Search

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet indulge in some investigating

The Maria Chronicles, # 39

Maria gives in to the itch she's been longing to scratch: she looks up Jack Casey on Google. She'd been resisting for weeks. There was the date they went on, then her unfounded conviction that he'd slept with Jen Abruzzi (who's now dating a college counselor at Collegiate), and then Dani Bernstein's jarring mention of him as a crook when Maria had her performance review with Dani last week. Through it all she had rejected the persistent idea that she investigate who the guy really is. Besides a feeling that it was somehow underhanded (though, really, anything she found would be a matter of public record), doing so would give her interest in Jack a level of reality she didn't want to acknowledge. Partly this was because she feared Dani was right, and Maria hated the thought she had succumbed to the charm of a sleazy man. But her resistance preceded knowing this possibility, and it confuses her.

But two glasses of wine in bed with your laptop on a lonely Friday night will weaken your resolve. Maria had considered calling her friend Janice, but rejected that idea because she knew she'd end up talking about Jack, and Janice would express incredulous exasperation at Maria's scruples. "Maria, what the hell is wrong with you?" she can hear Janice saying. "Of course you should Google him! You think I would get involved with a guy without googling him?" It's as if Janice is speaking through Maria's cell phone right now.

So Maria goes ahead. She makes the mistake of simply typing in "Jack Casey," which of course spits back about six million results. Then she types in "Jack Casey Bear Stearns," which is better, because, as it turns out, there are only two. One is apparently in Human Resources. But the other is her quarry. She sees his picture on one entry.

Jack appears to have had a high-level job. Executive VP for credit derivatives marketing. She sees mentions of him at professional conferences, interviews in trade publications, his presence at charity events. Seems a world away from the "Cuff Man" she had taken to calling him when she'd see him in the hallways or the cafeteria at school. The quotes she reads has his inflections. But it doesn't quite seem real that he's the same person.

It's only on the third page of results that she finds what she guesses she was looking for, a story in a financial blog: "Bear Stearns Execs Cashed Out Before Stock Cratered." The story mentioned Jack among a number of people at the firm who by selling a large block of shares at $170, just before the the financial tsunami hit, had netted at least $13 million more than they otherwise would have had they done so six weeks later, when the price was a mere fraction of that value. While the tone was one of raised eyebrows, the writer of the piece reported that there was no evidence that they had done anything illegal.

Another piece, however, suggested otherwise. In a piece entitled "Unindicted Co-Conspirators Worked with Cioffi," Maria came across the following:

"Prosecutors in Manhattan did not identify the co-conspirators. But people familiar with the investigation confirmed that they included John ("Jack") Casey and Thomas "Mack" McDonaugh, senior managers in the firm's derivatives division, as among those investigated. McDonaugh denied any involvement with Cioffi; Casey declined through his attorney to have any comment."

Mack McDonaugh: He was the guy who accosted Jack and Maria when they'd had dinner at the Mexican restaurant. No wonder Jack was uncomfortable. "Jesus," she says out loud.

Maria finishes her glass of wine and puts it on her bedside table. She opens a new tab on her browser and goes to her email. She writes:

Jack, How long were you going to wait before you told me about your questionable financial dealings with Bear Stearns? Did you really think I wouldn't find out you were an unindicted co-conspirator? I'm disappointed by your lack of candor, and your estimation of me.

Maria stops, unsure what to say next. She stares at the screen for a moment even after her cell phone rings.

"Hi Mom!"

"Hello Felicia. How are you, sweetheart?"

Felicia is fine. And as Maria settles into the familiar rhythms of talking with her daughter, she sees how foolish she is to remonstrate with Jack. A few conversations and a dinner with a man hardly requires him to disclose the inner working of his business, much less his mind. This is Maria's problem: her standards are too rigid. Just let it go, she thinks. So the guy isn't who he appears to be. Big deal. Just let him get on with his life, as you get on with yours. Maria pours herself another glass as she listens to Felicia explain her plans for a trip to Paris. Tomorrow she'll tweak her syllabi for the new spring electives she's teaching.

Addictive prose

Mary Karr's incandescent Lit gives testimony to a poetic resurrection

The following book was published last week on the Books page of the History News Network website.

