Living With Eggheads

One doesn’t have to look too far to see that public schools are very damaging to many, if not most kids.

Given the populations they deal with, many schools today are skilled at providing good care for children with special needs.

One category of need is for the “gifted” child.

During my public school days, nobody knew much about giftedness, but the Dallas mega-public school system did a pretty good job of separating out high achievers and pushing them through an excellent college prep curriculum.



Positive and negative characteristics of gifted children

Positive
Learns rapidly and easily.

Is highly imaginative.

Is less inclined to follow the organization and ideas of others.

Has a high degree of curiosity.

Asks many questions. Is interested in a wide range of things.

Has keen powers of observation and is alert.

Reasons things out, thinks clearly, recognizes relationships, comprehends meanings.

Has longer attention and interest span.

Can often form generalizations and use them in new situations.

Has greater than average ability to grasp abstract concepts and see abstract relationships.

Has a large vocabulary which is used easily and accurately.

Retains what has been heard or read without much rote drill.

Enjoys reading, usually at a mature level.

Follows directions easily.

Has a good sense of humor.

Can use material, words, or ideas in new ways.

Has a strong desire to excel.

Uses a great deal of common sense and practical knowledge.

Is a leader in several kinds of activities. Is often asked ideas and suggestions. Is looked to by others when something must be decided.


Negative
Can easily become bored with routine assignments.

May want to do things his/her own way--why not?

Can become a real pest.

May notice too much in the classroom.

May see relationships others do not see and want to spend large amounts of class time discussing all this.

Sometimes doesn't want to stop one project and start the next.

May notice the teacher's lack of inconsistency with "But you said we should always..."

Can get lost in pursuing own thoughts. Can appear to be daydreaming or not paying attention. Can lose other students or "turn them off."

Often gets bored by repetitious assignments.

Always has nose in a book and maybe the book doesn't seem terribly appropriate.

May not always pay close attention to those directions.

Can make jokes at adults' expense. Not everyone appreciates this.

Sometimes too innovative.

Can be easily or too deeply upset by perceived "failure."

Can be too authoritative.

Can become too bossy and be unwilling to listen to the opinions of others.


http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/2746/rwclub/gifted.html

Reinhardt Dreamwork

When I was a child, I had a recurring dream that I was in the hallways and classrooms, with only my underwear on, and nobody noticed.


Today, I have recurring dreams that I am enrolled in college, and attending classes, but have basically dropped out and don't know a thing about what I'm supposed to be doing. I also recently dreamed that I socked my boss in the mouth.

One of my classmates reports that he has a daydream of moving back into Reinhardt, converted into an old folks home:

Hey, maybe the DISD would just turn Reinhardt into an old folks home for alumni!!!!!

Another classmate reveals a weird dream:

[The] idea of Reinhardt as a retirement community for alumni . . . really struck home, because when I was a student at Reinhardt, I had a semi-recurring dream about LIVING in the school, not as a transient, but having the school retro-fitted as my house. What if we DID end up there after all? Would that finally be a dream come true? Or terminal detention?

My best waking dream would be to be sitting again as a child at my kitchen table (it was yellow formica with chrome legs and with matching yellow vinyl-covered chairs—would be worth a fortune today) and having my mother offer to mash up my potatoes and mix with the ground hamburger.



So goes our pitiful lives and desire to return to the Reinhardt womb.

Here’s some recent explanations:

Freud’s theory [dreams are wish fulfillment] has real difficulties explaining why people so often have anxiety dreams. Dreams also involve being angry a lot of the time. Freud said dreams were for fulfilling wishes. But who would want nightmares? Who would want to get beaten up or sexually assaulted in their dreams? So Freud’s theory just didn’t explain in any coherent fashion the fact that dreams involve far more than wishes and that only a minority of them can be characterised as wishes. And his claim that all dreams are sexually motivated is no longer given any credence. Freud claimed that we dream to protect sleep, to prevent us being awakened by threatening, sub-conscious wishes. However, the REM state, in which most dreams occur, is a regularly occurring biological programme in humans and other mammals, and not something which arises to protect sleep.

To recap, expectation pathways activate conscious, not subconscious, experience. There is no evidence at all that dreams are sexually motivated and Freud can’t plausibly explain why we would wish for anxiety dreams. The REM state occurs in all mammals, so it is not just a human activity, protecting sleep, as Freud suggested. A cat is unlikely to be dreaming about its Oedipus complex. So the attempt to revive Freud’s theory seems to be based more on wishful thinking than on realistic
considerations of its defects.

