We have a blog! And it is our distinct pleasure to introduce it to all of you! There has been a real atmosphere of excitement at the Ivory Tower Boiler Room surrounding the creation of this website in general, and this blog in particular. Andrew, who is usually so reserved, has been positively giddy, and Adam, who spent many years being snooty about both podcasts and blogs, is now eating crow. Meanwhile, Erika is grimly determined to share her process as she rediscovers herself as a writer.
And Mary is going to write her blog posts only after making sure the rest of us are in bed by 9 (but if we take out flashlights to read, she’ll pretend not to notice).
The gist here is simple. We have four regulars on the Ivory Tower Boiler Room—Erika, Mary, Andrew and Adam. There are four (-ish) weeks in a month. Tiffany Sowa has already agreed to sign on as a weekly columnist, and we hope to have more besides. In addition, we will have other members of our writing group joining in whenever they have something to boast or gush or rant about. These are all people whose writing we love, and so we are excited as both readers and writers.
The main reason we are starting this blog–and this is not an exaggeration–is the comments section. We want to hear from you.
Happy reading!
-Adam, Andrew, Erika, and Mary
P.S. Any unsigned pieces you see in this space, or on this website in general, are a product of the hive mind that unites the four of us.
(clockwise, Adam Katz, Andrew Rimby, and Michael Nevradakis)
Our podcast episodes will now premiere on Mondays at 5pm. We’re taking a break from the Big Think this week, but it will be back next Monday.Look out for some exciting Banned Books Week content on our blog page and on twitter @ivoryboilerroom.
Dr. Nevradakis’ interview acts as a sort of “Professor Is In” case study. He opens up about what to do when your academic advisor falls off the map, and how to figure out a fulfilling academic pathway when the odds are stacked against you. He gets into the dreaded sense of imposter syndrome and paranoia that PhD students are faced with and how to work through this.
Banned Books week starts Sunday, September 26, and runs through Saturday, October 2. Check back here in a few days for more content!
When we talk about banning books, what are we actually talking about? I can think of a lot of books that should be (or that, in effect, are) banned from high schools. Paradise Lost is one example. I loved it. Starting when I was about 23. Even in college, I found myself put off by its intricacies; in high school, I would not have made it past the first page. Come to think of it, all four of the books I centered my dissertation on would be inappropriate to teach in high school, specifically because of their difficulty.* But they’re all perfectly fine to read in college or after. So there are books that are inappropriate for children.
Now the question is whether books can be banned on ideological grounds. Sophie’s Choice came up in conversation the other day. I read this book when I was 19, or thereabouts, and what troubled me about it at the time was not the eponymous choice, though, to be sure, that is a hard passage to read. No, the issue is that it is a book about a Polish person of non-Jewish descent being accused by a Jewish person of complicity in the Holocaust, when in fact she is a survivor of the German camps and he, born and raised in the United States, is not. The whole story-arc struck me at the time as giving the lie to Jewish responses to the trauma of the Holocaust. The idea of centering a non-Jewish survivor is a good one; the idea of making her tormentor a Jewish man is cynical and ugly. I don’t think the book should be taught to high school students, nor to anyone, without a very thorough examination of the history surrounding its polemical construction. With the right approach, of course, you can teach anything.
A recently banned author, Kyle Lukoff, of whose work I am fond, was probably the inspiration for my thinking of banning books as something all educators do, at least implicitly, and not just bogeymen like Christian conservatives in faraway school districts that are, I realize, not far away for some. The following is from Lukoff’s keynote speech for the American Library Association:
“…before my first school year started, I went through the collection and pulled every picture book I could find where an animal or child wore a stereotypical “Indian” feather strapped to their head. I firmly believe that such depictions are dehumanizing, part and parcel of the larger white project of anti-Indigenous oppression, and while I was fed a steady diet of racist books as a child I did not want to inflict that upon my students. In the winter of 2014 I weeded almost every book in the collection about the police, because in children’s literature, nonfiction about the police always presents them as community helpers who keep good people safe, and that is inaccurate.”
It’s much easier to talk about books we would not like banned, because that makes us feel righteous: “Look at these books they want banned! Aren’t they barbaric for banning our precious books?” Maybe. But they’re trying to create a society according to their values, and to control the factors that influence their child’s development. Same as you. If I mentioned that To Kill a Mocking Bird is one of the books parents most frequently ask to have removed from the curriculum, a typical white, liberal American (like me) might be instinctively outraged. If I clarified that the NAACP is asking to have TKAM removed from curricula because it privileges the white savior narrative, would the same person reconsider their outrage? And what about bumping a book off the curriculum because of #MeToo, like my one-time favorite poet, Pablo Neruda? So the uncomfortable questions we need to ask ourselves are:
-What kind of adults do we want our education to produce? -Are we prepared to make, and fight for, those arguments? -Are choosing a book and banning a book two sides of the same coin? -What about reading a book that is problematic, but scaffolding the reading so that young learners understand why it’s problematic?
