Magazines

I thought I would post about magazines I currently subscribe to.

They are:

America, The Catholic Review-the Catholic newsmagazine put out by the Jesuits. I recently started a subscription, because I am circling around going back to the Roman Catholic Church. It leans moderately liberal.

The New York Review of Books-probably my favorite magazine to read; Bill turned me onto it about 10-15 years ago. I also think it’s the best edited of any magazine I’ve ever read; its voice is always consistent, and I’ve never seen a typo. It is almost always interesting, and every issue has at least a few articles worth reading. What's also great about NYRB is that, even though it purports to be reviewing books, it often uses that as a springboard to take a broad survey of whatever subject area the reviewed book is about. Its political articles are fairly good (probably the best I’ve read since Bush became President), but it is sometimes a bit too Establishment Liberal for my taste.

Whisky Advocate-a quarterly glossy about whisky.

Friends Journal-is a magazine about Quaker life and thought, mainly concerned with issues of concern to Liberal Friends.

Plough-it’s a Christian quarterly, published by the Bruderhof Community. Many of the Bruderhof live in intentional communities, where they share all things in common. The magazine is intended to run the gamut of the Christian experience, though it probably leans toward the Social Gospel. Its articles on marriage and sexuality are more “traditional,” though.

The Nation-I have been a subscriber, off and on, for about 25 years. It was founded by abolitionists in 1865. It’s a political magazine, and basically presents dialogue on current issues between the Social Democratic Left and Liberals. I sometimes think its tone is a little too strident, and I also sometimes think its function is to corral Leftists like me into the Democratic coalition, while letting off steam between National Elections, but I still read it quite often. It had a real good issue within the past two years about cities.

Dogster-a glossy magazine about dogs.

Whole Dog Journal-a newsletter about dog health, with a specific focus on natural alternatives.

Dog Watch-a newsletter put out by the Veterinary College of Cornell.




What magazines do you subscribe to/ recommend?

At Long Last/College Prof Insecurity

Dear All,

At long last, it seems that I have properly signed in and can now post to this blog. I hope that more of you will decide to participate in writing and that those who have already posted will post more. I cannot complain, however, as I have been negligent myself in getting this accomplished.

I'll only write a short piece tonight to get things back in gear. I'm at that moment in the semester where I've decided that everything I've done so far is wrong and that the students are suffering from my inability to give the proper assignments or to judge their papers with efficiency. Mostly this is because I'm looking up at 100+ papers with the threat of a new score appearing on Friday and the looming holidays. My students are more anxious than I've ever seen them -- even the good ones -- which is another cause for my fears. I know that both their fears and my own are mostly ridiculous, but their anxiety seems to be rubbing off on me. The more I try to play it cool, the more worried they are, the poorer they do, and the more anxious I get. It's quite a cycle.

This is my fifth year at Dominican College, my sixth teaching post-doctorate, and my fifteenth overall as a teacher. I've been given the opportunity to teach all kinds of crazy things, from Shakespeare to sci-fi to Latin to medieval lit. I must admit that I'm not sure I have any idea what I'm doing or where this all ends up. I hope that I've made them think -- some have told me that I have -- and that I've made them feel something about the literature -- exactly one has, and she is a bullshit artist. I see older professors begging for some kind of positive feedback from the students, and I worry about falling into that trap.

Don't get me wrong -- students have been kind in their reports about me. I've been told that I have "ill skillz" (no lie) and that I've made really boring stuff like Shakespeare momentarily interesting. I taught a once-a-week, three-hour, medieval-lit class on Thursday nights that filled, and it looks like I'll have a dozen students who'll take a chance on a 1-credit Octavia Butler class next semester. All of that feels good, and my superiors all seem pleased about the level of student interest. But I can't help but wondering how much of that is due to the fact that I don't like giving tests and my papers tend to be more on the "fun" side. Many of them clearly don't do the readings, and while they listen intently in class, I've got to wonder how much is sinking in. I did have a student recite a couple of lines of a sonnet she memorized in a class for me once, so maybe things are okay.

