Aidan’s Senior Year, Getting Past The Gatekeepers

Jacques Steinberg takes us inside the college admissions process.

I know I will have trouble completing this sentence, and Aidan started his senior year of high school yesterday.

Other parents may relate to the feeling of wonder both at the young adult their child has become and at how little time seems to have elapsed since I took him to the first day of first grade.

As with seniors the country over, Aidan is applying to college.  As is typical for him, he is carrying out the necessary tasks with extreme prejudice, to lift one of Joseph Conrad’s more memorable phrases.

In addition to filling out the FAFSA4Caster and wondering how the heck Dunreith and I are going to find the amount of money that tool says we should be able to pay the college of his choice, we are reading about college admissions.

The Gatekeepers, a suggestion from dear friend Dave Russell, is one of the most recent books I’ve read.  Dunreith is working her way through the book, which follows Ralph Figueroa, apparently a Stanford classmate of mine, and the rest of the admissions crew at Wesleyan University as they sort through the thousands of applicants.

More Katrina Resources by Beth, Murder by Type blogger

Reader and blogger Beth posted the following comment about Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and offered the following resources about Katrina:

I posted a review of ZEITOUN on my blog, Murder By Type. I knew people who lived in New Orleans at the time of Katrina and I don’t know where they are now.

As an acknowledgement of the fifth anniversay of Katrina, I used the blog (which is actually a place where I post reviews of crime fiction) to highlight some stories of the Katrina experience for the people of New Orleans.

Friday I used information from Chris Rose’s collection of columns for the Times-Picayune, 1DEAD IN ATTIC. Saturday, I focused on Orleans Parish coroner, Frank Milyard, and his experiences and the difficulty he faced in identifying the bodies of people who had died and were left where they lay.
Tomorrow, Sunday, the anniversary of the breach of the levees, I posted a review of ZEITOUN by Dave Eggers.

Beth
http://www.murderbytype.wordpress.com

D’Ann Penner on Overcoming Katrina

D'Ann Penner and Keith Ferndinand show another side of black New Orleans in Overcoming Katrina.

I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting D’Ann Penner in person-I’ve learned about her through reputation and exchanged a few emails-but look forward to doing so in November, when we will both participate in a refugee trauma program in Orvieto, Italy.

The reason: the award-winning scholar clearly has heart and intelligence and drive and grit and conscience and empathy in abundant measure.

These qualities and others pulse through Overcoming Katrina, an oral history comprised of interviews with 27 black New Orleanians, all of whom survived, and were deeply effected by, the hurricane that devastated the Gulf region five years ago tomorrow.

Paul Tamburello in New Orleans on Katrina’s Fifth Anniversary

Former fourth grade teacher, mentor, friend and fellow blogger Paul Tamburello is down in New Orleans for his fifth trip to the Crescent City, a place that has grabbed a firm place in his heart, if not yet his part-time residence.

Here’s an excerpt from one of PT’s latest New Orleans posts: this weekend he will attend a one-day bloggers’ conference, too.

Five years ago, Katrina drowned the city. The storm broke it in ways it wasn’t broken before. The black community that makes up the majority of the city remembers a history of being left to hang out to dry after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and felt it happening again with Katrina in 2005. Conspiracy theories about how and why the levees failed persist in these communities.

Remember video clips of people in New Orleans waving “HELP US” signs from rooftops of houses in over 20 feet of water in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005. Remember wondering why the National Guard, Red Cross, and FEMA didn’t show up a day after CNN began filming the horror? Remember thinking the scene looked like it must be happening in some third world country an ocean away?

How does this city balance the duality of injustice and inequality on one hand and exuberance for life on the other by continuing to let the good times roll in their lovable quirky ways ? There’s an old Lloyd Price song titled, “I Don’t Know Why I Love You But I Do.” Maybe that’s how New Orleanians feel about their city.

This is my fifth visit to New Orleans since the storm. The fact that I love the city certainly colors my writing about it so here on the eve of the fifth anniversary of Katrina, there are some things I’m sorting out.

International Literary Quarterly Update

Peter Robertson is expanding the International Literary Quarterly's linguistic offerings.

I’m back!

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks, between heading to California to look at colleges with Aidan, banging out a draft for our latest project for The Chicago Reporter and then traveling to Boston for Diane’s memorial service and burial.

I’ll be posting more regularly now and am excited, as always, to hear your thoughts.

Last year I interviewed Peter Robertson about the International Literary Quarterly, or Interlitq, the literary journal he founded.  Peter’s just created a couple of videos in Spanish and English in which he discusses “strategy for Interlitq and our aim of publishing considerably more literature in Spanish–becoming essentially a publication in English and in Spanish.”

Peter also shared that Interlit Q will be having a launch party in Miami in December-could be just the place we need to go!

I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Peter

Eulogy for Diane Lowenstein

My late stepmother Diane Lowenstein writing poetry in Rockport in the early part of last decade.

Good morning.  I am Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, one of Diane’s stepsons.  I knew her for more than 35 years, from the time Alex and I were in a joint second/third grade classroom.  While it’s nearly impossible to encapsulate such a vital and dynamic person as Diane, when talking and thinking about her with Dunreith and Aidan in preparation for talking today, several major traits of her stood out to us.

