Category storytelling

The Saturday Read ‘The Missing of the Somme’ by Geoff Dyer

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

Geoff Dyer has a new book out this summer, ‘White Sands: Experiences From the Outside World’ , but it’s a book originally published in 1994 that is The Saturday Read this week – ‘The Missing of The Somme’.

Dyer may defy categorization as an author, but one constant in his writing, is a theme of travel, highlighted by his publisher in a description of the current title.

“Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries “to work out what a certain place—a certain way of marking the landscape—means; what it’s trying to tell us; what we go to it for.”

‘The Missing of the Somme’ begins with the images and memory of his grandfather and continues on a road trip through the great war battlefields, pristinely kept, to ensure memory.

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The title comes from the memorial at Thiepval, France to ‘The Missing of the Somme’. The 131 pages explore the landscape of France and Belgium in an extended essay exploring the monuments, cemeteries, and literature that materialized from a time of “fear that people would forget”. A time when ‘soldier poets’ emerged from the battlefields to create a literary narrative of events, in contrast to the propaganda of the media.

This is Dyer’s strength in storytelling. You think you have opened a ‘war book’ and you find you have signed on for an unexpected adventure. The ‘origin’ story of the book is itself a tangent. He originally moved to Paris in the early 90’s to write a novel based on Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night’, and ended up writing a book about world war one. (F. Scott does make an appearance.)

In a 2013 Paris Review interview, Dyer addressed reader’s expectations, as a function of a publisher/marketer definition.

“I think the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is less about “Did it really happen or was it made up?” than it is about form. And, more than form, it’s about the expectations that are brought to certain forms. According to how a book is presented, packaged, or identified, readers have certain expectations. Following from that they expect books within broadly identified categories to behave in certain ways. So people can find it quite disconcerting when a book isn’t doing what they think it’s meant to be doing, even if the book is completely fine on its own terms and has no desire to conform to some external set of expectations. My books are often disappointing in that regard.”

You may read Dyer for the element of surprise, but it’s in his prose that your investment in time is rewarded, as illustrated in this short excerpt.

“But history does not lie uniformly over events. Here and there it forms drifts – and these drifts are at their deepest between the years 1914 – 1918. Watching footage of the Normandy landings, we can experience D-Day as it happened. History hangs in the balance, waiting to be made. The Battle of the Somme, by contrast, is deeply buried in its own aftermath. The euphoric intoxication of the early days of the French Revolution – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn’ – remains undiminished by the terror lying in wait a few chapters on. The young men queuing up to enlist in 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead. By (Johan) Huizinga’s terms, the great war urges us to write the opposite of history: the story of effects generating their cause.”

“Even when it was raging, the characteristic attitude of the war was to look forward to the time it would be remembered.”

When ‘The Missing of the Somme’ was published in Great Britain, there was no American interest. The first world war still competes for attention in American culture. Fortunately, we have Geoff Dyer to remind us that “the war’s true subject is remembrance”.

 

 

‘From the Somme’ a poem by Leslie Coulson

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

The Friday Poem this week is ‘From the Somme’, by journalist, poet and soldier of the first world war, Leslie Coulson. The poem was included in a collection of poetry, ‘first world war  poems’, published in 2014.

“Leslie Coulson fought in Malta, Egypt and Gallipoli, where he was wounded. He recovered in hospital in Egypt, was sent to France and was killed in action at the Battle of the Somme. Shortly before he died, he wrote in a letter, ‘If I should fall do not grieve for me. I shall be one with the wind and the sun and the flowers.'”

In remembrance of the Battle of the Somme, one of the lesser known poets of the great war reflects on the impact of the battle on his worldview. His voice carries through the century to speak to all who are transformed by tragedy.

From the Somme

In other days I sang of simple things,
Of summer dawn, and summer noon and night,
The dewy grass, the dew-wet fairy rings,
The larks long golden flight.

Deep in the forest I made melody
While squirrels cracked their hazel nuts on high,
Or I would cross the wet sand to the sea
And sing to sea and sky.

When came the silvered silence of the night
I stole to casements over scented lawns,
And softly sang of love and love’s delight
To mute white marble fauns.

Oft in the tavern parlour I would sing
Of morning sun upon the mountain vine,
And, calling for a chorus, sweep the string
In praise of good red wine.

I played with all the toys the gods provide,
I sang my songs and made glad holiday
Now I have cast my broken toys aside
And flung my lute away.

