Back to School

Farewell, Summer, with your idyllic schedule of being able to write all day and all night! University classes begin on Tuesday, and I'm hardly prepared for the onslaught of new students, new emails, and new distractions. This semester, I'm a Graduate Student Instructor for Great Books, which is a required class for all incoming Honors students. There are a total of about 500 students in the class, nearly all freshmen, but I'll have 19 students in my own section (or precept, if you will ;) ), which meets twice a week. The course fulfills the University's First Year Writing Requirement as well, so I'll be in for a whole lot of grading.

The syllabus is great: Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Genesis and Exodus. I've taught nearly all the texts in translation in the past, except for the Hebrew Bible. This will be interesting! But even more interesting are the goals for the course. There are reading and writing goals for the students, which are to be expected, and then there are the "ethical goals." As distributed to the students:

• have broader empathy and cross-cultural understanding

• be persuasive while respecting other views, in both writing and in discussion, and maintain high standards of civility

• Understand Greek lit’s relevance to contemporary cultural and political issues and problems in order to supplement their experience in life when considering moral, political, and personal problems, and so become wiser and more resilient

After my long lament in the previous post, I was shocked to see such bold claims for the power of ancient literature made openly and officially. Of course we all believe this personally, but we often don't speak of it in public, as though the declaration that the Humanities can make us more humane is too naïve or unsophisticated for "real scholars." (Or maybe it's because most scholars of the Humanities are typically insufferable.) Moreover, university classes are ever-more-geared towards the measurable and the replicable, where rubrics rule and success is easily defined. Setting an unmeasurable goal for the course is courageous indeed.

I'm still unsure about how to integrate community engagement into my research, or how to engage with a community outside of the University at all. But it's refreshing to be reminded that my job as a teacher of the ancient Mediterranean can have positive, significant, and meaningful effects in the lives of my students. These "ethical goals" may be foolishly idealistic (how much can a student grow if he/she never even opens the reading?), and I'm sure I won't be nearly as optimistic come Fall Break time. Especially while grading a stack of papers. But I'll take whatever fleeting moments of inspiration I can get.

Public Humanities Institute

This week, I've been a member of the Public Humanities Institute, an intensive seminar hosted by the Arts of Citizenship initiative. The goal was to provide professional development for graduate students in the Humanities with an interest in public engagement. To be honest, I was a little worried that it would be a couple days of talking about our feelings, feeling things together, and then disbanding into the mist. Fortunately, I found the experience intensely stimulating, and I found myself asking questions of myself that I had neglected for a long time.

I was one of ten graduate students, mostly doctoral students, with an MFA and a MSI student thrown in the mix. The schedule for our week was quite varied. A sampling: we read academic articles about community-oriented scholarship (like getting a class involved in a theater project in Detroit), visited public arts sites in Flint, interacted with panels of current academics whose work engages the public, saw the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, and toured urban farming sites in Detroit. Today, the mayor of Hamtramck, a city within Detroit beset recently by financial problems, came to visit us today; she brought three scenarios of current conflict in her community, and we brainstormed processes and ideas to work towards a solution.

Dome in lobby of Arab American National Museum

 Detroit's famed Eastern Market (farmer's market)

 Corned Beef Specialist? Yes, please!

 The Heidelberg Project

 Cesar Chavez mural in Mexicantown

My research usually consists of typing alone in a room with books, so it was really eye-opening for me to learn about scholars whose academic work involves interacting with living people. The diversity of projects that fall under the heading of "public scholarship" is impressive, and it's exciting to think that I could be a part of the group that helps shape its form in the future. But I still feel uncertain about how I, as a scholar of classical Greek mythology and literature, can use my skill sets and expertise to engage with community partners far outside the bounds of the traditional university. For example, we met with a theater professor who, in response to the proliferation of arson in Flint, collected eyewitness oral histories from around the city with his students, and turned those words into a play performed throughout the community. Pretty cool, right? But how on earth can I do something like that?

And so there was something distinctly discouraging about the seminar. Most of the examples we saw were visual art or performance-oriented, which Classics/literature do not easily translate into (unless I restrict myself to tragedy, which I wouldn't necessarily mind). My scholarly work is based on the reading of Latin and Greek, an obvious obstacle to sharing with others. More importantly, I still do not see a path in which a community-based project based around, say, reading an abridged version of the Ajax with a volunteer group at the Depression Center would be taken seriously by my peers as scholarship, much less count towards, e.g., tenure requirements. In fact, it may count against me, by openly busying myself with "distractions" from my "real" work instead of developing and publishing (for a tiny audience) new interpretations of Greek literature. There are dangers to being on the cutting edge.

