Tag: Education

Michael Armstrong: An Appreciation of a Teacher-as-Learner

Reflecting on the nearly ten years now since a dear teacher died

I’m writing an appreciation for a professor today, one who died in 2016, and whose life work was the elevation in adult minds of the worthiness of a child’s imagination. I started thinking of Michael Armstrong last night, without realizing it had been ten years, because I was remembering again how his work with children changed my own thinking about what gets lost as we “educate” our kids, to say nothing of how we are destroying all hope for their lives in America.

It’s what’s happening to the children in 2026 that is really killing me, the horrors of the kidnapping and no doubt sexual abuse and rape happening to brown children in American concentration camps at the hands of ICE. I know I’ve said this, but I finally realized that the reason Republicans never batted an eye as Sandy Hook was because as a party, I fear they do not see children as anything other than commodities, “resources” for war, toys for sex, punching bags, slaves for labor. It’s nothing I could ever have imagined until the Epstein Files. I think most of us still can’t. This evil simply should not be.

I’ve excerpted/edited for this post a letter I wrote to Michael’s widow, Isobel Armstrong, another of my favorite teachers at the Bread Load School of English (and the poetry scholar to whom A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession is dedicated; as of this writing, she’s still going strong in London at age 88). (Note: I’ve removed last names of friends, for example, but kept the spirit.) Writing appreciations is becoming a habit.

March 27, 2016, Easter Sunday

A bowl of magic stones from my travels.

Dear Isobel,

Of course I was just devastated to learn about Michael. And the first thing that I thought to do was to call Mark (who was kind enough to supply your email address last week), and then, of course, Anna (and we are sorry that we’ve lost touch with Ellen). Because that is Bread Loaf, isn’t it? Immediately reaching for community, to share the experience, seek out that support. And Michael was a searcher, a seeker—the finest model of teacher-as-learner I have met. The loss for you and your children is unimaginable, and no letter can assuage it, I know; but I wanted to share some memories with you and tell you something about Michael’s importance in my life.

First off: if I remember correctly my first summer at Bread Loaf, Michael came halfway into the term, co-teaching with or taking over a course for Jimmy Britton and Nancy Martin; and George had you for Romantic Poetry and was quite intimidated by you. So I think it was my first summer, 1990, that Alvin Kernan came to Bread Loaf to give the Elizabeth Drew Lecture on his book, The Death of Literature, to be published that same year. (Or it may have been the summer of ’91, after publication.) That lecture hit me and really got me thinking: Kernan was charming, a good speaker, and so sure of himself—his dismay at deconstruction, his perceived bastardization of the Canon, with a capital C, by the inclusion of women and minorities, etc. (as I heard him), had done, he said, irreparable damage to Literature, and now Academe was the lesser for it; nay, not lesser, but destroyed—something like that. I listened intently and then left and went directly to Jean’s room. She had skipped the lecture but let me recount it to her, and gradually I grew furious in my retelling, pacing, outraged, incensed. A day or so after, someone set up a panel discussion, pitting the traditionalists against the deconstructionists in Barn 5: Al Kernan, John Fleming, Walter Litz, Ed Lueders (who later confided to George, Jean, and me that really he wasn’t on any side) on one side (those are all I recall); and Michael, you, Dianne Sadoff, and others on the other side. People attended, but not as many as I thought should: And the moment I remember clearly, the one that completely transfixed me and corrected my self-doubt in the world of Bread Loaf was a moment when Kernan or Litz or Fleming explained that students were in school to learn an author’s intention in the text at hand, no more, no less (something like that), and this new teacher (to me) from Britain, Michael Armstrong, fairly flew across his desk and declared, angry to the point of spitting, “If YOU tell ME there’s only one way to read a text, I’m going to tell YOU to go to hell!” I was galvanized by this display of passion, especially given the self-satisfied air and calm of the Great White Men of Academe. You, Isobel, leaned in, putting a hand on Michael’s shoulder, and began in that arrestingly beautiful English voice of yours, “What Michael means, …”. I have to confess, in that moment I fell in love with the Armstrongs.

And yet I was afraid—you were both so fiercely intelligent, seeking, and knowledgeable, that I felt I needed to work up to you before taking your classes.

In the summer of 1992—when I decided to try Oxford because Anna, who was teaching at the American School in Turkey, was going there—I got to know Michael. Anna and Ellen were taking Michael’s class (I was studying Virginia Woolf with Jeri Johnson), and Michael was the only one of the professors who dined with us in Hall every morning. We four sat together, generally; one of the first mornings we did—diving into our toast, tea or coffee, and cereal—Michael caught my eye, and Anna’s, and Ellen’s, and declared in an “important” voice: “You know, jam is for the lower classes; marmalade is for the upper classes.” He paused significantly before demanding, “And by ALL MEANS pass the MARMALADE!” I collapsed with laughter. Michael showed only a little grin. Now I was less afraid, of course; and also, all summer, Anna and Ellen couldn’t stop talking about how much they were learning from him.

And so it was that the summer of 1993, I decided, would be my Armstrong Summer: I would take Michael’s class, Narrative and the Imagination (I think it was called) and your class, Women’s Writing from the Margins (or in my typical Malaprop-tinged description to Jean, who was also taking your course, “Women’s Writing ON the Margins”—sending Jean into a fit of laughter). My Malaprop-risk notwithstanding, it was perhaps the decision that saved my academic life: and now I have to tell you something rather personal, but it all connects to Michael in the end.

