underground reads: Big Brain

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Big Brain

On the Outbound R Train towards Bay Ridge
Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence, by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, looks like a big read, a thick popular science book, a science book for the rest of us. "It caught my eye." She was browsing at St. Marks Bookshop in the East Village. "I like non-fiction," said Stephanie, who when questioned about the book showed no hesitation about jumping right in explain what the book is about. We learn about a group of South Africans who had much bigger brains than we do now. Lynch and Granger, said Stephanie, who is waiting to study at the Aveda Institute, investigate the Boskops, who 10,000 years ago were human-like with bigger brains.

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Book Review

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz

The brief and wondrous career of Junot Diaz was nearly derailed by the sophomore jinx. No less than The New Yorker embraced the stories in his first book, Drown (1996), publishing several, even though Diaz was more or less an unknown writer. The stories took place in the Dominican Republic, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, and Diaz told the stories well. He told some stories that had never been told, he told some stories in a unique voice of a teenager sandwiched between the DR and the US, and he told crafty stories that created familial discomfort and even abuse as a daily ritual. I remember teaching my favorite stories from Drown at Long Island University in Brooklyn, not long after the book came out, and my Dominican students wondered why the people who read The New Yorker would embrace stories about “real life on the streets.” Such was the bridge the novel made—Upper East Side and Park Slope, I’d like you to meet Bushwick and Washington Heights; Adult Literati , please shake hands with 18-year-olds who normally don’t like to read.

But the pressure to produce another great book afterwards was great. He told Marina Lewis, in an interview that appeared in Other Voices #6 and on the website webdelsol.com:

I’m a brutal person. I torture myself. So I think for the first five years [after Drown came out] I just pressured myself to the point where there was no joy in writing, and if there’s no joy in writing you can’t tell stories. It’s funny, because in some ways, if I had not put so much pressure on myself, I probably would have written two books already. I’m not saying either of them would have been good, that’s another thing, but I could definitely have produced two books.

Last year, Diaz produced The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Sophomore jinx—fukú— lifted. How do you top a book of intimate stories of characters’ private battles with their families, poverty, their Dominican heritage, and most importantly themselves—stories told so discreetly that you have to wonder if you’re hearing a secret? You tell an epic—loudly, perhaps brazenly. Oscar Wao is the story of Oscar, a fat boy in New Jersey who desperately wants to get with a woman—even just one woman!—but he has too much going against him. Not only is he fat, but he’s a nerd. He loves the Sci Fi and fantasy. And if that weren’t geeky enough, he speaks like an over-educated dandy who is more socially awkward and wimpy than any of Diaz’s previous characters. And if that weren’t enough, he comes from a very angry mother, who terrorizes Oscar and his older sister Lola, a girl who is as smart as Oscar, but savvy and beautiful. And finally, if all that weren’t enough (Dayenu! or the Spanish equivalent) Oscar and his family were under the Dominican curse, the fukú.

This is not, however, the epic of Oscar and his family, but an epic of the Dominican Republic, or at least of the Trujillo D.R. Trujillo becomes the embodiment of the fukú that ravages Oscar’s life. The story not only takes place in New Jersey, where Oscar goes to public school and college, but in the Dominican Republic, where Trujillo terrorizes the country even more pervasively than Oscar’s mother terrorizes him. He destroys the life of Oscar’s family, including his mother Beli, who lived to escape to America, but was still soiled and beaten by, if not Trujillo, than “a flunky for the Trujillato, and not a minor one”—a man who was married to Trujillo’s sister. More than once in the novel, the clutches of Trujillo—either as in this case his family, or just his modus operandi—scar Oscar and his family irrevocably.

Though Diaz’s explanation of Trujillo’s brutalism and fascism, and through the symbolism of what happens to Oscar and his family, the novel indicts Trujillo for ruining the lives of the Dominican people. That is an easy mark, and Diaz is not the first. But because the novel starts out connecting the European invasion of the America’s with Dominican bad luck—“No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since”—the novel also arraigns the United States as well. For it is the U.S., Diaz reminds us, that supported Trujillo while he raped the Island and its people. The novel is quite good, mostly through the use of footnotes, of providing enough history to assail Trujillo properly. Oscar’s life, particularly towards the end of the book, makes sense to us through the lens of that history.

