Thursday and Friday we had a break in the winter weather, and today is supposed to be warm as well, though at the moment we have thunder, lightning, and heavy rain.  Kimber doesn't mind rain or snow, but she is not a fan of thunder, so she's cowering on her bed.  Monday a "wintry mix" is forecast, so winter isn't quite over.  Last Tuesday and Wednesday, however, were still gray and chilly, so they were good days to stay in front of the TV, listening to all the commentary on the arguments before SCOTUS.  My own comments are just those of an amateur, but when has that ever stopped me?  Although the projected results, at least in the DOMA case, appear to  be encouraging, the quality of the arguments from what are supposed to be nine of our finest legal minds was disheartening.  With eight justices (Thomas doesn't speak, of course) having only 80-90 minutes on each of the two days, I suppose we shouldn't expect debate in depth.

Justice Scalia is, of course, incorrigible.  In his offensive remarks in the Voting Rights Act case when he talked about voting as "racial entitlement," he said, "There have been studies" without ever citing any of them or even bothering to make his point explicit.  In the Prop 8 case, talking about the effects of same-sex adoption and parenting, he did much the same thing, only in reverse, denying that there were sociological data despite the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics had filed an amicus brief summarizing exactly those data.  His point was irrelevant anyway, since California permits adoption by unmarried hetero- and homosexuals.  Justice Alito's low point was probably his argument that same-sex marriages are newer than the Internet--neither true nor relevant to the liberty or equal rights arguments for such marriages.  And Chief Justice Roberts performed no better.  His argument that calling a union a 'marriage' was simply a matter of labeling was patently false (and was hardly the argument the opponents of Prop 8 were making) and was followed by an incomprehensible analogy to the use of the word 'friend.'  He seemed irritated with President Obama, who, he suggested, if he isn't going to defend DOMA, should simply refuse to enforce it.  Can you imagine the conservative outrage if Obama applied a sort of line-item veto, selectively refusing to enforce laws he had decided were unconstitutional rather than waiting for the Supreme Court to make a decision?  There would be howls about his usurpation of power.

Since the anti-same-sex marriage forces can't use tradition as a legal justification, they initially fell back on procreation as the primary purpose of marriage.  First, shouldn't their lawyers (and the Justices) show some understanding of the history of marriage?  Procreation was never the primary purpose.  And, as Justice Kagan pointed out, if procreation were the primary purpose, whole classes, besides gays, would be ruled out.  I wondered what Chief Justice Roberts, both of whose children are adopted, was thinking during this part of the argument.  Since neither moral objections nor tradition are constitutionally available grounds for challenging same-sex marriages and since procreation as primary goal doesn't hold water, the opponents of gay marriages had trouble finding their footing.   Here's what Paul Clement, the pro-DOMA lawyer, came up with:  "The link between procreation and marriage itself reflects a unique social difficulty with opposite-sex couples that is not present with same-sex couples--namely, the undeniable and distinct tendency of opposite-sex couple relationships to produce unplanned and unintended pregnancies."  If you can parse that sentence and figure out what possible point he was making, you're a better speaker of English than I am. 

Almost no one thinks that SCOTUS is going to issue a sweeping decision in the Prop 8 case, though how narrowly it rules and what effect that will have on the California law seems unclear.  At best, whether through a ruling about lack of standing or a more substantive decision, the Court would re-instate the lower court decision, thus allowing same-sex marriages to resume in our most populous state.  The common prediction on the DOMA case is that the Court will find DOMA unconstitutional and that the federal government will be empowered to grant the 1100 federal benefits that accrue to legally married couples.  Last year at this time, Mohamed and I were thinking about going to Iowa, my home state, to get married there.  You don't have to be a resident of Iowa or a U.S. citizen to marry under Iowa laws.  But since there would be no actual benefits and it seemed as if it would take more energy than I had for this symbolic gesture, especially as there is a three-day waiting period in Iowa, we decided not to do it.

Now, however, if DOMA is struck down, everything would change.  We could make the four-hour drive to Des Moines, check in at a hotel with a comfy bed where I could crash, get the license, wait for three days, perhaps with a one-hour drive to Story City, where I grew up, and then on the third day get married.  My income taxes would fall, since my federal marital status would have changed; if I had more money than I do, Mohamed would be exempt from inheritance taxes; and most important, he could get a green card and future visa problems would disappear.  We'll have to wait till the end of June to know whether that's going to be possible.  Three months and counting...

A couple of weeks ago, one of my oldest friends called from Oregon.  After talking about a new vacation home he was buying, he suddenly switched gears: "Since you live in one of those f-ing backwards red states that don't have physician-assisted dying, I hope you've been planning your suicide."  That got me thinking.

