Nice Shiner, Dude

Choose one of your favorite pictures of yourself and post it to your blog. Your assignment is to tell the story behind the photograph. Your tone should be casual and conversational, but try to include plenty of detail about the moment itself.. Min. length - 500 words.
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I was almost thirty before I suffered my first and, to date, my only black eye. Those thirty years included about ten as a wrestler and three as a coach. I wish I could say I got my eye blackened during the heat of battle. I wish that I had been doing something cool, or daring, or at least interesting. Instead though, I was playing Ultimate Frisbee. This was during my third year of coaching wrestling at Wootton High School in Rockville, MD. On Friday wrestling practices, before Saturday matches, it was our custom to let the boys play a spirited game of Ultimate Frisbee instead of our usual practice in the wrestling room. I joined in the games too, despite not being particularly fast or adept at throwing or catching a frisbee. On this day, a recently-graduated alum was playing with us. During his career as a wrestler, he had never lacked enthusiasm, but sometimes lacked the requisite good judgment and common sense to succeed in a sport that requires constant quick decision-making.

I don't remember the exact situation, but I'm pretty sure that he and I were on the same team. When one of our teammates threw the frisbee directly to me, the boy - we'll call him Arnold - unexpectedly lunged in from several feet away, to attempt to make the catch. The top of his skull made direct contact with my right eye socket. I saw a flash of light, and I was on the ground. I don't think I lost consciousness, but I remember being shocked both by the suddenness of the collision and by how much it hurt. From the ground, eyes still closed, I heard one of the boys say, "Whoaaaa, look at his eye!"

Truthfully, I was playing it up a little by closing my right eye to make it look like I physically couldn't open it. Still, it was a pretty nasty black eye.

Here's the strange part, though: once the pain subsided (after just a few minutes), and once I was back in the boys' locker room, looking at my rapidly swelling eye in the mirror, I felt a perverse sense of amusement. My black eye was a work of art: an angry black purple blotch, almost chrome-tinted. (I could see, finally, why they called it a "shiner.") It was a badge of masculinity too: proof to the world that I was a daring, dangerous badass. Once back at home, I placed a frozen pack of peas on it to stop the swelling - but I also sat in front of my computer taking selfies, trying to find the angle that made it look the nastiest. Certainly, I never thanked Arnold for crashing into me, but I can't say I was particularly angry with him either. 

As everyone knows, a black eye gives you serious street cred - or maybe not. But it's certainly a good conversation starter, as I found out when I went out that evening. Strangers commented on it all night. The 270-pound bouncer at a bar told me, "Nice shiner, man," before handing back my ID. "Got it during wrestling practice," I told them, keeping the details deliberately vague. And then, because I couldn't resist, even though it was the most obvious cliché: "You should see the other guy."

Cleaning blood off the mat during a break in the action.

We Want Them to be Good at Life

Last week, my Washington Nationals traded second baseman Daniel Murphy to the Cubs. Murphy signed with the Nats just over three years ago and his time with the team can be considered nothing but a huge success. For the first two years of the contract, he surpassed expectations in a big way. He hit a ton (356 hits in two years) and made two all-star teams. He was injured for most of the first half of 2018, but was actually starting to round into his old form when the Nats, who were going nowhere, decided to trade him and get what they could (which, as it turned out, was almost nothing). When I heard about the trade, my gut feeling was disappointment. I really enjoyed watching Murphy hit. I enjoyed the way he would greet teammates in the dugout after a bit hit, with his trademark victory shout: "Fwah!" I have fond memories of going to a game last year against the Phillies, in which he got the walk-off hit. Coincidentally, they were giving out his bobble head that day. It's been on the windowsill of my office at school ever since.

Had to glue the bat back on, but he's still in my office. Even if he's a Cub now.

But then I saw this article by Parker Molloy of The Guardian, which reminded me of a frankly appalling thing Murphy said a few years ago, which I guess I had chosen to forget. "I disagree with his lifestyle,” said Murphy, of Billy Bean, a former player and Major League Baseball's current Ambassador for Inclusion, “I do disagree with the fact that Billy is a homosexual. That doesn’t mean I can’t still invest in him and get to know him. I don’t think the fact that someone is a homosexual should completely shut the door on investing in them in a relational aspect. Getting to know him. That, I would say, you can still accept them but I do disagree with the lifestyle, 100%.”

Yikes. There's no need for me to explain why this is a completely unacceptable thing to say - especially in 2014. Besides, Parker Molloy already does a fine job of explaining it in the article. I'll just add this: if you throw around terms like "lifestyle" to describe homosexuality, you don't get to call yourself tolerant. (Same goes for "The Gay Agenda.")

Murphy has never retracted his statement (although, to be fair, he does seem to have cultivated a friendship with Billy Bean). I don't begrudge Molloy her decision to give up on her Cubs. She's pissed and she has a right to be. At the same time, though, it never occurred to me to stop rooting for the Nationals despite their employment of a known homophobe. It's maybe not something I'm exactly proud of, but I rooted passionately for the homophobe himself.