In the summer of 1993, I was in the midst of a profound depression—the worst of my life up to then, and even up to now, and suffice to say from a myriad of causes—and I really had no idea how I would get through my studies. I could not stop sleeping. Sometime in the second week, my roommate sat me down: “I know it’s not my business, but every time I come into the room you are sleeping….” She was right—and it was lucky I didn’t have a single room. As a result of this intervention, I made the decision to do all my reading, writing, and thinking outside my room—but it had to be in a PUBLIC area, so I didn’t nap. I chose the large Victorian sofa in front of the fireplace in Davison Library. I was there so often, in fact, that on seeing me enter through the door, people sitting on the sofa would get up! “No, no,” they would say when I begged them not to leave, “this is your office.” There was another “office” in the library—on the second floor, by a certain window: Michael’s. Everyone knew that was where Michael Armstrong sat to study and read all day long—a model scholar.

Michael Armstrong was awarded an endowed chair the summer of 1994, and I and other former students decorated his library desk (“so embarrassing”). We refused to take down the Ben Franklin Hardware Store frou-frou until he posed for a photograph by LO’H.

That summer, for some sadistic reason of his own, Michael assigned the class Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, all three volumes. I was utterly flummoxed by those texts. One afternoon, I heard loud footsteps flying down the library stairs, and turned to see Michael rushing toward my sofa-office: “Lisa! May I share something?” Please do! “I’ve just discovered something! I think I may have figured out something in Ricoeur!” He read a passage, and then he offered me his interpretation. I have no idea what passage it was, or what Michael said, or I said, but it was the shyness Michael showed that affected me; and I flashed back to the passionate man who announced to the most eminent Ivy League English scholars in America, “If YOU tell ME there’s only ONE way to read a text, I’m going to tell YOU to go to hell!” Michael was searching, too: He confessed later that summer that the only reason he’d assigned it was to try to figure it out. How wonderful is that? (I still dip into my Ricoeur volumes from time to time; I pick up a little more every year.) That connection, made almost daily, further incentivized me to keep to my sofa office and thus pass my courses.

The library sofa was a fortuitous choice for another reason: on Michael’s “reserve shelf” to the left of the fireplace sat John Berger’s A Fortunate Man, which Anna loved, and which Michael recommended to me. Despite all the other reading I had to do for both your classes (and not only was I a slow reader, but because of my intense 3-prep teaching schedule and three-shows-a-year life as a drama director, I could never get more than one and a half books read before the start of Bread Loaf), I read the entire book in a sitting on that sofa—one of the most marvelous reading experiences I’ve had, linking—so unexpectedly, but isn’t that Bread Loaf?—all the reading I was doing in both of your courses. A miracle.

And here is where I want to thank you both, Isobel: mine was not a dazzling intellect, as you know; and so, not being intellectually vain as a result, I was the person who happily opened every book talk. There is nothing more unnerving to me than a room full of silent students, so I said the first thing. (It was the astonishing students like Jean and Maggie who said the apt thing—the only thing worth hearing, but not until the end of class. Who has that kind of time?) You and Michael so very graciously indulged my need to start things off, however feebly, and never shamed me or made me feel foolish. I felt I was free to discover and to seek, and that summer of 1993 was perhaps the most fulfilling of my life as a student. Thank you so much for sharing your gifts.

A side note, Isobel: My friend, Hasan, who is a super in my neighborhood including part-time in my building here in Queens, New York City (where I’ve lived since 2003), just stopped by and shared a story that timed perfectly with this letter: He has been driving up to Poughkeepsie, NY, every night for the past three or four months, to visit his Albanian mother, who is dying, slowly, in a nursing home. He cannot bear the thought of her alone at night, and so he goes to sit beside her in her room, where he checks on her, or naps in a chair, or gives her a sip of water. They emigrated here (illegally, of course) from communist Yugoslavia back in the 1980s—it could be a movie. She speaks no English. Hasan, who is 62, is very sad, of course, and so tired. Last night, the floor nurse was being followed around by two little children—a niece and nephew, 3 and 4 years old, and of course they chatter, cheering Hasan very much. The little girl walked over to the bed of an old woman who shares the room with Hasan’s mother, and asked simply, “Why are you sick?” Hasan began chuckling. “Why are you sick?” she asked again. The old woman said, “I’m old. Too old. I don’t want to be here.” The little girl turned to her aunt, the nurse, who was trying to shoo her away, and said, “Why don’t you let her leave?” And Hasan began laughing, tears coming out of his eyes. “It hits you,” Hasan said, “like a cannon, right here,” pointing to his chest, “the way a child sees! And then the little girl, so cute my god, she said, ‘What do you eat? Where is your food?’ And she is accusing—you can tell—the girl look at her aunt, the nurse. And the nurse looked so guilty! Because this little girl sees this old woman is so sad. The old lady say, ‘How old are you?’ And the girl hold up some fingers. So sweet!” Hasan tells me this with tears in his eyes even as he laughs. “And I’m sitting there,” Hasan finishes, “thinking—cursing all the politicians of the world, wanting to give the White House to this little girl, let her clean up the world mess!”

And hearing this story, the first thing that came into my mind was Michael’s sharing of the stories of very young children. I thought instantly of “The Sparkling Star,” which I hadn’t thought of in years. I read the story to Hasan, and we teared up; so sweet. There is simply nothing like the unfiltered language of young children, and it was Michael who taught me to pay attention, to listen to children seriously when they speak and write.