What makes less sense—and is the novel’s major distraction—is the hipster voice of the narrator. Rather than using Oscar’s sister Lola to tell the story—which she does just a little bit—the narrator is mostly Yunior, a sometime boyfriend of Lola and Oscar’s college roommate. There is some hint that Yunior is a stand in for the writer, as Yunior is himself a writer. Yunior’s blue language, down aphorisms, and Spanglish is often obstructive and calls far too much attention to itself. The novel’s ending, too, seems to go on forever, and spells out far too much for us.

But the novel is well worth reading. Perhaps it is not worthy of the Pulitzer, which it won. But because Oscar’s story is engaging, as are the bite-sized spoonfuls of Dominican history, the novel is a fine, fine underground read.

Book Review

The Strike That Ch

anged New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis
By Jerald Podair

It never occurred to me until earlier this month that Prospect Park in Brooklyn has a black entrance and a white one. White people tend not to think of those things. My black high school students and black student teacher from Brooklyn College, however, pointed out that white people enter the park at its most Northern tip, Grand Army Plaza, and that black people enter from Parkside or Ocean Avenues, to the south. There is no sign that says “Colored Entrance” or “Whites Only.” Many black people live in the neighborhoods to the south and to the east, such as East Flatbush, while lots of white people live North West in Park Slope. One park: a black way of entering it, and a white one.

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Report, which issued a dismal summation of the United States in black and white: “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” It is also, of course, 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And 2008 also marks a more local anniversary, one that puts concrete detail into the Kerner Report’s abstraction and a lesser known post-script to King’s death: The Ocean Hill-Brownsville school controversy, teacher strikes, and race conflict.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville clashes stood for something dire in 1968 and afterwards. They showed the ugly underbelly of the era’s Civil Rights Movement—white liberals and power brokers manipulating racial integration from a convenient distance and for political rather than ethical reasons; black community activists preaching separatism and ethnic hatred; and the white middle class practicing white supremacy and segregation. For us, now, 40 years later, Ocean Hill-Brownsville was a portend, not only of different ways into a giant public park, but for a continued segregation of New York’s public domain—particularly its public schools.
As told by Jerald E. Podair, in The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, the conflict pitted white teachers and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) union against the mostly black community of Ocean Hill-Brownsville and its supporters in a fight for the control of the neighborhood’s public schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville shattered the belief many whites had that New York was the ultimate pluralistic city, Podair writes. Rather, white New Yorkers discovered what black New Yorkers had known all along: That New York was a city in 1968 where white and black not only live separately and unequally, but resentfully, suspiciously, and downright disdainfully.
At issue, to one way of looking at it, was Community Control (remember, we’re talking about multiple ways of looking at the same thing, by whites and by blacks). Community Control was an idea that came of age in the mid-1960s that said communities should govern their own schools, not massive central bureaucracies like New York City’s Board of Education. New York’s black communities, in Harlem and in Brownsville, notably, began wanting black principals and more black teachers, of which the Board of Education had a very limited number at the time. Meanwhile, schools like the ones in Ocean Hill-Brownsville were failing the kids who went there under the white principals, where primarily white teachers taught—often bad teachers or teachers putting in time in order to move up the Board of Ed. ladder or get a transfer to an all white neighborhood or a suburb. “’By the early 1960s, New York effectively had a dual public school system. In its ‘white’ system, presided over by a cohort of experienced teachers, students read at or above the national average…in the ‘black’ system, pupils in crowded classrooms, receiving instruction from teachers who were learning on the job, read an average of two years behind the city’s white students, and dropped out at a rate double that of the city as a whole,” writes Podair.

