New Location

I’ve moved my blog to its own domain: http://dcomposing.com

Thanks to all of you who’ve been following me here – and come take a look at my new site.

“it’s just violence”

Those words were uttered by a 17-year-old Vietnamese-American student in response to what has been described as racially motivated attacks against Asian students at a South Philadelphia High School in December.

The following month, in South Hadley, MA, 15-year-old Phoebe Prince hanged herself after incessant physical, verbal and emotional abuse from classmates at her school. (Full disclosure: the superintendent of schools in South Hadley was my superintendent when I taught in a nearby district several years ago.)

Both incidents are horrific. Both have been labeled, in the media, as bullying.

I can’t help but think that “bullying” doesn’t adequately describe what was at play in both tragic incidents. No, I was not present in either case. But from what I’ve read, both involved teenage victims who were immigrants: Phoebe Prince had recently moved from Ireland; the students attacked in South Philly were recent immigrants from Southeast Asia. The hatred directed at Phoebe was so virulent that even after she died, she was being taunted via her memorial page on Facebook. The Asian-American students in South Philly say they’ve been the victims of a “much longer pattern of anti-Asian/anti-immigrant violence at the school.”

If these were in fact anti-immigrant, bias-related attacks, it wouldn’t surprise me. Growing anti-immigrant sentiment appears to be a national trend, notes Gabriel Arana in an article in The American Prospect. One recent example: during an immigrants-rights rally in Washington, DC, there was the much-publicized incident of Tea Party followers shouting racial epithets and spitting on members of Congress.

Arana also points out:

Since the 2006 protests, membership in anti-immigrant groups has increased 600 percent. The number of these groups has also risen from around 40 in 2005 to over 250 today.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric is not a new phenomenon in this country. And neither is its consequences. As Kenneth C. Davis, author of Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned, wrote in an op-ed piece in the New York Times in 2007:

Scratch the surface of the current immigration debate and beneath the posturing lies a dirty secret. Anti-immigrant sentiment is older than America itself. Born before the nation, this abiding fear of the “huddled masses” emerged in the early republic and gathered steam into the 19th and 20th centuries, when nativist political parties, exclusionary laws and the Ku Klux Klan swept the land.

As we celebrate another Fourth of July, this picture of American intolerance clashes sharply with tidy schoolbook images of the great melting pot. Why has the land of “all men are created equal” forged countless ghettoes and intricate networks of social exclusion? Why the signs reading “No Irish Need Apply”? And why has each new generation of immigrants had to face down a rich glossary of now unmentionable epithets?

Using different terminology to describe what occurred in the high schools in South Hadley and South Philadelphia – anti-immigrant bias versus bullying – doesn’t bring back Phoebe Prince or dispel the physical and emotional pain experienced by the students at South Philadelphia High. It may all be, as the 17-year-old Vietnamese-American boy pointed out, simply unfathomable violence.

On the other hand, putting the right label on what happened, understanding the broader societal forces at play in addition to the local context, may provide insight into how we work with our students to prevent such tragedies from occurring in the future.

bridges, bay and brooklyn

This past week, the Bay Bridge finally reopened after a piece of metal came away from a section of the bridge that had been repaired Labor Day weekend.

The Bay Bridge when I choose to think about – and I try not to as often as possible – is scary. Personally, I think falling metal is the least of what’s worrisome. The bridge is so long, it takes what feels like an eternity to cross. Not a good feeling in earthquake country.

I think bridges in general are an amazng engineering feat. Suspension bridges in particular seem to be the most incredible – a roadway deck held up by steel cable attached to two long cables that are essentially being pulled by anchors on either end of the bridge. That’s the concept. I’m shocked more suspension bridges don’t collapse like the one in the video above – the Tacoma Narrows Bridge which was clearly not designed right. (Understatement.)

Photo by Simone Roda

As scary as I find bridges, I also am fascinated by them. When I taught second grade in New York, I used to take my kids on a trip by foot across the Brooklyn Bridge. The walkway is wide and gracious and wooden, and floats above the traffic. We would stop at the halfway point, break out crayons and paper, and draw what we saw – the East River and the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, pretty in their own right; lower Manhattan with its impossibly tall skyscrapers, beautiful Brooklyn Heights and its promenade.