I'm not sure where to go from here. After meeting these amazing people who manage to align their social goals with their career, I feel guilty for thinking, "not now, maybe next term, when my dissertation is done and my job applications are in." I'm also still working out for myself what publicly-engaged scholarship in my specific field looks like. Is it reading the Iliad and analyzing Achilles with youths in juvenile detention? Is it going into local public schools and talking about graduate school? Reading the Heroides at a women's shelter? Okay...scrap that last idea. There are a lot of ways to go wrong here, and one of the things that I loved about the Public Humanities Institute is that everyone was very open about the ways in which scholars can fail. Sometimes the projects never get off the ground, or the community is incredibly offended by students' attitudes towards them, or the partnership isn't sustainable and it all just melts away, leaving distrust and suspicion behind.

But I hope to carry the struggle with me. We participated in several corny self-examination exercises, and though I usually loathe that sort of thing, I found these incredibly effective. One thing that came out, on the first day, was that I had forgotten my own story. Remember when I went to Uganda for 3 months and came back and planned a career in sustainable development? Maybe in public health or public policy? Because I thought I should use my brains and education to enact concrete good for people in the world? Remember when I worked to eliminate the achievement gap in American public schools? Remember when I said that going to graduate school wouldn't necessarily change me, but that I could find a way to satisfy both my love of Classics and desire to help people? Do you remember? Because I apparently forgot! Thanks, graduate school. The rest of the week has therefore been a deeply emotional experience for me, a kind of professional (and let's face it, personal) identity crisis. We'll see how things shake out in the next few weeks – I fully expect to immerse myself in the same work I'd been doing on Monday and continue to press forward towards finishing the diss and securing employment. But maybe a dormant seed is being nurtured again, and you'll start hearing about entirely different sorts of projects for me! If you have any ideas or suggestions, I'm certainly all ears.

Family Time

I spent all of last week at Bethany Beach, DE, for a family reunion! My mom's family hadn't gathered together for an occasion outside of a wedding in the past twelve years, so it was a very special event. Over 50 people stayed in three houses near the beach – during the day, we went to the beach or boardwalk, and in the evenings we all ate together and had structured sharing time. It was wonderful to be together and spend time with the little kids, and I even got a little work done! Here are some highlights:

French Horn duets

 Ocean City, MD boardwalk – that's the Atlantic in the background.

 Playing with Apphia

 Kite-flying at the beach

 Building sand mounds (before destroying them)

 We had an Iron Chef-style cooking contest on the last day. Here's Team Tapir, preparing five dishes all with the secret ingredient: blueberry preserves!

After my family's reunion, we stopped in Maryland to visit Dave's family. We went on a train ride with his niece Amie.

I was kind of devastated when Family Reunion was over, but I'm gradually acclimating to regular life. The good news is that we'll all be together again...at the wedding in May!

The Worst New York Times Article Ever

Okay, maybe the title of this post is a bit of an exaggeration, since the NYT seems to find a way to write ever-unbelievably-worse stories all the time. But this one is so bad that I feel compelled to make you all read it. Don't waste a precious limited-article-click on it, though. I'm posting it in full below.

An entire cottage industry has been founded on criticizing the Times, so I know I'm not breaking any new ground here. And I deeply appreciate the significance of its investigative journalism – which is why I have a digital subscription (the student rate is very affordable!). But if the paper is so valuable, then why, WHY must it produce this kind of drivel? It reflects badly on everyone in the organization, and frankly, makes its audience (including me) look bad for seeming interested in this kind of pettiness. (This same criticism applies to the entirety of the Styles section, as well.)

How exactly did the reporter pitch this story to her editor? "Anonymous commenters on real estate blogs don't like the house that someone in Brooklyn has listed. That never happens! And here's the insight I'll offer: maybe all the criticism will provide free marketing. And maybe we can provide even more free marketing by writing a news article about it!" Editor: green light.

What exactly is newsworthy about this? Oh wait, I see now. The article's subject displays "thick, dark hair...[a] sharply angled chin dimple...liquid brown eyes...a perfectly symmetrical smile." Thanks for the awesome reporting!

Okay, dear readers, help me out. This article is so egregiously bad that I want to believe that it's tongue-in-cheek. Can you detect gentle self-mockery here, or an acknowledgement that this article is a parody of itself? Or is this just an example of the downward trajectory of the Gray Lady?

