Not Your Median Patient: How A Climate Scientist Faced Cancer

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine
Stephen Schneider
Stephen Schneider, climatologist and cancer survivor, died on July 19. Photo credit Patricia Pooladi / National Academy of Sciences; printed in Stanford Magazine, July/Aug 2010.

Not Your Median Patient:
How A Climate Scientist Faced Cancer
By John Unger Zussman

Stephen Schneider, the environmental scientist, died of a heart attack last month at the age of 65. He was a Stanford professor, a member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a tireless and articulate advocate for action to counteract the threat of global warming. The blog Realclimate.org has posted a moving “scientific obituary” by Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There was even a tribute on the NPR program Science Friday.

What most of the obituaries mention only in passing (if at all) is that Schneider was a survivor of a rare and often deadly cancer called mantle cell lymphoma. He was diagnosed in 2001 and refused to accept both the medical establishment’s standard treatment and its dismal prognosis. Instead, he diligently applied to his cancer the same principles of decision analysis that he used as a climate scientist, and as a result persuaded his oncologist, Dr. Sandra Horning, to treat him more aggressively than the protocols dictated. In 2005, safely in remission, he published an account of that battle, The Patient from Hell.

I’ve written about cancer in these pages before, recounting what I learned when someone I love, “Bonnie,” was diagnosed with breast cancer, and discussing the role of environmental toxins in causing cancer. If you read that first piece, you might be surprised that Bonnie, who chose to “undertreat” her cancer, looked to Schneider, who chose to “overtreat” his, as a positive model. But she did, and in this essay I want to explain why.

Both Bonnie and Schneider found inspiration, in turn, from Stephen Jay Gould, the late, great evolutionary biologist. At age 41, Gould was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, a cancer from which the median survival was only eight months after diagnosis. Two years later, he published a seminal essay entitled “The Median Isn’t the Message,” in which he interpreted that statistic and explained how he took hope from it. Beautifully written, it’s must reading—especially if you have been diagnosed with a serious illness.

The median, if you remember your college statistics, is a measure of the “average value” of a set of measurements that are distributed on a curve. It refers to the “middle” value if the measurements are sorted, high to low—half the scores are above, half below. It’s useful because it’s less sensitive to extremes than the mean, or mathematical average.

Gould realized that there was nothing magical about the median; it’s a measure of central tendency, but it doesn’t describe the distribution. His own survival might be any data point on that curve. Yes, 50% of abdominal mesothelioma patients survived eight months or less, but another 50% survived longer—some, given the characteristics of the distribution, significantly longer. Rather than despair, Gould set about figuring out how he could get himself on the long end of that curve.

And he did. He beat that cancer and had twenty more healthy and productive years—completing his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory—before he succumbed to an unrelated lung cancer in 2002.

Schneider’s insight was no less profound. He looked at the way the medical profession evaluates cancer treatments based on endpoints—survival or recurrence of the median patient at the end of a clinical trial of one treatment vs. another (or vs. a placebo). A good starting point, he said. But what if the disease is rare (like his) and there are no trials? Or what if a promising new treatment hasn’t yet been tested? Or what if you don’t resemble the median patient?

This situation reminded Schneider of climate science, in which you have a single patient (the Earth) whose symptoms are beginning to alarm you. Unfortunately, you lack good data on endpoints, your predictive models are imperfect, and the error ranges in your forecasts multiply upon each other. You have no other planets to run experiments with. “You can’t do controlled experiments on the future,” Schneider said in his last major interview. “What are we going to do, wait for it? Then apologize to posterity that we did nothing to slow it down?” Of course not. You collect as much data as you can about the climatic processes. You make your best estimates of the probabilities of each outcome, cognizant that they are only estimates, while continuing to monitor the data and update your models. And you make your best recommendations for policy that, you hope, will avoid the most catastrophic outcomes.

Applying these principles to medicine, in place of absent or inadequate clinical trials, or to supplement them, Schneider recommended process knowledge, Bayesian updating, and decision analysis. Process knowledge means that “your doctors should know how various treatments—both mainstream and not—work, how treatments for diseases similar to yours might work for you, what treatments are unlikely to be effective, and how your overall health could be affected.” Bayesian updating is a fancy statistical term for monitoring your response to treatment and adjusting it accordingly. Decision analysis means weighting potential outcomes, risks, and benefits by your doctors’ estimate of the likelihood of their occurrence as well as their confidence in that estimate.

Finally, Schneider, like Bonnie, insisted that his medical decisions were his to make. He treated his doctors as medical advisors, valuable for their knowledge, experience, and intuitions, but ultimately he had to make his own choices based on their advice.

If this sounds abstract, let me try to clarify with an example. One of the treatments Schneider’s doctors recommended, in addition to standard chemo, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant, was a new antibody drug called Rituxan. Rituxan targets a protein called CD20 that is expressed on the surface of B cells, the immune cells that cause mantle cell and other lymphomas. Essentially, Rituxan allows the body’s immune system to recognize B cells as foreign cells, which are then destroyed by the immune system’s NK (natural killer) cells.

The standard protocol was to administer a large dose of Rituxan (along with conventional chemo), then perform a bone marrow transplant, and then—to wait and see if the cancer came back, as detected by a CT scan. If it did—and 50% of patients on this protocol lost remission at least once within four years—they would try it again. But a second remission was harder to achieve than the first.

This didn’t sound like a good idea to Schneider. First, he questioned the means of monitoring his response to treatment. A CT scan won’t detect signs of cancer until there were already hundreds of millions of malignant cells and a detectable lump. Was there a way to monitor him more closely? It turned out there was, a highly sensitive molecular-based diagnostic test called PCR (polymeric chain reaction). PCR would provide a much more accurate measure of Schneider’s cancer cell count.

Schneider also realized that if the protocol didn’t kill the disease completely—and it was a coin toss whether it would—then the remaining cancer cells would keep reproducing, and in a few years he’d be right back where he started. Why not take a different tack, he reasoned, and presume the cancer is still present? It didn’t matter if his cancer was never cured, so long as the malignant cell count was kept below a dangerous level.

So Schneider requested what he called “maintenance therapy.” After the standard chemo, Rituxan, and bone marrow transplant, he wanted to receive low “maintenance” doses of Rituxan at periodic intervals. He also wanted periodic counts of his CD20 cells (to measure whether the Rituxan was wearing off) and cancer cells (via PCR), so that the dosage and interval could be adjusted if necessary. If his cancer cell count crept above negligible levels—signifying that his immune system wasn’t adequately controlling the cells—he would get another dose of Rituxan.

One of his doctors disapproved strongly. “We have no data whatsoever to suggest that low-dose interventions would have any benefit,” he said, “and operating without data would be foolhardy.” If there were no clinical trials showing that a particular treatment worked, it would be risky, idiotic, and even unethical to use it. Besides, side effects of the Rituxan might be damaging or even fatal.

So Schneider took his doctors through a decision analysis hypothetical. “Suppose you brought 100 people in off the street and gave them periodic maintenance doses of Rituxan,” he asked. “How many would die from the treatment?” The docs protested that they didn’t know because there were no trials. But Schneider persisted; he asked them to use their best clinical intuition and judgment. “Probably none, perhaps one,” Dr. Horning finally acknowledged.

“Now suppose you put 100 patients like me on the standard protocol,” Schneider asked. “How many would lose remission within five years?” “Probably eighty,” answered the docs. “And how many of those would not get back into remission with another chemo regime?” “Forty,” estimated the docs. “Who wouldn’t take that risk?” Schneider argued.

Schneider understood that he and his doctors were wandering into uncharted territory with Rituxan maintenance therapy. “There was no telling it would work,” he wrote in The Patient from Hell, “and no previous data that might help us develop a treatment plan.” But those are the risks you have to take when you are essentially running an experiment with incomplete data and a sample size of one. He viewed climate change the same way; with only one earth to experiment with, we’d better choose the treatment with the best chance of avoiding a catastrophic outcome.

This, I think, gives you a flavor of the way Schneider approached problems, both in climate science and in his battle with cancer. Ultimately, Dr. Horning agreed to put him on maintenance therapy—a low dose of Rituxan every three months—and it worked.

But Schneider was also an excellent writer and an engaging speaker, so I should get out of the way and let him explain it himself. Specifically, in 2008, Schneider gave a presentation at Stanford Medical School’s Café Scientifique entitled “Cancer and Climate Change: Parallels in Risk Management,” in which he outlined his approach to both issues. This talk is accessible and informative, and if you’re interested, I urge you to view it on YouTube or download it as a podcast from iTunes (available in the Medcast series from Stanford on iTunes U).

Near the end of the lecture (around 1:11), Schneider speculates, like Bonnie, that one reason doctors are so tied into the “standard treatment” has to do with liability issues. They are sometimes held accountable when, despite their best efforts, things go wrong. “I prescribed the standard treatment” is an almost universally successful defense against malpractice lawsuits. Schneider suggests that legislation is needed to exculpate doctors who, with their patients’ understanding and consent, depart from standard treatment to personalize their care.

One might wonder whether the aggressive treatment of Schneider’s cancer weakened his heart and eventually led to his heart attack. Of course, it’s impossible to know for certain. But it was a risk he took knowingly and voluntarily, believing that without that treatment he would likely be dead.

What Schneider and Bonnie share is their refusal to take the standard protocol on faith, their willingness to get their hands dirty with admittedly limited data, their insistence that their treatment be personalized, and their resolve to take responsibility for their own treatment decisions and outcomes. In the end, Schneider was able to spend his last nine years in good health, with his family, doing his life’s work—trying to make sure that we approach our climate the same way he approached his cancer. And that’s all any of us can ask for.

Copyright © 2010, John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.

