John Rocker, once the fireballing closer for the Atlanta Braves, hated coming to Queens, NY, to play the Mets before their raucous urban fans. To reporters he said nasty things about NYC gays, about what might happen to him if he took Mets' fans' beloved number 7 train--and he had earlier called an African American player "a fat monkey." You can well imagine what the New York tabloids did with this - and that, in turn, made Mets' fans at Shea louder still - and all this in a September pennant race.
What interested me at the time was that baseball officialdom assumed that the problem was psychological and that what Rocker needed was therapy. The triumph of the therapeutic - there are no real political problems; there are only psychological adjustments that need to be made in individuals - comes to baseball. Rocker was a die-hard southern conservative, replete with fears of northern cities and the racism and homophobia that either go along with that or are its source.
From the New York Times: "Last week, Selig, the baseball commissioner, ordered Rocker to undergo a psychological evaluation in the wake of disparaging comments he made about minorities and gays in an article in Sports Illustrated. He ripped teenagers with purple hair, called an African-American teammate a fat monkey and made racial and homophobic slurs about New Yorkers. The tests were ordered Thursday. Rocker visited psychologists on Friday and then left for a hunting trip in Arkansas. But in ordering psychological tests, Selig may have stumbled upon the beginning of a path to slay the wrenching beast of prejudice, intolerance, bigotry. Selig equated racism and bigotry to a psychological disorder to be confronted and wrestled with -- not to be shunted in a closet and hidden."
My favorite line here: Rocker goes to therapy and then off to his hunting trip in Arkansas, where, presumably, his hunting colleagues will reinforce the values of acceptance of diffrence and a love of urban culture.
Join us for this event; rsvp to whlucid [at] writing.upenn.edu.
We do remember Bob Lucid and created a web page that conveys the feelings of Bob's students and colleagues.
At the October 19, in my remembrance, I think, I will trace the intellectual-pedagogical lineage that Bob followed and brought here to Penn. A fantastic concoction of non-academic (the radical-anarchist influence of his northwest childhood and his older brother Jack who fought in Spain) and academic (the influence of his experimentalist small-college liberal arts college days and the University of Chicago of Robert Maynard Hutchins). To me it is an important and not-quite-discerned legacy and needs spelling out (I only hope not boringly).
"I always found Bob to be graceful and gentle. I remember him hosting Ginsberg and Creeley at Penn 10 years ago and showing his pleasure at just having them talk about getting into various sorts of trouble. Creeley spoke about how he liked sitting in open air toilets, Ginsberg sang the communist anthem, and Bob just made it all come together. He then held the stage with Norman Mailer and had just as much fun getting into trouble there. I would pass him by on occasion and just enjoy the short moments in common. He was complete kindness."--Josh Schuster
Above: Bob Lucid and his wife Joanne (at right) and (left) my parents, Sam and Lois. Taken in 1999.
Robert Frost dismisses modern poetry in Newsweek (January 30, 1956, p. 56):
Match Point: In Pittsburgh, 81-year-old poet ROBERT FROST strolled into educational station WQED for a televised chat and poetry reading with a group of fifteen high-school students, told them "Pittsburgh is still a kind of wilderness city . . . There are places where rocks stick out... Lots of places where you can't run a lawn mower...," got so interested that he ignored off-camera cues and overshot his scheduled hour of air time by a full 55 minutes. Four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Frost's tart dismissal of 'free' verse: I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down.
To celebrate the life and work of David DeLaura, we gathered at the Writers House for an event that David and I had planned just two days before he died suddenly. David was an eminent scholar and teacher of Victorian poetry and one of the most passionate citizens of the university. (He was the incoming Chair of the English department here at Penn when I was hired in December 1984, a wise and super-sympathetic person to whom I went for counsel on various matters over the years.)
After he retired I saw him maybe three or four times a year. One day I had seen David on the street. We had chatted in our usual animated way. Then I suggested that we work together on creating a program at the Writers House to celebrate Victorian poetry. Readings from the verse, some informal commentary, and a reception. Pure fun. He loved the idea and agreed. A few months later we met at KWH and planned the program. He had begun to write something that he himself would deliver that night - a mini-talk on the Victorian poets he loved. He and Ann flew off the next day to Portugal (his beloved ancestral homeland) and he died in his sleep the next night.
