{"id":3141,"date":"2012-05-09T21:14:52","date_gmt":"2012-05-10T01:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3141"},"modified":"2015-09-26T14:17:54","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T18:17:54","slug":"deconstructed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3141","title":{"rendered":"Deconstructed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

Deconstructed<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Lean on Me, by Bill Withers (1972), encountered 1972<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a>\u00a0| Lyrics here<\/a>\u00a0| Sheet music here<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Certain conversations change your life.\u00a0 Let me start with one that\u00a0did, but in\u00a0exactly the wrong way.<\/p>\n

It is a grey and damp March Saturday in 1971.\u00a0 A gentleman with close-cropped gray hair named Earl Wasserman and I are\u00a0walking the streets of West Philadelphia.\u00a0 It is an open-air interview for a spot in next year\u2019s Graduate English Program at Baltimore\u2019s Johns Hopkins University, which Wasserman runs.<\/p>\n

There’s History Here<\/h3>\n

This is a man who should be on my side, almost no questions asked.\u00a0 Without him, my life to this point would have been completely different, and he must know this.\u00a0 Back when he and my father were young faculty members together at the University of Illinois, they and their spouses\u00a0formed a foursome.\u00a0 Wasserman, an enthusiastic proselytizer for the academic\u00a0program he came from, Hopkins Graduate English, had persuaded my mother <\/em>to matriculate in that very program\u00a0should she return\u00a0East, as she eventually did.\u00a0 And it was there, on or around the steps of Gilman Hall,\u00a0my mother met the man who,\u00a0about a decade later, would become my stepdad.\u00a0 Ernie Gohn, the stepfather who did far more than his share of the heavy lifting in raising me, would earn his doctorate in that program a couple of years after he and Mother met.\u00a0 Wasserman knows all this history.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And incidentally, here you can see, on those Gilman steps (from the Fall of 1946), the students my mom joined, including my mom herself,\u00a0in the middle of\u00a0the front row, with my stepdad right behind her.\u00a0 This was three years before my mom and father even produced me.[1]\u00a0\u00a0In the gossipy world of scholars connected almost umbilically with this program, whatever\u00a0unconventional\u00a0goings-on lay\u00a0behind that photo\u00a0are history any faithful alum like Wasserman, especially\u00a0an\u00a0alum who pushed my mother into the program to begin with,\u00a0must have heard.\u00a0 And he should be\u00a0helping to write the next chapter of that history, right?<\/p>\n

And I am the kind of student any graduate English program should welcome.\u00a0 Great grades, working familiarity with Old English, Middle English, and the contemporary stuff and everything in between.\u00a0 Earning bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degree simultaneously.<\/p>\n

Not On My Side?<\/h3>\n

Yet for the moment it doesn\u2019t appear he is on my side.\u00a0 What do I think I\u2019m up to, applying to a department where there are twenty trying to get in for every slot?\u00a0 And what is this business in my application where I say I\u2019d like to do some creative writing in after life, along with scholarship?\u00a0 Am I aware that I can\u2019t possibly do both?\u00a0 OK, so C.S. Lewis did it; I don\u2019t think I can, do I?\u00a0 Am I really unaware that scholarship consumes all a real scholar\u2019s time and loyalty?\u00a0 Johns Hopkins only wants real scholars who will produce great scholarly works.\u00a0 Am I going to commit myself to that goal, or will I skulk in, pretending that I am going to produce these works, while actually planning to go off and fritter myself away being creative, when there are\u00a0so many\u00a0worthy people in the world who\u00a0would make better use of the opportunity?<\/p>\n

Now, if I agreed with Wasserman\u2019s premise, I\u2019d feel worse about trying to placate him.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t agree; oh, maybe I can sense the experience that lies behind\u00a0his pronouncements\u00a0and the faint traces of benevolence in his effort to send creative writers elsewhere.\u00a0 But I think I\u2019m more capable than Wasserman allows.\u00a0 I think that, with focus and drive, I really can do both the creating and the scholarship.\u00a0 But he won’t let me say that, so I kind of lie and\u00a0downplay parts of my ambition.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I succeed; I\u00a0am admitted two weeks later.<\/p>\n