[Incidentally, before we reduce Murphy to a bigoted caricature, let's also note that in the same year he made his questionable remarks about Bean, he took a bold stand for paternity leave when he and his wife had their first child. He stood his ground despite heavy criticism from Boomer Esiason, among others. And he said this of his wife: "She is too good of a woman for me...It was a humbling process to see how well she handled it." This is not to minimize his homophobic statement, but to point out that he is a three-dimensional human being, with virtues and flaws.]

I'm torn. While I understand the anger directed towards Murphy and his team, I've always tried to separate the art from the artist - or, in this case, the athletics from the athlete. If we start to really look closely at the morality of all of the players we root for, we'll probably end up disappointed. The sad truth is that to be a sports fan is to find yourself, at some point, cheering for someone who has said or done something horrible. Chances are that you've been compelled to root for a wife beater, or an animal abuser, or a bigot, or - worst case scenario - a murderer. If you were a baseball fan in the 90's, you almost certainly rooted for a cheater. By no means am I excusing any of this behavior. But it is the truth that, as sports fans, we are generally willing to look the other way.

At a certain point, fans might want to draw a line in the sand: "I can't, in good conscience, support a team whose player has done X." Frankly, I don't know where this line is for myself. Murder? The Patriots spared me from having to make that choice when they cut Aaron Hernandez. Short of that, as a fan of the Nationals, Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots, I've been in the position of rooting for an ultra-conservative blowhard (Curt Schilling), a loudmouth redneck Trump-supporting, teammate-choking moron (Jonathan Papelbon), a guy who tweeted a bunch of dumb, racist things (Trea Turner), and, briefly, a guy convicted of DUI manslaughter (Donte Stallworth).

A shame that he turned out to be such a jerk. But we'll always have the Bloody Sock Game.

One case that strikes particularly close to home for me is that of Ryan Church, a Nationals outfielder in the early days of the franchise, who once suggested in an interview that Jews are headed for eternal damnation unless they accept Jesus Christ as their savior. This bigoted moron was on the team for another two years after his infamous quote. And I cheered for him.

These cases are just off the top of my head. There are a lot of good people in professional sports too, but if you root for any professional team, you're going to run into one of these idiots sooner or later.

To me, being a fan often means hanging onto to two conflicting ideas simultaneously. For example,

Idea #1: Curt Schilling is a pompous, intolerant asshole.
Idea #2: The Bloody Sock Game against the Yankees will always be one of my favorite baseball games of all time.

I often have to think the same way when it comes to art, too. Woody Allen is a creepy predator AND Annie Hall is a hilarious, poignant, wonderful movie. Ernest Hemingway was a raging misogynist AND The Sun Also Rises is one of my all-time favorite novels. Cat Stevens probably wants me and my people dead AND "Father and Son" is a beautiful song.

If you want to reject an athlete or a musician or a writer on the basis of their morality, then I get it, but I choose not to play that game. If the Israeli Symphony can play the work of Wagner, a notorious anti-Semite, then I can permit myself to cheer for Daniel Murphy.

Writer Roger Angell said something on the Ken Burns baseball series that has always stuck with me: "We want [star baseball players] to be good at life as well as good at baseball. If you think about it, it’s unfair. It’s hard enough to expect them to play baseball well. I’m convinced there is the same division in baseball that there is in life itself: of true heroes; of people of strong principle; of ordinary everyday people; of rogues; of weaklings."

If you're going to root for a team, then sometimes you have to cheer the rogues and the weaklings - which makes it all the more special when you find a true hero to root for. Right now, my baseball hero (good player + good guy) is Nats closer Sean Doolittle, who tweeted this last month:

“Homophobic slurs are still used to make people feel soft or weak or otherwise inferior – which is bullshit. Some of the strongest people I know are from the LGBTQIA community. It takes courage to be your true self when your identity has been used as an insult or a pejorative,” he continued. “It’s a privilege to play in the major leagues and we have an obligation to leave the game better than we found it. There’s no place for racism, insensitive language or even casual homophobia. I hope we can learn from this and make the MLB a place where all our fans feel welcome.”

And also this:

"It can be tough for athletes to understand why these words are so hurtful. Most of us have been at the top of the food chain since HS, immune to insults. When all you’ve known is success and triumph it can be difficult to empathize with feeling vulnerable or marginalized."

If we're going to publicize the losers, then let's focus on the heroes too.

If you aren't currently following this guy on Twitter, please Doooooooo yourself a favor.

Baltimore's Favorite Weirdo

Given what I know about Edgar Allan Poe, I can think of a few places where he might hang out if he were still alive and living in contemporary Baltimore. Most of Mount Vernon would probably appeal to him, especially the spooky Methodist Church on the circle. I can easily picture him stalking around the cobblestoned section of Charles Street surrounding the Washington Monument, or ducking into the basement of Brewer’s Art for a Resurrection Ale. (He would no doubt approve of the name.) I can also see him strolling through the small, well-preserved graveyard on the corner of Fayette and Greene, where he is now buried alongside his wife, Virginia Clemm. Poe’s reputation as a drinker has apparently been distorted: the facts suggest that he may have been less a raging alcoholic than simply a lightweight. Still, I have the feeling he enjoyed a good drink – even if he couldn’t hold his liquor – and I think I’d be able to recommend him a few good bars. If dark and moody were his vibe (and I assume it would be) there’s Bookmaker’s Cocktail Lounge in Federal Hill, or the Wharf Rat in Fell’s Point. And obviously, there’s Annabel Lee Tavern, a veritable shrine to Poe, whose walls are hung with his portrait and emblazoned with some of his most quotable quips (especially ones that relate to alcohol). If he could ignore the undeniable weirdness of having to stare at his own likeness throughout the experience, he might enjoy a snifter of Brandy here. (His opinion of the pile of duck fat fries that have become the tavern’s trademark is anyone’s guess.)