This book is banned for being weird and trippy
So the question I have on my mind as we go into this Banned Books Week is: which books do you think should be banned, and which do you think should not be, and why?
*The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, Arcadia by Philip Sidney, and The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish are the other three.
This is an unusual one for us, which we’re especially happy to have. Steve and Mary DiPipi went to the same MFA program. As you read this story, you’ll notice more scaffolding than usual: a couple paragraphs of introduction explaining why the story was written, a bunch of discussion questions at the end showing how the story was used. Literary creativity shows up in a lot of places and for a lot of reasons. Also, it’s a really good story, as you’ll see.
Our theme this month, apropos of the start of the school year, is “Back to the Books,” and so, without further ado, here is a creative piece that shows how literary artistry can lead the way in education.
Plaka district of Athens in Greece, courtesy of iStock
This week’s guest, Dr. Michael Nevradakis shares a Stony Brook connection with Andrew and Adam. Dr. Nevradakis is also a former podcaster, and so it’s no surprise that their interview quickly finds a rhythm to talk about some of the real vulnerabilities faced by graduate students and early career academics… especially when it comes to their relationships with those who are more established in their careers.
Dr. Nevradakis’ interview acts as a sort of “Professor Is In” case study. He opens up about what to do when your academic advisor falls off the map, and how to figure out a fulfilling academic pathway when the odds are stacked against you. He gets into the dreaded sense of imposter syndrome and paranoia that PhD students are faced with and how to work through this.
When you hear someone tell stories like this, you often look for the common denominator and discover that the storyteller is that common denominator… and you wonder what it is about them that seems to invite the terrible things in. You’ll find that isn’t the case with Dr. Nevradakis. As you listen to Adam and Andrew talk with Dr Nevradakis though, you’ll hear more about the lack of accountability that can exist in academic environments, the precarity of being an outsider, the challenges of existing in that graduate-students grey area, lacking the backing and support that faculty are often accorded while still taking on many of the same tasks that faculty are doing. And you’ll hear what happens when decorum or collegiality seem to be forgotten.
Here they are carrying on with their lives, being beautiful or terrible according to how they were written, and we come along and literally stick our noses into their business. There are some people—scholars, philosophers, authors—who treat books as if they were alive. I once attended a talk at which the modernist literature professor Edward Mendelson said something like: “If you demand things of a book, you’ll never get the answers you’re looking for. You have to ask them questions and be patient if they don’t answer as directly as you’d like.” Another time I went to a book-signing and Q&A with the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and she said she does indeed have trouble writing a sex scene when she knows her father is going to read it. These two anecdotes do not make the same point, but there is a through line: books change, depending on who reads them—or who is going to read them.
But what about rereading? I pick up a book I ostensibly know the plot of already, as well as the characters. And yet it’s not the same book this time as it was the last time. I notice different things; I focus on different things; I may see pessimism where I once saw optimism, or vice versa. Sometimes the transformation is so complete, it’s tempting to think the book has changed and not I (this is to say nothing of reading a book in a different translation from last time).
There are a few books I just can’t stop revisiting. One of them is The Lord of the Rings. One is Pride and Prejudice. King Lear, The Once and Future King are two more. And two that are less popular than these others but no less magnificent, Song for Night by the Nigerian expat Chris Abani and Gora by Rabindranath Tagore. I’ve literally lost track of how many times I’ve reread any one of these books. And anyone who has taken a literature or writing class that I’ve taught since about 2014 can add one more name to the list, because I always start the first day of any class with “Reunion” by John Cheever. Yes, always. If you’re wondering why, this is why.
I could honestly write about any of these works and you’d get a pretty good idea of what my relationship with all of them is, but I’m feeling like going Early Modern, so let’s talk a walk down King Lear Lane together, shall we? For me, I can’t talk about King Lear without talking about the year 2009. I was in a serious romantic relationship, teaching summer school in Newark, New Jersey, and worried about my job prospects in the midst of the financial collapse (for you readers still in your twenties, that’s the recent financial collapse, not the current one). So one day I took a train out from Manhattan to Newark to attend a job-fair for prospective teachers, and I read King Lear the whole time that I wasn’t desperately, futilely networking. It may be that the bleakness of the story mirrored the bleakness of my mindset on that particular day, but I remember being much cheered by reading a Shakespearean tragedy in which half the named-characters get murdered and at least two others die of heart attacks.
I hear you asking why?—or how?
