In pursuit of a distant memory (trunks, part 2)

As a post scriptum to the post on trunks (below) let me say that I did proceed to dump the contents of my steamer on the basement floor. At the very bottom (really) I found this (dated March 30, 1978):

Dear Ms Lewandowske [okay, so he wasn’t the best at spelling Polish names],
Your very thoughtful letter to the New Yorker (with reference to the Notes and Comment on the wayward Soviet satellite) has just reached my desk, as I am the man who wrote the piece. Thank you for your kindness. It means a great deal to a writer to receive a letter such as yours. Sincerely yours, Philip Hamburger

So let me rephrase my concluding remark: do get a trunk, keep the contents organized, don’t confuse nuclear arms with nuclear reactor satellites, and let writers know that their work moved you.

If I have trouble sleeping, I’ll reprint the story later tonight. It’s short and quite touching.

The unbearable lightness of bears

A reader chastised me for not linking to the CNN story on green polar bears in the Singapore zoo (sorry – the story ran for 4 hours then was scratched, can’t imagine why…). Her comment is well taken for the following reasons: 1. I have a good friend who lives in Singapore and I NEVER have any occasion to say anything wise or intelligent about that small country, 2. the story is like no other these days: it presents an insignificant problem (green algae growing on the fur of polar bears), it is informative (it explains that polar bears typically have fur without pigment, hence the illusion of whiteness), and it has an easy, happy resolution (the bears are bathed in some Clorox-like liquid which does away with the algae). Oh and 4. it has (had) quite decent photos of a green polar bear.

How often can you read something these days that says so little about so little and still leaves you feeling perfectly content?

A long post promoting the acquisition of a trunk (part 1)

I had a few minutes before class today and I used the time to leaf through the New Yorker (see post below) that came in the mail. I remembered how this was the first magazine I ever subscribed to on my own, back when I was just around 20. Gradually I had stopped reading it – no time, no desire really. I kept up with the cartoons for a while and then, when the family expanded, I cancelled (for a good 15 years). The unread stacks were getting to me.

Today, I remembered one particular article that I did read, back in 1978. It was in the Notes & Comments section, and it talked about the sudden acceleration of the nuclear arms race (I can’t remember the triggering event). The writer had said how he had always imagined that some day, when he’d be long dead and gone, his red-haired children would be running around, and his grandchildren, and other children, all taking his place. This was a great comfort to him, though it was then threatened by the political ferocity of the administration’s so called defense measures. The comment affected me so much that I wrote him a letter explaining that I felt the same way.

All these years I remember fondly that he, this (presumably junior) writer from the New Yorker, wrote back. Tonight I went downstairs to the basement to poke around. I have a trunk there and it has in it a number, a great number of letters from both sides of the ocean, all written during the 1970s.

Of course I found the letter from the New Yorker. I knew it would be there. It said:

Dear Ms. Lewandowska: Thank you for letting us know about how much you liked our February 13th Notes and Comments piece. We’ll see that your reaction is passed along to the writer. Very truly yours, Fred Keefe (Editorial Office).

No, that’s not how I remember it! I heard from the author! Didn’t I? He was so wonderful and responsive. Wasn’t he?

In the trunk I also found a letter from my grandmother in Poland – agrammatical (she never finished elementary school), with good wishes for some new undertaking that I was embarking on (can’t imagine what). I know I probably impulsively (see post below) changed my mind and did something entirely different, but her letter was remarkable and uplifting and full of blind devotion and support.

And, buried underneath a stack of other treasures, there was an unmailed letter that I myself had written to the faculty member at Chicago who was to supervise my dissertation. It included the following sentences: “I received your letter today and I have to say that I am extremely angry at you…What you want is a dissertation of the type that’s never been written…People like you cause me to reconsider the veracity of all those intellectual ideals you claim to uphold. I'm convinced that you see only one road to creating sociology – your road… Aren’t you scared that in ten years you’ll be surrounded by clones of yourself? “ and so on. In the end, I never did send this. Good thing, because the prof is still around and in an indirect way I have contact with him.

Letters. No one these days has trunks, they have email folders. Too bad. And there is no such thing as good mail anymore: the box outside is filled daily with bills, ads and catalogues.

I am certain of this advice: print out the good emails (forget about the rest), stick them in envelopes and put them away in a trunk. Everyone needs a trunk to open at some point.

To choose or not to choose

A sign of acute face-recognition paralysis (where you look at a face and you fail to recognize the person) is when you read an article about an author, wonder if he is the same man who taught you 30 years ago in graduate school, google him to his current university, stare at the clear and large photo and still cannot tell.
Barry Schwartz, once prof at U of C is, I believe, NOT the Barry Schwartz discussed in today’s New Yorker article on making choices. It doesn’t help that he shares the name, age, and field (social psychology) of my former prof, but I believe I am confident in concluding that this is not the man I vaguely recall from my first year soc class (he left Chicago soon after).