A singer once, I now am fain to weep,
Within my soul I feel strange music swell,
Vast chants of tragedy too deep – too deep
For my poor lips to tell.

Leslie Coulson (1889-1916)  ‘first world war poems’ edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, 2014

The generational divide – #wearehere and #Brexit

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

A collection of amateur photos taken by ordinary British citizens, on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, served to bridge a century, and punctuate the generational divide that led ‘the lost generation’ to war, and ‘the millennials’ to #Brexit.

The topic #wearehere started trending early Friday morning as British citizens headed to work and encountered young men clad in the uniforms of World War I. For a few hours, in London, Aberystwyth, Birmingham, Sheffield, Salisbury, and Plymouth, the ghost soldiers of the Somme walked among their contemporaries.

Many of those first encounters were recorded on Twitter and Instagram, as commuters received cards from these ‘soldiers’.CmRNYS-UkAUqr3d“Thousands of volunteers took part in a UK-wide event on Friday 1 July 2016, as a modern memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. 19,240 men were killed on the first day of the battle in 1916 – the bloodiest day in British military history.

‘we’re here because we’re here’ saw around 1400 voluntary participants dressed in First World War uniform appear unexpectedly in locations across the UK. Each participant represented an individual soldier who was killed on that day one hundred years before.”

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Charlotte Higgins reported on the day for The Guardian newspaper. “The event, which unfolded without advance publicity, can now be revealed as a work by Jeremy Deller, the Turner prize-winning artist…Deller worked with Rufus Norris, the artistic director of the National Theatre in London, and theatres throughout the UK to train the volunteer army.

Deller was approached to devise an artwork to mark the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme by 14-18 NOW, the body responsible for art commissions commemorating the war. “I quickly realised that what I didn’t want was a static memorial that the public went to to be sad,” he said. “In the 21st century I felt we had do something different. So I thought about the memorial being human, and travelling round the country. It would take itself to the public rather than the public taking itself to the memorial.”

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“And also the public wouldn’t know in advance that there was this thing happening – they would encounter it in the shopping centres and carparks and outside schools and in everyday British life. And I wanted to avoid heritage places – churches, war memorials. I wanted to take it to the public.” His key idea, he said, was to “avoid sentimentality”.

Look at the photo of the finale at Waterloo Station. A group of soldiers at the center are surrounded by their contemporaries, telegraphing the moment to social media. Two generations, a century apart facing unknown fates @war, and after #Brexit.

CmcwkjWWcAAb1sy.jpgThe politics of the early 20th century led to over a million British, French and German casualties in the Battle of the Somme between July 1 and November 18, 1916.

The rhetoric of current political leaders called into question today’s younger generation’s European identity.

So what have we learned in 100 years?

Someone thought it would be a great idea to preserve the peace and form a European Union. For all its frailties, its crowning achievement was replacing nationalism with an overlay of a ‘European’ identity; a multilingual, multicultural generation that travels freely across the continent to study, work, live and love.

Francesca Barber, a self-described ‘transnational’, gave voice to this dilemma of altered identity in the wake of #Brexit.

“I was born in Washington in the late 1980s, grew up in Brussels, moved to London and then returned to the United States, where I lived in New York City; Providence, R.I.; and San Francisco.

My parents are English. My first language was French. I went to a Belgian school and the European School in Brussels, where my classmates almost always spoke at least three languages.

My childhood was defined by endless car journeys across Europe. And as an adult, I have enjoyed the benefits of cheap deals on low-cost European airlines. Most of my friends have gone to school and worked in at least two European countries. I am part of the Erasmus generation. My friends and my roots are everywhere — and only now do I realize how much I took that for granted.

The “Brexit” vote on June 23 was the most serious geopolitical event for Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But lost in all the geopolitics is another important message: It was a resounding vote against globalization from a country that has for so long been a proud champion of globalization.

But this vote was also a rejection by my fellow countrymen, from my parents’ generation to mine, of everything I cherished about Europe, Britain and my own childhood: the sense that our differences were less important than our shared experiences.”

Maybe it’s time for a ‘we are here’ for the European millennials – a ‘counter Brexit’, public art project.  What if, on a Friday morning, all over Britain, young workers approached commuters with CV profile cards, each participant representing a dream lost to Brexit? Mr. Deller, Mr. Norris we could use your help here.

