At the risk of unleashing a wavelet of hate mail, here’s a quick take on the Berkeley weather for this week. Meantime, the calendar says it’s November. Please remind me of this when next I snivel about the cold and rain. Of course, in the next 48 hours I’ll hear someone spoil the party by saying global warming is responsible for the continued warm, dry conditions.
Berkeley Halloween, Before and After
Halloween morning on Holly Street. You can just feel the anticipation: tricking and treating, overindulgence, and vandalism just hours away. Late in the afternoon on the front porch, Kate and I carved pumpkins. Hers looked like something; mine looked like nothing you could describe. Then nightfall and the troops of costumed youngsters. Well, first we saw maybe a dozen kids make their way up the other side of the street who never made it to our side. Maybe they were scared of odd-numbered addresses. After that, infrequent visits by one or two kids at a time. One bigger group, including the neighbor kids, knocked at the door. By the time we realized no one else would show up, at 8:30 or so, maybe 15 or 20 kids had contended for the five pounds of candy we had (a jumbo-sized bowl was contributed by a neighbor a couple of houses down at whose door no one stopped, apparently).
An acquaintance on Facebook talked up a San Francisco neighborhood where residents get together to do a full-on trick-or-treat fest. Lots of decorations and the like. “Haunted houses, horror films projected on bedsheets, hundreds of happy screaming kids trick-or-treating with their parents. Real Halloween.”
Real Halloween? Maybe where he came from. But in that odd place and time I grew up–the suburbia of the American Midwest, 1950s and ’60s–the adults didn’t organize much beyond treats and defensive measures against kids who might not be satisfied with them. Unless their kids were very young, parents didn’t have much of a presence on the street. There were hundreds of kids out and about because there were hundreds who lived in any given half-mile radius, and just about everyone was out in search of loot. A generation later, when our kids were little here in Berkeley, that culture didn’t seem to have changed a whole lot. Bunches of kids out after dark, trooping up front walks to whatever welcome awaited them.
The latter-day neighborhood festival my friend talked about in San Francisco is very un-Halloween-like in those terms. I suspect it’s purely a reflection of a culture that has decided that fun is fun within bounds: organized and controlled. You wouldn’t want kids interacting with strangers on the scary night of all scary nights, would you? So if there were kids out anywhere last night, I think that’s where you’d find most of them–where the parents could make sure the program contained enough of the right kinds of entertainment, but not too much, and none leading in some unpredictable or untoward direction.
You could argue about the value of our old Halloween customs. It has never been a favorite occasion of mine, even with the candy. Maybe there are good reasons for that tradition of door-to-door greeting to die. But I think its disappearance is just one more bit of distance we put between ourselves and whoever else we chance to encounter–not just on Halloween, but every other day and night of the year. Another barrier, another measure of isolation. And it’s really too bad for the kids, too.
“Modern American life”–i.e., we parents and our fears, helped along by media that seize on the most lurid of crimes, paint them as the stuff of unversal reality, and suggest we’re powerless to respond rationally–has already killed pick-up sports, going to and from school without a chaperone, and free-style loitering, among other pleasures of youth. In addition to the sweets, Halloween night used to represent a chance to explore one’s surroundings (an impromptu geography lesson), a chance to judge neighbors by the goodies they’d offer (applied sociology), experience in dodging ne’er-do-wells and dealing with fear of the dark (survival training), and hands-on practice with negotiations and bartering (economics and entrepreneurship). All that on top of healthy exercise in the out-of-doors.
It’s all a shame. Almost as big a crisis as the tens of thousands of candy calories our household must now figure out how to consume.
Berkeley Halloween, Before and After
Halloween morning on Holly Street. You can just feel the anticipation: tricking and treating, overindulgence, and vandalism just hours away. Late in the afternoon on the front porch, Kate and I carved pumpkins. Hers looked like something; mine looked like nothing you could describe. Then nightfall and the troops of costumed youngsters. Well, first we saw maybe a dozen kids make their way up the other side of the street who never made it to our side. Maybe they were scared of odd-numbered addresses. After that, infrequent visits by one or two kids at a time. One bigger group, including the neighbor kids, knocked at the door. By the time we realized no one else would show up, at 8:30 or so, maybe 15 or 20 kids had contended for the five pounds of candy we had (a jumbo-sized bowl was contributed by a neighbor a couple of houses down at whose door no one stopped, apparently).
An acquaintance on Facebook talked up a San Francisco neighborhood where residents get together to do a full-on trick-or-treat fest. Lots of decorations and the like. “Haunted houses, horror films projected on bedsheets, hundreds of happy screaming kids trick-or-treating with their parents. Real Halloween.”
