Three Beautiful Things 05/04/09: Computer, Lovely Starbuck's Barista, Ahhh! Napster Again

1. I threw caution to the wind today and bought a new notebook computer. It's cheap and basic. I think it will satisfy my basic needs and, if nothing else, it's got me blogging again!

2. I went to Barnes and Noble to pick up a book about the Vista operating system and in the back of my mind wondered if a very sweet student of mine from winter quarter might be the Starbuck's barista. She was. I really enjoyed learning about her ballet and voice class at LCC and what she's thinking about as far as education after LCC. I'd been wanting to talk with her a bit about us both being Christian. It's not always easy to do at school. We talked a bit about Christian universities. I hope money, grace, and good luck fall into place so she can study at a Christian university when she's done at LCC. (That was my path. Two year school to a Christian college, North Idaho College to Whitworth. It was perfect for me.)

3. I'm plugged into Napster again and what a pleasure to listen to the Allman Brothers rock out the "Statesboro Blues" as I finish this sentence.

Sibling Assignment #73: Shakespeare and the Mystery of the Meaning of Life

It's time to really get back in the swing of things on this blog. I'm dreadfully behind in writing sibling assignments, so one of the first things I'll do is caught up.

InlandEmpireGirl raised this question for Sibling Assignment #73:

As the school year here is the assignment. Write about a school experience that was significant to your school life. Describe the experience and why it was significant.

InlandEmpireGirl remembers being a public poet in the sixth grade here and Silver Valley Girl explores arriving at a deeper understanding of the relevance of essay writing, here.


When I enrolled at Whitworth College in 1974, I don't know what I thought I would discover through my study of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare course was required for my English major. Eileen, whom I would marry in two years, loved Shakespeare and we decided to take the course together.

In my two years at North Idaho College, almost all of my study of literature was concentrated in the twentieth century. I fell in love with the modern study of stories and poems that explored the lonely, alienated condition of the human being in an empty and meaningless world and the great weight of responsibility the modern human being carried to make meaning out of h/her existence in a world devoid of essential meaning.

I had experienced this meaninglessness in the summer of 1973 when I was nearly killed at the Bunker Hill Zinc Plant. The accident resulted from a random human error. It was purposeless, unprovoked, and unrelated to whether I was a good person or to anything I did.

I was blinded. During the days I was blind, my eyes turned inward and within myself I saw the very nothingness that modern writers explored as the one universal truth about life. I confronted the benign indifference of the universe within myself.

I came to believe that forging meaning in such an empty world was up to me. Through my study of literature at North Idaho College, I obsessively worked to figure out the meaning of my life and life itself.

When I commenced my study of Shakespeare, I thought I would find in Shakespeare's plays a well-ordered world, free of the absurdity of the modern world. I thought I would find these plays outdated, irrelevant to the struggles of my existential crisis.

The first day of the course, our professor, Dean Ebner, introduced Shakespeare by telling us that we would be entering into an exploration of the meaning of life. I gasped. Why would studying Shakespeare's plays and his characters involve exploring life's meaning? I thought that "back then" it was figured out and that it was thanks to the obliterating impact of the two world wars in the twentieth century that the meaning of life had been erased. I thought the question of life's meaning was a modern question.

Early in the course, the plays did not shake me up. I didn't feel the tremors of anxiety and doubt about the meaning of life I had felt studying modern literature.

But then we studied Othello. Iago began to shake me. I couldn't believe that an "old writer" from the turn of the 16th into the 17th century could have imagined and created such an amoral and duplicitous character so energetically committed to evil. I couldn't believe Iago's glee.

I was reading Othello in the basement of South Warren Hall and began to tremble. The character Othello was in an existential predicament. The world of loyalty and trust that Othello had assumed to be intact started to unravel. Absurdity, chaos, unpredictablity, all engineered by Iago became the dominant reality of his world. He couldn't make sense of it. Fear and rage fuelled by his outrage at the deterioration of his world view began to destroy him from within himself. Othello lurched from extreme distraction to murderous calm, unable to forge meaning out of his disillusion.

I was getting it. There is no such thing "back then". It hit me. Human beings have always wrestled with how to make sense out life, out of the excruciating demands of mutablility, out of the pain and disillusion of things in life never being what we might idealize them to be.

As we moved forward to Hamlet and especially King Lear, I spent more and more time leaving my dorm room and walking through the November fog that encased the towering pine trees on Whitworth's campus, feeling the passion of Shakespeare's tragedies, exploring how my life at this very young age paralleled the uncertainty, painful self-exploration, loss of idealism, and riddling mysteries Shakespeare brought to life in the actions and interior monologues of these characters.

