On Reading Parker Palmer late in life

It’s ten minutes to the hour.  Walking down the hall I can see into the classroom where students are settling in, the laptop users along the wall outlets, puffy down jackets chinked between chairs; it is winter.  Rising above the color and buzz a lanky male perches cross-legged atop one of the tables in the back of the room. Ball cap bill turned to the back, he calls out good naturedly, “Hey, Professor, why the big smile---is it because you are going to put the screws to us with this quiz?” He means the first of four quizzes during the course; it’s the end of the second week of classes.  Time to get down to business.  He looks incredulous when I reply that I’m smiling because I am so happy to be there.

The cross-legged student is a charmer---smart and susceptible to being engrossed by the material of this course.  And like many twenty-something males who turn up in classes today, pretty much fearless in the face of my academic, or at least grade-dispensing, authority.  I have arrived early to position the electronic props essential for the next hour and fifteen minutes of concentration. The choreography of the contemporary classroom. 

Several students approach me with personal issues---future absences, work and family problems.  Meantime I blank out the screen now humming down from the ceiling; at a later point I will want these students’ full attention on my words.  Lecture materials cascade out of my bag onto the table, layered like strata on an archeological site. The hubbub subsides; the cross-legged student has slipped down silently from the table into his chair. We begin.

What makes this twenty-first century classroom life congenial, a source of satisfaction different from before---when I wore a suit and the room was hushed until I filled it with my voice?  Where are the challenges of teaching in this changed atmosphere?

These questions were gathering in my mind in the early weeks of a recent winter semester when an interview Parker Palmer popped up in on NPR.  I recognized his name but had never read his book with the title that grabs: The Courage to Teach.  So, decades after I’d begun to practice the craft, I sought out a manual.  Decades into collecting materials and ideas, tips and techniques, it seemed high time to read this influential classic.

The Courage to Teach dates from 1998 and since then many of its concepts have percolated through pedagogy: the community of teachers and learners, acceptance of different learning styles, the futility of external power over students, the need for authentic dialogue in the classroom.  These notions are familiar now.  College and university centers for learning and teaching have promoted them across American campuses. Books and teaching materials of all kinds have disseminated classroom techniques (although Palmer is chary of the term) that foster successful learning.

Reading The Courage to Teach unearthed memories from the past.  The title echoes Paul Tillich’s 1952 volume The Courage to Be, a philosophical-theological reflection on the mid-twentieth-century anxiety of meaninglessness, fear of freedom and autonomy, and the consequent appeal of totalitarianism. Coinciding with American interest in existentialism in the latter 1950s, The Courage to Be was read in colleges and seminaries in the 1960s, cited in the pulpit and in Time magazine.

Tillich’s postwar analysis of the human condition (or its title) must have spoken to Palmer.  At least, this was my supposition. To teach without a sense of self, to stand with an aura of authority before learners perhaps adrift in an era of anxiety courts dangers ethical and political.  Whatever our subject matter, we are not simply purveyors of “objective” information.  In any case, nearly six decades after Tillich the availability of information has so proliferated that it compels teachers to devote time to teaching judgment and criteria beyond facts and data. Our role with students---as with ourselves---is to be part of a quest for understanding and, in Tillich’s terms, a quest for meaning. 

Reading The Courage to Teach also sent me back to a second book from the pre-Palmerian past: Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person, published in 1961. Rogers opened up the world of the human personality beyond my inherited cultural and parental understandings and introduced me to Kierkegaard’s injunction to become “that self which one truly is.”  The dignity and respect that Rogers’ fully attentive and non-judgmental stance accords another human being fixed the phrase “client-centered therapy” in my vocabulary.  Palmer’s several references to Martin Buber and “I and Thou” must have been a clue. On Becoming a Person offered hope and optimism; it imparted a different kind of confidence to meet the world than the baccalaureate diploma I attained.[1] 

The opening chapters of The Courage to Teach deal with identity and integrity, fear and paradox---Palmer is big on paradox, not surprising for a Quaker and mystic. All these chapters survey what he terms the “inner landscape” of teaching and learning.  Now, about midway through, however, the ground shifts:  Parker Palmer moves from the teacher-learner relation to the centrality of the subject matter as the terrain where both meet.[2]  The classroom is neither student-centered nor teacher-centered; it is subject-centered.[3] 

Something of a surprise here. Still expecting some ur-formulation of recent educational mottoes, I re-read the passage.  Of course; we knew this all along.  How could it be otherwise? It is the subject matter that lured us into our fields in the first place.  