I think King Lear is a bit like the “magic” ring from a Jewish folktale that can make a happy person feel sad or a sad person feel happy. The story goes that a criminal can discharge his debt to society by scouring the world for this ring, and, in the end, it’s not magical at all; it’s just some old ring that has engraved around the band: “This, too, shall pass.” So. If you’re in a good mood when you read King Lear, you might find the eye-popping level of violence (see what I did there) distasteful. But if you are in a foul mood when you read it, you might end up noticing that Edmund’s last wish is to do a little bit of good. That Lear’s and Cordelia’s respective last wishes are to spend a bit of long-overdue quality time with each other. I always come away from those harrowing last few pages thinking: the future is promised to nobody. But at least we can spend as much time as we have with the people who matter to us. For Lear and Cordelia, that ends up being less than an hour. But less-than-an-hour is infinitely better than nothing, which is what they had before.
In fact, a significant number of the deaths in Lear are accompanied by a moment of redemption. Gloucester, blinded and put out of his own castle, gets to embrace one more time the child he had spurned. Lear, finally seeing that he put his trust in the wrong daughters, gets the same opportunity with Cordelia. Edmund gets to try to save some of the lives he put so needlessly in jeopardy. For all the carnage of King Lear (and there is a lot… some scenes would make Quentin Tarantino pitch a tent, provided, of course, that the actors played the scenes barefoot) it is especially moving that this is such a strong theme throughout the play: whatever time you have left, use it to try to do some good, even if you don’t succeed. I do find it unfortunate that the queer themes, so prevalent in the Sonnets, are either absent or deep undercover in plays like Lear. But that’s why we have Shakespeare’s bolder contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. Look him up some time and you, too, might make a friend.
And yes, as someone who has struggled with depression, I’m mostly in a foul mood when I read that book (or watch one of the filmed versions; the two times I saw Lear played live I was decidedly in a good mood because live theater does that to people).
Anyway, when I finish reading, I usually feel at least a bit better.
Looking back, I find some more details about my relationship with this play interesting. First: it wasn’t my favorite when I first read it. Some books or plays, my first interaction with them is enough to sell me on endless rereadings. The moment I started reading The Once and Future King at age 14 or so, I was hooked for life. Same with Song for Night, which I basically can’t read without crying. Lear? It took until the first time I saw it performed before I was hooked. I was in college. I had first read the play maybe a year earlier. And now here were all these people I knew personally. Lear was played by a guy who was in the same seminar with me when we read it. Gloucester was played by the guy who lived next door to me freshman year. And so on. There were some creative touches, too, to the performance. When Regan and Cornwall went to blind Gloucester, they palmed blood-packets to make it seem as if they were really ripping out his eyes. And the illusion worked. Then the two started making out with each other right in the middle of the torture, and I’ve rarely been so creeped out in my life. This was maybe 15 years ago and I can picture it like it was last week. They got some of the blood in their mouths as they kissed. It was magnificently unnerving. #CouplesGoals. The other live performance I saw of King Lear was also really good. Lear was played by John Lithgow, whom I don’t know personally, but he did a good job, too.
If I’m honest, I don’t think King Lear is the best of the best Shakespeare ever wrote. It’s really high on that list, but for my money, the best of the best is Troilus and Cressida. But Lear is MY favorite, and I think that it’s because of those two live performances, one surrounded by friends (both onstage and in the audience) and the other so dearly bought: waking up at 3 AM and stumbling to the subway to get tickets to the last performance of the season at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, bowled over by the talent of John Lithgow and the rest of cast, and all this taking place a single day before I moved from New York to Stony Brook. It occurs to me that if I wanted to restructure this essay a bit, I could tell you why I love my favorite books, while hardly saying a word about the books themselves; focusing instead on how they have become indispensable parts of my story. So in that way, a book is like a friend. A best friend isn’t called ‘best’ because they’re the best at something. No, it’s because they were there for you in a way nobody else was, at a time when you really needed someone (or you were there for them). And if I look over the books I hold most dear, the stories that come to mind are often my stories, surrounding these books, as opposed to the plots of the books themselves. A few examples will suffice:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. My brother was assigned this book as summer reading when he was about 16, and he just couldn’t get through it. A book where everything is subtext can be a little much for a fidgety teenager. So we all took turns trying to read it to him. But if he was 16 then I was 12 and there is no way I was going to make any more headway into that book than he did. I re-encountered it in college and found myself charmed by its humor. Later the audiobook version became my go-to entertainment when I was doing chores around the apartment. And as I navigated the storms of interpersonal relationships, I found myself asking more and more: What would Lizzie do? Because I admire her for standing firm. Or what would Darcy do? Because I admire him for being willing to change. So ironically, my first impression was a prejudicial one, and I have since overcome my pride and fallen in love with the book.
