On Sunday I watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which I borrowed from the Homewood Library, a place that Mr. Rogers visited during one episode.

The places he visited in his neighborhood were often located around Pittsburgh; the WQED studio is just a couple of blocks away from my office on campus.

The film itself is puzzling and marvelous, continuing to resonate with me. One YouTube commenter wrote an incisive one-line review:

This movie isn’t a bio pic. It’s a feature-length episode of the tv show—for adults.

Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers. Matthew Rhys, whose work I admired on The Americans, plays the skeptical Lloyd Vogel. I am using the word play here in the most powerful sense, in the sense of how a child at play is performing the most important task to the child at that moment: deeply immersed in being creative while exploring thoughts and emotions. Making and believing.

One lesson of the film is to remind ourselves that it is important to listen when you are with someone else, to attend with your whole heart. Learn from the other person. When with a child, remember what it was like to be a child.

The director Marielle Heller employs magical realism, sometimes in jarring moments, as when we first see a photograph of Lloyd Vogel. The film invites us to reflect on the unity of Fred Rogers’ public persona and his private life, the studio set and the living room, actual buildings and tiny models, the televised neighborhood and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, the film on screen and viewers like us, ourselves and our better selves. It does not merely bridge these as though they are divided — it shows how they belong together.

We also come to realize Mr. Rogers is special in part because he is supported by the love of those around him. He is possible because of them; they are possible because of him.

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On Tuesday I watched the Presidential Debate. It is easy to observe how the words and emotions entering our homes that night displayed a horrifying absence of kindness. It was like staring into the void. My stomach unknotted when it was over.

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On Wednesday, yesterday, I received the most lovely email message. It concerned a pain and confusion that someone felt — a confusion and pain that I share. (I am being vague here to preserve privacy.)

I asked friends for advice on how I should respond. They said that I would respond graciously and thoughtfully, as always. I am still not sure how to do that, in this particular situation. I know I am not always gracious and thoughtful — why would my friends believe otherwise?

The film provides a lesson here too. Mr. Rogers was in many ways a living saint. But his empathy required an incredible amount of practice and care on his part. The film does not dwell on this, appropriately so. Yet the message is clear: being a better person requires mindfulness towards one’s conduct, to recognize that differences can be celebrated because we are all neighbors in this together.

When we talk about the need to attract and support a more diverse population within the university, I often hear others use the metaphor of the pipeline. I catch myself sometimes using this language too. The idea is that we want to increase diversity among the faculty, who come from graduate programs that need to become more diverse, who in turn come from undergraduate colleges, high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools that need to prepare a greater number of diverse students for the next stage in education.

One problem with this way of thinking is that it locates most of the blame and responsibility outside the university. Woe are we, goes the story that our own undergraduate admission office presented at the BOND (Building Our Network of Diversity) luncheon a few years ago, the number of underrepresented minorities graduating each year with high SAT scores is small, and some peer institutions offer them larger scholarships and greater name recognition. There is little we can do about this, except raise more money.

So much is broken with this attitude. Not the need for more scholarship funding: I certainly do not deny that. But an obsession with US News & World Report college rankings leads to tunnel vision. High standardized test scores are an important metric to the university’s admission office because they have been a significant factor (7.75%) in determining rankings.

Until last year, the admission office here firmly resisted any notion of making standardized tests optional. I know: I asked. Only after they saw the writing on the wall — that an increasing number of other institutions were abandoning the test requirement — did they begin to reconsider their position. Of course they framed themselves as prophets, enlightening the rest of the university.

This hyperfocus on high test scores even contaminated the summer pre-college programs here, until the academic leaders revolted and extricated the undergraduate admission office from the process. The pre-college programs can now finally admit a more diverse population, allowing them to more fully demonstrate students’ abilities to succeed in our college curriculum, despite low test scores.

The resistance towards increasing the diversity of undergraduate and high-school students at our university is not merely a risk-averse attitude. The conservatism that festers the admission office stems from an attitude of white man’s burden. Indeed, there have been only two people leading the admission office here in the past five decades, and the person being groomed for the position is cut from the same cloth. Provosts and presidents, deans and professors, all of them come and go, so the admission office takes credit for transforming the campus from a regional institution to an international university. Meanwhile, other staff members leave the admission office, dissatisfied with the lack of commitment and vision towards diversity.