THE SPARKLING STAR

One night I was in bed and I thought that it was a little bit hot. So I ran over to the window and opened it. In flew a star that was sparkling. I stood back and just looked. Then I started to stare very badly. Then the room went dark again and the room was the same. Because when the star flew in it just lit up the room. But now the star looked strange up against my spotty and stripy wallpaper. It was also multi-coloured, it had every colour of the rainbow. The star was glittering and sparkling worse than ever. It looked just like a very very precious jewel or diamond. I walked closer to the star. Suddenly it changed multi-coloured like my wallpaper. Then it started to flicker different colours. Now it blended in very very well. It looked like it was overheating. It flickered in time with saying Help Help Help. I thought it must be like a fish. Because a fish cannot go on land for a very long or it will die, and a star has to stay high in the sky. But if it is on the ground it will die. I was a little bit scared. But I closed my eyes and picked up the star and threw it out of the window.

~ Lydia, age 9, from Children Writing Stories by Michael Armstrong, 2006, p. 99,
McGraw-Hill UK

(See also: THE MAGIC STONE in the same collection.)

I used “The Sparkling Star” in my teaching for years, had hundreds of copies…and of course, in the past two hours of scouring the two remaining boxes of my life in education—one from my 15 years in the classroom, and the other filled with bits of Bread Loaf—not one copy could I find, but I do have Michael’s book. I did find, believe it or not, notes I made from your fabulous Barn lecture on glass, in the summer of my senior summer of 1994—information that helped inform my final Chaucer paper, which I also discovered. Oh, dear.

One wonders why we keep such things, especially moving from place to place—and then we turn over the old stones and find out. Just now, I opened my inscribed copy of Michael’s Tolstoy on Education, in which he wrote: “Keep on finding & re-finding the magic stone. August 3, 1993”. Over twenty years ago: It hardly seems possible. I remember Michael reading “The Sparkling Star” at Gilmore that first summer—one of the best readings I heard there. And here I am trying to re-find that particular touchstone.

Anna and LO’H, our senior summer at Bread Loaf, 1994. The book’s title is an apt one. We still talk about Michael’s teaching. Really.

Isobel, please know how much Michael was loved, will always be loved, by every student whose life he touched. Please know how loved you are—and how the privilege of seeing your marriage, as well as your scholarship and teaching, was one of the joys of being on that mountain each summer.

Much, much love, and best wishes always,

Lisa O’Hara, Class of 1994

[End letter.]

Another memory, as a sort of coda: There was a professor I knew at Bread Loaf who had an air of self-importance that I found odd in that setting and more than a little silly. I was having lunch with several friends one day, including David Huddle. As this self-important professor walked past our table, one of my friends commented, “I just don’t like him; he thinks he’s the smartest boy in the room.” David instantly looked up. “Well, that’s ridiculous. Everyone knows the smartest person in any room is Michael Armstrong, who doesn’t know it himself.” So many reasons to love David.

The last time I saw Michael (and Isobel and David, too) was at Bread Loaf ca. 2005, on a visit, my last. He plunged into our reading lives. “Have you read Calvino’s Invisible Cities?” he asked. My eyes wide, I said, “Michael, I have, I bought it when I first moved to New York City!” Michael gave me that impish grin, “Of course you have,” he said. It felt like being anointed.

And here is hoping you, dear Reader, have good teachers and friends to appreciate in your lives, that you have the magic stone energy to promote the imaginations of children, the lives of children, and value all the good people. With thanks to all our teachers. Save the children.

Why read literature? It beats drugs, and it makes us human

On this MLK Day in the year of our lord 2026, where only 16% of American adults read for pleasure and 40% of our nation’s children do not know how to read at all, not even their own notes from the board—it’s just symbols on a page to them—we really have to figure out a new world order. I’m thinking about reading today because my friend Steve just sent me The Uses of Literature, a collection of essays by Italo Calvino, ca. 1982, with a specific reference to part 2, “Why Read the Classics?”

Reason number 6: A classic is a book that hasn’t finished what it has to say.

Books are old friends, and we need our friends. With that in mind, I found myself shelf haunting (after a morning of chopping up ice and salting my co-op front sidewalk, followed by navigating lethal ice patches in two different directions for two sets of store runs—and those “ice” references can mean so many things now ) in my own library. Lots of associative tasks all around—ideas for little collages, fumbling into art materials I had no idea I even had, pulling out volumes to peruse. Interesting, luxurious really, to spend time off on a frigid day in a sick-ass national moment in memory of one of the best of us just letting my mind wander.

For example, I rediscovered this book, a gift from friend Tom Corbin in 2016—how is that ten years ago? This led me to learn more, again, about William Morris and his wife Jane Burden Morris, where I rediscovered a painting I used in an acting exercise ca. 1983, wherein I posed as and had to bring to life the character in the painting, as I felt her, and then participate in a class “interview” as this character. Harrowing.

Blue Silk Dress (Jane Morris) 1868, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), Society of Antiquaries of London

Revisiting this painting (like a classic book, it’s never finished talking to us), I find I would like to hold this pose until 2029, but failing that dream, would like to suggest that we teach all our little ones to meditate in lieu of overstimulating them. I am so serious. Meditation and quiet, followed by reading, followed by walks in nature. Couldn’t school just be that for a few years? Starting now? Life is precious. Time is short. Quiet is a gift. I mean, look at her.

Sending love, quickly, because I have reading to do before the day is done, and one more walk in me, too.

Miss O’

David Huddle: An Appreciation

A letter of gratitude for my friend and writing teacher

In July of 1991, writing professor David Huddle brought recently-published Allen Barnett to the campus of the Bread Loaf School of English, where I was a graduate student in my second summer. In 1990, Barnett’s debut collection of fiction, The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories, was a critical smash; but a year later, Barnett was dying of complications from AIDS, a disease that features in his stories. David Huddle, a popular professor who taught the courses American Short Story and Fiction Writing, hosted an evening in the Burgess Meredith Theater on campus so that we all might hear Barnett read from his book.