Reviewing my lecture notes the night before a teaching day, I am amazed at their density of information.  Single-spaced with penciled notes crawling up the margins, their thoroughness is startling. Almost as startling to me is how my focus has shifted from masses of detail to problems and questions that continue to puzzle me after several decades of teaching.  Some initially intrigued me in graduate courses; others have emerged over time.  I have pursued them on my own, but I notice that more and more I raise them in the classroom. 

For their part, students pose questions to which I can only respond that I do not have an answer, but that the question is good and worth some research.  To paraphrase Palmer, our subjects are large and complex, while our knowledge and our skills remain imperfect and partial.  The shift away from masses of detailed material has opened space for exchanges in an area once chock a block with data.  In the hour and fifteen minutes formerly too short to cram in the requisite coverage of material I feel a certain spaciousness. 

Gathering in my mind this particular semester was a fresh awareness that each time I begin a Polish or Russian history course my own excitement as a learner returns. Once again, I am in thrall to my field, Slavic studies, just as I had been as a graduate student fascinated by history, literature, language.  At that time Russian Formalism and the monumental figures of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) dominated the field.  We graduate students sailed along boldly, intrepid under the twin flags of binary oppositions and the dialogic imagination. I did not become a linguist or a literary theorist, but the insights of Jakobson and Bakhtin marked my understanding of Slavic languages and literatures, history and culture.  The most basic notions of Jakobson and Bakhtin have nourished the lectures that I’ve composed, the readings I’ve chosen, and the discussions I’ve tried to stimulate.  They nestle deep in every course.   

Despite its prolixity, Palmer’s subtitle, “Exploring the Inner Landscape of the Teaching Self”, touched on something I recognized: congruity between the teacher’s inner and outer life, harmony between one’s knowledgeable self and the self who teaches. The teacher’s inner and outer lives meld without tension along the terrain of the course subject matter.  In my own experience some congruity and harmony have grown increasingly palpable in recent years.  I think I can even date it from roughly the time that texting replaced cell phone ringing, and students’ classroom comportment took another swerve downward. 

When The Courage to Teach first appeared in print, the informality of teaching had already been advancing for three decades, since the late 1960s. Today colleagues decry the disappearance of classroom decorum.  Syllabi catalog the proscriptions: alimentary (food and noisy wrappers), sartorial (hats), electronic (phones and laptops).  The list grows yearly.   Perhaps we should be surprised that the teacher-learner encounter still involves any layers of convention at all. 

Vestiges do remain.  When the chips are down---a student challenges my expertise, all electronic equipment fails, a death occurs on campus---I feel the layers fall away.  Sudden exposure reveals the self; I teach who I really am.  Palmer calls it teaching from within.

Outside of class students seem perpetually en route: they email from their smart phones. They work several jobs or must be absent from class to do training for a job, having searched for months and finally landed one.  They care for siblings. They seem less and less healthy. Students’ inner and outer lives are in struggle, not harmony.  

The fragmentation of work and learning challenges the vaunted multi-tasking capabilities of their generation, sabotages their efforts to focus, to concentrate.  Learning requires concentration and not only now in the classroom.  They will need the same ability to concentrate in the future, to persevere in jobs, and to pursue what we exhort as life-long learning.  What facilitates concentration---beyond manners and decorum?  I think it is fascination with a subject so absorbing that one forgets oneself.  How can I entice these students to enter deeply into the subject matter of our course, deeply enough to promote the concentration essential now? If students can concentrate deeply here in the classroom, perhaps they can replicate the process elsewhere and repeatedly in life. 

