P.S. A Column On Things

Start of August 15 Column

All The Different Me’s: College Paul

 (Just ran into a Joan Didion quote that is apt for the series: “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”)

MIT wasn’t quite an all-male school when I showed up in the fall of 1970, but it was close enough as makes no never mind. It is 50% female today, but the class of 1974 was 10% female―limited by the amount of housing available for women and by MIT’s policy that all frosh live on campus or in official MIT fraternities.

I was admitted to MIT Student House, a co-op for students on financial aid, located across the Charles in Boston’s Back Bay, along with most of the fraternities. I was part of the first co-ed class at the house. Given my limited exposure to females since grade school, it may come as no surprise that I fell in varying degrees of love/infatuation with every woman in the house, including one to whom I proposed marriage (our engagement lasted a year until I backed out) and another one I lived with for a year. The one who was a senior when I was a frosh roomed with me in an after-college apartment, and politely said “no” when I asked for more than roomie status.

In college, I had three sources of friends, Student House, the student newspaper (The Tech) and the radio station (WTBS, now WMBR). I have friends from each of those groups who are still in my life a  half-century later. I didn’t drink much, or smoke much marijuana, but I was still invited to the occasional party of the grounds that I might liven it up. My best friends, a group which called itself the UGI (Usual Gang of Idiots, Mad Magazine’s designation, in its masthead, for contributors) insured that I learned how to dress myself without embarrassment to them, and how to drink too much. The first lessons stuck, not so much the second.

The UGI literally threw away my entire wardrobe, so I started dressing better, in clothes from Saks and Lord and Taylor. I had been wearing French cuff dress shirts since high school; from this point I wore nothing but.

A memorable moment: the seniors at the newspaper convinced the younger members of the board that it was a tradition you couldn’t be elected editor-in-chief if the staff had not seen you drunk. There was no such tradition (except in the sense that no previous editor drank as little as I did), but we fell for it, so a party was scheduled on Burton 5 for one week before the board election. I brought a liter of Dr. Pepper, which bartender and news editor Storm Kauffman combined with increasing amounts of vodka all night. I was as drunk as I’d ever been, and threw up outside the Phi Beta Epsilon house as I walked home to Student House. And a week later, I was elected editor.

I wasn’t a hale fellow well-met when I arrived, but I was by the time I left. I had perhaps a dozen dates in four years, most of them with women from Student House, two of whom I eventually lived with. I avoided the women from nearby campuses who, as we unkindly put it when they came to meet their dates at The Tech. “rented out their heads for hard vacuum experiments.”

I grew a beard in 1972, and except for a month in 1992, it has been on my face ever since.

Paul’s Poetry Corner: And That’s It

I’ve run through my poetry outburst. I am now seldom producing new poems. Was it a phase I was going through? A Covid hobby? Most likely, it was 68 years of backed-up inspiration, like George Harrison’s first couple of albums after the Beatles broke up. Eventually, you use up all your seed corn and have to start new production at a (likely) slower pace. Perhaps my muse will come roaring back. Or, perhaps, I have thought of every possible way for me to express my love for Vicki and my joy in my new mindful life of gratitude. Every day no longer brings new snippets of inspiration. At the start of this project, I felt almost frantic with inspiration, filling my iphone with notes for new poems, with couplets and rhymes. Now, it’s just filled with shopping lists and the names of films I want to see. I suspect I will return to my half-century habit of plodding along in prose.

Right Column Redux: Richard Gross/Counterpoint

The column to the right on this blog contains permanent content, most of which has appeared at one time or another in the main body. I’ve decided to include a reminder.

• Richard C. Gross at Counterpunch Lucid commentary from a former UPI colleague

This and That

Advice to Girls
A Hungarian Facebook meme: “Girls, get married. No man should go unpunished.”
…
Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris ****
Amazon is streaming an adorable piece of fluff about a washerwoman who wants to own a Dior gown. There are moments which, had they occurred in real life, would restore your faith in humanity. It loses a star for being 30 minutes too long.
…
A Million Monkeys
“We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”--Robert Wilensky, University of California, 1996
...
Roevember
Applying his usual mix of righteous anger and stone-cold facts, Michael Moore presents some reasons for optimism (starting with Kansas) about the effects of the Supremes’ destruction of human rights: Roevember Is Coming.

Shaggy Dog: What’s Your Dad Do?

From my friend Clark Smith:

Teacher asked the children what their Dads did for a living. All the typical answers came up... builder, fireman, policeman, salesman, etc.

Joshua, a kid with a blond mop of hair, was being uncharacteristically quiet and so the teacher asked him about his Dad. “My Dad's an exotic dancer in a gay bar and takes off all his clothes in front of other men. Sometimes, if the offer is really good, he'll go out to the back lane and have sex with them for money.”

The teacher, obviously shaken by this statement, hurriedly set the other children to work on some coloring, and took little Joshua aside to ask him, “Is that really true about your Dad?”

“No,” said Joshua, “He's just resigned as the prime minister, but I was too embarrassed to say that in front of the other kids.”

(I can’t find the original source on the Internet, but I enjoyed two variations: “He’s a reporter for Fox News” and “He plays Test Cricket for England.”)

Hunter Thompson on Writing

In Songs of the Doomed, Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “I found out then that writing is a kind of therapy. One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having to come to grips with it. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it. So I use writing as a learning tool.”

I’d just add: me too. My slightly different formulation: since the age of 12, “I don’t know what I think about something until I write it out.”

End of August 15 Column (No. 838)

Start of August 8 Column

Some Thoughts On Sliding Doors: You Have Agency

First, a diversion. Just as Groundhog Day has become synonymous with living the same day over and over, Sliding Doors has come to mean “our lives are governed by random acts of fate.”

