A Pilgrim’s Digression

I came across the following story in the New York Times this morning, In Literary London, the Strange Case of the Steamy Letter. Recently it was revealed that A. N. Wilson, a biographer of the former British Poet Laureate, John Betjeman, utilized a phony letter from the poet to prove his contention that the poet had a homosexual affair with a friend during World War II.

The fake letter, purportedly the ingenious work of a rival Betjeman biographer, Bevis Hillier, can be viewed below.

Wilson had no idea that the letter was phony, but he probably should have. Maybe I have grown unromantic in my middle age, but the letter is just a bit over the top: “I have a Romaunt of the Rose feeling?” Please spare me. That’s obviously someone who is not a poet trying to write a love letter such as he or she thinks a poet would write.

Also, as it turns out, the first letter of each sentence, except the first and last two sentences, spells out an obscene insult against Wilson. Pulling off a caper like this requires a personal interest in Betjeman’s life and Wilson’s work.

As the Times reporter writes:

The trick was complicated and planned well in advance. Mr. Wilson told The Sunday Times that he received a copy of the fake Betjeman letter in the mail about two years ago from someone claiming to be Eve de Harben, a cousin of Honor Tracy (a real friend of Mr. Betjeman). Eve de Harben said that the original letter was owned by an American collector.

Mr. Wilson had no reason to doubt its authenticity, he said. He put it in the book, at the end of the chapter titled “Betjeman at War.”

No reason to doubt its authenticity? That seems a little odd. Someone purporting to be a cousin of a deceased friend of Betjeman’s mails him a copy of a letter that explosively confirms the biographer’s supicions about the poet’s sexuality. The fact that it is a copy should be the first tipoff that Wilson needs to verify the authenticity of the original with the owner.

And as if that weren’t enough, it turns out that the name of the mysterious person who sent him this copy of a Betjeman letter, Eve de Harben, is an anagram of “Ever been had.” Furthermore, when the biographer tries to return the copy of the letter to Ms. de Harben, it is returned “addressee unknown.”

Hmmm. Do you think he should have investigated the authenticity of that letter? It sounds to me like the letter provided exactly the information Wilson wanted, and so he didn’t question its authenticity. Why question something that confirms the truth of what we already believe?

The incident does not speak well for Wilson’s reputation as a biographer, which may have been the point of his rival sending him the letter. Wilson, described as “waspish” by the Times writer, could better be described as prideful and mean. He mocked Hillier in a newspaper column, describing him as “some old bachelor in a Hiram’s Hospital, smock-clad like a pauper in the reign of Henry VIII, dripping resentment like the dottle from a smelly churchwarden’s pipe…”

Hillier in turn described Wilson as a bully. It sounds to me like Wilson got exactly what he deserved.

So what was the obscene message encoded in the fake letter?

“A. N. Wilson is a shit.”

Well, at the very least, he is a fool. A fool with a big vocabulary (what the hell is a “dottle?”), but nonetheless a fool.

For most of my life, whenever I have had some free time, I engage in the completely unproductive activity of playing video games. I admit that with some chagrin, because I know that the rest of the world looks upon video games exactly as I described it in that sentence: “unproductive.” And that word is probably too generous a term for how some people feel about it.

From the evening my dad brought home an Atari 2600, about 1980, I have had no other hobby. Sure, in online Harris Polls and Zogby Polls, I say that my hobbies include “reading” and “sex with my wife,” but I actually read very little these days.

Anyway, recently, the Washington Post has been reporting on the negative impact of MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) on individuals and society, and I have read these articles with some interest.

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Brendan’s first week of Kindergarten came off without any problems to report. Lynn dropped him off and picked him up on Wednesday and Thursday; I dropped him off and picked him up Friday and yesterday. Each afternoon when we pick him up, we subject him to an intense inquisition on the ride home.

“How was your day?” “What did you learn in school?” “Did your teacher have to talk to you about your behavior today?” “What did you play on the playground?” “What do you do in gym?”

Already, even at age five, extracting information from him about his school day is about as easy as prying tree stumps from the ground. But from what we can gather, all is going well.

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It’s early morning in the big city. The homeless man sleeps under his blanket on a bench in Stanton Park, still and quiet as a small child. The newspaper delivery man throws a bundle of freshly inked papers in the doorway of the Trover bookshop. Gunpowder blue light suffuses the upper facades of the east-facing buildings; at street level, it is still night.

Broke: that feeling you get at the end of the month when the bills have been paid, and you stand in the middle of the two-week chasm between paychecks and wonder why you haven’t got two nickels in your pocket. Did you overspend? Did you have some unexpected, but necessary expenses?