Some stories.  It seems to me that I've known more suicides than is statistically probable.  Mr. VanEshen, my eighth-grade homeroom teacher, committed suicide.  He and his friendly rival, Mr. Shroeder, were coaches as well as social studies teachers.  They were both big, powerful, and sometimes violent, and all of us were frightened of them.  Once in p.e. class, Mr. Schroeder pulled one of my classmates upright by his hair and slapped him hard twice--all because of a misunderstanding about double dribbling, which the student was discussing in terms of the two-dribble limitation for the six-girl, half-court basketball then played in Iowa, not the violation.  At rehearsal for our eighth-grade graduation, Mr. VanEshen threw a student into a metal folding chair so hard that the chair was bent out of shape.  (So much for nostalgia about 1950s small-town schools.)  It didn't seem as if either had trouble externalizing their anger.  As eighth graders, we stayed in one room, and the teachers rotated classrooms.  One day, Mr. Schroeder decided to play a practical joke on Mr. VanEshen, who came to the classroom next, by putting a thumb tack on his chair.  We all sat in class petrified, knowing we'd want to laugh but scared to death of the consequences if  we did.  As in a movie, Mr. VanEshen kept almost sitting down, but not quite doing so until finally he plopped himself into the chair.  His face turned red.  We were absolutely silent, not so much as a giggle.  Fortunately, Mr. Schroeder couldn't contain his pleasure and came rushing into the room.  Mr. VanEshen didn't seem like a probable suicide, but he later killed himself for reasons unknown to thirteeen-year olds.

In graduate school, one of my professors was supposedly a hotshot standout from Yale.  He taught contemporary poetry and didn't seem to understand a single poem during the semester.  At first, the class helped him out, but that didn't last long, and the class turned on him in what became the most unpleasant class I ever had.  Meanwhile, his marriage was falling apart.  He killed himself.  One of my brightest students in the first class I ever taught, the son of a rich and prominent Oklahoma family, called me after the semester was over.  He was in jail in Montana and wanted me to send him bail money.  While I was making the arrangements, he hanged himself.  One day early in my career at Washburn, I went to the library to check out a couple of books on T. S. Eliot.  Browsing through one of them as I walked back to the English building, I found a note that Bob G., a very bright student, had written to me about some point of interpretation of an Eliot poem.  He had never given it to me.  When I got back to the building, there was a phone call from Bob's girlfriend, telling us that he had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.  And in talking about gun control and background checks, I told the story in this blog about the colleague I found, positioned in her bathtub, who had shot herself in the head.  I could go on.  There are more.  And more recent ones, but they are too immediate and painful to recount here.

I have no religious (obviously) or moral qualms about suicide.  I don't think it's necessarily--or even often--cowardly.  I don't want any "heroic" end-of-life measures taken.  My instructions read DNR and "No Code."  I trust that at the end, the doctors will give me enough morphine to ease the pain and ease my way out of here.  I don't want to place the burden for decisions on Mohamed, so medical decisions will be made by my lawyer, whom I've known for a long time--well enough that I trust him, not well enough so that there's any emotional involvement.  Death is natural and inevitable.  And while I'm not a romantic follower of nature, which is, after all, "red in tooth and claw" and which is as responsible for my cancer as for the roses I should stop and smell, still, I've never understood the obsession with prolonging life by artificial means.

If Kansas were a state that had physician-assisted dying, I can imagine a point at which I might decide with doctors and with Mohamed to have a quiet, sober discussion of whether the time was right.  But it's not such a state.  One reason suicide isn't on my bucket list is the effect it would have on those I would leave behind, especially Mohamed.  I couldn't devastate him by doing it without his knowing ahead of time.  That would be selfish and cruel.  On the other hand, I couldn't discuss it with him first and ask him to leave the house for several hours because I'd be too afraid that he'd be implicated for aiding and abetting. 

And then, too, even contemplating committing suicide just isn't in my nature.  Maybe it's cowardice: I'd be too afraid I'd screw it up with all sorts of disastrous consequences.  Maybe it's curiosity: I'd be too afraid I'd miss an interesting visit.  Even if I thought about it, I'd put it off until I was no longer capable of carrying it out.  I realize this is easy to say now when I'm not really in any pain.  I know, and have recently been reminded, that the end may be difficult.  I'm afraid of how it may play out, and the fear seems quite reasonable and realistic.  But whatever my rational thoughts and fears, I know myself too well to think that suicide is an act that would even seriously cross my mind.  Nature, indifferent as it is, will just have to take its course.

I was panicked last night: I thought I'd finally run out of topics to blog about.  The every-three-days schedule, which I had originally thought would last a few months, was beginning to seem too frequent.  Yes, we had another big snowstorm yesterday, and it snowed throughout the night.  After two months of winter with almost no snow, February and March have sent us over our normal winter snowfall by several inches.  But how often can I talk about winter and find appropriate quotes from Frost and Dickinson? 

I think that talking about my health becomes quickly monotonous: nothing much changes.  Friends tell me that they like and want the updates, so here goes, though skipping this paragraph is encouraged.  On the plus side, I think my appetite has improved.  (And having friends bring a scrumptious berry pie certainly helps.)  I take something to enhance the appetite, and it seems to work for breakfast and lunch.  Most of the food may not taste the way it used to, but I still can eat.  Dinner is more problematic, but I can usually manage to eat something, if not as much as Mohamed would like.  The diarrhea and nausea continue with perhaps less of the former (I gulp Imodium) and more of the latter.  And certainly fatigue remains a major problem.  I usually sleep for an hour before lunch, take a two-hour nap after lunch, and then fall asleep on the couch sometime in the evening, though with the TV on and Kimber's nails clicking against the hardwood, that nap isn't very deep.  It's no wonder I don't get bored; I'm not awake long enough.  And everything seems to take longer to accomplish.  Just getting my tuches off the couch to take a shower or to carry a load of laundry to the washer requires several minutes of summoning my energy.  But all of that has been the "new normal" for so long that it's no longer new.  There won't really be any news until April 19th, when I have the full battery of tests again at KU Med.  For the first time in nine months (we used to do this every three months), in addition to the CT scans and other tests, I'll have full skeletal x-rays.  The secondary tumors have been stable (though the primary kidney tumor has been growing again for the last six months), but the question is whether, even though they haven't been growing, those tumors have been eating away at the bones.  It was, after all, because of the destruction of my left scapula and right femur that the doctors discovered the cancer in the first place.  So until the 19th, there really isn't going to be anything new (I hope) to report.


