The Class of 2011-Commencement Speech

Thank you. I can tell from that greeting that you must know that I’m planning to speak for at least thirty minutes.

In all seriousness, this is about all of you out there waiting to get an important piece of paper and go to a great party, and certainly not about me. In fact, as I was getting ready tonight, I was hoping that I’d look like a young Professor Dumbledore, but, as I can see that you are gazing at me with horror (or boredom), I know that I’m much more Dementor than Dumbledore. So, to avoid the Patronus charm, I'll keep it short.

I'm simply going to share two pieces of wisdom that I received from, in all honesty, the most important men in my life, my grandfather and my mentor teacher. My grandpa, who passed away this winter at 90 years old, whenever he saw me, asked when I was going to get my PhD and become a literature professor or become a high school administrator (no joke). He always wanted me to push, to demand more of myself, to demand more from my place in space. I would tell him that teaching high school students is my vocation, my calling, but his message was clear: don't ever be too content.

As I've had the opportunity to work with many of you, you know that I've tried to impart that message to you. I've asked you to demand more of your educations, more of this place, and, in many ways, by pushing against traditions, you've created real change. For all those who have refused to be content with the status quo, the norm, the safe, I'm very proud of you.

Tonight, I hope that you have a vision for the type of life that you'd like, a vision for how you'll impact your universes, and I hope that you'll continue to demand more, to need your worlds to be better.

I now know that my grandfather feared, above all else, the still, the stagnant; that’s why he was always pushing me to do something new. While there are many still, stagnant, poisoned pools in this world, you don't need to stop and drink from them. Seek out the new, the clean, the nourishing in your lives. Or, better yet, when you find stagnant pools, clean them up and bring them back to life.

Then there was my master teacher, a big fan of George Orwell, who liked to say, "Struggle is Strength." When I was learning to teach, he would often grumble those words just above a whisper, "Struggle is Strength." Too often, my response would be to throw papers around his office and long for something easier. My friends were all working for dot coms in San Francisco and making lots of money doing, as they put it, nothing, while I was laboring to teach people to effectively think. I like to think that my struggles to do what I needed to do have resulted in a personal strength, a strength of purpose and conviction.

I see that strength, one that I didn't even begin to possess until my mid-20's, in many of you sitting here this evening, and I so much admire you for being the compassionate and powerful people you are.

It's now been fifteen years since those initial meetings in the back office with Ed, my master teacher, and that whisper, "Struggle is Strength" is still in the back of my mind, but today I prefer Beat Poet and Reed College alumnus Gary Snyder's riff on the same theme: "All true paths lead through mountains." I have it etched on every Apple product I buy (and I buy as many as I can), and it's my email signature, and I'm sharing it with you today to let you know that it's ok for things to be hard.

We as human beings grow when we struggle, when we experience tension, when we strain. Remember that, as I too often do, when considering the things that really matter, maybe your jobs, maybe your politics, but most certainly your relationships with those whom you love. It's ok for things to be hard.

I wish you lives filled with love, peace & happiness.

Congratulations-thank you for letting me share part of this evening and these four years of your lives with you.

I Am A Dharma Bum

It was winter of my senior year at UCSD, and my life was taking form. The problem? The form was much too formal-it wasn’t the life of the cavalier poet that I’d imagined. It was a life of responsibility to “the machine,” to “the man,” to a profession, to everything that, in my deadhead mind, was going to send me “down the road feeling bad…bad…bad.” Enter Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. A life not on the typical American road to the west, but a life on the road to a wilderness that I had thought was lost when the golden spike forever welded the coasts together in the 19th century. More than just living vicariously through the characters, I wanted to live the characters’ lives of backpacks and wine and adventures. So, I gave a couple of buddies a copy of the book, and we decided to track Kerouac’s ghosts up and over the eastern Sierras to the Matterhorn peak.

Scenes from an Execution and Inconvenient Truth

Here's a link to a transcript of An Inconvenient Truth:
http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/blog/gw/An%20Inconvient%20Truth%20Transcript.pdf

Here's the link to the Hitchens essay:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ERjrcFPSkHkC&pg=PA235&lpg=PA235&dq=hitchens+scenes+from+an+execution&source=bl&ots=ic-XBH_tVK&sig=lmogFpyymDudKwxZHF8EGVNGOdo&hl=en&ei=IJO7SqGiCYrKsAPG4OncBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Beauty=Truth?

In his emphasis on the fleeting nature of beauty, Wilde’s Lord Henry overtly challenges many assumptions his audience, in both the readers and in Dorian, have about aging and truth. This dramatic monologue from chapter two of the novel steers the title character towards a predetermined destination, thus emphasizing the power of the critic’s language.
At the outset of the speech, Henry, by negatively connoting thought and passion, prepares the soil of Dorian for the seed of his argument. Writing, “When you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines” (28), Wilde, through Lord Henry, insinuates that the final destination of any life is ugliness. In short, by making ugliness a foregone conclusion of any life that’s not youthful, Lord Henry paints an unflattering picture that conflicts directly with the idea that old age brings wisdom. Or, if it does, wisdom, which necessarily corresponds with thinking, “sear[s]” the thinker's face with wrinkles. The idea that thought is dangerous, that it can burn, undermines the conventional wisdom that a lack of thinking is dangerous. In essence, Lord Henry takes to the extreme the idea that ignorance is bliss. He essentially states that young and beautiful ignorance is not only blissful, but is “the wonder of wonders” (28). This, according to the novel, is not explored on the symbolic level; it is on the superficial as Henry makes clear, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances” (28).
By not having the audience interject, Wilde creates, much like Browning’s Duke, a persona in Lord Henry who is trying to control every aspect of his environment. When he anticipates, or informs Dorian, of why he reacts to his speech in a particular manner, Henry is also anticipating the reader’s counterarguments. There are no pauses in the monologue to allow for debate. He then, in his praise of Dorian’s beauty, erects the character as a hero, who’s fighting against the personification of Time. By putting the battle on a mythical plain, Henry builds Dorian’s confidence while encouraging the rest of the audience to side with the promethean hero that is Dorian Gray. He is a human who is fighting against the gods that made him, and this makes him, to an extent, an everyman. His beauty is human, and the tragedy of our existence is that, in the words of Bob Dylan, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