 

 

The Saturday Read ‘I Was Amelia Earhart’ by Jane Mendelsohn

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Sometimes the stories behind what we read are as interesting as the books themselves. We now know that the musical Hamilton had its inception when creator Lin-Manuel Miranda picked up a book in an airport on the way to vacation.

Jane Mendelsohn, the author of this week’s Saturday Read, ‘I Was Amelia Earhart’ found her inspiration reading a newspaper article about the aviator while riding a train into New York .

“I didn’t know much about Amelia Earhart, but the idea of her surviving on a desert island, even if only for a little while, appealed to me, sang to me, waved furiously to me from a great distance. Perhaps this was because I felt at the time as if I were flying hopelessly around the world and searching for land, longing for one of those islands of stability some of us keep looking for in our 20s, a braceleted wrist held up to the face, hand shielding our eyes from the harsh sun of adulthood, not realizing that we will have to build that island for ourselves. Whatever the reason, I was certainly not the first person to be fascinated by Earhart’s disappearance. Nor the last.”

Where will you find inspiration this holiday weekend?

On this 79th anniversary of Earhart’s disappearance, go back in time as newspapers around the world reported the news:

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“Coast Guard headquarters was advised tonight that Amelia Earhart was believed to have alighted on the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island shortly after 5 P.M. Eastern daylight time today.

A message from the cutter Itasca, stationed in the vicinity of the island in the mid-Pacific, said:

“Earhart unreported at Howland at 7 P.M. [E.D.T.]. Believe down shortly after 5 P.M. Am searching probable area and will continue.”

Author Mendelsohn imagines the other side of story, as Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan transition from pioneers of the sky, to survivors on a tiny Pacific atoll.

“It went very quickly, those first few days. They got out of the plane, and together looked around and tried to make sense of their surroundings. Then all of a sudden, as if part of the choreography of a dream, they set about performing the necessary rituals of survival.

They check the radio, which picks up nothing, and the fuel tank, which is low but not empty, and they confirm their worst suspicions – that they have no idea where they are…They build a fire on the beach to attract attention. They know that a search will have already begun.”

It’s not too long before Earhart spots a plane.

“In the morning I see a speck appear on the horizon, a black spot the size of an insect.

The point of blackness, which at first appears to be nothing more than a gnat, keeps coming closer, heading directly toward the island, and I tell myself that it must be a figment of my imagination. But after two minutes, it assumes the form of a plane to such perfection that I need a moment to recognize what it is…At first I take off my scarf and gesticulate furiously, but as the plane appears to lose altitude, I begin to relax and wave it calmly, welcoming it ashore. Everything about this plane conveys purpose and assurance, as if it had been designed solely to rescue us. I find the promise of its shape more beautiful than anything I have ever seen, but strangely lost to me, although I don’t understand why until it comes closer and I am able to determine that despite my wish it is not coming toward the island at all. It looked as if it were heading directly at me, but as I watch it grow larger I see it pass overhead, high above, too far to see me as I desperately shake my scarf. It circles once – for an instant I image that it is heading toward the water and I think I can make out black pontoons for landing – and then it makes a wide turn, points back to the mysterious place from whence it has come, and flies away. It hasn’t seen me at all.”

The mystery of Earhart’s disappearance continues to arouse interest as researchers continue to search for a remnant of the missing plane. Mendelsohn’s narrative offers the reader an alternative history, employing beautiful prose to recreate a time when “Planes used to be vehicles for dreaming…As soon as you saw a plane, you started dreaming. It was a thrill just to catch a glimpse of one. “

In 2012 Jane Mendelsohn revisited the subject of her 1996 novel in an Op-Ed for The New York Times.

“We still wonder what happened to Amelia Earhart — perhaps soon we may even find out — but do we know what to do with her? Do we know how to make not just her mysterious disappearance but also her miraculous life relevant and inspiring to our global society? And could she matter across the globe, that ball around which she tried to fly that feels so much smaller today but is in fact exactly the same size it was then?

Historically, one thing America has been good at is offering inspiration. We haven’t been doing a brilliant job of it lately, but in Amelia Earhart we have something, someone, to offer the 21st century: a heroine. She was a leader, not a passive bystander. She was strong, not a victim. And she was not born into a rich family, as were many other women pilots of her day, but was lifted up by her own accomplishments. In other words, she gives us good shoes to fill.”

On this weekend, when we celebrate our nation’s independence, read ‘I Was Amelia Earhart’ and discover why her life still inspires.