Mary Karr didn't actually launch the memoir boom of the 1990s (Tobias Wolff, following in his brother Geoffrey's example in The Duke of Deception in 1979, can plausibly claim that honor with This Boy's Life in 1989). And she may not represent the zenith of that boom (Frank McCourt's 1996 book Angela's Ashes was more of a global blockbuster). But Karr's 1995 account of her wild Texas childhood, The Liar's Club, was perhaps the quintessential expression of the movement. The book was a surprise hit, because while she had been building a reputation as a poet, Karr was not a well-known public figure. And her tale, while notably dramatic and filled with vivid characters, was also rendered with great literary flair. In her wake, comparably talented writers like Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), along with some less talented ones like Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors), scored popular success. Meanwhile, the movement over-ripened into a fad and curdled into controversy following the publication of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces in 2003 when Frey revealed that much of his story had been fabricated. Memoir now seems firmly established a commercial literary genre, but the charm of its novelty has long since passed.

Karr, for her part, has continued spinning her tumultuous life into a literary commodity. She followed up The Liar's Club with Cherry (2000), which recounted her sexually active adolescence. Her latest book, Lit, picks up where Cherry left off, but does so in a neatly segmented way that requires no prior knowledge of her other work. The story this time is of Karr's descent into alcoholism and subsequent resurrection by way of a conversion to Roman Catholicism.

After a prelude in California and an unfinished undergraduate career at an unnamed Midwestern college (Macalester), Lit follows Karr's marriage to blue-blooded poet, the birth of their son, and the couple's struggles over work, money and love. Karr's drinking problem grows steadily worse, and its impact is depicted in terms of her family life, her professional aspirations as a writer/teacher, and the other addictive personalities she encounters along the way. In its depiction of a struggle to attain (and maintain) a semblance of a middle-class life -- and a strenuous, educated-class reluctance to submit to the perceived hokiness of the recovery movement -- Lit is reminiscent of of the late Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story (1996). But Karr's work is peopled with a cast of much more bumptious characters, beginning with her mother, and is rendered with a tangy Texas wit she attributes to her father ("wouldn't say sooey if the hogs were eating her" is among the gems she attributes to him). But some of Karr's encomiums go well beyond her rich provincial roots, as in this resonant exchange with a husband impatient with the lushes she's entertaining while he tries to sleep:

He whispers, I can't sleep from the noise. If you don't ask them to leave, I'll have to.

I hiss at him, You're such a control freak.

He says, you knew I was like this when you married me.

The righteous cry of married men everywhere, for it's a cliché that every woman signs up thinking her husband will change, while every husband signs up believing his wife won't: both dead wrong.

Tellingly, there are no quotation marks here. Even given the lax factual standards of the genre, Karr feels compelled to signal her subjectivity. Such hedging is not sufficient to put one's skepticism to rest, however, given that Karr repeatedly confesses that much of her memory of her drinking days has been blacked out. Moreover, her portrayal of her repellently parsimonious husband strains credulity, if for no other reason than to make one wonder why she would cast her lot with him. The great pitfall of books like these is that the author wears out her welcome with her reader, and while Karr never quite crosses this line, she certainly flirts with it. Yet she ultimately maintains control of her material, revealing that for all its pleasingly democratic implications, the success of contemporary memoir finally depends on a sense of iron-willed literary discipline applied to God-given talent.

Which, in turn, testifies to one source of the book's likely durability. Lit should find a lasting life in the the discourse of addiction and recovery. It also can help explain why, for all its considerable liabilities, the Roman Catholic Church has a singular power to fuse spirituality, ritual, and a sense of social solidarity difficult to match elsewhere in American life. But beyond the title's allusion to biological and religious intoxication, it also points to a third figure in what is finally a trinity: a life saved and lived through the power of the written word. Whether it's in scenes depicting the joy of poetry as experienced by the mentally handicapped women Karr teaches, or the thrill of encountering a real, live poet in the flesh, Lit is a testimonial to Good Books and the sense of purpose and structure they offer. This sense of purpose and structure is psychological, but material as well. Few things give Karr as much joy as the $750 she gets as an advance for one book, or the car she can buy when she lands a publisher for The Liar's Club. Compared to other ways of making money, this one is laughably inefficient, and one that -- speaking as a fellow addict -- can and perhaps should seem bizarre to those inclined to pursue more practical livelihoods. But a great many of us, lit remains nice work if you can get it. And a remarkably compelling even when you can't.

Principal reservations

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet hear a performance review -- of somebody else

The Maria Chronicles, #38

Maria is sitting alone with a cup of coffee in the office of the principal, Danielle Bernstein, whom she has barely met. They conferred briefly last summer when Maria was interviewing for the job at Hudson High and Bernstein was about six months pregnant. Bernstein took a semester leave when the baby arrived in September, but while she delegated her authority to a series of people -- an unusual move, Maria thinks -- she's heard Bernstein continued to play a substantial role behind the scenes. (In the acidic words of her colleague Edie Wilson, "I can't tell whether she's a real cunt, or a real prick, though in the end I suppose it doesn't make any difference.")

