Monday, December 17, 2007 | by nathan

The Enemy of the Electronic Media

This sign is posted on the door of one of my favorite professors from college, Dr. Lewis. I took his intro Philosophy class because everyone kept telling me, "Don’t take Dr. Lewis. He’s too hard. You’ll fail." So I took it, and I got an A-minus. More importantly, I loved the crap out of everything we studied and discussed in the class. I sat on the front row, because no one sits on the front row, as you might occasionally get asked things - gasp! - and have to answer.

It turned out that most of the people who didn’t like Dr. Lewis didn’t like him because they resented that they had to take Philosophy 111. They resented that they paid obscene amounts of money to attend college and then weren’t permitted to skate through classes they didn’t care about.

Also, his exams were a bitch: six hours of writing, divided into 3 sections: short essay, long essay, and dialogue. He’d give you three or four philosophers and you’d have to write a dialogue between them. It was hard as hell to think about, but if you studied and understood, it was insanely fun once you got started. After earning my A-minus in his intro course I decided I’d minor in philosophy, and I took two more courses with Dr. Lewis: Philosophy of Religion and Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche (commonly abbreviated HKN). They both kicked my ass; every class session was to my brain what a hard-core workout with a personal trainer would’ve been to my body. I got A-minuses in both classes, and for my entire life I will always be proud of that.

There was a cadre of good friends of mine who loved Dr. Lewis’ classes, took all of them, and, in the case of my friend Matt, stayed an extra year at Wake to get a philosophy major. When we had to take courses with other professors we were almost always disappointed. After lectures we’d spend an hour in his office, talking over minor points of the lecture or reading. I was raised by college professors, and Dr. Lewis reminds me a lot of them. When I came out, Dr. Lewis called me into his office and told me he was behind me 100%, because as he’d thought and read about it, he’d decided that the church should adopt gay-friendly theology. I’d have cried, except you don’t cry in The Office.

Two weeks ago today Brian and I were walking around Wake’s campus, and I was knocking on doors, seeing professors and people to whom I hadn’t spoken in quite awhile. I wanted to introduce people to Brian, and show him the faces I’d been talking about for so long.

But when we got to Dr. Lewis’ door, I said, "Can I do this one alone?" I wasn’t sure why, except I just wanted to talk to him alone for a minute.

When I entered, there was a student in there. Dr. Lewis greeted me warmly and asked me to wait a moment while they finished talking; I gladly did so. The student was explaining his idea for his Philosophy of Religion paper, the topic of which, I quickly realized, was remarkably similar to the one I’d done my senior year on the theodicy of John Hick.

Yes, I’m linking to a Wikipedia article about John Hick in a post about Dr. Lewis. His students will know why I feel a bit dirty doing that. I highly recommend that you go get an actual book and read the actual words with an actual page. Be careful; you may get something called a "paper cut."

The student left and I took his seat, and Dr. Lewis and I started talking. I quickly caught him up on my life - that I’d dropped out of Yale (the school he’d encouraged me to attend and for which he’d written my recommendation letter), moved home, and decided to become this writer. I explained that I’m working on a novel about the end of the world, only it’s not the end of the world, see, and there’s all this subtle political and spiritual commentary, and as I explained it I started to feel like a giant hack, so I asked him how he’s been doing.

We talked about the state of college students today. Dr. Lewis said it was discouraging to feel that the students were learning more from the electronic media than from their classes, that between digital cable (now standard in every Wake dorm room) and the internet, the students were seeing college as less about learning and more about being handed the world, digitally. Wake students are no longer required to take Basic Problems of Philosophy, a policy change I’m going to vehemently disagree with here, on this website. (Yes, I see the irony).

"They are learning everything they think they need to know from the electronic media," he said, "and I’m the enemy of the electronic media."

I grinned wide and thought, briefly, about shutting down this website. I’m not going to, but I understood what he was talking about; people are being taught from an early age that the internet and technology can take the place of human interaction, that reading a website is as good as reading a book, that if students don’t want to have to take a class, they just shouldn’t, because they’re paying.

Dr. Lewis taught me better than that. He taught me to challenge what my culture is handing me. That television really is, for most people, the same as the shadow puppets in Plato’s cave, and that Eminem is jello and Mozart is creme brulee.