“Amelia Earhart can be a beacon for our country and for women and men around the globe because everyone, each of us, needs to be “aware of the hazards” and accept “the inevitable risks.”… Earhart’s mystery endures because of who she was as a person, the pilot of her own destiny, mistakes, failures and dreams, reachable and unreachable. She still beckons.”

‘Transmission’ a poem by Rachel Richardson

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

On July 2nd, 1937 aviator Amelia Earhart was attempting to be the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan had completed 22,000 miles of a 29,000 mile journey when transmission was lost. Ten ships, 3,000 men and 100 aircraft searched for the missing plane. The disappearance remains a mystery and has generated multiple conspiracy theories and continuing efforts by private organizations to discover the wreckage.

Earhart had become an early twentieth century role model for women. Her final note to her husband acknowledged the danger as well as her feminism.

“Please know I am quite aware of the hazards of the trip. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”

The Friday Poem by Rachel Richardson captures an imagined ‘transmission’ from the final moments of that flight.

Transmission

There was a girl who heard it happen:
Amelia Earhart calling
on the radio, she and her navigator
alternately cursing and defining their position
by latitude, as best they could read it
in the bellowing wind, and by what
they could surmise of their rate per hour,
last land they’d seen. Stay with me, someone,
and the girl wrote each word
in her composition book, kept the channel
tuned, hunched to the receiver
when static overtook the line.
Why do I think of her?
The coast guard laughed at her father
holding out the schoolgirl scrawl
and sent him home ashamed. A lost woman
is a lost woman, he told her, and the sea
is dark and wide.

Rachel Richardson  The New York Times Magazine  January 22, 2016

 

 

The Saturday Read ‘Max Perkins: Editor of Genius’ by A.Scott Berg

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

How many of you have turned your senior thesis into a career?

In 1971, recent Princeton graduate, A. Scott Berg began the seven-year process of expanding his college research into the biography of book editor Max Perkins. Earlier this month, a 38 year long journey, from the first film option of the 1978 National Book Award winning biography, ended with the opening of ‘Genius’ in theaters.

The Saturday Read this week is ‘Max Perkins:Editor of Genius’, a story that defines the role of a professional mentor as the narrative unfolds.

Allison Silver interviewed the author in 1981 for an article on the relationships between biographers and their subjects.

“Scott Berg’s biography ”Max Perkins: Editor of Genius” grew out of a fascination, bordering on fixation, for F. Scott Fitzgerald. At Princeton, Mr. Berg wrote his senior thesis on Perkins’s relations with Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and Fitzgerald during the 1920’s. Mr. Berg realized there was a book in the life of the Scribner’s editor, and felt he was the one to write it. On graduation day, 1971, he told his roommate, ”I’ll take three months to research it, three months to write it and then another three months to get it published.” Mr. Berg remembers this philosophically. ”I was only six years off.”

Berg introduces Perkins at age sixty-one, in 1946, as he enters a storefront on Forty-third street in Manhattan, to speak to a group of students enrolled in an extension course on book publishing. “All were eager to find a foothold publishing and were attending the weekly seminars to increase their chances.”

“Maxwell Everts Perkins was unknown to the general public, but to people in the world of books he was a major figure, a kind of hero. For he was the consummate editor. As a young man he had discovered great new talents – such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe – and he had staked his career on them, defying the established tastes of the earlier generation and revolutionizing American literature. He had been associated with one firm, Charles Scribner’s Sons, for thirty-six years, and during that time, no editor at any house even approached his record for finding gifted authors and getting them into print.”

For many years this biography has been a ‘bible’ for aspiring editors. In this time of book publishing ‘disruption’, when editors have become an endangered species, it’s worth the readers’ time to travel to post WWI New York, when a different type of disruption was taking place as the novels of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe began to appear on book shelves.

Let’s return to the 1946 extension class, as Berg continues his first chapter.

‘”The first thing you must remember,” he said, without quite facing his audience: “An editor does not add to a book. At best he serves as a handmaiden to an author. Don’t ever get to feeling important about yourself, because an editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing…A writers best work…comes entirely from himself…Because in the end an editor can get only as much out of an author as the author has in him.”‘

This advice, shared with folks pursuing a career in publishing, could be edited for any contemporary management text to define the modern day mentoring relationship.