The brown suit Allen Barnett wore, I remember, dwarfed his fragile body; as he took to the lectern, he said sincerely into the microphone, “I hope I don’t die while doing this.” He was not being histrionic; he would be dead in less than a month upon returning to New York City. I found the story he chose to read, “Snapshot,” devastating, and his reading was just beautiful. I still hear it in my mind. What struck me as much as Allen’s reading was the gravity, kindness, care, and sincere admiration that David showed in his introduction of Allen, his enthusiastically urging us to buy the book, and the way he showed Allen around the campus, that tender care at a time when AIDS freaked out many Americans.

The day following the reading, I found myself in Barn 5 (we literally had our classes in rooms annexed to a barn, and it was great), a basement area where there was a special seminar going on about literary theory, or something related. I’d sat in a desk in the back, the old-fashioned kind, ca. 1970, for the kids out there:

Professor Huddle and Mr. Barnett walked in, David guiding Allen’s elbow, and took desks right in front of mine. I leaned in, “Mr. Barnett, I want to tell you how much I loved your reading.” And David Huddle, a professor my grad school friend George had had for American Short Story in 1990, and now Jean had for Fiction Writing, whipped his head around and said, “Where did you get that accent?” A lifetime of living in Virginia even with parents from Iowa had given me some Southern.

“Yes,” Allen Barnett said, turning painfully, carefully to look at me, “where did you get your accent?”

“I’m from Virginia,” I explained.

David said, “I’m from Wythe County,” and I said I’d gone to Virginia Tech (also in Southwest Virginia), and taught in Appomattox. It was old home week. I know I said words, and heard some other words from Allen and David, but I was just astonished to be chatting with them, as if we all sort of knew each other.

That evening, I took up a yellow legal pad and I wrote a poem/letter to Allen Barnett, so clearly dying, to tell him what his story had meant to me, and even more than that, the fact that he took an interest in my accent of all things. Unwritten was, “and you are dying; how could you spend that kind of time on me?” I put the poem/letter in an envelope, with Allen’s name on it, and wrapped it in another note for David. “Mr. Huddle,” I wrote, explaining in some way or another that I wrote this letter to Mr. Barnett, and could he send it to him if he thought it was something to bother him with; and if not, just toss it.

The following Thursday evening was the weekly bonfire at Gilmore, a men’s dorm a half mile into the Green Mountains, one of the summer resort cabins that Joseph Battell willed to Middlebury back in 1920, causing the Battell-named “Bread Loaf Mountain” to become a century long (and counting) graduate English program for teachers as well as a famous Writer’s Conference. So on Thursdays, walking in the dark along the dirt road to Gilmore, you could hear the students and faculty gathering to pour a beer, sit outside, and stare into a fire (Vermont always has cool evenings) as a member of the faculty read a favorite story. It was sublime. That particular evening, still deeply sad about Allen’s fate, I sat by myself by the fire. Soon, David came over and knelt beside me. “I sent Allen your poem,” he said. I nodded. We held the space together for a few minutes, looking into the fire, and then David quietly got up and walked to greet others. I can’t remember if I learned from David when Allen died, two weeks later, but I don’t think I did.

But those few moments in a classroom and by the fire formed and sealed my mystical friendship with David Huddle forever. We never had long conversations, never spent long stretches of time together. One summer, he suggested that he, George, Jean, and I have pizza together, and thus began a tradition for us, once a summer for three or four summers, David would crank Steve Earle as he drove us into Middlebury down Rt 125 to Rt 7. I know he didn’t do that with anybody else, and we all knew not to tell anyone. It was our thing.

In the summer of ’93, my penultimate summer, I saw David at the annual summer cocktail party on the porch of Treman, a guest dorm with a kitchen that also served as an evening faculty hangout for The Eleven O’Clock Club, a legendary gathering of wits, to which I was never invited. The cocktail tradition was a rolling invitation list over the weeks, where one “dressed up,” and faculty and students could hobnob over alcohol. David, in his summer suit, walked over to me on the porch with his gin and tonic; I (a nondrinker at the time, I enjoyed a tonic water and lime, but who’s to know?) in my purple summer dress greeted him. He asked about my plans for my last summer. The rumor was John Fleming was coming up from Princeton one last time to teach Chaucer, and I needed that era of literature to graduate.

David asked, “Are you going to take my fiction workshop?” All these summers, it never even occurred to me to take a class with David. “Oh, no, David,” who always signed his most recent books for me, calling me “my sister Virginia” once. I explained that I wasn’t a writer but a drama director, George and Jean were the writers, that sort of thing. David looked tauntingly over his drink and said in his best kewpie doll voice, “Is the baby afwaid to take my workshop?” I glared at him. “Fuck you,” I said, “I’m taking your workshop.” He grinned. “Good,” he said, and sipped.

Bless that son of a bitch. Best decision I could have made. That last summer I took my two most challenging courses, challenging myself in ways I really hadn’t before, and David’s steady encouragement gave me the confidence to do it—that’s a longer story for another time.

My favorite greeting question of his, and I remember him once asking me this on his way to the tennis courts across from the library (not the best location), “How is your writing life?” David treated his students like fellow artists, and though I couldn’t be that, it helped me feel belonging.

David and I formally decided to have lunch together one day in the dining hall, and just as we’d sat down to talk, we were joined by another workshop student, a private school teacher (now the head of one of the most prestigious boys prep schools in the country) and a graduate of University of Virginia, like David. Tanned and dashing in his polo shirt, the fellow said, “May I join you?” and sat down without waiting for an answer. He immediately began schmoozing, complimenting David on a poetry reading he’d given with the likes of Donald Hall and others. David met my eye, which invisibly rolled, and I smiled; we shared this trap but it was David who was truly caught. My grin said, “You are on your own.” David’s gaze said, “I hate you.” Now that is love.

