Category: Harvard

Categories
Harvard Writing

Poetry man

the emperor of ice cream once lived down the street.
e.e. used to live right down the street. sadly, his family could not afford capital letters.

This is Harvard: Today I stood in line to get tickets to a poetry reading.

The guy in front of me had driven an hour from the suburbs. By the time the box office opened the line was 50 deep.  A woman was first in line; she left the counter with four tickets and a giant smile.

For me poetry is like soccer — 99 percent of the time it’s boring and incomprehensible, but that 1 percent is so breathtaking and beautiful that I understand why people give it so much of their hearts. So Tuesday morning I stood in line for tickets to Seamus Heaney.

He grew up in a three-room farmhouse in Northern Ireland, the oldest of nine brothers and sisters. “It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence,” he said, “in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other.”

I don’t know how many of my favorite writers grew up in a blue-collar life or on farms, and how many grew up in cities or the ‘burbs, but I’m guessing I lean toward the people with a close relationship to dirt. So many poems I read (or try to read) are like a subway map — you have to stare and stare at the thing to figure out where you’re supposed to go.

It’s not just poetry, of course — there are so many novels and short stories and magazine pieces that are set up like the Olympic decathalon. You want to get to the point? OK, first jump these hurdles, then throw this javelin, then run around this track a few miles. You have to earn it. If the writing is entertaining enough along the way (R.I.P., David Foster Wallace), maybe I stick around. But most of the time I’m hopping off for the next train.

It’s OK to say what you mean. It’s OK to just tell a good story. If you’re a poet, it’s even OK to rhyme. Let me have some Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson or Billy Collins, who is clear and supple and wrote the funniest dog poem ever.

Give me long furrowed rows that go straight to the heart of the thing.

Speaking of which, here’s Seamus Heaney’s “Follower”:

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full-sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back,
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

That’s a poem worth standing in line for.

Categories
Harvard Movies Music

Unplugged

Somehow, we turned down this deal.
Free couch on the street! Somehow, we turned down this deal.

Last night we saw our third Hitchcock movie in two days. The Brattle Theatre in downtown Cambridge is doing a retrospective on Hitchcock’s 1950s films; on Sunday we saw a double feature of “Rear Window” (my all-time favorite movie*) and “Vertigo”; last night it was “Strangers on a Train.”

*My top 5 favorite movies:

“Rear Window.”

“The Princess Bride.”

“The Searchers.”

“Richard Pryor Live in Concert.”

“The Sure Thing.”

Of course these aren’t the five GREATEST movies of all time — no “Godfather” in here. These are just the movies I’d happily watch over and over all day long not just because they’re great, but because they match up with some other special moment. No. 6 on the list would probably be “Airplane II,” which is not nearly as good as the first “Airplane!”, but I went with my friends Perry and Virgil and we were the only people in the theater laughing, but we were laughing so hard we just about rolled around on the dangerously sticky theater floor. That’s what makes a favorite movie — the memory of what your life was like when you saw it.

And by the way, I am totally stealing my good friend Joe Posnanski’s Pozterisk idea here. When he patents it I’ll be glad to pay up.

Back home we might not see a movie once a month, much less three in two days. But time is chunkier here. We’re not racing to make deadline or lingering at the office to catch up on e-mails. There’s plenty to do — and will be plenty more once classes start in full next week — but there’s also some air in the day. You can read a book. Or go hang out in Harvard Square and compare the street musicians. Or just take a long walk at night and think about who else has walked these old brick sidewalks.

There’s also air in the day because of what we’re not doing. We’re reading the Boston Globe every day but not like we read the Observer — we don’t need to know how the mayor up here is doing, we won’t be covering the first day of school. We watched the Obama and McCain convention speeches (and Sarah Palin’s, of course*) but I’m not as tuned in as I’d normally be. We’re sort of checking the news in Charlotte — that United Way thing turned out to have some legs after all — but we’re pretty much unplugged there, too.

*So doesn’t Sarah Palin look like she walked right out of the “Hot For Teacher” video?

I have to say, being unplugged is not a bad thing at all.