“Beginning with Fitzgerald and continuing with each new writer he took on, he slowly altered the traditional notion of the editor’s role. He sought out authors who were not just “safe”, conventional in style and bland in content, but who spoke in a new voice about the values of the postwar world. In this way, as an editor he did more than reflect the standards of his age; he consciously influenced and changed them by the new talents he published…

The successful editor is one who is constantly finding new writers, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success. The thrill of developing fresh writing makes the search worthwhile, even when the waiting and working becomes months, sometimes years, of drudgery and frequent disappointment.”

The biography offers a chronological timeline of relationships with the icons of early twentieth century American literature: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe and Ring Lardner. It also includes his nurturing of emerging women writers in the 1930s: Marcia Davenport, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Taylor Caldwell. In the final chapter, we meet two of the last authors Perkins edits in 1946 and 1947: James Jones, author of ‘From Here to Eternity’ and Alan Paton, author of ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’. Max Perkins died on June 17, 1947.

How do you turn you senior thesis into a career? In the 1981 interview with Allison Silver, Berg shared his secret.

“During his first months of research, the scope of his work broadened every day until, by the end of that summer, he says, ”I made a private pact with myself then that I would work on the book until I finished it.” Mr. Berg remembers deciding ”that I was not going to be a slave to arbitrary dates; because, in truth, I owed Max Perkins more than that. Suddenly I went into twilight-zone time.”

This attitude toward deadlines has remained with Mr. Berg. He recommends that anyone involved in a long project should ”move to Los Angeles, because the seasons don’t change and you’re not aware of the passage of time. To this day I cannot account for three months between May and September, 1974.”

The week@work – Tonys, LinkedIn, Microsoft, ‘Brexit’, Orlando, and how to make a good teacher

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This week@work the amazing Broadway production of Hamilton took home eleven Tony awards, Microsoft absorbed LinkedIn, young workers in Great Britain contemplated life after ‘Brexit’, journalist Anderson Cooper reported from Orlando, and we learned teaching can be taught.

Rolling Stone Magazine reporters Amy Plitt and Phoebe Reilly tallied the ’20 Best, Worst and WTF Moments at 2016 Tony Awards’.

“On a night that was marked by tragedy — and occurring mere hours after news broke of the deadly mass shooting in Orlando, Florida — the Tonys provided a much-needed bit of levity. The performers and honorees didn’t shy away from speaking about the shocking events of the day, but the overall mood was one of celebration. Part of the credit goes to the master of ceremonies James Corden, best known as the goofy host CBS’s Late Late Show, yet still a dorky theater kid at heart; his charming, cheerful persona brought an upbeat mood to the proceedings. And the Hamilton effect — and the fact that it was just a strong year for Broadway in general, with plenty of wonderful productions to celebrate — surely had something to do with it as well.”

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One of the best moments was James Cordon’s resume review of Tony nominated actors and their appearances on Law and Order.

“If you’ve ever thumbed through a Playbill wondering “Where have I seen that actor before?!?,” the answer is usually: Law & Order. Corden made very rewarding use of this New York actor résumé mainstay last night when he called on Claire Danes for her memorable portrayal of … L&O’s Tracy Brandt. The joke only got better as Corden showed footage of Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs and Leslie Odom Jr. (who were in the same episode!) and poor Danny Burstein — the Fiddler on the Roof star played six different roles on the series, and each time Corden flashed the photo of another character, the audience (and Burstein) laughed harder. Apparently, there is absolutely no continuity on Law & Order.”

And now you know.

The breaking business story on Monday was news of the Microsoft/LinkedIn acquisition. The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann examined ‘LinkedIn’s Complicated Bet on the Future of Work’.

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“LinkedIn, the business-oriented social-networking company that Microsoft acquired, this week, for $26.2 billion, was founded on two premises. The first was that, even in the winner-take-all world of Internet businesses, there would still be room for a niche company (meaning, in this case, only four hundred million registered users, and a hundred million users per month). The second was that what it means to work in a business is now profoundly different from what it was in the Organization Man era. White-collar employees are highly unlikely to spend a lifetime with a single employer, and more and more are not employees at all in the traditional sense. They self-manage their careers, in part by maintaining online personal networks, rather than have them managed by a corporate human-relations department.”