So in 1967, black school leaders, parents and white teachers, including representatives from the United Federation of Teachers, formed a community governing board. Community, in this case, was defined not only by people who lived in Brownsville, but the white teachers who worked in the schools, and the liberals who supported community control, like the Ford Foundation and even the mayor, John Lindsey.
A kumbaya solution, however, was not welcomed, and this particular sense of community did not last long.

Some background: While whites dominated New York’s public school teaching ranks, Jews made up a disproportionate share of those whites, 60 percent of all new hires between 1940 and 1960. Those public school teachers, Podair points out, rose through the school system through a complex series of civil service-like examinations and made for themselves a nice little middle class niche, living comfortably far away from Brownsville and other black neighborhoods in their own outer borough enclaves, such as Forest Hills, Queens, and Canarsie, Brooklyn.

Podair writes that many of those teachers operated under the assumption that black school kids did poorly because of the “cultural of poverty,” which he defines as a “rejection of, or indifference to, the dominant values of the surrounding society,” and included, “among other traits, nontraditional family structures, strong present-time orientation, propensity to violence, and lack of sexual inhibition.” Children born into “the culture of poverty” lacked the drive towards upward mobility. Sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Podair writes, found the Black family deeply flawed in its “structure and life style.” Because of the Culture of Poverty, Black students did poorly. In Brownsville’s Junior High School 271, a school that would become the center of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy, “reading and math scores were among the lowest in the city, with 73 percent of its pupils below grade level in reading and 85 percent in math…discipline was poor [in Ocean Hill-Brownsville beyond JHS 271], with a rising number of assaults on teachers and acts of vandalism.” According to the Culture of Poverty, the blame could be laid on the black community, not on the white teachers.

Black intellectuals and the local community obviously did not see it that way; in fact, they blamed the teachers. Integration had failed. New York’s white families in the outer ‘burbs didn’t want their children going to primarily black schools in primarily black neighborhoods any more than white people did in other parts of the country. Since white people opposed integration, went the thinking among some, perhaps segregation might the answer, not only from white students, but white educators as well. Here, Podair quotes Kenneth Clark: “Cultural deprivation, he argued…was a ‘cult,’ an ‘alibi’ for white teachers: ‘[Black] children, by and large, do not learn because they are not taught because those who are charged with the responsibility of teaching them do not believe that they can learn, do not expect them to learn, and do not act towards them in ways which help them to learn.” According to these activists, the blame could be laid on the white teachers, not the black community.

White and black values: It was a meritocracy that allowed white and particularly Jewish teachers to rise through the teaching ranks, all the while thriving on the middle class values that held that education was the key to the middle class version of the American dream, which included material comforts, economic stability, and professional advancement. Those values elicited criticism from black thinkers and Brownsville community members. Again, Podair quotes Clark, who “describes a white middle-class world that, apart from the damage it did in the ghetto, was itself ‘sick.’” Harold Cruse, writing at the time, “called for a ‘new black middle class organized on the principle of cooperative economic ownership and technical administration,’” not the materialism of the dominant white culture. Cruse, the African-American Teachers Association, and the man ultimately put in charge of Community Control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Rhody McCoy, called for black control of the black children’s schools, curriculum, and the hiring of black teachers.

An added source of conflict included the Jewish teachers. At the time, Jews, who prided themselves in their participation in the civil rights movement, were at odds with Black militancy, which had gained popularity in black neighborhoods by 1968. Traditionally, one way of thinking went, New York Jews had a unique character separate from whites, a minority that sought common ground with other minorities, like African Americans. But as Jews moved into the middle class and out to the outer boroughs, they found themselves making alliances with other white non-Protestants, like Catholics, and on the other side of the city’s fence from the blacks. Jews began worrying about the rise in welfare, taxes, and crime. And that made them less than supportive of the New York’s black communities; that, to many people in the black community, made Jews white.
White teachers in Ocean Hill-Brownsville who were supposed to be part of the community control experiment, part of a local board of education, left the neighborhood for the summer vacation in June of 1967, expecting they would continue work on community control in September. That board, sans the UFT and its teachers, met all summer. They had already gotten permission to appoint teachers and administrators who were not on city-wide seniority lists. During that summer, the local board appointed three principals without the teachers’ participation. Those teachers were told that they had only to vet the newly written community control plan.