To this day, thirty-four years later, Shakespeare is the philosopher and artist I look to with the most trust to help me understand what a dicey, often unfair, and inherently contradictory experience human life is.

Shakespeare's plays and poetry helped light my understanding of all other writers and all other philosophers I've studied.

It was through my study of Shakespeare that I have come to understand the complexity of the stories of the Bible and the parables and poetic words of Jesus.

No other writer has so profoundly shaped my perceptions, insight, wisdom, or understanding of love, war, politics, despair, redemption, restoration, human nature, and the condition of human life itself.

Whitworth College Dreams

I'm not much of a dream interpreter and welcome anyone who reads this to offer their insights

I graduated from Whitworth College and then taught there twice, first as an adjunct instructor of composition and then as a full-time instructor on two consecutive one-year contracts.

I loved teaching at Whitworth and until I failed to complete my PhD, I often wished I could return as a professor.

I often have dreams at night about returning to Whitworth. It's a recurrent dream. In it, I'm asked to return again as a one-year full-time instructor and teach a variety of courses. I never dream about students. I dream about my colleagues. In my dream, the professors I taught with back in 1982-84 are still there and I am giddy to be back with them and be a part of the English Department again.

I live near Whitworth in this dream and see myself walking on to campus, often in snow, and enjoying the tall pine trees and aromatic environment. It's beautiful.

But my colleagues are always gone. I arrive at my office in Westminster Hall and Leonard Oakland is gone. So is Laura Bloxham. They still teach there, but I never see them. In the dream, I teach my classes, hold my office hours, but it is as if I am the only member of the department.

It saddens me.

Last night, when I had this dream, it ended with me visiting Gloria Johnson, my dissertation advisor. She lives in a building with several stories. I go up to her residence and greet her and her husband Gerald.

Gloria and I go downstairs and the first floor of this building is a wonderful bookstore, stocked with volumes of books focused on Renaissance studies. It's the area I focused on in graduate school.

Gloria and I sit in a comfortable couple of chairs and she asks me how my work went at Whitworth. I tell her that I had a terrific time teaching, but it was unusual.

I tell her I never saw any of the other professors. I worked a whole school year, I tell her, and never did I see my colleagues. She shakes her head.

Then I wake up. Last night was about the fourth or fifth time I've had this dream.

The dream has a pleasant tone. Whitworth is idyllic. I'm happy with my work in the classroom. But I'm alone. I never see these professors I loved so much.

They are always gone.

Church and Church Key in Kellogg

While growing up in Kellogg, I had this idea that our town was divided between the churches and the taverns. I know it wasn't this simple, but I saw it all around me. I got the idea from this idea that church life was a teetotaling life and people who drank alcohol didn't go to church.

My family make-up reinforced this idea. My mother went to church sometimes, but was adamant about my sisters and me going to Sunday School and junior choir. My mom didn't drink.

My dad, on the other hand, rarely went to church and drank alcohol daily, except when he decided from time to time to go on the wagon. He called the opener he used to crack open bottles or pierce a can of beer a church key. Mom was of the church and he was of the church key.

I know that from outside Kellogg, it looked like our town was all about hard work and drinking, gambling, fights, and, until the new freeway construction razed the houses, prostitution (though there prostitutes who worked out of the McConnell Hotel), Kellogg also supported strong Lutheran, Baptist, Roman Catholic, United, Mormon, Assembly of God, Nazerine, and other non-denominational congregations.

I knew Kellogg's Catholics drank alcohol. Many of the Italians in town were Roman Catholic and many of them bellied up to the bar with my dad at Dick and Floyd's and I knew that some of the Italians made their own wine and I'd gone to the annual Italian picnic with my dad and the alcohol flowed freely.

I knew of Lutherans who drank. So I knew that there was crossover, but the prevailing idea in my head was that alcohol and serious church attendance didn't mix. Therefore, it didn't surprise me when one of my dad's friends, whose wife and kids were devoted to the United Church across the street from our house, came to the church to pick up the family, he didn't go in the church, but sat in his car, waiting, drinking a six-pack of beer in the church parking lot.

All through high school, I drank very little beer. Once I started college, this changed. I also sang in the choir at North Idaho College with Rick Frost, a wonderful choir director, and a very public Christian and a teetotaler. Being Christian, Rick attracted many Christians to the choir and I became friends with some of these choir members and I felt torn by the faith these friends professed and my drinking.

In other words, I internalized the conflict I perceived between church and drinking. Once I started drinking, I took on my father's attitude toward church: drinking made me unworthy of the church. I felt guilty when I saw church members and if I went to church I felt like a hypocrite. On the other hand, if I decided to go to church, I felt embarrassed with my friends who were drinkers and who didn't go to church.

