Approaches to texts

One of the more annoying and unhelpful tics one sometimes encounters in discussing books is the unrestrained urge to fight with them. This seems to be especially common in discussions of ancient books, of religious books, and of Marx. (All three of which are required reading at St. John’s College.) Thankfully, after a while of having conversations about books in every class every day, most people at St. John’s do eventually realize that this way of approaching texts rarely leads anywhere interesting, and that other ways do, or else they at least absorb as a kind of local cultural etiquette that they ought to go easy on it.

Over the years I’ve heard a few bits of advice, or assertions, or aphorisms, that seem aimed at ameliorating these tendencies. Sometimes they seem exaggerated, or not clearly true, or even intellectually risky in some way or other, but always formulated as ways of improving conversation and consideration, and I’ve generally found them to be of some use.

One popular one is alleged to have been said by Emerson about a paper criticizing Plato (though perhaps an invention of a biographer — and paraphrased by Omar on The Wire): If you shoot at a king, you had better kill him. Another one that gets around is that, when reading a book that is truly great, you should read it as though you agreed with it completely, as though its author were right about everything, give yourself over to it, and then feel free to change your mind once you’ve made it through to the end. Another was said by some religious figure, perhaps a rabbi, to David Daube — a legal scholar who wrote extensively on the Bible — when, as a young man, Daube left a religious Jewish community to study the Bible in a secular university: if you must study the Bible in this way, do it like a surgeon who must operate on his father. I find that this can be a helpful perspective with many other books besides the Biblical ones.

 

We students in the Graduate Institute at St. John’s were recently given a helpful letter by Mr. Venkatesh on writing St. John’s essays, which several people new to the College understandably feel some trepidation about. I find one piece of his advice especially helpful, on the subject of fighting with texts. I hope he doesn’t mind my reproducing it here:

Picking Bones. If you plan on picking a fight with a book, I would recommend to you the following tripartite scheme: a) First get clear what the book is saying, and see why it would be compelling to an intelligent person; b) then articulate your dissatisfaction with it, and argue against a); then c) return to the book, and ask how it would respond to your objection. This way of picking bones with an author helps you to see a question more fully.

September 21, 2008 · Education, Friction, Literature · (No comments)

Symbolism

The first presidential debate of the election season will be hosted next Friday at Ole Miss. Dr. Mullins, Executive Assistant to the Chancellor (and who I believe has been some sort of university liaison for the event), told us in the Teacher Corps about the possibility of the University’s hosting a debate at least a couple of years ago. The planning has been enormous, and they’re expecting something like 3,000 journalists. I hear the place is already filling with reporters, and getting more attention than it’s gotten in a very long time.

I’m sure the symbolism of Obama’s participation will not be missed: the debate will be only a few days shy of the 46th anniversary of James Meredith‘s becoming the first black student to enroll at the school, and the accompanying riots that cost two lives (including that of an international journalist) and caused dozens of injuries. Bob Dylan wrote a song about it, and the bullet holes are still in the main administrative building.

 

Following the attention to symbolism, I remembered a small project conceived while still in Mississippi: mississippeponymy.

There are only two entries, and I’m not sure now that there will ever be more. But if you have suggestions (they need not be in Mississippi), do submit them.

September 19, 2008 · Friction, Politics, The South · (No comments)

Aggressions and Resentments

I usually don’t give money to beggars. There were lots of them around where I grew up, and when I was small I sometimes saw my father turn down their requests for money with an offer to buy them food. I never saw one accept the offering. Once, when I was a teenager, someone asked me for spare change as I was walking into a Taco Bell, and I gave him none, but I walked out with some food for him a few moments later. He looked at me disgustedly and continued collecting soda cans from a dumpster.

Today I left school on my way to a doctor’s appointment for which I had to fast. It was hot and muggy and I had the windows down. I haven’t seen many beggars in Mississippi but when I stopped at a light in downtown Jackson, hungry and tired, a guy on the curb started to shout his begging at the windows of each of the stopped cars in turn. When he got to mine and I didn’t immediately respond, he belligerently shouted, “White boy ain’t help no nigger,” and waved me away angrily. I told him I might help if he weren’t such an asshole. Maybe that was rash.