As a newsman I should whack myself on the knuckles for saying this, but sometimes it feels like there’s just too much news. We’re drowning in it. You can’t ever keep up. It’s like going into the record store and realizing that no matter what you pick, there’s 5,000 great CDs in there that you’ll never get to listen to. (Driving around today I heard 20 great songs on the radio by bands I had never heard of, and of course it was one of those college stations where they ID the songs every two hours, but then they played “Celebrated Summer” by Husker Du* and it was like being lost and finally seeing your house up ahead on the street — hey, I know that song!

*Husker Du. What a band. The loudest band I’ve ever seen live — even louder than the Ramones. Bob Mould lived my dream — he fronted a great rock band and then wrote storylines for World Championship Wrestling. Now that’s a career.

At home I think, most of the time, we try to do it all. But one of the things we have to learn up here is what we can’t do. We can’t take every great class. We can’t read all the books in the library. We can’t go see every great speaker or hear every great band. So, in a weird way, the pressure’s off.

I say that knowing that in a couple of weeks we’ll be pulling all-nighters to get our reading done and dashing across campus to catch a brownbag speaker. But we’ve already learned something important: Find those air bubbles in your day. Then breathe deep.

They’re showing 12 Hitchcock movies at the Brattle. We might have to go 12-for-12.

Categories
Harvard

Dreamland

Health update: Feeling great. Still sore from time to time, still can’t lift more than 20 lbs (doctor’s orders), still need regular naps. But closer to normal every day. And doing tons of walking — this is a foot town, not a car town.

Well, I went a few weeks without writing and couldn’t hardly stand myself. So here we go with a new blog. If you’re reading this you probably know that I write a column for the Charlotte Observer but have temporarily landed at Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship. Somewhere in the middle of that I had open heart surgery, which is why there’s a health update at the top. I’m taking my pills, Mama, I promise.

We’ve been here two weeks and all I can think of is this Far Side cartoon — my brain is full as a tick. We’re getting to know 28 other fellows (plus spouses and kids), plus we’re meeting 2-4 hours every day to learn about Harvard life, plus plus we’re figuring our way around Cambridge (haven’t even tried Boston yet), plus plus plus Alix and I are trying to pick three or four classes each from, by my rough estimate, 17,482 classes being offered at Harvard this fall.

We have also discovered that Fred the neurotic dog is scared of elevators. It turns out that treats help. Which is pretty much the case for any situation involving Fred.

In general, people don’t say hey to you on the street here — maybe two times out of 10. But when you end up talking to somebody they’re as friendly as anywhere else. There was an incredibly nice woman at the returns counter at Target this morning. Nice normally gets you fired at the returns counter. Maybe it was some sort of trial program.

We’re doing our best to live like broke college students. Our computer table cost 5 bucks at a Habitat for Humanity sale last weekend. Our cupboard features pinto beans and rice. We sat on folding chairs until we got butt cramps — then we broke down and got a couch at Ikea. (We tried the secondhand places but the couches smelled funky in ways we sometimes couldn’t identify. We do have our limits.)

But all the best stuff here is free.

Walking the dog through the little park catty-cornered from our apartment. Lounging in the Lippmann House (headquarters for the fellowship), reading magazines and making new friends. Strolling through Harvard Yard, where students in search of themselves have strolled for nearly 400 years.

The other day we took a tour of the stupendous Widener Library, where I could happily spend the rest of my life as long as somebody delivered pizza there. At the end of the tour we wound up in the magazine stacks and I stumbled across Fantasy & Science Fiction, a magazine I’d never seen before. It had a new short story by Stephen King. So I found a carrel on the far wall, looking out over a little courtyard, and I read King’s gem of a story about a widow who gets a call from her husband.

Outside it was a cloudless late-summer day and inside there were millions of books and magazines waiting to be read.

One day when I was a senior in high school, my dad sat me down for a talk. He and my mom had tried hard to make the numbers work, but they didn’t have enough money to send me to the University of Georgia, where I had been accepted. He said maybe I could go to the junior college in town or maybe I could work awhile and come up with the money on my own. I know it just about killed him to say it.

He didn’t know about these amazing things called Pell Grants. I told him that with a Pell Grant and the little bit of scholarship money that I had, I thought that would be enough. He looked like I had lifted a sack of rocks off his shoulders. That’s good, he said. That’s good.

That was 26 years ago and he’s been gone 18. I thought about him as I sat there and read a story in my little corner of the greatest university in the world. Sometimes our lives outstrip our dreams.