The Appraisal

Listing of Model’s Brooklyn Home Ignites Blog Readers

Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

Josh Wald, a model, has been criticized on real estate blogs about the price and features of his three-story home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which is listed for $2.5 million. The cedar shingle siding has been one subject of criticism.

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

Published: August 20, 2012

The pictures of Josh Wald’s three-story, cedar-shingled home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, seemed perfectly nice. They showed a leafy garden, a bright, open kitchen, the sleek retro finishes one might find in a Restoration Hardware catalog and a closet larger than many New York apartments. All those touches were drawn together with an asking price of $2.499 million.

But it appears that the readers of certain New York City real estate blogs prefer to shop elsewhere.

“$2.5 mil and uglayyyy as sin!” one reader commented on Brownstoner.

“Cedar shake shingle looks lovely in Breezy Point, but Greenpoint?” another remarked. “There is no accounting for taste.”

A commenter who tried to defend the listing on the Web site Curbed was treated to a skeptical rejoinder: “You are the broker. You are Wald’s buddy. You are Wald’s mother.”

Mr. Wald, who makes his living as a model and who spent a year converting the house from a three-family sheathed in linoleum and vinyl into its meticulously finished current state, was not amused.

“For the record,” he declared, sitting at his kitchen counter last week and running a hand through his thick, dark hair, “my mom probably doesn’t quite understand what a blog is!”

Buying or selling a home in New York City has long required rugged skin and a strong stomach, but in these heady days of lightning-speed gentrification and very public Internet flaying, buyers and sellers do well to enter the fray with their elbows out.

A look at the response to the listing of Mr. Wald’s home, which was featured on the real estate blogs Curbed and Brownstoner just after it came on the market about a week and a half ago, offers a glimpse into contemporary New York real estate at its ugliest. Despite the home’s stylish ingredients, about the only things that didn’t come in for criticism were the owner’s looks.

“It all feels very college student with a chunk of cash,” a commenter on Curbed said. “Still — he is so handsome. So very, very handsome.”

One might recognize Mr. Wald’s sharply angled chin dimple from his work over the last 15 years with brands like Dolce and Gabbana, Versace, Dockers and Gap. But when Mr. Wald, 33, bought the house, at 87A Guernsey Street, three years ago, its Smurf-blue vinyl siding and mustard-yellow aluminum awning were hardly runway material.

“When she first showed me the house,” he said of his real estate agent, “I was like, ‘No way. There’s no way. There’s no way I’m going to buy it.'”

Eventually, Mr. Wald’s broker, Maryam Zadeh of Prudential Douglas Elliman, who this time is the listing agent, did manage to talk him inside. When he finally decided to buy the place, Mr. Wald paid $920,000 and immediately began tearing it apart.

He ripped off the vinyl and found layers of metal and asphalt siding underneath, on top of what appeared to be the original cedar shingles. He pulled up the linoleum flooring and found a red cedar base. He scoured antiques stores from Rhode Island to Texas, buying up old doors and knobs, funky chandeliers and the like.

On the top floor, Mr. Wald created a giant master suite with 14-foot ceilings, a skylight and an enormous closet straight out of a Vogue reader’s fantasies. But his favorite room, said Mr. Wald, who is also a musician, is one floor down: a recording studio.

“Rock ‘n’ roll,” he said, grinning at the room’s many keyboards.

Mr. Wald designed the house himself, he said, and his father, a general contractor on Cape Cod, where Mr. Wald grew up, helped him put it together. Unfortunately, those personal touches make the swipe of a stranger’s Internet blade sting all the more.

“Yeah, I read it,” Mr. Wald said of one of the blog posts, as his liquid brown eyes narrowed. “If someone seemed like they knew what they were talking about, then O.K., they can have a difference of opinion. But if it’s just ignorant blabber, then it just seems like Web chat out of control.”

“It bothered me,” offered Ms. Zadeh, his broker, standing in Mr. Wald’s house last week. “You’ve put a lot of work into it.”

Though the tone in comment sections can get nasty and feelings can be bruised, real estate professionals say negative chatter does not tend to hurt the final price.

“The net effect is that there are more eyeballs on it, more conversation around it,” said Jonathan Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. “You can maybe even say that perhaps by being controversial in the blogosphere, that gives it more attention, and that’s marketing.”

As the old saying goes, Mr. Miller continued, “Right or wrong, just spell my name right.”

