Visiting Sacramento

I'm sitting at a Pete's Coffee and Tea in Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport. The seating area is so tight that this is reminiscent of Paris, complete with the Phoenix couple at the next table, who have, I feel certain, been to Paris together. I guess the difference is that it's 70 degrees here, and I can look out and see a remarkable skyline of jagged mountains, while in Paris it's 27 degrees and visibility is low.

Perhaps you can tell that I'm unabashedly in favor of warmer climes these days. This morning I went on a run around Lake Merritt in Oakland CA, where I've been visiting Tess for the past several days. There was nothing like it. This is exactly what the lake looked like at 7:23, before the sun officially rose at which precise moment the fairy lights turned off. It felt so glorious to be able to be outside on December 30th before sunrise!

I went to Sacramento on Wednesday. I am considering a move to Sacramento after this year of the MAT. There is a teacher shortage in California, and there is a temperature shortage in Indiana, and a shortage of a commodity in very tight supply anywhere outside California: Tess Marstaller.

I took the Capitol Corridor train to Sacramento. The ride was beautiful, affording many views of the water and of the countryside. It reminded me of the ride from Toulouse to Lourdes. Well, actually le Sud-Ouest is much, much more beautiful, but the similar climate pleased me. I loved the idea of living in the Southwest of France when I lived there, but could never figure out how I could adjust to living so far from family, and to being a foreigner all the time. Northern California seemed to be offering many of the same benefits, much closer to home.

I had been in touch before I arrived with the Quaker Meetings in Sacramento to see if there were any public school teachers in their midst. I was connected with Alison, who came to pick me up at the train station, and dedicated the next two hours to driving me around, touring schools and neighborhoods, talking school culture and district climate with regards to things like administrative oversight, emphasis on testing, and profile of student bodies. I'm overwhelmed by gratitude for this Friend who donated her time and energy to helping me make an inroad into this city.

Here's the upshot of the day: I want to live in Tahoe Park, and teach at West Campus high school!

My time with Alison and my exposure to the schools would have been enough to make me feel good about moving to Sacramento. A few other things glazed the cake with icing:

1. The art museum.
The Crocker Art Museum is phenomenal. Fairly small, but with wonderful traveling shows and a stunning permanent exhibition in the original mansion, which itself is an elaborate building like an art jewelry box. I felt like Mary Crawley walking down the grand staircase.










2. The waterfront walk.
A path goes for 32 miles along the rivers in Sacramento.




















3. The cops on horseback.

Nothing steals a girl's heart like seeing three cops on horseback. Rather gives the impression there isn't a ton of crime.

4. The park full of homeless people.
I had my picnic lunch in a park where homeless people had gathered to talk and spend their day. Alison told me that on Christmas there were three organizations providing food, and they had way too much. I liked at least that the homeless were allowed to congregate here, right outside the public library in the center of downtown, and that there are organizations, even if not exceptionally organized ones, to help them.

5. The flat whites, and coffee shop patrons like Lisa
At the end of the day I was at a Starbucks next to the train station, waiting for my train to board. A woman ahead of me ordered a flat white. I asked her what it was. I got one too, made with almond milk, and it was the best thing ever. I just had another at this Pete's. Lisa, the woman who explained flat white to me, had the most fantastic colored purple lipstick on. Feels silly to say a caffeinated drink helped secure Sacramento in my mind, but it did.

6. At this Starbucks I saw the headline of the NYtimes having to do with how CA is at the forefront of the climate challenge. Encouraging.

Autobiographical fiction; the importance of letters

Two recent articles in the New Yorker have profiled female writers who insert themselves unabashedly into their fiction. The first is Chris Kraus, and the second is Helen Garner (whom I mentioned in my last post). 

Kraus told an audience at a book talk in no uncertain terms that she is a writer because she is a person with a life: 

"It all happened. There would be no book if it hadn’t happened.”

A friend of mine objects to this kind of personal writing, which tends to be self-involved and doesn't tend to say much of significance about the state of the world, only the state of one's heart and mind. Those are good topics too, but can't they be incorporated into books that have something grander to say? 

Flannery O'Connor, who had much grander things to say, about black and white identity in the South in the 60's, believed she should not be present in her stories. She wrote:

To say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration. A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen. . . . Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.

I think I agree with her. My experience is that I can be much more honest about what I find in myself when I read it in other people's fiction, not when I try to put it into mine. I don't have good enough vision of self to portray with any accuracy my own character, and I always end up feeling shallow and as though I'm trying to be "clever" by getting into my own head and subjecting myself to my own cynicism. 

How do we know that Flannery O'Connor felt this way? Because she wrote a letter to a friend, from which is pulled the above quote. What are we going to do without letters? How will we know how the great writers and thinkers were thinking? I believe that we cannot trust their blogs. 

In a recent paper I wrote for my MAT I quoted from journal articles about writing in the English classroom. One teacher wrote about the role of audience in writing: 

"It is precisely the acts of responding, analysing and reflecting that are required in the process of writing but, with no ‘real’ audience, these seem impossible for many boys."

(This entire, excellent article is available here.)

I wonder about the difference between the audience of a blog, and the audience of a friend. I am certainly more discerning and stylistic in what I write in my letters to individual friends than what I write here. Email has never inspired the same thoughtfulness as writing on paper. I flinch actually, to mention it in the same paragraph with real letter-writing, not because I object to writing emails, but because it is such a different endeavor from writing a letter.

Some of the best articles I've read about figures and writers I like include parts of their letters. This is an excellent one containing correspondence between Nabokov and his wife.

I think I shall start scanning and saving all the letters I receive from my few correspondents. I have some in boxes, but certainly not all survive, and I must be the change I wish to see in the world!