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Not Your Median Patient:
How A Scientist Faced Cancer
By John Unger Zussman

Stephen Schneider, the environmental scientist, died of a heart attack last month at the age of 65. He was a Stanford professor, a member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a tireless and articulate advocate for action to counteract the threat of global warming. The blog Realclimate.org has posted a moving “scientific obituary” by Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There was even a tribute on the NPR program Science Friday.

What most of the obituaries mention only in passing (if at all) is that Schneider was a survivor of a rare and often deadly cancer called mantle cell lymphoma. He was diagnosed in 2001 and refused to accept both the medical establishment’s standard treatment and its dismal prognosis. Instead, he diligently applied to his cancer the same principles of decision analysis that he used as a climate scientist, and as a result persuaded his oncologist, Dr. Sandra Horning, to treat him more aggressively than the protocols dictated. In 2005, safely in remission, he published an account of that battle, The Patient from Hell.

I’ve written about cancer in these pages before, recounting what I learned when someone I love, “Bonnie,” was diagnosed with breast cancer, and discussing the role of environmental toxins in causing cancer. If you read that first piece, you might be surprised that Bonnie, who chose to “undertreat” her cancer, looked to Schneider, who chose to “overtreat” his, as a positive model. But she did, and in this essay I want to explain why.

Both Bonnie and Schneider found inspiration, in turn, from Stephen Jay Gould, the late, great evolutionary biologist. At age 41, Gould was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, a cancer from which the median survival was only eight months after diagnosis. Two years later, he published a seminal essay entitled “The Median Isn’t the Message,” in which he interpreted that statistic and explained how he took hope from it. Beautifully written, it’s must reading—especially if you have been diagnosed with a serious illness.

The median, if you remember your college statistics, is a measure of the “average value” (central tendency) of a set of measurements that are distributed along a scale. It refers to the “middle” value if the measurements are sorted, top to bottom—half the scores are above, half below. It’s useful because it’s less sensitive to extremes than the mean, or mathematical average.

Gould realized that there was nothing magical about the median; it’s a measure of central tendency, but it doesn’t describe the distribution. His own survival might be any data point on that curve (constrained by the shape of the distribution). Yes, 50% of abdominal mesothelioma patients survived eight months or less, but another 50% survived longer—some, given the characteristics of the distribution, significantly longer. Rather than despair, Gould set about figuring out how he could get himself on the long end of that curve.

And he did. He beat that cancer and had twenty more healthy and productive years—completing his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory—before he succumbed to an unrelated lung cancer in 2002.

Schneider’s insight was no less profound. He looked at the way the medical profession evaluates cancer treatments based on endpoints—survival or recurrence of the median patient at the end of a clinical trial of one treatment vs. another (or vs. a placebo). A good starting point, he said. But what if the disease is rare (like his) and there are no trials? Or what if a promising new treatment hasn’t yet been tested? Or what if you don’t resemble the median patient?

This situation reminded Schneider of climate science, in which you have a single patient (the Earth) whose symptoms are beginning to alarm you. Unfortunately, you lack good data on endpoints, your predictive models are imperfect, and the error ranges in your forecasts multiply upon each other. You have no other planets to run experiments with. “You can’t do controlled experiments on the future,” Schneider said in his last major interview. “What are we going to do, wait for it?” Of course not. You collect as much data as you can about the climatic processes. You make your best estimates of the probabilities of each outcome, cognizant that they are only estimates, while continuing to monitor the data and update your models. And you make your best recommendations for policy that, you hope, will avoid the most catastrophic outcomes.

Applying these principles to medicine, in place of absent or inadequate clinical trials, or to supplement them, Schneider recommends process knowledge, Bayesian updating, and decision analysis. Process knowledge means that “your doctors should know how various treatments—both mainstream and not—work, how treatments for diseases similar to yours might work for you, what treatments are unlikely to be effective, and how your overall health could be effective.” Bayesian updating is a fancy statistical term for monitoring your response to treatment and adjusting it accordingly. Decision analysis means weighting potential outcomes, risks, and benefits by your doctors’ estimate of the likelihood of their occurrence as well as their confidence in that estimate.

Finally, Schneider, like Bonnie, insisted that his medical decisions were his to make. He treated his doctors as medical advisors, valuable for their knowledge, experience, and intuitions, but ultimately he had to make his own choices based on their advice.

If this sounds abstract, let me try to clarify with an example. One of the treatments Schneider’s doctors recommended, in addition to standard chemo, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant, was a new antibody drug called Rituxan. Rituxan targets a protein called CD20 that is expressed on the surface of B cells, the immune cells that cause mantle cell and other lymphomas. Essentially, Rituxan allows the body’s immune system to recognize B cells as foreign cells, which are then destroyed by the immune system’s NK (natural killer) cells.

The standard protocol was to administer a large dose of Rituxan (along with conventional chemo), then perform a bone marrow transplant, and then—to wait and see if the cancer came back, as detected by a CT scan. If it did—and 50% of patients on this protocol lost remission at least once within four years—they would try it again. But a second remission was harder to achieve than the first.

This didn’t sound like a good idea to Schneider. First, he questioned the means of monitoring his response to treatment. A CT scan won’t detect signs of cancer until there were already hundreds of millions of malignant cells and a detectable lump. Was there a way to monitor him more closely? It turned out there was, a highly sensitive molecular-based diagnostic test called PCR (polymeric chain reaction). PCR would provide a much more accurate measure of Schneider’s cancer cell count.

Schneider also realized that if the protocol didn’t kill the disease completely—and it was a coin toss whether it would—then the remaining cancer cells would keep reproducing, and in a few years he’d be right back where he started. Why not take a different tack, he reasoned, and presume the cancer is still present? It didn’t matter if his cancer was never cured, so long as the malignant cell count was kept below a dangerous level.

So Schneider requested what he called “maintenance therapy.” After the standard chemo, Rituxan, and bone marrow transplant, he wanted to receive low “maintenance” doses of Rituxan at periodic intervals. He also wanted periodic counts of his CD20 cells (to measure whether the Rituxan was wearing off) and cancer cells (via PCR), so that the dosage and interval could be adjusted if necessary. If his cancer cell count crept above negligible levels—signifying that his immune system wasn’t adequately controlling the cells—he would get another dose of Rituxan.

One of his doctors disapproved strongly. “We have no data whatsoever to suggest that low-dose interventions would have any benefit,” he said, “and operating without data would be foolhardy.” If there were no clinical trials showing that a particular treatment worked, it would be risky, idiotic, and even unethical to use it. Besides, side effects of the Rituxan might be damaging or even fatal.

So Schneider took his doctors through a decision analysis hypothetical. “Suppose you brought 100 people in off the street and gave them periodic maintenance doses of Rituxan,” he asked. “How many would die from the treatment?” The docs protested that they didn’t know because there were no trials. But Schneider persisted; he asked them to use their best clinical intuition and judgment. “Probably none, perhaps one,” Dr. Horning finally acknowledged.

“Now suppose you put 100 patients like me on the standard protocol,” Schneider asked. “How many would lose remission within five years?” “Probably eighty,” answered the docs. “And how many of those would not get back into remission with another chemo regime?” “Forty,” estimated the docs. “Who wouldn’t take that risk?” Schneider argued.

Schneider understood that he and his doctors were wandering into uncharted territory with Rituxan maintenance therapy. “There was no telling it would work,” he wrote in The Patient from Hell, “and no previous data that might help us develop a treatment plan.” But those are the risks you have to take when you are essentially running an experiment with incomplete data and a sample size of one. He viewed climate change the same way; with only one earth to experiment with, we’d better choose the treatment with the best chance of avoiding a catastrophic outcome.

This, I think, gives you a flavor of the way Schneider approached problems, both in climate science and in his battle with cancer. Ultimately, Dr. Horning agreed to put him on maintenance therapy—a low dose of Rituxan every three months—and it worked.

But Schneider was also an excellent writer and an engaging speaker, so I should get out of the way and let him explain it himself. Specifically, in 2008, Schneider gave a presentation at Stanford Medical School’s Café Scientifique entitled “Cancer and Climate Change: Parallels in Risk Management,” in which he outlined his approach to both issues. This talk is accessible and informative, and if you’re interested, I urge you to view it on YouTube or download it as a podcast from iTunes (available in the Medcast series from Stanford on iTunes U).

Near the end of the lecture (around 1:11), Schneider speculates, like Bonnie, that one reason doctors are so tied into the “standard treatment” has to do with liability issues. They are sometimes held accountable when, despite their best efforts, things go wrong. “I prescribed the standard treatment” is an almost universally successful defense against malpractice lawsuits. Schneider suggests that legislation is needed to exculpate doctors who, with their patients’ understanding and consent, depart from standard treatment to personalize their care.

One might wonder whether Schneider’s aggressive treatment of his cancer weakened his heart and eventually led to his heart attack. Of course, it’s impossible to know for certain. But it was a risk he took knowingly and voluntarily, believing that without that treatment he would likely be dead.

What Schneider and Bonnie share is their refusal to take the standard protocol on faith, their willingness to get their hands dirty with admittedly limited data, their insistence that their treatment be personalized, and their resolve to take responsibility for their own treatment decisions and outcomes. In the end, Schneider was able to spend his last nine years in good health, with his family, doing his life’s work—trying to make sure that we approach our climate the same way he approached his cancer. And that’s all any of us can ask for.

Copyright © 2010, John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.

Raving On: The Archaic Revival in 2010

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine


On a  recent sunday afternoon my husband was taking a disco nap reclining on faux-fur cushions in a gazebo bedecked with hanging saris and tie-die fabric. Some fifteen hours before he’d been playing records stage left of here, illuminated by crazy visuals projected onto a panoramic screen behind him.