Have\u00a0I really fooled Wasserman?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know, but I doubt it.\u00a0 My best guess, looking back, is that he let me in on account of auld lang syne, because of the connections with my mom and my stepdad — and my father.\u00a0 And he was probably hoping for the best, the best being that he could\u00a0eventually ease\u00a0me\u00a0into his ascetic\u00a0scholarly mold.\u00a0 As for me, on the strength of that conversation alone, I should have run like hell in the other direction, because even if I didn’t know yet exactly what he wanted, I had sufficient warning that it would be something I could never\u00a0provide.\u00a0\u00a0Each of us thus said yes when we should have been saying no.\u00a0 Call it fate.<\/p>\n

As is always the case, it wasn\u2019t sheer cussedness alone that led me to make that choice; there were also various sensible considerations. The pattern of acceptances and financial offers I and my fiancee received made it clear we were either headed to my home town of Ann Arbor, or to Baltimore, from whence she came. And slightly better money seemed to be coming from Baltimore.<\/p>\n

Deconstructed<\/h3>\n

But it proved to be nothing like what I had expected.\u00a0 Partly this stemmed from me unwarrantedly extrapolating from what I knew. I\u2019d assumed that all graduate English departments were like Penn\u2019s: lecture format (where the professor did much of the heavy lifting) with the occasional seminar.\u00a0 Hopkins was all seminars, all the time.\u00a0 We were expected to do multiple papers in each course,\u00a0read them\u00a0to each other, and comment (and if you think that brought out some unhealthy competitiveness, you\u2019re right).\u00a0 But those were the superficial dissimilarities.\u00a0 Wasserman had been less than candid too, it seems, about something even more important.\u00a0 Hopkins, it emerged, was all about criticism, not scholarship.\u00a0 And so, in our seminar papers and everywhere else, we were expected to spend more time talking about the published criticism than about the works being criticized.\u00a0\u00a0This\u00a0brought to my mind the picture of a man bent over, playing tic-tac-toe in the dust, ignoring a spectacular sunset going on behind him.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t just the emphasis on the criticism; it was the kind of criticism.\u00a0Unlike what my mom and stepdad had encountered with their band of brothers and sisters in the 1940s, the Hopkins Grad English program of the 1970s had dedicated itself heart and soul to turning out Deconstructionist critics. And what (you may ask, if you\u2019re not in the know) is Deconstructionism? I\u2019ll tell you: I can\u2019t tell you. There is no there there, no definition by definition. There are certain tenets: texts have no fixed meaning; we interpret them according to our sense of reality, but that sense is just another text. Criticism is therefore the creation of texts about texts, and the most creative creations of texts about texts are those that subvert the apparent meaning of the texts under discussion. Hence critical creativity dwells most consistently and most laudably in destruction.\u00a0 Or, as they preferred to call it, Deconstruction.<\/p>\n

My interest\u00a0in scholarship, then, was not merely different from the interests of the professors; it was an affront to the premises on which they were basing their careers.\u00a0I sought to learn facts about literary works that would help us understand what they actually, objectively meant.\u00a0That\u00a0quest\u00a0that presupposed a conviction that works had objective meaning, that their meanings\u00a0were tied to their authors\u2019 lives and intentions, and that lives, intentions, and meanings\u00a0 in many cases would be knowable.\u00a0 This was anathema to my professors, or something worse than anathema: belle-lettristic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And even that wasn’t the whole problem.\u00a0 I came to realize fairly quickly that a lot of the writers and books I cared about weren\u2019t considered worthy to be on the syllabus. So-called minor genres that I\u2019d been able to write about freely at Penn (mystery, science fiction, spy fiction, children\u2019s literature, rock lyrics) were off-limits.\u00a0A destructive radicalism in reading was thus\u00a0put at the service of a conservative and snobbish selection of what to read.<\/p>\n