I promise you that any attempt to assure me that everything is probably okay will not work -- as a matter of fact, it may make things worse. If past semesters are any guide, I'll probably wallow in self-pity, fearing that I haven't given them enough homework until the final week, realize that I have a shitload of ungraded papers, curse the amount of work that I did assign, and then rush through it all to get it done in time for the grades to be in. And then I'll take a month off and start it all up again in January with the best of intentions. Shakespeare, medieval lit, and writing in the spring (with maybe some short classes of Tolkien and Butler): I promise it'll all be different next semester. (Yeah, right!!)

Rob

Ford to City: Drop Dead

At JZ's gaming session the other night, I mentioned my friend Chuck's take on the dramatic power of cell phones in a visual medium. I mentioned that he had done some writing on the subject spurred by his watching of Stranger Things. Here is that piece. (His blog is interesting on other points, as well, including Wisconsin politics and the future of the UW System, if you are interested.)

I still stand by his main point, which is this: "This handheld technology and endlessly flowing content might make for a lot of great things; it might save lives daily; it might upend power structures and governments; it might reconnect you with your 8th grade besty–but we need to face the dramatic truth: phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and left swiping are Xanax for the narrative soul." Chuck is writing about the same kinds of things I did in talking about that cafe in Brooklyn that I wrote about a few weeks back. Big picture, I am not at all sure that this is the right road for humanity to be traveling. Long term, where does it get us, this mediated communication, these anonymous comments sections?

Culturally, what is important, anyway? What does "culture" even mean anymore? If shared experience fades from memory, if the way we define ourselves (gender, ethnicity, politics, nationality e.g.) becomes fluid and then gaseous, who are we as a group of people? Just humanity? Well, whose version of humanity? Apple's?

Mike and I recently talked about the Hoboken train station and how much time we spent there while we traveled together to and from Regis. We've got some great memories of that station, including the greatest Paydirt game ever played on the stairs while a blizzard was underway and no trains were running. Imagine the scene as PATH trains, one after the other, disgorged thousands of commuters into the Hoboken station while no surface trains budged! We had a nice crowd for our umpteenth Pats-Raiders grudge match. Lots of middle-aged guys asking what we were doing, taking sides, and cheering us on.

Anyway, I was there again this summer and marveled at how intact it was, how very little had changed. (Glad I saw it before the train accident. Some good old stuff was destroyed in the accident, sad to report.) There was one big change, however. The newsstands are gone! I am ambivalent about pulping the forests of the world to print the internet each day, but newspapers used to be the powerful attractive force that drew together a community. Reading the daily paper was a shared experience that helped to define a city, and culture, a moment in time. I assert that we toss forces like these aside at our own peril. Here is a study of the effect on civic engagement following the closing of two major metropolitan newspapers (short version) (long version).

 

(It is ironic, given my overall thesis, that the people in this picture are conspicuously not talking to each other as they read their papers. I understand that and am not sure what to say about that.)

All of this reminds me also of the ending of Lester Bangs' famous obituary of Elvis in the Village Voice (8/29/77):

"If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. [...] We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you."

I know, I know. The internet allowed me to find the Voice article instantly and to share it effortlessly. I get it. But you have to admit: it was fin seeing those original pages in the Voice, all those ads, the endorsement of a mayoral candidate. It came down to Herman Badillo, Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch, and Bella Abzug. Did you read who they picked? Remember a time when everyone would have read that same article? When what was in the Voice (or the Daily News or the Times) was a starting point for a conversation with (almost) anybody in NYC?

Lathe of Asbury Park

Mike bought the Springsteen memoir for me (thanks!!) and I am a hundred pages into it, and I have to say that one of my main illusions about the man has been shoved aside for good. See, I always had it in my mind that this guy was at least 40% literary, that words came early in the process and that they were a central part of the origin story for Bruce. Turns out that the guitar meant 100% to him, that he wasn't even the singer (I knew that) and that he didn’t really yearn to be (I didn't think that one through until now). Moreover, the bands up and down the shore were just about all instrumental bands when he as coming up and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to a young him that words in a song could have a primary place in the kind of music he loved.So different from the generations that followed. Thank you, Bob Dylan!!