I’m delighted and impressed to see that since 7am, when we left the dirt dance floor and now, a clean up crew has been through and meticulously lifted every cigarette butt and denuded the altar of many beer bottle offerings. We are guests in the un-incorporated town of Belden which used to host biker parties back in the day and has recently embraced the rave scene, giving a new home to the Sunset campout, the favorite event of the year for a crew who throw free parties, boat parties, and club parties all year round. The venue which runs by the side of the Feather River is thoroughly occupied by around seven hundred party people who are either drifting between outdoor dancefloors,  their pop-up tents and the bathrooms  or floating in the cool green river. Hakim Bey would be proud of us; this is a dedicated Temporary Autonomous Zone – folks are eager to do their rave thing, especially their ritual hours on the dancefloor: getting on with being in the moment for as long as the moment can last.

On the cushions here, while dad augments his hour and a half morning snooze  (no more was possible in our unshaded tent) I sit smoking and thinking about how relevant or interesting writing about a rave in 2010 might be. It has been over twenty years since the advent of rave culture when house music, acid house and techno brought  a new all-night underground dance experience replete with mind-expanding  psychedelics  to the masses. The first rave I went to was in an old school building in south London which had been squatted and groovily adapted as a venue. My life transformed as my mind tuned into unknown sensations and my body became a medium for music that drew me and my two left feet into a space I had never imagined existed. My fervor for this experience led me away from the preoccupations of the commercial art world where I’d been busy curating “warehouse shows” this had all seemed quite radical until I segued with rave culture, whose creative modus operandi went far and beyond my callow hopes of  art world success. Raving constituted a full visceral and intellectual experience for me and nothing could hold a candle to it: I threw out my trendy Wittgenstein and Derrida and turned to McKenna and Leary who held the roadmap and the ciphers to this type of boundary-dissolving social phenomena.

Rave never had so much as a honeymoon with the mainstream media, the shock horror stories of Ecstasy use and unlawful, unregulated parties have been standard fare since the get-go. By 1994 in the U.K. the Criminal Justice Act was passed and raves were essentially outlawed, heavy penalties were meted out to organizers and the party scene migrated to the confines of commercial clubs and venues. Though this somewhat compromised the rave atmosphere, there was no going back for many: the combo of  house music, techno and MDMA induced an inexorable desire to dance, laugh, love everybody, wonder fearlessly – basically engage in that elusive boundary-dissolving activity that humans enjoy so much.

Unlike the countercultural movement of the Hippies, whose ideals have entered the mainstream and are seen to have enriched society, Rave has a lousy reputation for irresponsible hedonism.  Despite the tenacity and global reach of the rave scene and the undisputed originality of electronic music, ravers are largely considered to be epicurean knackerbrains of the first order.

So I set aside my notebook, gloomily noticing a spent whippet nestling in the cushions as I liberated a copy of Harpers from underneath my slumbering, raved-out partner.

As I turned pages I could hear the bass bins of the sound system down by the river and imagined the afternoon dance floor teeming with dancers who’d sporadically cool off with a dip in the river or another chilled beer from the cooler.

As soon as I saw the article “Improvable Feasts” I felt the flutter of a synchronic moment in effect—one of those nanoseconds where a glint of the hidden weave of the multi-dimensional cloth of life is revealed.

In this cleverly titled piece, Alain De Botton, ruminates on what greases the wheels of a well-functioning society. Feasts, he believes, were the origin of communal worship; once the average serf was well-fed he was disposed to think more kindly upon the societal strictures which bound him to both neighbor and god. Alain also favors the Judaic mechanism of Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement where a touch of confessional humility will win the man-god’s absolution from most crimes.

I agreed with Alain on the failure of modern social locales (restaurants, nightclubs, art galleries) to promote community or companionability while projecting a simulacrum of that potentiality, but I don’t agree with his analysis of The Feast of Fools. He argues that this festum fatuorum, The Feast of Fools, was like a doctrinal safety value for both the Church and the wider dominator society, where everybody got  to participate in sanctioned anti-social behavior. The priest was at liberty to cavort around with an outsize woolen phallus strapped on, the mothers got loaded and ran off to the woods and the donkey pissed on the altar — after the fest the populace settled back down to another year of medieval drudgery, apparently satiated.

Wild feasting in the name of god and community is a pleasing idea but I believe those early feasts, for example the Agape feasts of the early Christians had other components, perhaps more important than the fatted lamb on the menu. De Botton chooses to ignore the significance that Agape translates as love and that if the fare of these festivals was just food why did the Council of Laodicea in 364 A.D. ban them from the religious calendar? It was the free-form carnal exuberance of Agape that the early Christians sought to eradicate; the vestiges of our ancient pagan practices, our boundary-dissolving  goddess worship that they cleaned up and reinvented as the Eucharist. The medieval incarnation of the festum fatuorum might well have been presented to the peasants as a “chance to be naughty and get away with it” and this is clearly De Botton’s take, but I believe its roots were older and pagan and not anti-social at all. Terence McKenna, beloved of ravers, had a radical theory about human consciousness and societal evolution: he believed that psychedelic excursions on psilocybin and other plants were the catalyst for our adventurous step into language which then gave the means to create the ecstatic rituals, which like social glue, bound us deeply together.

Mckenna and Leary, and other counterculturalists made a point of alerting our raver generation to the importance of boundary dissolution and the nature of psychedelic experience: in the psychedelic landscape we are explorers stepping outside of our cultural programming, looking for usable ideas and perspectives to bring back to our dominant physical reality for consideration.

This lofty task, the heady territory of the ancestors, is a place that boundary-dissolving  ravers are equipped to negotiate, but this rite of dimensional passage is not necessarily for every brain.

Terence often referred to Marshall McLuhan, the philosopher and communications theorist who wrote prophetically in the year I was born that “the medium is the message” – he believed that our contemporary means of communication were the pertinent subject to study rather than what was actually being said.

Thus, as the DJ awoke, craving a vegan wrap and requesting a last late trip to the dancefloor, I grasped the essential idea that has kept so many of us endeared to rave.

The medium is dance and boundary-dissolution – the ecstatic building blocks of culture which has served us throughout time. These psychedelic tools held our early cultures together, in times when true loving kindness,  charity and selflessness were essential to survival.

So turn up the bass, brothers and sisters, we need real community in the face of our imploding dominator society, and the vibe we share on the dancefloor is the one to take home to Mama.

fabulous foto courtesy Alyson Kohn

Andreas Economakis

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine
flickr photo by mira d'oubliette

An Ataxic Minnow Amongst Whales

by Andreas Economakis

I don’t know exactly how or why I decided to buy Laurent’s tiny inflatable boat. Not much of a seaman, I guess I nonetheless always fancied myself owning a boat. Was I trying to recapture my childhood, a sometimes wondrous, oftentimes hazardous and constantly anarchic time replete with memories of our family’s small fiberglass Kris Kraft, my brothers and I whizzing around with wild abandon, water-skiing dangerously, cutting a violent white path through the calm blue waters while the local kids ran along the beach pointing at us like we were nuts?

Laurent’s boat is nowhere near the size of the old “Spitfire ERA,” but hell, it’s a boat. With great joy, I ride my bike down to the docks to meet Laurent and take her out for her first spin. I’m a boat owner at last. Time to start hanging out with yachting types. Should I buy some Nautica threads? One of those big French fisherman’s sweaters? Salt crusted on my face, talking about the big one that got away? Hemingway? I’m a fucking yachtsman at last. A man of the seas. A captain! I’m the first of my generation (or at least of my brothers) to own a boat. That’s got to count for something, right?

I park my bike on the docks like I belong, next to a boat the size of the Queen Mary. I casually stroll onto the Tweety, the powerboat that belongs to Laurent’s employer. Laurent offers me a beer and gets to inflating my boat. I must admit, she looks kind of small on the deck of the Tweety. I lean against the boat rail (portside or seaboard, aft or bow I couldn’t begin to tell you) and squint at my new possession like a well marinated skipper.

Okay, my new boat is definitely small alright, all 2.3 meters of her, with her 5 horsepower Mercury outboard motor. Still, to me, she’s a huge fucking deal. Reflected in my mind’s eyes, my inflatable is the size of one of those enormous cigarette boats on Miami Vice. Pastel poofy suits and blonde hair and 5-o’clock shadows and chicks that smell of Coppertone. Lines of coke on the Formica table down below, Cold War vodka and some crappy 80’s Bananarama synthi tune thumping from small Bose speakers.

Laurent looks at me with a smile. He knows what I’m feeling. He gives me this huge cork and points at the boat. I hold this strange object in my hand and stare at the boat with a blank expression on my face.

“What do you want me to do with this thing?” I meekly ask after twirling it in my hands for a while. It must come from an enormous bottle of champagne Laurent must obviously stock in the Tweety’s kitchen. I smack my lips with glee, ready to ask for champagne glasses.

Laurent grabs the cork from my hands and corks this hole at the base of this board where the engine slides on. “Oh, yeah!” I think to myself, remembering the days of old. You’ve got to cork and drain these fuckers too…. Like a good bottle of French vin. I smile and picture myself motoring into a small, private bay, palm trees hunched over the water. My Coppertone chick, topless of course, dives into the aquamarine waters and comes up like that Channel #5 ad. I pop the top off of a bottle of a vintage Merlot. We sip wine and eat cheese on the sandy beach, my yacht bobbing up and down in front of us. Then we drink some coconut juice from a coconut that has fallen nearby and make salty sandy love on the beach before we go nude spearfishing for octopus.

“Grab the gas can and let’s go,” Laurent blurts out, the coconut disappearing like a puff of smoke from my hands. Back on the docks in Greece, no coconut trees anywhere in sight.

We lug the boat over to the edge and slowly lower her into the water. Shouldn’t there be a brass band and a well-dressed lady with a bottle of champagne hanging from a string somewhere nearby? Who is going to inaugurate this momentous launching?

Laurent asks me what I’m going to call my dinghy.