Bernstein's secretary, an inscrutable gray-haired woman named Marnie Mayne, admitted Maria to the office, and returns a moment later to put a vase of fresh flowers and a cup of tea on Bernstein's desk and turn on her computer. "She'll be right along," Mayne says. Maria surveys the room -- framed posters of museum exihbits, a Georgia O'Keefe print, photographs of a handsome husband and another child in addition to the infant. Pretty much what you'd expect.

Bernstein's entrance, however, has surprising force, as she bursts into the office from the secretary's door. "No, I will not speak to her now," she's telling Mayne. "I'm done with that woman. If you can't tell her I'm in a meeting, then tell her I'm dealing with an unexpected emergency. Then email Dwight and tell him to call her. This shouldn't be my problem."

Her coat still on, she brightens -- briefly -- to smile at her visitor. "Maria Bradstreet. So nice to see you again." She extends a gloved hand. "Dani Bernstein." Maria shakes her hand, and upon release Bernstein busies herself of shedding her coat, scarf and gloves. "Freezing outside," she says. "Lived here for almost 20 years now, but still haven't gotten used to it."

Even without knowing that Bernstein just had a baby Maria can tell she's young -- not yet forty, for sure, hard to tell how much below that. Everything about her, from her vocal delivery to her expensive clothes, hums with a sense of ambition. Maria remembers thinking during her interview that this is not a person who suffers fools gladly. Bernstein was polite, but a bit distracted for what at that point had been a formality: she had apparently accepted Jen Abruzzi's recommendation. Maria hears that Bernstein is looking to move on to a bigger arena. Apparently this is a good pit stop for a maternity leave. Maria wouldn't be surprised to learn she went on job interviews while she was on it.

Bernstein is now fussing with her email, and Maria has just about decided that this is crossing the line into rude when suddenly she looks up from the computer, locks eyes with her, and renders a smile. "I'm happy to say that this is going to be a brief meeting, Maria."

"I'm glad to hear that. I think."

Bernstein sips her tea. "Yes. Under normal circumstances, we would have talked about your performance long before now, and I would have dropped into one of your classes unannounced at some point this fall. But as you know" -- she tilts her head at a photo to her left -- "I've been juggling other projects."

"I see. Lucky you."

"I understand you have two of your own. Grown now. Started early." Bernstein sips again, and changes direction. "I'm pleased to report that the word on the street about you is good, Maria. My sources among the students say you're smart, prepared, and return work promptly. Colleagues say you're pleasant, if a bit distant."

Maria nods, willing to endure the slightly awkward silence that follows from her deciding not to say anything.

Bernstein smiles. "Good. I will tell you that I was not particularly enthusiastic about hiring you. At 49, you're set in your ways. And as a veteran, you were expensive. Frankly, I wouldn't have even had the budgetary option of taking you this year. But I -- and, from what I understand, you -- are a big Jen Abruzzi fan. Jen was willing to spend a lot of political capital with me in order to get a seasoned hand in the History Department. I consider Jen to be one of the real team players around here, the best department chair I've got, and I ultimately decided to back her on this, in part because I share her belief that that a strong, stable History Department an important anchor for the school as a whole."

"I'm glad to hear that."

Bernstein glances at her computer and smiles wryly before looking back at Maria. "If only I could get a few other departments into shape. The language department, of course, is a revolving door."

"I can imagine." Maria can: turnover among foreign language teachers has always been rampant at every school she's worked at.

"And don't even get me started on the math department." There's a twinkle now in Bernstein's eye: "You understand. You're faculty, sure. But you don't like dead wood any more than I do."

Maria smiles. Bernstein is presumptuous, but not altogether lacking in charm. Actually, Maria suspects she's got plenty at her disposal when she decides to dispense it. Which she's doing, in a measured way, right now.

"The absentee rate over there is ridiculous. Seems like virtually every day they've got a sub over there. Penny Perez keeps using this guy named Jack Casey. You know him?"

Maria nods.

"Scum, as far as I'm concerned." Bernstein evidently reads the surprise on Maria's face. "You know his story?"

Maria shakes her head.

"He worked for Bear Stearns. You hear about that trial recently about the guys running that hedge fund over there?"

"I don't really know much about banking."