Puff Puff<\/h3>\n

You might expect that with such radicalism would come at least some kind of excitement, no matter how ersatz.\u00a0 Sorry to disappoint you.\u00a0 I present a transcript of a moment chosen almost at random from the seminar table talk of one professor I had.\u00a0Imagine him smoking his pipe.\u00a0 \u201cWhen…I…was…in…(puff)…(puff)…college… …(puff)…(puff)…I had… … a friend…(puff)…who wrote… …(puff)…I get tired… … (puff)…(puff puff)…Is that a sign…(puff)…of…(puff puff)…maturity?\u201d\u00a0 You could go mad waiting for the end of two sentences like those, and then mad again dealing with the attitude they conveyed.\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The acme of the Hopkins Grad English universe was the Tudor Stuart club, a paneled room on the third floor where monthly evening meetings took place.\u00a0 I attach a 2011 photo of the room, not much changed from how I remember it then.\u00a0 Attendance was de rigeur<\/em>, though they softened the blow by laying out beer and the makings of cold cut sandwiches.\u00a0 But then you\u2019d have to sit through lectures by visiting Deconstructionist dignitaries.\u00a0 If a lecture were graspable using ordinary logic and common sense, it was deemed a failure.\u00a0 There were few failures.\u00a0 Instead, there would be the most\u00a0impenetrable prose you ever heard.\u00a0 After an hour of that, the questions would start.\u00a0 People, mostly faculty, would pose questions, many in the same diction as the lecture, and you\u2019d have to sit through that for up to another half hour, until dismissed.<\/p>\n

There were those who drank the Kool-Aid, who claimed to get it.\u00a0 These were the ones the professors rewarded with continued stipends and bona fide job recommendations (more about that in a later entry).\u00a0 I neither claimed to nor did.<\/p>\n

And They Hated Me Right Back<\/h3>\n

I caught on quickly that this wasn\u2019t a congenial place for me, writing my parents at the end of\u00a0September that I hated it.\u00a0 Evidently the feeling was mutual.\u00a0 At the beginning of February, I received a letter from the department chair advising that \u201cOn the basis of the necessarily limited evidence available, we have some doubts about the quality of your work as of this moment.\u201d\u00a0 My wife got a similar letter.\u00a0 In my case, the department ultimately relented, and allowed me to stay with a stipend (I was upgraded to \u201csatisfactory\u201d in May), but it would extend no stipend to my wife.\u00a0 She stepped down (and went on to better things).<\/p>\n

In light of these developments, I wrote to a friend who\u2019d gone to Yale:<\/p>\n

Words have not been coined to describe the awfulness of this place…. They don\u2019t have any money and they\u2019re doing people dirt, right and left.[2]\u00a0 Since there are no grades, we have no objective standards to point to in our own defense: all they have are subjective analyses of us on file with the chairman which we aren\u2019t even allowed to see…. Classwork counts for nothing, and so the phenomenal string of papers we have to turn out like sausages is the essential means the student has of establishing his worth.\u00a0 But around here you\u2019re expected to become somebody\u2019s disciple … and your papers had not only better be done well, but they had better coincide in their findings with the professor\u2019s own opinions.<\/address>\n

So I arrived at year\u2019s end battered and bruised.\u00a0 My value as a literary man had been impugned, my earlier-described vision of my wife and me as soaring through the clouds together sharing an academic career<\/a>\u00a0had crashed to earth, and I was in need of ready cash.\u00a0 At least there was a partial and temporary solution for that last one: My father-in-law called in some favors and landed me and my brother-in-law a job to split: driving a Mister Softee truck in Anne Arundel County, a marshy enclave west of the Chesapeake and south of Baltimore.<\/p>\n

It was certainly a different experience, I’ll say that.<\/p>\n

The Power of Positive Ice Cream<\/h3>\n

\"\"[3]<\/p>\n

Different, but not\u00a0much of an improvement.\u00a0 In those days you could fairly call that area (Glen Burnie and Severna Park) a redneck suburbia.\u00a0 I drove up and down neatly-platted streets trying to sell soft ice cream, listening to a maddening jingle played over and over again on the speaker mounted above my cab.\u00a0 The ice cream may have been cold, but the cab was hot, and I sweated off over a dozen pounds.\u00a0 I was being paid a small base plus commission, incentivizing me to sell, sell, sell. But redneck or not, these were neighborhoods to which freezers had come, dampening demand, and the trucks were old and prone to breakdowns, frequently killing outright my ability to meet what demand there was.<\/p>\n