“Um, ‘The Idefix,’” I stutter.

“That’s good. She is small and she is white.” Uhm, small and white, two things a guy hates to hear. Maybe I should rename her “The Christina 4.” My dad thinks I should name her “The Indefatiguable,” but that’s kind of hard to pronounce in Greek. “The Idefix” it is. He was good dog.

The boat in the water, Laurent jumps in and bids me to follow. I damn near fall face first into The Idefix, my motorcycle boot becoming horribly tangled on the Tweety’s ropes. This yachting business needs attention.

Laurent at the helm, we motor off into the marina, skirting the big yachts. We must look like a minnow amongst whales. After a few rounds, Laurent lets me captain The Idefix. I slide closer to the lever that controls the speed and direction of the craft. With an ease paralleled perhaps only by Bogart in The African Queen, I show my true mettle as a captain. Before long, Laurent asks me to drop him off at the dock, telling me to continue tooling around in order to get the hang of things.

I bring my ship into port like a seasoned skipper and Laurent jumps off. Then I make what turns out to be an almost fatal nautical error. I scoot over to the other side so that I can control the vessel with my left hand like Laurent. Up until now I’ve been piloting my ship with my right hand. To my surprise, when I throttle it, it heads directly into the side of a rather large parked (moored?) skip right next to me. The skip’s captain, who’s there polishing brass, leans over the side and starts yelling at me to back off. Vessel out of control (I’m doing everything backwards), I jet off toward the center of the port, other captains yelling at me to back off, to cease and desist, to abandon ship. Out of control, and rather panicked, I floor it by accident and start doing donuts, woefully glancing at Laurent, who’s bent in two, laughing his head off on the dock.

Eyes streaming with tears, Laurent yells at me to decrease my speed and bring her home. Through his guffaws I can hear him saying that throttle right makes the boat turn left and throttle left vice versa. The instructions are lost one me. Instead, I shoot off towards the open seas, doing an abrupt 180 the moment I see a huge Coast Guard boat with a cannon coming my way. Are they going to open fire on me? I can almost hear them barking commands in their walkie talkies to open fire on the leather clad motorcycle boy who’s obviously stolen somebody’s tender.

I hunch down into the belly of my craft, wind whistling through my thinning hair, arm outstretched and clinging a piece of rope in order to not fall out of the boat. Salt spray coats my motorcycle leathers. I’m hanging on for dear life. How, oh how, am I going to dock this beast? She’s out of control! At top speed I head straight for Laurent. He’s waving his arms frantically, yelling at me to decrease my speed. When I get close, I pull the power safety switch and the boat coasts up to the dock with the engine turned off at last. Laurent grabs the rope and pulls me to safety.

A few neighboring captains approach us to find out what the hell all this fuss is about. I scramble out of my vessel and dust the salt off of my leathers. The captains all look at me like I’m Bowie’s man on the moon. Laurent explains that I’m the new owner of the offending boat that nearly damaged several multi-million dollar yachts. I calmly walk over to my trusty motorcycle and start rolling a smoke to calm my nerves. I overhear one crusty captain ask Laurent what a city boy like me is doing with a boat.

“He’ll get the hang of it,” Laurent replies.

“Not in our marina! He’s ataxic,” another captain scoffs.

“Huh?” Laurent replies. “What’s ataxic?”

“Uncoordinated. His right is my left and so on. He’s a walking, talking, floating hazard. Motorcycle boy’s got boat dylsexia, if there is such a thing.”

Damn yachtsmen. Snobby, upper class boating dishrags. I climb on my bike, wave goodbye to Laurent and squeal off in a cloud of oil petrol smoke. A clumsy yachtsman maybe, but a coordinated motorcycle boy always.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

On Turning Thirty, by Raul Clement

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

 

“It’s impossible for a man to waste any time before thirty-five…” – James Michener, The Drifters

“What you don’t do before thirty, you’ll never do.” – John Updike, from…?

 

I.

The Pixar film Up presents itself as for children. It is animated; it features talking dogs, floating houses, and nefarious schemes.  But for adults it contains one of the most remarkable – and remarkably close-to-the-bone – opening sequences in recent movie history:

In the early part of the twentieth century, a young boy named Carl watches a newsreel about an explorer named Charles Muntz. Afterward, infatuated with Muntz and his trip to Paradise Falls, South America, Carl races up and down the streets near his home pretending to be Muntz. In a nearby abandoned house, he meets a girl named Ellie. She shares his obsession with Muntz and describes to him her dream of moving their clubhouse to Paradise Falls.

Cut to: Carl and Ellie’s marriage. As a sort of montage we see their entire married life – their clubhouse remodeled into their home; their jobs as balloon-maker and zookeeper respectively; a touching scene of a silhouetted Ellie in a hospital room, crying (she has either had a miscarriage or learned she is inferitle). In their living room is a shrine to Paradise Falls, and before this shrine is jar. As the couple grows older, they fill the jar with coins for their trip Paradise Falls, only to see it emptied again in times of financial crisis.

One day, when the couple is old, stooped and gray, Carl finally buys two plane tickets to Paradise Falls. He invites Ellie out for a picnic on their favorite hill in the park, where we have already seen them lying hand-in-hand at various ages, staring up at the clouds. Midway to the top of the hill, Ellie falls and doesn’t get up. She is ill. She is taken to the hospital, where she dies. They never make it to Paradise Falls.

It was John Lennon who most famously said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” If I had to choose one phrase to sum up the opening sequence of Up, this would be it. It’s not just that we put things off until it’s too late; it’s that the decisions we make get in the way of the reasons we make them. We go to law school to support our true passion; the law consumes so much of us that we don’t ever get around to pursuing that passion. Or else accidents happen: wives get pregnant; parents get sick; money we intended for other purposes is spent. Sometimes we just keep saying tomorrow until there is no tomorrow left.

As an opening to a major Hollywood production, and one for children at that, the beginning of Up is formally and thematically shocking. We expect our stories to start in media res, but this opening functions as back story, a prelude to the main event. But more than that, it is its bleakness that disarms us. The lack of resolution. Or at least tidy resolution – death resolves us all, of course. But while in the conventional movie, death comes with a speech or one last grand, redemptive gesture, here it comes in the middle of life, leaving many things undone. Words unspoken. Dreams unrealized.

We are disarmed not by the artfulness of the sequence but by a graceful artlessness we recognize as truth. It acts as a corrective to the too-neat narratives of Hollywood that force a calming order on life.

 

II.

By the time you read this, I will be thirty years old. That’s 10,957 days, counting leap years. 262,968 hours, 15,778,080 minutes, 946,684,800 seconds. Etc. I break it down this way not because it’s an original way of looking at it, but to illustrate how meaningless such a measurement is. Divided into its smallest units, the number becomes as incomprehensible as records of the dead – days fallen, left behind.

Thirty years is, of course, thirty revolutions of the earth around the sun: this is what it generally means to us. Seasons change, holidays come and go, the ball in Time Square drops and we imagine a fresh start. And maybe there is something innate in such a cycle, something our bodies respond to in a way outside the understanding of science. Or maybe it’s just a convenient cultural marker, a way for us to talk about units of change.

Because that’s all time is: a measurement of change.

But does change always – for lack of a better word – change at the same rate? Anyone who has arrived at this number will tell you there are different ways of being thirty. Some people seem to have it all figured out: they are married, or taking the bar exam, or buying their first home. Others work at McDonalds, drink with their friends after work, perhaps move to another town when things get stagnant. Some don’t even make it to thirty. For everyone who has it figured out, there are probably ten who don’t; and those that claim they do are often just striking a confident pose.

What does it even mean to be thirty? What separates it from being twenty- nine years and three hundred and sixty-four days old? Nothing, scientifically. At least nothing that separates it from any other day tacked on– just another step in the slow decomposition of the body that starts at around twenty-five, I’m told.

But culturally, it does mean something. A lot.

Eighteen. Twenty-one. Thirty, forty, sixty-five. I have left out a couple, I’m sure, but these are the big ones – the birthdays that we are judged by. In this society, we don’t have true rites of passage, though we do have unofficial ones. At eighteen you are a man, generally expected to move out of your parent’s house. You can die at war, vote, smoke cigarettes and look at pornography. At twenty-one, you can drink. At thirty…

Ah, but there’s the crux. These first two ages are defined by privileges and their attendant responsibilities. What can you do at thirty that you can’t at twenty-nine? To the best of my reckoning, it’s not what you can do, but what others expect of you. What the pressure of their expectations can do to you.

 

III.

For the past ten years or so I’ve lived in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s a city of three hundred thousand, the third biggest in the state. There are two universities, three more colleges. Dozens of bars, plenty of coffee shops, a few used book stores. As a friend of mine puts it, it is a “great place to be in your early twenties, but not such a great place to be in your late twenties.”

This is because it is a college town – as you age, the people around you don’t. Or rather, they graduate, move on, are replaced by another group of undergrads. There is not much reason to stay beside inertia. There are not many jobs for recent graduates – it’s pretty much all bartending or tenure-track professorships. Greensboro is called the Gate City, and though it got this name because it acted as a train hub for much of the state, it has come to mean something different to the current residents: the city as a way station, as a place to catch your breath before diving into real life.

For this reason, those that stay here are generally failures in one way or another. Take, for example, a bar I’ll call the Pizzeria. On any given Friday night – in fact, on any given Monday afternoon – you can find the same five people hunched at the bar, deep in their cups. It’s tempting to judge these people – as, in fact, I now am – because frankly it’s a lot of fun. But more than that, it sets up a distance between you and them – insulates you from becoming one of their ilk. Because when you’re twenty-nine and it’s three o’ clock in the afternoon and you’re in the same bar you’ve been going to since you were allowed to drink (for the braver of us, even earlier than that) you are, to all outside appearances, one of them. A nobody, a failure. A townie. It is only in your mind that you are different.