Brahms and Garner on Solitude

I love the public radio program Performance Today, but I often complain to myself that Fred Child a) speaks too quickly after the end of a piece and b) repeats the snippets of cocktail party knowledge about a piece both before and after it, which seems to me to render the sparkling gems of context rather less titillating. If something is said once on the radio, it is the precious possession of those lucky enough to be tuned in. If it is repeated, the club of the informed grows unpleasantly larger.

Brahms, when he was
"free and lonely"

Tonight I was the happy beneficiary of FC's repetition of the story behind Brahms' third symphony. He and his friends, when they were young, developed a slogan, which they snuck into their music, "free but lonely," to describe their single status. Brahms, a lifelong bachelor, wrote the symphony #3 when he was fifty, and in it re-configured the original slogan to be "free but happy." As FC points out, the symphony is not what my tenth graders would likely describe as "happy" music, but it certainly, to me, conveys the thoughtful contentedness that single life affords. 

Brahms, when he was
"free and happy".

I am single, and 26. Perhaps I can save myself many years of unhappiness by adopting the Brahms-at-50 version of the slogan. Here's the episode (hour 1), which has the story at the beginning, and the symphony (and again the story!) at the end of the hour.

No sooner had the symphony ended than I read this book review of Helen Garner's new book, "Everywhere I Look". Imagine my surprise on reading this excerpt:

“This isn’t really a story. I’m just telling you what happened one summer when I was young. It was 1961, my first year away from home. I lived at Melbourne University, in a women’s college on a beautiful elm-lined boulevard. I was free and happy. Everyone was clever and so was I.” 

How easy it is to be free and happy when young and clever. I wonder at what age free and happy became free and lonely for Brahms -- when it does for all those not entwined in matrimony. 

Incidentally, Garner's first book "The First Stone," which is discussed in the article, is about young women who were assaulted by a professor when they were in college. The title seems to allude to the parable in which Jesus says, "Let the sinless among you cast the first stone," when a woman has been accused of adultery. 

This parable ran through my head today when, in the tenth grade class, we discussed "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. Our first focus was narrative point of view, and I asked students to rewrite the climactic closing scene from the perspective of one of the characters present. (The entire story is told from a third person objective POV). 

(Spoiler alert) In the scene, the woman whose named has been drawn in the annual "lottery" is stoned to death by her neighbors.

One of the boys in period 1 wrote, "Everyone was looking at me to begin, so I had to throw the first rock." 

Another said, "As soon as I saw the first rock fly, I hurled mine at her as hard as I could." 

Both responses reveal the weight of that first stone. The story seems to me a comment on how much easier it is to act inhumanely when one is part of a group. I was first introduced to this idea in my Capitalism and Socialism class at Utah, when we read Niebuhr's "Moral Man, Immoral Society." 

Tenth graders speak wisdom. 

I wonder how many of them would describe themselves as "free and happy". Or, for that matter, either "free" or "happy". 

Appreciating professional symphonies

I was relieved this evening when, upon leaving the concert hall where Earlham's symphony orchestra gave its winter concert, that my companion was the first to say, "It makes you appreciate all those professional orchestras so much more, doesn't it?" 

The orchestra had put together a technically and technologically ambitious program, complete with film screenings of silent films to which they played the scores. Technical and logistical glitches were several; the orchestra had not rehearsed without the house lights, and when the film went on and the stage lighting went down, they discovered they could not see the conductor and had to stop. At one point the film score was playing over the orchestra- the sound tech had forgotten to mute the movie. At another point the play button could not be played in such a way that the film was the only thing on the screen, besides other elements of an Apple desktop. The conductor discovered, at the beginning of another piece, that his score was still backstage. When he called for the baritone featured in one piece to come forward, it appeared the singer was not in the room.

You have to love a small town, and no less a liberal arts college community, for its ability to play the loving and forgiving audience. "It makes it so much more interesting! I love getting to see how they deal with challenges. The more real, the better!" exclaimed my companion. To borrow a line from my reading in Emma today, "Emma (Mimi) denied none of it aloud, and agreed to none of it in private." I was exceptionally uncomfortable for the conductor, whose embarrassment and frustration must have been extreme, even with the loving audience. He handled each development (or unraveling) well, as did the musicians, but indeed I would prefer a concert that goes according to plan. 

They played Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 1, op 13, "Winter Dreams", which I was not familiar with and which I like very much. Here is a version of the whole thing. 

This afternoon while holed up in my room reading Emma I was struck by how unlike Emma's society of English nobility is from our own. So little emphasis on gainful work, so much leisure time to fill, such necessity to draw every bit of news or diversion out into something substantial to fill the otherwise unoccupied hours... it sounds pretty dull. Days and days spent looking forward to a picnic, and the picnic spent in the company of tiresome people (Mrs. Elton, Miss Bates, Mr. Elton). 

I remember when a high school friend told me, "I'm done hanging out with people I don't like." It is clear to me that evasion was an impossibility in Emma's circle - that people simply had to engage with people that they might not choose as friends, simply because of the size of the country circle. Mr. Darcy describes Hertfordshire society, as "confined and unvarying," and I think it would certainly seem so to those of us used to a wider social radius. 

As I sat in the concert hall before the performance began, I was struck by just how similar our society still is to that which Jane Austen so magnificently dissects in her novels. We were all part of a fairly small community, and with each grand entrance into the room of a new person, we, the seated, took stock of that person's beauty, attire, and social status - were they meeting friends? Did they look confident? Were they accompanied? Did they quickly make eye contact with a friend who was reserving seats? 

We haven't progressed too far beyond the pump rooms at bath after all.