You would not have guessed the existence of either of the problems listening to the franchisee, a man named Marshall.\u00a0 In Marshall\u2019s imagination the sky was the limit, and mechanical troubles were to be overcome with a positive attitude, not expensive repairs.\u00a0 Yet ice cream trucks contained two complete mechanical systems (truck and kitchen), each with a plethora of moving parts.\u00a0 Old systems are apt to go on the fritz; that\u2019s just the way of it.\u00a0 Your product was perishable, and if you couldn\u2019t turn that mix into ice cream and those bananas into splits, they had to be written off.\u00a0 If you had a flat tire, or the ice cream machine went down, you were out of business until further notice.\u00a0 Marshall thought (or at least pretended to) that if we were really committed<\/em> on a deep spiritual level to sales,\u00a0we could magically\u00a0move ice cream\u00a0irrespective of whether the trucks could\u00a0budge or the ice cream could dispense.<\/p>\n

Marshall had a trophy younger girlfriend, Roxanne, who had been a beauty queen.\u00a0 Marshall had made her vice president of his company.\u00a0 It was painfully obvious to the rest of us that Marshall had mistaken whatever he saw in her for business acumen, but that she possessed neither more nor less of that than the rest of us, and her beauty and certain degree of spunk could not change the overall direction of an undercapitalized business\u00a0dependent\u00a0on a badly depreciated truck fleet.\u00a0 We wanted Marshall to spend less time looking\u00a0communing with Roxanne\u00a0and more time looking at the fleet.\u00a0 Marshall\u2019s starry-eyed embrace of motivational nostrums could not substitute for an outlay of cash, and somehow he couldn\u2019t see it.\u00a0 And he probably couldn\u2019t have afforded it even if he had seen it.<\/p>\n

The Power of Nature<\/h3>\n

I obviously did not share Marshall\u2019s rosy vision of the transformative powers of pure sales karma, but I did believe in getting to work on time (an improvement over my views working at Ford three summers before, written of in an earlier entry<\/a>), and so, on Thursday, June 22, 1972, even though the weather was bad, I was trying to fight my way in.\u00a0 I\u2019d heard that there was a hurricane around but not exactly in Maryland.\u00a0 Heading out to the car, I felt a lot of rain, but nothing like hurricane winds.\u00a0 So I optimistically\u00a0set out for Glen Burnie and the Mister Softee compound.\u00a0 Bill Withers\u2019 annoying April hit, Lean on Me<\/em>, was playing on the radio as I cruised downhill on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway toward the wetlands that constitute the banks of the Patapsco River.\u00a0 It was when I got close to those wetlands that I realized things might be a little different today.\u00a0 There were no wetlands to be seen at all, just water that came up disconcertingly close to the highway — where there ought to have been at least 10 feet of grade separation.\u00a0 And traffic had almost stopped.\u00a0 As I got close to the next interchange, where I was supposed to exit the Parkway and get on the ramp for the Beltway southbound, there were police cars with flashing red lights, waving us off.<\/p>\n

I guessed that there was something wrong with the Beltway, but I assumed I could find an alternate route.\u00a0 So I not only kept on going (I had no choice about that), but also kept trying to get to work.\u00a0 And that was the beginning of what (in memory at least) was a three-hour ordeal, in which, through increasingly powerful rain, I was seeking a way to Glen Burnie on back roads, roads I did not know, roads I was sharing with far too many drivers, roads that kept ending in roadblocks.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how long it took me to figure out that Hurricane Agnes (they were calling it that even though it was no longer at hurricane strength) was simply going to keep me out of Glen Burnie altogether that day, and that, however great a sales opportunity might be presented with power out all over the peninsula and people\u2019s freezers out of commission and their dark houses driving them into the street, I was never going to get there to capitalize on it.<\/p>\n

\"\"[4]<\/p>\n

When I did realize it, though, I also realized that it had been my choice to put myself out here, against advice, that I was in parts of the back of beyond I did not know, getting lashed by rain, and that, by this time, the paths back to what was comfortable and familiar might be closed.<\/p>\n