Gora by Rabindranath Tagore. This is an easy one. I bought it at a second-hand bookstore in Bangalore and read it in a sleeper-car traveling from the south of India to Bombay. The person I was traveling with (and still am, in a sense) kept stealing it when I wasn’t looking, so I had to fly through it (also I flew through the pages because I wanted to know what would happen next). It actually reads a bit like a Jane Austen novel if the not-so-secret subtext to the marriage plot were focused on religion instead of economics.
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. This is a book I inherited my love for from my mom. She used to say that she would reread The Lord of the Rings when things were hardest because it reminded her that there were people and ideas worth fighting for. And now I use it in the same way. This book gets a lot of shit for having so many paragon-characters, but the point that that criticism misses is that the paragons are not characters; they’re window-dressing. The evil in this story may be pure evil, and the good may be pure good, but the main characters—the Hobbits—still live in a world that’s almost hopelessly shaded with grey. Yes I know I’m breaking my rule and talking about what’s in the book but it wasn’t a very good rule in the first place. While I’m on the subject, I am sad to report that the racism of the book grates on me a bit more with each reading. North and West are always good; South and East are always bad. The paragons look Teutonic and the faceless hordes of the enemy often look Middle Eastern or African. It’s a lot to overlook. I honestly don’t know why I am still ok with a book that has so many issues. I may have to make that the subject of a future essay. But anyway, now that I’ve broken my rule, I can begin talking about the books that I fell in love with as books, like Chris Abani’s Song For Night. But honestly I’m not fully sure how to talk about that one. You need to just go read it and then you’ll see. It’s not long.
Anyway, I don’t really believe that books are sufficiently conscious that they feel intruded-upon when I crack the spine and start prying into their personal affairs. But in a way, when I am reading them, mulling them over, asking them questions and being patient with the answers, I can’t help but think that they are keeping me company in the way a person would be able to do. Or that, as with any friendship, I am conversing with them; visiting with them. Books, particularly the ones that are like old, comfortable friends, can occupy that middle ground: when I don’t want to talk to a person, but neither do I want to be alone. That is a bleak thought, read a certain way, and probably makes me sound more self-centered than I’d really like. But read another way: books, especially my old favorites. keep me sane. They teach me to be a better person. And in their own way they’ve got my back.
Clockwise from the top left: Adam Katz, Andrew Rimby, Dr. Karen Kelsky, Kel Weinhold
The Professor Is In team, Dr. Karen Kelsky and Kel Weinhold join Adam and Andrew in the Ivory Tower Boiler Room. Their discussion centers on ending gaslighting and how to push for more equity in academia.
-Who is expected to bring social change? Overburdened women, queer people, and People of Color.
-#MeTooPhD: How and why do supposedly modern, liberal professors allow (and even perpetrate) sex-crimes on campus?
The conversation between Andrew and Adam and Kel and Karen is a laugh-filled trip through a world of serious issues, providing a great reminder that humor is a wonderful antidote to the stress that we’re all feeling and an important way to take care of your mental health.
Karen Kelsky, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Academic consultant,Career coach, writer, and speaker. She is the founder and CEO of The Professor Is In theprofessorisin.com. You can buy Karen’s book, listen to the podcast, check out the blog space.
Friday is upon us once again, and pumpkin spice season has already descended on the Ivory Tower Boiler Room… as evidenced by a lively discussion in one of our recent meetings about pumpkin spice vs apple as the better autumn flavor. Erika, who is usually the one encouraging us to “embrace the and” came down firmly on the apple side of things.
courtesy of theprofessorisin.com
This week Andrew and Adam sit down with Karen Kelsky and Kel Weinhold to talk about the innovative academic mentoring over at “The Professor is In.” While the conversation is filled with frequent laughter, no one avoids talking about the difficult things. They talk about the ways that academia is like a cult, and the risks of conforming, or resisting conformity, by learning to “speak like a straight, white, male.” Questions about #MeTooPhD come up and why modern, liberal professors still allow, or even perpetrate, sex crimes on their students. The discussion also asks why so much of the onus for social change is left to those already carrying the heavier burden: women, queer people and People of Color. If you found yourself nodding along at any of these topics, we hope you walk away knowing that there is support and community waiting to help you, and that you have options.
After you listen, you’ll keep wanting to know more about these guests, so keep reading to find out more about Karen and Kel.
Kel shared the following answers to our fabulous questionnaire with us:
1.What are you listening to, reading, watching?
Listening: “Keep It” and “Unlocking Us.” Reading: “Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought.” Watching: “Astrid” and “Unforgotten”
2.Do you like to cook? What is your favorite thing to make?
3.What is something you have read and loved, and wish more people would read?
Toni Morrison’s “Playing in the Dark.”
4.Did you grow up with video- or computer-games? What were/are some of your favorites?
