Adams and Obama

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I received an email with a link to Obama’s speech on racial issues, so I read all the text and watched most of the Utube video.  And was, well, unimpressed.  I had hoped to be transported, but felt very far from that.  The content wasn’t new and the deliver was far too measured and methodical.  I felt as if I were sitting in Sociology One.  Although, brevity being the soul of wit, he did manage to say in about twenty minutes what most sociology courses take ten weeks to say.

I was thankful for that.

Though probably my impression of Obama’s speech was informed by John Adam’s little speech right before the Declaration of Independence was signed.  That’s not a fair or just comparison.  Adam’s speech was transporting partly because he delivered in a situation far beyond his control and because he recognized and registered that situation as being beyond his control.  He knew the Declaration was risky business.  Should the colonies come out with the shit end of the stick, the signers of the Declaration had a good chance of losing property and life.  Either that or be signed on as collaborators when the British retook control.  Ignominy or death.  Those were his options.

Of course there was another: that the Colonies would win and probably in the innocence of his child heart Adam’s was in denial.  No, nothing really bad was going to happen.  Still when he said he would stake his life on the justice of their cause and the principles from which it was derived, I believed him.  To risk his life, limb and property for an idea or an ideal, that’s pretty heady stuff.  Of course, the idea and principle have become pretty rusted over.  But being ideas, the damage is far from fatal and they still could be burnished up.  What with a lot of elbow grease.

What would Obama die for?  What is there for Obama to die for?   So the context was not there—one that might provide a transporting dimension.  What does Obama stand to lose?  An election?  Is Obama willing to die to be president?  And if he is so willing, I must ask if his priorities aren’t all screwed up.  I don’t know honestly what I would die for, but I am pretty sure I would not die to be the President of this Republic.

Right now that office reminds me of those public restrooms you can find in Greyhound bus stations.  One enters a booth to find it so befouled by its previous occupant that no way I am going to go in there.  This stench would drive me from the room and my flesh would crawl.  I don’t think that place worth dying for, not at least without it having been previously disinfected.  And that would be the most minimal of requirements.

Adam’s Speech

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Last night I watched part of the show on John Adams now running on HBO.  I found particularly affecting Adam’s speech delivered just before the vote confirming the assertion of independence.  He was a learned man and able to capture the largeness of the moment.  Never before, he argued, in history, had the opportunity arisen for a country to create its own government, one moreover responsive to the will of the people, and while he was aware of the risks involved, such an opportunity he said could not be allowed to pass. 

I felt like crying.  I was raised to believe in the greatness of America.  I don’t know when I began to have my doubts exactly.  I know in high school that I had problems with a government that advocated capital punishment and our attitude towards the Reds seemed to me—I don’t know—un-Christian.  Still with Kennedy in office and great leaps forward in the area of Civil Rights, I felt the gap between our professed ideals and the actualities of life in American might be closing.  I remember when a friend told me in college that 10% of the people controlled 80% of the wealth in this country I just didn’t want to believe it.

And since that time, if I have been critical of the country into which I was born, I have been so, not because I ever felt the ideals espoused by the founding fathers were wrong but because of the failure of the government and the people to live up to them.  Sadly, the distance between the promise and the actuality has grown so great that the principles of the country now seem tired maxims, hackneyed phrases, and the stuff of jingoistic patriotism.  They have no meaning beyond the use to which they are put for the purposes of politics.  With the result that events occurring at this moment—the elections—feel to me as if they might as well be occurring on Mars.

Adam’s little speech caused me to reconnect with that younger and more childlike self that did believe in those ideals as things that might come true.  I was hurt at that moment to feel how very far the country has slipped from its initial promise.  Still I wonder if it is not better that I felt hurt.  I don’t think the young people I work with today would feel hurt.  They seem, when I ask them, to feel, to a person, that government is just not to be trusted. And in light of the events of the last thirty years, I understand why they don’t trust, not just on the basis of things they have seen and heard but in response to the prevailing view that government is somehow inherently a bad thing.