I am hoping the focus of the book changes, that his attention to literary detail becomes a bigger part of the story. Bruce is an interesting guitarist, but I would not say that he is in any way some kind of guitar genius. Songwriting, yes. Lyricist, absolutely. Guitarist? He has his moments, but there is also a lot of incoherent soloing in his live repertoire. So that's the surprising thing about the book so far. But I'd have to say that it is extremely well-written. Very funny in places! Reminds me of the Sinatra biography that the King of Rock recommended a few years back. What was the title of that book, Rock? The thing that struck me about that Sinatra book was how closely identified every kid in his Hoboken neighborhood was with their ethnic identity. The first thing you needed to know about a stranger in Sinatra's neighborhood was ethnicity: Italian? Jewish? Irish? Something else? That got you slotted into your world and your niche in it. 

I still do remember growing up, though, and those vestiges remained. I know (or think I do) the ethnic background of everyone on the yak. Why should that be? Kind of like gender these days for Millennials and Generation Z, the old categories have become so fluid as to have almost vanished. I ask my students sometimes—almost always when they have an obvious Italian or Irish name—if their family arrived here recently and if they have family in zee olt country. Many of them seem shocked to be asked and have no good answer. It is almost as if who we are begins these days with our births. For Springsteen (and for us too), I think, who we are started generations before we happened to be born. Here is how he describes meeting one of the many, many girlfriends who populate this memoir: “She was Italian, funny, a beatific tomboy, with just the hint of a lazy eye, and wore a pair of glasses that made me think of the wonders of the library.” That's a funny line! It's also instructive that the first adjective is so totally locked down on ethnicity. It seems inescapable for a kid of Springsteen's age who is trying to make sense of his world.

This idea obviously intersects with the King's posting of two weeks ago. Springsteen grew up in a world where your ethnicity and heritage determined a great deal about how you might live your life. For kids today, I think, that's much less true. We are curing our society of its terrifying ills by, what, erasing important information from our libraries? I used to be a white male of Irish and Italian (like Bruce!) heritage. I really don’t know what I'd be if I were born these days. I think the old categories are fading. How do we define ourselves? Is it what we do? What we believe? Political party? Socioeconomic status? And what will we all be fifty years hence?   

Not sure where this idea is taking me. I guess I need to keep reading to see how Bruce searches for an finds his community. Once he moves to Rumson in 1983--the home of the preppy rah-rahs with whom he had clashed over the years--how will he define himself? This question continues to have real relevance to me, a person who abandoned home for the Midwest and who still has not found his feet under him. 

Anyone else want to read this book along with me and Mike?

Wounded, Not Dead

“Wind up wounded, not even dead.”

That's always been my favorite line from Springsteen, though "you ain't a beauty, but hey you’re alright" is a close second.

It has always resonated with me. What happens, if, expecting to "go out in a blaze of glory," instead you fail in the attempt? You couldn't even get martyrdom right.

How long does the wound last?

We know it never goes away, whatever the wound is. In fact, for years I have savored mine, sweetly. Francine has often said that when she first knew me, if I was meeting someone new, they'd know the whole morbid history within the first ten minutes.

Tending the wounds.

The great thing about literature is there's an ending, maybe even a consolation. And sometimes, real life is like literature.

I got some consolation this past Summer, in ways that I am still processing, and please forgive me for telling the story if you've heard it, or parts of it before.

You all know the extremely difficult relationship I had with my father. To be honest, it really wasn't a relationship. By the time he passed away, we were totally estranged, though through the mediation of Christopher, he occasionally gave me some money those years I didn't work. We were so estranged that I did not visit him on his deathbed.

At the time, I though the only reason my father was trying to patch things up was his fear of Judgment.

I told my Uncle that-maybe it got to my Dad.

I thought I was standing up for some great principle by refusing to see him.

What did that principle even mean?

Fast forward to 1997. One of my cousins from the UK (who I had never met, and still haven’t met), put together a book listing all the-then descendants of my Irish grandparents, Edmond English (who I had known as Edward; in fact, Chris’ middle name was Edward) and Helena (who I knew as Helen) Cusack. I and my father were named after her father, Thomas Patrick Cusack (though I am not a Junior because my middle name is Robert).