As a foolish painter plunges his eye,
sharp and loving, into a museum madonna
so I, from the near skies bestrewn with stars,
gaze at New York through the Brooklyn Bridge

Brooklyn Bridge, Vladimir Mayakovsky

dolphins v. jellyfish

I recently heard a report on NPR that said dolphins like to use their flippers in an effort to propel jellyfish through the air in what seemed to be an act of play. Soccer, except with jellyfish as the ball.

 

Unfortunately, jellyfish don’t generally survive the humiliation.

Researchers in Wales discovered this surprising, never-before seen behavior.

The story made me wonder a few things. First off, is Wales its own country? Second, are there other animals that engage in what we as humans might think of as sport? And, finally, don’t jellyfish stings hurt dolphins?

Here’s what I found out:

• Yes, Wales is its own country. In fact, after reading about its history in Wikipedia, I began to suspect that Wales may have been Tolkien’s inspiration for the setting of Lord of the Rings. At least the historical names sound suspiciously Elvish.
• When I googled “are there animals that play sports,” the results were either about animal sports movies (one person’s Amazon list on the topic featured Soccer Dog: The Movie and Soccer Dog: European Cup numbers one and two, respectively) or animals capable of playing human sports. I’ll keep researching this one.
• I could not find an answer to my third question. Though I did come upon this passage at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources website:

Stings usually paralyze or kill only small creatures (fish, small crustaceans), but some jellyfish are harmful to humans. Although jellyfish do not “attack” humans, swimmers and beachcombers can be stung when they come into contact with the jellyfish tentacles with functional nematocysts. The severity of the sting depends on the species of jellyfish, the penetrating power of the nematocyst, the thickness of exposed skin of the victim and the sensitivity of the victim to the venom. The majority of stings from jellyfish occur in tropical and warm temperate waters. Most species off the southeastern coast are capable of inflicting only mild stings that result in minor discomfort.

I’m guessing that they do sting dolphins, and that the stings must hurt. But, clearly, these bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Wales are too in the game to care.

stuyvesant town

Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village are in the news.

courtesy New York Times

The two massive co-op housing complexes on the lower east side of Manhattan were sold to a development group for something like 5+ billion dollars a couple of years back. Apparently a highly leveraged purchase.

Of course with the crash of the financial markets, the development group, like many homeowners, is finding it hard to pay its debt obligation.

I bring this up only because Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village were a part of my high school life. They represented a de facto campus, along with the worn-out park off 15th street littered with vials and syringes.

The buildings stood across First Avenue from the high school – impossible to miss. We would sneak into the courtyard areas sometimes during lunch to play basketball. Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper felt different – middle class and manicured. Not like the rest of the downtrodden lower East side in 1970s recession New York.

Basketball in the City meant something to us. Uptown, there was the legendary Rucker Park. Closer by, in the West Village, you could watch games from behind the chain-link fence at the West Fourth Street courts. And of course, in 1978, Jim Carroll – who died just a few weeks ago – published his Basketball Diaries, which we devoured.

No one paid attention to what we did on the courts at Stuyvesant Town. Except maybe the security guards. No one films games there like they do at Rucker or at West Fourth. But I’ll bet if you mention Stuyvesant Town or Peter Cooper Village to anyone who went to the old Stuyvesant, before the move to the new building in Battery Park, they’ll eventually get around to talking about sneaking in and playing a game or two of basketball.

hardly strictly

Went to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this weekend, a free three-day music festival in Golden Gate Park for those of you unfamiliar with the event.

sunset on Lyle and the Banjo Stage

There’s a lot I could write about – Lyle Lovett was amazing, singing his old stuff from Pontiac with the Large Band backing; Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris and Old Crow Medicine Show brought down the figurative house with their rendition of the Band’s “The Weight”; the crowds were peaceful and happy and spontaneous music broke out all around as I walked through the park between stages.

All true.

