To Boldly Go

Tonight after class one of my women students came up to me to talk. I was pleased because this particular student, L., never seems to want to chat or share anything or ask a question. It's not that she's aloof, just kind of self-sufficient. As the other students filed out, she said, "I was reading this book. . . ." "Yes," I breathed, all eagerness. . . "and there was a joke in it, something about someone telling someone else that he split more infinitives than Gene Rodenberry." She looked at me, and then continued. "I know who Gene Rodenberry is, but I want to know what a split infinitive is."

I was so tired I couldn't even think of what an infinitive was, let alone a split infinitive. I said, "Gene Rodenberry, well, he's the one that wrote Star Trek, right?" She said, "Yes."

I said, "Well, a split infinitive, that's something that used to be considered very bad, but even when I was growing up, it was already not such a big deal, I didn't really learn that rule."

Then I had to resort to pulling out Hacker's Writer's Reference to see if I could find a definition of a split infinitive.

"Sit down," I invited the student, placing the book between us cozily. "Ah, yes, there it is," I said. "An infinitive is when you have 'to' and then a verb, like 'to think,' and then if you split the infinitive you put a word between them when it shouldn't be there." The book had a couple of examples, and I showed them to her. "Oh," she said, "so probably the joke was because of the Star Trek opening where it says 'to boldly go where no man has gone before...' "

"Right!" I said. "'To boldly go' is a split infinitive. It should really be 'to go boldly.' But look at this," I continued excitedly, "here it explains how most experts say avoiding the split infinitive is no longer mandatory if it sounds awkward the other way, just like I said. Look, here's another example..."

L. jumped up, her expression pained, interrupting me. "That's okay, I don't really want to know about the grammar, I just wanted to understand the joke."

"Okay," I said, a little taken aback by her forthrightness. But then I said, trying to resurrect my teacherly poise, "It's not such an important rule anyway."

By that time, though, she was halfway out the door.

I have lost track of whether I think this is an amusing or troubling story.

Sunday Night

It was good to really slow down over this long weekend, see family, friends, sleep a lot, exercise (every day but Thursday!), clean (a little bit). Now it is 8:30 Sunday night and I am starting to feel that end-of-the-weekend anxiety creep in. But I am in pretty good shape for tomorrow--not that many more papers to grade. And I just came back from a yoga class, so I am hoping the calmness in my muscles will carry me through the evening.

The papers I am grading are responses to two different personal essays/memoirs (students had a choice of which one to respond to)--one by Naomi Wolf recounting an abusive relationship with a boyfriend that she experienced at age 14 and one by Meghan Daum recalling the crushing disappointment she experienced when she met the man she had been carrying on an Internet relationship with for months and months (her story took place when she was in her 20s). I have been impressed and touched by many of my students' responses. Even the usually less articulate writers have been able to convey both a sense of compassion for the narrators of the stories and a more distanced and analytical understanding of how these narrators got themselves into the situations they describe and the meanings of the situations.

It's interesting because in class the students have not responded in a particularly active or engaged way when we talk about gender roles or relationships. But in their writing, they seem to have strong feelings to express about these subjects.

More another time.

Giving Thanks

Grateful tonight for

1) My health.

2) My beloved family.

3) The ability to support myself--although I grumble often about my apartment's shortcomings, the bottom line is that having a roof over my head has never seemed like something to take for granted. And the fact that I do it on my own is gratifying in some profound way.

4) My friends near and far.

5) The odd moment of grace.

6) The kindness of strangers.

7) Opportunities to be kind to strangers.

8) The ability to read and think. And to teach.

9) The outdoors.

10) The subway--yes, the conditions can sometimes be maddening and frustration-inducing, but at other times there is the joy of rubbing elbows with every sort of family, hearing the conversations, seeing what people are reading, watching the children, looking over someone's shoulder at a notebook filled with lists of English words and matching Chinese characters, smiling at her.

11) My downstairs neighbor, king of the quick comeback. He had my butter and cheese while I was defrosting the refrigerator, I wanted them back but it was late and he wasn't really dressed or whatever. Then he said, "Or do you need them for dinner?" I said, in my indecisive way, "Well, I shouldn't really eat cheese. . . " He chimed in at once, with the air of pointing out something quite reasonable, "Or butter." Maybe you had to be there, but it made me laugh because the whole thing was so ridiculous--obviously I do eat those things or they wouldn't have been in his refrigerator. And the point was really whether I was going to come get them, not whether I should eat them.