It was a fairly interesting article in any event, as it talked of the phenomenon that Schwartz (not MY Schwartz, but Schwartz nonetheless) describes in his newest text – that of mischoosing. From the perspective of an economist (eg Hirschman, who I think is NOT the same guy who taught me economic sociology back at Chicago – no, that was HIRSCH, that’s right. Or was it Herschfeld? No, that was the Nina guy. Okay, sorry) this may be identified in a theory of disappointment, which is described thus:

The world…is one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don’t want it nearly as much as they thought or don’t want it at all and that something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really want.

Basically, we are horridly indecisive, we waffle, then regret, and rarely are we satisfied with that which we took forever to choose (an example of a car is given). We study intently ads of things we’ve already purchased in the hope of convincing ourselves that we made the right decision and still we are convinced that we failed in our selection.

Yes, that’s right. This just makes people like me – accused of being terribly and regrettably impulsive – look so good! Great article. Yes, definitely, quite accurate. Yep, no doubt, go with that one.

Blogging on flogging

In today’s late afternoon seminar, I treat one of my favorite topics in comparative family law: domestic violence (parent to child and spouse to spouse). This kind of a statement must raise eyebrows, all the more so since I have also spent many years working with law students to provide representation to parents (here in Madison) who abuse their children. What kind of a person likes to talk about violence and enjoys working with abusive parents?

“Enjoys” is perhaps not the best term, though if applied to the process of teaching, then yes, I do enjoy it in this particular field. Rarely are you given the opportunity in teaching law to create so easily a comprehensive diagram where international legal instruments, grass roots efforts, legal activism in the courts, political transformations, etc etc all have their cell, exploding, imploding, exerting influence, being shaped in turn, all in fascinating and not always predictable ways by the others. And, it is all the more captivating (for discussion purposes), because whereas most in class will overtly align themselves on the side that condemns domestic abuse of the spouse to spouse kind, there are always hold-outs (sometimes it’ll be the majority of the class) who believe in slapping the kid who misbehaves. Herein lies an opportunity to bring in the role of historical legal developments that can help explain our confused posture on the topic of physical punishment.

The American legal system has such an idiosyncratic approach to violence, far different than that in Great Britain, which in turn is completely at odds with the Swedish approach. A look at the new Russian Family Code, and its comparison to Swedish or American Family Codes or the South African or Namibian Criminal Codes (the latter two prohibit the physical punishment of juveniles, but only in criminal proceedings) brings a relevance to comparative analyses that makes, one hopes, converts of us all.

For those who are nuts about France and Italy

A reader and a friend (and an accomplished travel writer) is looking for editorial and writing assistance with an adventure guide on Rome and central Italy. It can be a very short term thing, and the writer would get some good free food and accommodations, in exchange for putting together reviews. Interested? Visit her website here for more info. I’d do it myself if I had the time.

But the ‘travel’ book that really grabbed my attention this morning was the one exposing the Michelin rating system of (primarily French) restaurants. It is a spiteful little gem, written by a former reviewer who had been part of the Michelin network for 16 years. A NYT article provides a good summary of the raging battle between the company and the reviewer-turned-writer (Michelin Guides are put together behind a solid wall of self-imposed secrecy; the company was desperate to put a halt to the book’s publication, but the author prevailed).

A confession is, I think, in order: I had always wanted to be a Michelin restaurant critic. People have responded to this with comments such as “yeah, restaurant critic – wouldn’t you just love being on the payroll for the NYT and eating out in the city daily?” The answer is no, I would not. I would love to be the anonymous reviewer who bikes around rural France (that’s my imagery) and tries out hidden, little known brasseries and restaurants, where locals still hang their own personal napkins on a peg in the hallway. There are several impediments to this career choice, and I am working on improving my resume before I send it in (a recent history of restaurant moonlighting and a stack of unpublished travel articles that are just waiting to be edited and sent off to airline magazines should help), but I am concerned that the expose of Michelin will dampen my enthusiasm for this long-term project.

On the other hand, I do think that it is a little bit disingenuous for the critic to collect good money for more than a dozen years from the Guide, and then mock the process itself for being somewhat corrupt. The French are groaning now that they will become the laughingstock for having created this powerful instrument – the Red Guide – only to let it be destroyed from the inside. It’s sad to think that this could be the case. How we do love to laugh at the French for their profound food obsession (yep, from field to table… this is an inside joke as many know that I have used this label to describe my meager organizational efforts on behalf of sustainable agriculture), never mind that we offer as an alternative a total life-long commitment to sitting in front of the TV and working our way each day through several bags of chips and packs of M&Ms –certainly a good substitute for growing and serving the perfect melon or ripening the perfect cheese. Dilettante and dabbler that I am, I have nothing but awe and respect for those who spend years or even generations perfecting their craft. Would it be that I were one of them!