Teachers

Last night I thought of Monsieur Garrapon. Perhaps I should not say "last night," but rather this morning. I saw the clock from where I lay in bed, and the time was 4:15 a.m. I was not dreaming, but rather lying there in one of those stretches of time in the night when old men like myself cannot sleep, but rather devote themselves to thinking over their life, what they have seen and done and accomplished, and what many of their experiences have meant to them over the years.

Monsieur Garrapon was a French literature at the Universite de Caen, in Normandy, France, where I spent about four months studying. I cannot remember a thing about the other three or four instructors I encountered there, and I cannot remember much about Monsieur Garrapon except for several details. My impression is that he was not tall -- perhaps 5' 10" in height --, that he spoke very clear and measured French, and that his medium-length hair was what we would call "dirty blond." Since I was 19 and he was probably in his late forties at the time, and since I am just now turning 71, if he were still alive he would now be around 96. It is rather unlikely that he has lived this long. He taught a course about the plays of Moliere, the great French 17th Century dramatist, and he also had a great deal of contact with foreign students such as myself.

At French universities, if my experience at Caen is any indication, success or failure are left very much up to the student. A student took a course, attended classes, and studied like hell to prepare for the final exam. There were no assignment such as "Read pages 200 - 350 for next Tuesday." Since this was a course in the plays of Moliere, I remember Professor Garrapon stating at the first class meeting that there are many editions of Moliere's plays and that he recommended 10 or so for various reasons. He explained these reasons as he listed them on the board. It was up to the student to decide which edition or editions he would study, and to go out and find them. The course was about "the plays" of Moliere -- ALL the plays. And so we were to read ALL the plays.

What I remember most about Professor Garrapon were his lectures. He came to class, opened notes he only occasionally referred to, and delivered brilliant, finely polished lectures that left the class with insights few other teachers would have had and that we students would never have had without his instruction.

It was also Professor Garrapon from whom I learned a literary technique the French call "explication de texte." This technique really shows whether or not a reader has worked hard to understand an author's writings. It consists of a very close reading of between half a page and a page of what an author has written, and then analyzing what is on the page. How is this small sample of text typical of the author's writing ? How is it different ? What does it mean ? How does it mean whatever it means ? Are there ambiguities in the writing ? Are these intended. How did the author's life affect what is in the text ?

Professor Garrapon demonstrated the meaning of "explication de texte" by performing a number of these in his classes. He was brilliant. His analyses featured a great deal of intellectual enthusiasm. I shall never forget them.

In short, he was a great teacher. I'm sure that even now, so many years after his death, he is remembered by thousands of his students.

Let me tell you, also, about two teachers I knew from primary school and junior high. I remember almost nothing about two of them except what each told me.

The first was my third-grade teacher, Ms. Askew. I recall her as a very prim, upright and prissy lady, middle-aged, very precise and fussy. The main thing I remember is that several times she said to our class, "The only thing a customer can be short-changed on and never complain is education." In teaching as a substitute teacher at a Bay Area high school, where most of the students behave as though they don't care about their studies at all, I have often recalled her statement.

Unlike Ms. Askew, one teacher had a detrimental influence on me. This was a Mr. Needham, who taught my sixth grade class in Massachusetts. Mr. Needham said something to me that no teacher should ever say. His words affected me for many years.

For some reason, our seventh grade class was given a test to determine our language learning abilities. A week after the test, our teacher announced the scores. He went down through the list of pupils present, passing out a little slip of paper with the score on it to each student. When he came to my name he said, "Come and see me at the end of the class." There was no piece of paper, no score.

At the end of class when everyone else had left he told me, "You got a very, very low score on this test. It is so low that it shows you wouldn't ever be able to learn another language. Don't try to, because you'll fail."

That summer I was sent off to an elite private school for summer session. One of my classes was Latin, which I failed. At the start of the normal school year, I decided to try French.

At the end of the year I again had a failing grade. This time, however, I was told by the instructor, Mr. Fish, that I had "passed numerically, but I thought it would be better if I failed you."

Again I attended summer school. This time, I took introductory French. I must have learned something in Mr. Fish's class because at the end of the summer my grade was A. After that, I took French every semester, and I always got an A. What I had needed was confidence. I learned French well enough to receive advanced standing in it when I entered college.

In my first year of college, I continued studying French. Then at the start of summer after my freshman year participated in a French foreign study course that sent me to France. It was in the fall at the Universite de Caen, where I met the Monsieur Garrapon.