PONG! (I’m 60)
5.You’re taking a sick-day from work. What movie are you putting on?
Notting Hill
6.What’s your favorite excuse for why you have writer’s block?
I am sooooooooo busy.
7.What’s a book everyone says you should read, but you either read it and hated it, or haven’t read it.
Anything by Jane Austen. Same goes for those Bröntes.They are tolerable, but not compelling enough to tempt me past a few pages; and I am in no humor at present to give consequence to characters who are demeaned incessantly by asshole men. Don’t @ me.
And Karen’s also shares her answers:
1.What are you listening to, reading, watching?
The Wolf Hall series by Hilary Mantel. I’m on book three and I love it. I say, “excuse me while I go back to the 16th century.” It’s my coping mechanism.
2.Do you like to cook? What is your favorite thing to make?
I do like to cook but Kel’s a former chef and does most cooking; however, I’m awash in fresh garden heirloom tomatoes so in the past three weeks I’ve made salsa, pico de gallo, Greek haloumi tomato salad, an INCREDIBLE masoor dal bhat, Japanese tomato shiso salad, multiple capreses, a spectacular basil garlic pasta sauce, and a Moroccan spiced bisque. With more to come!
3.What is something you have read and loved, and wish more people would read?
The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964)
4.Did you grow up with video- or computer-games? What were/are some of your favorites?
Nope. I’m 56.
5.You’re taking a sick-day from work. What movie are you putting on?
Knives Out 🙂
6.What’s your favorite excuse for why you have writer’s block?
*gestures widely*
7.What’s a book everyone says you should read, but you either read it and hated it, or haven’t read it.
Every Harry Potter book (and this long predated the author becoming a notorious TERF). Those are just objectively bad books.
And as always, the team has kept our own lists of what we’re watching, listening to and reading…
Andrew has been busy this week reading Possession by A.S. Byatt to prepare for our first ever Ivory Tower Boiler Room Book Club! And, Hagar’s Daughter by Pauline Hopkins to begin teaching it in his “Whitman’s Multitudes” course. None of his students have ever read it so it’s going to make for an exciting classroom literary conversation. And since he’s going to be staying in Manhattan for his birthday weekend, he’ll actually get some extra time to read these texts on the train ❤️
Andrew’s following Mary’s True Crime lead and got into Only Murders in This Building…He says “Steve Martin and Martin Short feed off of each other so nicely.”
For music this week, Andrew is celebrating the reopening of Broadway with the Beetlejuice, Wicked, and Lion King musical cast albums. Andrew’s also fully enamored and captured by P.J. Vernon’s Bath Haus audiobook! He reminds us that “the actors are so good. I have to be careful not to listen at night… it’s that psychologically thrilling.” (What a hint for our October Ivory Tower theme, too.)
Mary is still focused on reading We Keep the Dead Close.
She’s been watching Norm MacDonald’s standup (new and old), his Late Show appearances, and SNL characters ( “how can you forget Turd Ferguson?”) and says “rest in peace” to a comedic genius.
Last week Erika mentioned the Matrix 4 trailer… This week, Mary’s been listening to “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane, which she recently heard in the trailer for Matrix 4: Resurrection. She is completely obsessed due to the references to Alice in Wonderland-Mary’s favorite children’s story. Feed your head.
Erika and Adam are back to trading music recommendations again. They’ve both listened to recordings of Kol Nidre this week. Adam’s pick is this vocal version, while Erika went for an instrumental version… on viola of course. Erika’s Thursday evening writing began with Bach Cello Suites before she decided she needed something much more melancholy. Adam also brought up Tori Amos’s cover of “Time” by Tom Waits, which Erika agrees is incredible. If you’re interested in the Tom Waits version, you can hear that, too.
Erika has been happily working her way through The Guncle this week and is so excited for Steven Rowley’s upcoming interview with the Ivory Tower team. Her reading time has also been a lot of WordPress related things, and things about alterous attraction. She is also incredibly frustrated because she is having an incredibly difficult time trying to get a copy of Meg Grehan’s Baby Teeth (queer love, lust, vampires and lyrical poetry…Erika is not the only one who finds this really exciting, right?)
It hasn’t been a thrilling week for things to watch, even if Erika is still doing more of that and less of other things than she would like. She was excited that Season 2 of DotGay’s The Library premiered this week (and season 2 of The Dictionary will premier next week, which Erika will definitely watch, too.) Erika is really just waiting for the premier of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. In spite of living in Florida, she was hoping things might feel safe enough to go see Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield in The Eyes of Tammy Faye but that will have to wait. In the meantime, whether you can or can’t go see it, Erika highly suggests checking out the 2000 documentary of the same name. And after mentioning it last week, Erika started watching SheZow again…performative gender with a little twist.
