
Second Crusade. The first was a Crusade against Communism that
took the Pope to Poland in the early 1980s. The Pope was
credited, then, with instilling in the Poles a sense of national
identity from which Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement
benefitted. That was just the first step in a series of largely
quiet revolutions that culminated in the felling of the Berlin
Wall. This "Second Crusade," according to ABC, was against
"Western Materialism." The Pope taking on America's culture of
greed and glitz in the Mile High City, in front of the Youth of
Today. If he had the same success as he enjoyed with his First
Crusade, that week might have been the beginning of the end of
Hollywood!
But of course the Pope's visit was as much an endorsement of
Hollywood tropes as it was an attempt to regain firm control of
the American Catholics. The Vatican hired people to help stage
and run the extravaganza, the same type of media experts who
stage rock concerts. Harrison, in a parenthetical aside, gives
the reader a sense of the scripting of events with an excerpt
from a media guide:

"When the Holy Father reaches the top step and enters from
stage right the trumpets will sound and white doves will be
released. ... 4:21:10 p.m. Drummer: Song -- Ethnic Drumming
4 minutes. ... 1. Look around and see who is here. 2. Raise
your banners and see who is here. 3. Stand up and say hello.
..." (52)

"Spontaneity," Ms. Harrison writes, "is not left to chance."
Against this careful preparation is the plight of many of the
young participants who suffered from the extremes of weather and
poor diet. A _Newsweek_ article of the time wrote that

critics blamed the mass malady on the weeklong event's sole
food vendor: McDonald's. Some parents, health officials and
the local sheriff suggested that youths were weakened by a
diet of burgers and sodas and complained that McDonald's
stands were more easily accessible than either water
fountains or medical tents. (4)

It seemed, in some accounts, that the Church was more concerned
in making a good, profitable show (McDonald's paid for the right
to be there, of course, as did the "official" vendors) than in
destroying the bad in American culture.
Despite the hypocrisy, and the Pope's refusal to bend on
matters spiritual (in fact he was quite stern in demanding
adherence to Vatican doctrine), Ms. Harrison comes away lifted,
buoyed more by Catholicism than by Pope John Paul II. She, and
many others like her, will continue in the church, agreeing to
disagree, unconvinced that they might risk hell for having an
abortion. As a gay friend tells the author: "I would go to my cat
before I would go to my cardinal for moral direction. I don't pay
any attention to him or to the Pope. But I have no reason to
leave the Church" (55). They had been shown that week the
Catholic Church which they could love, in the spirituality of the
youth, in the moral dictums from the Pope, and in the play that
featured a woman actress portraying Jesus. If this Pope won't
follow his flock, then, according to Ms. Harrison, "it hardly
seems to matter, in the flowers, in the dark."

_Around the Campus_
I have gone to several functions at UNCG lately, the most
interesting of which was the Winners' Night of the Carolina Film
and Video Festival. There were ten films shown this night, the
best of the previous three days, and not a one was disappointing.
Several UNCG students made a good showing, with Curtis Gaston's
poignant portrait, "Brother," winning Best Documentary. This was
an homage to the filmmaker's brother, who suffers from Down's
Syndrome. What made this film powerful was that it didn't stoop
to sentimentality: the story of the brother is told very matter-
of-factly, even the painful admission that as a schoolboy the
author had denied the existence of his brother. The film
celebrates and does not pity -- in fact the implication is that
the brother is the lucky one: he must live close to God since he
knows only smiles and joy.
Todd Campbell and Jason King received an Honorable Mention
for their Narrative, "Second Chance." This is the story of a drug
addict who subsumes the body of the person who's image he
concentrates on in his final thoughts (he is dying of an
overdose). He takes over the body of a friend, depletes his bank
account, alienates all those close to him, and becomes disowned
by the parents that no longer know him. With no options left, the
addict invites another acquaintance over, intending to commit
suicide while affixing the friend in his last sight. The film
ends with the dying man confronted with an angry dog, providing a
hilarious closure to what had been a very dark tale.
Angela Chou, a San Francisco State University student, won
the award for the Best Experimental film with her "Red White Blue
and Yellow," a film that explores the feelings of an American of
Oriental descent when faced with prejudice. There is a wonderful
juxtaposition of scenes in which someone tries to pick up
chopsticks with a fork; the image is reversed and the fork then
tries to pick up the chopsticks. Throughout the film is the
recurring question, asked by a stranger in a bar: "How do you say
'Good Morning' in your country?" The actress answers with various
snide remarks, the most potent (repeated several times) being the
simple, drawn-out "Goooood Moooorrrrrning."
I also went to a couple of readings since last I wrote,
presented by the UNCG MFA program. The first was given by Marly
Swick, the author of the collection of stories _A Hole in the
Language_; one week later came Stephen Dobyns, who has several
books out including a collection of poems, _Heat Death_, and a
novel, __The Wrestler's Cruel Study. The two artists provided an
interesting contrast.
Ms. Swick read a short story in which the men were portrayed
as rather inept creatures. The story opened up with the
protagonist at a gathering of men: you've certainly read about
these camps that men might go to, where they'll sit around the
campfire and bang drums, get in touch with the 'real man'
feelings that they suppress. In Marly Swick's story, though,
these men are humanities wimps: they sit around the campfire
strumming guitars and singing folk songs from the Sixties and
holding hands. Another character is so heavily influenced by
Oriental philosophy that he is ludicrous, and and wastes an acid
trip working on his Tai-Chi moves. The protagonist of this story
cannot maintain any of his relationships, though by the end there
is some hope. I don't mean to imply that the author is a man-
hater, only that she held up to view some all-too-common foibles
of the human male.
Stephen Dobyns' we might easily imagine at the drum
pounding, howling, chanting kind of men's outing. One poem
celebrated that good old-fashioned male sex drive that's derided
so by the politically correct. In another, the wishes of a man
contrast with the desires of his companion, a dog. The man wants
to get in the car and drive all night, watch the sun come up in
the rearview mirror, then pull over and go to sleep. The dog
wants to sniff legs in a bar, knock over trash cans and dig
holes. I enjoyed his first poem of the evening the most, which
dealt with a God who is being overrun by his creation: tour buses
clog heaven and angels perform for the crowds. This God insists
that the humans he created were not banished from Eden but
angrily shook at the gates, demanding their release from pastoral
boredom. The poet seemed at his best when treating light
subjects; the heavy themes did nothing for me.

_Quote of the Day_
Here is a Sufi leasson for the week. Idries Shah, in his
_Learning How to Learn_, cites Ibn Arabi on how a teacher should
be:

People think that a teacher should display miracles and
manifest illumination. But the requirement in a teacher is
that he should possess all that the disciple needs. (54)

Of course Arabi intends the 'teacher' to be a spiritual teacher
in the Sufi tradition. And implicit in this idea is that the
disciple, or the student, has to be ready for the teacher. We are
taught what we are ready to learn when we are ready to know. I
like this theory of knowledge because instead of feeling stupid
that I never "learned" baseball, I accept the idea that the time
wasn't right and I knew then what I had to know.

Happy Birthday Martha!