This same semester when reading Parker Palmer, I watched a PBS program in which a young African woman imprisoned during civil war in her country and threatened with torture or execution, recounted how she kept her sanity by learning a foreign language.  Her desperate concentration helped her maintain some small degree of equanimity in inhuman conditions.  She turned incarceration and maltreatment into a time for learning; learning became a refuge.  Psychologically as well as physically, she survived.  

Her story reminded me of the many memoirs of concentration camp victims and Gulag prisoners who recited Torah or poetry from memory.  The power of concentration, of total immersion in a world of knowledge beyond ourselves, can support the human spirit in the most acute, relentless, and terrifying situations we know.   

And what of the elusive congruity between the teacher’s inner and outer life?  That I experience congruence in my existence in the classroom today, an inner and outer life that have come together, is a convergence of disparate life experiences.   The many pieces that have gradually moved toward connection have jagged edges and have been for decades far apart.  Accidental experiences which first took me to Poland and encounters with amazing people there and along the way (few were scholars) shaped both my learning and my development as a person. 

Only the distance of years reveals how valuable were experiences, collisions with people and events over which I had so little control.  Now what seems pivotal in the process was the attraction, the captivation with a subject that occurred and that impelled me to study, to concentrate.  Understanding---knowledge---emerged slowly and partially.  Time has intensified this dimension of what Palmer phrased as “the centrality of the subject.” 

What seems to make this twenty-first century teaching life congenial and satisfying to me is somehow connected to the informality of the classroom which allows me to experience the congruence between my inner and outer life, my scholarly and teaching self, a shared humanity with my students. The challenge of teaching in this changed atmosphere involves finding new ways to let the subject matter captivate students, and so in turn promote the concentration that allows learning to develop. If I can exhibit that congruity at all, then perhaps such an experience can give students hope.  Hope that their fragmentation, their anxiety, may gradually abate.  Confidence that captivation may occur when a student finds his or her subject.

I’m glad that I found Parker Palmer late in my teaching life.  Had someone handed me The Courage to Teach years ago, I probably would have been impatient with it.  I would have skimmed it, frustrated at the tedium of therapeutic language.  But just now it hits the spot. There are still things I can learn.  I can read it for teaching, but better, I can read it for myself.

---

[1] In an October 2000 review of The Courage to Teach, Neil Lutsky noted Parker Palmer’s debt to Carl Rogers, writing that

“there's more than a faint echo of Carl Rogers in Parker Palmer (although Rogers is not mentioned in the book). What matters most in Palmer's scheme is the apparent authenticity of the teacher's commitment to his or her vocation and role. Inauthentic teaching reflects a turn from the deep personal valuing of the self toward, largely, the conditions of worth specified by the norms of contemporary ‘objectivist’ culture. “

Lutsky, N. (2002). “Should it matter who the teacher is? A review of Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach.”  In W. Buskist, V. Hevern, & G. W. Hill, IV, (Eds.). Essays from e-xcellence in teaching, 2000-2001 (chap. 7). Retrieved [June 30, 2009] from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Web site: http://teachpsych.org/resources/e-books/eit2000/eit00-07.html

[2] Palmer shifts gears a second time with the last section of the book on the social microcosm.

[3] Ch. Four, pp. 116-117.

Million Dollars Red

My daughter-in-law Kristin posted a picture of her toes on Facebook after a recent pedicure.  Slender and delicate, her phalangial extremeties (toes) are pale and regular like those of the six cavorting ladies in Botticelli's "Allegory of Spring".  Bright red nail polish and a tiny fanciful daisy---slightly different on each great toe---add joy to her agile step.  And step she does.  Kristin is a nurse in a trauma ICU.  She works ten to twelve hour days, goes to school to earn her BSN, and loves my son Christopher. They have an energetic dog and a nervous cat and many, many friends. And two mortgages. Step, step, step.

I am fascinated with the bones in the foot, especially now when the metatarsus of my left foot seems to have developed a life of its own. For example, bones fracture.  Since November of last year I've had metatarsals 3 and 4 both break. I've spent months in various kinds of casts. Knobs of bone seem to be developing on the sides of the foot. What is this?