"Well, I don't either. But my husband works for JP Morgan Chase. He tells me that Casey was an unindicted conspirator in that case. They all got off anyway, so I suppose it doesn't matter. But the whole thing was unbelievable. When I was in the hospital having my daughter Gerri I read this book, House of Cards, about the fall of Bear Stearns. Enough to make your blood boil. Probably sped along my labor."

"Wow. I didn't know."

Bernstein is looking at her computer again. "Penny started using him after I went on leave, so I didn't know, and by the time I did, she said that Casey was too useful to give up. Which is okay, I guess. But the guy will never get a regular job here on my watch." She chuckles. "Not that he needs one. Teaching's penance, I guess. He's sure as hell not doing it for the money."

Maria sits stunned. Why is Bernstein telling her this? Does she know more about her than she realized? How could she?

"Anyway, again, Maria, you're doing good work. You're still technically on probation, but I'm recommending you for renewal. Assuming nothing goes wrong, you're squarely on the tenure track." She extends her hand across her desk. "Congratulations."

Maria shakes it and stands up. "Thank you."

"Jesus," Maria says aloud as she leaves the office. This is one hell of a place to work. She wishes she had a bottle of whiskey in her desk, the way Ed Asner's character did on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show. She looks over at the faculty lounge. A doughnut will have to do.

Happy Birthday to AHN

This week marks the first anniversary of this blog. To commemorate it, I'm running my first blog post of February 4, 2009. I'm very grateful for the hundreds of visits American History Now has received each week since its launch, and hope it will have many more. Thanks for coming!

--Jim Cullen

Outlaw Pete:
Springsteen Makes a Western

Among the many virtues in Bruce Springsteen’s music is a rich sense of history. And like many of those virtues, that sense of history has emerged organically over the course of his career. Springsteen’s first albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, were marked by a powerful sense of immediacy; to a great extent, they’re records of the present tense. Beginning with the release of Born to Run, a consciousness of history – principally in the form of a growing awareness of past failure, and a desperate desire to avoid similar mistakes – begins to suffuse the consciousness of his characters. This consciousness is deeply personal, typically expressed, for example, in generational tensions between fathers and sons. That’s what I mean by “organic.”

By about 1980, Springsteen’s sense of history begins to get broader. It emerges in a series of forms, ranging from his decision to perform songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (reading 1980 Joe Klein’s biography of Guthrie as the suggestion of his manager, Jon Landau, seems to have been a watershed experience) to recording original songs like “Wreck on the Highway,” avowedly patterned on the style of country & western singer Roy Acuff. His 1982 album Nebraska is saturated with a sense of the 1930s (his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad even more so), and even deeply personal songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” connect the private struggles of their protagonist to much larger historical ones. This trajectory is a striking, and impressive testament to an artist’s power to grow and integrate everyday life into a broader human drama.

One of the less remarked upon aspects of Springsteen’s body of work is his fascination with the West. This is, of course, counterintuitive – Springsteen is nothing if not the voice of New Jersey, an embodiment of urban, ethnic, working-class values and culture typically associated with the Northeast Corridor. But the western signposts are there, as early as “Rosalita,” which climaxes with a vision of triumphant lovers savoring their victory over paternal repression in a café near San Diego. That’s a fleeting reference. But beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town – think of the “rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert” of “The Promised Land” – the West becomes a vivid and indispensable setting for a number of songs. Springsteen being Springsteen, he’s not always content simply to invoke or use such settings in conventional ways. So, for example, the gorgeous yearning that marks his 1995 song “Across the Border,” redolent with music, instrumentation, and language of the Southwest, is purposely ambiguous which side of the border its protagonists long to go. Springsteen’s mythic tendencies are often marked by creative friction with the concrete details and ironic realities of everyday life.

“Outlaw Pete,” the leadoff track on Springsteen’s latest album, Working on a Dream, represents the next turn of the wheel in a way that’s somehow predictable, surprising, and inevitable all at once. Superficially, the song, like the album as a whole, is something of a throwback, a return to the dense, lush, melodic pop songs that were once Springsteen’s stock-in-trade. At eight minutes long, it’s also the first time in decades that’s he’s recorded a mini-epic on the scale of “Incident on 57th St.” or “Jungleland.” For thirty years now, the overall trend in Springsteen’s work has been toward more sparse, even minimalist songs that approach spoken-language records, though the approach here was first broached on Magic in 2007.