It’s not a “can’t make my mortgage” broke feeling; not at all. It’s more a “no Starbucks this week” broke kind of feeling. Walking down the street, past the bookshop, past the Starbucks, you check your wallet again, as if those two bucks that have been haunting its folds for the past three days will have somehow metastisized into a ten dollar bill, or even a five. Heck, a five would do.

A person can buy a good cup of coffee and a croissant with a five.

As you pass Pete’s Diner, where you usually have breakfast on Thursday, you look inside. The fat, white tee-shirted, white-haired fry cook is tossing hashbrowns on the griddle. The eyes in his baggy, bassett-hound face never look up from his flashing spatula, even as the little Asian woman who runs the place yells at him soundlessly. The waitress pouring coffee looks out the window and sees you looking in; you look away guiltily.

Broke. Part of it is the end of the month, part of it is gas prices. Ten dollars buys you not even three gallons of regular. Twenty will raise your tank only to about three quarters full. Plan on spending at least thirty if you want to fill ‘er up.

Broke. Why did you spend twenty-two dollars at the iTunes Music Store last week? Well, it always seems like you have a lot of money in the bank when the direct deposit first comes in, doesn’t it? And twenty-two dollars wouldn’t have made much of a difference. How about if you hadn’t had to pay $360.00 in student loans? Now that would have made a difference in your bank book.

You arrive at work and ride the elevator up to the fifth floor. You turn on the lights and drop your bag at your desk. You take your coffee mug to the water cooler and draw a cup of H2O. Microwave the water, three minutes on high. Drop in a teabag, Twinings English Breakfast. You peal open a Pop Tart package, brown sugar and cinammon, and begin eating them cold as the tea steeps.

You think to yourself, “Boy, some eggs, bacon, and potatoes sure would have tasted fine this morning.”  Broke.

You plug in your earbuds and turn the clickwheel on your iPod to a bootleg MP3 of this new radio program you’ve been listening to.

Welcome to Theme Time Radio Hour, Dreams, Schemes, and Themes, with your host Bob Dylan. Today’s theme is “Broke,” and we begin with an old standard by Lefty Frizzell. He wants to go honky tonkin’, hit all the night spots, dance, drink beer and wine. But he’s broke. “If you got the money, Honey, I got the time.”

Bring along your cadillac, leave my old wreck behind. And if you run short of money, I’ll run short of time. So says Lefty, and amen. We all could use a Money Honey, as Elvis called her.

Lacking that, there’s always work. Which is where you find yourself at 6:30 AM. Time to punch the clock and earn that paycheck. Next week you won’t be so broke, you tell yourself reassuringly. You’re almost to the top of the hill, you’re out of the canyon and with the pastures of plenty already within sight. You won’t be broke for long, at least until the end of next month.

A middle school teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, has been reassigned to non-instructional duties for burning an American flag in the classroom. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Now consider the rest of the story. The flag-burning was a teaching device intended to enflame emotions prior to beginning a Social Studies assignment on free speech. Still stupid? Or brave?

The safety issue of burning a flag in a classroom trash can is probably enough, in itself, to label this action as stupid. Any teacher who lights an uncontrolled fire in class is probably going to be suspended or reassigned. It just was not a particularly bright thing to do. But it did grab students’ attention, and for that I give him credit.

Stuart sixth-grader Kelsey Adwell, 11, said students were abuzz about the incident yesterday.

“They just can’t believe that a teacher would do that — burn two American flags in front of the class,” she said. “A teacher shouldn’t do that, even though it was an example.”

At least one school board member believes the teachers’ actions went too far, not for safety reasons, but because of potentially offending students: “School board member Pat O’Leary said the flag burning was unnecessary and could have offended some students, including those in military families.”

It probably did offend people. Some parents are apparently calling for the teacher to be fired, so obviously offense was taken. So what? The purpose was not to cause offense, but to provoke thought, as even the school superintendent allows.

Furthermore, using the “offense” argument equates an insult to one’s patriotism with an insult to one’s race, ethnicity, or religion. Sorry, but offending someone’s sense of patriotism is not the same as using a racial epithet, or otherwise insulting someone. If a teacher insulted a race of people in class, as a thought or emotion-provoking act, to me that would be grounds for dismissal no matter the teacher’s motives.

Patriotism is fair game: a patriotic student should be able to defend his or her beliefs against attack, and I see the teacher’s flag-burning as a way of provoking a “fight” response in patriotic students. That means they respond as the teacher wanted them to respond: by writing a thoughtful opinion paper. Not by calling for the teacher’s ouster.

However, all that aside, it was still pretty dumb to light a fire in a classroom (no bad metaphor intended), even if he was standing by with his own fire extinguisher. The only way I see that the experiment could be justified is if the teacher informed administration of his lesson plan (the plan would probably be refused, however) and allowed outsiders to observe the lesson.

