Thursday, April 7, 2022

Flashback 2009: Don’t be frightened, it’s just a book


     Republicans across the country, in their junkie scramble to find somebody to consider themselves better than, are assailing books that treat transgender children with dignity. They have some kind of argument, but the bottom line is they identify subgroups they feel safe to attack, and then do so. Plus it's key for them to deprive their children of any kind of broadening literature or experience to help guarantee they grow up to be fearful lunkheads like themselves.
     We're safe from that kind of crap in Chicago, generally, though nine years ago the the Chicago School Board did briefly suppress Marjane Satrapi's well-respected graphic novel Persepolis, until hoots of derision caused them to reverse course and pretend it never happened. But not before I wrote this column: 


     Can children be hurt by books?
     I’m not talking about the lifelong lower back problems, herniated discs and such, that no doubt will come from dragging around those text-crammed 35-pound backpacks. Sometimes I go to relocate a backpack belonging to one of our boys from the center of the living room floor, and it’s like trying to pick up a fire hydrant.
     I mean in the sense — always unspoken, always just assumed to be true — behind every book-banning controversy, such as the still-smoldering brush fire set off when the Chicago Public Schools booted Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” off its seventh-grade curriculum.
     Could reading a certain book hurt a child?
     “Research does not show any kind of direct connection between what is in a book and any kind of harm to a child,” said Barbara Jones, executive director of the Freedom To Read Foundation of the American Library Association. “There really is none.”
     A child encountering a supposedly “inappropriate” book will, she said, more likely just read over the alleged offensive parts.
     “The research shows when a child doesn’t understand a particular part of a book, they’re likely to skip over it,” Jones said.
     Given that Chicago is a city crawling with academics examining precisely how children learn, I figured it would be easy to find experts on this. It was. I turned to the Erikson Institute, probably the nation’s top graduate school teaching childhood development.
     “The important thing about a book is that it invites lots of discussion and debate,” said Professor Gillian McNamee, director of teacher education at Erikson.
     Can’t some difficult books jar sensitive kids?
     “Life experiences just don’t come at us that way,” McNamee said. “If we go see a movie, encounter a book, no one thing in life damages us. We might wish we hadn’t seen it or hadn’t read it. I remember reading “The Jungle” and just being furious and upset by it. Did it hurt me? Yes. But that was the power of the experience.”
     Of course, keeping children from powerful experiences, from the pain of discovering stark truths, is the principle behind these controversies. It’s the hangover from the Victorian era — childhood as a secret garden of fairies and flowers where scary real life must never intrude. Who still holds that view?
     “I’ve come to believe people mean well, they want to make a difference in world,” said Jones. “In the case of ‘Persepolis,’ torture is on the minds of all Americans. People want it to go away, and they think that by taking the book away, it’s an easy way to solve the problem. Only it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t solve the problem.”
     McNamee wondered if the people who decided to remove “Persepolis” from the seventh-grade curriculum even understand what the kids have been studying up to that point.
     “They’ve studied slavery in America by then,” she said. “They’ve encountered and chewed on some unhappy circumstances, both in their lives and in history. We’ve obviously heard about war. Hard times and brutal experiences are not unknown to them.”
     The ironic thing is, stark moments in literature, rather than somehow scarring children, instead help them overcome the actual troubles in their real lives.
     “Understand the power of fairy tales,” McNamee said. “You have these wrenching situations — ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ the Number One favorite story of generations. That’s a pretty bleak story. The mother sends her pigs away — two of the three get eaten. That’s exactly how we feel every day — two out of three times we get chewed up. But we rebound and learn to build an inner house that has some stability. We learn we can protect ourselves from the wolves. When you get these juicy stories, we open up and get distance from our own experience so we can start processing it. We ought not to be saying that book is going to jar somebody, when the whole point of literature is to wake us up and give us some space for a conversation.”
     She noted the CPS comment that teachers may not be ready to deal with the book.
     “That’s their job,” she said. “Our schools are filled with children who are vulnerable but might feel healed and stronger and wiser because we had a great discussion about a powerful book. Instead, they’re worried that this might upset somebody.”
     Teachers should be worried, not about kids possibly being shocked by a sentence or a drawing, but about them instead being bored by pabulum guaranteed not to offend.
     “The biggest threat is students who are not engaged,” McNamee said. “Not talking about what they’re hearing, reading, seeing. Ironically, what state standards now want is students who are able to get inside a book and wrestle and argue and debate about it, using text-based evidence. If young people are reading bland literature and things that aren’t engaging them, that’s really a problem.”
          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 20, 2013