It’s almost jarring to hear his eager embrace of melodic hooks and multi-track harmonies. It’s also almost jarring in that “Outlaw Pete” so willfully introduces us to a protagonist who seems like a cartoon figure from an imitation John Ford movie, who “at six months old” had “done three months in jail” and “robbed a bank in his diapers and little baby feet.” Pete’s signature question, “Can you hear me?” seems like a childish insistence for attention. Some might be amused by such a description; others might dismayed, even irritated by its triviality. One could be forgiven for perceiving that Springsteen is slipping into superficiality in his advancing age, perhaps trying to recapture the sense of popular appeal that once seems so effortlessly his.

But appearances are deceiving. More specifically, our perception of Outlaw Pete is deceiving. After hearing the seemingly requisite description of a horse-stealing, heart-breaking scoundrel – rendered in an amused voice that suggests the narrator views him as a figure closer to a rakishly charming Jesse James than a hard, frightening, Liberty Valance – the story turns on a dime (the music, which shifts to a declining phrase of repeating notes, indicates this) as Pete gets a vision of his own death that prompts him to marry a Navajo and settle down with a newborn daughter on a reservation. Yet in some sense the story is only getting started. A vindictive lawman – another staple of western mythology – is determined to bring Pete down and precipitates a confrontation. “Pete you think you have changed but you have not,” Dan tells him, in so doing posing the existential question at the heart of the song, which is to what degree we have agency over our characters and thus our fate. In the showdown that follows Pete is nominally the victor, yet Dan literally gets the last word in observing before his death that “we cannot undo these things that we’ve done.” The question “Can you hear me?” is turned on its head, as Dan speaks to Pete instead of Pete speaking to the world.

Pete, now a fugitive from the law, makes an ambiguous disappearance from the story. Is it to be understood that his encounter with Dan demonstrates the fixed nature of his personality and the impossibility of any lasting mortal redemption? Or is it an act of abnegation that protects his wife and daughter from the wickedness that surrounds him? The final verses of the song depict Dan’s daughter braiding Pete’s buckskin chaps in her hair – original sin and grace at once – with the question “Can you hear me?” now completely reversed, as we listeners seek the vanished Pete. Like Alan Ladd in Shane or John Wayne in any number of westerns, Pete catalyzes action that leads to resolution, but pushes him beyond the frame.

Like a great many works of art, “Outlaw Pete” asks many more questions than it answers. But there are at least two things it does clarify. The first is the ongoing vitality of western mythology (now nicely updated with a multicultural accent) as a vehicle for exploring the complexities of American life. The second is the ongoing vitality of Springsteen himself, 37 years into an enormously broad and deep body of work, to reinvent himself through reviewing and revising our cultural traditions. He hears us, and we see ourselves.

Multiple Choices

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet try to build confidence

The Maria Chronicles, #37

Maria is not surprised when Olivia comes to see her during a precious free period, though she has been momentarily distracted by the student newspaper, which has announced the return of the principal, back from a semester on maternity leave (Maria has barely met her). Olivia's visit was presaged by her mother, who sent Maria an e-mail the same day she returned Olivia's exam, a disappointing 70%, on the heels of 72% last time. "Don and I would like Olivia to come see you, so that we can understand what the problem is," Olivia's mother, Alice, had written. "We'd like to know what steps Olivia must take to improve her semester grade."

Maria finds messages like this, which she gets at least once a year, to be very irritating. There's often a subtext that weak student performance is somehow her problem, that Maria is failing to "get" a child, not recognizing and/or arranging the class and its assessments to maximize the child's performance. As if there's a secret password or routine that Maria is withholding. Tests aren't everything, of course. But just as there are kids like Olivia, who don't do well, there are others like Willie, who routinely ace them. Or Derek, after failing last time, scored a 98% this time (no signs of cheating that Maria could observe). For reasons that remain obscure, he decided he wanted to do well.

"Hi Ms. Bradstreet," Olivia says, courtesy mixed with listlessness. "Would it be OK if we talked for a minute about the test?"

"Sure, Olivia." Maria puts the student newspaper aside and swivels toward her. "Here, pull up a chair and have a seat."

Olivia sits down and puts her backpack at her feet, rifling through it to pull our her exam, which she hands to Maria, along with a stapled collection of pages that constitute her notes. She puts her hands, face down, in her lap, and looks up. "Here's the thing: I studied so hard for that test. Like ten hours. You can ask my parents. They drilled me over dinner all week. It's just . . . " Olivia looks away and looks down. "When I get in there I suddenly freeze up. I hope you believe me. I know this stuff. It's just when I see 'all of the above,' or 'none of the above,' or 'A & C' I just lose all my confidence. My dad says . . . . "

Maria looks down at the exam. She can see a couple cases where Olivia had the right answer, erased it, and chose something else instead. When she looks back up she sees that Olivia is silently crying. "Oh honey," she says, grabbing a few Kleenex off her desk. She hands them to Olivia, who is, with some difficulty, regaining her composure.