I believe that was the only time in four summers on the mountain that David Huddle and I ever tried to hang out, and it was not meant to be. David told George, Jean, and me that final summer, when they attended my graduation, that we would lose touch, as David said he never kept up with Bread Loafers. But he’d never reckoned with us. Over the years, I sent letters and cards to him, and he sent letters and poems in progress to me, to all three of us. Facebook later became the repository of greetings. George and Jean, who had married, remained in closer contact with David than I had, even visiting him in the hospital in Burlington as he was dying, complications of dementia. I knew something was wrong a few years ago when suddenly David left Facebook, where he had actively posted bird photos, shared poetry, including his own latest publications and readings, and boasted on his family. The onset must have been swift, is all I can say. Such a loss for his wife, daughters, and grandchildren, and a great loss too to his friends, readers, and fellow writers.

So I’m sharing this today because I finally found David’s obituary—he died in October; the obituary wasn’t published until November, and by then life happened and I didn’t search. George had let me know when he’d heard. I don’t know what made me think about David today, to decide I needed to write about him; coincidentally I got a brochure in the mail for the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference just as I started typing this. Something in the air, I guess.

David’s poems, short stories, and novels are still in print. He’s one of those so-called “minor writers,” which is sort of ridiculous because his work is wonderful, and you realize these tiers, these hierarchies, are silly. What is better than David’s “ABC” from Story of a Million Years? What’s more moving and beautiful than Allen Barnett’s “Snapshot”? There’s so much wonder to find in the world, so many encounters that teach us about ourselves, that moor us in the most turbulent of times, you have to know it all counts big, however small or quiet.

Hoping you find any consolation you need for yourself today, that you might take a moment to think about the teachers in your life. Bless them.

P.S. I loved to show friends this author photo. “Here’s why I took his workshop,” I’d say. David would have choked, catching my eye. I will always miss him.

Offloading our hearts and minds, tempest-tossed, and the salve of art

O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer.
(Miranda, The Tempest, Act I Scene 2)

I read this week that the tech bruhs, so called in current parlance, see the world as being divided into two classes of people: the thinkers and the scrollers. While they, the Thinking Class, devote themselves to higher learning, philosophy, and deep work, affording the same wealth of life experience and cashflow to their offspring, they themselves are engineering the planet so that the rest of us, by which I gather they mean the 99% and our offspring, are relegated to the Scrolling Class, those who work as drones and merely consume whatever they, the Thinkers, put out for profit.

It’s all very Brave New World, a novel I read in high school and can’t shake. Will you be made into an Alpha or an Epsilon? Will you even know? And even if you are an Alpha, watch out if you forget to take your soma (“the opiate of the masses” that replaces religion) and have an original thought. All hell will break loose, and the only antidote is a rebel copy of Shakespeare.

My library was dukedom large enough.
(Prospero, The Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2)

This week the Trump Administration, illegally as usual, dismantled the U.S. Department of Education, spreading all the allocated funds around (which legally only Congress can do, but Republicans) to different departments, so K-12 education is now under the U.S. Department of Labor. Huh? In a seemingly unrelated development, the Trump Administration also demoted a bunch of educational degrees to “nonprofessional,” meaning people pursuing nursing, say, or teaching, will not be able to take out unlimited loans to attain a degree. Not only were the listed degrees for women-dominated professions, the professions listed were those whose members are legally bound to report suspected child abuse. If no one is educated to take those jobs…

Are you following? The Pedo-in-Chief is terrified of the release of the Epstein Files, and his Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, whose husband Vince McMahon was set to go on trial amid accusations of child sexual abuse until a Chicago judge paused the case last December when Linda was announced as Trump’s pick for her new position. Meanwhile, Trump’s former “spiritual advisor” was arrested for child rape and plead guilty. In a call-in show I heard a snippet of this week, a caller demanded to know what was “wrong” about child rape.

The cumulative effect of all this during a single week has made me a bit of an emotional wreck, but it was an independent journalist on Instagram who formally linked all these pieces for me. From Love Ethic Yoga:

Moving K-12 education to the Department of Labor while red states are removing child labor laws & dropping the age of consent to 12 or 14 is a calculated move. The leaders of these departments are pedo📁files or pedo apologists. This is NOT coincidence.

Uneducated children are easy prey.
Hungry children are easy prey.
Homeless children are easy prey.
Unaccompanied minors are easy prey.

These predators are baiting the water. They’re creating the proverbial “fish in a barrel”. Yes, privatization is part of this but we cannot forget how many pedos are in this current admin. We cannot let them get away with this.

I got ill—I mean, Trump and his people are transparently, openly constructing a world where child sexual abuse is normalized, institutionalized, and unstoppable. These “men” want all young women and girls (40% of whom between the ages of 15-44 want to leave the United States, I saw in a recent poll) under their complete control in order to force-breed children, for either labor on behalf of or the sexual pleasure of (white Christian) men. Once the children “age out,” a term I learned on Law and Order: SVU, they will be, one presumes, forced to push through their trauma with slave labor, living in one of the concentration camps being constructed all over the United States.

Utah’s planned mega-shelter should be like a jail for homeless people, one widely embraced group says

This is the Brave New United States of America, friends.

It’s more than hard to take—it’s impossible. This insanity has to stop. We need to see handcuffs and prison bars on the right people, and soon. We know this.