Several years later when I attended graduate school at Berkeley, I worked as a French translator for the United States Joint Publications Agency in San Francisco. I might add that other events later in life took me to the South Pacific, where I also learned spoken Samoan well enough to serve a number of times as a court translator. So much for Mr. Needham's prophecy.

But all the rest of my life I remembered that Mr. Needham had committed the one sin a teacher can commit against a student. He told me I could never succeed.

At Dartmouth College I had many good instructors, but one, a writing and English instructor named Arthur Dewing, stands out above the others.

Professor Dewing was known as one of the college's most demanding professors. He took his students and their work seriously. He expected them to take themselves and their work seriously, too.

Once a week as we entered his freshman English course we turned in compositions, placing them in a pile on his desk. A story, perhaps apocryphal, circulated to the effect that one day he'd entered the classroom and asked the class if anyone had written anything wonderful. Met with silence, he was said to have swept the whole stack of compositions into the waste basket and told the students, "Okay, try again. This time make your work wonderful."

Professor Dewing was a tough grader. Rumor had it that the last A he'd given anyone was to Budd Schulberg ten or fifteen years earlier.

Professor Dewing looked somewhat like an elderly Humphrey Bogart. He spoke with a similar tough, clipped accent. I had a freshman English course with him the second semester of my freshman year. After that, because I'd received advanced placement in English before entering the college, he allowed me to take part in his creative writing course, which I did for the rest of my years at Dartmouth.

His creative writing course involved writing perhaps 5,000 or more words a week, meeting with him on a one-on-one session in which he read that week's work and discussed it with you, and then meeting with the whole class every two or three weeks.

The key fact I learned from Professor Dewing is that a writer must write, then rewrite, rewrite and rewrite everything. He examined the smallest details in my work. Was the word I had used in a sentence really the right word? As we sat in his office, he puffed on his pipe and read aloud what I had produced that week. How did each sentence sound ? What was the rhythm of each sentence ? ("Read Melville," he said.) He took my work seriously and he expected me to take it seriously, too. I remember laboring through through 12 rewrites of one piece. The effort proved worthwhile. It won the college writing prize that year, as well as the senior class writing prize.

My encounters with Professor Garrapon and Professor Dewing took place 50 years ago. Both must surely have passed away now, for at the time I knew them they were both late middle-aged.

I regret that to either or them I never sufficiently expressed how much I valued and appreciated their teaching.

If You Like to Read . . .

I enjoy reading very much. Put me in a bookstore and I am sure within 15 minutes to have found at least 6 books I would like to own. However, like most people reading this blog, I don't have unlimited money to buy all the books I'd like.

One of the solutions to this is an online and catolog remainder house called Daedalus Books.

Here, as I understand it, is how remainder houses work. A publishing company prints 10,000 copies of a book. Sales are great the first year, but then they slow down. After a few years perhaps they still have 1,500 copies in their warehouse. Warehouse space isn't free. There's no use storing 1,500 copies of a book the company will only sell a dozen copies each year for the next decade.

So what can a remainder house do to come out as best as possible financially ? One possibility might be to sell the remaining copies for scrap paper. I don't know what scrap paper sells for but I don't think one could sell a book for scrap for more than a few cents a copy. Another possibility is to sell the remaining copies to a remainder house, which surely pays more.

A remainder house can mark up books way beyond their purchase price and still make a handsome profit. (Don't think the business is easy. There are still large costs in staffing and warehousing, not to mention the printing and mailing of catalogs.

Nevertheless, consumers can find great bargains. For instance, I recently bought several different volumes of The Essays of Aldous Huxley for $5.98 each. If you bought the same volumes in a boostore they would cost $35 each. Being a photographer who works occasionally in Africa, I bought a book of black-and-white photos called Broken Spear: A Maasai Journey for $9.98. The price in a boostore is $50.

I could list a lot of books I have bought from Daedalus. Once when I was working rather than retired and was really flush, which I definitely am not now, I bought a complete set of a limited, special edition of the compete works of Joseph Conrad (one of my favorite authors) for $1000. The edition is strictly for collectors -- limited to 500 copies, I think it was, bound in Nigerian goatskin, with specially watermarked pages. Brand new and with pages still uncut, it sold for $3,000 a few months before I made my purchase.

No matter what kind of books interest you, Daedalus has them -- novels, poetry, fuctioon, non-fiction, short stories, childrens books, you name it. They also sell DVDs and CDs.

You can contact Daedalus at 1-800-944-8879 and get on their mailing list or go to www.salebooks.com or www.salemusic.com. I have shot my financial resources for a while, but I'll probably be temped to buy more than the next catalog arrives.

I Was Lucky Enough to Survive (3)

It was chance that helped me survive a medical problem that has been developing for me during the past decade. If not for chance, I would have died.