“Under the Constitution, the regulation and control of marital and family relationships are reserved to the states.”
— U.S. SUPREME COURT, SHERRER V. SHERRER (1948)

The big news of the upcoming week for LGBT Americans are the two cases that the Supreme Court will consider: the constitutionality of DOMA and the more complicated consequences of California's Proposition 8.  Just to review: the first case would potentially strike down the 1996 law, signed by Bill Clinton, that denies over a thousand federal benefits to couples who are legally married in the nine states and the District of Columbia that recognize same-sex  marriage.  For Mohamed and me personally, this would have immediate consequences.  When we were thinking of going to Iowa to get married, it was frustrating to try to explain to many friends that a marriage would have absolutely no legal benefits--not for income tax purposes, not for inheritance, and most importantly to us not for Mohamed's immigration status.  If we were a heterosexual married couple, Mohamed's path to citizenship or permanent residence would be easy.  As a same-sex married couple, there would be no change whatsoever in Mohamed's visa status.  It seems that the chances that the Court will strike down DOMA are fairly good.  For liberals, the vote is easy, whether it's based on liberty or equality arguments.  For conservatives, who in theory want to prioritize state law in matters where the Constitution is silent, the vote should be easy as well.  The Sherrer quote comes not from a liberal, but from the arch-conservative George Will in an op-ed piece urging the Court to strike down DOMA.  There are many, many amicus curiae briefs, from business, labor, even NFL players, among others, urging the Court to overturn DOMA.   Justice Kennedy seems to be the swing vote (though as the ACA decision showed, the Court isn't always predictable these days), and his past positions seem favorable to the "right" decision.  But there is also talk that since philosophically both liberals and conservatives should find something to object to in DOMA, perhaps the Court will, as in Brown v. Board, find common ground for a more decisive conclusion.  (I have little faith, however, the Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, who aren't known for consistency to principle, will really vote with the liberal wing.)  At any rate, there is a lot of optimism about this case, and there will be a lot of disappointment if the Court upholds DOMA.

The Prop 8 case is much more complicated with a number of possible outcomes.  The first possible decision is that the SCOTUS can rule broadly that laws prohibiting same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, thus invalidating the forty state laws and constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage.  With one stroke of the pen, marriage equality would become the law of the entire country.  I don't think many observers of the Court think that this is likely.  One vote that will be interesting is that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, while probably sympathetic, has had a tendency throughout her judicial career of defining issues as narrowly as possible and avoiding such broad decisions.  A second possible favorable outcome (there are others, but they are less likely) is a more narrow ruling, like that of the 9th District Court, that strikes down Proposition 8 in California, using the argument that a state cannot give constitutional rights (for a brief time, same sex marriage was legal in California and roughly 18,000 California same sex couples are legally married in that state) and then take them away.  Of course, there is no guarantee that the outcome will be favorable at all, and the Prop 8 case is definitely unpredictable.

Although the decisions won't actually be issued until June, the arguments before the Court usually provide a pretty good indication of how the Justices are thinking--usually, but not always, as the ACA case proved.  In any case, this is a momentous week for the LGBT community and the long journey along the "arc of justice."

A poem for spring.  Last week we had two beautiful, sunny days--followed immediately by 2" of fluffy snow that melted after a couple of hours and then a return to gray, chilly, wintry weather.  The forecast for today is rain, sleet, and snow.  Often we'll have a longer period of warm weather, enough for trees to bud and flowers to bloom before a hard freeze reminds the buds and blooms of nature's power.  That's Kansas weather--and evidently New England weather as well.   Here's Emily Dickinson's poem #1624.

          Apparently with no surprise
          To any happy Flower
          The Frost beheads it at its play--
          In accidental power--
          The blonde Assassin passes on--
          The Sun proceeds unmoved
          To measure off another Day
          For an approving God.

Dickinson, like the aptly named Frost, is a synecdochist, not a symbolist.  And here we have a morning scene in spring, beginning with a close-up and then, as if in a camera shot, pulling gradually out for broader and broader perspectives.  At the center is a single flower--not daffodils, nor roses, nor lilacs, but one lone generic flower, indeed any flower.  The flower is tritely personified: it's happy, though perhaps not entirely naive since it apparently (apparently to whom?  the flower itself?  the observer?) isn't surprised by how short-lived its happiness is. 