Enter UFT President Albert Shanker. He called for the first of three teachers’ strikes in September 1967. Shanker became one of the major players in this drama, the face of the white teachers and the wily opponent of McCoy, who lead the community control board. The strikes, lead by Shanker, were largely precipitated by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville split between teachers, on one side, and Black leaders, educators, and community members on the other, although the first strike was a contractual dispute. But, like so many scenes in this way, the strike was not seen by everyone as a labor dispute. “While the 1967 strike, which last two weeks, affected all of New York, black communities, especially Ocean Hill-Brownsville, viewed it as a racial affront—an attempt to withhold educational services from black school children.” McCoy and his board kept the schools open during the strike, and sought revenge on the striking teachers by notifying their local draft boards, as many young adults became teachers to avoid the draft, and “harassing” them after they returned to work.

It became war. The mayor, the New York Times, the Ford Foundation—a battalion of liberal power brokers—took the side of community control, but Shanker fought them all. Podair portrays Shanker as both the autocratic UFT leader and a labor superhero, standing up unflinchingly for the teachers, forcing his will on everyone who would comply. McCoy, another major player, was depicted as quiet but powerful, with lots of allies, who was as unmovable as Shanker. After the first strike, McCoy ratcheted up the pressure on the white teachers. A teacher was accused of striking a student and was fired, without a hearing. The UFT fought back. The Ford Foundation issued a report praising community control and the UFT offered its own decentralization plan, one that included teachers’ rights. A decentralization bill was proposed in Albany, only to be opposed by Shanker and the UFT. By April, the community board announced that it would fire teachers hostile to community control. On May 9, 17 white teachers and administrators in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, particularly at JHS 271 were fired without due process.

Members of the local community barred the teachers’ path into the school. John Lindsey, the liberal Republican mayor, who boasted that New York didn’t have the race riots other cities had in the mid 60s, had to send in police to protect the teachers. The mayor ultimately decided not to have the police force their way into the school and Shanker called Lindsey “’a profile in weakness.’” Shanker said the teachers had the right to teach at the school to which they were appointed. McCoy and the community disagreed, arguing that the white teachers demeaned the black students with their curriculum, culture, and incompetence. Eventually, hearings for the fired teachers were held and McCoy had little evidence to show the teachers’ incompetence, only that they opposed the community control. Weeks after the mass dismissal, some of the teachers were ordered back to school by the central Board of Education, and the local board closed all of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools in protest. Shanker and the UFT responded by striking the 350 Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers for the rest of the school year. Replacement teachers were brought in. By that fall, nearly all of the city’s 50,000-plus teachers struck for two days. The mayor settled with the union, and the teachers went back to work. When the teachers got to their schools in Brownsville, they walked into a cauldron.

As they arrived, approximately fifty community residents, most from the Brooklyn branch of CORE, surrounded them, brandishing sticks and bandoliers of bullets. While the men cursed the teachers, threw the bullets at them, and threatened to ‘carry you out in pine boxes,’ McCoy entered the room, and quietly observed the scene, offering no assistance o the terrified educators. After a few minutes, he told them to report back to their respective schools…At JHS 271, students attacked Nauman [one of the original teachers who had been fired] and other UFT teachers. Principal Harris herded them into a locked classroom for their safety. Police rescued them later in the afternoon.

By the next day, the teachers struck again, this time for two weeks. When that strike ended, the local board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville still would not reappoint the fired teachers to classrooms. Eventually, they fired all UFT teachers instead. After much political wrangling, between Lindsey, the Board of Education, and the UFT, a third strike ensued. This time, reports Podair, the whole city took sides. This time, the strike lasted five weeks. This time, Shanker demanded the removal of McCoy as head of the community board and dismissal of the board itself. After the media showed the violence between the school community and the teachers, the city’s blacks sided with the local Brownsville board and the whites with the teachers. Anti-Semitism reared its ugly head. Shanker was compared to Joseph McCarthy. The UFT picketed the New York Times offices.