April 11, 2007 · Friction, The South · 1 comment

Mingling Race into Tension

The Mississippi Teacher Corps summer training included some warnings about confrontations with students and physically threatening situations, all of them as I recall centered in the classroom; and there was surprisingly little talk of the effect on these situations or on the classroom environment of being, in most cases, the only white person (or Asian person, or. . .) in the room.

In these first three weeks I have generally felt no substantial effect of my whiteness in the classroom. A few students have made small jokes about whiteness or blackness, but I have always had the impression that they would have been hardly less likely to make them with a black teacher. Almost all of my classes have at some point become briefly distracted by questions of my race, students abruptly changing the subject from, say, transitive and intransitive verbs, to asking bluntly, “What race are you?” or sometimes something more subtle to the same effect. One class insisted that I didn’t look American, and one student in it continually asserts that I must be from Paris (still further, that I look like a magician from Paris — what her experience could be of Parisian magicians in rural Mississippi I am not able to guess). Many students have squared me away as Spanish, and at least as many as “Middle Eastern,” which they most often interpret, quite simply, as “Iraqi.” (I have been so questioned elsewhere, and the usual identifications are Spanish and Jewish — both at least somewhat correct — and I suppose my students might be making the same identifications from within a more limited framework.) I have usually not felt that my students perceived the racial segregation and politics here so acutely as I have, or at least that they were so unsurprised by them that they seemed not to notice anymore.

Friday night was the first football game, and all faculty were “on duty” and assigned to posts. I was standing for the whole game at the gate on the visiting team’s end. The team we played had maybe one or two black players, and one black cheerleader; all others were white. Virtually everyone whose ticket I took was white. The other side of the field was all black. I knew that these games happen, but actually seeing a football team of whites lined up against a football team of blacks, their families and friends cheering on their respective sides of the field — and two separate gates for their entry! … somehow my knowledge that it happens left me no less surprised to see that it actually does. Maybe it happens everywhere to one degree or another. It was actually my first high school football game.

I was not sure if the faculty was supposed to stay for the whole game, and there was nobody nearby for me to ask, so I stayed. When the game ended and I began the walk to the other side of the field, toward the school and the parking lot and my car, I saw few teachers, and assumed most had left toward the end of the game. Many of my students saw me and said hello, wished me a good weekend. One commented that I must be tired. (It was 10:30pm, and I had been on campus since 6:45am; I was still wearing a tie; and though nobody else knew it, because of the chance load of my schedule that day I hadn’t even eaten anything since dinner the previous night.)

As I got to the front parking lot the crowd was a bit rowdier. I noticed for the first time since I’ve been in Mississippi that I was the only white person. I put the thought out of my mind, taking it to be an unseemly one. It was dark, and I thought I heard someone shouting, “Mr. Pollack,” as several of my students had just done on the other side of the building before friendly exchanges of greetings. I turned in the direction of the call, and saw a group of maybe four or six teenagers, but they weren’t looking toward me and I thought I might have imagined my name. I reached my car, unlocked it, and opened the door, and heard from the same direction my name again, this time followed with, “Get your white ass outta here,” and “Go back to Iraq.” I shook my head and continued into my car, put on my seat belt, turned the key, and put it in reverse. After backing out of my space and turning the wheel, as I was shifting into drive but before the gear was engaged, I see these kids running up behind my car, covering their faces with hats and t-shirts. I hesitate before pulling forward and they start banging on the back of my car. I begin to pull forward and they run away laughing.

It occurs to me that banging on the back of somebody’s car could be quite light-hearted, though obscuring one’s face as one does it makes the act rather more threatening. I am sure these kids were in my fifth or sixth period class, or perhaps a few from each, though I’m not sure who they were. I am somewhat sure, maybe 80% sure, that I know who one of them was, the one who seemed to be the ring-leader, but I am not sure enough.

There were cops just around the corner. I was probably not ever in actual danger. Nevertheless, I’m not sure how to feel about the encounter. At the time I wanted nothing else but to eat something and go to sleep, and would entertain thoughts of no other action. And maybe in a dark and crowded parking lot after a football game it is plainly and always foolish to engage half a dozen apparently hostile people, even if their hostility might not be wholly serious. But I am bothered with the idea that their overtly aggressive gesture was met in their minds with a hasty retreat, that from their view they forced an authority to submit, that they won dominance, and that discipline problems they have already presented to me might now become worse.

August 28, 2005 · Culture, Friction, Teachering · 2 comments