"Let's get a few things straight, Olivia. First, I know that you studied for this test. I could tell from the way you were talking in our review session earlier this week. Second, I know that you know this stuff." Maria does not know this for sure, but is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. "Actually if I had to guess, you probably studied too much, not too little."

Maria turns from Olivia momentarily, hits a few keys on her laptop, and looks at an electronic ledger. "Look, Olivia, while your performance on the exam was not awful -- you're certainly in no academic danger here -- I understand it's not what you want. Taking tests is clearly not your thing. Other things are. I see here you got a B+ on the colonial history essay, and I have you down for an B+ in class participation. So you didn't do well on a couple tests. Maybe you'll never do well on my tests."

"I don't do well on anybody's tests."

"Whatever. I would never make that the only determinant of your grade. I would never make it the primary determinant of your grade. It's just one thing. Other kids find tests come to them relatively easy. Or are just too shy to say much in class. That's OK, too. The important thing is to have a variety of assessments, so that I can see who's good at what." (And, Maria thinks silently, to see who's good at everything.)

Olivia nods. But Maria thinks it's because she's trying to be agreeable, not because she feels much better.

"All this said, there's nothing that says you can't improve at test-taking. You can. You absolutely can. And there are things we can do. The thing is, Olivia, you know the information, but you have trouble using it. That might come with practice." Maria has an idea. "You ever see those SAT II or AP History books?"

Olivia nods.

"Maybe you can pick up one of those and practice answering the questions from the period we're studying."

Olivia nods again. Still no sale.

"Here's another thing," Maria says, flipping through the stapled collection of notes. This is a lot of material. Your goal should be to distill all this. Reduce it. I'm not sure how well I could memorize a stack of information like this."

"I try to write down what you say in class. It's hard to keep up with you."

"Then don't even try. Just sit back and take it all in. Maybe you can relate what you learned over dinner."

"I couldn't do that. I'd just be too afraid I was missing something important."

"Well, how about this: Can you tape our classes?"

"Tape them?"

"Yeah, tape 'em. You could get a little hand-held recorder or something."

"I could probably use my iPod. My brother has a microphone he puts on his to practice his singing."

"There you go. Why don't you give that a try?"

Olivia shakes her head. She's buying in.

"I don't know if any of these approaches will work," Maria says. "But they're worth a try. Maybe one of them will click and stick. I don't see how you have much to lose. The important thing to keep in mind, Olivia, is that you're really doing fine, whether or not one of these techniques turn out to be helpful. Keep up your class participation, do a bang-up job on the History Day project, and I'll bet you could still end up somewhere solidly in the B range. But I do think that trying to meet the challenge you have with testing is worth trying to meet head on, at this moment, anyway. Sound good to you?"

"Sounds good to me."

"Alright, then."

Olivia stands up. "Thanks, Ms. Bradstreet."

"Hey, no problem, Olivia. Keep your head up. And be sure to have a look at that reading about Chief Joseph and the Nez Pearce. We're going to be talking about Native Americans this afternoon."

"I will. Thanks again." Olivia leaves. So Maria will salvage a good half hour from this free period. She begins diagramming a slate of lesson plans for the next week.

Poor kid, she thinks as she works. I suspect there's a lot of parental pressure. But I can't let them get to me, anymore than I want them to get to her. It may not be my fault that she's a weak student (and, let's face it, that B+ on the colonial history essay was a gift). But I really should try to help if I can. Even if I don't really know how. It's important to keep trying.

Men of an uncertain age

In Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, Michael Chabon engages the topic of gender with a impressive lack of professionalism

The following review was published earlier this week on the Books page at the History News Network

Manhood for Amateurs is not entirely candid about what it is: a collection of previously published magazine pieces, most of which appeared in Details (a men's magazine more obviously notable for photographs of scantily clad women than insightful social commentary). This is something you only learn by studying the copyright page. The flap copy calls the book an "autobiographical narrative," which comes close to crossing an ethical line: autobiographical, yes; narrative, not really. As a matter of marketing, such camouflaging was probably necessary; while Michael Chabon has a well-deserved reputation as an entertaining literary novelist -- his 1995 book Wonder Boys was made into a pretty good movie five years later, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and his most recent novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007), got good reviews -- he doesn't have the readership of a Maureen Dowd necessary to flaunt the book as a collection of columns. Such ledgermain aside, this is a smart, funny, and cohesive little book, elegantly clustered into segments about sex, gender, parenting, and the like. It's also a remarkable historical document of a life begun in the mid-twentieth century that has carried over to the twenty-first.