One day, you tell yourself. One day I will write that novel I have been dreaming of. One day I will meet a nice girl and get married. One day I will leave this place. This is the insidious part of being a twenty-first century American: it’s not just that others judge you by what you have or have not achieved, it’s that you judge yourself. It gets so you don’t want to answer one of the most basic questions: “What have you been doing?” Because the answer, if not nothing, is at least nothing worth talking about. By which you mean: nothing that won’t diminish me in your eyes, and in doing so, in my own.

So you find ways to make yourself sound better, more promising than you are. These are not lies exactly, but a positive spin on reality. You become a PR man for your own life. “I am thinking about applying to grad school,” you say. Translation: I have looked up some schools online and dreamed about how nice it would be to attend one. Or: “I might move to New York. I have some good connections up there.” Translation: I know a few struggling actors.

Still, a young person now has certain freedoms, freedoms our parents gained us through years of costly and painful rebellion (or so the story goes – more likely it was just a gradual loosening of the belt that started generations before).  These freedoms are by and large negative ones: the freedom not to marry at eighteen, not to have three children by twenty-five, not to pick one job and stick with it until your pension kicks in. These are good freedoms – nothing is gained by committing to so much so early, except maybe the illusion of adulthood. But I also wonder if it isn’t part of the problem. You take away all restraints and there’s nothing left. You end up floating in air, untethered as Carl Frederickson’s house in Up. Except instead of floating toward Paradise Falls and a kind of redemption, you are drifting toward nothing at all.

 

IV.

The themes in the opening of Up are not particularly new. That they can be expressed in a single song lyric by one of our most universally loved musicians proves that. And nor was John Lennon the originator of that aphorism: a quick Wikipedia search shows that William Gaddis, Lily Tomlin, and even Reader’s Digest have been credited with the phrase.

Nor is Up the first work of fiction to dramatize it. One of the great – and until recently, greatly neglected – twentieth-century American novelists, Richard Yates, made dashed hopes the subject of his most affecting fictions. The short story “Oh Joseph, I’m So Tired” deals with a talentless sculptor and mother of two who cannot square the life she dreams of leading with the one she ends up leading. This character, probably based on Yates’s own mother, appears in several others works, including the novels The Easter Parade and A Special Providence. As the title of the latter indicates – and this could be the title of any of Yates’s books – she is the subject of a biting authorial irony, as well as a source of pity and frustration for the people around her.

But mothers are not the only ones to see their hopes dashed. Shattered illusions are Yates’s great theme, and nowhere does he treat them more completely and devastatingly than in his acknowledged masterpiece, Revolutionary Road. Set in the early 1960s, it tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a couple who move to suburbia, but consider themselves different from the bland conservatism that threatens to swallow them. April has dreams of acting, while Frank has a desire to do something vaguely artistic; in the meantime, Frank goes to work at the same company his father did and April becomes a housewife. In despair over their failing marriage, they hatch a plan to move to Paris: April will work and Frank will take the time to figure out his “purpose.” But April becomes pregnant and Frank, who was beginning to have doubts about the plan, receives a lucrative job offer. April, desperate not to lose what she sees as their last chance at happiness, administers a self-abortion and dies. Frank is left shattered and empty.

This is Up if the movie ended after the first fifteen minutes – and if Carl and Ellie, and not life’s vagaries, were responsible for the failure to live out their dreams. In Up, Carl is redeemed by his friendship with Russell – a Wilderness Scout who is a younger version of himself – and a belated journey to Paradise Falls, where he learns that the life you dream of leading is not always the one you’re supposed to lead. There is no such redemption for Frank Wheeler: by foolishly clinging to his dreams he destroys the possibility of ever realizing them.

So what is Yates’s solution then? Submit to our bland fate? Apparently not: the reason we identify with the Wheelers is that they are the only characters in the novel who still have the ability to dream. If we give up our dreams, then we are like Mr. Givings, the husband of the Wheelers’ real estate agent. Tired of his wife’s constant gossiping, he turns off his hearing aid so as not to listen to her. This is the novel’s final image: a woman’s lips moving soundlessly, a man engulfed in his own silent world.

 

V.

My parents divorced when I was two years old. I went to live with my mother. While I was too young to have been traumatized by the event – and the word “trauma” should probably be reserved for events like rape and genocide – I do remember the subsequent years of fatherly neglect. I would wait by the door for him to pick me up; he was hours, sometimes days, late. I don’t remember being upset by this, either – though I do remember the elation when he did arrive – but it must have bothered me on some level, because we still have a hard time interacting.

We’ve only recently begun to repair our relationship. I’ve spent a chunk of the last two summers with him in the small town of Tarboro, North Carolina, helping him renovate his Queen Anne-style home. He pays me in food and lodging and whatever cash I need.  The work needs to be done – and he would have to pay a skilled laborer more – but mostly it’s an excuse for us to hang out.

We talk about our lives, which have taken remarkably similar paths in some ways and have diverged in others. Like me, he took most of his twenties to finish his undergrad (I still have not quite done that). Like me, he spent most of that time flitting from city to city, traveling around Latin America, and working low-paying, unskilled jobs. But he also married my mother when he was twenty-two and had me he was twenty-five – two experiences I can’t imagine going through now, let alone at that age. I can’t help but think that if he had waited he might have been a better father: the proof is that I have two happy, well-adjusted half-brothers, Graham and Jacob, and that he and my step-mother have no intention of divorce. The proof is that he is here for me, finally, now.

It was he who shared with me the Michener quote that is one of the epigraphs of this piece. We were talking about Up, which he had seen with Graham and Jacob when it was in the theater. Their uncle, my father’s brother-in-law, was with them. During the opening sequence, he kept leaning across the aisle and pretending to smack Jacob in the head.

“I thought you said this was a funny movie,” he would say.

He was playing around, but there’s some truth there, too. For adults, the opening of this movie registers as a painful recognition: we don’t end up doing most of the things we plan to do. I told my father how, now that I was approaching thirty, I could see the sad truth of this idea.

And that’s when he quoted, or misquoted, Michener to me. “You know Michener said it was impossible for a man to waste any time before thirty,” he said. “So I guess you’ve still got… what? A month?”

“But Updike said ‘What you don’t do before thirty, you’ll never do,’” I shot back.

So which is it? And are the two even mutually exclusive? The Michener quote is from a novel about twenty-somethings bumming around Europe, a book that begins with the sentence “Youth is truth.” As such, it embodies the romantic idea that the purpose of youth is not to accomplish anything, but to accumulate experience. That this is, in a way, its own accomplishment.

While I couldn’t find the source of the Updike quote – too many random bits of data floating around in my thirty-year-old skull – I suspect it is from one of the Rabbit novels. Perhaps Rabbit thinks it about himself, as a way of dismissing the whimsy of his own dreams. Or perhaps it is in Rabbit is Rich, and he thinks it about his son Nelson, as a way of dismissing the whimsy of youth. Either way, the meaning is the same – something akin to “strike while the iron is hot.” That this phrase should be uttered by a writer who was printed in the New Yorker while still in college, who published his first novel at twenty-five and his first masterpiece just a few years later, is hardly surprising. It was probably this attitude that allowed him to accomplish such things.

But maybe these two statements can be squared. Maybe the time we spend doing “nothing” can be seen as a way of doing something. We might not publish (or even complete) a novel at twenty-five, but we might make the mistakes and accumulate the experiences which allow us to publish that novel later. And maybe this is what Michener really means: that youth is a time of preparation, that as long as a person spends their formative years, well, being formed, then they are not wasted. If so, it’s not what a person doesn’t do before thirty that they’ll never do, but what a person doesn’t get ready to do.  Hence, Michener and Updike are not expressing opposite sentiments but two shades of the same optimism.

Or maybe this is a last lingering bit of my youthful romanticism. Maybe it’s an elaborate justification for all the time I’ve wasted. Can’t it be these things and also be true?

 

VI.

Another book turned movie, The Natural, offers us the solution that Yates’s relentlessly bleak Revolutionary Road refuses. Like Up, it focuses on what we do after our dreams are shattered. Roy Hobbs is a preternaturally gifted baseball player who has his career cut short because of a senseless crime. As he lies in a hospital bed, lamenting the choices he made, he receives the following piece of advice from his one-time lover, Iris.

“You know, I always thought we had two lives,” she says.

“How…what do you mean?” Roy asks.

“The life we learn with and the life we live with after that.”

The meaning is clear: Roy is still a young man. There is a lot of life ahead of him – he can lead it with the knowledge he has gained from his past mistakes. He doesn’t have to wait until he is old and alone like Carl for redemption.

I, for one, look forward to a decade of no more wasted time.  Of course, according to Michener – the true version of the quote, not the one my father misremembered – I’ve got five more years.

 

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ANNE SEXTON

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THE TRUTH THE DEAD KNOW
by Anne Sexton

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Anne Sexton (1928 – 1974) was an influential American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her suicidal tendencies, long battle against depression, and various intimate details from her own private life, including her relationship with her husband and children. (Annotated biography of Anne Sexton courtesy of Wikipedia.org.)

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is dedicated to the poet Norma Liliana Valdez, who recently shared an audio recording of Sexton reading today’s selection. Keep an eye out for the work of Ms. Valdez who, like Sexton, has the ability to transform emotional turmoil into a poetic experience that transforms her readers.

For me, this piece slices as close to the bone as a poem can. That inevitable human experience of losing my parents is my greatest fear.

Despite the inherently personal nature of the poem and of Sexton’s experience, a distance can be felt in her choice of words and images. In another country people die, not in this, her own country. The dead lie in boats, not here with her. And Sexton’s discussion within the poem is directed to her darling, to someone among the living with whom she is sharing an experience of touch, of connection, of living and of not being alone. It feels as though in order to even comprehend the overwhelming experience of losing her parents Sexton has to distance herself from that experience and throw herself into connection with another living being, with the notion that “no one’s alone.”