Enter the Frost, who is simply playing, the 'who' appropriate since it too is personified.  But what play!  By line three, the flower has been beheaded--an accurate image for what happens to the flower, but a grisly one as well.  The frost has the power all right, but then, unless the world operates by design, which a mere five lines later will seem a distinct possibility, the power is 'accidental.'  Accident or design--a familiar dilemma in Dickinson and Frost.  Then again, one may injure others accidentally or playfully, but behead?  Not such a common accident.  The frost doesn't linger; he has other play to enjoy, but the description of him--a blonde Assassin--may cause the reader a second thought.  Blonde is good, isn't it?  And assassins, aren't they hashish smoking and swarthy? 

And then we pull back: the sun has come out, and it "proceeds unmoved."  At first, that seems like an oxymoron, since 'proceeds' suggests movement.  Is the sun the "unmoved mover" in a cosmic sense?  But then the oxymoron dissolves (almost) as the reader reinterprets 'unmoved' to mean emotionally: the sun is going about its business of measuring time.  If it's personified as potentially having emotions, it's only to say that it has no interest in this springtime death.  We pull back once more for the definitive last line.  Here there is no ambiguity; from the highest perspective of all, God's, we see approval.  God looked at his work and saw that it was good.  The poem has moved from suggesting accident to focusing on design.  Either way, however, the happy flower has quickly been extinguished and forgotten by the dark natural order of things.

While I've got my English teacher hat back on, let me continue my advocacy of eliminating whom and whomever from our language.  It would be no loss.  Over the centuries, we've lost the nominative/objective distinction for all nouns and for almost all pronouns (excepting I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, and they/them).  Among almost all native speakers, except the most self-conscious, the who(ever)/whom(ever) distinction has disappeared as well.  The problem is that even the most educated often screw up (not to put too fine a point on it) and use the objective form indiscriminately, thinking it sounds more impressive.  In the last New York Review of Books, which doesn't seem to have a proofreader who knows the difference and almost invariably uses whomever when whoever is called for, there are two problems in just one article, Robert Brustein's "From Brecht to Broadway."  First, Brustein writes about George Gershwin that his "brassy syncopations were always unmistakable, whomever his collaborator."  Usually there's a certain logic to the mistaken choice; in this case, I have no idea why anyone would choose 'whomever.'  A few paragraphs later, Brustein writes that Lotte Lenye's husband "continued to accumulate mistresses, whom Mordden (like Fuegli) believes wrote a lot of his plays."  The sentence isn't clear in the first place, but that aside, 'whom' needs to be 'who.'  Here, we can see what Brustein was thinking: 'believes' needs a direct object; thus 'whom' is the appropriate choice.  But that ignores the rest of the sentence, which has the verb 'wrote.'  Verbs need subjects in English, and the subject is 'who.'  What's the direct object of 'believes'?  The noun clause, "who wrote a lot of his plays."

The same erroneous logic is at work in the NYRB's typical construction, "I will give the prize to whomever does the best."  The writer/editor/proofread sees 'to' and assumes that 'whomever' is the needed object of the preposition.  But again, there is a verb, 'does' in this example and the verb needs a subject, 'whoever.'  Isn't 'to' a preposition and don't prepositions need objects?  Yes and yes.  And the object of the preposition is the noun clause "whoever does the best."  For most Americans (and for all Americans in most circumstances) 'whom' and 'whomever' have gone the way of all other pronoun distinctions.  Let's just continue the inevitable trend and sweep these two words away for good as well.

If I were being even more pedantic this morning, I'd explain why Quentin Tarrantino's line from "Django Unchained" ("the d is silent") is nonsense, since whether it's written or not, the /d/ is there, the sound represented by 'j' not a single phoneme but a combination of /d/ and 'zh.'  But I don't want to push my luck.

I made an error in the last blog, and although I corrected it later in the day, by that time 79 people had read the entry with the mistake.  The essay that focuses on working with terminally ill children at M. D. Anderson was "You Owe Me" by Miah Arnold.  I confused it with Dudley Clendinen's description of living with Lou Gehrig's disease, "The Good Short Life."  Clendinen's article is unconvincingly upbeat in part because no symptoms have yet developed as he writes and also because he has, he assures us, planned his own suicide, which he appears confident he will have the means and physical abilities to carry out before the disease becomes severe.  There is also a touching narrative, "My Father/My Husband," by David J. Lawless about living with his wife of fifty years who has Alzheimer's and no longer knows who he is.  Although I said the Best American Essays of 2012 was varied, I realize now that at least five of the articles concern medicine and disease--memoirs and analysis.

The literary critic Susan Gubar is also blogging about living with terminal cancer.  Rather than your having to read me today, I'm going to provide a link to "For the Birds," one of her blogs about the responses to her cancer that she gets from others.  Believe me:  I've gotten them all as well.  And her blog seems particularly relevant since Saturday night I had a strange encounter with a friend and colleague who had lost his wife recently to cancer.  "How are you doing?" I said.  And the response was a surprising monologue about how he hoped I was strong because the end was going to be uglier and more painful than I could imagine, that he hoped Mohamed was prepared for how awful it was going to be for him, and on and on.  Although I realize he is still grieving, I was rather taken aback by the vehemence of his response. 