. . .
It was the first time in scientific dream research, I believe, that someone set out to predict their own dreams, with the hypothesis that dreams relate to emotional experiences of the day before – a hypothesis that has since been well validated. Dreams do involve waking emotional material. I set up an experiment using my own dreams, waking myself up every two hours, and, for a period of a week, predicted the emotional concerns that would feature in the dreams. I found that the dreams always reflected my waking emotional concerns of the previous day, but not necessarily the most important of these. By analysing the data, I was able to show that dreams dealt not with emotional concerns per se but with those emotional concerns that had not been dealt with satisfactorily. No matter how important the emotional concern, if it got dealt with while awake, it was over and did not reappear in a dream. The only emotional concerns that became dreams were those that I was still aroused about, for which I still had expectations that I couldn’t complete. Dreams are the fulfilment of those emotional expectations that have not been met prior to waking. They always act out the fulfilment in metaphor – ie a matching sensory pattern to the original expectation. For example, if a man feels like hitting his boss but restrains the impulse, that night he might dream of attacking another authority figure. The hypothesis was derived from a scientific experiment, which anyone can replicate, should they wish.

http://www.why-we-dream.com/

And so we old folks should wish for many and sweet dreams, but the bad ones are good too--helping us to deal with emotional concerns that had not been dealt with satisfactorily during the day.

I Must Have Been There, Because I Don't Remember a Thing

Labor Day Weekend 1969

http://www.texaspopfestival.com/home.htm

Another Dark Story from the Early 60s

From Columbia Magazine:

Copland’s Party Music

By Samuel Adler

Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War
By Elizabeth B. Crist (Oxford University Pres, 253 pages, $35)

In the spring of 1960, Aaron Copland came to Dallas to conduct the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in an all-Copland concert. In connection with the event, I asked him to spend some time with the composition students at the University of North Texas, where I was teaching. He accepted, and his visit was so successful that I invited him to come back the next year. “I appreciate your invitation, Sam,” he told me, “but I will never return to this part of Texas again.”

I wasn’t completely surprised. The John Birch Society, headquartered in Dallas, had contacted the Dallas Symphony Orchestra management and threatened to place a bomb beneath the conductor’s podium if they permitted Copland to conduct the concert.

Aaron Copland! Was there a more American classical musician than the Brooklyn-born composer of Appalachian Spring, Old American Songs, and Billy the Kid?


Copland receives his honorary degree at the 1971 commencement. Victor Kraft/ Aaron Copland Fund for Music

But what the Birchers well knew — for it was no secret — was that in the 1930s and ’40s, Copland had been affiliated with numerous progressive and left-wing causes, including, to some extent, the Communist Party. Elizabeth B. Crist, the author of the excellent Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland During the Depression and War, calls him “a communist with a lowercase c.”

The 1960 Dallas visit came a generation after his fellow-traveling, but his communist past haunted Copland for the rest of his life. The House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI, and various conservative organizations constantly made Copland a whipping boy. His Lincoln Portrait (1942) was pulled from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inaugural program after complaints from Illinois congressman Fred Busbey that Copland stood less for the spirit of Lincoln than for “alien ideology.”

It is therefore welcome to have a book that isolates these early years in Copland’s intellectual and creative life. The great ferment that prevailed among artists and art critics of that time brought the desire to tailor the arts for “the people.” How different from the blasé attitude we find among the artistic establishment today. Crist writes in depth about the collaboration and close relationship between the creators and critics of diverse arts and their efforts at reaching a wider audience, even as they sought an aesthetic to embody a difficult historical period.

Copland was instrumental in organizing the Young Composers Group, made up of composers such as Henry Brant, Israel Citkowitz, Lehman Engel, Vivian Fine, Bernard Herrmann, Jerome Moross, and Elie Siegmeister. According to Copland biographer Howard Pollack, they “leaned heavily in the direction of Marx, and [were] fashioned in some degree on the Russian group, The Five, or the French, Les Six. Yet though these composers practiced much greater stylistic diversity than their Russian and French counterparts, they were brought together by Copland.”

Copland’s love of the Americas, in particular Mexico, and his endeavor to expand our understanding of “America” leads Crist to an excellent discussion of the origins of El Salón México, and the Danzón Cubano. Crist looks closely at the relationship between Copland and Carlos Chávez and the influence the Mexican composer had on his American colleague: She does a fine job analyzing Copland’s major compositions from this period, especially such accessible works as An Outdoor Overture (1938), written for the New York High School of Music and Art Orchestra, and the children’s opera The Second Hurricane (1937). Seldom performed today, The Second Hurricane is an important work, for it again “reflects an awareness of the contemporary American political, social, and cultural context and influence of the Popular Front.”