Well, you get the idea.


Tomorrow I will be with my family, some of whom I get to see often, others not so often, and we will be happy to be together.


To all who may chance to read this, a happy Thanksgiving.

And I Didn't Even Take a Nap Today...

Yet here I am up at 1:42 a.m. on a school night. Nothing for it but to search my mind for some bloggable tidbit to share.

Christopher Buckley's op-ed piece in the Times today about the imagined scenario of the White House staff at ethics class made me laugh out loud, right there at my desk at work. That doesn't happen too often when I'm reading the Times.

Okay, laugh away. I'm going to bed.

Family History

This week I went to see a rough cut of a documentary about Queensbridge Houses, the housing project in Long Island City where my family lived after the war, in 1945-50. I hadn't been born yet--by the time I was born, in 1958, my family had moved to Brooklyn, to another housing project that had just opened for low- and middle-income families, in an area not far from the ocean that was still surrounded at that time by small farms.

I went to see the documentary because my 83-year-old father, along with his 90-year-old actor friend R., were featured in it. My father had seen a piece in The Daily News about a young filmmaker who was making a documentary about Queensbridge and was eager to hear from residents past and present. So he called her up and she came out to Sheepshead Bay one evening several months ago and interviewed him. (My parents had moved out of the projects for good in 1974 but my father still lives in Sheepshead Bay, around the corner from the development in which we lived when I was growing up.)

At the "premier" of the film this week, which occurred, appropriately enough, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, not far from Queensbridge Houses, the filmmaker explained that she had been galvanized into making the film when a cabdriver refused to drop her off at her apartment building within the complex. "I'm not going in there," he said. Selena, the filmmaker, decided she wanted to make a film that would show the world that there was more to Queensbridge than gang warfare and drugs, which was apparently the cabdriver's vision of the place.

The film that resulted is a melange of interviews with old-timers like my father and more recent or current residents. The old-timers are mostly white, the current residents mostly African-American and Hispanic. Their stories remain separate, reflecting in miniature the shift in population and economic well-being that took place there and in a multitude of other urban neighborhoods in the 1950s and 60s. The old-timers--a mixture of Italian, Irish, and Jewish people now in their 60s and older--have fond memories of the projects. They reminisce about things like calling out to one's mother to throw down the ice cream money, watching for the bride to come out on the way to her wedding. Many of the more recent residents also remember Queensbridge as a good place to have grown up but they share sorrowful stories of the influx of drugs in the 60s and the schism that grew between residents and the police. In one of the few moments in the film where the story of race relations was made explicit, one of the older African-American residents recalls, "During the 60s, with all that we were seeing on TV every day, you didn't look at your white friends the same way, you suddenly realized they were white, and then you couldn't really be friends anymore."

The film made me remember things about my own project childhood that I had not thought about for a long time. I had forgotten about how the bride would come out of the building in her wedding dress, all exultant and grand and beautiful, and the children and grownups, but especially the children, would be waiting excitedly and would throw rice. (The buildings were set back from the street, so it wasn't as if there would be a car waiting for the bride when she stepped out of the building--she had to walk to the curb, or, as likely as not, to wherever the wedding was taking place.) Closer at hand is the memory of yelling up to one's mother to throw something out the window--or to ask, "Can I go to Esther's house?" And we would always say, "so-and-so's house," a habit that I still have when I talk about visiting anyone, whether they actually live in a house or an apartment.

My father's friend R., being an actor (as recently as five or so years ago he was in an off-Broadway production of The Jazz Singer), got lots of play in the movie, my father somewhat less. They have known each other since the Queensbridge days, 60 years now. R. came to the premier too, but dozed off through some of the key scenes in which he appeared. After the movie he was in his usual feisty form, though. A man came up to him and complimented him on his appearance in the movie. R. turned to me, and in his best deadpan delivery, mimicking the persona of a somewhat confused old man, asked bewilderedly, "Who was that?" He waited just long enough for me to think I had to come up with an answer, and then added, "Clive Barnes?"

The four of us--my older sister, who spent her first three years living in Queensbridge Houses, my father, and R., got a ride back to Brooklyn from a friend. We went through Manhattan to drop R. off where he lives on the Upper West Side and drove straight down Broadway. My father, whose mobility is limited and whose usual circuit of activity ranges only a few blocks from his home, hadn't been to Manhattan in two or three years. He was bowled over by the lights and activity of Times Square. "Wowee," he kept saying. "Holy smokes."

It was quite an evening.