Variable Weather

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Midweek it felt as if spring had sprung, somewhat prematurely.  We hit the seventies in the day, but Friday the wind started blowing.

A few whitecaps: 

thursday
Friday got really windy.  And the kite surfers were out.
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windsurf4
Today, the weather changed.  No more warm.
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saturday 
On the way back from the bluffs, Carol and I were drizzled upon by this big black cloud. 
 
 
 

Student Evaluations

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Every quarter in the last week of classes, I get this email saying come pick up your student evaluations. This term “student evaluations”—come to think of it—is sort of misleading since it would seem to imply that students are the ones being evaluated.  But, no, student evaluations are actually evaluations by the students of their teacher.  So they should be called “teacher evaluation” since that’s what they really are. 

 Where I work, these come in two forms: statistical and narrative.  In the narratives, students are supposed to write something about the class, the teacher, and the content of the course. I don’t know why these are called “narratives” since students never write anything approximating a narrative.  They just state an opinion or make an observation or two.

As regards the statistical part, students fill out a scant Ron sheet with two questions on it:

Rank the Instructor

Rank the Course

As accordingly:

Excellent

Very Good

Good

Fair

Poor

Next quarter I will get an email saying the results of your statistical scores are in your mailbox.  So I will go over there and find these sheets with numbers on them; the little black marks that students have put down have been digitized, I guess one would say, and turned into numbers that tell me whether I have scored at the average for all of the sections of the courses I taught or above the average and by how much or below the average and by how much.

I have been getting these “scores” for over 30 years and they still freak me out every time I have to go over to the mailroom and look at them.  The whole business seems vaguely dehumanizing.  Like that bathing beauty contest in the Miss America Pageant, or as if somebody has put me into the American Idol Contest.  And I sure wouldn’t want to be in that contest.  It’s not about who wins but all the people who are humiliated in the process of proclaiming as the winner the person who has been least humiliated.

I am embarrassed and ashamed that I even care about these damn numbers.  Even when they are good numbers I am not really happy; I just heave a sign of relief—well, that’s over for now.  Anyway, I handed out those forms this week and the students filled them out and stuck them in a big yellow envelope, and now the office then and next quarter I will get his email saying the scores are in my box.  And I will feel humiliated all over again, because, you know, it is humiliating.

 

King?

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One of the questions of the survey that determined students entering college in the fall of 2006 were more narcissistic that entering classes previously surveyed was: “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place.”  I presume the more narcissistically inclined said “yes.”
 

My answer to such a question way back when I entered college–and still today–would have been “no,” and I was wondering why.

First, even to begin to answer that question or to take it seriously as a question would seem to require a much richer fantasy life than I have.  I remember when the lottery first came in talking with people who would go on and on about what they would do with those vast amounts should they win it, how they would divide it up and give money to relatives and charitable organizations and buy a Jacuzzi.  These people really seemed to enjoy themselves talking about these fantasy prospects.  I would sit there with my mind completely blank.  I just couldn’t entertain the fantasy much less enjoy having it. I guess I do not have a rich fantasy life.

Second, answering yes to the question would seem to imply that one would want to be ruler of the world.  Personally, being ruler of the world strikes me as requiring way too much work and responsibility.  I think being ruler of the world would be quite time consuming and even onerous.  Also rulers of the world tend to have many enemies and frequently get killed off by assassins.

Finally, being ruler of the world would not, to my mind, necessarily put one in the position to make the world a better place.  The way I see it no one person –even the ruler of the world—can make any difference to the state of the world.  Individuals can do little or nothing to improve the state of affairs on a world wide scale.  Even to think so implies pure megalomania.  If the question read, “If I ruled the world, along with a very large army, and a fanatically charged mass following, I might be able to make the world a better place (if I had exact and clear directions on how to make the world better)….well, I still would answer “no” because I couldn’t entertain the fantasy in the first place.