Crist comments that Copland was “slightly disappointed in the European attempt to write Gebrauchsmusik (music for use, or utilitarian music), especially the works of Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith.” Copland seemed to agree with the assessment of Marc Blitzstein, who, in a 1934 article in Modern Music magazine, calls it “music which abjectly copied what the mob already learned to like. Instead of educating, it panders.”

I remember an interview that appeared when I was a student of Copland in the late 1940s. Copland was asked to comment on the fact that his music seems to perfectly evoke the feeling and ethos of America’s West. “That is very strange,” he answered rather sarcastically, “since I have never been west of Albany.” It was an offhand remark, of course, and Crist poignantly discusses the origins of Billy the Kid and Rodeo. These ballets, both about the West, have sociological and liberal political ramificiations. Rodeo, Crist explains, “envisions frontier democracy as a negotiation of individual and civic welfare, of personal expression and public good.” This is an “egalitarian, democratic West . . . entirely fit to serve as a usable past for present reform.”

With the sudden alliance between Hitler and Stalin in 1939 and the United States’ joining the war in 1941, America’s Left, and with it Copland, were shocked into a new reality. Though they did not give up their social and political ideals, their concerns turned toward a distinct Americanism. Copland had already made use of American folk songs, but he now fused folk elements and gestures in a new way to create an American sound — a Copland signature — that we all recognize as his. Fanfare for the Common Man from 1942, which became the basis of the final movement of his Third Symphony, possibly his masterpiece, presents this sound at its majestic best.

Crist speculates on the reasons Copland’s output slowed after the war. “His musical philosophy was repudiated by the cultural politics and aesthetic ideology of 1950s liberalism, and the progressive ideals that had proved so motivating in the era of Depression and war were, within the tenets of anticommunist ideology, considered at best naïve and at worst seditious.”

Although Copland’s popularity receded in the 1950s and ’60s beause of the prevailing preoccupation with more complex musical styles, his is today probably the most performed American music in the concert hall. The reason is simple: Audiences love it and orchestras and choruses are eager to perform it.

Crist has written an excellent book, full of insight into the times and Copland’s musical aesthetics. And while occasionally her concern with the political overwhelms the musical, this volume is, after all, not only for musicians or even for music lovers, but for all those who are interested in the struggles of the artists during one of the most trying and critical times of our national existence.

Samuel Adler is the composer of more than 400 published works and is a faculty member of The Juilliard School. In 2003 he was awarded ASCAP’s Aaron Copland Prize for lifetime achievement in composition and composition teaching.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2006/copland.html

Texas Cowboys and Cowgirls Shoot from the Hip

It’s gratifying to see our two Democrat candidates for President greeted so warmly in Dallas this week.

In 1963, many Dallasites likely would have spit on them.

Many of us have seen tv footage of one of Dallas's radical right moms beating Adlai Stevenson on the head with a sign in 1963


Everyone who lived in Dallas in 1963 was traumatized by the JFK assassination.

I’m reading Dallas Public and Private by Warren Leslie, which was written 1964 and analyzes pre-assassination and post-assassination Dallas.

And Casa Linda's own U.S. Senator Bruce Alger led a group of radical right hens to jostle poor Lady Bird and her husband during another Dallas visit during that time period.




Here are some interesting observations about post-assassination Dallas:

The world has indeed treated Dallas and Texas harshly. “Do not bring your children to this city” was the lead paragraph of a news story in Lord Beaverbrook’s London Evening Standard, written by his granddaughter. “Giants 27, Assassins 21,” somebody said, and it was a shock to understand that the “Assassins” were the Cowboys, Dallas’ professional football team.

“Where you living now?” a bartender at the St. Regis in New York asked an old customer, a former New Yorker.

“Still in Dallas.”

“I’d have thought you’d been coming home by now,” the bartender said. “Or going somewhere.”

In Los Angeles, shortly after the assassination, a fashion writer for the Dallas News, covering the California market, found it impossible to get room service. “Seems to take a little longer for the people from Dallas,” a waiter explained.

In New York, a returning visitor to Europe spent less time than usual in customs. “Dallas,” the customs official said, looking at her declaration. “Hell, don’t stick around here. Just go home.” He walked away.

After studying the city for a short time, a visiting journalist said, “If I were a liberal living in Dallas, I might try to shoot a President just to get attention.”

And a familiar remark now, among the thousands that have been made about the Dallas police: “I don’t think the Dallas police force is so bad—look how quickly they
caught Ruby.”