As it happens, the internet has a strong supply of Poe memes.

One place where I have trouble imagining Poe is The Horse You Came in On Saloon in Fell’s Point, a loud, rowdy bar at the epicenter of one of Baltimore’s loudest, rowdiest neighborhoods. I don’t actually know much about Poe’s personality beyond what I can try to infer from his writing, but I still have the distinct impression that the Horse isn’t really his scene. It’s a really bro-ey place – meaning that it attracts a lot of well-dressed, finely coiffed young professionals who watch college football and order Jager shots or Red Bull and Vodka. Actually, Poe was purportedly a bit of a fashion plate, but I kind of doubt he’d be at home with the Bros. He’s too dark, too morose, too artsy. And that’s why it’s strange to me that this bar is so closely associated with his death.

To be completely accurate, it wasn’t this bar exactly. The bar where Poe most likely consumed his last drink was called Ryan’s Tavern, and on the day he showed up, it had been converted into a polling place for a local election. Still, on this day, Poe certainly spent at least some time on the inside of the cavernous expanse that is now the Horse, and later, in an incoherent stupor on the sidewalk outside: in the very spot where it is now common to see groups of young Morgan Stanley executives standing in a huddle, smoking cigarettes.

Would Poe's ghost stop here for a drink? I'm not sure it's his scene.

One compelling theory – and there are many versions of the story – suggests that Poe was given alcohol by political backers as a reward for casting his vote for their party. In the corrupt, scantly regulated world of mid-nineteenth century politics, it was not uncommon for parties to hire goons whose job was to ply prospective voters with alcohol and then to dress them up in disguises so they could cast their votes a second time – a practice called “cooping.” If Poe was cooped on the night he was found drunk in the street, which would turn out to be three nights before his death, it may also help to explain the story’s most peculiar idiosyncrasy: he was found wearing another man’s clothes. Normally a sharp dresser, Poe reportedly had on a dirty shirt, an old coat, a straw hat and (most scandalously) unpolished shoes. His hair was unkempt and his face unshaven. An acquaintance, who eventually showed up at Washington College Hospital to identify him, described his appearance as “repulsive.”

To further complicate matters, Poe, who was never to regain his lucidity, repeated one name again and again: “Reynolds.” An untold number of biographers and amateur sleuths have come up with theories about this odd detail without coming to any real consensus.  I wonder about it too sometimes – about all of it. Who was Reynolds? What was Poe doing in the polling place that day? (He lived in New York City at the time and evidently interrupted a trip home from Richmond, Virginia to make a pit stop in Baltimore that was, by all appearances, unnecessary.) For that matter, what did Poe actually die of? Alcohol poisoning? Some concealed illness like influenza or cholera? Or maybe something more nefarious? (Some have suggested the cause was syphilis or rabies.) The mysteries are many, and it’s hard for anyone familiar with Poe’s writing not to find the circumstances surrounding his death uncommonly fitting for a man fascinated with darkness, creepiness and unexplained phenomena.

But what haunts me even more than the story itself is how little it has to do with the festivity that occurs almost every night, oblivious to the disturbing demise of one of the most renowned American writers. Panhandlers are a fairly common sight in Fell’s Point. And on occasion, incapacitated men or women may be seen sitting or reclining on the curb outside some bar or other. (On the night of his last drink, Poe couldn’t have been wearing a shirt any dirtier than some I’ve seen worn by denizens of Fell’s Point.) Panhandlers are occasionally humored with a few cents and drunks are occasionally ridiculed, but more than anything else, people who occupy the curbs are ignored. They are understood by most to be part of the neighborhood’s wallpaper, irrelevant to the main storyline of young professionals enjoying a little time off from work.

What kind of a response, or lack of response, would a drunken Edgar Allan Poe provoke now, as he lay shivering in the gutter, wrapped in an ill-fitting coat, muttering “Reynolds… Reynolds”? I see a recent Hopkins grad, clad in a blue and white striped Brooks Brothers shirt, elbowing his buddy, gesturing discreetly towards the supine figure, and smirking, “Get it together, Dude.”

Here’s the ironic thing, though: Baltimore loves itself some Edgar Allan Poe. His former home, located in a rather dicey West Side neighborhood is a popular tourist attraction, and its docents are leaders in an endeavor to package Poe as a Baltimore Native Son, despite the fact that he wasn’t actually born there. Though he died in Baltimore, he was actually born in Boston during his parents’ brief sojourn there. Even Baltimore’s Poe House concedes, on its website, “Richmond is the place that Poe most considered home.” Frankly, even the work that Poe wrote during his residence in Baltimore is undeniably obscure: of the stories written in the house on North Amity Street, “MS. Found in a Bottle” is the only one anywhere close to a household name.