On November 17, 2005 - the very day we'd planned to have our program - we memorialized David. Wendy Steiner read from Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam sec. 5 and Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" and told some DeLaura stories in relation to both poets. Rebecca Bushnell reading from Algernon Swinburne's "Sapphics." Vicki Mahaffey (who had been David's student as an undergrad at Texas as well as a long-time colleague at Penn) read from Robert Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi." We recorded the event and each of the readings/reminiscences is available as downloadable mp3 audio files here. If you have time to listen to only one, I recommend Roger Abrahams. Roger was a dear, dear friend of David's, and read that night Hugh Clough's "Qua Cursum Ventus" and gave a moving talk.
“David was perhaps more interested and open with other people than any academician I ever knew," Bob Lucid remembered at the time of David's death. "His friendliness was so irrepressible that he automatically fell into conversation with anyone standing next to him in line or sitting with him on planes, trains or buses, especially if he perceived the person to be in need of any sort.”
Here's Janet Malcolm, dismissing an early biographer of Gertrude Stein:
“[Elizabeth] Sprigge was a woman of her time, which may not have been the best time to be a woman. ... She is flirtatious, pleased with herself and given to exclaiming over the beauty of Paris and writing down everything she ate (‘a very chic sandwich with soft black bread and veal on the terrasse at Webers’). ... She refuses the role of the quietly treacherous interviewer, preferring to remain the spunky heroine of her own drama.”
The passage is quoted from Malcolm's new book about Stein and Alice B. Toklas (it's called Two Lives) as reviewed by Katie Roiphe in this week's New York Times Book Review. Roiphe opens this way: "One would not naturally pair Janet Malcolm, a clear, analytic writer, with Gertrude Stein and her modernist shenanigans."
William Carlos Williams was right in 1951 to wonder "Why...have we not heard more generally from American scholars upon the writings of Miss Stein? Is it lack of heart or ability or just that theirs is an enthusiasm which fades rapidly of its own nature before the risks of today?" Williams was probably referring to Louise Bogan's selectively antimodernist Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950, that comprehensive book in which Stein is given one paragraph. A little later, in 1954, in Grant Knight's 229-page survey of literature in the century's first fifteen years, Stein is mentioned in just one sentence.
In the book-length attack on Stein published in this period by a man named B. L. Reid, Stein's problems were reduced to the neurotic and the unAmerican. Her talk of war as a dance evinces signs of insanity--of "monumental detachment." Because she liked to arrange buttons, she could be said, like lunatics, to have "enormous patience with triviality."
In 1956, reviewing the Yale edition of Stanzas in Meditation, Karl Shapiro concluded that Stein was not properly understood as the obscure poet; the better Stein--the Stein now to be preferred--was the poet who "turned to writing about historical relations." He actually said: "[Stein] was on bad terms with the Imagination."
Then there's Stephen Spender, in a typically standoffish, skeptical review of Elizabeth Sprigge's 1957 biography--the same biography Roiphe is pleased to say Janet Malcolm mocks. Spender had much to criticize in Sprigge, yet at least he praised Stein in a way that stressed the possible, the local, the unabstract, the bodily: she was no longer to be deemed "a genius of invention" but rather a figure of "a good deal of inertia" whose talent lay in "her ability to stay put and hang on" - language that all but undoes newness (and expatriation). Spender wrote: "She had a certain massive, weighted-down greatness."
Beginning in the early 50s and continuing more or less to the present day, mainstream reviewers have tended to look away from the problem of language, focusing rather on domestic particulars. Roiphe seems delighted now that Janet Malcolm’s "concern isn’t so much Stein’s stylistic innovation as the construction of her life and reputation."
triumph of the therapeutic comes to baseball
What interested me at the time was that baseball officialdom assumed that the problem was psychological and that what Rocker needed was therapy. The triumph of the therapeutic - there are no real political problems; there are only psychological adjustments that need to be made in individuals - comes to baseball. Rocker was a die-hard southern conservative, replete with fears of northern cities and the racism and homophobia that either go along with that or are its source.
From the New York Times: "Last week, Selig, the baseball commissioner, ordered Rocker to undergo a psychological evaluation in the wake of disparaging comments he made about minorities and gays in an article in Sports Illustrated. He ripped teenagers with purple hair, called an African-American teammate a fat monkey and made racial and homophobic slurs about New Yorkers. The tests were ordered Thursday. Rocker visited psychologists on Friday and then left for a hunting trip in Arkansas. But in ordering psychological tests, Selig may have stumbled upon the beginning of a path to slay the wrenching beast of prejudice, intolerance, bigotry. Selig equated racism and bigotry to a psychological disorder to be confronted and wrestled with -- not to be shunted in a closet and hidden."