This division continued after I graduated from North Idaho College. I transferred to Whitworth College. It's a Christian college. I think I felt like I could shelter myself in North Spokane away from alcohol and be a teetotaler in a Christian atmosphere. It didn't take me long, of course, to discover that many students at Whitworth drank alcohol. At first I was disillusioned. But as time went along, I began to think of myself as being sort of a hip Whitworthian because I began to believe I had integrated the worlds of the church and church key.

I drank alcohol at Whitworth and I worshipped. Upon graduation, in 1976, I got a job as a Chaplain's Assitant at Whitworth. I celebrated winning the job by having a nice dinner and wine with friends and then came back to my dorm and drank a couple of coffee mugs of Chevis Regal with Dave in my dorm and was so hungover the next day I could barely wiggle.

It wasn't the last time my chaplain's work and alcohol crossed paths.

This divide I perceived in Kellogg and felt within myself played itself out most clearly when my younger sister, Carol, got married in July, 1986. I had quit drinking the year before. I had come to the conclusion that I had a terrible drinking problem, and had been maintaining sobriety with the help of a couple of 12-step groups for about eighteen months by the time of the wedding.

Carol and her groom, Paul, were deeply committed to a non-denominational Christian church, the Christian Life Center. Paul's family had been pillars in this church for many years and it had taken hold in Kellogg very strongly.

When the wedding ended and the wedding reception started in Mom and Dad's back yard, across the street from the United Church, where the wedding took place, I was in charge of the bar. I could be trusted with pouring drinks and serving beer because I was sober.

As I started pouring some ditches and gin and tonics and screwdrivers and handing out some beers, I noted that our backyard had become a divided place. Members of the Christian Life Center occupied the west half of the back yard and the boisterous drinkers who were all family friends occupied the east half. As had been the case in my years growing up in Kellogg, the teetotalers and the drinkers were keeping their distance and didn't really know how to get on with each other.

I took a "what will be will be" attitude toward this division since there was not hostility, only awkwardness. But, after an hour or so, the groom, Paul and his brothers and his sister took out their guitars and a banjo and stood in the middle of the yard and began to play and sing.

Their wonderful playing and singing attracted immediate attention. My dad's friends inched toward the music. So did the church members. Pretty soon Dad's friends, a little lit up, but not sloppy, began to compliment the musicians to the church members, employing all their concentration not to say, "Son of bitch, these kids are goddamned good" and instead saying things, a bit artifically, like "These kids are great musicians. You must be very proud of them."
Joyful laughter accompanied these words of praise.

The music broke the division. The music seemed to cast a spell on those celebrating my sister's marriage to Paul that erased the self-consciousness of the polite church-goers unsure of how to mix with the more rough and tumble drinkers and of the drinkers acting sure that they were being held in judgment by the Christians.

Like most such magic moments, this one ended when the party dispersed. My dad's friends did not become members of the Christian Life Center and members of the church did not all grab a bottle of Oly and start telling stories spiced with profanity.

My period of sobriety lasted until fall, 1996. For mental and physical health reasons, I'm in another period of abstinence which I think will last a long time.

My struggle now is less with church and the church key as it is with refinement and vulgarity. Whether I'm drinking or not, I've been blessed by growing up in Kellogg with a profane mouth, a love of dirty jokes, vulgar phrases, giving and taking shit from people, and the kind of unrestrained humor that I learned in the Zinc Plant, from my high school friends, and at home. But, I work in higher education.

The classroom is not the right place for this love I have of profanity, irreverent comments, and picking on people. (Fortunately, I have several fellow teacher friends who don't mind too much if I lengthen the leash and some students with whom I can be myself away from the classroom.) But, in the public square, the prevailing tone and attitude is to be refined, not profane, and so I watch my tongue. Too many people take too much pride in how easily they can be offended.

I fight this all the time. How much, in the academic context, can I be my full self? How much should I hold back? How much can I let my personality rip? How about at home? In a way, my job has become what church used to be and watching my tongue as become the equivalent of not drinking.

I suppose it's why when I get excited about something around my family or enjoy a poem with my students or want to compliment a piece of student writing, I don't say, "It's like a wooden dick: you can't beat it."

I wait until I get back to Kellogg to speak such words that reflect my personality that honestly.

Won't Get Fooled Again

I'm starting to think I have the perfect marriage. Each evening, I come home, take out my laptop, set up camp on our kitchen counter, and start blogging. My wife goes in the living room and puts another CSI Miami DVD in the player and absorbs another series of cases built around this ethic: "I'm Horatio Caine, and this much I know. At CSI Miami we never close." I know they never close. Or at least they never get fooled. Every forty minutes or so, while I peck away and remember stories, I hear the Who blasting out their revolutionary anthem, "Won't Get Fooled Again," and I know another CSI Miami is underway and I hear words like "semen" "laceration" and "swab the wooden handle of the pick-ax for trace" waft into the kitchen.