And so here's Gubar's clever and apt essay:  http://nyti.ms/YDpz8T

It's 7 a.m.  I've been up since 5:30 (call of nature), though I'm not sure what I've done for the last 90 minutes--read the news online, I guess, taken my morning pills, including the three chemo pills, waited an hour so that I could have something to eat, wakened Mohamed, who has given me my morning shot, fed Kimber and let her out twice.  Her morning routine is invariable: she goes outside, but I'm sure does nothing because she's waiting for her breakfast.  She eats while I swallow pills, and then she goes out briefly again.  Once it's daylight, she'll be happy staying outside for the next twelve hours, but it's too dark to see the squirrels and rabbits, so she's now snoring contentedly on her orthopedic bed.  Yesterday we had a break from winter with temps in the 70s, so that when my friend Raylene came over (with an asparagus frittata and oatmeal raisin cookies), we could sit out on the back deck.  Today it's supposed to be even warmer, perhaps record highs, before winter returns on Saturday.

I'm 78% of the way through the Best American Essays of 2012.  One of the small disadvantages of my first generation Kindle, which Mohamed gave me for Christmas over two years ago, is that a reader doesn't know how many pages a book has (or even what page s/he is on) but only the percentage of the book read.  (Mohamed: this is not a hint for a new Kindle.  I already have a tablet, and I love my Kindle and the soft leather cover that makes it feel as if I'm holding a book.)  I've found this collection of essays more interesting and more varied than the Best American Short Stories 2012, which I had just finished.  I've been a little disappointed that there are no essays on political subjects, and humor is in short supply.  Sandra Tsing Loh in "The Bitch is Back" tries to be funny, but she's too self-conscious in striving for an I'm-a-female-Woody-Allen tone.  Indeed, I think the two weakest articles are both about feminism: Loh's and the novelist Francine Prose's "Other Women," a reflection of her experiences with women's and "consciousness-raising" groups, which could have been written by any woman of her generation at any time during the last twenty years.  She tries for a hook--in narrating her experience, she tells people that her first husband slept with every woman in the group, when in fact, he had slept with only two--but she can't find any place to go with the trope, and even she seems to tire of it.

The tone of the essays ranges from very angry to analytical to sad.  The most forceful essay is probably that by the medical muckraker, Marcia Angell, "The Crazy State of Psychiatry," which analyzes the unholy connection between Big Pharma and psychiatry and the enormous profits which the move to prescribe everyone psychotropic drugs have enabled.  She points out, for one thing, the high percentage of Americans who are now diagnosed as suffering from depression or anxiety and the enormous increase in drugs that this ever increasing proportion of the population takes, posing the question that if these drugs are so effective, shouldn't we be seeing a decrease in the number of people who are still depressed or anxious?  And now, of course, that so many are taking Zoloft or Paxil or Prozac, Big Pharma has created a whole new class of drugs (Cymbalta, for example) to supplement the earlier generation.  Big Pharma spends more on advertising than on R&D, and we're inundated with ads for Cymbalta and its ilk with soothing pictures and music while the voiceover mentions such side effects as "potentially fatal events" (which I believe means You Can Die if you take this drug). 

There are two essays about cancer.  The first, Miah Arnold's "You Owe Me" describes her decade-long work teaching writing to terminally ill children with cancer at M. D. Anderson.  Arnold's tone is never maudlin, and her portraits of the children are vivid and lively.  She strikes a fine balance between the despair of the situation and the value of the children's writing and lives.   I'll have to admit, however, that I cried non-stop from about paragraph two to the end of the essay. 

The other essay about cancer, Ken Murray's "How Doctors Die," describes the reasons--sometimes innocent or unavoidable, sometimes not--that doctors, hospitals, patients, and family often end up opting for "heroic" measures to keep someone alive, when, if reason prevailed, almost no one would really want these expensive, often painful, and finally futile measures taken.  Doctors, Murray suggests, are themselves usually much more realistic about death and rarely die in such a prolonged fashion.  Murray's esssay produced a moment of panic.  When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I redid my will.  Mohamed wasn't in my life when I had done the last version.  But, although I knew I had all the papers about end-of-life decisions, I hadn't even looked at them again.  What if I hadn't been clear when I filled out all the forms--22 years ago, as it turned out?  So I rummaged through all the papers (the lawyer has everything organized in a professional looking binder with tabs for each section) and discovered to my relief that everything is in order.  Even in 1991, I knew what I wanted and what I didn't.

Since my last blog about the French, I've received numerous e-mails seconding my opinion and recounting stories of French friendliness.  So let me say one unkind word: of the four years I've taught abroad (in Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Morocco, in addition to France), the French faculty were by  the far the least friendly or helpful.  In every other country, I made many friends among my colleagues and however unorganized or resource poor the university was my colleagues were invariably friendly and helpful.  Even in the poorest of countries or situations, I was always invited many times to colleagues' homes.  Not so in France.  No one greeted  me, and certainly no one helped me get settled in Metz.  I made no close friends among the faculty.  It wasn't that my colleagues were unfriendly; it's just that they showed no interest in my presence.  Only once was I invited to a colleague's house: at the end of the year, the chair was going to teach in Texas for a year, and he had numerous questions about the mechanics of getting settled.  I remember that car insurance was a particular concern.  (The VCR began recording while we were eating dinner.  He was taping "Santa Barbara," which was a huge soap opera hit in France that year.)  That was my only dinner invitation.