Adam has been reading while walking lately, which he can do when the streets are empty because of Yom Kippur and the like. We’ll see if that remains a safe activity. Reading what, you ask? Why, Adam happens to be a third of the way through The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of Bob Moses and New York City. It’s an ongoing source of frustration because it’s too many pages and it’s too depressing (with all the corruption and political infighting and casual racism) and there are so many upcoming books to read for Ivory Tower Boiler Room events, but… when a book hooks you, it hooks you.
Adam has been listening to a bit of Brenda Harris’s operatic arias lately, as well as the aforementioned Tom Waits and Kol Nidre. And of course singing a lot of Jewish music (because it’s just been that kind of week for some of us).
Adam is nearing the ending of the sixth season of Buffy, and, not incidentally, could really use a pat on the shoulder and some assurance that things will be ok. They won’t, but as a wise person once said: “lie to me.”
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In the last year and a half, we’ve all gotten used to wearing masks… and seeing the faces of those around us covered by masks. That kind of opacity is the opposite of what we need in academia. This week’s episode of The Ivory Tower Boiler Room invites Kel Weinhold and Dr. Karen Kelsky to talk about unmasking the world of academia, and about why they created “The Professor is In” for their unique brand of academic mentorship.
Some Topics Covered:
-Academia is a cult in need of transparency
-How to talk like a straight white male (and the risks and rewards of doing so)
-Who is expected to bring social change? Overburdened women, queer people, and People of Color.
-#MeTooPhD: How and why do supposedly modern, liberal professors allow, and even perpetrate, sex-crimes on campus?
The conversation between Andrew and Adam and Kel and Karen is a laugh filled trip through a world of serious issues, providing a great reminder that humor is a wonderful antidote to the stress that we’re all feeling and an important way to take care of your mental health.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider making a donation to help us grow our literary and artistic community.
Editor’s Note: Readers of The Ivory Tower Boiler Room know that on Monday, we typically publish our Big Think, an essay giving a perspective on the month’s topic. But then in the days leading up to this important anniversary, Erika wrote the following and we decided just to go with it. Sometimes you have to be flexible, and, as you’ll see, the piece does revolve around the themes of books and education.
National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Va. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Patrick Kelley)
September 11, 2001 was a bright, clear, sunny morning. Washington DC doesn’t let you forget it was built on a swamp, and it was a morning where I remember appreciating the impending change of seasons, and feeling that the oppressive summer humidity was fading. There wasn’t anything all that unusual about the day. Just little things–I was taking a call from home that morning instead of going to the office, because, while I liked my job, I was also searching for something else. Labor Day had been the previous week, and I’d been out of town, at a family wedding. I’d traveled by airplane, too, not having any idea how much things would be changing just a few days later. I’d returned home pretty sure that the relationship I was in was over, but not really ready to make the final decisions and moves on how to end things.
I took advantage of the decision to take the call from home and slept in a little bit, but I finally drifted downstairs at about 8:30 to get ready for my phone call. I sat on the couch with a cup of tea, a cat and the paperwork I needed for the meeting, and shuffled through what was in front of me. It was quiet, the big city kind of quiet. Suddenly my boyfriend comes racing down the stairs yelling “put CNN on! Put CNN on! What channel is CNN?” We grabbed the remote control and put the TV on. Stunned and frightened, my heart racing, my stomach sour, I wondered which building was on fire–my father was in one of those two buildings. I grabbed the phone and immediately began trying to reach my mother’s office–she would normally have been on her way to work around the time the first plane hit the North Tower. I had no way of knowing if she’d heard what happened–she didn’t have a cell phone, and the probability of her having the radio in the car on or off was about 50-50. Call after call after call to her office went unanswered. I called the main desk in her department… still no answer. I finally called a co-worker of hers, who answered and told me that my mother was at home, trying to find out about my father. I called my mother at home. Her voice was shaky. I’m sure mine was, too. We talked briefly, I let her know I’d be home and not in the office, and we hung up, without acknowledging the looming possibility that something had happened to my father. It didn’t matter–we both knew what was possible. I called my office, let them know I’d be staying home and away from the phone, and that my father was in the Towers so I’d call them later. The second tower was hit. I have no idea what the actual sequence of these three events is… time was immeasurably slow, but racing by. I know at some point I raced into the bathroom and threw up, the sour, burning, empty stomach, painful, retching kind. My boyfriend’s mother called. My boyfriend’s father and stepmother called. That’s when the buildings collapsed. I screamed. His stepmother asked why I was screaming, in a tone that clearly suggested I was overreacting. It was hours before we knew my father was safe, some of the most agonizing hours of my life. That night our electricity went out. I’ve never been one who copes well in the dark; I have terrible night vision to begin with, and terrible things have happened to me in the dark, but that night it was even more frightening than usual, sitting in the dark, not sure if it was just a normal electrical issue or if it was another terrorist attack.