Also, how to think. The man, more than anyone else, ever, taught me how to think.

After half an hour of talking, I had to leave, and he said it was very good to see me again, and we shook hands, and I left. I felt good, and unsettled, like the mud at the bottom of the river had been stirred up and was not going to settle back down for a bit. Which is always how I felt in his classes.

Thanks, Dr. Lewis. I know you’ll never read this - or the e-mail I sent you in January 2000 saying I was sick as a dog and wasn’t going to make it to class that day (this was before I understood that you have never checked e-mail) - but thanks. The Owl of Minerva is taking flight.

Also, you’ll notice that this week’s reading is Frederick Copleston’s History of Philosophy, Vol. 1; all of Father Copleston’s volumes were much-beloved, much-required, wouldn’t-have-graduated-college-without-them texts from Lewis’ classes. Definitely recommended, and affordable.

Monday, November 26, 2007 | by nathan

How My Dad Went to College

My dad and my grandmother, Clara Mae, in the late 1970’s.

My dad was born and raised in Hackett, Arkansas, a small burg twenty miles south of Ft. Smith, in 1935. His family were hard-working farmers. He graduated high school in 1953 and late that summer was hanging out in town with his best friend. Bereft of anything better to do, they decided they’d sneak in the back of the high school gymnasium and hear the principal’s yearly address to the student body. They had, after all, heard it every year for over a decade. "Why don’t we see if it’s changed at all?" they asked themselves.

It hadn’t, of course, and the two found themselves almost able to recite the thing verbatim. As the speech wound down, the principal pointed at the two of them in the back of the gymnasium and said, "I want to see you two in my office right now."

Thinking themselves caught and in trouble, they proceeded to the principal’s office, where they expected a lecture on finding better things to do with their time than intrude on the assemblies of a school they no longer attended.

Instead, the principal looked at them and said, "If I could get the two of you into college, all expenses paid except your own personal spending money, would you go?"

They looked at one another and thought, "Ah, what the hell?" So they said yes.

"Okay," said the principal. "Go home and pack. You need to be back here by 5 p.m."

Dad and his friend raced to their own homes. Dad started to tell his mother, Clara, about the proposition. She handed him a cardboard suitcase packed with all his best clothes and all the money she had. She already knew of the plan; the principal had been to see her.

The principal, it turned out, had a contact at the College of the Ozarks, and was able to wrangle a spot in the freshman class for the two of them. Clara waved goodbye to her son and dad and his friend were back in town by 5 p.m., as per their principal’s orders.

So that was how my dad got to go to college. He didn’t wake up that morning expecting anything of the sort.

He went on to study chemistry, and to earn a master’s degree in nuclear physics at Vanderbilt and his Ph.D. at Arkansas. He taught at a small college in southwestern Oklahoma for 30 years, which is where he met my mother, which is how I came to be.

He was one of the greatest lecturers ever there was. His voice could be heard echoing down the halls, and he engaged people with the subject matter in a way that few people could. He advised pre-pharmacy freshmen, of which there were many, and I was often told by his students how much they enjoyed his class.

There’s currently a scholarship in his name for freshman chemistry students at that university. One of my long-term financial goals is to permanently endow that fund, so that the legacy of his teaching can remain there for as long as that institution stands.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007 | by nathan

Can We Talk About My Hair For A Second?

I’ve alluded to this before, but in October 2002, when I was living with my ex-boyfriend in a shoe box apartment in New Haven, CT., I accidentally broke out a plate glass window at a Wendy’s and had my scalp sliced down to the bone by huge chunks of glass. I got a 14-inch scar, a zillion stitches, and lost the feeling in large patches of the top of my head.

When this happened I was going through an "I don’t want to deal with my hair" phase. Preceding this was the "hippie" phase of my college years, wherein I grew my hair out ridiculously long, traveled Europe, and then on a whim, buzzed it off, and kept it buzzed. So when I had big, ugly, black stitches sticking out of my head, looking like weeds or antennae, it showed. People asked.