Real Halloween? Maybe where he came from. But in that odd place and time I grew up–the suburbia of the American Midwest, 1950s and ’60s–the adults didn’t organize much beyond treats and defensive measures against kids who might not be satisfied with them. Unless their kids were very young, parents didn’t have much of a presence on the street. There were hundreds of kids out and about because there were hundreds who lived in any given half-mile radius, and just about everyone was out in search of loot. A generation later, when our kids were little here in Berkeley, that culture didn’t seem to have changed a whole lot. Bunches of kids out after dark, trooping up front walks to whatever welcome awaited them.
The latter-day neighborhood festival my friend talked about in San Francisco is very un-Halloween-like in those terms. I suspect it’s purely a reflection of a culture that has decided that fun is fun within bounds: organized and controlled. You wouldn’t want kids interacting with strangers on the scary night of all scary nights, would you? So if there were kids out anywhere last night, I think that’s where you’d find most of them–where the parents could make sure the program contained enough of the right kinds of entertainment, but not too much, and none leading in some unpredictable or untoward direction.
You could argue about the value of our old Halloween customs. It has never been a favorite occasion of mine, even with the candy. Maybe there are good reasons for that tradition of door-to-door greeting to die. But I think its disappearance is just one more bit of distance we put between ourselves and whoever else we chance to encounter–not just on Halloween, but every other day and night of the year. Another barrier, another measure of isolation. And it’s really too bad for the kids, too.
“Modern American life”–i.e., we parents and our fears, helped along by media that seize on the most lurid of crimes, paint them as the stuff of unversal reality, and suggest we’re powerless to respond rationally–has already killed pick-up sports, going to and from school without a chaperone, and free-style loitering, among other pleasures of youth. In addition to the sweets, Halloween night used to represent a chance to explore one’s surroundings (an impromptu geography lesson), a chance to judge neighbors by the goodies they’d offer (applied sociology), experience in dodging ne’er-do-wells and dealing with fear of the dark (survival training), and hands-on practice with negotiations and bartering (economics and entrepreneurship). All that on top of healthy exercise in the out-of-doors.
It’s all a shame. Almost as big a crisis as the tens of thousands of candy calories our household must now figure out how to consume.
News Tales: ‘You’re Still a Kid’
Sometime back in the rich Early Middle Era of my news career — 1987, I’ll call it, at The San Francisco Examiner — something awful happened at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. A wire-service bulletin said an airliner had gone down somewhere down the coast. I was new on the city desk, and had just started my shift. I had been part of many newsroom scrambles for big stories on deadline, but I was never really in charge of the response. I wasn’t, really, on this night, either. I remember that the senior city editor grabbed a reporter who was just about to leave for the evening and told him he needed to fly down to the crash site. Done. I think my fellow editor collared two or three other reporters who thought they were going home and told them to stand by.
Just recounting the incident revives its horror for me, though I don’t think of it often. What made a more conscious impression, one that still rises to the surface whenever I’m in a newsroom–every working day, now–was the way the editors and reporters reacted to the simple suggestion that a story was happening, that game was afoot.
I’m thinking about that now because my current newsroom, at KQED Public Radio, is in the midst of trying to respond to this week’s problems on the Bay Bridge. Circumstances are a little different now. Much smaller newsroom–which means much smaller staff. No one to stop at the door on the way out and say, “Hey — wait a minute. Big problem on the bridge.” In fact, when the incident occurred the other night, I was winding down from our evening newscasts and getting ready to edit a feature story, a guy wandered over from an adjacent (non-news) department and asked if we knew what was happening on the bridge. When it came down to it on night one, it was me, the local traffic reporting service, and our evening announcer who held the fort. (One of the bosses said to me, “These all-hands-on-deck situations are fun.” I didn’t reflect until later that at first, mine were the only hands on deck.) I had started work before noon and sent my last new email of the night after 1 a.m. I complained mildly on Facebook that it’s harder for me to do those long news days and come back the next day to do it again. The very same editor I was so impressed with that evening back in ’87 responded to that note: “And yet … you’re still a kid.”
Not so sure about that. But some old news reflex is still there.
Guest Observation: Howard Nemerov
Kate’s a teacher. We talk a lot about school around here, and everything that happens there, and all that should or might and doesn’t. We brought out this poem this evening and read it aloud: “A school is where they grind the grain of thought,/And grind the children who must mind the thought.” Wow–what a description of the institution. (And who was Howard Nemerov? Here’s a good writeup from the American Academy of Poets.)
September, the First Day of School
I My child and I hold hands on the way to school, And when I leave him at the first-grade door He cries a little but is brave; he does Let go. My selfish tears remind me how I cried before that door a life ago. I may have had a hard time letting go. Each fall the children must endure together What every child also endures alone: Learning the alphabet, the integers, Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff So arbitrary, so peremptory, That worlds invisible and visible Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down Before the dreaming of a little boy. That dream got him such hatred of his brothers As cost the greater part of life to mend, And yet great kindness came of it in the end. II A school is where they grind the grain of thought, And grind the children who must mind the thought. It may be those two grindings are but one, As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays, As from the integers comes Euler's Law, As from the whole, inseperably, the lives, The shrunken lives that have not been set free By law or by poetic phantasy. But may they be. My child has disappeared Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live To see his coming forth, a life away, I know my hope, but do not know its form Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds Among his teachers have a care of him More than his father could. How that will look I do not know, I do not need to know. Even our tears belong to ritual. But may great kindness come of it in the end.