I can’t take in everything—you can’t either. So while I know there’s Israel’s defiance of the ceasefire, and Russia’s wish-list labeled a “peace agreement” by Trump and Rubio (rejected, thank goodness) by Zelensky; protests in Charlotte and Raleigh over ICE raids; so much, so much, my god, it was the children and their protectors I focused on, “offloading” the rest, more or less.

This week on a work Zoom call, a colleague mentioned that there is always work or training or something that we simply have to “offload.” It’s not a term I knew—but I got it. You just pass that conceptual understanding to someone, maybe a spouse who gets plumbing or a coworker who is good at Excel, and you don’t worry about trying to learn that thing, much less master it. You only have the capacity for so much, and recognizing that is not a bad thing. (That said, we all have to trust in our capacity to learn new things, and try to do that, even though in my early 60s I’m finding that I have to immerse myself with the focus of a monk to his devotions to do something as complex and unintuitive as Jira (if you don’t know, don’t ask), say, but it’s reassuring to know that I can still do it, if more painstakingly.)

Speaking of offloading: I no longer have a creative life in the recognizable sense. I’m sorry about it, but between taking care of family, holding grief, learning new things on the job, and this fucking administration’s atrocities, I had to let something go, and that was it—and it’s no great loss to the world, obviously. That out of the way, I’d like to celebrate the achievements of women artists whom I know as friends. In a world, and more specifically a nation, that doesn’t value women, children, innocence, creativity, or truth, here’s some art you need.

  • Read Amanda Quaid’s debut poetry collection No Obvious Distress, which explores her (still) young life with Stage IV metastatic mesenchymal chondrosarcoma (learning the pronunciation of which seems to be more trouble from some people than her years of treatment, so say the name) in all the ways;
  • Read Anna Citrino’s fourth collection, Stories We Didn’t Tell, which explores the unspeakable hardships and abuses of her American prairie women ancestors, based on the poet’s decades of research, in rich language;
  • Watch Patricia E. Gillespie’s documentary, The Secrets We Bury, which I saw at IFC here in New York in its premiere screening this week, about a true crime, told with love and empathy and not sensationalism;
  • Listen to Patti Smith’s Horses (1975). (Envy me my Row X seat at The Beacon Theater on Broadway Friday night in New York City to see Patti Smith and her Band play the shit out of Horses in its 50th Anniversary Year, plus encores of classics. Patti also spat, twice, and it was glorious.)

So lest you think Miss O’ has given up on art, I haven’t, and I hope you haven’t either. There is nothing on this earth as satisfying as a creative act, something you can point to and say, “I made that.” There was nothing, and now there’s something, and I did it. And the world is more colorful and right and full than it was before you created that thing, however small, even making a smile happen on a stranger’s face in a notebook store, which I did on Friday night before the concert. I did that. That thing, there? You did that. Not AI, not engineered by some tech bruh, or ordered on you by some basement-dwelling podcaster or a bottom feeder in Washington. You. Just you.

Let’s stop scrolling together and get seriously radical in creative community. Take a moment to read. To be quiet. And then connect.

Here’s Mr. Rogers on the value silence from Charlie Rose, which is a clip I hope you watch. “My, it’s a noisy world,” he says, and it is. There’s more he goes on to say from his 1994 book, You Are Special, including about his professor, Dr. William Orr, who told him, “You know Fred, there is one thing that evil cannot stand, and that is forgiveness.” Take a minute with that. As a reader, Rogers says that the white spaces between the paragraphs are more important than the text, by which he means that if you aren’t using silence to reflect on what you are reading, you are missing the point of the endeavor. You can see more clips of Fred Rogers here. “A great gift an adult can give to a child is to let the child see what you love in front of them.” Whether it’s car repair, lawn maintenance, playing cello, fixing things, reading, singing, cooking, telling stories, dancing, whatever it is (note: what you love, not what you exploit)—that is the gift. I think I try to do that in life—to show love of life in greeting others. It’s tiny—I’m not a worldwide creative power like Patti Smith—but really it’s about being present, as Rogers says, moment to moment (and it’s the most important work in rehearsing a show, as shown me by director Maureen Shea). Doing things even a little larger than ourselves, then, in presence, is the point. Mr. Rogers only cared to be recognized if it made a child feel special—Fred Rogers liked “not the fancy people,” but regular people, and he aspired to “be the best receiver I can ever be—graceful receiving of what someone gives us; we’ve given that person a wonderful gift.”

Miss O’ most gracefully received.

The play I’ve been quoting here interstitially, The Tempest, is my favorite Shakespeare play; in some ways it’s like a compilation reel of all his best ideas, and his final play and only original plot, his retirement play. I’ve seen four productions of it—at the Globe in London, with Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero (it was awful); at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C., directed by Garland Wright, which still ranks as the top theater experience of my life (even after seeing Hamilton and Gypsy with Patti LuPone); one at Classic Stage Company downtown, with Mandy Patinkin (okay); and the fourth at St. Ann’s Warehouse, an all-women cast set in a women’s prison, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, with Harriet Walter as Prospero (fantastic). The most famous speech of the play, by Prospero, comes in Act IV, and I always think of it when eras end, as well as even a simple good thing, and especially a life:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on: and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(Prospero, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1)

In the final act of the play, Prospero’s daughter newly in love sees all the possibility of life, and this is from where Aldous Huxley took his dystopian novel’s title:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.
(Miranda, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1)

Sure, love is wildly naive, but it’s the beginning of everything. There’s a new world to be made. Let’s stop the fucking fuckers and do that.