I was estranged from that part of my family, so I put the book away without doing anything about it. 

A few years later, my cousin Anne, who lives in Iowa of all places, one of the daughters of my Uncle John (he passed in 2010) contacted me, having gotten my phone number from the book. John and my dad were very very close. What happens in a very large family is that there are three or four siblings you end up being close to. For my Dad, it was John, Larry, Lizzie, and Alice. So, in a sense, it was a descendant reaching out to a descendant, across time.

I ignored her.

The night before Sandy hit, though, Anne called me to make sure I was alright.

This time, I didn’t ignore her.

Over the past few years, I have been in touch with her often and have gotten to know her well. I also learned one hard-to-forget fact about my dad, which I have told some (if not all of you), but that is something I do not want online. It was something that was so shattering, so wounding, that by the time my father was my 27-year-old dad, he was a broken man.

For a certain type of Irish-American, every St. Patrick’s Day is a time to think of Ireland. Though during their lifetimes I loved my Mom more, even adored her, I think the reason Irish culture has always resonated with me was because it was a way to get at the Dad I never had. This year, I again thought of Ireland, but I decided that this was the time to “go over.” (The Irish always say, “When are you coming over?”). I think part of the inspiration was Anthony and Alysa’s trip to the Ring of Kerry last year.

Through Anne, I met her sister Mary Teresa online, who, along with her husband Pat and their daughters Cliodhna and Aisling, hosted me the first day Francine and I arrived, a Friday. They live in a really nice house in Passage West, a suburb of Cork City. As an aside, I found out a lot of my cousins are in the caring professions-Mary Teresa is a social worker/ nurse at a government-run facility for people with autism, and Pat, retired Navy, is a social worker/ psychotherapist with a practice he runs from their house.

That first Saturday morning, he cooked us a full Irish breakfast.

Amazing.

Later that morning, he drove us to Blarney Castle, where we didn’t actually go to the Castle, but had some coffee and shopped for some Aran sweaters. (My Aunt Eilie had made one for my dad about 40 years ago, which I retired about 10 years ago).

In the afternoon he drove us to Kilfinane, a small town in Limerick, where we stayed with my Aunt Ann for the weekend. My Aunt Liz was also visiting with her daughter Clare.

Three months later, I cannot get over how absolutely heart-stoppingly beautiful everything was! The green is just a different green than the green that greens here. If I can swing it, I’d like to live there whenever I “retire.” I started researching how to get dual citizenship last year, and will put it on the front-burner next year. I want to go every chance I can afford to and have the time.

But as beautiful as the land was and is, and how I understand why the Irish love their land so, and how the land just LIVES with the past, that’s not the most important thing, though maybe it is related to the most important thing.

Cullane Middle, about 40 minutes from Kilfinane, is a townland in County Limerick. A townland is basically a crossroads, with maybe three or four cottages next to each other. The nearest actual town, with a current population of 333, is a pleasant little place called Ballylanders. It comes from the Irish, Baile an Londraigh, or “Town of the Londoner.” That might explain my last name. I have always suspected the fact that “English” was an Irish last name was a bit of the Irish humor. It is also about 14 kilometers from Mitchelstown, a town known for its cheese and other dairy products, with 3,300 residents.

One of the cottages in Cullane Middle is the house where my father was born. He had (I think) 14 brothers and sisters, born between 1924 and 1944, though I can’t imagine there were more than 8-10 siblings living in the place at any one time! The house is currently owned by his brother, Larry, and Larry’s wife, Mary. One of their sons is also named Tom English, and he lives in Moscow.

My visit to the old family cottage, Sunville House, was the central reason for my trip. Aunt Ann drove Francine, my Aunt Lizzie, and her daughter, Clare, to the house late on Sunday afternoon. I had heard that Larry was very shy (I think he is a retired prison guard), and not necessarily very friendly. I was a little nervous because of that, and also because he was very close to my father and might be a little angry for my estrangement.