The problem with the pipeline metaphor is that it treats individuals as masses, as though they are fluids to be confined and diverted. The pipeline metaphor objectifies our fellow human beings, as though they were part of a manufacturing process.

I suppose it is slightly better than to bottle students up, to contain them, to restrict them to living in dormitories that are separate but equal.

Some days I hope for a mighty river to wash the plain, to carry away the gatekeepers. But I know which voices whisper in which ears and where the power lies. I am not holding my breath.

The Story of The Story of Ferdinand

Once upon a time in New York City there was a little boy and his name was William. More than anything, he loved to read. One of his favorite illustrated books, which he enjoyed reading with his mother as well as on his own, was The Story of Ferdinand the Bull. In this story, Ferdinand liked to just sit quietly and smell the flowers. He had no interest in butting heads with the other young bulls or in going to Madrid to fight matadors.

Many summers later, William was learning Castilian, the national language of Spain. He had visited Spain the previous winter, including Madrid, Toledo, cities and towns around Andalusia, and Barcelona. While asking a question about how the Spanish language indicates two noun phrases are in apposition, he wrote an example with the words mi toro Ferdinand.

It had been decades since William had read The Story of Ferdinand the Bull, because he had not read it with his own children, so he decided to revisit the book. He started with the Wikipedia article, where he learned this little book was first published in 1936 and became immensely popular in the US among adults as well as children, outselling Gone with the Wind and topping bestseller lists. William also learned the story was banned in Spain during his childhood because it was considered a pacifist book against the Franco regime, as well as in Germany because Hitler considered it democratic propaganda. He learned the book drew the admiration of Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. It compelled Ernest Hemingway, that inveterate admirer of bullfighting, to write his own children’s story in response. He realized that the illustrations included the iconic Puente Nueve spanning Ronda, the town where Hemingway spent many summers and which William and his family had visited last January.

It had also been decades since William saw the short Disney film, which won the 1938 Oscar for Best Animated Short. Watching it again, he winced at the narrator’s imitation of a Spanish accent, as well as the clichéd drawings of the women (who all looked like Snow White) and the matador (depicted as a fool). But he was still pleased to see the bridge in Ronda, adjacent to the parador where he and his family had stayed.

William also learned that another film adaptation had been made in 2017. While apprehensive about the padding necessary to stretch this simple tale into a full-length feature, he requested a DVD from his local library, which he had not visited in five months because of COVID-19.

COVID-19 is the disease that ravaged New York City, coursed across Spain, and shuttered libraries everywhere, not only at home. The closures of these public space disturbed William. Wherever they traveled, he and his family sought refuge among the stacks. On their family vacations in the last three years, they had visited libraries in Spain, Hong Kong, Ohio, Massachusetts, California, Utah, and Iceland. This summer, for the first time in memory, they are homebound.

Millions of children are homebound too. Searching now for videos of “ferdinand the bull”, there are many read-aloud videos made since last March by librarians, teachers, and other book lovers. These are lovely, sharing the pleasure of reading with children whose caregivers may also be home but are occupied. Still, these videos are not as intimate as two people reading in the same room together: pointing at letters and pictures, taking turns, wondering aloud about the thoughts and relationships of the characters, looking at each other, laughing with each other, making up back stories, admiring the art, flipping back to remind themselves of something that happened earlier — traveling through at their own pace, making it their own, reading as an activity.

I’ve been playing the Coda EDC flute for a couple of weeks. Here is the instrument with its inventor, Karl Ahrens.

This vessel flute, closely related to the ocarina, is marvelously durable and portable, perfect for Everyday Carry. Beyond being literally easy to bring, it’s also easy to pick up, particularly for anyone with a musical background. The fingering for diatonic notes is linear and remains constant across both full octaves.