Now LinkedIn will function as part of a Fortune 50 corporate structure and employees will move from an entrepreneurial culture/ stock option pay structure to an “alternative universe, where, by tech-company standards, employees stay an unusually long time—the average tenure at Microsoft is five years, versus two years at Google, according to data from the consulting firm PayScale—and are unlikely to get rich from their stock options zooming up in value, as was the case for Microsoft employees back in the twentieth century. They are going to be their world’s equivalent of corporate lifers, with generous salaries and benefits and some measure of job security, while working to promote the continued growth of a very different kind of work arrangement elsewhere in the economy.

The technology world seems to be creating a small number of extremely successful people, a larger number of well-treated corporate employees, and an even larger number of people who wish they could be employees.”

And then there are the rest of us who now face the prospect of LinkedIn ads invading our quiet space as we commit great thoughts to Word and fill in Excel spreadsheets.

Randall Stross shared his opinion, ‘Why LinkedIn Will Make You Hate Microsoft Word’.

“My version of Word, a relatively recent one, is not that different from the original, born in software’s Pleistocene epoch. It isn’t networked to my friends, family and professional contacts, and that’s the point. Writing on Word may be the only time I spend on my computer in which I can keep the endless distractions in the networked world out of sight.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,” said the move reflected a failure to understand what writers need. “Most of the most innovative writing tools now on the market position themselves precisely as distraction-free platforms,” he said.

What Mr. Nadella fails to see is how extending LinkedIn’s “social fabric” to Word will kill the magic, not speed it up.”

On Thursday, voters in Great Britain will choose to leave or remain in the European Union. Kimiko De Freitas-Tamura reported ‘Brexit’ Vote Worries European Up-and-Comers Lured to Britain’.

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“For years, Britain’s relatively vibrant economy has attracted a steady flow of young people fleeing a lack of opportunity in their home countries on the Continent. London in particular is full of young Europeans, who have helped give the city its dynamic, global feel. From entrepreneurs, bankers and fashion designers to artists, waiters and students, all are free to resettle in Britain and make their futures here without so much as a visa.

No one knows for sure what would happen to them if Britain voted to leave the European Union — their immigration status would have to be worked out in the negotiations that would follow — but the debate itself has left some of the young people feeling fearful, frustrated and even angry.

Journalist Anderson Cooper covered the mass shootings in Orlando this week, demonstrating empathy for the victims and tenacity in interviews with politicians. Michael M. Grynbaum profiled the CNN anchor for The New York Times.

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“Anderson Cooper was reading the names of victims of the Orlando massacre on CNN this week when, uncharacteristically, his voice wavered and he drew up short. For moments, viewers around the country heard only silence, and then the sounds of the anchor struggling to compose himself.

As the news industry descended on Florida this week in the aftermath of a mass shooting in a gay nightclub, Mr. Cooper’s raw, activist-style coverage has stood out. He has held a prime-time vigil of sorts, reciting a list of the dead; refused to name the gunman, saying he wanted to focus on victims; and, in a widely viewed exchange, grilled Florida’s attorney general for defending a state ban on same-sex marriage.”

It was a very tough week@work. Colleagues celebrating their day off late Saturday into Sunday morning were viciously murdered in a gay nightclub in Orlando, and on Thursday, Member of Parliament Jo Cox was murdered as she went to work to meet with her constituents in West Yorkshire.

The last story, from The Economist, ‘How to Make a Good Teacher’.

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“Big changes are needed in schools, too, to ensure that teachers improve throughout their careers. Instructors in the best ones hone their craft through observation and coaching. They accept critical feedback—which their unions should not resist, but welcome as only proper for people doing such an important job. The best head teachers hold novices’ hands by, say, giving them high-quality lesson plans and arranging for more experienced teachers to cover for them when they need time for further study and practice.

Money is less important than you might think. Teachers in top-of-the-class Finland, for example, earn about the OECD average. But ensuring that the best stay in the classroom will probably, in most places, mean paying more. People who thrive in front of pupils should not have to become managers to earn a pay rise. And more flexibility on salaries would make it easier to attract the best teachers to the worst schools.

Improving the quality of the average teacher would raise the profession’s prestige, setting up a virtuous cycle in which more talented graduates clamoured to join it. But the biggest gains will come from preparing new teachers better, and upgrading the ones already in classrooms.”

Here’s what I think. Improving the quality of teachers will improve the quality of content taught. It will ensure a ‘safe space’ to openly discuss the issues facing our neighborhoods, counties, countries and continents. Good teachers remove the blinders of hate and discrimination. A courageous teacher at the front of the classroom cautions the young against the errors of the past, and is the best antidote to history repeating itself.