 In almost every way, the Poe Museum in Richmond is objectively superior to the house in Baltimore, boasting more artifacts, better hours, and Poe-themed ghost tours. Its attractive space and desirable location have even made it a popular, if unlikely, wedding venue. But regardless, Baltimore has fought hard to make Poe “their guy”: that is, to strengthen the bond between the city and the figure in popular imagination. Anyone who has spent a few weeks in Baltimore can attest to the success of this campaign: his visage appears everywhere – even in the most unlikely places.

Just a few doors down the street from The Horse You Came in On is a store called Nattybohgear, an emporium that specializes in merchandise featuring the iconic logo of National Bohemian Beer (“Natty Boh”): a smiling, mustachioed cartoon face, perhaps a cousin of the Pringles guy. One of the store’s hottest items is a t-shirt featuring a hybrid of Poe’s and Mr. Boh’s faces. The caption: “Natty Poe.”

Far weirder is the intentionally ironic mural on the side of a building in Station North, featuring Poe’s melancholy face on the body of an astronaut. The general tone of Poe’s writing, which tends toward deadly seriousness, conflicts with the irreverence of this image – but like Poe, the mural seems to take delight in their own self-conscious weirdness. This graffiti artist is at least close to Poe’s aesthetic ballpark, in other words.

But what would Poe think of the city’s most visible, and, simultaneously, most incongruous tribute to his legacy? The Baltimore Ravens, who relocated from Cleveland after the 1996 season, were undoubtedly the first football team to take their name from a poem, Poe’s most famous work, “The Raven.” Divorced from its context within the poem, the Raven is fine mascot: intimidating, aggressive and predatory. But the poem itself, the ruminations of a solitary man in his study, looking desperately for a supernatural message from his deceased lover, is light years away from M&T Bank Stadium on game day. And it isn’t like the team’s name is some esoteric in-joke contrived by the eggheads in the front office. Its poetic origin is widely known to fans, and with small touches, like cartoonish raven mascots whose names are Edgar, Allan and Poe, the franchise is fond of reminding them.

For its part, The Horse You Came in On is slightly understated in the way it deals with its connection to Poe. In a single sentence on the “history” section of its website, the saloon admits, “The Horse was the last destination before the mysterious death of the great American writer E.A. Poe.” Its décor, more country western than Gothic, also suggests that management may be attempting to distance itself from the Poe story and its accompanying unpleasantness.

Baltimore, more than most of its east coast neighbors (especially strait-laced D.C.), has always prided itself on its quirkiness. It boasts a strong element of artists, hipsters and literary enthusiasts whose familiarity with Poe’s work often stretches far beyond “The Raven” and commonly anthologized stories like “The Tell-tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” They appreciate the man and his work, as much as they appreciate the ideal union between a character and a city that both revel in their own eccentricity. But I’ll wager that the majority of Baltimoreans – the off-duty electrician wearing the Ravens helmet and the Ray Lewis jersey, the yuppie stock broker at happy hour in Fell’s Point, and everyone in between – know only a few elementary facts about the man himself: he wrote “The Raven, he had a mustache and a receding hairline, and (a half-truth) that he was hometown guy. They love Poe, though – just ask the man on the street in Canton or Charles Village or Highlandtown. An admission otherwise is a blasphemy on par with admitting a preference for lobster over crab, or The Sopranos over The Wire.

Baltimore loves Poe unconditionally, but not the Poe who was found passed out in the street on that night in 1849, and definitely not the Poe who married his much younger first cousin, and probably not even the Poe whose poetry and stories are still widely taught in schools and are still capable of capturing the imagination. They love Poe the icon, whose very face, around these parts, is as ubiquitous as the Orioles logo. Except in small academic circles, the details of his life and work only matter insofar as they add to his legend, which in turn, adds to the identity of a city.

Sophomore Slump

Music Discussion Question #3
** Note: I've recently been listening to "Dig Me Out," a podcast devoted entirely to 1990's rock music, and it's giving me some serious nostalgia. I had no idea until recently that it was possible to find an hour-long discussion of The Rentals' debut album on the internet. This article is inspired by the podcast, specifically an episode about "Disappearing Acts," which the hosts define as bands that experienced great success for a short period of time, followed by a rapid decline in popularity. If you have any interest in the subject, you should check out the episode, and really, the podcast in general. **

The question: Which new album purchase left you the most disappointed?

In the height of the CD era, before Youtube and illegal downloading, CD's were going for like $16 to $18 a pop. So it was important to be sure you were going to like the album before you bought it. Nothing was worse than the sinking feeling, after two or three tracks, that you had just wasted almost twenty bucks on an album you probably wouldn't listen to again.

It took me some time to admit it, but Live's album "Secret Samadhi" was the first album ever to give me this feeling.

It's easy to forget now the popularity of Live during the 1990's. Their big hit songs - "Selling the Drama," "I Alone," and especially "Lightning Crashes" - were all over rock radio. Everyone I knew owned their breakthrough album "Throwing Copper," which I still think is a fantastic rock album, full of catchy hooks, interesting, enigmatic lyrics and varied dynamics. I remember going to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in, I think, spring of 1999, and watching a highlight reel on the history of rock. It covered just about everything chronologically: Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Beatles, Zeppelin, up through the Grunge Era. The last band on the montage was Live. And their inclusion, following all of those other great acts, confirmed what a lot of people believed at the time: they would inevitably inherit the title of Best Rock Band in the World.