Personally, I can think of other, safer ways to desecrate an American flag. I’d put it in a bucket of bleach. Somehow, bleaching all the color out of the flag seems to me as powerful a symbolic statement as setting fire to the flag.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if conservative radio hosts decide to make an issue of this.

Last night, we went as a family to Brendan’s elementary school for an ice cream party “meet and greet” with his principal and teacher, as well as the other three kindergarten teachers.

The ice cream was the school cafeteria kind, served in a tiny, styrofoam cup with a paper peal top and a small wooden “paddle” to eat it with. That brought back some memories, almost as much as if we were given one of those tiny half-pint cartons of chocolate milk to drink.

But the real purpose for being there was not to eat ice cream, or even to acclimate this crop of five year-olds to school, but to soothe the anxieties of parents sending their children off to elementary school for the first time.

After meeting with Brendan’s teacher, Mrs. Morris, his classmates, and their parents in the classroom, we adjourned to the gym for a meeting with the principal. After the principal spoke for a few minutes, the teachers called the names of their students and assembled them in lines and took them back to the classroom so that parents could concentrate on assuaging their own worries.

Surprisingly, only one little girl out of approximately sixty children went into loud, screaming convulsions when the teacher tried to separate her from her parents.

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This should warm the hearts of liberals all across the land: candidate for Governor of Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, the much-hated orchestrator of President Bush’s 2004 Ohio victory, trails his Democratic challenger Ted Strickland by 20 points in a Columbus Dispatch Poll.

According to David Broder, when the poll results were made known to him, “the best that Blackwell could say was that his own internal surveys showed him trailing by only 11 points.” The President seems to have become the proverbial White Elephant of election year 2006.

More from Broder’s column today:

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A Fox News Hounds article about the continuing debate over the President’s use of the term Islamo-fascist contains a link to an interesting bit of video. Through selective editing, and creative splicing of real news footage and voice overs, someone has created a version of the film V for Vendetta that suggests parallels between the movie’s fiction and our reality.

The film is titled 9/11 Vendetta. Like the Hollywood film on which it is based, the amateur film oversimplifies to a great extent; and in one respect, it is even misleading. Near the beginning, dialogue from the film in which Chancellor Sutler’s lackeys discuss V’s terrorist plot to bomb Parliament is overlaid with images of the World Trade Center. The only problem is, the dialogue used suggests that the plot to bomb Parliament is an inside job, rather than a plot by an outside terrorist. This would suggest to someone who hasn’t seen V for Vendetta that WTC was an inside job.

While this bit of propaganda clearly indicates the editor’s bias in regards to 9/11 conspiracy theory, the rest of the film does a better job of pointing out ways in which elements of the Chancellor’s fascist British state match up to America in the first decade of the 21st century.

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In the weeks leading up to the start of school, we have been trying to fit as many family activities as possible into every free day. Lynn started back to school today; Brendan starts next Wednesday, so we are soon going to become more constrained in the kinds of things we can do together, at least during the week.

Last Sunday, we took Brendan to a local store called The Creative Kiln, where patrons can purchase a piece of pottery and paint it, then return in a few days to take the piece home after it has been glazed and fired in the kiln. Brendan painted a snake and a ladder; I painted a flower vase.

Each Tuesday at the Creative Kiln is story time, during which children gather to hear a story and paint a piece of pottery based on the story. Last Tuesday, Lynn took Brendan to hear Make Way For Ducklings, after which he painted a small duck sitting on a lilypad covered pond.

Today, I took him for story time, and we heard the story of Frederick, a mouse whom all his mousey friends think is incredibly lazy. All summer, he does not work to store up food for the winter, telling his friends he is gathering sunshine for cold winter days, and colors “because winter is gray.”

At first, this story seems like merely a retelling of the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, but in fact Frederick delivers on his claim that he is also doing valuable work for winter. I read this story as the fable of how an artist, who does not perform any traditional work for the betterment of the community, nonetheless provides valuable resources despite appearances to the contrary.

After the story, Brendan painted a little brown and pink mouse he named, of course, Frederick.

But the highlight of these last weeks of summer, however, has been blackberry picking.

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One constant in the life of a parent is that children control the music in the car. I have 3,210 songs and podcasts on my iPod, but on a family roadtrip, or even a trip across town to the grocery store, Brendan determines the two or three albums we actually listen to. Again and again, we listen to the same music. Dare to select something different, and one risks a miserable voyage.

Right now, there are four albums we listen to: the soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou [links will open iTunes]; the new Dan Zanes album Catch That Train; a collection of children’s music by various artists, including Bob Dylan, titled Gather Round: Songs For Children and Other Folks;and finally, Bruce Springsteen’s new album, We Shall Overcome.

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