RIP Valerie P.

Yesterday a colleague of mine died in the hospital of complications from breast cancer which ultimately spread to her brain.

The government program which my dad's company is contracted to run part of includes a call center, and the call center is under our purview. As part of the proposal process and subsequent negotiations, Unisys was contracted to do an independent analysis of the call center, which was a big embarrassment and one of the central problems (that we were aware of) coming into the job. People were routinely on hold for thirty or forty minutes before getting their calls answered. I think my father and his business partner presumed they'd have to hire new personnel and new management staff. Unisys actually said otherwise; the staff was good and as best as they could tell the management was great, they just didn't remotely have the technical capacity or especially the manpower to meet the call volumes our clientele generates. Upgraded systems and a 50%+ increase in staffing have the call center operating smoothly and admirably.

Valerie, or as I referred to her (as I do most people around the office) "Ms. P______", was the manager of the call center, and she was good at it. I didn't get to know her well over the past few months, but she was always friendly, cheerful, and (lame and unimportant as it sounds) was always responsive and timely when I asked her for data. Now that she's gone I feel great regret that the only concrete thing I can say about her is that she was good at her job, but being good at your job is a good thing, I guess, and I can see from the reactions of those who knew her better as well as my own instinctive fondness for her that there was, of course, much more to her.

I actually went, with my compliance compadres, to visit her in the hopsital yesterday, but I kept getting kicked out of the room so that they could come in and do procedures (suctioning fluid buildup, mostly) before I could say anything to her, or rather gather the courage and thought to do it. She was supported by breathing machines, and putatively unconscious, although we were assured that she could hear us. By the time I'd worked out what I wanted to tell her I'd missed my chance, and ultimately I realized that sticking around and crowding both her family and all the other employees coming by to say hello, say farewell, offer tears and a little humor, I realized it was selfish, that what I had to say wasn't that important in the end and that I wanted to say it more for me than for her. If she could hear us, she had more than enough love around her than to miss my meager offering.

I realized that this was something I'd never seen before; my mother died suddenly and alone, and while the three of my grandparents who are gone died over extended periods of time in hopsitals, I was always away, out of state, and only ever flew in for the funerals. I've never seen anybody dying before, and I started to think about what it would've been like to be there by (especially) my grandfather's (dad's dad) side, post-stroke, as he struggled and improved before finally collapsing in resignation. I thought about that, and then I thought, as I often do, about humanity's twinned hunger to feel empathy and stunted resources with which to do it. I was sad, and then saddened again.

She died a few hours later in the afternoon, and I found out a few hours later still. She seemed to be well loved, as we'd all hope to be, but all I really know was that she was friendly and good at her job, so for me that will have to serve; it is enough. If there's anything after this, I hope it's good for her.

That's all, I guess.

Prickly, Alma Mater

FIRST: Noticed for the first time this evening that the hanging signs in Chicago's El stops (the ones which indicate whether you're on the northbound or southbound side of the tracks, e.g.) are topped with closely-spaced thin metal prongs, jutting out like a row of Vs. I presume this is to deter birds from perching on top of the signs.

SECOND: I get email updates alerting me to the highlights in the University of Chicago's magazine. I almost always delete them, and when the magazine (which is delivered to my father's house) is in my presence I usually scan the alumni updates at the end and otherwise disregard. Nested amidst emails I did want to read, though, I passed through and noted the teaser: "While pundits debate whether a former Law School lecturer is too University of Chicago to be the next president, the UofC focuses on--what else?--what it means to be UofC."

Good lord. This in a nutshell is 75% of what I didn't like and remember so unfondly about my college experience, this endless self consideration and regard. I don't know what it's like to be a faculty member or a graduate student at Chicago, but I do know what it's like to be an undergrad, assuming you'll grant me the caveat that I only know what it was like for me. My essential and early dissatisfaction was that I felt like I'd been duped: college, and Chicago in particular, was not what I thought it was and not, especially, what I thought I'd been sold. That's largely beside the point here. What built on that dissatisfaction was the endless stream of input you get at UofC that is primarily concerned with the experience of being at the UofC. This input - small talk, formal addresses, merchandising - was almost uniformly categorized by me into one of the following slots.

(1) Self aggrandizement which I found ugly and tiresome.
(2) Self deprecation bleeding into self loathing which I (!) found ugly and tiresome.
(3) Self deprecation masking self aggrandizement which I found ugly and tiresome.

I scanned the article advertised in my email and it's the predictable contentless crap. The closest I thought it came to making an insightful point was Dean John Boyer's assertion that to understand UofC you have to understand that it was founded in the middle of nowhere - it might as well have been, in his words, a farm in northern Wisconsin. He then unpacks this point to say a lot of nice sounding things that might have been a lot truer thirty years ago than they are today - or at least, that separate Chicago from other schools in a way that would've been more accurate several decades ago, because I would imagine that the other elite private institutions have become less class-conscious in the exclusive sense, and more egalitarian, than they used to be. (And Chicago's not so egalitarian that, e.g., a change in financial aid standards didn't cause both of my 3rd-year roommates to set wheels in motion so that they could graduate in three years [one of them decided to stay for four in the end, the other did indeed graduate a year ahead of me].) What I think there is to understand about Chicago is that it has a long and proud (too proud?) history of Not Being Harvard and that it is currently trying to Become Harvard while pretending it's not. Not Being Harvard includes a lot of different ideas I'm not going to enumerate right now, but it's a pretty big gestalt that generates both positive self appraisal and neurotic levels of chip-on-shoulder development.