Obviously, this was not to be. In 2002, just a short time later, I bought tickets to see Live at a relatively small venue in Columbus, Ohio, and I had trouble finding anyone to go with. "No thanks," said one of my friends, "I'd rather not drive an hour to see some washed up band from the 90's."

I'm not entirely sure why the end for Live came so suddenly. The guys on the Podcast theorize that, while they were played to death on mainstream radio, they never really had the fan base of a Pearl Jam or a Dave Matthews Band, and so when the radio stopped playing their songs, the band quickly faded from memory. That makes sense to me, but certainly, they didn't do themselves any favors with their lackluster third album.

Easily the most 90's band photo you'll see today.

In 1997, Live followed up "Throwing Copper" with "Secret Samadhi." It wasn't completely terrible. There are a handful of good songs - "Rattlesnake," "Lakini's Juice," and... actually, i guess that's about it. But the album was marked by a series of forgettable, mid-tempo songs, some absolutely cringey lyrics (first line: "Let's go hang out in a mall"??), and, overall, a painfully pretentious vibe. I listened to it plenty of times anyway, as if in an attempt to convince myself to like it. But "Throwing Copper" it was not. And its only major hit, "Lakini's Juice" (Who is Lakini? Why is his or her juice important? Got me.) kind of came and went without much fanfare.

Back to those lyrics, for a moment. Some lowlights included:

"I can smell your armpits"
"You stole my idea/This puke stinks like beer"
"If the mother goes to sleep with you/Will you run and tell Geraldo?"
"I rushed the lady's room/Took the water from the toilet."
"Angel, don't you have some bagels in my oven?"

And so on. Maybe we shouldn't have been totally surprised. This was the band whose biggest hit had crowds of people singing about a placenta falling to the floor.

Some years later, Live put out "The Distance to Here," which actually wasn't bad. And they followed that one with "Five," which was. I think they put out another one after that, but by then, I had stopped paying attention.

The failure of "Secret Samadhi" continues to bother me more than it should, and not just because it was a waste of $16. I think the bigger heartbreak was that it more or less meant that one of my favorites bands, the one that seemed most destined for legend status, would effectively fail to survive the decade. My parents came of age at the same time as some of the best bands in history - The Beatles, The Stones, The Who. In 1996, when I watched Live perform at Garden State Arts Center, I thought I was seeing a legend in the making. Instead, it turned out I was seeing a footnote - or maybe even a punchline.

What does this album title even mean? Part of Live's downfall had to be their pretentious fascination with Eastern imagery.

Postscript: Three years ago, Live's frontman Ed Kowalczyk marked the twentieth anniversary of "Throwing Copper" with a series of shows, in which the setlist was the entire album, played on acoustic guitar. Once again, I had trouble finding anyone to go with, and was basically resigned to skipping it. But on the night of Ed's show in Harrisburg, I found myself sitting at home with no plans and made the spontaneous decision to drive up and buy a ticket. (When I called beforehand, the box office representative happily told me that tickets were still available for "Ed Kowalski.") I was surprised how much the show moved me. After not really having listened to it in ten years, I got actual goosebumps from "Lightening Crashes." if Live never did anything else, they made an album that still got under my skin, twenty years after I first heard it. That's more than most bands can do.

The Sparknotes Problem

A few months ago, I gave a routine reading quiz to my ninth graders, which yielded some suspicious results. My antennae perked up when five of the students in my class of fourteen used the word "big-headed" to describe Curley, the antagonist in Of Mice and Men. It was an unusual word for anyone to use, much less a fourteen-year-old boy, and it's certainly not an adjective favored by Steinbeck. So, it seemed likely that my students had picked it up from somewhere else - like an online summary. I pulled up the Of Mice and Men page on the website Shmoop, the most popular of the sites that specialize in these summaries. And sure enough, the first sentence of Curley's character analysis page read: "Curley is the son of the ranch boss, so he's got a big head—which doesn't quite match up with his body."

Some of my more literal-minded students had taken this to mean that Curley literally had an over-sized dome. As though being a sadistic, abusive bully weren't enough.

My kids had been using online summaries alright - and on the first book of the year, a one hundred ten page novella with an action-packed storyline and, save for a light sprinkling of Depression-era slang, an eminently accessible vocabulary. These guys weren't turning to the summaries because they had tried and failed with the original text: they were going there immediately, without having even cracked the book. It was depressing. And worst of all, I really wasn't sure how to make them stop.

As much as I'd like to (or perhaps just feel I have an obligation to) denounce them, the fact is that Sparknotes, Shmoop and other online summaries are, after all, awfully convenient. They save time and, although we English teachers often like to complain that they oversimplify great works of literature, the truth is that many of the summaries are pretty comprehensive. Most of the writing on Sparknotes and Cliffsnotes is rather bland and dispassionate, but  I've been downright impressed by some of the material I've read on Shmoop. It can be witty and insightful - and why shouldn't it be? Its writers, after all, aren't some dopes who wandered in off the street. They're academics themselves - from the "crème de la crème PhD and Masters Programs," according to the site itself.