I'm not sure what accounted for the distance.  I would think that my Parisian friends were right when they warned me that people in the East of France weren't warm like Parisians, but I made so many close friends in Metz and returned for the holidays to be with my "family" there for the next twenty years so that stereotype doesn't ring true.  Perhaps because I did make so many friends outside the university so quickly, I was the one who didn't make the effort.  The faculty seemed a particularly querulous group: they complained constantly about their work load, though none of them came to campus for any reason but to teach and none of them was doing research.  When I gave my students my office hours, none of them knew what office hours were or that it was even possible to meet with their professors.  Maybe there were physical reasons as well.   There was no central English office for colleagues to meet, and there was no cafeteria or canteen on campus.  There were only vending machines for coffee, so there was no place for faculty to congregate.  The students were nice, and several of them became friends.  But Metz was the only place I taught abroad where I felt invisible to the faculty.  And that's my unkind word.

This weekend I watched Victor Sjøstrom's marvelous 1926 version of "The Scarlet Letter," which I had recorded a couple of months ago from TCM.  One of the favorite courses I sometimes taught was a special topics course called The American Novel into Film.  The cliché had always been that the best American movies had been made from grade-B novels.  The idea was that major novelists had such a complete vision or found such a perfect union between form and content that the novels would be severely diminished by a transition to film.  I wanted to see whether some classic American novels could do more than survive but rather become first-rate films on their own.  I settled on six choices.  After "Scarlet Letter," we read Henry James's ghost story "The Turn of the Screw," which was made into "The Innocents" with a script by Truman Capote and a brilliant performance by Deborah Kerr as the governess.  The movie manages to maintain the delicate ambiguity of the novella.  That was followed by John Huston's mutilated version of Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage."  Crane's novel is short, but it feels much longer, as characters remain nameless for long stretches, as we, like the soldiers, never have a  firm sense of where we are or what the battle means, and as territory is gained and lost with no apparent movement--just as Henry Fleming's character vacillates without any clear growth or direction.  The studio added patriotic flourishes to Huston's final version and cut the film mercilessly, but Huston's genius still shines through.

Perhaps the greatest of the films was Erich von Stroheim's much more severely mutilated version of Frank Norris's novel "McTeague."  The last time I taught the course, as a senior seminar, none of the students had even seen a black-and-white film, let alone a long silent one.  They were engrossed from the opening scenes to the final struggle in the desert.  We watched the only decent version of a Faulkner novel, Clarence Brown's "Intruder in the Dust," and concluded with Stanley Kubrick's witty "Lolita" with its great performances by James Mason, Peter Sellers, and Shelley Winters.

Finding a copy of "The Scarlet Letter," the first of the six films I usually showed, became a major problem.  When I started teaching the course, I showed it on 16mm.  But then for years, it wasn't available on VHS or DVD.  No matter how much I tried to assure companies that no, I didn't want the Demi Moore version, the Library of Congress was very slow to preserve the film.  But it's now available again, and it's a brilliant version with Lillian Gish giving a sublime performance as Hester Prynne.  Sjøstrom makes some interesting choices: the first 35 minutes of the film take place before the novel opens and trace the romance between Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale.  We see the prologue to the adultery.  And Roger Chillingworth makes his entrance much later, so his parasitic relationship with Dimmesdale is undeveloped.  But the dark heart of the novel is preserved.  Hawthorne's story of guilt and shame and redemption takes on an equal depth of understanding of Puritan morality.  It's an amazing film that deserves attention when TCM next shows it.

The meteorologists had promised that yesterday would be warm, a lovely taste of spring for our trip to the KC Cancer Center.  Instead, it was hazy, then overcast--gray and chilly all day.  But the drive to KC was easy, and we met our good friend Scott at Room 39, a fairly upscale restaurant near the Med Center.  KU Med is bounded on the north by 39th Street, which has become a restaurant row as soon as you cross State Line Rd. (the east boundary of the center) into Missouri.  It's great to have so many choices close at hand.  We were lucky to be seated immediately, and my G-I tract cooperated (I'd taken three Imodiums and an anti-nausea pill) for a lovely lunch of calamari, followed by seared scallops (two of them, a definite sign that this isn't your average Kansan's restauant) on a bed of lentils.  The Cancer Center itself is about a mile away; we got there early after lunch and got right in for the blood work.  A short wait later, we had the consultation with Jennifer, the physician assistant, and then Dr. Van, the oncologist.  The results showed almost everything within normal range, so that was good news.  In the tests six weeks earlier, however, the resident had overlooked the fact that the Vitamin D level was quite low, so now I'll start taking a once-a-week massive dosage of Vitamin D until we can establish a maintenance level.  Since the cancer long ago metastasized into the bones, it's important to do whatever is necessary to keep them strong.  The next tests will be in six weeks, and it will be the full battery, including CT scans as usual, but also full skeletal x-rays, something that used to be done every three months, but that haven't been done for nine months.  We were done by 3.  As I knew would happen, I fell asleep on the ride home, then crashed as soon as I saw our bed.