When we first got there, he did seem a little depressed, and was lying in bed, under the covers, watching the Kilkenny vs Galway All-Ireland Hurling Semifinal. (The room where he was watching TV was the actual room where my father was born.) I didn’t want to push it, so I was quiet myself. Uncle Larry said we’d watch the game until the end (about 20 minutes), and then we’d join the women in the kitchen. We talked a little bit, and slowly but surely, he warmed up to me. He gave me a picture of himself with my Irish grandmother from the 60s and a sliotar (pronounced “shlidder”), or hurling ball. It’s a lot like a baseball, but harder.

When the game was over, we walked to the kitchen, where a kettle of tea had been made and my Aunt Mary was serving cake and sandwiches. The Irish drink tea almost all the time; there’s always a kettle at the table and one boiling on the stove.

I sat down. Then it hit me-all the emotions of a lifetime came over me, my relationship with my father, his relationship with my mom, Chris, and me, what it must have been like to live in such a beautiful country, how my family thought it was a bad idea for him to go the States, fragile and broken at 22, what he must have been like before that, when he was a boy, how I treated him when he was sick.

I lost my composure, and had to leave the room. Francine immediately followed me to make sure I was OK, and I was crying, saying “he never had a chance, he never had a chance, I was too hard on him.”

After I calmed down, I went back to the kitchen.

Then, like the Irish often do, we decided to sing. I sang “Four Green Fields,” one of my father’s favorite songs. I had a very palpable sense that he was singing through me, especially to his brother Larry and his sister Liz, and adding and taking lifeblood from my family. I also had a great sense of being part of a stream or a river-my individual existence didn’t matter so much. I was just one expression of the English life-force (Auntie Lizzie said she could tell that I was an English just by hearing the way I talked, and Francine said there was a certain family charisma I shared).

There is something to the Christian metaphor of Heaven as a banquet; I felt as if somehow the Divine cracked through. I did not despair that some day we were all going to die. I knew that there would be other, similar, Tom Englishes, maybe others who fancy themselves Kings of Rock.

Epiphanies end, unfortunately, but when I hugged Uncle Larry for a last goodbye, I felt I was a source of some consolation, too. In me, he was able to see his brother who he missed.

Wounded, not even dead.

Maybe I was lucky after all to tend that wound-from its nagging hurt I was able to create some happiness.

Here are the pictures from our trip.

The first link is to Francine’s album, the second is to mine.

https://1drv.ms/a/s!Ao1bH36neWScmF2rhET2KXD21A-5

https://www.flickr.com/photos/142224243@N04/albums/72157669869437520

Who is Xeno?

The thing that stood out as the biggest departure from the play in Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time was her concentration on the relationship between Leontes and Polixenes (Leo and Xeno).  At first, I really appreciated this.  Their boarding school relationship was more interesting than the whole baby drop episode. And over time, I thought Winterson did a great job fleshing out Leo's character into something recognizable and believable.  He's a narcissist and materialist (very Trumpian) who only grudgingly and almost imperceptibly gains some small wisdom through the extraordinary and implausible action of the play.  But it seemed to me that Winterson set up Xeno as something more; more self-aware, more depth, more understanding.  But for me, the follow through on his character just wasn't there.  After the action shifts to the younger generation, which wasn't all that compelling, I kept waiting for Xeno's return, but it came with a whimper, rather than a bang.  It just never seemed resolved.  I found the denouement "Xeno came and stood beside him.  He put his arm around Leo. Leo was crying now, long tears of rain. That which is lost is found." a trite and insufficient resolution.

Winterson writes (pg. 270) "Polixenes, who has our sympathy in Act One, proves himself as conventional and irrational as Leontes, when in Part Two he tries to wreck the love between his son, Florizel, and Perdita with death threats as sexually sadistic as anything dreamed up by Leontes".  In the play perhaps, but this is largely missing from the cover version!  I liked her general point that the Romances are about forgiveness, and overall I enjoyed the book.  But I've never seen The Winter's Tale as she does - "a private text for me for more than thirty years".  I'd put it way down the list of plays that remain in my consciousness and occasionally surface.  Perhaps that's why I didn't appreciate this more.