A good teacher reminds us that we are all teachers.

paris

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Saturday Read – Revisiting ‘The Sage of Waterloo’ by Leona Francombe

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

Two hundred and one years ago, on June 18, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte led his troops in battle against those of the Duke of Wellington on a farm three miles south of Waterloo in Belgium. At the end of the day, close to 50,000 soldiers were dead and French domination of the continent came to an end.

A number of books were published last spring to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the bloodshed. One, ‘The Sage of Waterloo’ by Leona Francombe, recalls events through a very different form of ‘oral history’. For this ‘Saturday Read’ we return to Hougoumont.

“Hougoumont is…dear me, where are the words? It’s a mute place, you see, but with such startling eloquence. Perhaps the fact that few visitors to the battlefield even know it exists fosters the air of an unopened message. Physically speaking, it’s a ruin: a decaying farmstead of brick and sandstone in perfect complicity with the land. The other, less tangible things are far more difficult to describe. Go there yourself and you’ll feel it: the knowing wind; the trees scarred as leviathans; and a strange sort of peace that isn’t peaceful at all but alert with memory and other, less palatable phenomena. Sometimes, when the wind comes off the eastern fields, it’s as if a worn curtain is shifting, and through a tear in the fabric you can see something unimaginable for such a sleepy backwater.”

I reviewed this exquisite story last year, and after this week of tragedy in Orlando and Birstall, West Yorkshire, ‘The Sage’ seemed to beckon from the bookshelf, inviting a return to the wisdom of Old Lavender.

“”Nature never truly recovers from human cataclysms,” Grandmother said one day, to me alone. “Never.” She was using that tone: two parts old sage, one part female warrior, scant affection and no salt… Every creature who was anywhere near Waterloo sensed what was going to happen,” she explained. “If they could get out, they got out. Those who stayed and survived passed the experience on through collective memory, right down through the generations until the present day. Collective memory… and resonance.””

Author Francombe is a pianist and composer whose lyrical interpretation of history, through a narrator at ‘ground level’, delivers a timely reminder –

“There are sometimes no explanations, William. So don’t try to find them, or pretend that they’re there. They aren’t. But there’s always a way forward.”

 

 

The Friday Poem ‘A sonnet’ by Lin-Manuel Miranda

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

At a moment of career recognition, ‘Hamilton’ creator, Lin Manuel-Miranda shared a sonnet for his wife and the world about family, tragedy and love. At it’s center was his response to the terrorist, hate crime in Orlando.

The New York Times Sunday Styles reporter, Katie Rosman, shared the ‘back story’ of the sonnet from creation to delivery on the Beacon Theater stage Sunday evening.

“…as the first grim reports out of Orlando, Fla., were circulating, Mr. Miranda took out his phone and began to tap out the sonnet he would read aloud that night while accepting the Tony for best score. In 14 lines he paid tribute to his wife, his son and the victims of the massacre.

Back at the Mandarin Oriental before curtain time, he realized he would need a printout of the verse he had written. He called the suite where his father was staying and asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking care of it. Luis, 61, said yes, and traveled down a flight, where his son handed him a thumb drive. Lin-Manuel had one stipulation: “He said, ‘Can you please not read it?’”

He went down the elevator, thumb drive in hand, toward the concierge desk. There, employees of the Mandarin Oriental sprang into action.

Back in the elevator, with the printout, the father did the very thing his son had asked him not to do: He read the sonnet.

“That’s like asking me not to drink water when it’s 90 degrees out,” Luis said. “I thought it was very moving and pretty and important for the moment.”

Back in the suite, Luis listened as Lin-Manuel read it aloud, practicing for the big moment.”

Yesterday Mr. Miranda announced a fundraising effort, for Equality Florida. Revenue will be generated by the sale of a T shirt with words from the sonnet. “Here’s a thing that speaks for itself. I’m very excited about it and it’s a way you can help.” 

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The sonnet has been published in a variety of outlets since the awards ceremony. After the horror of this past week, there was no other choice for The Friday Poem.