My favorite line here: Rocker goes to therapy and then off to his hunting trip in Arkansas, where, presumably, his hunting colleagues will reinforce the values of acceptance of diffrence and a love of urban culture.
Here is a link to two Times articles from 2000.
as lucid as it gets
We do remember Bob Lucid and created a web page that conveys the feelings of Bob's students and colleagues.
At the October 19, in my remembrance, I think, I will trace the intellectual-pedagogical lineage that Bob followed and brought here to Penn. A fantastic concoction of non-academic (the radical-anarchist influence of his northwest childhood and his older brother Jack who fought in Spain) and academic (the influence of his experimentalist small-college liberal arts college days and the University of Chicago of Robert Maynard Hutchins). To me it is an important and not-quite-discerned legacy and needs spelling out (I only hope not boringly).
"I always found Bob to be graceful and gentle. I remember him hosting Ginsberg and Creeley at Penn 10 years ago and showing his pleasure at just having them talk about getting into various sorts of trouble. Creeley spoke about how he liked sitting in open air toilets, Ginsberg sang the communist anthem, and Bob just made it all come together. He then held the stage with Norman Mailer and had just as much fun getting into trouble there. I would pass him by on occasion and just enjoy the short moments in common. He was complete kindness."--Josh Schuster
playing tennis in the Pittsburgh wilderness
Robert Frost dismisses modern poetry in Newsweek (January 30, 1956, p. 56):
citizen of the university
After he retired I saw him maybe three or four times a year. One day I had seen David on the street. We had chatted in our usual animated way. Then I suggested that we work together on creating a program at the Writers House to celebrate Victorian poetry. Readings from the verse, some informal commentary, and a reception. Pure fun. He loved the idea and agreed. A few months later we met at KWH and planned the program. He had begun to write something that he himself would deliver that night - a mini-talk on the Victorian poets he loved. He and Ann flew off the next day to Portugal (his beloved ancestral homeland) and he died in his sleep the next night.
“David was perhaps more interested and open with other people than any academician I ever knew," Bob Lucid remembered at the time of David's death. "His friendliness was so irrepressible that he automatically fell into conversation with anyone standing next to him in line or sitting with him on planes, trains or buses, especially if he perceived the person to be in need of any sort.”
speaking of Stein
“[Elizabeth] Sprigge was a woman of her time, which may not have been the best time to be a woman. ... She is flirtatious, pleased with herself and given to exclaiming over the beauty of Paris and writing down everything she ate (‘a very chic sandwich with soft black bread and veal on the terrasse at Webers’). ... She refuses the role of the quietly treacherous interviewer, preferring to remain the spunky heroine of her own drama.”
The passage is quoted from Malcolm's new book about Stein and Alice B. Toklas (it's called Two Lives) as reviewed by Katie Roiphe in this week's New York Times Book Review. Roiphe opens this way: "One would not naturally pair Janet Malcolm, a clear, analytic writer, with Gertrude Stein and her modernist shenanigans."
William Carlos Williams was right in 1951 to wonder "Why...have we not heard more generally from American scholars upon the writings of Miss Stein? Is it lack of heart or ability or just that theirs is an enthusiasm which fades rapidly of its own nature before the risks of today?" Williams was probably referring to Louise Bogan's selectively antimodernist Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950, that comprehensive book in which Stein is given one paragraph. A little later, in 1954, in Grant Knight's 229-page survey of literature in the century's first fifteen years, Stein is mentioned in just one sentence.
In the book-length attack on Stein published in this period by a man named B. L. Reid, Stein's problems were reduced to the neurotic and the unAmerican. Her talk of war as a dance evinces signs of insanity--of "monumental detachment." Because she liked to arrange buttons, she could be said, like lunatics, to have "enormous patience with triviality."
In 1956, reviewing the Yale edition of Stanzas in Meditation, Karl Shapiro concluded that Stein was not properly understood as the obscure poet; the better Stein--the Stein now to be preferred--was the poet who "turned to writing about historical relations." He actually said: "[Stein] was on bad terms with the Imagination."
Beginning in the early 50s and continuing more or less to the present day, mainstream reviewers have tended to look away from the problem of language, focusing rather on domestic particulars. Roiphe seems delighted now that Janet Malcolm’s "concern isn’t so much Stein’s stylistic innovation as the construction of her life and reputation."