By November, the third strike had, in the words of one observer, ‘become nihilist.’ White UFT supporters screamed ‘nigger scab’ at a black teacher in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, ‘nigger lover’ at a white replacement teacher, and called a local board ally a cannibal.” The word ‘genocide’ now appeared in the public statements of local board members on almost a daily basis, in a clear attempt to inflame Jewish sensibilities. Shanker’s words of choice were ‘extremists’ and ‘mobs.’ Even Whitney Young [a civil rights leader] whose relationship with Shanker had been poisoned…appeared to lose control, asking rhetorically, ‘it’s a pity, isn’t it, that there are only two thousand blacks you can get killed on Ocean Hill.’

Finally, the strike ended. Again, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers were sent back to work. This time they stayed there.
Podair tells a damn good story, much in the way that Johnathan Mahler did with his Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, which told the story of New York City in 1977. There are major and minor characters, but no real heroes. Podair seems fair: No one looks good in this story, not the masses, not the individuals. The ways Podair spins his yarn, this is in fact a story of nihilism, when all sides descended into a morass of anger and racial hatred.

What is different now? I teach in a school of black and Hispanic students and, mostly, white teachers, not that far from Brownsville. I have to believe the teachers are better than Podair describes, and college is a very real goal for many of Brooklyn’s minority students. Yet, there still is a vast divide between black and white. Schools are not segregated by law, but most are segregated nevertheless. So are many movie theaters and bars and restaurants and cafes. And, apparently, so are the entrances of parks.

BOOK REVIEW

Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
By Ben Ratliff
Farrar, Straus, Giroux
2007

by Garth Wolkoff

In Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff charts saxophone colossus John Coltrane’s maturation from workman-like sideman to A-list tenor player to leader of the avant garde to cultural and jazz music and cultural deity. His final incarnation— according to Ratliff, he once said he wanted to become a Saint—and untimely death left jazz musicians and jazz music an empty space that has not been filled—how can anyone fill the artistic, not to mention spiritual, shoes of a God?

For jazz fans like myself, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound is like cake—a dense, rich piece of cake. The book isn’t a biography but the story of how Coltrane rose to become the foremost jazz musician, and then, at a pinnacle of critical and popular appreciation, changed his sound and his approach, garnering accolades for an almost populist approach to the music industry but intense flak for joining the outer ranks of, to many fans and critics, an unlistenable jazz avante gard.

Ratliff writes about music through the lens of cultural history and sociology—Coltrane, he says, didn’t just become great all on his own, but that “there were circumstances.” Most importantly, however, Ratliff writes about music using a language that most of us layman don’t understand. He charts Coltrane’s rise from late bloomer, jazz wise, through those who influenced him—the obvious, Charlie Parker—and the not so obvious—the transcriptions of Bird’s solo on “Don’t Blame Me” and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suites. But Ratliff takes us a step further, telling us what Coltrane and his friend, fellow saxophone player Jimmy Heath, did with the Stravinsky: “’We were extracting the cadenzas,’ he [Heath] remembered, ‘and turning them around to fit our own groove.’”

Writing in a musician’s idiom doesn’t help us know “cadenzas,” but it does help us know how Coltrane evolved into such a superior technical player—Coltrane was a student not only of jazz, but of the most important and subtle vagaries of all kinds of music. Read though The Story of a Sound despite the fact that Ratliff does not spare us the idiomatic language of musicians. It turns out that Coltrane was not like Miles Davis who lived in the world of celebrity, or Charles Mingus, who also lived in the world of the cultural critic. Coltrane was a homer who didn’t like to socialize and became obsessed with the idiosyncrasies of the language of music that Ratliff takes such care to chronicle.