Even a day like that ends, and then another, and then I remember standing in the shower on Thursday evening, going through the motions of getting ready to go out with my girlfriend. We went into Georgetown to a Mediterranean restaurant that we liked, having decided it was extra important that we were out there showing that we understood that extremism is not the same thing as Islam, knowing that this business and others would probably be dealing with serious economic losses. Not too long after that, I drove out of the city, along a highway that takes you past the Pentagon. I couldn’t easily see the huge hole ripped in the side, but I remember being struck by how brightly lit the Pentagon was. It was surrounded by banks of floodlights. Those lights were a symbol for the ways things would never feel okay again, the ways everything that had been “normal” would now be topsy-turvy.
The initial shock of the first day faded quickly, to be replaced by a fog. It was days, weeks even, before I finally felt like I wasn’t wading through a fog as I went on with the motions of daily life, and all the shock came back to me a few months later. As I drove back to Long Island for Thanksgiving, along a route that had always included a view of the Twin Towers before, now there was a gap, like a child missing their front teeth.
As a Gen-Xer, I grew up with the constant threat of mass extinction overhead. The ever-looming shadows of nuclear war, “Just say ‘no’” drug education, because if you do drugs you’ll die, and if you have sex you’ll die. Everything was about our doom. I remember news stories about terrorism when I was growing up, but it was something that happened “somewhere else.” “Terrorism,” in my memory was mostly used to describe actions taken by various groups in the Middle East, and in spite of the kinds of things going on in parts of Central and South America or Europe or Asia, it still seemed the word specifically referred to action in one region. I was in my mid-twenties when 9/11 happened, and still, suspicion focused on the Middle East. The first first fingers pointed were at Muslims. For years before September of 2001, it seemed that whenever there was any kind of terrorist action aimed at the US, the first fingers pointed where at Muslims. Terrorism though, is about dangerous extremism, and not about religion or race or any other specific identity. Terrorism can come from anyone, gender, race, faith, nationality–it’s about radical adherence to dogma. That same kind of dogma is present in the way we learn about certain groups of people, whether that’s in school, the media, or some other source. The things that come out as our microaggressions, and become woven into the fabric of our speech, our thinking. We have work to do to unlearn those things, but what to do in the meantime when you have to teach someone else?
When my oldest kid was around six or seven years old, we had a book about famous buildings. My kids loved looking at the buildings, seeing what was inside, and asking questions–there was something about the guillotine that really excited them. The conversations about architecture and engineering were really interesting, too. That book spurred so many fascinating conversations. I loved listening to the kids talk about Notre Dame. (They studied French as well as English in elementary school. When we outgrew charming malapropisms about “the wife-el tower” it meant beautifully pronounced French words in the middle of sentences sometimes.) New York, however, fascinated them, more than anything. They were familiar with it… we visited. New York was where my parents were, where they got “up to the top of a very tall building,” (although I think they remember the trash can on fire even more than the view from the building.)
One day, I had my oldest alone in the car, and we decided to stop at the Starbucks drive thru for a little treat. My kids always had books in the car, and after I placed our order, while we were still in line, the voice from the back seat rose up and asked me “Mama, what was there before the Freedom Tower?” I paused, swallowed hard and explained that there had been two buildings called The Twin Towers or The World Trade Center. Nothing more than that, it was an honest and complete answer to the question. I knew that one day I’d have to say more than that, I just wasn’t prepared for that day to be the day. But the back seat voice piped up again to inquire about how the buildings had been knocked down to make room for the Freedom Tower. I took a deep breath, swallowed again and said, “It’s a scary, scary story. I will tell you the story now but only if you decide it’s okay to hear it.” I emphasized that it was okay to say “No,” or “not today,” but it was also ok to start listening and then decide it was too much and that we needed to stop and come back later. I would tell the story anytime; it didn’t have to be now. My kid, however, has always been brave, and insisted I continue. And so I proceeded to talk about how some people who didn’t like things about the United States, about how we lived, and about the freedoms we have, and the countries we try to help and how we help them wanted to try and convince us to be more like them-to behave the way they did, to believe what they did, and to not help out in some of the places that we were helping. I went on to explain that the people who did that thought the right way to convince the United States to do that was to do terrible, horrible, very big and scary things to us, and that they convinced some people to fly airplanes into the buildings that had been there and knock them down. (More on that explanation in a moment.) I used the word “terrorist.” That word was okay. But it was so important to me to make sure that if I had to introduce the idea of terrorism into the world of my elementary-school-aged kid, it was absolutely essential to make clear that this act of terrorism wasn’t about religion. Our beloved babysitter at the time was a Muslim woman. One of my kiddo’s best buddies is Muslim. There were, and are, important people in our lives who are Muslims, and my kids needed to understand that all terrorists aren’t Muslims and all Muslims aren’t terrorists. And the next question wasn’t really any easier. “Did kids die?” I had to be honest. I had to tell the truth, no matter how hard it was. And I did. I didn’t talk about my father, and how he had survived the day, or about how scary it was, or what it felt like in Washington DC. I tried to keep it essential and factual, without frightening the incredible child who was asking. I tried to make sure that extremism as a behavior, no matter what the extreme belief was, was emphasized as the problem. I hope I did a good job… I think so, because a few years later, when a third grade teacher showed a film with a strong, anti-Muslim bias, my kiddo spoke up. (The teacher that year was a piece of work… within the first two weeks of school, she tried to argue over the definition of “segregation,” telling my 8 year old that dividing children by gender so they could be assigned to lunch tables wasn’t segregation. My 8 year old was absolutely right on both issues… it is segregation to divide the children by gender and showing anti-Muslim-biased videos in school, or anywhere, is ridiculous.)