(Used without permission, but in a noncommercial spirit.)
You’ve Been Warned
This was posted adjacent to the campus of Santa Clara University. We spotted it Saturday night when we were down there to watch soccer with Eamon and Sakura.
Let’s not even talk about what the reaction a poster like this is trying to elicit. Let’s focus on the wording. If prompted, my slogan might be, “Vaccines save lives.” Clearly this local leafleteer is of another mind. Fine–let’s resolve this disagreement in the marketplace of ideas. But here, the pitch isn’t “vaccines may be dangerous” or “Vaccines: use at your own risk”–statements that would probably be attention-getting and may not stray across factual lines. That’s not enough for this broadside, which says flatly “vaccines are poison.” In a world where apparently no one can be trusted to think–hey, which vaccines are we talking about here?–nothing but the most alarmist message will do.
[Update: NPR’s “Morning Edition” did a segment this morning addressing questions about the safety of the new swine flu vaccine. ]
‘Fight the Anti-Worker Capitalist Agenda’
A couple of days ago, a young woman came down the aisle of my car on BART as we neared the Civic Center station. She was dropping postcards on empty seats. Strangely, she wasn’t handing them to any passengers. Maybe this is why: One of my fellow passengers picked up one of the cards, scanned it, and started to laugh. His companion said, “What’s so funny?” “Nothing,” he said. “Crap.” Then he tore up the card and discarded the scraps on the floor. Even here, the region some people would unhesitatingly dub the furthest left in all America, it’s hard to win people over to the fight against the anti-worker capitalist agenda.
John Muir: ‘I Asked the Boulders Where They Had Been’
We’ve watched most of the first two installments of the new Ken Burns public TV extravaganza, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.” The beauty of the show is exhilarating and the history is fascinating (Theodore Roosevelt–what a guy).
The first two episodes are closely entwined with the story of John Muir, and part two focuses first on his fight to complete the preservation of Yosemite and then on his unsuccessful battle to stop San Francisco from flooding Hetch Hetchy valley. Muir’s voiceovers are done in a soft Scots burr. Occasionally, you hear about Muir from Lee Stetson, who has portrayed him for decades and who has even adopted the Muir look. But when Stetson appears on camera, he speaks in a plain old General American accent. At the very end of the second episode, though, he briefly introduces a Muir quote, then instantly transitions to the gentle and compelling Muir voice, then appears on camera to finish the quote. It’s a moving performance. Here’s what he recites:
“Muir said, ‘As long as I live I’ll hear the birds and the winds and the waterfalls sing. I’ll interpret the rocks and learn the language of flood and storm and avalanche. I’ll make the acquaintance of the wild gardens and the glaciers and get as near to the heart of this world as I could. And so I did. I sauntered about from rock to rock, from grove to grove, from stream to stream, and whenever I met a new plant I would sit down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance, hear what it had to tell. I asked the boulders where they had been and whither they were going, and when night found me, there I camped. I took no more heed to save time or to make haste than did the trees or the stars. This is true freedom, a good, practical sort of immortality.”
Blood Sport, and a Second Coming
A friend writes: “… The public personalities who get the most attention now are the raging, fulminating blowhards who seem to be non-differentially angry at everything. It’s become a blood sport. But it’s nonetheless disturbing when you think that the population is so much in the grip of its shadow that it needs to find a victim to feed to the lions. At times I really do wonder if Obama will end up a single term president because he could not answer that savage impetus in the country. …”
Which put me in mind of this poem from William Butler Yeats:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Safire’s Rules for Writers
From Robert D. McFadden’s obituary on William Safire, the Nixon-Agnew speechwriter, conservative columnist, and usage maven:
“… And there were Safire ‘rules for writers’: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid cliches like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!”
Did I like the guy’s politics? No–not that it matters. But you have to love a guy so precisely but unfussily focused on the language and how we use it.
[Update: In his “On Language” column for October 7, 1979, Safire included a query to his readers:
“I am compiling “Ten Perverse Rules of English Grammar.” Thanks to Philip Henderson of Lawrence, Kan., I have three. They are: (1) Remember to never split an infinitive. (2) A preposition is something never to end a sentence with. (3) The passive voice should never be used.
“Any others along these lines?”
Four weeks later, Safire published, “The Fumblerules of Grammar,” which contained the first three dicta and 33 more (ending with “last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague; seek viable alternatives.”) Here’s the complete set of 36 rules (along with some research disclosing that another writer published a similar list earlier in 1979). In 1990, Safire reprinted the list (and added 18 more “rules”) in “Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage.”]