Sending love, philosophy, music, poetry, creativity, all the good church,

Miss O’

The People Have the Power: Patti Smith and her band, The Beacon Theater, NYC, 11/21/25, the 50th Anniversary of Horses. Photo by LO”H. This was church.

Selfishness: A Treatise on Me and You but Mostly for Me about You

April 18, 2020

“Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope for a cure.”

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

Years ago, after a friend of mine had been married for several months, her relatives and friends began asking, “So when are you having a baby?” And the longer time went on without a pregnancy, the more her relatives began muttering, “Oh. Selfish.” My friend teared up as she told me about it. She wanted to scream, “No—we tried and we can’t. Go to hell.”

So who in that story is in truth being “selfish”? If you aren’t sure, we may need to have a talk.

When I think of humans who are “selfish,” inevitably a few names spring to mind.

(Seen around the web.) The bartenders are just expressing their freedom. Right?

Selfishness Unmasked

So here’s what I really want to talk about: Yesterday, over walks and talks and viewings of various programs, I found myself reflecting on the concept of selfishness in the time of pandemic. So I guess what I want, selfishly, is to talk about selfishness and have you, my reader, reflect on it, too.

Your Miss O’, like you and the rest of the world, is living into a new year of an old pandemic; millions of us have perished, or lost loved ones, or endured the illness, or have somehow managed to avoid it, ever-present though it remains. Some who were infected merely “tested positive” and had little more than a loss of taste and smell and maybe sniffles (as with my brother Pat and his family, as well as a few of my friends). More often, people have had high fever, aches, and their breathing almost lethally compromised for weeks (one of my dear cousins is currently hanging on day by day; others I know have recovered; a few friends were touch and go for months; one friend died); or experienced near-lethal dehydration as a result of severe diarrhea (two close friends); others, quite young, died suddenly after throwing a blood clot, including those who had been otherwise asymptomatic. The disease is utterly different in different bodies, and over different amounts of exposure. For nearly half of the United States, the view of the pandemic, whatever the human cost, has shifted from “hoax” to “who cares?” These same Americans view this pandemic in the same way that they excuse war or mass shootings, as nature’s way of “culling the herd.” And these same people don’t bother with masks or social distancing, and not only because of a cavalier attitude toward health. In their view, any restriction on their personal liberty is the greatest evil that any person can experience. Even more evil than a gun massacre, they insist, is the law that would prevent any individual from committing that massacre.

And so it goes. And don’t get us started on vaccinations!

This week, I am getting my second dose of Moderna. I mask up and live every day hoping against hope that I can remain virus free long enough to get fully vaccinated. To many, this is me being selfish. All I want is to see my parents again for the first time in a year and a half; and meet my new baby nephew James, who (if I can make it to the end of May), will be just over 6 months old when I meet him. Have I been selfish to wait this long? Or have I been responsible?

On my 6-sibling text thread, besides enjoying adorable baby pictures, we’ve been reporting our vaccination updates. My sister Sherry works in a retirement home, so she was the first of us to be fully vaccinated. My brother Craig, who is taking care of his and Sherry’s mom, Ann, who has Alzheimer’s, was next—he and Ann both have theirs now; I finally qualified and have one dose down; then brother Jeff, who will get his second dose April 30; and my youngest brother Mike, dad of wee James, had his second dose on Saturday, leaving just his wife to finish hers. There was, however, one notable silence on this thread: My brother Pat.

This does not surprise me.

When Pat texted on Friday that he was going to be visiting my brother Jeff and our parents, I flew into my usual hyper-responsible panic: I texted Jeff and called my parents to advise them to wear masks and keep their distance from Pat; don’t go out with him, etc. My mom called him to query this, and he declared that Covid was nothing (he and his family were hardly sick), that he’s pissed that his wife is getting their son vaccinated just because the school and his sports teams won’t take him back unless he is, that it’s his choice, hardly anyone has really died relative to the world population, etc. My mother told him not to visit if he wasn’t going to be responsible about it. My brother was furious and didn’t visit after all. (No one said who told them, but Pat knows that I know and have challenged his anti-vaxxer views.) Query: Is it selfish or simply freedom not to tell the people you love that you are not vaccinated and never intend to be vaccinated against a deadly virus?

“SELFISH, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.”

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

First, is it in fact asking too much of one another to wear a mask in public, socially distance, and wash our hands regularly during a time when such actions could prevent mass death?

To me, such a question sounds absurd; even to ask it feels ridiculous. For at least half of America, these simple precautions, requested by leading epidemiologists, are in fact too much to ask. Why?

“It’s almost paradoxical that on the one hand they want to be relieved of the restrictions, but on the other hand they don’t want to get vaccinated. It just almost doesn’t make any sense.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, discussing [the] vaccine hesitant

Second, is it too much to ask all eligible (that is to say, not allergic) Americans to get vaccinated against Covid? After all, polio and smallpox did not eradicate themselves. Children must be vaccinated by law to attend public school. As a society, I thought we had accepted this, and if we don’t, we move to a survivalist compound in Idaho or Texas and spend a life in hiding. Again, why is this request too bitter a pill to swallow?

On this same subject, people claim “reaction” as their reason for refusal; so if your personal child once had a bad reaction to a vaccine, does that mean we should not require vaccinations? Or, because I had a severe allergic reaction to penicillin as a child, should my family have lobbied to have penicillin banned from pharmacies? What if we had, and had won?

Third, is it fair or unfair of national or state governments to require a “vaccination passport” to travel? (My brother, for example, who loves Mexico, would, I think, get vaccinated if Mexico or the US required such a passport.) Or is this too much government in the name of preventing a virus from doing what it was born to do—kill as many of us as possible?