Dr. Van and his wife are leaving next week for Paris, and I had sent him a list of my favorite Paris restaurants--authentically French, free from tourists, reasonably priced.  As I was updating my notes on each of the restaurants, I started thinking of an article that my French friend and colleague, Marie-Luce, had sent me about a journalist who had gone to Paris ten years ago, convinced that the French would be snotty and cold, and who after ten years of living there had concluded that the French were indeed snotty and cold (though he found enough other compensations to stay).  Marie-Luce wondered whether perhaps he was correct.  I wrote back saying that I didn't agree with his observations and that I'd met almost nothing but warm and friendly people in France, but then I began to ponder whether my francophilia was skewing my perceptions.  One of the things I realized as I commented on my restaurants was how often I described the owners: Chez Nenesse is run by a charming couple, The owner of A la biche aux bois is constantly pouring extra armangac while his elegant wife manages twenty tables, Laurent at Florimond is the consummate professional, but still has time to joke with his clients, while once the last seating is served, the chef and I have had remarkable conversations about what it's like to run a restaurant in Paris, etc.  I deleted all those remarks as irrelevant, but it struck me how personal and friendly the experiences have often been.  At Topeka's best restaurant, The Rowhouse, the owner is amiable and greets the customers, but I've never had a conversation with him.  I must have eaten at Chez Yasu in Topeka dozens of times, but no one has ever showed the slightest inclination to be friendly.

I have another habit in restaurants that sometimes drives my French friends crazy--or rather always drives some of my French friends crazy: Paris restaurants tend to be very small, and the tables are quite close to each other.  It's almost impossible not to overhear what your neighbors are talking about (and for them to overhear you).  I'm forever (and  this is very non-French) striking up conversations with my neighbors, and no one has ever not joined in.  Indeed, I made two of my very favorite French friends, Michel and Michèle, in just this way.  A Washburn professor who was visiting me was droning on and on for the umpteenth time about his dissertation thirty years before.  I wasn't interested in the first time, let alone the eighth, and M & M, though not sure exactly what was going on, were bemused by my discomfort.  So we started talking, they came back to my apartment for digestifs, and a great friendship was begun.  (In a more humorous episode, I was with some French friends in a restaurant, and an American couple at the next table were having trouble ordering.  I offered to help, which they found a great relief.  Once they had finished, the woman said to me, "You speak very good English."  I was so startled, I said, "Huh?"  She replied, "You......speak.....very.....good....English."  "I should," I said.  "I'm an English professor.")

I shouldn't exaggerate: I can think of a few times in my 35 years of going to Paris when people have been rude.  But then every year Paris welcomes ten times more tourists than there are Parisians.  Few of them speak French, and everyone, no matter what their own first language or their proficiency in English, assumes that French shopkeepers and restaurateurs speak English.  It would be as if Topeka suddenly had a million and a quarter tourists each year, almost none of whom spoke English.  I'm not sure that Topekans would be consistently warm and welcoming.  And it's not hard to think of times when employees here have been positively rude to me.  Ace Hardware is close to my house and easier to use than the three big box home improvement stores, but I avoid it whenever I can.  I've never encountered a friendly employee there.  If one is in a particularly good mood, he's just unhelpful.  The default mode, however, seems to be downright rudeness.  Best Buy is another store where I just assume I'm going to encounter rude employees.  As a struggling retailer, maybe Best Buy ought to consider some employee training.  Obviously, most store personnel are friendly and helpful, but it's unrealistic to think that no one is going to be having a bad day and be impatient or curt.

So like the journalist Marie-Luce cited, I've been reconsidering my opinion about the French.  And like him, too, I've found that I haven't changed my mind.  It's just that my conclusions and his are complete opposites. 

After finishing the Best Short Stories of 2012, I thought I'd continue the sampling theme with the Best Essays of 2012, perhaps a collection that will not only be interesting and enjoyable in itself but help me out as I begin my 139th mini-essay on the blog.  The general editor, Robert Atwan, teaches creative non-fiction writing and begins his introduction with the observation that his students now seem to think that essays are purely autobiographical:  "When they start writing, they seem to have only one template in mind: a straightforward personal narrative heavily interspersed with 'realistic' dialogue and told in a sincere, casual voice intended to be wholly congruous with their own."  What Atwan wants from his students (and from the essays in this collection) is something different--textured and original description and ideas--reflection, contemplation.  In the long tradition of essays, the central feature used to be the trying out of ideas.  Essays used to be on topics.  "The innner dynamics of the genre," Atwan writes, "often depended on the essayist's persona leisurely and often unsystematically grappling with or dancing around a topic." 

In the introduction to the 2007 volume in this series, David Foster Wallace attacked what he called "abreactive or confessional memoirs"--not only as "a symptom of something especially sick and narcissistic/voyeuristic about U.S. culture," but because he doesn't trust them, or at least their agenda, "which is to make the memoirists seem as endlessly fascinating and important to the reader as they are to themselves.  I find most of them sad in a way I don't think their authors intended."

I'd sometimes been feeling guilty because these posts had so quickly wandered away from a memoir of living with cancer to an "unsystematic grappling" with topics that came to mind on any given day.  Now, with the imprimatur of Atwan and Wallace, I feel better.  I haven't actually started reading the essays in the collection, so I'll see whether the professional authors live up to the editor's promise.

