I Don’t Have an iPod, But My Mom Does

Part of the hiring process in the English Department at UMB is going out to lunch with a group of students so they can check you out and pass along their impressions to the faculty. Yesterday, I was one of these student representatives, and the complimentary buffet isn’t the only thing I’ve chewing on since. (Sorry, that set up is unforgivable, but…forgive me.)

The candidate yesterday was a young guy with a newly minted Ph.D from City College in New York. He looked 18, and his clothes were self-consciously hip in a way that I’ve gotten less used to these months in Boston, but I’m sure he was 30 or so. He was trying to get a feel for how the student demographic at UMB compared to CCNY, and when he figured out that I had lived in New York for enough time to make it count, the conversation changed completely. At first, we were just talking about favorite spots and “It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You” coffee cups. Finally, someone with some idea of what it might mean to teach middle school in Bushwick! Oh, street cred, how I’ve missed you.

But then: “So what’s it like to live up here after New York?”

The question I don’t want to answer, don’t know how to answer. And what I said almost surely didn’t make any sense to him. In fact, I’m not even sure exactly what I meant, but I’ll try to make some sense here.

It’s a trade-off. The things you come to think are going to be hard in New York (and, yes, that list is long), like dealing with any institution, not getting the benefit of the doubt from your landlord, having to live in a dirty din (even if people tell you that you live in a “nice” area), those things aren’t hard in Boston. It’s clean. People can be eccentric but mostly reflect the friendliness of those who aren’t embattled, who haven’t been screwed over or inconvenienced one time too many. Boston does not breed an unspoken contempt for authority, or distrust, or ill will.

But the things you come to expect to be no big deal in New York are hard in Boston. Heading over to a party, you might reasonably think that you can stop at the ATM and pick up a six-pack or a bottle of something. Maybe. But maybe your simple little errand will lead you around a dizzying circle of dark residential streets, leaving you, if you didn’t get lost, trying to rationalize the faux pas of showing up empty-handed. You probably won’t get anything to eat, anywhere, after 11:00 pm, and definitely not after midnight. And if it’s midnight, you should probably be heading home anyway–the assertion that the T runs until 1:00 is just a lie. The T almost never goes exactly where you need it to, so you’ll have to get a bus or take a hike. On a clear, mild night, that walk can be a sweet finish to an evening out. But this is New England, and the weather doesn’t usually cooperate. So, you’re stuck in that no man’s land between the last T and the last bus, which can last for nearly an hour (at Harvard Sq, anyway). So basically, you just left a party (where hopefully your friends with cars were understanding about the empty-handedness) at midnight to get home at 2:00 anyway. 

Dark thoughts emerge. Is it even worth trying to go out when there’s Facebook chat and DiGiorno? Has it come to that?

This is turning into a rant, and I’m going to get it under control, but it felt good. There are deeper, more important things in a city than how easy is to stay out late, of course, but I’m building to a metaphor…

New York is both the party and the hangover. Whatever it promises, it resolutely refuses to be all one thing or the other. Boston is constant: medium-sized, medium-paced. For a soul accustomed to the cycle of being elevated by sights and sounds, then ground down, then elevated, then crushed again, Boston doesn’t, on the surface at least, seem to offer much to fight against or fight for. 

Maybe it’s a little crazy to want to live that way, anyway. And maybe Boston has a spirit I just haven’t been let in on yet. So, the answer is: I don’t know. I await.

Posted in Off my chest | 3 Comments »

‘We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was “rod”. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to “rod” in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme…Has it ever occurred to you that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?’  –Part 3, Chapter 1, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Passages like these are throwaway gems in Orwell’s work, the literary equivalent of the breezy, effortless melodiousness of a McCartney-penned B-side. It’s rich in a few ways. The speaker is Ampleforth, a poet Winston meets in a squalid cell in the bowels of the Ministry of Love. Clearly, he functions to demonstrate what Orwell had written nearly nine years earlier, in ‘Literature and Totalitarianism,’ that art, which is elementally an expression of an individual’s emotional life, cannot exist under the kind of regime Nineteen Eighty-Four imagines. In Oceania, the ‘art’ is either intended to pacify (the music and porn novels churned out literally by machines to keep the proles happy), or to promote the Party’s ideology (the grand anthems and Newspeak ‘scholarship’). It’s also worth pointing out the intertextual reference to Kipling, since Orwell wrote so extensively about his experiences with British Imperialism and is considered by some among the very first postcolonial theorists.

Obviously. But this passage is also a kind of Valentine to English, and I confess that that is why I have always liked it.  Something in me swells with irrational pride at the idea that English is an unyielding language that can only be tamed, molded, and elevated to beauty by the most talented and committed among us. It’s little wonder why Orwell, who wrote against the long odds of poverty, war, chronic illness, and hunger, and railed against the muddying of English with ugly jargon and purple, meaningless Latinate words, is among my very favorite writers. His passion, at least as I understand it (or imagine it, but it comes to the same thing)–to keep English the sort of language one can tell important truths in with style and grace–is the soul of my literary conscience.

As an ESL teacher, I did not enjoy watching my students struggle with silent letters and irregular verbs. I know that English would be easier to learn if there weren’t so many vowel sounds (15 or more, including diphthongs). Still, I think English gives as good as it gets. Once mastered, it offers a massive, grand vocabulary which is constantly being infused with apt words from other languages (and its own dialects) and the ideas that go with them. English has a tremendous capacity for clever euphemism and register shift. In English, you can produce stirring rhetoric that doesn’t sound over-the-top, express dissatisfaction without sounding like you’re going to kill someone, and say sweet things to someone special without sleaze or cheese. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s invented language–Newspeak–seeks to restrict people by taking away these latent expressive powers in English. The ending of the novel is devastating, but, having read it over and over, I can say that it makes me feel absolutely alive. A bit of that aliveness rushes to the surface every time I reflect on the messy weirdness of a word like “enough,” or a resolutely irregular plural like “children,” or the counterintuitive “had had” verb construction. (The children had had enough!) 

So, rock on Ampleforth. It’s almost Valentine’s Day.

Posted in Musings | No Comments »