Chabon establishes the tone for the 39 pieces as a whole with his first essay, "The Loser's Club," which describes a childhood memory in which his mother helped him establish a comic book club in which no one wished to be a member. This tragicomic anecdote leads to the point of the story: "A father is a man who fails every day," he explains. Occasional successes do "nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do. But you always knew that. Nobody gets past the age of ten without that knowledge. Welcome to the club." Yet far from bitterness or self-pity, this message proves oddly liberating. The mood of the book is actually quite buoyant: like the cakes he learned to bake in his mother's kitchen, the journey matters at least as much as the destination, which every once in a while proves to be delicious.

Chabon has the not inconsiderable gift of turning apparent cliches into bracing moments of revelation. He writes about hoisting his son on his shoulders in Grant Park on the night of Barack Obama's victory, and the sad loss of innocence it portends for Obama's daughters as well as his son. An essay about the collapse of his first marriage suggests his greatest regret may well breaking his (very different) father-in-law's heart. Alternatively, enrolling in an MFA program at the University of California not only proves to be a good career move, but helps him grow up (go figure).

A number of themes stitch the book together. Chabon, who was born in 1962, is a child of divorce who came of age in a feminist era. That this has resulted in confusion and anxiety about his relationships, male and female, is less something he laments than it is something to be taken for granted. (It's worth pointing out in this context that Chabon's wife, novelist Ayalet Waldman, has also recently published a book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace.) He writes with a good deal of curiosity and sympathy for a number of women in life, past and present, even as he accepts the criticism he's received in his fiction that he doesn't really portray female characters three-dimensionally.

Chabon also describes, as a number of observers have, the transformation of American childhood, which is now more intensively managed by adults than it ever has been. But few people to make this point are as entertaining as he is on the evolution of Legos from his own childhood to that of his son. In "Hypocritical Theory," Chabon asserts his detestation of Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants books less because he actually hates them than because he needs to give his child a subversive pleasure. He grieves that his children lack the joy of going out and playing after dinner, riding their bicycles in the neighborhood, or exploring dank basements the way he once did.

Running through the whole book is Chabon's infectious lifelong infatuation with pop culture, whether it's pop music on FM radio, old television shows, or classic characters from Marvel cartoons (there's a nice piece on cartoon women). Chabon makes clear that the jetsam and flotsam of this culture, which will surface in his consciousness at the oddest moments, is not simply the source of happy childhood memory, but the seedbed of his adult creativity. And seemingly mediocre figures like José Conseco (this from a piece Chabon wrote when the steroid scandal was first breaking) suggests that scoundrels can be genuinely edifying figures. In one of the more moving pieces in the collection, "The Amateur Family," Chabon savors the joy of shared passions -- a joy he lacked as a child but savors with this own children -- before making this moving peroration:

Maybe all families are a kind of fandom, an endlessly elaborated, endlessly disputed, endlessly reconfigured set of commentaries, extrapolations, and variations generated by passionate amateurs on the primal text of the parents' love for each other. Sometimes the original program is canceled by death or separation; sometimes, as with Doctor Who, it endures and flourishes for decades. And maybe love, mortality, and loss, and all the children and mythologies and sorrows they engender, make passionate amateurs -- nerds, geeks, and fanboys -- of us all.

Manhood for Amateurs would make an excellent addition to any number of gender studies courses. Chabon's insights rival those of many academic scholars, and he renders them with a grace and wit that will enliven many a discussion. I suspect this book will become a classic of its kind.

Testy

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet explain the life of facts

The Maria Chronicles, #36

"OK, kids, as you know we have an exam tomorrow. So I've put aside some time for review today. I'm the human jukebox. Pick a topic and I'll sing."

"What's a jukebox?" Mia asks.

Oh my God, Maria thinks. These kids, Mia in particular, are absolutely determined to make me feel old. "A music device from the paleolithic era," Maria answers. "iTunes for dinosaurs."

Vanessa, hand up, has no interest in ancient history. Maria acknowledges her knowing she'll get a change of subject. "Can you tell us exactly what we need to study for the test?"