But I remain engaged and enthusiastic about the Hogarth series; and to this blog, dedicated to its exploration and discussion.  I put aside Shylock Is My Name, but will gladly pick it up once everyone has weighed in on The Gap Of Time.

Still Life With Psychiatric Hospital

I wrote this last week to Rob and Rich. I thought this prequel might provide background to my real blog entry (below). Sorry for hogging all the space to get started. Who's next?

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At the start of the summer, I had some big plans to be productive which, for an English nerd, means writing. I had some time and some good ideas and I was ready to get rolling. My summer Harry Potter class loomed in July, but I could handle that. It was fun, in fact, to plan for each day of that course. I had a commitment in Kansas City grading AP exams, a task I truly despise, but we needed the money, and so I said yes. On the way there—the first week of June—the air conditioner in my car died at the Illinois-Wisconsin line. The temp that day soared into the high 90s and I was driving right into that flaming orb for hours and hours. I got dehydrated without really feeling it coming and then started feeling really, really rotten somewhere west of St Louis. GPS took me to the nearest hospital, and the good folks there rehydrated me and monitored me for two hours while I recovered. They seemed a little surprised to see me for some reason. A half dozen nurses were in my room at one point just chatting. It was a fun night in the emergency department. I found out later that this hospital was actually a psychiatric hospital for women that has a lightly-used emergency room due to the regional trauma center just a mile down the road. I was big news in this place, a patient neither female nor in need of psychiatric treatment. Funny!

I spent the following week at Tim’s in St Louis recovering and waiting for the heat to break a little bit. I got a ton of good Harry Potter prep done that week, part of which I spent at the Wash U library. Super impressive. Finally, I just decided to drive all night to avoid the sun on the way home to Appleton.  That brought me right up against the start of the Harry Potter course still feeling a bit hazy. I jumped right back into my second job as a college counselor. On my return, my dean asked me if I would help him do some personnel work at UW-Manitowoc. I said sure, and that brought a fourth job into my summer, one that required a lot of travel. It more or less killed my late June and all of July for writing, but we need the money. I kind of like academic hiring process, anyway. Lots of interesting people out there.

Why is money so tight these days, you ask? Well, Gwen (who is 12) is playing hockey now at a very high level. She’s got a lot of travel opportunities these days and has already met informally with a college coach (RIT). Exciting stuff. The newer news is that Imogen spent three weeks in Brooklyn this summer dancing at a pre-professional program in classical ballet. There were fifty girls in the program and two were asked to join the year-round professional training program. Imogen really wants to make a go of a professional career in ballet, and so we pulled the belt even tighter and said yes. We had to figure out a way for her to live, and so the tentative plan was for her to stay with my parents in North Haledon, NJ (next door to Jeff), and commute each day. That’s expensive and time-consuming. Our preliminary budget put us well over two grand in the hole every month. Then Liz’s miraculous wedding happened, and we got to talking to one of my first cousins, Katie, a woman I had not seen in decades. Her dad (my uncle) married into Oklahoma oil money—lots of it—and now Katie happens to have an extra apartment that they never use on 72^nd St between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Katie offered it to Imogen for as long as she wants it. Is that incredible luck, or what? But Imogen in NYC on her own didn’t sit right with us, and so now Susan is quitting her job and moving with Imogen to NYC from September to May to be her stage mom. If she is able to make some money while Imogen dances, then we might be able to pull this off. If not, then we’re truly sunk. Bankruptcy sunk.

But my philosophy has been that we get only one chance to raise our kids. We’ll have plenty of time (we hope) after they’re out of the house to try to work out net worth back to zero before we retire for good. And so we’re going for it. Banzai. No regrets. The full monty.

I am here in Milwaukee tonight at the rink typing this while Gwen skates with her team, the Milwaukee Jr Admirals (an affiliate of the AHL team of the same name, minus the Jr). I finished my second day of school today and am too tired to think about sleeping, let alone the two hour drive I have home tonight from this rink. We’ve got no money. I’m working three jobs. Our little family is splitting into two pieces for the foreseeable future, and I desperately miss my wife and daughter already!

If I think about all of it, I feel something like vertigo.

Writing helps.