“In this case, he continued, “it would be, ‘Right or wrong, just get the address right.’ “

Mark D. Friedman, a senior vice president at Halstead Property, who found his own listing the subject of blogosphere chatter when he sold Sting’s apartment two years ago, agreed with Mr. Miller. He said “the people who are actually interested in buying the property” were smarter than to listen to some kibitzer sounding off.

While the chatter about Mr. Wald’s home may not matter, much of it has been fixated on something that will: the price.

A sale price of $2.5 million for a home in Greenpoint would set a major record, according to Mr. Miller. But a renovated single-family home in that area is hard to come by, and there are one or two examples nearby of similar prices on a per-square-foot basis.

Mr. Wald’s asking price works out to $833 per square foot, while the news anchor Pat Kiernan of NY1 bought a house nine blocks away, on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg — a house with vinyl siding and lower ceilings, right on the noisy main drag — for a price equivalent to $823 per square foot.

It’s been just two years since Mr. Wald finished his gut renovation. So why hurry back into the fray?

Well, why not, he says. Growing up, he lived in 16 different houses in the same town, he said. His father would build a home, the family would live in it for a while, and then they would sell it and start the process over again.

“This house is my art project, and you’re inside it,” Mr. Wald said. “You can hang out in my art project.” He flashed a perfectly symmetrical smile, and continued, “I want to do it again.”

update your idioms, everyone

While refilling my tank at the gas station the other day, I was eavesdropping on the man on the other side of the pump. He was talking on his cell phone, and where I would've used the phrase "it was like walking on egg shells," he said, "it was like walking on potato chips!"

Brilliant! Next time I'm talking to a college student who clearly has more experience with dirty apartments than cooking brunch, I'll know what phrase to use. ;)

Le Tour de Washtenaw County

Today was the start of a new adventure: riding a bicycle! Yes, I learned to ride a bike as a child. But it's been a long time since I've "gone for a ride" for pleasure – fifteen years, in fact. The Fat and I had decided to go out on our bikes that fateful day long ago, and while we were passing through a nearby neighborhood, a car passed me on the left. I was so startled that I promptly drove my bike into the curb and flew off into the grass. No real harm done, but I was shaken by my own incompetence, and the Fat swore never to take me riding again! I acquired a few unrelated concussions in high school, so after that, we all decided it was best for me to stick to my own two feet as much as possible.

Dave enjoys cycling, though, and starting suggesting I join him a couple summers ago. Recently, the stars began to align: he acquired a new speedy road bike from my friend last week, so now he had two bikes in his possession – perfect for riding together! I decided that if I were going to get used to bicycling again, Ann Arbor is a good place to start: it has an extensive network of bike paths that are separated and protected from car traffic, and most of these routes are quite scenic. I got a new helmet a few days ago, so we were all set!

Here we go:

Today, we went for a short and gentle ride along the Huron River, made even shorter by the fact that I got a flat tire at our destination, an old historic mill. However, I did not crash the bike into a wall, or another person, and I did not fall off even a little along the way...SUCCESS!

The First Olympics

I haven't been able to watch NBC's TV coverage of the London Olympics, but I've been catching bits and pieces of the live streaming online. The Olympics are always so exciting!! One thing that I bet the NBC commentators haven't shared with the audience is the "true" origin of the Olympics. I'm not talking about the first modern Olympics, in 1896, or even the earliest entry on the ancient victors' list from Olympia, dating back to 776 B.C.

I'm talking about the legendary foundation of the Olympic Games by my guy, Heracles. I came across this description of the event today in Diodorus Siculus (Oldfather's translation, emphasis mine):

After the performance of this Labour [of the Cretan Bull] Heracles established the Olympic Games, having selected for so great a festival the most beautiful of places, which was the plain lying along the banks of the Alpheius river, where he dedicated these Games to Zeus the Father. And he stipulated that the prize in them should be only a crown, since he himself had conferred benefits upon the race of men without receiving any monetary reward. All the contests were won by him without opposition by anyone else, since no one was bold enough to contend with him because of his exceeding prowess. And yet the contests are very different one from another, since it is hard for a boxer or one who enters for the "Pankration" to defeat a man who runs the "stadion," and equally difficult for the man who wins first place in the light contests to wear down those who excel in the heavy. Consequently it was fitting that of all Games the Olympic should be the one most honoured, since they were instituted by a noble man. (IV.14.1-2)

Now Heracles, he had the right idea! Next time I found an athletics competition, I hope I win every event uncontested. (And, for the record, he picked a terrible place for his Olympic Games – no water or shade! He had to go all the way to the land of the Hyperboreans to pick up some olive trees.)