I am suspicious of such surveys and how much they can tell us about the psyche of the student of today.  Still, the idea that by being the ruler of the world one could make the world a better place seems to suggest a remarkable naiveté about what goes into being the ruler of the world.  Or let us say, it would appear one could answer yes to this question only if one assumes that, because one is the ruler, the world will somehow plastically and magically respond to one’s attempts, no matter how ill-informed, to make it better.

This is narcissism.  Or rather, let us say, it is primal, archaic and relatively untempered narcissism. Twenge and others suggest that today’s college students are narcissistic because they were told by their parents and in schools that they are special, and are encouraged in their specialness by such attention seeking technologies as my space and Utube.  I don’t buy it.  If today’s students retain a high degree of untempered narcissism, that has little to do with being told one is special, but rather to having the “world” in fact plastically respond to one’s needs.  Those relatively few families that reaped the wealth of the 80’s and 90’s may have produced such children.  I wonder how young people not entering college might respond that question.

Last Day of Class

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All of a sudden it’s 74 degrees.  The rise in temperature, along with the change in the clock, which has completely screwed up my body clock, has reduced me to a tepid pool of inertia.  My brain is a puddle, a dark back water for whatever the hell is going on in my unconscious these days.
 

Part of whatever that is has to do with the end of classes.  I am no good at closure.  Closure?  What the hell is that?  I mean at the end of my classes I feel sort of sad and depleted.  After all I have been meeting with these people in my classes for ten weeks; I have had email exchanges with many no matter how mundane or trivial, and some not so mundane and trivial, but about deaths in the family and suing doctors for malpractice or having to go to court themselves for various reasons, or becoming deathly ill and throwing up all night, or getting the pink eye, or having their computer suddenly die and go blue screen—with all their work disappearing into some digital void.  So I have come to know these people a little bit—and then the last day of class comes around, they go out the door to wherever it is they might be going, and I am not likely to hear from them again.

 Ever.  Except if they want something, like a letter of recommendation.

It’s like a post-partum depression or something without knowing what I have delivered or if I have managed to deliver anything at all.  So I keep trying to think of ways that might round the whole class out and bring it to a sense of completion.  Some people bring cookies to that last day of class or something.  But I am not that kind of person, a here’s a cookie person.  Anyway I couldn’t in good conscience hand out sugar.  If I drank myself, I would be more like, a “here’s a stiff drink person,” a “here’s looking at you, kid” sort of person as you go off into the crap that is going to befall you, because in your twenties, and let me tell you, the crap will just rain down.

I won’t see any of them again.  I am a writing teacher—; it’s not like I am a professor in their major or anything.  They have to work like hell to arrange another class with me and even then I am not going to get ten years down the line any emails or snail mail thanking me for like having totally changed their lives.  I mean what the hell—I make them write papers.  It’s not like I am teaching Zen Buddhism or something that might lift the veil of illusion from their eyes and show them the light.

I am left with loose ends and dead ends.

God bless’em each and every one.

Spring Forward

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I didn’t realize when I woke that the clocks had changed.

Carol and I went out for breakfast and after having washed the car took a brief spin to the beach.

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The dunes in the foreground are part of a nature preserve. 

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Human beings on a sunny California beach on a Sunday morning engaged in some form of ritual 
activity. 
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More human beings.

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 Human beings engaged in water activities.

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 Strange bird on post, so well adapted to its environs that its outlines blur into its surroundings.  Carol asserts accurately I think that this is a heron "all scrunched up."

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Looking away from ocean over placid lagoon a half a mile or so beyond the end of which we live.