"No, Vanessa, I cannot tell you exactly what will be on the test. That would defeat the whole point of giving you a test."

Maria hears the harshness in her voice, a harshness that's a function of the question and who's asking. Time to calibrate if she can. "Look," she says, "I know that for you this test is all about getting it over with and getting a good grade. Studying is a means to that end. But for me, the teacher, studying is the end. My goal is to have you go over the material we've covered, go over far more than I could ever want to actually ever test you about, in the hope you'll actually retain some fraction of it. Since you don't know which of any number of possible questions I'll specifically put on the exam, you in effect have to overlearn. To keep the whole thing manageable, I'm putting temporal boundaries on this -- the Civil War and Reconstruction -- but within that I'm hoping you'll cast as wide a net as you can manage."

"I get that," Olivia says dejectedly. "But I always do terribly on tests. I always seem to study the wrong thing."

"I understand, Olivia. Some of us are better at this than others. By 'this,' I don't simply mean the ability to memorize a lot of information. It's about developing judgment about what information is most likely to matter."

"Do we need to know dates?" Denise asks.

"What do you think, Denise? Do you think that I think that dates are important?"

"Some, I guess."

"Can you give me an example of a date you think I would like you to know?"

"Like when the Civil War ended?"

"Yes, Denise. That's correct. That is something I would like you to know. Do you know why I'd like you to know?"

"Because it's important?"

"Yes. But why is it important?"

Kenny jumps in. "Well, it's sort of like a math problem. If you know one thing than you may be able to figure out others. Like if someone says, 'the most important blah blah blah after the Civil War, it gives you a ballpark idea of when it happened. After 1865."

"That's correct in a blah blah blah kind of way, Kenny." Some laughter.

What about things like laws and amendments," Mia asks. "Which of those do we need to know?"

They refuse to let this go, Maria thinks. And why is it that the girls always seem to be the ones who are most insistent on pinning me down?

"Well, again, Mia. Can you give me an example of, say, an amendment that you would think I would want you to know?"

"The thirteenth?"

"Brilliant. Now let me ask you this: do you know when the thirteenth amendment passed?"

"1865?"

"Right. And do you know why that's a fact worth knowing?"

"Because it's at the end of the Civil War, before the actual end of the Civil War." Willie says. "Actually, President Lincoln signed the bill in February, before he died. I'm so glad he got to do that before he died in April. I think it was very important to him."

Maria is moved by the depth of Willie's feeling for Lincoln. "And why do you think so, Willie?"

"Because of what he said at the Gettysburg Address in 1863," she responds. "'A new birth of freedom.' The Civil War, which began in 1861 to hold the union together whether or not there was slavery, ended up holding the union together by ending slavery."

"How about that," Maria says. "You see how Willie strung together some dates to make some sense of the Civil War?"

A nod or two. They're not impressed. Well, I am, Willie.

"How about the battles? What do we need to know about those?"

"You mean like the way General Robert E. Lee won the Battle of Antietam?"

"Wait a second," Ali interjects. "Lee didn't win at Antietam!"

"Who cares?" Maria says. "What difference does it make who won stupid battles whose names it's impossible to keep straight?"

"Because Lee lost."

"So?"

"Well, I'm not sure Lee really lost," Kenny says. "I mean, he did have to retreat from Maryland. But McClellan, who had his battle plans, didn't destroy Lee when he had the chance. Lincoln was pissed off at him."

"Oh dear," Maria says in sing-song distress. "You mean we're not just talking about facts anymore? We're actually going to have to interpret them, too?"

They don't seem amused. Is it because they don't understand her? Or that they dislike her sarcasm?

"Emancipation." It's Derek, in his customary spot in the back of the room near the window.

"Excuse me?"

"Emancipation," Derek repeats, pointing at the clock.

"Touché, Derek," Maria says, shaking her head. Just when she's about to write him off, Derek will say something that hints not at his fierce intelligence -- that's evident to anyone who pays the slightest attention -- but at his willingness to deploy it, to use it. Derek failed the last exam. But Maria knows he need only decide to ace this one.

"Send me an e-mail if you have any questions," Maria says amid the shuffle of exiting students while a line forms in front of her. Her role, she knows, will be more to soothe than inform. Maria hates the adversarial dimension that's built into testing kids, and it troubles the progressive educator she thinks she is. It's just that she's never quite figured out how to substitute for students having at least some retained information. The facts alone are never enough. But she doesn't know if you can do much of anything without them.