I was working at a bank at the time, and on my first day back after the accident - with stitches, a black eye, bloodied and sliced-up hands and eyes that were constantly watery from all the crying I’d been doing - a woman approached my teller station. In a voice that couldn’t have sounded more irritated, she asked, "Oh my God, what happened to you?" Like I’d smeared myself in jelly and was wearing tattered rags. Like my grotesque appearance was some kind of statement.

"I fell in love," I remarked sarcastically, then took her deposit slip from her hand.

"These fucking kids," the woman growled, looking to my boss for agreement.

I slammed the deposit slip down on the desk as hard as I could, and the word "Bitch!" almost escaped my mouth, but I managed to choke back my temper and finish the transaction as quickly as possible, wanting the whole time to tell her to take her fur coat and her money and meet me at the plate glass window at the front of the store, because I was going to show her exactly what had happened to me.

My stitches came out and I was left with a large, visible scar on the top of my head. It seemed to take forever for my hair to grow back out after that, like the accident had scared it, and it was going to stay close to the ground from now on. The subject of my accident came up in a few job interviews after I returned to Oklahoma, and I never heard back from the interviewers.

Finally, though, my hair did grow back out, and it’s been in varying states of longness ever since. I keep bangs, and generally kind of do the whole "look at me, I have rimmed glasses and my hair’s in my eyes" look. I look like someone who listens to Interpol way too much. See? April 2006 is a good example:

Something happened last week. It was an exceedingly rough week, peppered liberally with family dramas, emergency surgeries (everyone’s fine), and a whole lot of tears, one set of which happened because CARRIE UNDERWOOD CAME ON THE RADIO. See? Okay. It was a hard week.

I’ve been thinking about buzzing my hair again for awhile now, kind of telling myself I’d do it, and then not doing it, and having this whole inner dialogue. Thursday night after Brian and I got home from the gym I just did it. I whipped out the clippers and buzzed my hair off. Brian sat, watching, stunned, thinking perhaps that some piece of my fragile psyche had finally chipped away and fallen into the ocean, like a piece of an iceberg. It was, after all, a fairly intense experience for me, exposing this scar to the world again.

But I finished, and it felt nothing like I’d expected. I wasn’t okay with the scar, or that it showed. Five years after this horrible thing happened, it still terrifies me to think what could have happened to me that night. Some of that pain still lingers; I suppose it always will. It hurts that this event made me quit grad school and move home, that it was the worst in a series of awful events that drove me into a two-year depression.

But also, it’s over now. I looked at my hair, and my scar, and felt just kind of okay for a minute or two. And then, I came to work and everyone seemed to like how I looked. Only one person asked about the scar, and I didn’t have a problem telling the story. My head feels lighter, and I can’t stop running my hand over my little fuzzy scalp. So I guess, five years later, I’m okay. I wish I could tell 2002 Nathan just how wonderful his life will become, half a decade later. In a way, I suppose I did.

Anyway, enough talk; what do you think?

and here’s the scar in question. It actually goes a significant distance up the top of my head as well, but maybe it looks a little badass, too. No? Oh, well.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 | by nathan

Classic Literature

This via The Palinode:

Over at Amazon, you can apparently buy the entire Penguin Classics library for $7,989.50, which, it turns out, is a savings of exactly $5,326.34 (40%).

Imagine that for a moment, if you will: this is a collection of exactly 1,082 books that - let’s be generous and say you actually WILL read one of them a week for 1,082 weeks - would take you damn near 21 years to read. Fine, okay, you say, you’re not doing anything for the next 21 years, literarily speaking, but seriously? Where are you going to keep an extra 1,082 books? In my pittance of an office/library there are far more books than shelf space, and I still make bi-weekly trips to Borders and Full Circle, where I totally buy books I won’t read until next year. I still haven’t finished my "Grand Master Reading List" from HIGH SCHOOL.

But hey, if you’ve got $7989.50 to spare (shipping is free) and you’re pretty sure that you won’t want to read anything from the 1960’s on for the next 20 years, I absolutely say go for it. To be honest, I can’t think of a better smell with which to infuse one’s house than that of a whole bunch of brand-new paperbacks, especially if they’re classics.