Tomboys and Sissies, Prissies and Studs

When I was growing up in the fifties, we had two types of kids who were sometimes bullied--tomboys and sissies.

At school I had a friend named Betty who walked like an Amazon among her classmates. Always bigger and stronger than both the boys and girls, she used her strength to get her way.

I liked her alot and expressed my affection by kidding her (verbally). I think she liked me alot, too, and expressed her affection by kicking me very hard (physically) on my shins.

If my mother had been as protective of me as other mothers, she would have called Betty's mom and told her to make Betty stop making those big bruises on her sonny's legs.

Kids can be so cruel.

We know more today about why we had all these gender differences. And observing our cohorts' progress through life, we can see that those with a certain level of androgyny have fared well--perhaps even better--than the prissies and studs.

http://csulb.edu/~kmacd/361SEX.html

http://www.preventdisease.com/news/articles/born_to_be_tomboy.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tomboy

Whodunit? Who Killed JFK and Lindsey Rose Mitchell?

In 1963, Dallas was the site of the biggest and most complex murder case in U.S. history.

From Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi. WW Norton, 2007.

Political author Thomas Powers cannot be accused of hyperbole when he observes that Kennedy’s assassination “was probably the greatest single traumatic event in American history.” Years later, it remains a festering wound on the nation’s psyche. Though Powers made his remark several years ago, its truth continues to this day. . . .

Throughout the years, national polls have consistently shown that the percentage of Americans who believe that there was a conspiracy in the assassination usually fluctuates from 70 to 80 percent, down to 10 to 20 percent for those who believe only one person was involved, with about 5 to 15 percent having no opinion. The most recent Gallup Poll, conducted on November 10–12, 2003, shows that a remarkable 75 percent of the American public reject the findings of the Warren Commission and believe there was a conspiracy in the assassination. Only 19 percent believe the assassin acted alone, with 6 percent having no opinion.

It is believed that more words have been written about the assassination than any other single, one-day event in world history. Close to one thousand books have been written. So why the need for this book, which can only add to an already overwhelming surfeit of literature on the case? The answer is that over 95 percent of the books on the case happen to be pro-conspiracy and anti–Warren Commission, so certainly there is a need for far more books on the other side to give a much better balance to the debate. But more importantly, although there have been hundreds of books on the assassination, no book has even attempted to be a comprehensive and fair evaluation of the entire case, including all of the major conspiracy theories. .
. .

I have spent many hours over the last month surveying what’s on the web about 1963 Dallas and JFK assassination theories. The Internet contains an enormous amount of conflicting and mis- information. On no other topic is the web likely to be such an inaccurate source for information. In 2008, a researcher studying the subject with a fresh eye is likely to be impressed with how many experts, having been “around the barn,” are convinced that both Oswald and Ruby acted alone.

http://www.reclaiminghistory.com/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/oswald/more/fr.html

On a lighter note, fictional mystery is much neater than true crime, and 1961 BA grad Mary Elizabeth Goldman has recently published a mystery novel rich with nostalgia about teenage years in the White Rock Lake area.

To Love and Die in Dallas by Mary Elizabeth Goldman. Forge Books, 2007.


Here’s a lengthy excerpt that captures some of the late 1950s Casa Linda nostalgia.

http://www.tor-forge.com/Excerpt.aspx?isbn=9780765309341#Excerpt

In her Author’s Note, Goldman recounts how she came to write the book:

Years went by quickly and one day in the early spring I received a notice of my upcoming high school class reunion. Early on I had resolved, and up until then had managed, to avoid such events but apparently time had softened me and now I was curious to discover what had become of my classmates at the school “near the city’s eastern borders underneath the Texas sky.”

Were the football players still popular? Did the ROTC cadets continue to stand at attention, did the class personalities become as successful as I imagined? Did the cheerleaders continue to exude bubbly encouragement? Did the preacher’s daughter ever learn to behave, and was homecoming queen still the most enviable girl alive? Sadly, there were several, too many, missing from this one time hopeful group of wide-eyed wonders, but Vietnam, the drug culture, and the sexual revolution had that effect on many graduating classes in the sixtieth decade of the twentieth century. I wanted to bring them back, to remember them in an imaginary world, and as a result, I created a handful of eager young people found here in the pages of To Love and Die in Dallas. I hope you enjoy reading the mystery, perhaps solving it as you go, and almost recognizing the characters portrayed.

And, the answers to the above questions are absolutely yes, in every case!

http://www.maryelizabethgoldman.com/

Jews, Negroes and Mexicans in the City—Part 1

In the early 1950s, my parents waged battle at their new Casa View suburban home against Johnson grass and nut grass as they worked to cultivate their St. Augustine and Bermuda.