On the political/judicial front, while the Supreme Court is preparing to tackle the two important marriage equality cases later this month, it was discouraging to see that the arguments on voiding the renewal of the Voting Rights Act seem to indicate that the Court will strike down the law passed 98-0 by the Senate.  Scalia clearly relished his role as provocateur in his remarks about "racial entitlements." 

In Kansas, Governor Brownback is trying to re-invent Supply Side economics by doing away with the Kansas income tax, assuring Kansans that increased jobs and sales will make up for lost revenue.  The first "big cut" was supposed to have taken effect, but when I got my tax returns back from the accountant this week, I discovered that I not only owed federal taxes (though less than I had feared), but actually paid more in Kansas taxes than the year before, increasing my suspicion that Brownback's tax cuts are going to the wealthy rather than the middle class.  Meanwhile, the attack on education continues.  Kansas has mercifully few charter schools, but the legislature is trying to change that, encouraging private charter schools that can deny admission to special needs students, that are exempt from state curriculum and graduation standards, and that prohibit collective bargaining by teachers. 

Friday I go back to the KU Cancer Center for the every-six-week tests, this time only for bloodwork and a consultation.  The schedule--after Mohamed's one Friday class with the bloodwork at 2, means that we can meet some KC friends for lunch.  That should be an upper.  I think we're both suffering a bit from cabin fever, so with warmer temps in the forecast, the beginning of daylight saving time this weekend, and a nice lunch with friends, the end of winter seems much closer.

There's a new biography, And Bid Him Sing by Charles Molesworth, of the brilliant Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen.  (Cullen pronounced his first name as if there were an accent aigu over the first 'e,' but now it's usually pronounced as it's spelled.)  Cullen died young at 43, and his poetic career effectively came to an end ten years earlier, but during his brief moment in the sun, he produced a small, powerful body of work.  Like so many minority writers, Cullen was accused by more militant writers as not being black enough.  It would happen later to writers like Ralph Ellison and Robert Hayden, who said they were writers period and didn't want to be pigeonholed and limited.  Or, in a different context, Saul Bellow objected to being described as a "Jewish writer" and lumped with Roth and Malamud as the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of Jewish literature.  Over thirty years ago, in a movie review, I described Leni Riefenstahl as "the greatest woman director" of all time, a comment that received a lot of blowback.  What's a minority writer to do?  It's convenient to put writers in categories; we don't teach John Milton in a class on American literature, and no one objects that we're limiting Milton.  But for a minority writers, it's been a constant dilemma.

Cullen certainly wrote about black subjects.  His poem "Heritage" is a bitterly ironic comment on being torn between heritage and present.  It's one of the strongest expressions of that tension that I know, and the reader's awareness of the poem's real tone develops gradually until with a start, one understands that the opening line ("What is Africa to me?") has finally a very different import than one thinks at the beginning.  "We wear the mask" is the famous line from Paul Laurence Dunbar, but Cullen didn't actually wear the mask--at least not about race.  On the other hand, and much less commented on, is that, despite being married twice, Cullen was gay.  And here the gender negotiation was much trickier.  Cullen was a "member" of Carl Van Vechten's gay, Afrophilic circle in New York, and in that context he was quite open; he also had a long-term relationship with a man.  And yet the minute he stepped outside that circle, gay themes and the tension in his life play no part in his poetry.  Even the queerest of critics will have a hard time finding a gay subtext in Cullen's work.

The title of Molesworth's biography is taken from Cullen's most famous poet, "Yet Do I Marvel":

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why

The little buried mole continues blind,

Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,

Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus

Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare

If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus

To struggle up a never-ending stair.

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune

To catechism by a mind too strewn

With petty cares to slightly understand

What awful brain compels His awful hand.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

 

Like many of Cullen's poems, this is a sonnet, and chief objection to the "failure" of his blackness is that he so often used traditional "white" forms.  The most quoted linesfrom the poem are the final couplet.  But the first line is masterful.  What could be more affirmative than Cullen's declaration of God's goodness?  Seven of the words are one syllable, and five of them end in /d/ or /t/.  But of course, the minute one says, "I doubt not," the element of doubt has been introduced.  (Everytime Melville begins a sentence with 'Doubtless,' the reader had better be on his guard.)  And in the middle of this seemingly positive affirmation comes the adjective 'well-meaning,' which always implies a 'but.'  Cullen works his way into the doubts slowly: our questions are mere quibbles that should God stoop condescendingly to answer, He surely could.  Our first quibble is just that: none of is much concerned about why a 'buried' mole is blind; the second quibble, however--why our flesh must someday die--abruptly changes the import.

 

Perhaps it's safer to question the Greeks gods, but the oxymoronic choice of "brute caprice" is hardly reassuring.  God's ways are, as believers are often told, 'inscrutable,' especially to minds strewn with petty care.  Yet though 'awful' originally meant awe-full, when Cullen uses the word to describe both God's brain and his hand, no reader thinks that the poet is using the words in their historical and complimentary fashion.  We know what 'awful' means.  The final couplet ends with one personal question that may be 'curious,' but that also causes a much stronger response, the poet who marvels.

 

Cullen's career may have been short, he may have been criticized for his formal conservatism, and he may have eliminated the sexual dimension from his poetry altogether, but for the few years that he wrote, he managed to sing--and to do so beautifully.