When Megan posted from Sheridan, Wyoming late yesterday afternoon, I was concerned. They’d never make it to Glacier National Park by bedtime! It took a moment to register that their speedy, two-day trip to Rapid City was simply their escape velocity. Now that they were out West, they could slow down. They’ve just passed Belgrade, Montana. I’m not sure that they know yet that the next exit, I kid you not, will be for Manhattan. There has to be somebody in New York who can stand at a bar and say, “I’m from Manhattan, Montana.” After a few drinks, you start sounding like Lucy, after a few ladlings of Vita-Vegemin. (Thank you, Google Maps.)

“Jammie Day” sounds decadent and self-indulgent, and, besides, you can’t have one all by yourself. But I can’t think what else to call these off-days, which seem to befall me once every two weeks or so. I am always especially tired, usually from the moment of waking up. The immediately previous days have been unusually productive, as a rule. It’s nothing to worry about personally, but it feels unprofessional. I don’t want to appear to be shirking. Shirking what, exactly, though?

So, anyway, I watched Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s first movie. I watched it because Caleb Crain remarked that David Haglund’s very nice review of Necessary Errors (in the Times) begins with a quote from the opening scene.

“Oh, I’ve been to Prague,” the lead in Noah Baumbach’s 1995 film, “Kicking and Screaming,” says to his girlfriend, shortly bound for that city. “Well, I haven’t ‘been to Prague’ been to Prague,” he clarifies, “but I know that thing, that ‘stop shaving your armpits, read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” date a sculptor, now-I-know-how-bad-American-coffee-is’ thing.” His attempted put-down hints at how quickly the post-college stint in post-Communist Prague became, for a certain set of sophisticated liberal-arts types, a cliché.

What’s sad about the men in Kicking and Screaming is that they haven’t “been alive” been alive. They’ve only read about life, or seen it on game shows. I didn’t find the movie funny at all, except for the book-club scene, which made me roar with laughter. Chet (Eric Stoltz) delivers a nice summary of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. He begins by expressing relief that they both know Spanish. The other member of this “both,” the hapless Otis (Carlos Jacott), looks like a very unhappy horse at the mention of a foreign language. Then he fastens his eyes on the back of the book in desperation. It is only after his gassy regurgitation of what he reads there, spiced with bits of Chet’s précis, that Chet asks if he has read the book, but you’ve known it from that first terrified glance. “I’ve been remiss,” says Otis. That sums up his life. It sums up all their lives. On top of that, they weren’t very likable. I did find myself wishing that Grover (Josh Hamilton) had a passport, and could get himself to Prague.

In today’s Times, the book under review was Mark Edmundson’s Why Teach? A few years ago, I read Edmundson’s Why Read?, and rather liked it. (Good grief, one of the earliest Daily Blague entries!) If I knew where it was, I’d pull it down and dip into it again. Of the new book, Michael Roth writes,

Mr. Edmundson worries that too many professors have lost the courage of their own passions, depriving their students of the fire of inspiration. Why teach? Because great professors can “crack the shell of convention,” shining a light on a life’s different prospects. They never aim at conversion, only at what Emerson called “aversion” — bucking conformity so as to discover possibility.

I’m all for this, but something is missing. I’m reminded of a remark made by David Denby in Great Books, his account of going back to Columbia for a year and taking its great-books seminar. Every generation must rediscover the classics on its own, he observes. I’ve mentioned this many times before, I think, but I don’t think I’ve ever stressed something that probably ought not to be left to implication: in order to recognize classics, students have to encounter them, and this can’t happen if there is too much focus on the recent, the “contemporary.” It occurs to me that all liberal-arts professors are necessarily historians. They are intimately familiar with the development of the novel, or the changing tastes in oil painting, or the success arguments on a philosophical point. It’s not just the political historians who are historians, in other words. Everything we do — everything that we can learn — has a history, usually a lot of it. There is far too much history for anyone to learn, beyond the barest outlines, in four years of undergraduate life, but what a good teacher ought to do, along with inspiring students to think for themselves, is to persuade those students that the history of anything that interests you is also interesting.

Watching Kicking and Screaming, I wondered what the new graduates had learned in college, if anything. I suspected that one thing that they hadn’t learned was that they were the latest leaves on a very long vine. Life was as flat to them as their sense of the past.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 21st, 2013 at 4:01 pm.