After drug troubles and less than superlative run with Davis, Coltrane plays with Thelonious Monk and begins to put all his various musical study and apprenticeship together. He rejoins Miles’ band in 1957 and his career really begins. “He was a different musician,” Ratliff writes, and he takes us through one solo on the Milestones album, which he called “one of the great Coltrane moments”:

At first he announces himself, getting comfortable with some long tones in his first chorus. But most of the second and third are expressed in sixteenth notes, skidding through extensions of chords and implying several chords simultaneously; it’s like dirty motocross.

While we may know nothing about the difference between chorus and verse, or the second or third of anything, Ratliff deftly brings us to dirty motocross. It is this type of writing that can drag the reader through the unfamiliar vernacular to an image of which we can connect; Ratliff’s writing about music is not dancing about architecture, but a description of sound and how sound is made physically, technically, theoretically, emotionally, and even spiritually.

Coltrane’s blossom can be heard on Davis’s seminal album Kind of Blue, “a lyrical record,” Ratliff tells us, “that sits almost formally isolated in jazz history, one more turning point for Coltrane in a five year stretch that was already full of turning points. It is a sweet and expressive music, but it lays out its formal intensions quite plainly.” Coltrane and Miles’ playing on the record would spark a revolution in jazz, one where something called “modal” playing—not the conventional switching of chords—puts the onus less on the piece of music and more on the musicians playing it. Coltrane formed his own band, one often referred to as the Classic Quartet, and recorded an album My Favorite Things, including the title track from the quotidian song from the quotidian musical, The Sound of Music. The album would become a hit, and if Coltrane followed the trajectory of a conventional star, he would have continued to issue hit albums to please an admiring public. At his critical and popular zenith, “Coltrane was as much of a culture hero within jazz as Charles Mingus,” Ratliff writes, “but, unlike Mingus, he didn’t worry out loud about the place of jazz in American society. He was curiously uncompelled to publicly condemn uncomprehending listeners, whether for reasons of aesthetics, philosophy, culture, or race...”

Here’s the rub and the point of the book. Coltrane didn’t take a star turn, but a left turn—some would say metaphorically—that would bring him farther from fame and closer to music and perhaps God. Although his modal playing with Davis began the revolution that would change the sound of Coltrane’s recordings and live performances, his playing jumped even further in 1965, after his awe-inspiring and religious sounding 1964 recording, A Love Supreme, which Ratliff calls “the fulcrum of his career.” While his music had gotten farther and farther “out,” as jazz musicians might say, beginning with his “Live at the Village Vanguard” in 1961, it really went to the margins of the conventional in the last three years of his life. By ’65, “The great quartet was still intact but reaching the edge of the cliff”; Coltrane’s music had reach an “excellence...in its turbulence.” It is that turbulence that began to turn off more staid listeners from Coltrane and attract musicians and fans who like many in 1965 were searching for something more radical and less predictable.

Coltrane began expanding his band, letting players join him on the bandstand that were considered below him in ability by some, and the cream of the new experimental sound by others: Rashid Ali, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders. Ratliff recalls a concert in Chicago in August of ’65 that “has been understood as a famous breaking point—a Dylan-at-Newport, or a Rite of Spring.”

The set was thirty-seven minutes long. The quartet, with Archie Shepp as an extra on tenor, yoked together a set out of the theme from “Nature Boy,” some collective improvising, and “Blue Valse.” The music grew jagged and vociferous. It aggravated a great part of the crowd, prompting, according to some witnesses, a large exodus.”

But for Ratliff, Coltrane’s story is not a rise and fall of arguably the greatest jazz musician ever. Coltrane, the book tells us, took jazz from the post-World War II world of Be-Bop to where it is now, single handedly, through what he did and didn’t do, during life and death—for the last half of the book is about Coltrane’s impact after he died. Coltrane never fell, just defined jazz in broader and more emotive terms than anyone had every done or has done since.

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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Big Brain

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