At the start of October 2008, I was scheduled to travel to Ivory Coast, West Africa in about two weeks. I had an ear infection. How do I know I had an ear infection ? Because juice was coming out of the ear whenever I stuck a Q-tip in either one, a practice I have engaged in for at least 50 years despite those warnings you see now and then that you "should never put Q-tips into your ear." Also, I have had frequent ear infections since my childhood, and I know when one or the other of my ears is infected. Experience does count for something.

I made an appointment with my regular doctor at my HMO. He examined my ear, and claimed that he saw no signs of infection. Luckily, however, he gave me a prescription for an antibiotic which I could take if, during my trip, I "saw any signs of ear infection."

On schedule I went off to Ivory Coast. My ears were obviously infected. My hearing in each year was way down, and I had great trouble understanding what people around me were saying. I started taking the antibiotic, which only helped a little.

Near the end of my stay, I suddenly developed a terrible pain in my side. I knew what caused this -- kidney stones. I had had kidney stones four or five times before, had had them destroyed with lithotripsy at least three times, and had naturally passed them without lithotripsy at least twice. The pain caused by kidney stones is terrible. It is claimed by many that it is worse than childbirth. Once you've had it, you know exactly what it is.

Fortunately, this initial bout with kidney stones in Ivory Coast ended within four or five hoursa. I must have passed the stone naturally. Two days later, however, I had another, more serious bout. My ear problems were also increasing, so I upped the dosage of antiobiotic I was taking. In the middle of the night, I went through heaving respiratory problems I could not control, something that had never happened to me before. By morning, and after a steaming hot bath, the pain went away. I continued taking the antibiotics.

I got on my Air France flight and returned home to Oakland, California. About two days later, I had another bout with serious kidney stone pain, and I also began the same uncontrollable, heaving breathing. It became so bad that my wife, who is bedridden and disabled and cannot drive, called a neighbor and had him take me to the hospital.

No sooner had I arrived at the emergency department when I went into more of the respiratory problems. Luckily I was hustled into the Intensive Care Ward. I remember four or five doctors and nurses hovering over me, shouting instructions to one another, and then I passed out. I went in and out of unconsciousness a few times, I think, but gradually I improved. I spent about a week in Intensive Care, hooked up to so many monitors and intravenous devices that I looked like something out of a science function movie.

Later, a day or so before I was able to leave the hospital, two doctors independently explained to me what had happened. The kidney stone had caused an infection of the kidney. Once that happened, the infection spread throughout my body and began to infect all my organs. Both told me, using identical words, "You were very, very lucky." One of them told me that the antibiotic I had taken for the ear infection had probably bought me enough time to return home and get to the hospital before the situation became fatal.

I owe my life, I think, to that ear infection and the fact that I had with me antibiotics that kept me from going over the edge. I also owe my life to the incredibly fine medical care I had at the Oakland Kaiser Hospital.

After writing this, I am going out to buy some potato salad for my wife and myself to have with our lunch of pot roast. I am going to stop at our favorite Montclair coffeehouse, called Nellie's, and have a cup of their wonderful coffee.

I Was Lucky Enough to Survive (2)

The second time I was lucky enough to survive, but might very well not have, was about 25 years ago, when I was in American Samoa.

When I travel, I always make it a point to go out and meet the people. A hotel, after all, ius not only a set of walls to keep the local people away from the guests, but also a set of walls to keep the guests away from the local people.

I was riding in a rickety, mostly wooden bus along with about five other passengers. American Samoa is mostly mountains, with a shelf of level land around the edges where most of the villages and the town of Fagatogo is located. We were way up in the mountains. Our driver kept talking with one of the passengers. Thisd wouldn't have been nearly as bad as it was if he hadn't kept half turning and trying to make eye contact with the person.

At one poiint when he was paying very little attention to the road we hit a soft shoulder. We skidded off the road. This wouldn't necessarily have been serious had we been soimewhere on the level part of the island. However, we were up in the mountains.

We went straight out into space. Below us, a hundred feet or so was a small spit of land sticking out with a palm tree growing on it. Beyond that was a drop of perhaps 500 feet ending where waves were breaking over a partly exposed reef.

I remember thinking to myself as we sailed out into space, "This is going to be interesting." Then I felt as well as heard a rending crash of metal and shattering glass.

When I became conscious again, I was lying on my back. The bus had broken in half, and one of the halves had pinned my legs against the trunk of the solitary palm tree. Someone came alonmg and pushed the bus half just enough to allow my legs the drop to the ground. Although my left leg was crushed slightly, it wasn't broken. Nobody in the bus had been killed, as we all would have been had that palm tree not been there to stop our descent another 500 feet onto the reef.