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Russian lies mirror our own

     Why are liars so bad at lying?
     When the grisly images of atrocity started coming out of Bucha — the mass graves, the civilians with their hands tied behind their backs — the Russians immediately replied: it didn’t happen, the accusation itself another “provocation” against them. The photos were staged, or, if killings did occur — as the presence of hundreds of bodies would seem to imply — then it was from Ukrainians shooting their own citizens to make the Russians look bad, because nations do that.
     The speed of the reaction was breathtaking. No hesitation, no flutter of false concern, no “Atrocities? Gosh, we’ll have to look into it right away!”
     Instead, straight to wild conspiracy theories.
     That shouldn’t surprise anybody. The whole war was birthed in lies. When their army massed around Ukraine, Russia dismissed the idea there might be war as an American fantasy. Once it started, calling their “special military operation” a “war” could land you in prison.
     The Russian approach to the truth sure rings a bell, doesn’t it?
     The world was once divided between East and West, Capitalism and Communism, liberals and conservatives. Now it is between those who navigate the difficult world of fact and those sprawled in self-constructed sties of easy fantasy, rooting around the thick, warm mire of self-glorying falsehood.
     Russian rhetoric is characteristic of chronic liars. The nimble, shape-shifting quality. Their reaction this week echoes Alex Jones, the toxic radio host.
     Jones, if you recall, insisted the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary didn’t actually occur, but was a false flag operation, perpetrated by the government to encourage gun control. Jones whipped up his listeners to harass grieving parents.
     Where did that come from?

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Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Mina Zikri agiatamente

 

      For all the years I've been schlepping downtown to Orchestra Hall to go to the Chicago Symphony, I've never—before Sunday—gone to the Northbrook Symphony, now in its 42nd season. It's certainly easier to get to, playing at the Sheely Center for the Performing Arts, which is a fancy way of saying the auditorium at Glenbrook North High School. A solid five minutes from my house.
     We settled in for the all-Beethoven program, Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Op. 60, and Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55, "Eroica." I'm sure Andrew Patner would have had no trouble pointing out the glaring differences between NS and the CSO, but he is no longer with us, and I really couldn't. Maybe the music was less bright, less defined, a certain softness, but that could just be me groping for differences. Heck, maybe the Northbrook Symphony is better. I don't know. What I do know is that the Northbrook Symphony's next performance, an evening of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, is May 29, and I'll certainly go, if I can.
      The conductor, Mina Zikri, invited the audience to stay after the performance to hear a brief talk on the music, so Edie and I lingered. We recently saw the Oistrakh Symphony of Chicago, which he founded, playing along with a performance of the DePaul Chorus
    Zikri began by talking about rehearsals—the Northbrook Symphony had only three for Sunday's performance. They must be quick learners. A member of the audience pointed out that he didn't conduct from a score, and he talked about how familiar the music is to him.
     One key, he said, is to accept the inevitable slip-up.
     "I have enjoyed music a lot more in my life when I realized it's okay if I make a mistake—you're not the Chicago Symphony." That struck me as a laudable attitude to have. People either propagate their upbringings or push against them, and Zikri, who had a strict Russian musical education as a youth in Cairo, has obviously decided not to pass along the rigors he's endured.  Though he did run down
 Wagner—the operas are very long, and he bragged about dozing off in one, which almost soured me to him. If you don't value Wagner, fine. But at least have the good sense not to crow about it. Don't diss the Old Sorcerer; it only reflects poorly on yourself.
     Still, I stuck with him, and he recovered.
     Someone asked Zikri how he put his particular stamp on "Eroica," and he said, in essence, at 
his age, he doesn't have the right to, not yet. He's still learning.
     "A real conductor isn't a conductor until he's 60 years old," said Zikri, 41. "There are things you can only gain by experience. Self discipline, so you don't have to put your take over everything."
     Of course a soft touch is a take, albeit a humble one, realizing that you can perform a couple Beethoven symphonies withou
t leaving your claw marks all over them. I wish more people had that kind of humility. We are, after all, merely passing through this world, and should want to leave it in roughly the condition we found it. 