Reminds me of a story:

After my parents split up my brother and I started spending summers with dad. Dad lived in a house rented to him by his best friend G.E. for virtually nothing, a truly cozy little place where sometimes, in the summer, the air conditioning went out but which felt like home from the moment he moved in. I really liked it there, and dad liked having us. We’d get paid for doing the chores: we traded off weeks doing the dishes and making the beds, and every Saturday one of us would mow the lawn, for which we got paid an extra $10. At the end of the summer dad doubled whatever we had saved from our summer earnings.

The first day of summer dad posted lists of books he thought we should read. It was our duty, all summer, to always be reading something; there were no time limits or anything, and if we didn’t read a book from the list that was fine, as long as we were reading. This is how, by age 15, I had come to read a whole bunch of the classics, a few of them several times over, but one in particular became a sticking point for me and dad: Treasure Island.  

For whatever reason, I just didn’t want to read it. Sure, it was about pirates, whatever, but dad was pushing it really hard and I didn’t want to read it. So, at first, I lied and said I had read it, but of course I got caught and punished. So after that it became a battle of wills. Dad started acting like Sam I Am from Green Eggs and Ham, pushing that stupid book on me at every turn. But my mind was made up: I would not eat it in the rain, I would not eat it on a plane, not in a boat, not with a goat. I never, ever read Treasure Island.

Now my dad is older, and proud of me, and not a day goes by when I don’t worry about him a little, living in Arkansas on his own. He and I are so much alike that at times I am alarmed and humbled by it. Alarmed, because I remember that when I was a child I didn’t get him at all, or where he was coming from, and humbled, because now I feel like I do get it; I get it so well that I often think that no, I must have it wrong, there’s no way I’m there yet, except every time we talk it’s perfect simpatico.

I think I might head to a book store at lunch and buy a copy of Treasure Island. I’ll push back whatever else is on my reading list and, after nearly two decades, finally let dad win this tiny little battle of attrition.

Oh, and by the way? This is what that entire Penguin Classics Collection looks like on someone’s shelf:

Saturday, September 29, 2007 | by nathan

Of Bees and Poet Laureates

Springtime in Winston-Salem is really glorious; I fell in love with the Piedmont Triad in April. The smell of tobacco is thick in the spring; you wade through it as you walk. The magnolias would bloom on campus and the flowering trees around the Quad would shake in every gentle breeze, showering you with petals. Also, there were gigantic bees, killer bees the size of dinner rolls, with stingers like machetes, and they were mean-spirited; they’d chase you.

One of the reasons my life has gone the direction it has is that, when I was 12 years old, my cousin Robert gave me a book of poetry; "Here," he said, presenting it to me like I was an adult just like him, "I think you’ll like this woman." It was Maya Angelou. My decision to attend college where I did was influenced in no small part by the fact that she was a professor at Wake Forest. In the spring of my junior year I was lucky enough to get to take her class, titled World Poetry in Dramatic Performance.

It was kind of everything you’d think; she’s intimidating, but she puts you at ease quickly. She has a way of being in a room - in the world - that makes you want to be polite, and well-spoken, to think before you speak, and think well. The class was only 3 and a half weeks long, but in a lot of ways it changed my outlook. It made me see the importance of good manners and of laughing at oneself. I’ll always be deeply grateful for the experience.

One day, my friend Brianna and I were walking to Dr. Angelou’s class, and as we approached the Fine Arts Center where the class was held, Dr. Angelou’s car pulled up. Her personal assistant, who we’d met and come to like, got out and opened the door for the professor, and the two of them began schlepping these big bags toward the building. Brianna and I walked up and said, "Professor, may we help you carry your things?" Trying to be all nice, you know.

Dr. Angelou and her assistant handed us the bags with a thanks, and the four of us began walking toward the building. As we approached the door, a large bee flew directly into the professor’s face, and she swatted it away a few times before it finally left her alone. We all kind of stood there, frozen, for a moment, and then Maya Angelou said, in that unforgettable voice, very softly:

"That bee came to me and said, ‘I want to become one with you.’" 

Tuesday, September 18, 2007 | by nathan

The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round

When I was in the seventh grade we lived in a sort of ghetto-ass neighborhood off of south Shields Boulevard in Moore. My bus ride home was full of thugs and fourteen year old girls who smoked and had tattoos they’d given themselves with pens and clothespins during algebra class.