But hold on: I just admitted to having spent time on these sites, didn’t I? I wish I could honestly say it was only for research purposes. But the shameful truth is that I have used Shmoop on occasion, both in my role as a student and a teacher. As a Master's student in English, I read plenty of difficult texts - Paradise Lost, Vanity Fair, Prometheus Unbound - and online summaries helped me to reinforce the material, and keep track of characters and plot. As a teacher, although I almost always keep up with the readings I assign, I've found that a quick glance at these summaries before class can help jog my memory about what happened in the previous night's reading. So strong is the stigma attached to using online summaries that I have until now never admitted my secret to classmates or colleagues (and certainly not to students), even though I doubt I'm the only one who does it. To tell my secret would be tantamount to outing myself as a fraud, undeserving of both my degree and of the purported authority that comes with teaching English. Even now, I'm only partly joking. There really ought to be a confessional booth for English teachers to relieve themselves of burdens like these. Bless me professor, for I have sinned. As penance, I shall recite Portia's "Quality of Mercy" speech eight times.

Of course, my guilt over having read online notes for Paradise Lost is tempered somewhat by the fact that I have also read Paradise Lost - three times, in fact. Twice as an undergrad and once in grad school. Still, since I have used online summaries myself, it has always made me feel a little hypocritical to present a wholesale denunciation of them to my students. I tried it once and I practically choked on my words. I think I referred to the sites as “evil,” which may have been overstating my case somewhat.

I wish I didn't feel as ambivalent as I do. Ninth graders don't always do well with ambivalence; in my experience, hard yesses and nos are much more effective. Whether or not I agree with it in my heart, "Thou Shalt Never Use Sparknotes" is direct, unambiguous and easily digested by the fourteen-year-old mind. What I'd really like to tell my students is something more like this: "If you have closely read the assigned text, and you've made an effort to process what you've read to the best of your ability, then you may, on occasion, read the Sparknotes summaries - but if you do so, you need to do it discretely, and never in school, and obviously, you should never steal phrases and sentences from these sources for your own work. Oh, and certain works like Of Mice and Men, which fall well within your reading abilities, should never require the use of Sparknotes or any comparable sites. Using them for Shakespeare is marginally more understandable."

This is a mouthful. And I worry that my message is too subtle, too nuanced, too mealy-mouthed, and too easily misinterpreted as outright approval by my students.

Recently, I've tried a different tack: I've stressed the illegality of these sites (at least in reference to school rules) rather than their supposed immorality. The use of online summaries is, after all, a violation of our school's honor code and, though truth be told, offenders are punished only slightly more often than jaywalkers, I can at least recite this rule to my classes with a straight face.

The problem with the rule, as both my students and I know full well, is that it's virtually impossible to enforce. It will generally stop all but the most careless students from reading the forbidden material right under my nose, but if they want to access it at home, there isn't much I can do about it. In this way, my policy toward online summaries is not unlike Major League Baseball's attitude towards the use of pine tar, as I understand it: Officially, you can't use it. But if you are going to use it - and let's face it, you probably are - at least have the decency to be discrete about it. Otherwise, I'm going to have to call you on it, and that will be embarrassing for us both.

When both the moral and legal arguments fail, I try the personal approach. I tell an anecdote about a blind date I went on about ten years ago in which, upon hearing that I taught English for a living, my companion proudly informed me that she had succeeded in graduating high school without having read a single book in its entirety. "I just read Cliffsnotes and it worked, like, every time!" she boasted. Both the date and our potential as a romantic couple, I knew, were dead on arrival; nonetheless, I spent the next hour making awkward small talk over a frozen margarita and some chips and salsa, before we said goodbye for the first and final time.

I always assumed the moral of this story was that people who didn't read actual books would wake up one day to find, to their dismay, that they were actually pretty boring, and that others - like potential romantic partners, for example - would judge them accordingly. But a colleague pointed out to me that high school students are liable to interpret it as something more like: "Don't read Cliffsnotes if you have any interest in dating an English teacher. And if you do read them, then certainly don't brag about it."

Not to be defeatist about it, but I tend to think that kids will continue to use Sparknotes, Shmoop, et al., for as long as teachers continue to assign them challenging books. The sites save time and energy, and they come with very low risk of tangible negative consequences. In trying to convince a teenager not to do something so expedient, any teacher will face an uphill battle. It’s hard enough trying to convince them to put their phones away at the beginning of class. And for some teens, the “forbidden” nature of these resources is bound to make them even more appealing.

I don’t know if I have a strong anti-online-summaries argument – at least, not one that I can reliably sell to all of my students. But what I think I do have is a strong pro-books argument. Books – even the ones I don’t enjoy – have the potential to fill me with a sense of wonder. That’s why I got into this line of work in the first place. I’ve never gotten anything remotely close to this buzz from Sparknotes. I can talk to kids about that scene in King Lear – Gloucester, after his blinding, speaking to Lear on the heath – that never fails to gives me chills. I can tell them how Gene in A Separate Peace has helped me to understand some of my more complicated friendships, and how “The Dead” has helped me to understand marriage. I can argue, persuasively I think, that the poetry of Walt Whitman will make you a better person. All Sparknotes will do is help you pass your next reading quiz. When you put it like that, the decision should be a no-brainer.