Want to read more by and about Anne Sexton?
Audio recording of Sexton reading “The Truth the Dead Know”
Modern American Poetry
Poets.org

Andreas Economakis

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Shotgun

by Andreas Economakis

11:53 pm.

He’s sitting alone in the living room, alone with his two dogs. His mother is at a cocktail party down the road. Connecticut, the edge of suburbia, where manicured lawns meet the forest, the unknown, the bogeyman. The TV is chattering in the corner of the room but he’s not paying any attention to it.

He looks out the large sliding patio window in front of him, into the deep, dark forest. He can barely make out the abandoned old house that’s rotting by the fork in the little stream that cuts through the woods. That house gives him the creeps. He can feel bad energy coming from it, kind of like the energy of a motel room after a murder. He buried his cat under a tree in the woods the week before, fashioning a crude cross from birch branches. His mother had accidentally crushed her under the garage door. He kept a weary eye on the abandoned house while he dug, running away quickly once the cat was in the ground.

He switches channels on the TV and a movie with dolphins comes on. In one of the scenes, a dead man hangs upside down in a large aquarium, his frozen eyes looking directly at him. He runs upstairs and gets his mom’s shotgun. It’s a single-barrel 20-gauge Harrington and Richardson. He loads it and goes back downstairs. He sits on the couch again, his dogs at his feet, listening to the woods.

At 3 in the morning, 2 cars rumble up the driveway. He tenses, his finger on the trigger, the hammer cocked. A fist pounds on the kitchen door. A large man is holding his mother in his arms. She’s unconscious. He puts the shotgun down and holding the dogs by their chokers, he opens the door.

“Hey kid, is this your mom? She’s drunk,” the man says. After a pause, he adds: “This is the address on her license.”

“Thanks,” he says.

The man lays his mom on the kitchen floor and hands him his mom’s car keys and her purse. He smells of whiskey and cigarettes. He looks around silently, a glint in his eye. He then nods with a slight smile and exits slowly.

He locks the door behind him. He struggles to get his mother into her room. He goes back downstairs and takes the shell out of the shotgun. His mommy is home and he is safe again.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

USELESS BUT VALUABLE

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USELESS BUT VALUABLE

by John Dunn

It began with an email from an old friend, now living in Sweden. He is in his later 60’s and reported that one of his kidneys had quit working and the other was down for the count and maybe longer. Weekly dialysis is what he has to look forward to.

A day later another old friend, a musicologist and pianist, about the same age as my friend in Sweden, told me over breakfast that just two weeks before he had suddenly lost the use of his left arm. A debilitating and despair-inducing moment for anyone, but especially for a pianist. The function is slowly returning, but the discouraging thing is that they still don’t know what caused it.

Yet another friend of about the same age reports that back trouble has led to a loss of feeling in parts of his legs, which affects his ability to walk and stand. X-rays and MRI’s suggest all manner of disc problems. Neither the prognosis nor the path to recovery is yet clear.

These incidents and a number like them over the last few years put me in mind of a story  about R.H. Tawney, the great English economic historian and socialist. Tawney was well acquainted with mortality. An English non-com in World War I, he survived one German bullet only because it struck the Book of Common Prayer he kept in the breast pocket of his jacket. Later wounded during the Battle of the Somme, he was left in no-man’s land for some 30 hours before being evacuated to a field hospital and later back to England. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._H._Tawney).

After the war, Tawney returned to civilian life and lectured for a number of years at the London School of Economics (LSE). Like many Englishmen of his time, Tawney smoked a pipe and wore tweeds. Walking into the lecture room at LSE one day, he stuffed his still-lighted pipe into his jacket pocket. A few minutes into the lecture a student noticed smoke curling up from that pocket. He alerted Tawney who, without missing a beat, pulled the pipe from his pocket, patted the smoldering tweed jacket to be sure the fire would not spread, smiled and remarked to his students (echoing Wordsworth) “intimations of mortality.”

Intimations indeed. However we humans have come to be what we are – Dawkin’s “blind watchmaker”, directed evolution, dumb cosmic luck, divine intervention – we are biological machines and we are wearing out. We are mortal.

When someone young confronts her mortality, it’s one thing: facing a possibly fatal illness or recovering uncertainly from an accident, she thinks about what she will miss if she does not survive.

For those of us in our 60’s, it’s different. We have largely lived our lives. As I see it we have three choices.

One is urged on us by advertisements, medical inducements and a variety of feel-good books: struggle to remain young, in appearance and in our activities. Try to look 20 or 30 years younger than we are and try to continue in activities at levels that our bodies simply cannot endure any more.

The second choice is to resign ourselves to old age, in effect to see the glass as half empty and say to hell with it. Why bother? It’s no use. We are going to die, so what’s the point?

The point is the third choice, what I might call the path of wisdom. It was my friend Alex, a priest in the Orthodox Church of America and a very wise man who urged this on me when I was telling him about this article.  (He’s not much older than I am, making me wonder how he got to be so wise!) I was lamenting the fact that our generation is being discarded, that we are being made useless by the way society treats us, ignoring our hard-won experience in its pursuit of whatever is new.

In effect he said that he has no desire to retire into the kind of busyness that our society thinks of when it thinks of someone being useful. “I want to be useless”, he said, “I want to be free to relax and write and think.” He went on to talk about how he wants to make his life-experience available to others. At which point my wife said to him “you want to be useless but valuable.”

“Exactly”, he replied.

Useless but valuable. We slip over into the local lanes, where we can pull off easily. We can stand by the roadside, waving to those driving by, causing them to wonder what we might be doing, whether we have something to offer.

Alex went on to tell me about an entry in the published journals of Alexander Schmemann, an Orthodox priest who was Alex’s mentor. (As well he was the father of Serge Schmemann, who used to write for the NY TIMES and who now writes for the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE). Schmemann senior says that we can”cling to life (“I can still be useful”) and to live as if death had no relation to me.” Or we can transform “the knowledge of death”, i.e., our honest acknowledgment of our mortality, “into the knowledge of life…” He goes on to say that we “really are needed, but not for all the concerns that fragment our lives. Their [our] freedom is needed, the beauty of old age, the reflection of the ray of light from it, the dying of the heart and the rising of the spirit.” (These quotes are from THE JOURNALS OF FATHER ALEXANDER SCHMEMANN, 1973-1983, p. 84.)

Alex’s comments, my wife’s response and the journal entry reminded me of the way I have tried to lead my own life, practicing what I call teacher’s mind. I can never know how what I say or do will effect others. All I can do is share with them what I’ve come to know and what I now realize I cannot know. I offer it to them with no expectation that it will make a difference. I can only hope that at some point it will come back to them at a time when they need it. I may find that out; more likely I will never know. Which is alright.

Recently, expecting that we will be moving at some point, I have been giving away books, lots and lots of books. I love books, I cherish books, I have a touch of bibliomania. But, with my wife’s help, I realized that I didn’t want to pack up all these books and move them two thousand miles. And I wanted others to have use of them. I wanted them to find good homes where others would read and enjoy them as I have read and enjoyed them.  I’ve given them to local libraries, to cull for volumes they’d like to add to their collections and to sell the rest to raise money. A few I’ve given to particular people.

I would like to do the same with my life and I hope my contemporaries will consider doing the same.

I cannot give my experience away – the memory of it will be mine until I die – but I can share it with others. I can share with them all that I have read and thought and experienced, the good and the bad. I am sometimes surprised to discover that nothing more than an account of my time in the anti-war movement in the 60’s or of the year I lived in Israel, on a kibbutz, in the early 70’s, can hold people’s attention. Young enough to have only read about these things, they can hear about them firsthand and ask questions. Or they can share a moral dilemma with someone older, wondering what you – the older of the two – might do under the same circumstances.

Growing older can be economically difficult, especially now that we are all living longer and given the fact that many of us have seen retirement savings badly eroded or even destroyed. Growing older is physically difficult: no matter how we try, these bodies of ours will slow down and wear.

But it need not be spiritually debilitating. Some of us can take comfort in the promise of an afterlife. (I have my doubts on that score.) Even with that, though, we can, if you will, set ourselves spiritually alight, as numerous small beacons to those coming after us. Beacons to remind them that we are still here for them, places where they can sit and warm themselves in the glow.

As Alexander Schmemann says in that same entry, we should not “focus on death, but, on the contrary” we should “purify one’s reason, thought, heart, contemplation and…concentrate on the essence of life, the mysterious joy. Aside from that joy, one needs nothing else because “bright rays are rushing from that joy”.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: EMILY DICKINSON

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine




THE DANDELION’S PALLID TUBE
by Emily Dickinson

The Dandelion’s pallid tube
Astonishes the Grass,
And Winter instantly becomes
An infinite Alas —

The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower, —
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o’er.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is one of America’s most beloved poets. Most of her work was published after her death, and since then she has become an icon for American poetry.

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is dedicated to Deborah D., a dear friend, faithful reader, and lover of poetry. Deborah was thoughtful enough to let me know (since I am currently living in New York) that the New York Botanical Garden is hosting an exhibit titled “Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers.” The exhibit was inspired by Dickinson’s life as an avid gardener. Known to be a recluse in her Amherst, Mass home, she was known in her lifetime as more of a gardener than a poet, though she always carried the latest poem she was working on in the pocket of her gardening dress and incorporated flowers and nature into her poems. Dickinson referred to herself as a dandelion. Read about the NYBG Emily Dickinson exhibit here.