Diane was a marvelous listener. Beyond the training she had as a counselor, she had a deep empathic sense, forged during her years in Luxembourg after World War II, that let her make the person she was speaking with feel safe, and to listen to what a person was saying, what they meant, what they felt.  She also could connect whatever they were discussing related to their life as a whole.  Dad has talked to me often about how he had lived 52 years before feeling completely understood by another person.  Diane gave that to him.  Her listening was a central part of why he felt that way.  Dunreith treasured the walks and excursion she and Diane took in Evanston, in Cambridge and in Rockport for that same quality.  Running the gamut from child to George Eliot, their conversations were often punctuated by hearty chuckles on both sides.

On Blog-cation

I'm taking a blog break this week and will be back next week.

Hey, folks,

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be on blog-cation the rest of the week and back next week.

Have fun!

Upheaval in 1968, Richard Wolin on French Intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution

Richard Wolin's textured look at French intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution is worthwhile reading.

By any standard, 1968 was a tumultuous year around the globe.

Here in the United States, two of the decade’s leading lights, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, were murdered within two short months of each other.  In Czechoslovakia, the arrival of Soviet tanks marked the brutal end to that nation’s experiment with “Socialism with a human face.”   In Mexico, students challenged the government, which responded by massacring hundreds of protestors.

France also saw its share of revolutionary ferment and action, especially in May.

Many of the leading activists were students and left-wingers drawing inspiration from the recently launched Cultural Revolution in China. Enthralled by Mao Zedung, whose commitment to philosophy and poetry they admired, these intellectuals were blind to the revolution’s abuses.

Yet, far from being a one-dimensional story of privileged students and intellectuals ignoring the blemishes of an exotic other, the French tale is more complicated, according to Richard Wolin.  In his fascinating book, The Wind from the East, Wolin argues that the actions the French people took while acting in accordance with their limited understanding of the cultural revolution permanently and positively changed French society for the better.

The Wind from the East is more than a straightforward analysis of intellectuals’ enchantment with the revolution.  In this enormously rich work, Wolin evokes an age, takes the measure of towering philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, among others, supplies a subtle and textured analysis of French, and to a lesser degree, Chinese society, and raises important questions about the legacy of social movements and appropriate criteria by which to evaluate them.

Wolin will be speaking about the work today at 2:00 p.m. at the No Exit Cafe, 6970 N. Glenwood Ave.

Bill Ayers’ retirement, resources about him.

Education professor and former radical Bill Ayers is retiring this summer.

The Chicago Tribune announced on Thursday that UIC education professor and former radical Bill Ayers will be retiring at the end of the summer.

The scion of a wealthy and influential Chicago family, Ayers and later wife Bernadine Dohrn were two of the leaders of the Weather Underground.  Operating in the late 60s, the group carried out a series of bombings against targets they deemed were key cogs in the capitalist machine.  Things went awry in the early 70s, when a bomb accidentally exploded at a house in Greenwich Village, killing three members, including Ayers’ girlfriend at the time.

Todd Gitlin, a fellow SDS member who disapproved of the violence, wrote about this and many other events in his summary history of the 1960s’, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Combining his journalism training and personal experience, Gitlin gives a comprehensive if somewhat brief look at the decade’s major events, with an understandable slant toward those in which he was personally involved.

Ayers and Dohrn appear briefly as parents in Ron Suskind’s A Hope In The Unseen, a book that grew out of Suskind’s Pulitzer Prize winning series about Washington, DC student Cedric Jennings’ efforts to gain acceptance to, and then survive in, Brown University.  Zayd Dohrn, the couple’s son, and Jennings struck up a friendship during their freshman year, and  Ayers and Dohrn meet Jennings’ mother in an awkward encounter during that year.

Alexandra Fuller on reconciliation in South Africa

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's book provides context for Alexandra Fuller's article.

The World Cup has ended, but, hopefully, attention to South Africa has not.

Last night I read an engaging National Geographic story by Alexandra Fuller, author of a memoir about growing up in Zimbabwe that I have not yet read.

Accompanied by photos by the remarkable James Nachtwey, who worked in the country for the magazine during the bloody days before South Africa’s landmark elections in 1994, the story tells about Stefaans Coetzee.  A hate-filled white young man, Coetzee  carries out a bombing that kills people and wounds several others, including Olga Macingwane, one of the story’s other characters.

The killing lands him in prison, where he met a prisoner in his 60s-the notorious Eugene ‘Prime Evil’ de Kock. One of the heads of the notorious Vlakplaas farm, where hundreds of apartheid opponents were tortured and killed, de Kock was serving two life sentences and 212 additional years for the heinous acts he had committed in the service of the government.

When Coetzee met him, though, de Kock’s racial views had changed.  The older man worked tirelessly to change the young Coetzee’s mind about being superior to black people because  of the color of his skin.

Part of the change in de Kock’s thinking may have come about through a series of conversations he had with former Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner and friend Pumla Gobod0-Madikizela-an experience she recounts in A Human Being Died That Night.

In the slender book, Gobodo-Madikizela talks about the swirl of emotions that came over after she comforted a crying de Kock, who then reminded her that that had been the hand that had ended so many of her comrades’ lives.  She recounts de Kock’s gradual sharing of being physically abused by his father as a child and release, if not complete surrender, of his racist ideas.

By the book’s end, de Kok had apologized to the mothers of some of his victims, who accepted his repentance. Gobodo-Madikizela uses the exchange as an example of restorative justice’s potential.  The accepted apology did not absolve de Kok from criminal responsibility, and, as mentioned above, he will die in prison.

Coetzee goes through a similar process, and has an as yet uncertain legal future.  Fuller’s story and Pumla’s book both touch of central issues of how damaged societies and people can heal after unspeakable atrocities.

Both texts offer some cause for hope.