One girl in particular stands out in my mind for her decision, one afternoon, to leap from the emergency door on the back of the bus.

Her name was Linda. She looked exactly like a young Susan Sarandon, with the smirking mouth and bug eyes. Our bus driver was a red-headed Pentecostal minister named Lewis. Linda’s territory was the last seat on the bus, the hidden one, next to the emergency door. You sat there, you got pounded, as I saw more than once. Lewis was a fire and brimstone preacher, you could tell; his theology was clearly informed, at least in part, by his fiery temper.

It was bound to happen.

One day Linda was wearing a hippie-hoodie, one of those striped Mexican jobbies like you see Woody Harrelson in all the time. The song on the radio was "Free Your Mind" by En Vogue; it was 1993.

She was dancing around in the very back to the song, flicking her cigarette, which I’m sure she thought she’d carefully concealed, out the window. Lewis yelled at her to sit down. Again, and again.

Eventually Linda wrapped the hood of that sweatshirt around the top of her head real tight, so that the top was sticking up in a perfect point. She looked ridiculous. She began bobbing her head back and forth, calling out in a loud, high-pitched voice:

"Lewis!"

"Lewis!"

She’d bob her head back and forth each time; between that and the hood sticking up in a point on the top of her head, she looked like some kind of maniacal sock puppet. The buggy Sarandon eyes only added to the effect.

Lewis’s face grew red; I was in the middle of the bus. As a short, unathletic nerd, I’d long before learned better than to sit anywhere but the middle, and that I should always keep my head down, down, down, and avoid eye contact even with people who were my friends at school.

"I’m writing you up, Linda!" Lewis screamed. He spit when he yelled; by now the bus had grown silent, and everyone was suppressing laughter.

"You can’t write when you’re driving, Lewwwwwwwisssss!" she sang.

And then, bam. Lewis stopped the bus cold on a residential street in a ghetto-ass Moore, Oklahoma neighborhood. He slammed on the brakes, turned off the bus, and stood, facing Linda, fire burning in his eyes, little foamy triangles of spit at the corners of his mouth.

"Get up here, Linda!" he shouted. He knew her by her first name because of how many times he’d already written her up for smoking.

"No, Lewwwwwwwisssss!" she sang back. He took a couple steps toward her, and, like a flash, her hand was on the emergency door handle.

"If you open that you’re going to be expelled!" Lewis’s face was as red as an apple now.

"You can’t expel me!" she hissed at him. Then, like a flash, she threw the door open and leapt out the back door, running up the street. God knows if we were even anywhere near her house.

"Everybody just stay right where you are!" Lewis shouted, digging around in her now-vacated seat for - evidence? A scent?

Lewis returned after a moment to stand in front of all of us, then began barking out a lecture about how things were going to change on "his" bus. No more disrespect on "my" bus, he said, no sir, you’re all going to sit quietly from the moment you get on until the moment you get off. You’re all going to have assigned seats on the bus. I run a tight, tight ship, he said, and I’m through with all this foolishness.

Then, he sat down in the driver’s seat and STARED STRAIGHT AHEAD for probably five minutes. Looking back on it now, the kind of neighborhood it was, the kind of kids we were, all ghetto and dirty and adolescent, I like to think that perhaps Lewis was stroking a Glock, wondering how many of us - if any - would be able to take him down once the shooting started.

But, having worked with junior high kids - and been fired after only a single day on the job - I realize that he was probably catching his breath. Finally, tired of waiting for him to collect himself, my only friend, Will, and I followed Linda’s lead and began moving toward the still-open emergency door. At this point everyone on the bus was either afraid or angry, and there was a line toward that open door like the bus was on fire.

Which, in a sense, it was.

I never saw Linda on the bus - or at school - again. But I got back on the bus the next day. Lewis’s eyes didn’t meet mine as I boarded, or as I got off that afternoon. He only drove the bus a couple more months, and then - weird coincidence - the guy who replaced him had been my bus driver in Weatherford, before we’d moved to the city. But I never forgot Lewis’s red, spitty face, or that hoodie, and every time I drive through the intersection of NW 27th and Shields in Moore, I find myself compelled to start screaming, "Lewis! Lewis!" So, I make it a practice to avoid that intersection altogether.