Of course, I am older than Kristin---by nearly four decades---but I still want my feet to work.  I don't stand, or walk, or run as much as a younger person would; I try to be kind to my skeletal system. I realize that bones age and get tired, but I take calcium and vitamins.  I've not quit; why should they?

I coddle my feet.  I wear Birkenstocks and just invested in a pair of New Balance 927s for walking.  Not only are these shoe prices high.  If you have any fashion radar, you see that you have to revise your entire wardrobe to accomodate this large boxy shape at the base of the silhouette.  Or, not look down; or cover the lower portion of a full length mirror. The "line" just doesn't work.

Then, there's therapy; I get a foot massage from Tom at a manicure/pedicure place in LA.  But the nail and polish business is less important to me than the "reflexology" therapy he does on my feet and legs.  Whatever the scientific value of  my "qi" or meridians, my step is light after an hour with Tom. This business is an Asian speciality, of course, and in Los Angeles, practically every block you drive has at least one nail salon.  It's one of the growth industries of the last decade and the particular province of Asian immigrants.

Tom and his sister Nancy are from Vietnam; they run a little shop in one of the countless strip malls lining the major arteries in Torrance. They are open 7 days a week, from 9 am to 9 pm. Decor is minimal and the tv has no cable.  A little shrine sits on the floor---an indecipherable Asian baroque design; sometimes with some kind of sweet roll offering in celophane. I restrain the impulse to genuflect. How they got here is sketchy: she'd escaped in a boat and watched people drown; then waited in an internment camp.This must have been several decades ago, maybe during the 1970s.  Now she sends letters back to family in Vietnam, but not too often. I overheard this history in the most chatty encounter I'd observed in the three or four years I've gone there.  Tom and Nancy do not talk much; their English suffices for business.  Once in surprisingly expansive moment Tom confided to me that his daughter was applying to medical school and needing to re-take entrance exam.

But the main thing is that Tom understands my feet and in particular what's going on as my left foot ages and stress fractures occur.  It touches me that he examines my foot with such understanding and compassion.  He slowly nods his head when he takes my left foot in his capable hands and carefully probes its strengths and weaknesses. Gently tests its flexibility. Presses points in the sole and behind the knee.  I am comforted.

Toward the end of an hour, after all therapy, he applies the polish: "Million Dollars Red."  It's a bright, true red; makes me think of Marilyn Monroe.  Who wants subtlety in southern California?  For several weeks now, my feet will feel young again.  That is, to say, I won't feel them at all. Some yoga classes and regular walking in those 927s will improve my attitude toward my phalangial extremities.  So much of my life has been done on foot---the long blocks of Vienna suburbs and the cobblestones of Cracow, traipsing from campus to the edge of town in grad school, childhood wandering northern California hillsides from bus stop to home.  Whatever the need, if I could walk it, I was OK.  If I got tired, I could sit and rest.  Legs and feet  recovered. Walking has been my measure of life. Maybe only street people gauge their lives that way now.  I wish them and their feet well.

Read more essays at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Jerry Rig

Urban dictionary defines jerry-rig as fixing something non working in an unconventional way. Their etymology states that the term was created during World War II, a reference to the Germans who were termed "Jerries" as slang. Allies supposedly came across hastily repaired objects left by the retreating Germans.  Hence the admiring, resourceful Yanks invented the term Jerry-rig.

Wikipedia offers a competing derivation; it contends that the phrase's origin is nautical, deriving from jury-rig, a temporary mast erected to replace one carried away. The make shift mast would only survive one day--un jour. Presumably this jour migrated to jury and thence to jury-rig.  So the term dates back to sailing ships and predates American adventures in twentieth century war. 

I’m not sure about all this; it's pretty shaky web research.  Just the kind of “evidence” that I circle in red on student papers.  But whatever its historic origins, jerry-rig is a useful expression in life which is so often make-shift.  