My wife quit drinking. So did I. I had to, once and for all, because of medications I take for psychological and physical ailments. Alcohol and these medications mix in subversive ways that rob me of my dignity and erode my wisdom if I drink. Wine became poison for my wife. It started to make her sick. So, instead of drinking wine in the evening, she knits and watches CSI Miami. I write. And read others' writing.

I haven't watched even a minute of CSI anything. But, having CSI Miami come to a conclusion and restart through the evening brings me a sublime pleasure, thanks to the Who. When I was a junior at Whitworth College, I took my first Shakespeare course. My love for poetry and fiction and drama had been awakened the school year before at North Idaho College, but I didn't know Shakespeare' s plays or anything about their impact.

I had no idea that Shakespeare dramatized the most essential conflicts of the human soul. I had no idea that his plays would bring me into stories of moral complexity, mystery, and human mayhem beyond my capability to imagine any one exploring human life this deeply and fully. I began to dream in iambic pentameter. I would listen to speakers at Whitworth and I'd hear the stressed and unstressed syllables in the cadence of their speech.

I read the King Lear heath scene for the first time while riding a Greyhound bus home for Thanksgiving and felt, underneath the tiny beam of the overhead reading light, suffused with the banana odor Greyhound used to fruit up the chemical toilet smell, that I had been transported out of the secure world I thought I knew into an unhinged world, stripping me to examine what I thought my life's foundation was, even as the proud King Lear strips himself of the last remnants of his kingly garments, and faces the pelting rain of the fierce tempest, freezing his naked body, but kindling the fires of his compassion, the fellow feeling that had been all but dead in him as a King.

I'd been through my own heath scene just fifteen months earlier. I fell to the bottom of a flash roaster in the Zinc Plant. I was gassed by sulfur dioxide and heavy metal dust. I lay down to die. I imagined the story of my death on the front page (how audacious) of the Kellogg Evening News. Lying down to die saved my life. I got under the poison. This accident turned my world upside down. I'm still trying to figure it out. But joining King Lear in that storm on that Greyhound bus took me more deeply into what that accident had meant and how stripped I had been of assumptions I'd had of life being a secure and predictable undertaking.

My brush with death was making Shakespeare rock for me, but near death wasn't going to help me much with Dr. Dean Ebner's final exam in the course. I had to get Shakespeare's work inside me in a different way for a grade. Somehow, I discovered that if I put headphones on, punched the recent Who 8-track *Who's Next* into my roomate's eight track, that that drive of Pete Townshend's knifing power chords, the orgasmic wail of Roger Daltry, and the manic edge of chaos drumming of Keith Moon meshed with the Elizabethan momentum of Shakespeare.

I loved the intensity of it. I built a stack of my Signet paperback Shakespeare editions, punched in Who's Nest, opened my notes, and got lost in the throb of rock 'n blank verse. I nearly cried at my desk as I reread Othello's suicide speech, Macbeth's last despondent soliloquy, Prospero's homage to grace and forgiveness, and King Lear's unbearable howling as he carries his dead daughter Cordelia after she's been hanged. And, somehow, the one pile driver song that drove Shakespeare into my deep guts the strongest was "Won't Get Fooled Again."

I'm going to try to figure this out. I'm clicking on my Napster icon and I'm going to let "Won't Get Fooled Again" hammer its way back into my life through my new Best Buy DJ Headphones and see if I have anything to say: What was the magic of "Won't Get Fooled Again" and Shakespeare and why does hearing it pound into the kitchen from the living room, always excite in me those days in my South Warren dorm room studying Shakespeare and feeling the course of my life taking a hard turn in a direction I never could have imagined?

Click. Click. Here goes: Oh yes. The epic. "Won't Get Fooled Again" is epic in its sweep. It begins with that watery tide of syntesizer rising to Townshend throttling power chords...it's those power chords....I could feel the power of Shakespeare's meter in those power chords. In the same way that Pete Townshend crashes and sustains the impulse for change and revolution into this song with his insistent, defiant power rhythms, the unrelenting meter of Shakespeare's poetry was pounding his sense of urgency, his sense of a revolution in language and theater into my inner most self, and the two were married, even as they still are as I listen to "Won't Get Fooled Again" thirty-two years later. The drive, the discord, the wailing, the dark danger, the sense of temporary triumph, the irony of not getting fooled again: of course we will, but the urgency of fighting complacency, of living on the edge of a new world drives the Who in a way I found so completely congruent with how Shakespeare was revolutionizing my perceptions of the world and my experience with language, that I began to feel that with Shakespeare's help, I would never get fooled again.

Ha! If only.