In the end, UofC is of a kind with pretty much every other academically elite private research university in its tier; I can't imagine that there'd be a radically different experience of attending Columbia such that you could meaningfully talk about "what it means to be Columbia" and come up with a list of substantive attributes (not the enjoyable ephemera you'll recall and reminisce about, but the hard core of what it was like to be in college) that would be markedly different from the one at UofC. There may be adjustments of degree - Chicago may really be harder, and its students may really work harder, and be more academically inclined on a 24-hour, never a bad time to talk Kant kind of way - but you're not going to get a Stanford graduate to say "Yeah, you know, we really don't value the life of the mind here. Sure, we go to class, and we're smart, but once we leave the classroom its all beerbongs and football games and people roll their eyes at you if you want to discuss something learned after sixth grade." If there's something that I imagine might set UofC apart as unique in kind it might be a perversely negative social/academic atmosphere (I know this isn't everyone's experience, but I also know for a fact I'm not alone in perceiving it that way) which manifests, in part, as the incessant self consideration I so despise.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and there is some value to considering "what it is to be UofC" in such a way that it produces different results than "what it is to be Cornell that's not animal husbandry." I'm prickly, and weird, and I'm very prickly about some weird things to be prickly about. I have great difficulty with books and movies which deal with children who are either precocious or affluent or (worse!) both. It's not that I generally don't like them, I have visceral reactions to such portrayals and almost always think there was at best error or at worst dishonesty or even moral turpitude in the work. I am however self aware enough to know that this is because I was a child of extremely considerable precocity (at sub-genius levels) and some level of affluence (at sub-"rich" levels). I'm both fiercely protective of my autobiographical impressions and abnormally (for me) uncharitable to the notion that substantial groups of people who shared one or both of these qualities with me would have such markedly different experiences of them that they would match - even justify - the artistic popularity of examining the precocious child or the rich one.

And since I've wandered down this road I might as well also expand that a great deal of what I rankle against, particularly when it comes to Precocious Kid narratives, is the idea that said precocity is allied somehow to a maladjustment: the nascent stage, if you will, of the various insidious narratives surrounding the connection of "genius" (especially but not only artistic "genius") with depression and dysfunction. And yet note that while not a genius I have certain aspirations to artistic quality, and I am also depressed! Now that I've poked a little further into this terrain I think setting out and untangling the various tightly wrapped strands of this particular region of my autobiographical impressions and the way I do or don't universalize them would take longer than I can take right now, and may not be something I'm prepared to do in this venue anyway. But it was not by accident that my post just below, trying to assemble some instant thoughts on David Foster Wallace's work in the immediate wake of his death, did not engage with or even acknowledge the manner of his demise.

Anyway, I hate the UofC's penchant for turning out articles which ponder what it is to be UofC, but maybe you think it's great; if we're both right, you're probably righter than I am.

RIP DFW

David Foster Wallace is dead.

He was probably, on reflection, my favorite "contemporary" writer, certainly the only living writer whose work I felt an obligation to purchase on publication. (Michael Chabon is easier to like, and I like him a lot, but my favorite work of his [Wonder Boys] is a success, in my opinion, because of its smaller ambitions; Kavalier and Klay is the sort of novel that wins the Pulitzer, but I thought it a less perfect work. I liked The Yiddish Policeman's Union, but I wasn't excited to buy it; I didn't really like Wallace's last collection of stories, but I was giddy with anticipation when I first opened it.) I can't think of a younger writer whose work I hold in anything like the same esteem, and the living writers from whom I derived something like the same enjoyment and wonder (and sometimes surpassing what I got out of Wallace) are older and not expected to churn out top-level work for several decades more.

I loved his essays* (the easiest element of his oeuvre) and struggled with his short fiction; aggressively experimental and mercurial (except when it wasn't) I thought his stories were brave and inventive but often had to hold them at arm's length, looking for the small moments of breathtaking observation amidst the formal gamesmanship. My favorite of his collections, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, contains several such interviews that made me wince in something like anticipatory recognition; I had not yet had, on first reading, the opportunity to be any of those men, but some of them seemed like people into whom I could develop, and I suppose I'm still struggling against that fear to this day. His more recent work was harder for me; the stories in Oblivion seemed, on the only pass I made through the book, to accentuate the things I liked least about his fiction and diminish what made me love it in the first place, but it's only one step on a journey now sadly cut short.

* (Not that they're all great; several of the pieces in Consider the Lobster, including the title piece but especially the epic engagements with John McCain and grammar, are well written disappointments, in my view; very erudite claptrap.)

His first novel, The Broom of the System is likable and clever but not so great in the end. Infinite Jest is the glittering tower, the mammoth meteorite dropped into our planet to general awe and adulation (or not, but whatever). I've read it only once and have planned to reread it for a long time; I even purchased a second copy (my first is in Tampa) for just this purpose recently, on the logic that I didn't mind funneling a few more cents of royalties Wallace's way. Soon would be a good time to start, I suppose. I offer up the standard, and selfish, wish that he'd left more of a body of work behind, but Infinite Jest is legacy enough for a few lifetimes.