Despite the term’s condescending connotations of something flimsy and shoddy, these temporary repairs sometimes outlive the original piece of equipment.  Such successful jerry-rigging depends upon equipment: wire, duct tape, C-clamps, and an assortment of screws, shims, and sealants.  All this in addition to a set of good tools that include a power drill.  Jerry-rig operations also benefit from a solid work bench (stationary vise highly recommended).  And above all, jerry-rig requires invention.  

Jerry-rig is the specialty of my partner, Dennis.  Through him I have learned to look differently at the broken objects of daily life.  To embrace potential, instead of succumbing to frustration, to visualize the material world working in alternative and unexpected ways.  To honor the originality praised by the romantics. Throwing something into the trash or even the Goodwill pile means that you just don’t rise to the challenges of life.  It’s not sporting---a rejection of improvisation, imagination, and the unconventional.   Going to the mall to buy a replacement means craven capitulation to the commercial (although we always seem to have a sheaf of expired Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupons just in case).  

Last summer the switch on our tea-kettle cracked and broke off.  As you can see here, Dennis' solution was to hold down the internal lever with a chop stick. Presto! The little orange light goes on and soon the water is boiling.  English Breakfast tea will steep to its sable brown, caffeine-laden intensity. And no one has been electrocuted.  To turn the kettle off, you pull the stick out---and just toss it into a drawer until tomorrow.   No trace left to disturb kitchen décor. Of course, to insert the stick properly requires surgical precision.  In my early morning, pre-caffeine bleariness, I am neither patient, nor particularly adept with chop sticks. I need a flashlight to poke in the stick at just the right angle.

We are offspring of Depression generations and recall the stories of how homes and lives were held together and very little was thrown away.  Our family lore includes tales of the first refrigerator that replaced the old icebox, of sewing machines converted to electricity (my mother had one with an electric pedal), of knives and lawnmowers sharpened annually at the hardware store.   Any piece of good metal, wood, or rope was stored and saved.  What to do with such bits and pieces?  Out of habit we continue to coil wire and wind up rope.  We sort screws, nails, and bits of metal in tea tins and jelly jars.  We buy duct tape on sale in multiple rolls from teen-aged clerks who pronounce it “duck” tape.  (What do they envision with that webbed and quacking metaphor?)

The sturdy workbench in the basement of my house dates from the 1950s.  The builder constructed it.  Successive owners paneled its back wall with peg board and someone had thoughtfully left a few hooks.  Now the wall is now covered with tools.  Its dangling shop light has been augmented by old bathroom fluorescent rods also from the 1950s---salvaged and mounted on the beams.  Still working but in a new context. Good light is essential for jerry-rig work.

Dennis comes from the rich repair tradition of the mid-twentieth century.  His father and grandfather delighted in scavenging for broken equipment.  They fixed motors and re-built car engines.  Once they wired up a communication system from kitchen to garage so they could work in peace until dinnertime.  Dennis even built his first stereo set.  I marvel at this energy and precision, this depth of knowledge of the mechanical world.  How it can be mobilized in a small emergencies.  

My appreciation of jerry-rig has grown in recent years, while energy for re-furnishing the domestic material world around me has declined.  I’m increasingly immune to the whole lot of the redecorating enablers---Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, Williams-Sonoma. Fatigued by their showrooms of coordinated objects. Making do with a jerry-rig is just fine, so long as things collapse at a leisurely pace.

  For more essays see East Village Magazine at  http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Waste management

When I come to Los Angeles in the summer I live in an apartment on an alley. Actually, an alley in Torrance, one of the over 88 cities of LA county. It’s an area of small homes, a few shingled cottages from the 1940s, many tract era houses, and on the hillside multi-storied stuccos on stilts. A few two and three-storey apartment buildings cluster closer to the highway. Our place is the upper level rental at back of a small house, the kind built before the era of subdivisions. That’s what the decades of real estate expansion did here. Bungalows sprouted a second story, rear lots added rentals, garages became storage, driveways became patios, and cars went to the street where between 5 pm and 6 am there is no parking at all. When I walk the alley, here and there a garage door will be partially raised. Boxes and plastic bags jumbled inside from concrete floor to ceiling. No car. It’s strange for me, a California transplant to the Midwest where housing space abounds and population declines.