Want to read more by and about Emily Dickinson?
Poets.org
The Literature Network
NPR on the NYBG Exhibit

The Coming Crisis of Western Food: Critical Theory, Social Problems, and Food

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

By Liam Hysjulien

Credit: Bill Sanders http://www.wku.edu/library/onlinexh/sanders/pages/imagery/hunger_us.html

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once wrote, “[a]‘social problem’ (juvenile delinquency, drugs, AIDS)…constituted as such by the fact that it is hotly disputed and fought over, passes lock, stock and barrel into science” (Bourdieu 1992: 42).  For Bourdieu, the hasty “constitution of social problems¹” places these problems in the same arena as “sociological problems”—something that Bourdieu feels limits our ability to understand the complexity and historical development of these problems.  Bourdieu finishes this passage by stating, “social problems draw attention to critical sociological questions, but they must be approached with a redoubled epistemological vigilance, with a sharp realization that they must be demolished in order to be reconstructed” (Bourdieu 1992: 42).

While I agree with Bourdieu’s position, I put forth this question in response:  what happens if a problem isn’t really seen as a sociological problem to begin with? How do we reconstruct something that rests in a political, theoretical, and scientific nexus of “not really, but kind of a problem, or maybe more of a serious concern.” As a sociologist interested in food, I have a memory of discussing with a friend my interest in community gardens as a means of providing access to local fresh fruits and vegetables.  Halfway through our conversation, my friend—a compassionate and intelligent liberal if there ever was one—interjected with the statement, “well, access to food isn’t really a problem. I mean everyone can get enough food to eat these days. So what do you really see is the point of these community gardens?” At that time, my acquired knowledge had not equaled my passion for food systems and food securities, so I shrugged my shoulders and went on about the aesthetic contribution of bringing food and gardens into low-income neighborhoods—a position I hold to this day.  If I had, as the saying goes, known then what I know now, I would have rattled off statistics about how in 2008 over 50 million Americans, or nearly one in six, struggled to feed themselves and their children (Debusmann 2009).  And that a recent report by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), one of the oldest anti-hunger social movements in the country, cited that over 17.3 million people in the United States currently live in very low food security households (FRAC 2010).

Credit: UNEP http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/trends-in-food-commodity-prices-compared-to-trends-in-crude-oil-prices-indeces

But again how do we begin to understand food as a social problem?  Is it in the fact that we are destroying valuable topsoil to increase larger  crop yields—and not only that, but we are completely dependent upon a finite petroleum-based resource to keep the system humming along (Hellwinckel and De La Torre Ugarte 2009; Roberts 2008)?  Probably.   Or how about the reality that over 200 million people in the world starved in 2006 because investors, seeing food securities as less financially risky than the housing market, drove up the cost of grains by 80% (Hari 2010)?  Yeah, that’s actually pretty depressing. Or is it simply the reality that rates of obesity have increased to the point where nearly one-third of adults are currently obese in this country (Flegal et al. 2010)?   While this list is far from exhaustive, I’m sure you’re getting the point—it doesn’t take much unpeeling to see problems embedded in all aspects of our current food system. Understanding how something becomes a social problem, at least from a critical theory perspective, is an attempt to recognize the contradictions inherent in the totally administrated world—to use Adornian language—of modern society.  Similar to Bourdieu’s charge that we must demolish in order to reconstruct, and in doing so, understand the complexity of a problem, a critical understanding of food as a social problem requires that we push beyond the noise of ideological divisions and polemics, and see the seams of contradictions splitting the edges of our society.

Let us take hunger, for example.As Paul Roberts writes in his incredibly well-researched and thought-provoking book The End of Food, hunger, being an almost daily reality through much of Western civilization’s history, tended to ebb and flow, like the cycles of economic recessions, during periods of plague, war, mass famine, or invasions. If we use the decline of the Roman Empire as an example, we see how the collapse of the Roman’s extensive outsourced food system resulted in the fact that “in fourth A.D., the Western food economy collapsed so completely that for the next six centuries, global population rose from 300 million to just 310 million”(Roberts 2008: 12).

Even today, American public policy discourse often falls short in its framing of hunger as a problem.   Looking at the lack of attention among policy officials toward food securities in urban areas—where the problem of food deserts are reality in many communities— Pothukuchi and Kaufman argue that, “food is not perceived as an urban issue in the same magnitude as…housing, crime, or transportation”(Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1998: 214). Nowhere is this point better articulated than in Patricia Allen’s article, “The Disappearance of Hunger in America.”  Allen, one of the most significant voices in food policy and food securities research, describes the effect of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) decision to change their terminology from hunger to food insecurities.  Unless you study the linguistic decisions of the USDA, this change probably went unnoticed by you, but it has the potential to have a resounding impact on how hunger is understood in this country.  As Allen writes, “If hunger is no longer an analytical category, how does one talk about it or advocate for its elimination…the discursive shift from hunger to very low food security…takes away the sharp edge of the word hunger” (Allen 2007: 22).    While the word food security—a word that has its own complex history within anti-hunger movements— may offer a more nuanced way of conceptualizing a person’s inability to access nutritional food, it doesn’t pack any sort of political punch.   The word hunger evokes images of people physically emaciated and ravaged by a lack of access to food. There is a dimension of humanness in a word like hunger, and as the late philosopher Richard Rorty would have said, it helps in manipulating our sentimentality toward other fellow featherless bipeds (Rorty 1999).

Through social movements, policy reforms, and food-based theories, we must challenge these issues surrounding food as a social problem.  When I consider the attention, or lack thereof, placed on hunger in American politics, I immediately think of the statement made by South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer comparing providing people with food stamps to feeding “stray animals”(Barr 2010).    It is these Sorelian myths that epistemological vigilance can help to negate.   The longer this crisis of food is marginalized, the more we will face ideological narratives that fit comfortably within a neo-liberal framework—a linkage that food experts are only now beginning to connect: new technologies will solve our food problems; obesity is the fault of the individual; everything is fine; healthy food is elitist propaganda.  We’ll continue to do nothing with the knowledge that we have gained, and the system that we’ve created— the totally administrated world of food—will go on unraveling.

Notes
¹ The critical theorist, Harry Dahms, delineates the difference between social and sociological theory as being the way in which “social theorists endeavor to understand the logic of social and/or political historical transformations” while “sociological theorists strive to set up a suprahistorical frame of reference for theoretical and empirical research” (Dahms 1995:2).

References

Allen, Patricia. 2007. “The Disappearance of Hunger in America.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 7(2):19-23.

Barr, Andy. 2010. “S.C Lt. Gov.: Poor Like ‘Stray Animals.‘” Politico.  January 25.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. “Thinking About Limits” Theory Culture and Society 9:37-49.

Dahms, Harry. 1995. “From Creative Action to the Social Rationalization of the Economy: Joesph A. Schumpter’s Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 13(1):1.13.

Debusmann, Bernd. 2009. “A Paradox of Plenty-hunger in America.” Reuters. Nov 24.

Flegel, Katherine, Margaret Carroll, Cynthia Ogden, and Lester Curtin. “Prevalence and Trends in Obesity Among US Adults, 1999-2008.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 303(3):235-241.

Food Research Action Center. 2010. “Nutrition Programs and Refundable Tax Credits in President Obama’s FY 2011 Budget.” Retrieved April 24, 2010 (http://www.frac.org /Legislative/budget_FY2011.htm).

Hari, Johann. 2010. “How Goldman Sachs Gambled on Starving the Poor – And Won“.Huffington Post. July 2.

Hellwinckel, Chard and Daniel De La Torre Ugarte. 2009. “Peak Oil and the Necessity of Transitioning to Regenerative Agriculture.” Farm Foundation.  October 6.

Pothukuch, Kameshwari and Jerome L. Kaufman. 1999. Placing the Food System on the Urban Agenda: The Role of Municipal Institutions in Food Systems Planning. Agriculture and Human Values 16:213-224.

Roberts,  Paul. 2008. The End of Food. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Rorty, Richard. 1999. “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality.” Pp. 67-83 in The Politics of Human Rights, edited by the Belgrade Circle London UK: Verso.

OPEN LETTER TO BILL GATES ABOUT EDUCATION

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

(from a public schools parent)

by Sue Peters

Dear Bill,

I am a public schools parent in your own general neighborhood (Seattle). I realize you have an interest in public education, and are a major participant and funder in the current “education reform” efforts being attempted nationally.

Unfortunately, I don’t agree with a number of the choices and “investments” you are making in our schools. I believe they have not been that effective, and some of them are even damaging.

Your all-tech $63 million “School of the Future” in Philadelphia, for example, apparently hasn’t worked out so well. Your $2 billion “Small Schools Initiative” was ultimately canceled (though the concept of smaller schools seems sound to me). And now you are promoting charter schools and “merit pay” for teachers as a measure of “teacher effectiveness,” even though recent reputable studies from Stanford and Vanderbilt universities cast serious doubts on both of these concepts, showing that most charters are not better than public schools and merit pay doesn’t work. (Also see “The Pillars of Education Reform Are Toppling.”)

In other words, you seem to be spending a lot of money and not getting good results.

Does “merit pay” actually improve “teacher effectiveness”?

As a keynote speaker at the national American Federation of Teachers (AFT) conference that was held here in Seattle last week, you said: “The truly impressive reforms share the same strategic core – they all include fair and reliable measures of teacher effectiveness that are tied to gains in student achievement. Public schools have never had this before. It’s a huge change – the kind of change that could match the scale of the problem.”

By this you mean teachers being measured by and paid according to student test scores.

But lashing teachers to test scores is the kind of “change” that will quash innovation and passion, and turn teachers into test-prep robots and schools into test-prep factories. It leads to teaching to the test. That’s already happening in some schools as a result of No Child Left Behind “Annual Yearly Progress” pressures. Not all students test well, by the way – didn’t Einstein famously get Fs in school? And not all learning shows up on tests. I have said before, how do you measure that “Aha!” moment when a child understands something for the first time? It will never show up on a standardized test, but those moments are the real measure of successful teaching.