Other battles were being waged in the city.

From White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, by Michael Phillips, Univ. of TX Press, 2006.

By 1948 a nine-square-mile community of 25,000 blacks, Mexican Americans, and poor whites lived on a low flood plain in West Dallas. Created by the earlier construction of levees along the Trinity River, West Dallas consisted of “flimsy shacks, abandoned gravel pits, garbage dumps, open toilets, and shallow wells.” Fewer than 10 percent of those dwellings had indoor toilets, and only 15 percent had running water. Tenants drank from wells located near human waste disposals. West Dallas accounted for 50 percent of the city’s typhus cases, 60 percent of tuberculosis, and 30 percent of polio.

Desperation forced relatively prosperous blacks to again venture in the early 1950s into the Exline Park neighborhood, scene of the 1940-41 bombings. Twelve bombs in the next year and a half targeted homes sold to blacks in formerly all-white neighborhoods in a two-square-mile area of South Dallas. Not expecting white protection, African Americans armed themselves. Juanita Craft noted in a letter to Walter White, the executive director of NAACP, that bombing stopped on Crozier Street when “the widow Sharpe” ran from her home firing a gun at a speeding getaway car after one explosion.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/021008dnmetcraft.316526e.html

1946 State Fair of Texas

http://dallaslibrary.org/CTX/photogallery/marionbutts/places.htm

The Conquest of Cool

In the late fifties, boys and girls tuned in to coolness. Boys like me were groomed by older siblings. What were the fashions? Ducktail hairdo, Lee jeans, white t-shirts, Marlboros, black leather jackets and shoes with taps—all modeled from the now dominant media, television and movies. Think Marlon, Elvis and James Dean.













From Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism, by James B. Twitchell, Columbia University Press, 1999.

What separates the way we live now from earlier times is that the style leaders tend to be younger than the style followers. Once kids were the only ones with sufficient disposable time and money to consume, once advertisers realized that you sell to those who have not made brand choices, and once television became the primary medium of learning, trickle down reversed directions and became bubble up. As you gradually captured the machinery of consumption and the delivery of entertainment, groundswells passed through commercial culture. What started in the 1920s, chronicled by Fitzgerald as the defining aspect of the Jazz Age, has become the norm: upper and lower crusts sprung unpluggable leaks.

Never underestimate television. In print/magazine culture you show a picture of a debutante or royal beauty puffing on your cigarette, or washing with your soap, and social aspiration does the job of inflating the diffusion bubble. With movies, so much the better, simply insert a movie star. But television is different. It is programmed by those who don’t care about diffusion theory, and this audience doesn’t know top from bottom. As Seinfeld, showed, the changes now jump all over the place, George is not the usual avatar of fashion.

To be sure, modern fashion has always been willing to absorb sideways influence, the look of the street. Where would high fashion be without prostitutes and perverts? Think only of how successfully the cosmetic industry adopted facepaint and lipstick of streetwalkers. Where do you think short skirts and four-inch stilettos come from if not from the red light district? Over the last thirty years, fashion designers have also spent many hours in the fetishist’s closet. How else to account for all the corsets, pointy bras, rubber macintoshes, frilly underwear, leather and latex gear, body rings, and tattoos? These appropriations have been so masterly that most trendy dressers who have adopted them have no idea about the fetishistic roots of their fashion. Meanwhile, there are doubtless fetishists running around fretting that their magical objects have been drained of the magical power.

The height of chic is cool, and nothing is more cool than to look poor, downtrodden, and beyond style.

Body piercing, scarification, nose rings, lip rings, unmentionable rings, plus that old standby, tattooing, are not so much the signs of rebellion as of the colonization of the personal space left. Quick! Brand yourself before the worldwide conglomerated package goods company headquartered somewhere out in the American Midwest does it for you.

This kind of self-customizing is stunning, literally. It is on the edge. The epidermis, which the ancient Romans branded as punishment for disobedience (a stigma, literally a brand), has come full circle with self-stigmatization. In a world where second-hand smoke, sugar, saccharin, and asbestos are the hobgoblins, in a culture that spends part of its energy telling kids how great they are and the rest saying there is no room for them at the inn, in a commercial world in which adolescents can drive the car, but only to the clotted mall, it is not unreasonable that youngsters should turn to such rites of self-imposed initiation. Where is the risk of danger in a world of air bags, training wheels, and curbs on sidewalks? Such self-branding seems to say, “been there, done nothing, don’t care, on my own.”