Los Angeles is not a very conversational place. Neighbors don’t acknowledge one another much. But in summertime the alley is lively: the cat lady calls to her felines by name in the morning, the classic car enthusiast guns his burgundy vintage Mustang as he heads out to Saturday breakfast, the Mexican swap meet guy hunches over the tail gate of his truck tinkering with something, and Steve the iron worker forges metal trellises with his blowtorch in the backyard.

But the prince of the alley is Larry. He has a real set up. And he’s friendly. In shorts and polo shirt, comfortable shoes and thick white socks, Larry pushes a laundry cart he’s customized for action. With brooms erect and bags dangling off the sides of the cart, he is outfitted for battle. Trundling methodically along the alley, Larry halts at the round, black 300-gallon trash containers set out every two or three residences. With gloved hands and a variety of home-devised spears, he probes the barrels for recyclables. It’s delicate work. Four feet high and nearly four feet across, the black containers are---as the city website proclaims---the frontline of the waste management system for alley residents. Unofficially, the Mexicans with small pickup trucks scour the alley on weekends for large metal: water heaters, room air conditioners, and miscellaneous pipes residents leave to the side of the barrels. We are on Larry’s Monday morning route. His schedule is set by the Mexicans and the city. On Mondays, Larry can park his cart at the barrels and poke in peace. On Tuesday mornings, an enormous city truck wedges and beeps its way through where two cars cannot pass; automated claws extend to grasp the containers, lift and tilt and dump them, now lighter from Larry’s work. And unimpeded thanks to the Mexicans. A lone driver operates a vehicle that would have been useful at the siege of Stalingrad.

Larry is retired and he first began re-cycling to get some exercise and lose a little weight. It enables him to get out in the fresh air and move around. And the alleys are an El Dorado. His son sometimes helps out; it’s worth it to net a grand or two per year. On summer mornings when the windows are open, I hear Larry’s soft, patient prodding of the barrels around 10 am. These are a retiree’s hours. I call out and he responds with a wave and a smile.

Today we term this work recycling or re-purposing; it connotes extra effort associated with higher values. Monochromatically “green,” earth-friendly, with a whiff of the virtuous. But such current discourse is pallid compared to the vocabulary of the past. Colorful, motley English terms---rag and bone, grubber, tosher and mudlark---refer to people. Like the tinkers, itinerant menders of kitchen pots and sharpeners of knives who extended the life of valuable metal. Smelly at best, disreputable if not illegal at worst, nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, re-cycling had a human heart.

Lest I wax too nostalgic, it’s worth remembering the crass practicality of the more distant past, armies melted down bronze statuary for weapons, roads were laid with the stones from the monuments of the defeated, new towns were built on the convenient rubble of their predecessors. Today in some European cities, you have to walk down steps into churches, the street level having risen several feet over time.

The online “Solid Waste Management Glossary” (from Aerobic Composting to Worm Culture and Yard Waste) is encouraging for the global environment, but, alas, not much fun in my daily life. A 2007 article in The Economist details impressive improvements in recycling in Europe, Japan, and Britain, as well as the US. National rates for waste recycling have risen to over 50 percent in some European countries. New developments like sustainable packaging and spectroscopic sorting have streamlined the recycle process; markets for recycled materials have emerged. It’s scientifically and technologically inspiring, an intellectual G-up as I haul my bottles and cans to Meijer here in Flint.

I miss Larry though. At least my Flint paper goes to the Neighborhood Association’s collection where there’s always some chit chat with the volunteers on Saturday mornings---a bit of human connection as we manage our waste.

Read this essay and others at The East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Social Utility

I am into Facebook. This past October when I got the urge to be social, I could not log on to the Facebook page. Panic. How to find my login name, what was my password? I am locked out of society. My retrieval system to the rescue: rummage in my briefcase for the piece of paper on which various passwords---campus email, university libraries, journals, credit cards---are scribbled horizontally, vertically, obliquely.