Above all, research shows that “merit pay” for teachers doesn’t work – it does not lead to true and lasting improvements in genuine student academic achievement.

Meanwhile, perfectly good teachers and principals are being sacrificed and fired under such draconian rules, as this article in the July 19 New York Times attests, “A Popular Principal, Wounded by Government’s Good Intentions.”

One of the main problems with merit pay is that it’s based on the flawed presumption that teachers are motivated by greed and competition, and not by collaboration and helping students learn. But teaching is a cooperative profession; the best teachers are not motivated by making more money than their colleagues.

You yourself have said you want teachers to share their expertise with each other, so they can all become stronger teachers. They already do that, for starters. But how likely is it that they will continue to help each other if you set up a scheme in which they are pressured to compete with each other to get bonuses?

If you want teachers to improve, help give them the respect and salaries they deserve, the resources they need, and the autonomy to be creative and innovative and cooperative with each other, and small classes so they can give each student the attention s/he needs.

Why charter schools?

At the National Charter Schools Conference on June 29 in Chicago where you also spoke, you promoted charters – privately run schools that use public money but have little to no public oversight.  Why do you keep promoting this concept when growing evidence shows that most charters are no better than public schools? In fact, according to Stanford’s CREDO study, as many as 83 percent of charter schools perform no better or do worse than public schools.

Even the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently admitted at the same convention of charter operators that charters have serious problems: “…unfortunately, we have far too many mediocre charters and we have far too many charter schools that are absolutely low performing.” (Duncan’s address to the National Charter Schools Conference, July 1, 2010.)

(Also see: “Study Finds No Clear Edge for Charter Schools,” Education Week, June 29, 2010.)

Education reformers repeatedly claim to be “data-driven.” The data do not support charters.

If you support innovation, take a look around inside public school districts. Secretary Duncan recently toured Aviation High School, an innovative public school here in the Puget Sound area. Check out the Nova Project, an innovative alternative high school in Seattle that has some of the most independent thinking and civically aware kids I’ve ever met and some of the highest SAT scores in the district. In Seattle, we also have successful and award- winning schools for highly gifted kids that challenge these kids with an accelerated and deeper curriculum while keeping them in with their age group peers (Accelerated Progress Program), and a number of alternative schools that all have waitlists because they are so popular – Salmon Bay K-8, Thornton Creek. And yet your education reform colleagues and your own foundation are pushing curriculum alignment and standardization on all our schools, quashing any chance for individuality or innovation. That’s a mixed message you are sending.

While it is certainly good of you to be generous with your wealth, it would seem that you are funneling good money after bad, as the saying goes.

So I have some suggestions for you. As a parent with children in public schools, as someone who is the product of both private and public schools and an international education, I hope you will consider my thoughts on how you can direct your public education involvement in a manner that will get genuine and positive results for children. These would be investments in education that parents like me could get behind.

Here are three ideas. They are not flashy. They are not tech-oriented. But they will get positive results.

Invest in Smaller Class Sizes

If you want to fund education and make a difference, fund smaller class sizes. Help school districts hire more (and genuinely qualified – not short-term, inexperienced Teach for America type) teachers and reduce class sizes. Every child would benefit from more one-on-one interaction with a teacher. I don’t think it takes a multi-million dollar “study” to prove that. Here in Seattle our superintendent has laid off teachers two years in a row and closed schools. So class sizes are large and getting bigger.

One of the main reasons people who can afford it choose private schools is because they tend to offer smaller teacher-student ratios.

I’ve read you’d like to see kids taught en masse by one teacher on camera beaming a lecture via the Internet to thousands of students at once. While technology may have its place in our world and in schools, don’t you agree that the most valuable connection a child can have is not to the Internet, but with a teacher, a parent, a nurturing human who will give this child the individualized, personalized attention s/he needs?

Here’s a study that shows that class sizes matter:  “Smaller is Better: First-hand Reports of Early Class Size Reduction in New York City Public Schools,” as does this blog: Class Size Matters.

At the AFT conference, you said something that implied that funding for public schools has gone up in my lifetime and class sizes have gone down: “The United States has been struggling for decades to improve our public schools. We have tried reform after reform. We’ve poured in new investments. Since 1973, we have doubled per-pupil spending. We’ve moved from one adult for every 14 students to one adult for every eight students.”

I am confused by this claim because all my life (which began before 1973) public schools have been scrambling for money, school districts are constantly telling us parents, our kids and their teachers that cuts and layoffs and school closures have to happen. Our own state of Washington, Bill, ranks 46th in the nation for per-pupil funding! Washington State recently passed a law mandating full state funding of K-12 education, yet that is not happening. Meanwhile in California, the public education system has been drained of property tax revenue ever since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.

Are you referring to student-teacher ratios? Or do these “adults” you speak of include all adults in the school district,  from counselors to custodians to central district office staff? (If the latter, that would be true for Seattle, which has a disproportionately high and growing number of administrators in its overstaffed central office. (See “Central Administration Efficiency in Seattle Public Schools,” a very troubling report by parent/analyst Meg Diaz.)

Class sizes have not gotten smaller in my lifetime. Neither I nor any of my children have ever been in a public school class of eight – or 14, for that matter. Here in Washington, teacher to student ratio has not gone down, even though we voted for it on Initiative 728 which passed with 72 percent of the vote in 2000.

What is your source for this data? Is it that McKinsey & Corp study that Vicki Phillips, your foundation’s education director, has referred to in the past? The same discredited consulting firm that was “a key architect of the strategic thinking that made Enron a Wall Street darling,” according to Businessweek? If so, I think you can understand how one might question their research.

Lastly here’s a personal story: One day earlier this year, I sat at my kindergarten son’s lunchroom where some of the kids were goofing around. When I told them as group to settle down, I got a limited response. But then I knelt down and looked one of the boys in the eyes and asked him about one of his hobbies, he calmed down immediately and engaged with me. That personal engagement is priceless and essential to good and inspired teaching. It’s not possible when classes are too big and teachers are overwhelmed.

Consider Grants for Books

I sense you have mixed feeling about the value of books. I understand your “School of the Future” in Philadelphia is bookless, paperless and pencil-less, but offers a laptop and Microsoft portal for every child.

I personally want my children to know the pleasure of reading an actual book, the smell of the paper, perhaps the feel of the embossed letters of the title or the details of the illustrations, the joy of summer reading while lying on the grass or idly spinning from a tire swing with a book in hand, unplugged from the wired world.

If you and Melinda were to simply create an endowment that would provide every school in the district, for example, a grant to stock their libraries, buy complete textbooks for classes, that would be an amazing gift and would go a long way toward endearing you to the community for such an obvious, tangible contribution. Because, as you may or may not know, schools like Rainier Beach High School in Seattle don’t have complete or updated sets of history books. Hard to believe, but true. Teachers across the nation still scramble and scrounge to buy class sets of books. My own brother, a public school teacher in California, is trying to gather enough copies of Shakespeare plays for his class. I’m helping him out by scouring local used bookstores up here and mailing them to him. Is this the way it should be? Don’t you agree that every child in every class should be able to take home and spend time with a book, read it on the school bus, even if they are not fortunate enough to own a laptop, and that the cost should not come out of the teacher’s own pocket?

I can imagine a bookplate with your and Melinda’s name on it. (I believe Paul Allen does something similar.) If my children were to grow up believing that you are the providers of books to Seattle school children, believe me, you would rank high in their pantheon of heroes. They love books. (The thrice-yearly Measures of Academic Progress™ computerized test your foundation may be funding, not so much.)

How about Nutrition & Health here in the U.S.?

There are kids who come to school hungry, as I’m sure you know. School districts serve packaged food of questionable nutritional value. Good nutrition would manifest itself in positive and tangible ways. I know you are concerned about health in other parts of the world — how about in your own backyard?

Imagine a Gates Foundation program that supported the creation of freshly cooked meals made of locally and sustainably grown organic produce for all of Seattle’s public schools. (I don’t mean Monsanto-style GM foods, by the way.) I promise you that a well-fed child will do better in school than one who is hungry or on a nutritionally empty diet. This would also create business opportunities for local farmers.

In sum, these ideas, simple as they might seem, will work. They will help kids do better in school. Charters, merit pay have a very mixed and inconsistent record.

I know you and Eli Broad and others have some notions about how you would like schools to be. But as you have acknowledged yourself, you are not an education expert, and I understand that neither you nor your children have attended public schools. So I am asking you to listen to parents and teachers and kids who are in the public schools, who are on the receiving end of all that is good and not so good about our current system, and on the receiving end of all your “reforms,” and learn what we really need and want for our kids.

I suggest you take a look closer to home at the town of Everett, Washington, where the school district has managed to decrease high school drop-out rates significantly in the last few years. (See: “Simple, steady is way to win,” by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times  and “Once shamefully low, Everett’s graduation rate soars,” by Linda Shaw, Seattle Times.) How? With computers and Smart Boards? No, with old-fashioned follow-up, teachers and counselors getting to know kids and keeping them in their sights, engaging and challenging the students with interesting classes. What this requires is the time and care of sufficient staff. Meanwhile, here in Seattle, the school district (SPS) continues to lay off needed teachers and counselors. If you could offer a grant to SPS to rehire these crucial people, you would see results, I guarantee it.

I would value the opportunity to meet with you to discuss these and other thoughts about education. Your new foundation headquarters are not too far from where I live. You can reach me care of Seattle Education 2010, a blog some parents and I started up last year in response to the school closures and “reforms” our children and their schools have been subjected to.

Sincerely,

Sue Peters

Seattle public schools parent

July 2010

Sue Peters is a Seattle-based writer and public schools activist. She co-edits the Seattle Education 2010 blog which can be found here
and here.

Bill Gates, co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a speaker at the AFT convention held in the Seattle last week. His speech can be found here.