Regarding the title of today's piece, "agiatamente" is an Italian musical notation meaning "relaxed" or "at ease."






Monday, April 4, 2022

Tracking down the family and the famous

 


     What do we owe our departed loved ones? The people once behind the faces that stare at us — happily or blankly or beseechingly — from those black-and-white photographs?
     I’ve been thinking about that lately, moving my parents here from Colorado, packing up box after box of albums jammed with fading Kodak photos of ordinary moments and once-in-a-lifetime vacations. Albums now in storage; albums no one might ever want to look at again.
     I know I’m not alone here. But I was pleasantly surprised Saturday to see the big front page treatment the Sun-Times gave Friday’s unlocking of the 1950 U.S. Census Bureau data by the National Archives. I thought the joy of plunging into old records and tracking down relations was a personal quirk. Apparently not. 
     Saturday morning I dove into the database, starting with my mother’s father, Irwin Bramson. Too easy. Go to the website, https://1950census.archives.gov/. Go to “Begin Search.” Plug in the state and city, in this case Cleveland Heights, Ohio. There was exactly one result. Zoom in on the photographed census form. There is his little household: wife Sarah, my mother June, then 13, her younger sisters, Carol and Diane. My grandfather’s nation of origin was Poland and his job, an accountant in a factory — Accurate Parts Manufacturing, maker of clutches. My grandmother was born in Russia. Nothing surprising there.
     My father’s father I knew would be harder. A more common name in a far bigger pool. When I plugged “Sam Steinberg” into the census for the Bronx, New York, up popped 4,585 hits. The machine learning used to read scrawled cursive entries can be maddeningly imprecise. One of the hits was “Sam Silibority.”

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Sunday, April 3, 2022

Why don’t schools ban the Bible?



     April Fool's Day was low-key this year. I noticed only two attempts at pranks—Manny's delicatessen announced they were moving to Arlington Heights and shifting to a vegetarian menu, which didn't make it over the skepticism bar—I smiled at the attempt but never believed it for a second. Though Yasso unveiled a mouthwash, which did catch me for a single moment, as I initially mused, "This is an odd brand extension for a line of frozen yogurt bars..." before realizing, "Ohhhhh!"
     Understated seemed the way to go—maybe because reality seems so incredible and distorted that one hesitates before adding to the confusion, even toward a humorous end. My own humble effort, explaining my drift toward becoming the paper's beekeeping reporter, was undersold enough that a number of readers fell for it, which pleased me greatly. But it did require holding my Friday column until today.


     William Blake’s engraving of Laocoon and his sons is what art historians call “busy.”
     OK, I doubt art historians call it that. Doing what journalists call “checking” — consulting the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism — I see the preferred term seems to be “cluttered.”
     So, cluttered, then. Whatever you call it, there’s a lot to unpack. Not just the unlucky Trojan priest, who tried to warn his citymates not to take that large wooden horse into the walls of Troy, and was rewarded by being crushed, along with his sons, by a sea serpent sent by Athena.
     But all that writing, in several languages. A wordy fellow, Blake. Which I guess makes us soulmates. I do go on.
     Though today, I’m only interested in a single line, written perpendicularly in the right margin: “Is not every Vice possible to Man described in the Bible openly?”
     The only honest answer must be a resounding “Yes!” Murder, for starters (Cain). Incest (Lot). Drunkenness (Noah). Selling your brother into slavery (Jacob). Debauchery, cheating, stealing, war. Onan spills his seed. God tortures Job as a lark.
     The whole book is practically one long grindhouse movie. Yet do school boards ban the Bible? Never. Why is that? Maybe because such bans are never about the pretexts supposedly inspiring them.

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"Pity" by William Blake (Metropolitan Museum of Art)



Saturday, April 2, 2022

Wilmette Notes: Life Passing By

 
"Chicago Taking a Beating" by Roger Brown.