City Envy

Last week, my family and I went to San Antonio to visit some of my wife's cousins, and to eat our collective weight in Tex-Mex food. I had been there once before, but on this visit, I was again struck by what an underrated city it is - at least by us East Coasters. We underestimate its sheer size: as of 2016, its population was close to 1.4 million, which was good for seventh in the nation, just behind Phoenix. That's more than double the population of Baltimore, my home city. Unlike Baltimore, and every other East Coast city for that matter, San Antonio has had virtually unrestricted room to sprawl, and sprawl it has. Its downtown is relatively small - the eye test  tells me that it's smaller than Baltimore's - but its strip malls and housing developments seem to go on forever.

We east coasters underrate San Antonio's main draws too. I'm actually not talking about the Alamo, its most iconic sight, which I would argue is actually overrated. A key battle was fought there, but I imagine the average American doesn't know what it was for, and certainly doesn't realize it ended in Texans being basically massacred by Mexican troops. Besides, I'm told that only one of its four walls is original. I'm not saying it isn't historically interesting and worth a visit. I'm just saying it seems like one of those place, like the Liberty Bell or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, whose fame outstrips its actual historical importance.

The River Walk and the Mexican Market Square, though? They're awesome, and if a random Thursday is March was any indication, vibrant and festive. (The entire city was on spring break and it was two days before St. Patrick's Day, so maybe the date wasn't as random as I originally though. But still.) A walk through crowded and lively San Antonio triggered in me a nagging sense of City Envy. Not that we're keeping score, but if we were, I could maybe argue that Fort McHenry is objectively superior to the Alamo, even if it lacks the same renown. But it's hard to argue that Baltimore's central tourist area, the Inner Harbor, ranks anywhere close to the River Walk. I like the Inner Harbor, too. I like climbing to the top of the hill in Federal Hill Park and drinking in an excellent view of the whole harbor and skyline. But if you had focused a video camera on the Inner Harbor at the exact time I was on the River Walk (about 9 CST/10 EST), you would have seen an almost laughable difference between the sizes of their respective crowds. The Inner Harbor is a ghost town at that hour.

I'm a little jealous of San Antonio's food scene too. We have crab cakes - they have tacos and barbecue. Don't make me choose between the two: they're both great. But crab cakes are expensive. You're probably dropping $20 to $30 for a top shelf one. That'll get you a lot of tacos. What single-handedly tips the scales in San Antonio's favor is Mi Tierra, a 24-hour Mexican restaurant and bakery, which, for my money is The Happiest Place on Earth. As you would expect, it attracts a lot of tourists, but locals concede that the food lives up to the hype. Until Baltimore gets a 24-hour crab cake emporium, nothing here comes close.

I love Baltimore, but it's hard not to be a little jealous of a city that has this.

So I was impressed with San Antonio. But when I asked my wife just out of curiosity if she could ever live there, she answered negatively without a second though - and I agreed with her. Too hot, too far away from family and friends on the east coast, too isolated from other cities, too devoid of culture. (That last one may not actually be true, but it's the impression I get.) We're here in Baltimore for the long haul, or at least for the foreseeable future. But trips to other cities tend to make me wonder, at least in passing, what I see in this place. It would be nice, I have to admit, to be able to walk around my city's downtown after hours without constantly looking over my shoulder. It would be nice to have drinks at a unique, festive, centrally located bar on the water, popular with locals and tourists alike. It would be nice to live in a place where a 2 AM empanada craving could always be addressed. And it would be nice if people knew my city for more than just The Wire, the HBO show about how messed up my city is.

But there's a lot to like about this place too: the cobblestone streets in Fell's Point, Camden Yards, Faidley's Crab Cakes, the fact that I get to walk by Edgar Allan Poe's grave on a semi-regular basis. And we've got the intangibles on our side too. More than other big cities on the east coast, Baltimore has a little chip on its shoulder. It has a ton of dirty, yet friendly corner dive bars that haven't yet been gentrified. It has more local color than D.C. And it's cozier than Philadelphia and New York. Plus there's that lovable way that Baltimoreans pronounce their O's and call each other "hon." I'm still holding out for that 24-hour crab cake emporium, but even if it never opens, I don't think I'll be going anywhere for a while.

Look at this Photograph

Blog Entry #8: Look at this Photograph

Choose one of your favorite pictures of yourself and post it to your blog. Your assignment is to tell the story behind the photograph. In doing so, try to emulate some of the techniques used by the author of the Iraq piece - namely, his use of imagery and ethos to allow his audience to relate to this experience. Min. length - 500 words.
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The Motorcycle Diaries is an underrated film. It's a classic buddy pic road movie in which two friends - Ernesto, a 23-year-old medical student and Alberto, a biochemist, tour South America on a single motorcycle, camping out or finding lodging wherever they can. The hook is that medical student, Ernesto (played brilliantly by Gael Garcia Bernal) will one day grow up to be Che Guevara. The film implies that some of the poverty and injustice he sees on his journey will at some point motivate his transformation into the notorious revolutionary figure we know he will ultimately become, but the film's politics remain in the background. The main point is the adventure, the exhilaration and sometimes the danger of the central trip through a beautifully shot South American countryside.