Redemption Songs

Covering or treating one of the most powerfully beautiful, yet simple songs of the 20th century requires great chutzpah or great stupidity or both. Bob Marley’s haunting lyric and simple guitar accompaniment make any rendition of “Redemption Song” a challenge. Despite their masterful treatment of the lyric, Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash, due to who they are, fail to level their rendition with Marley’s work.
As this lyric is essentially a slave narrative, “Old pirates, yes, they rob I; / Sold I to the merchant ships” (1-2), Cash and Strummer’s voices, as they’re white, are less valuable than Marley’s. And what of African-American Stevie Wonder? His pseudo-gospel rendition of the song exalts in the celebratory nature of the chorus while totally missing the tragedy entrenched in the verses. Wonder completely botches his rendition, and, as a result, is barely worth mentioning in an analysis of the piece. The simple, uneducated diction of the narrator belies the complexity of the story that the song tells. As a song of overcoming, the narrative emphasizes not only the overcoming of physical slavery, but also the psychological slavery associated with being a part of an oppressive system. While the pain in Strummer’s, and particularly Cash’s, voices appeals to the pathos of the audience, Marley’s raspy storytelling grabs his audience with deep compassion for the oppressed as well as it appeals to an ethos that all humans deserve physical and ideological freedom.
Looking at the notion of redemption as freeing oneself “from the consequences of sin,” “Redemption Song” emphasizes a dual responsibility, that of the oppressor and the oppressed. The second verse castigates the oppressed, “How long shall they kill our prophets, / While we stand aside and look?” (19-20), for inaction even as the first verse points out the hypocritical nature of the colonizers, who offered salvation with the Bible shortly before conquering with sword and shackles. Marley’s voice matters, as a Caribbean whose ancestors, more than likely, made their way across the Atlantic on a slave ship in a much deeper way than the voices of the Anglo artists. This is true, even though Cash and Strummer, by addressing the narrative so directly and honestly, speak to the redemption that the oppressors may potentially be seeking.
So, yes, speaker does matter. How a speaker gives voice to a message determines aspects of how an audience will react; however, who a speaker is must equally be taken into account. In a simple way, who a speaker is in all her or his complexity will determine how deeply an audience will react.

5th Period Musings On The Common App

A jerk. A nerd. A wimp. Perhaps. But Stephen Dedalus has is many ways formed me or, more accurately, defined me. Although Joyce’s protagonist predates me by nearly a century, when the novel’s cryptic words made their way into my consciousness, I, for the first time in my life, was reading myself.

Born the first son of an Irish Catholic only child father, my lot was, in essence, an awkward one. I was defined by my name, George, the fourth in a row of Georges whose history could be traced to the impoverished farmers of Ireland’s County Cork. Being raised my father’s son and a Catholic were two mantles that I could not remove regardless of how hard I tore at the fabric. Enter Stephen Dedalus my senior year of high school. Diving into the character’s thoughts and dreams, I saw my experiences reflected in the glass. Someone had lived my life! Someone knew what it meant to be relied upon to carry a family’s heritage and tradition like a sacred chalice to the altar of experience.

For years, I felt I was destined to a life that was full of indulgent reflection and its corresponding melancholy. I walked the world with the heavy steps of the seriousness of an “artist,” and I failed to realize that the character’s destiny wasn’t necessarily mine. Everything seemed to fit, love for art, frustration with the powers that formed us, but I finally realized that I was always going to be George and never Stephen. I was liberated from what I thought was my autobiography.

It was at this moment that the power of art became real. When I first read the text, my path wavered, my truths became less true, but now, nearly twenty years later, I know that my encounter was more that an undulation, it was a crossroads. Standing daily in front of young intellectuals, preaching the power of language and art and passion, Dedalus’ words, “This country and this life produced me, I shall express myself as I am,” still throb in my temples. However, time has tempered the character’s impact to that of a mentor, leading me away from some choices; he is no longer the feeble hero in whose steps I’m destined to tread.

April is the Cruellest Month

In so many ways, April is relentless in Central Oregon, as it's, unlike the rest of the country, not really spring. People behave in strange ways when the sun is out, but the batteries are not turned on, and the wind blows hard from the south in the morning and the north in the afternoon. People seem to question all they believe in; it's as if the wind drives the unconscious out of them.

Yes, I've been out on the bike too alone and too long, but today Ossie and Billy accompanied me on a twenty mile jaunt around the back roads of Redmond. Next week promises to be warmer, so check the forecast and plan to ride towards May with the club.