How do you emphasize the idea that extremism is at the heart of the issue–not religion, not race–when they’re just too young to appreciate those grey areas? It can’t be a one-time conversation, for sure, and there has to be honesty about terrorism; that anyone can hold extremist beliefs, and that therein lies the danger. So instead of piling on every nuance in that first conversation, it’s about laying foundations for critical thinking, and allowing questions to be asked, sometimes hard questions. And it’s about teaching children very early on that everything they read, hear and see isn’t going to always be accurate, so they have to learn to question, to verify, and to choose carefully the information they are going to trust. So many of these difficult conversations change over time. Obviously they change because a child understands more, knows more about the world. But when the educator’s vision changes, the education changes, too. In the last twenty years, what we’ve seen, what we’ve learned, what we’ve lived through… it’s all changed us. It’s changed how we interact with the media, and how we trust the news. I think we’re all a little more cynical, a little more jaded. The ethics of intervention, the practicality of intervention in the long list of places we’ve invaded or occupied or meddled in recently: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and further in the past, like Nicaragua or Vietnam, sit with us differently now, and as you revisit your own feelings about those events, and challenge the things you learned growing up, it’s okay to revisit the conversations you’ve had with others about them… especially children… especially your own.
The events of 9/11 changed the world for all of us, whether we were old enough to remember the day or not. It’ s not a day or an event that we can stop talking about–it’s a cultural touchstone, a “where were you when…” moment for multiple generations. My parents told the stories of where they were when JFK was shot. My children hear the stories of where I was when the Challenger exploded. But the other “where were you when…” stories they hear from me are not only tragic stories, but violent stories. If I’m trying to create a more loving, kinder, more peaceful world, how do I do that? The only choice I have is education–to tell the stories of violence, and to tell them also about the mistakes we’ve made by not laying foundations for respect and compassion, the mistakes we’ve made by promoting false patriotism instead of real patriotism, by being unwilling to see the mistakes that we’ve made, or to recognize the damage that imperialism has caused. Books open doors to some of these hard conversations, even with children. I probably wouldn’t have brought up ideas like “terrorism” at that point, but that book in the hands of my child, opened the door for a really difficult conversation, and we did the delicate dance of giving enough information, but not too much, answering the questions but leaving room for more. There’s a saying of Maria Montessori: “Establishing peace is the work of education. All politics can do is keep us out of war.” I’ve written before about how I don’t think of myself as a teacher. But obviously, I know that parenting is, in so many ways, teaching kids how to be themselves, and how to become grown ups. It’s hard work for us to teach ourselves, to learn for ourselves how to confront the right or wrong-ness of things we’ve been taught, of the bias in the history we’ve learned, of the things in our legacy that were immoral, wrong, unethical. We have to do this in order to empower our children to create the kind of world we want them to live in. And almost always, that begins with talking about hard things.
(clockwise, from the top left) Dr. Doreen Thierauf, Andrew Rimby, Dr. Shannon Draucker, and Dr. Kimberly Cox
Today’s episode is one that any teacher, writer or editor will want to listen to… whether you’re a “teacher” in the traditional sense or not. Andrew sits down with editors of “Teaching to Transgress,” the special pedagogy issue of the open-access journal Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. As a public humanities organization, we aim to bring you accessible literary and artistic content, and this week’s round table is an exciting discussion about the overlap between pedagogy and scholarship. The panelists really turn a lens on the collaborative effort of journal editing, with a particular focus on nurturing scholarship and empowering writers.
Speaking of empowering writers, Andrew’s article in this issue is his first peer-reviewed publication! Listen to Andrew read his article “Talking Back to Walt Whitman…” or read it for yourself (or do both!).