While Fate has a role, I find that most of the big inflection points in my life were the result of my own decisions: I had agency. Looking back, men under the age of 25 have no business making any decision more momentous then bedtime. And yet, those ignorant, impetuous, foolish decisions of my youth turned out fine.

I need to acknowledge that whether you regret your decisions when you look back is largely dependent on how things turned out. Since this is the best moment of my life… now this is… now this is… it probably comes as no surprise that I have very few regrets.

This doesn’t mean that I haven’t, from time to time, wondered what would have happened had I made different decisions at various inflection points in my life (the premise of Being Erica, reviewed below). As I drift into sleep, I consider what would have happened had I not picked MIT, not snapped at that girl on the phone, not met this woman or that, not lived with them, not broken up with them, not taken this job or that.

It astounds me that no matter how I replay the decisions, no matter how much pain I could have avoided (for myself and others) at the time, it turns out that, as they put it in Erica, “We are the sum of our decisions.” If things turned out all right (or even great) that means every decision you made was part of the mosaic that allowed you to live your best life.

You may well ask, “How do you know some other decision would not have given you a better life?” I’m sure it sounds arrogant, but that’s simply not possible. My joy and gratitude levels are set at 11 (Spinal Tap reference), so they couldn’t go higher. Just as good? Maybe. Better? I don’t think so.

All The Different Me’s: High School Paul

I went to Benson Polytechnic School (“The Nation’s Finest Technical High School” in its own estimation). It was a citywide, limited-admission high school, divided evenly between shop students and college-bound students.

If you’ve ever seen anything I made with my own hands, you know which group I was in. Or, as Mr. Lovgren, my 8^th grade woodworking teacher said, when I turned in my toolbox, “What’s that supposed to be? You know you dad’s model boat won the city regatta.” The boat stood in a position of pride in his office until he died.

You needed good grades and a teacher recommendation to get into Benson. Also, you needed a penis as well as a brain. It’s co-ed now. it has also lowered admission standards.

There are advantages and disadvantages to single-sex education, as already discussed here. I made it through four years, regularly taunted for being gay (or as they put it back then, “a homo.”) by boys at Benson, and for going to “Homo High” by my grade school friends who went to Grant.

I dressed eccentrically, as already noted, regularly wearing a coat and tie to a school where a clean tee-shirt was considered formalwear. I had a handful of close friends from the radio station (KBPS) and my EE (Extra Enriched) classes (top level tracking, back in the days when there was tracking). I literally never dated, except for the woman I took to four proms: the Benson winter and senior proms, and the Madison winter and senior proms.

And of course, sports and student government to successfully pad my resume for MIT and CalTech (although Stanford rejected me, as it would my older daughter a half-century later). They weren’t just padding, of course; I loved government and tolerated football (never above JV), wrestling (varsity letter), and track (one year of discus).

Plus, people were still nice enough to invite me to parties now and then because “a party just seems better when you’re there.”

Paul’s Poetry Corner: Your Hand on my Knee

Link to: Your Hand on my Knee

Which begins:
When your hand’s upon my knee,
There’s no place else I’d rather be.

Right Column Redux: Brendan Leonard: Semi-Rad

The column to the right on this blog contains permanent content, most of which has appeared at one time or another in the main body. I’ve decided to include a reminder.

Brendan Leonard: Semi-Rad
A runner/travel writer's consistently brilliant three-dot blog with funny artwork

Reviews: Throat Clearing and Reviews

Funny how some things you never forget. Mike Elgan (who, I feel certain, doesn’t read this column) was my editor at Windows Magazine. In a phone conversation once, 25 years ago, he told me he was thinking of writing a Word macro that cut the first three grafs of my stories automatically. “You spend too much time clearing your throat; just get on with the review.”

I think he was wrong, but as I considered the throat clearing for the two reviews that follow, I decided to separate it, so you could “just read the review” if that’s all you wanted.

My younger daughter and I share a Kindle library. When I finished my last book, I was looking for my next. There was a title on the list that I thought was a “Comedy Women In Print” winner I had forgotten. So, I stumbled into Lessons in Chemistry (from her book club). one of the best novels I’ve ever read. And, by coincidence, my older daughter tells me her book club picked it too. Given that the book is about the raw deal women get, even in America, I’m not surprised.

Much shorter is Being Erica, which also came to me as a recommendation, largely because everyone who knows me knows how much I like the tropes of time travel in (so far) fiction.

Review: Lessons in Chemistry ******

 

ATTENTION MIT WOMEN WHO READ THIS COLUMN: READ THIS REVIEW

The stars next to the title are not a typo. It’s a six-star rating. This novel is one of the best I have ever read. It is vivid, well written, and has one of the finest and most satisfying endings ever. I’m so glad I didn’t read the end first, as I often do with novels. Lessons in Chemistry describes the travails faced by intelligent women in American during the 50s and 60s, in academia and at work.

Every type of torture of the intelligent woman that is described in this book is familiar to me, as a second-wave feminist. I could (but won’t) name women I know upon whom each of these indignities were visited, at MIT and life. Proud to say I never committed the worst of these crimes against women, and seldom committed the least of them.

And yet, it’s not a polemic. It’s a clever, witty book that includes passionate love and steadfast adherence to principals. And a few out-loud laughs. And enough metaphors to float a section of English Lit.

When I finished, I instantly Googled the author, Bonnie Garmus, so I could read her other works. Imagine my surprise to find that this is her debut novel. I am hoping and praying for more from her.