My friend Jan wrote a sharp essay about Facebook. It’s somewhere on her blog, Nightblind. I can’t find that online now either---too much time has passed for me to remember the month she wrote it or the tag it might have. She and I are in the same age cohort; we are boomers, as the pop sociologists say. What are we doing here in our early 60s posting on an electronic social network? You’d think if we didn’t have a social network by this time we might just hang on until we are in “assisted living” and go with what’s there. We are old enough to have grown up with another social network, one that monitored now forgotten minutiae of behavior: gloves and hats, invitations and thank you notes in the mail. And yet here we are: pursuing the socially networked life online.

I can’t scorn these new ways. One night a couple of months ago my side of the city of Flint suddenly resounded with booming sounds like fireworks. Only it was October 3. Facebook friends were flummoxed---what was the reason? No answer online, but comfort comes from communal clucking about mysterious and perhaps alarming events.

Facebook is the preeminent social network service or, as Google and founder Mark Zuckerberg categorized it, a social utility. Social utility is not new. It is the backbone of the nineteenth century fiction. Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Balzac---the utility of social connections for status and success is the driving force of their plots. Where would these novels be without the filiations, gossip, and intrigues of social networking? If the characters had had a reliable service, think of the possibilities for the climbers, poseurs, parvenus.

Back in the day, certain behavior used to “have social utility”: an advantageous marriage, a promising business connection, joining the right church. My maternal forebears were keen observers of these social stratagems to advance in the world. They had phrases they used privately to describe people who deftly or disastrously deployed them. Today we openly, indeed brazenly, network, log on and link in to the socially useful.

When people post obnoxious statements, I can “hide” them. Not just the present irritating opinions, but the people themselves and everything they say on Facebook in the future. They disappear from my News Feed, retrievable later when I feel up to it. Exiled from my trough of web-based chatter, chit chat, or per uno chiacchierare as the Italians say---the natively gifted in this field. What a change from the past social life in the flesh when I mentally strained to marshal a smart retort, or physically had to dodge and dart to avoid people. And then the guilt. My mother ---who as a young woman was fully armed with social skills to deflate such verbal irritations---would be impressed with this new, painless convenience.

Our city newspaper has gone to three days a week. The task of recycling has eased, but the consequences for local democracy are negative. What has come to the rescue? Facebook. Flint civic and cultural organizations---most all are on Facebook, the FIA and FIM, Buckham, Steady Eddy. Along with the Mayor and the young urbans renewing the city.

My neighborhood association now has a Facebook page. We can join efforts to maintain our neighborhood, to advocate with our Councilman, to discuss city problems. We find the “Affordable Handyman” to keep our old houses going. Most of all, the neighborhood Facebook page helps us with safety---the bedrock social utility. We keep the neighborhood page up on our laptops in the kitchen, ready to alert others about “scopers” roaming our streets. A Facebook member sends text messages to our phones as an alert. Highly efficient when compared to email which is fading along with dusty answering machines.

My students are on Facebook, of course; they reinvent themselves there, play games. A new profile picture, an update of personal information, album after album of pictures---their doings, their relatives’ doings, their friends at indecipherable and generally uninteresting events. Scores of people whom my Grandmother once would have dismissed icily remarking, “I don’t believe we have met.”

So now a librarian colleague has taught me how to use “delicious” to save my teaching and research bookmarks. It’s wondrously efficient for organizing sites and has brought order to research and teaching. And it has a social networking feature. Maybe my Facebook network would like to know about my primary sources or 19th century maps of Central Europe? Probably not.

Several of my former students have invited me to Linked In. I don’t think I can take it; I’m not building my career, I’m trying to dismantle it. Toward the close of last summer I went to see friends for a twilight glass of wine and some chit chat. Where was her husband, I asked, as we walked to the candle-lit screened in porch? Oh, he’ll be out soon; he’s just back in the dining room in the dark---facebooking.

Read this essay and others at The East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/