Stuck Here<\/h3>\n

Even after two semesters at semiotically insane Johns Hopkins, I recognized a metaphor when one was rapping me on the knuckles.\u00a0 And I also recognized that Lean on Me<\/em>, which was played at least once again on the radio (it would become a Number 1 hit in July) as, against all odds, I gradually worked my way back into Baltimore, was a perfect metaphor for the metaphor.<\/p>\n

Was there ever a more ugly or simple-minded song?\u00a0 Starting with that opening piano cadence, an inverted C chord, followed by the hands simply moving up and down on the white keys without changing their position, and just seeing what happens.\u00a0 The verses doggerel, poorly scanned.\u00a0 A bass line that at one point is sketching out a different chord from the one being played by the piano, and not because the bass player is being inventive, but because he apparently isn\u2019t listening.\u00a0 And lyrics that relate two notions, though they do not explain the relationship, because they can\u2019t.\u00a0 One notion is that we need to help each other out, and the other is \u201cthere\u2019s always tomorrow.\u201d\u00a0 Tell that second one to the three children in Maryland whose car overturned in the floodwaters of Hurricane Agnes and drowned.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t get even one tomorrow.\u00a0 And if there were<\/em> always tomorrow, then how important would it really be for people to help each other out?\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t they all be assured of a tomorrow regardless of whether others lent a hand or not?<\/p>\n

I could beat this horse for a long while, but it\u2019s dead and I\u2019m done.\u00a0 The point is, that song just made it perfect.\u00a0 I knew from having my ear well trained over the preceding decade what a good song sounded like.\u00a0 I knew what the proper approach to literature looked like.\u00a0 I knew that mysticism didn\u2019t sell ice cream.\u00a0 And now I was in a world where no one who ran the show cared what I knew; they thought they knew better and were going to do it their way.\u00a0 And I was going to have to be a part of that world for a while.<\/p>\n

I just had no idea on that wet June day how long I would be stuck there.\u00a0 But stuck I was.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n

[1].\u00a0 In answer to the obvious questions, my mom and father were in the midst of an extended separation at the time the photo was shot.\u00a0 They were back together later, from 1948 to 1953, during which period I turned up.\u00a0 A story to tell at greater length somewhere else.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[2].\u00a0 The underlying problem seems to have been the end of a Cold War program that had funded humanities as a defense expenditure.\u00a0 Why anyone had ever thought the study of literature constituted national defense in the first place is beyond me.<\/div>\n
\n

[3].\u00a0 Image source here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4].\u00a0 This is a screen capture; the interactive map from which it\u2019s taken\u00a0 is on the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s website here<\/a>.\u00a0 On the source map, you can follow (at whatever scale you like) how Agnes moved up the coast, and make out why the storm was initially thought not likely to cause problems on June 22 at the top of the Chesapeake Bay.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew from having my ear well trained over the preceding decade what a good song sounded like. I knew what the proper approach to literature looked like. I knew that mysticism didn\u2019t sell ice cream. And now I was in a world where no one who ran the show cared what I knew; they thought they knew better and were going to do it their way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[3472,2733,3375,3477,3482,3481,3474,3467,1209,3484,3473,3468,48,3471,3478,3470,3480,3469,3466,3476,2257,3483,3479,3475,2895],"class_list":["post-3141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-3472","tag-2733","tag-3375","tag-anne-arundel-county","tag-baltimore-beltway","tag-baltimore-washington-parkway","tag-belles-lettres","tag-bil-withers","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-chesapeake-bay","tag-deconstructionism","tag-earl-wasserman","tag-ernest-gohn","tag-gilman-hall","tag-glen-burnie","tag-graduate-english-program","tag-hurricane-agnes","tag-johns-hopkins-university","tag-lean-on-me","tag-mister-softee","tag-national-oceanographic-and-atmospheric-administration","tag-noaa","tag-severna-park","tag-tudor-stuart-club","tag-university-of-illinois"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3141"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5530,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3141\/revisions\/5530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}