    Our past follows us wherever we go like a pull-toy duck. North Shore Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey's has been quacking particularly loudly of late, as she relates in her Saturday report:

By Caren Jeskey

   Living in a tiny rental home in Wilmette means that I am up against memories of childhood that I haven’t had in decades. It’s as though I’m watching my life pass by slowly through a train window, vignettes flickering past while I try to ponder them. I’m seeing myself probably too clearly now in this COVID navel gazing solitude complicating my return home. 
    It was nice to be in Texas for those 7 years, where there was no chance of feeling that I had stepped into a time machine filled with youthful (well, ok, some not so youthful) mistakes.
     Now, in the past few weeks, four people I know have all gotten BA.2. So for now, I'm back only dining in pods at Napolita in Wilmette or Fiya in Andersonville, or in dining rooms where vaccination cards are still required like Jerry's Sandwiches in Lincoln Square. As if life weren't strange enough, I'm eating in plastic bubbles.       
     I started studying flute at the Music Center of the North Shore, a mere mile and a half from my current home, when I was in 3rd grade or so. Once a week, a parent and I would ride in a station wagon from Chicago to the school on Green Bay Road so I could have a lesson. My mother became intrigued by the charming school also housed on the same plot of land, North Shore Country Day. By the time I’d graduated from a Chicago public grammar school, my folks had me enrolled at North Shore Country Day for high school. I felt heartbroken and a little scared to be stepping into freshman year with only 47 other students, far from my grammar school buddies. Going to North Shore turned out to be a great gift, as far as education and culture. It’s funny that it took me this long to live close enough to walk to school.
     I thought I was much bigger than I am. Tucked away in the comfort and safety of one of the safest places to live in Illinois, and probably one of the safest places in the country, I see that I’m simply the same person I have always been, and things are much more simple than I had figured. I thought life was about adventure and fun, collecting experiences. Staying on the move. I didn’t realize that all I need to feel alive is having healthy plants to tend, a satisfying career, and peaceful relationships with my family and friends.
     I don’t have much clutter anymore, since I’ve worked for the past few years to pare down. Somehow I’ve managed to hold onto a small carry-on sized suitcase full of letters, cards, and moments that date back to the early 70’s.
     Looking back at some of them this week, I can see things even more clearly. Egad. It’s right there in ink. I’ve always been the kind of person to value kindness, but I’ve also been too hungry for excitement. Rather than settling in with stable, life-long friends, I was drawn to drama. Intrigue. I took a lot of the good ones for granted over the years. I'm grateful to have a small number of true friends, most of whom I met about twenty years ago, but I did not nurture my high school connections very well. Perhaps now is the time.
     When I was lucky enough to be attending a gem of finer education, I kept my eye out for things I should have probably shied away from. Became close friends with a transfer student who stole my father’s phone card number from me and had charged up hundreds of dollars before he discovered what was happening. She later got involved in drugs and sadly, a much darker side of living. Fortunately, we reconnected several years back and she is doing quite well.
     At school, I snuck clove cigarettes in the gymnasium bathroom when no one was supposed to be in the building, which were given to me by a big stoner in our class. She also once got me super high— well OK, it was my choice to say yes— on a drive during a lunch break. As a novice, my tolerance was low and I was baked. I passed out on the Senior Homeroom couch and recall the face of a kind jock looking down at me, concerned, as I slept it off. I remember how scared he looked as he grappled with getting adult help, or leaving me be, as I had asked.
     I feel strangely young and vulnerable these days as I look back at my journey. As a good friend said, the battle is done and the war has been won.

Friday, April 1, 2022

Bee careful what you pretend to be.

 

     Well, this is awkward...
     Regular readers will remember that, at the height of the COVID lockdown, I took it upon myself to delve into the Illinois beekeeping community. The column wasn't a joke, per se. I would never do that. These are real people keeping real hives of actual bees, making real honey. 
     Like all people, they deserve respect, and I treated the whole thing seriously. I was interested. I have an affection for bees—"stout warriors in their waxen kingdom," to quote Virgil's marvelous summation. 
     My opening sentence, however, "But how has COVID affected beekeeping in Illinois?" well it has a certain—what?—a wink, a sparkle. That opening word, "But..." designed to convey a sense of picking up the action in mid-story, in medias res, as the classicists put it. Enough with the vaccines and Trumpies and lockdowns and social turmoil. What about beekeepers!?!?
      Perhaps that was reckless of me. Perhaps I should have foreseen the risk involved. That I was setting myself up, pigeon-holing myself. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a line I feel is very true: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” (from Mother Night, It's important to cite the exact source since, like Mark Twain before him there is a tendency to ascribe any half witty line to Vonnegut, whether he wrote it or not).
     A couple columns about bees—there have been others— doesn't make me the beekeeping reporter, not yet anyway. But money is being infused into the paper, which encourages specialization. We're hiring more beat reporters. A classical music critic. A science reporter. Editorial member Lee Bey was just named the architecture critic, a slot that went unfilled for years. 
     So I was having a conversation with my editor the other day, and he said, out-of-the-blue, "Have you thought about circling back to the beekeepers? What's up with them, bee-wise?"
     I said something about it being only a year and a half since I last wrote about bees, and that it was the sort of topic that one examines every 20 years, if that.
     "I think readers really like that kind of thing from you," he said. "Beekeeping. Robotics clubs. Cheesemaking. Stamp collecting. You're so good at that. People get bored with the political stuff, and that's everywhere anyway. Embrace your uniqueness. Why drive readers away when you can draw them closer?"
     Something shifted in my gut. A sinking feeling. A kind of a shiver. An "Oh, I'm so screwed" dread. You spend enough time in an organization, you begin to know its ways. How things are done.