 

 

Wilhelm von Humboldt

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I was looking for a book on consumer society—to snatch a chapter—because next quarter I will be working with that subject again.  I was sure I had this book; I could see it in my mind’s eye but for the life of me not in plain sight.  Instead, plucking through books, I pulled out another because reading the book sidewise I could not make out the title.  I thought at first that it was one by Helvetius that I had taken from the library, as part of an effort better to understand the origins of sociological thought.  I started reading and right off it didn’t sound like that guy but instead something very German.

Indeed, turns out I was reading from a collection—in translation—of the works of Wilhelm von Humboldt.  I can’t remember why the heck unless I was doing further research into German Transcendental Idealism. 

I am doing my version of speed reading—by this I mean I read a line here and there and on the basis of other stuff I have read from that period begin to contextualize the thought relative especially to Kant and Rousseau (the twin pillars of German Idealism).  And then I come across this line:

 As we can imagine life neither standing still nor moved by an external mover, so does the whole universe subsist only in urge; nothing lives or exists except insofar as it strives to live or exist.

 Now I doubt very much that Bob Dylan read Wilhelm von Humboldt, though it is not out of the question that he did, but suddenly this line drew my attention to something I had not quite seen or seen only peripherally in the title of this blog, “And he not busy being born is busy dying.”—taken as I previously noted, I believe, from Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma.”

I don’t know quite how to put what I previously saw in that line but, taken in the context of the Wilhelm von Humboldt, I feel the emphasis shift to being as the busy-ness to be born.  Or following von Humboldt, the line shifts into the assertion: being is becoming or becoming is being.   That would appear itself to be a paradox, unless one concludes, as von Humboldt seems to do: that “being” is an activity and not a state of stasis. 

Funny—von Humboldt thinks of the entire universe, not as a set of pre-existing scientific laws, or something empirical, but as an “urge,” or one might say a feeling.  I think in German he may have used the word “Trieb,” which means variously “urge,” “impulse,” “driving force,” or “drive.”   

 

Vocalizing

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So I spent an hour with a vocal coach.  I am putting together a CD of ten of my own songs and I want to do the vocal part as best I can.

Going to a vocal coach is not part of my usual behavior.  In fact I pretty much hate going anywhere.  Going to try to sing in front of a complete stranger, on top of that, is pretty unusual for me.

But I got to see a street in Santa Barbara I had never seen before where the home of the vocal coach was located.

So there I sit with this vocal coach and she says my natural voice—if there is such a thing—more or less related to my speaking voice–is probably a baritone.  She says I have a deep voice for a skinny guy (because I am now once again really skinny). But the songs I have written are coming out more in the tenor range.

The coach had me try to find the soma of my sounds.  That is, where my voice comes from depending on the note I am trying to hit, and sure enough when I began to pay attention, I could feel the real high notes come somewhere from the middle of my forehead, and then down through the nose, and then down in the mouth/throat, and finally down in the chest—that’s where the baritone seems to be located.

And then there’s the breathing part.  I have got to get that down.  That means practice, because breathing while singing is not the same as your normal breathing.  More or less in normal breathing we take in some air through the nose using our lungs to drag it in, but if you do that even you will possibly note that the stomach pops out a little as one breathes in.

Singing requires stomach breathing.  You really let the stomach pop out as the air goes in and then you exhale by pulling in the stomach muscles—and sure enough it’s possible that way to get air in and out more quickly and also to sustain a note. 

Singing also requires good posture.  I don’t naturally have that.  I slouch and have slouched for years.  Instead—singing wise—you are supposed to stand up straight—with your center—your stomach and pelvis–acting as the pillar for your whole body, and you let the rest of your body above that go as limp as possible.

Carol says too that in dance the center of the body—the stomach and pelvis—are at the heart of the whole thing.  That’s where you start and need to build from.

I remember this pro basketball player—though I can’t remember his name—with this terrific jump shot.  From a stand still position, he really get in the air, and midway in his jump, you could see his hips and stomach—go up—as if after the initial leg movement he had a second booster rocket.

I went to the vocal coach some time this week but it feels now like an hallucination.