In other words—and not that environmentalism is on the minds of anti-vaxxers—are those of us who would prevent mass suffering and death, including our own—deaths that may in fact save the health of planet Earth—really the selfish ones?

What is the line between selfish and responsible, and what makes this line so difficult to navigate? I ask that because it seems to me this is the dilemma. Is denial easier to live with? If we don’t attend a church service or a wedding or a funeral or a birthday celebration due to Covid, are we being selfish (not making ourselves physically present to honor others), or are we, in fact, responsibly looking out for the greater good? Or is it both? If we deny them and ourselves a temporal pleasure with the idea of serving a greater longterm goal, is it worth the sacrifice? Or are we being fools?

Perhaps we should consult the healthcare professionals who haven’t seen their own families in a year. And the soldiers who go to war.

The Royal Treatment

Yesterday afternoon, I streamed the funeral of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, via the BBC, listening to interesting history but able to fast forward to the essential ceremony, which was beautifully done—intimate, restrained, yet also grand. (Robin Givhan of The Washington Post captures it perfectly. )

It might seem odd to talk about privileged royals at a royal funeral in an essay that concerns selfishness in the time of a pandemic, but the broad sweep of history and the roles of those in power are part of the big story. To be unselfish in the big moments means, for example, sharing your personal grief with the larger world, accepting the condolences and comforts and kindness of the many with grace and gratitude even if you might wish to weep alone. In addition, for those of us who might not understand why a royal relic of a colonial era is deserving of this globally seen ritual, we have to be unselfish enough to try to understand the full picture.

If rituals remind us of how small we are in the scope of history, they can also reassure us that despite all evidence to the contrary, none of us is alone.

So many people have been missing the reassuring powers of rituals these past 13 months — especially the spiritual ones. They have not been able to attend religious services, and when they have, they’ve been reconfigured for safety. Perhaps they’ve been held outdoors. Communion has been transformed into a drive-through event. It has been impossible to extend the hand of fellowship, and there have been so few people in attendance that it hasn’t felt like fellowship at all.

And so Philip’s funeral was a reminder of what these rituals can do. They don’t erase the flaws in the deceased but they afford the public an opportunity to make peace with them. They’re about endings, but also renewal. During a time of emotional upheaval, they’re guardrails to keep people from tumbling over.

~ Robin Givhan, The Washington Post

Learn One, Try One, Teach One (Repeat)

In the end, the events of the past year have reminded me of the importance of our teachers. To take one example: Last night on Turner Classic Movies I watched again (for the first time in years) William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker starring Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan and that prodigy Patty Duke as the prodigious Helen Keller. To help bring to heel the ungovernable and tantrum-prone Helen—who since an illness at 19 months (possibly meningitis) had been blind and deaf—her parents have sent for a teacher; and while wrestling Helen to gain control and be effective, this teacher is doubted and questioned continually by Helen’s parents, “Why can’t you show some pity?” At one point in the film, Helen’s older half-brother (who had been on Anne’s side but sees the whole business to teaching Helen as a hopeless cause) asks Anne, “Why do you care if Helen learns or not?”

Any reasonable person watching this madness, this wrestling match, might easily wonder both of those things: Why fight this poor, wretched creature? and, Why do you care to try?

And I can tell you, as a teacher, that any teacher watching this film will offer in answer to anyone posing those questions, “Well, it’s obvious you aren’t a teacher.” Anne herself says it, that where there is one closed mind that is never opened, that’s a loss to the world, and so of course she must work to open that mind. (She spells into Helen’s hand, T*E*A*C*H*E*R, not ANNE, to introduce herself.) So, how much learning is “enough”? When Helen learns to sit at the table and fold her napkin, for example, instead of roaming the room eating off of everyone’s plates, the family is satisfied. What more is needed? Isn’t it enough that she obeys? Anne, the teacher, knows that obedience is not enough: Where there is only obedience without the knowing why, that’s a loss not only to the person, but also to the world. (As you know, of course, because of Anne Sullivan’s teaching persistence, Helen Keller went on to be one of the most inspirational activists for good that the world has known.) Selfishness may be born of ignorance more than anything else, and that is why education is key.

I’m sometimes messaged by friends on social media, following one of my usual posts on racial injustice, for example, “Why do you care so much about other people?” I don’t know; I never really thought about it. I just always did. I guess that’s why I became a teacher in the first place. What I find odd is that so many people who do not have the vocation to educate or help others, want selfishly to throw up obstacles to prevent the success of those of us who do. See also: voter suppression and climate change denial.

Selfishness, then, causes loss—first for the closed or untapped mind of the “selfish” person, sure; but ultimately, it is that other and more insidious selfish desire for “calm” and “order” without sacrifice or struggle (obedience without knowing why one obeys, nor caring), that makes the world the biggest loser of all. Why should we, as individuals, care about the world? The teacher says, How can you not?

In sum, anyone who claims not to understand why he/ she/ they must “obey” an order to be vaccinated against a deadly and highly contagious disease, or openly rebels against the order fully knowing and denying the consequences, is acting not righteously but selfishly—selfishly because, even with all the information to explain the why, he /she /they has chosen personal and unfounded belief over the greater good. Morally, this is simply wrong. So judgeth Miss O’.

I look back to Ambrose Bierce up there, who hit the mark where too many people today live: the idea that my asking you not to be selfish, makes me the selfish one. Teachers especially are imbued with just that kind of selfishness—the selfish need to unlock closed minds so that all of us may experience life in all its richness and complexity, and grapple with all the points of view so that we ourselves may grow and be more fully of service to those we love.

Ain’t it awful.