My wife’s the reason anything gets done
She nudges me towards promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one
Our son is her most beautiful reprise
We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised, not one day
The show is proof that history remembers
We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger
We rise and fall and light from dying embers
Remembrances that hope and love last longer
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love
Cannot be killed or swept aside
I sing Vanessa’s symphony
Eliza tells her story
Now fill the world with music, love, and pride

Lin Manuel-Miranda   June 12, 2016

 

The Friday Poem @ the intersection of Maya Angelou, Hillary Clinton and Muhammad Ali

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

Maya, Muhammad and Hillary. Not three names you would intuitively link together, but that’s what history claimed this week, as a ‘political poet’ passed, and a deceased poet’s 2008 words echoed in the background of a rally at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The news of the death of Muhammad Ali literally stopped the presses at the New York Times early Saturday morning. On Wednesday, newspapers across the country led with the history making headline reporting “Hillary Clinton‘s nomination: A win 96 years in the making”.

It will not be an easy road to November for Secretary Clinton as reported by Patrick Healy and Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

“When Hillary Clinton swept onto the stage at her victory rally Tuesday night, the thunderbolt of history struck many Americans, no matter their love or loathing for her: A woman could be the next president of the United States.

But like so much about Mrs. Clinton, her speech, which lit up televisions and smartphones and social media all day Wednesday, produced conflicting emotions.

For some, it was an inspiring moment that brought home in a visceral way that Mrs. Clinton is the first woman to become the presumptive nominee of a major party. For others, there were chills and discomfort that this next step forward in our national story was unfolding with this particular woman.”

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The candidate might take heart from the poem Maya Angelou submitted to The Observer in 2008, with the backstory told by Vanessa Thorpe for The Guardian.

“She is supporting Clinton despite her close friendship with television personality and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey, a prominent backer of rival Democrat Barack Obama, the first black presidential hopeful with a real chance of reaching the White House.

Angelou is steadfast in her loyalty to Clinton. She said recently: ‘I made up my mind 15 years ago that if she ever ran for office I’d be on her wagon. My only difficulty with Senator Obama is that I believe in going out with who I went in with.’

Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, said of the poem: ‘This is a great thing for The Observer to have.’ He favourably compared it with the ‘vivid flourishes’ of Angelou’s recent work. ‘With this kind of poem Angelou has decided to interpret public writing as a verbal equivalent of making a poster, and there’s nothing wrong with this. The rhetoric is full of big gestures that make a direct appeal to our feelings, rather than getting to it by the little winding ways more personal poetry might use.'”

The poem:

State Package for Hillary Clinton

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may tread me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

This is not the first time you have seen Hillary Clinton seemingly at her wits’ end, but she has always risen, always risen, don’t forget she has always risen, much to the dismay of her adversaries and the delight of her friends.

Hillary Clinton will not give up on you and all she asks of you is that you do not give up on her.

There is a world of difference between being a woman and being an old female. If you’re born a girl, grow up, and live long enough, you can become an old female. But to become a woman is a serious matter. A woman takes responsibility for the time she takes up and the space she occupies. Hillary Clinton is a woman. She has been there and done that and has still risen. She is in this race for the long haul. She intends to make a difference in our country. Hillary Clinton intends to help our country to be what it can become.

She declares she wants to see more smiles in the family, more courtesies between men and women, more honesty in the marketplace. She is the prayer of every woman and man who longs for fair play, healthy families, good schools, and a balanced economy.

She means to rise.

Don’t give up on Hillary. In fact, if you help her to rise, you will rise with her and help her make this country the wonderful, wonderful place where every man and every woman can live freely without sanctimonious piety and without crippling fear.

Rise, Hillary.

Rise.

Maya Angelou, 2008

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On Thursday, Henry Louis Gates Jr. recalled ‘Muhammad Ali, the Political Poet’. In the essay he linked Angelou and Ali by their poetry, often labeled ‘doggerel’.

“Perhaps Maya Angelou, whose own poetry is sometimes labeled doggerel, said it best: “It wasn’t only what he said and it wasn’t only how he said it; it was both of those things, and maybe there was a third thing in it, the spirit of Muhammad Ali, saying his poesies — ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.’ I mean, as a poet, I like that! If he hadn’t put his name on it, I might have chosen to use that!”

“It would be a mistake to say that Ali made black oral poetry more sophisticated or complex, but he did make it more political. After learning his local draft board had declared him eligible for induction into the Army in 1966, Ali recited this poem:

Keep asking me, no matter how long,
On the war in Vietnam,
I sing this song:
I ain’t got no quarrel with no Viet Cong.

On this Friday, we pause to remember the athlete, humanitarian and role model who was Muhammad Ali, we celebrate a milestone for women, and reflect on the words of two American poets who significantly influenced our culture.