    Remember when WBEZ acquired the Sun-Times last fall? Some were concerned that it meant the paper, now a 501(c)3 charity, could no longer make political endorsements, through some quirk of law I never did figure out. Not that I minded particularly. As someone who sat on the editorial board for five years, I remember what an enormous pain-in-the-ass assembling those recommendations are, tracking down obscure suburban candidates, getting questionnaires to them and then from them, arranging your face into a look of interest while they prattle on about issues you neither know nor care about.
     So farewell to that stuff, and I'm not on the board anyway. Not my table. But I did kinda wonder if it would end there. Or is there another shoe to drop. When would the after echo of the sale reach me? What form would it take? 
     Now here it was, veiled by unmistakable. Bees. And maybe cheese. The oddities reporter. He kept talking while I sort of tuned him out, lost in my own reverie.
     Why not bees? A fascinating subject. Endangered. Our entire ecosystem depends on them. A complex social system: a queen and her Amazon army, the hive, entirely female, which makes them very of the moment. In a way I'd be returning to my roots—I was the paper's environment reporter for a few years in the late 1990s. And WBEZ is certainly within their rights. It's their newspaper. Why shouldn't they move the chess pieces around? Nobody ever bought a bike and  didn't ride it. The check clears, of course they have a say in the coverage. It's to be expected. Some part of the paper are hands off. I'm sure WBEZ isn't planning to give a lot of direction to the Tim Novaks and Andy Grimms and Frank Mains on the staff. Just sit back while they kick ass and take names and wait for the eyeballs, clicks, plaudits and praise come pouring in. Hard news. Exposes. Deep dives into the financial records of bad guys. That's what people talk about when they talk about the importance of journalism.
     But what about me? Staring with clonic fixation at the trivial, the mundane, the off-base and off-kilter. Occasionally pulling my gaze away from insects 
to regard the national and international scene with a cry of outrage. Maybe that's what drew this unwelcome attention, if that is what this is. My sense of alarm. It can be so ... visceral. Maybe too visceral for National Public Radio, which prefers to be more zen, shoeless in linen pajamas, sitting cross-legged in a meditation room, pinging whalesong burbling in the background, eyes half mast, murmuring into a microphone, remote, removed, steeped in that make-a-cathedral-with-your-fingers and intone approach. Nobody screams on NPR. Or pants. Or cackles. Nothing extreme, or Rabelaisian about NPR, they aren't crawling through the sewers and making rude noises and bringing you exposes on men who have difficulty peeing in public settings, as I have done. They don't drive to Madison to meet immigrants who open jars of shit for a living.
    I heard a buzzing in my ears, and realized he was still talking. I tuned back in.
    "...and the pieces you did on Fresca," my boss continued. "Those were excellent. People loved those. We need more of that."
     "Ummm, I...." I began. That's how they do it. No orders. No memos. Nothing in writing. Just a series of gentle nudges, water wearing away the rock. 
     "No need to discuss this now," he said brightly, wrapping up, confirming my worst fears. "Just think about it. More Fresca. Less of that other stuff. And more bees. There's a hive on top of the city hall. And a number of top chefs have their own apiaries. What kind of honey trends are coming up for spring? I've sent you a list of bee-related stories you might want to look into."
     You can see the list yourself here.
     I told him I would have to think about it.