But instead, I’m going to say that being at Hardly Strictly was both amazingly fun and weirdly deja-vu-ish. It was as though I had returned to my alma mater, Wesleyan, and it was 1984 Spring Fling all over again.

There were the barefoot hippie kids looking shabby chic. There were the drunken no-neck boys. (Why would they want to be at Wesleyan of all places?) There, in front of the stage, were the kids with no rhythm dancing to Gillian Welch’s folk ballads.

I half expected a hackey sack tournament to break out.

Hardly Strictly is a quintessentially SF experience. Clearly, Wesleyan prepared me well to live in the Bay Area.

cathedral (revisited)

My friend Caroline gave me the book Meditations of John Muir: Nature’s Temple for my birthday. She said she saw it soon after reading my blog post cathedral about a visit I made to Muir Woods.

The book pairs writings of Muir’s with quotes or passages from other writers, thinkers and texts. The last chapter is called All the World Seems a Church, taken from Muir’s own words. It’s paired with this quote from Emerson:

– these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion.

I’m going to enjoy this book.

facebook birthday

I’m old. There’s no getting around it.

I turned 47 today. As you can imagine, I’ve had many birthday experiences before, but I’ve never had the onslaught of a social network birthday. I received more birthday wishes through facebook from people around the country than I ever have in my life. Somehow, they all picked up on the fact that my profile says my birthday is July 23rd.

Interestingly, I’ve been on facebook longer than a year. So I had a facebook-era birthday last year. It’s a sign of the growing popularity of facebook, at least among people who are close to my age, that there would be such a huge difference in the number of nods to my birthday this year.

This is probably an indication that facebook is already in its decline, that it will soon be transplanted by some other social media site, founded by kids and used – at first – by kids. Until we forty-somethings co-opt it.

pool

Played pool right after work at Thalassa, a downtown Berkeley bar, with my friend Shelby Monday night.

I’ve done this a couple of times recently. There’s a very mixed age group of patrons at this pool hall. There are older men, most of whom have the tweedy air of Cal professors, alongside younger 20-somethings – mainly guys, but some women. The older men seem to take their time with their shots and have a smooth, almost loving stroke. While the younger players seem more to relish the power and violence of the cue’s kinetic energy released in a burst.

Shelby is an accomplished pool player, with her own two-piece cue. She kisses balls gently into the pockets while she herself is loud and boisterous. A wonderful contrast. I myself am a below-adequate amateur. I, for instance, can’t imagine what it takes to learn the angles when hitting balls off the rails. It must involve muscle memory, like shooting free throws in basketball. Once you do it enough, it isn’t about calculating, it’s about intuiting and doing.

When I was a kid, we used to frequent a pool hall on Kissena Boulevard in Flushing. It was on the top floor of a row of storefronts. There were lots of Asian kids there, since Flushing was evolving even then into a predominantly Asian neighborhood. I knew nothing of the intricacies of the game – like most things from my childhood, I did what seemed to work and picked up what I could as I went along.

My favorite aspect of the game? The oddities. Like using the bridge. That seemed like such a strangely acceptable crutch to me, as though a baseball player might be allowed to wield two bats if the occasion called for it. Pool seemed exotic because of these rules and much less straightforward then the sports I played every day, like basketball or baseball.

I’ve come to realize that one way to become a better pool player is to crouch low and see the table from the perspective of the balls. Very few games are like that. In most cases, it doesn’t matter at all whether you see things at ball level. You just do, react.

Maybe that’s why I’ve come to embrace pool again after all these years. It’s no longer a frenetic game of youth but rather the studied art of multiple perspectives.

bullet in the brain

Re-read a much-heralded short story by Tobias Wolff, Bullet In the Brain, today. My book group for its next selection is having each member choose a short story and as a group we’ll read them all. I used Bullet in the Brain in a summer writing program with high-school age students years ago and thought it would be fun to talk about.

I won’t say a lot about the story other than it is an amazing piece of craftsmanship. Read it yourself. You can find a pdf of the story (with a few typos) here.

Or, if you have a subscription to the New Yorker, you can search for it at the New Yorker website.