When I saw this movie in the late summer of 2004, I was just out of college and a year younger than Ernesto. And having just graduated, I was living with my parents. The contrast between his life and my life wasn't lost on me, and I watched the movie with a seething sense of jealousy and longing. I should be motoring cross-country with a buddy, not watching someone else do it. I was young, adventurous enough, and unemployed, which meant that at least I was flexible. If not at that moment, then when? I spent the two hours in the theater, planning the logistics of my own road trip. The more I thought about it, the better it sounded, and the more eminently possible it seemed.

It should come as no surprise that I never took the trip. In about a month, I would find an interim teaching job, and then I would get into grad school, and basically that was that. Part of me has always regretted not just throwing caution to the wind and taking to the open road, and I know that a repeat viewing of The Motorcycle Diaries would only serve to exacerbate this feeling. I have a friend named Marc - incidentally, the friend in the picture below - who  decided one summer that he wanted to learn Chinese, and promptly bought a plane ticket for the southwestern city of Kunming so as to immerse himself in the language. He chose this particular city, despite not knowing a soul there, because it was known for its moderate climate and relatively laid-back vibe. I admired him quite a bit for having the guts it takes to do something like this. He's an agent for the State Department now, so his international adventures have continued. We aren't in regular touch, but every two or three years, he will return to the States after an appointment in some exotic place (China, Thailand, Turkey), and we'll catch up over a beer. Meanwhile, I haven't been outside the country in over a year and a half - and that was a trip to Canada, which arguably doesn't count.

But I haven't been sitting on my couch for the past fifteen years either. Adventurousness is relative, and though I've never pointed blindly to a globe and made the on-the-spot decision to go wherever my finger landed, I have to admit I've taken some pretty cool trips. In 2007, the summer after my first full year of teaching and the same summer Marc was in Kunming, I volunteered with a colleague to teach English at a school in China. The teaching portion of my trip turned out to be somewhat disastrous (For details, read the series of blog entries I wrote last summer), but the disaster turned out to be a blessing in disguise. If the volunteer teaching program hadn't been exploitative and generally awful, I never would have run away from it, I never would have met up with Marc, and this picture (easily one of my top ten favorite pictures of myself) would never have been taken.

Once the teaching program went south, I considered trying to get an earlier flight back home. But a more intriguing option was to ditch the program and meet up with Marc in his adopted city - even though it was on the other side of the country from the city of Nanjing, where I was holed up in a cheap hotel behind a KFC on the outskirts of town. I e-mailed Marc to suggest the idea, and in typically spontaneous fashion, he urged me to catch the earliest flight I could.

It turned out that Marc's experience in China had been as fortunate as mine had been catastrophic. (Certainly his success was not a coincidence: he was a much more savvy traveler, with a much firmer grasp of Chinese language and culture.) Within two weeks of arriving in Kunming and setting up temporary residence in a hostel, he was more or less adopted as a live-in English tutor by a local family with a disposable income. For the past month or so, he had been enjoying a positively cushy lifestyle, which included free meals and trips to various scenic areas of Yunnan Province.

I was told not to worry: its mouth was Scotch-taped shut.

When I arrived, Marc told that I was in luck: his new family was about to take him on another vacation - this time to a beautiful region called Xishaungbanna, on the Mekong River, just north of China's borders with Burma and Laos - and I was invited to come along. In fact, they had already bought me a plane ticket (it was about an hour flight from Kunming, in a tiny aircraft) and a hotel room for the week.

There was something so surreal about being whisked away by strangers to a magical land whose name I could barely pronounce. I had never even heard of Xishaungbanna prior to my trip to China, and what little I learned about it, I read in my Lonely Planet, between bouts of turbulence on the tiny aircraft.

Of everywhere I've ever traveled, this was both geographically and culturally the farthest I've ever been from home, and the farthest I'm ever likely to go. It was in Xishaungbanna that I:

• Ate a meal consisting entirely of three whole fish on skewers.
• Had my picture taken with a giant python around my neck.
• Sang karaoke to "My Humps," in front of a room full of people. (Don't judge. It was one of, like, three English language songs to choose from.)
• Judged a beauty contest at the Dai Minority Village, which is by the way, one of the most ridiculous places I've visited. Picture a touristy "authentic Native American village" in the U.S., only cringier.
• Hunted for the best price on jade nick-nacks.
• Received an excellent blind massage. (What is a blind massage, you ask? It's a massage from a blind person. Obvs.)

On our final day in Xishaungbanna, Marc and I rented bicycles and ventured into the countryside. The scenery was out of Apocalypse Now, minus the Napalm. Big sky, mist rising from unbelievably green hills, and a sea of rice paddies. This was the Chinese countryside of my American imagination. I had been in China long enough to realize that almost no one wore those stereotypical wide-brimmed hats, like they did in the children's books - but here, they were everywhere.

My Motorcycle Diaries moment.

I have plenty of photos from my time in China, but only one from this stretch of the trip: this one of Marc and me, standing in a field with our bicycles. greenery and forbidding clouds as far as the eye can see. Forget the fact that we would both sleep comfortably in our hotel beds that evening. And forget the fact that within twenty-four hours, we would be back on a plane to the city. At that moment, we were Ernesto and Alberto, and these ten-speed bikes were our motorcycles.