All of us seemed to be bleeding from various cuts, but no one had been injured close to death. One of the other passengers, a young man, had a broken leg. We all craweled up the slope, bleeding as we went, to the road. Once there, we simply lay on the grass, trying to recover a bit. Within a few minutes another bus came along. Seeing us, they screeched to a halt, and everyone aboard jumped out and dragged, carried and lifted us onto their vehicle. The new driver found a safe place to turn around, then sped as fast as his bus would go, taking us to the hospital.

That night I was to board a frieghter that was scheduled for a 12-day run between American Samoa and Los Angeles. After the hospital exam, I was taken by one of the other passengers to a nearby home to rest for a while. I was then taken to the freighter. I spent most of the next 12 days with my legs elevated to keep them from swelling much. When I got to my home in Berkeley I saw a doctor, who drained a certain amount of fluid from my left leg. Over the next few weeks I mended, and I felt as good as new.

Serious injuries like this one are never really over, though. During the last few years I have had recurring arthritic pain in the leg that I'd injured. Now it has become so bad that sometimes I have to take pain medication even to get out of my home and shop at a supermarket.

I am able to get about, however, and I am still able to enjoy a great deal in life. Judging froim the normal life expectancy of the men in my family, I have about 14 more years before I am gone. The last four of them I shall probably be drooling somewhere in a wheelchair, unable to remember where I am. Buit for the time being I AM HERE ! And I shall enjoy life enormously every day that I can.

I Was Lucky Enough to Survive (1)

Yes, there certainly is a lot to be thankful, from beautiful sunsets to delicious pastries like the ones pictured above.

At the age of 70 -- 71 in two weeks -- I look back over my life and see three events during which I could easily have died, and yet I somehow survived. Despite these three events, I am able to be grateful for the sunlight in the morning -- or even for the rain. I can still enjoy a good cup of coffee, a wonderful book ("So many books, so little time"), the company of my wife, great music, watching the innocence of children playing, seeing the beauty of flowers, remembering some of the incredible things I have done in my life and the incredible places I have been (lots more about that in subsequent posts), and the amazing variety of human personalities I have been exposed to. And I reflect that had each of the three events I referred to at the beginning of this paragraph gone slightly differently, I would not be around to enjoy all the things I enjoy.

The first of these events chronologically was not dramatic at all, and I have only one fleeting memory of it. When I was very young (I was born in 1938) I got pneumonia. This was either near the end or after World War II. My father was a physician and was on the staff of the hospital where I was admitted. I don't know if antibiotics were rationed at that point, but I do know that they were very new and in short supply. Probably because of my father's position in the hospital, I was given antibiotics, without which, I was told later when I was an adult, I would not have lived.

[A note about the photo: Here are some French pastries I found at a patisserie in Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa. Show me someone who doesn't enjoy food (or have a sense of humor) and I will show you a deficient human being. I love food !

If you want to have fun and enjoy life, go out and get yourself some French Pastry like this. Taste the smooth, creamy custard. Sense the fragrance of the custard and of the fruit. Note the texture of the fruit and its sweetness. Don't just wolf it down. Make eating this pastry an experience to remember. Enjoy it !]

You would think the only magazine I read is The New Yorker, but this really isn't true. The New Yorker, however, is the gift that keeps on giving . . . and giving . . . and giving. An issue appears every week, at least 50 weeks out of the year. Back issues tend to pile up because almost every issue contains lots of articles worth reading, and some weeks one just doesn't have the time.

The other day I picked up an issue (January 12, 2009) I hadn't done justice to and found a fascinating article about Barney Frank. The title is "Barney's Great Adventure, and it is subtitled "The most outspoken man in the House gets some real power."

Frank is fiercely intelligent and hard-working, and he has a caustic sense of humor. The quote I love best from him is "Conservatives believe life begins at conception and ends at birth."

If you want to learn more about one of the most powerful present-day figures in Washington, D.C., I highly recommend this article by Jeffrey Toobin.

Stephanie and Phillip

My wife religiously watches Days of Our Lives ("Daze of Our Lives") and has for thirty or more years.

I just noticed that Stephanie and Phillip are both prisoners in separate drawers in the local morgue. Before I came upstairs to this computer, I heard Phillip says something to Stephanie about "texting" someone.

When the writers on that show first came up with the idea of Stephanie and Phillip being held prisoner this way at the local morgue, they must have degenerated into screaming fits if laughter. What do you think they were smoking ?