The Coda is a joy to play and, more significantly, a joy to learn to play. Because it is in the key of C, spans more than two octaves starting with C4, and includes the entire chromatic scale of sharps and flats, there is a world of sheet music available. I have no prior experience with woodwind instruments, so at times I struggle with embouchure, especially because it is different for the two side-by-side mouth pieces. I also need to make sure the pads of my fingers cover the holes adequately. Finally, I am working on controlling the flow of my breath: to blow steadily in order to hit the right note and prevent the tone from wobbling, yet to vary the strength of my exhalation across notes as more or fewer holes are open. 

However, these challenges in technique are manageable, as well as fulfilling to confront. I can feel when the muscles in my face get a good workout. Likewise, my fingers are becoming stronger and I am learning how to position them better; these demands are especially gratifying for my left hand, serving as physical therapy for the internal scarring and tightness I suffered from a hard fall I took earlier this summer. Finally, I love being aware of my breath, even more at my current level than when I am scuba diving. My lungs feel good after I play.

Meanwhile, I am sounding better as I progress through the lessons on the Coda website, the songs in the included workbook (I am especially fond of “Silent Night” and “Scarborough Fair”), and melodies from a Beatles fake book I purchased last week. It is satisfying to make music and gratifying to hear my progress. I think that is just one of the reasons people like to make food (that is, if they like to program or cook at all): clear and immediate feedback. Writing computer code, while much less sensory, has this quality too.

…

I taught myself to code with BASIC on the TRS-80 (“trash eighty'”) during high school, when programs were stored on the same cassette tapes we used to play music. A bit later in college I learned PL/C and kept my programs on 8-inch floppies. In grad school I programmed mostly in FORTRAN and backed up on TK50 cartridges. These computer languages are still in use in some form, although they are no longer state of the art. The hardware storage technologies are, of course, long obsolete.

These days I don’t code much at all. Still, I find it entertaining to work on similar problems by playing programming games. Recently I began while True: learn() , which is giving me a better understanding of machine learning as well as a tiny taste of visual programming. In that game I have progressed far enough in the timeline to begin using genetic algorithms, which in real life I first encountered twenty-eight summers ago at the Santa Fe Institute immediately after grad school. (As a graduate student, I handled my own multi-variable optimization problems with simulated annealing and Monte Carlo simulations.)

I’ve also been rehashing the problems in 7 Billion Humans. a game that focuses on parallel computing, a concept I initially learned while working on Cray supercomputers during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Human Resource Machine, by the same game developer, is more focused on low-level, assembly-like programming, the same highly constrained code used in classic HP calculators, the same tightly succinct code that got twelve astronauts to the surface of the Moon. 

It’s wonderful to make music on the Coda (as well as on my guilele) and to code in computer languages (as well as learn human languages). In areas such as these, the immediate result tell the tale of how well I am doing. In other aspects of life, it’s more difficult to connect intent and result; head and tail are cloven.

In our most recent grocery delivery I ordered strawberries, cherries, and peaches. Here and now, the middle of July, this is a magical time. Thanksgiving remains my favorite holiday because it convenes family and food, but you can’t beat the peak of summer for luscious variety of produce.

Although greenhouse strawberries can now be had year-round, I find them best in summer. I recall first enjoying them as a young child in our apartment in the Bronx, thawed from a bag in the freezer, served in a cereal bowl with milk that turned into strawberry soup and a sprinkle of granulated sugar. The first time that I had fresh strawberries, that I can distinctly remember, came after we moved to small-town Ohio. We went to a u-pick-it farm, and somewhere in that field I lost my favorite pair of sunglasses from childhood, which flipped up. After we moved to a bigger house we grew strawberries ourselves in the terraced rock garden in the backyard; I took them for granted. The most delicious strawberries I ever ate were tiny — smaller than cherries — when hiking in the Wind River Range. For three days I allowed myself to eat only what I could gather and knew to be edible. That ended up being only pale white tubers, save for two small hands of these most precious berries. The children will tell you the best strawberries they have ever enjoyed came from a roadside stand when we were driving up the Pacific Coast Highway a couple of years ago. We were surrounded by fields of strawberries as far as the eye could see, eating them outside the rental car. As we continued to drive on, we saw the migrant field workers in the distance. I remarked on how hot the sun can get when picking fruit.

Growing up, we had a sour cherry tree in our backyard too, next to the crabapple tree. I believe the rock garden, the cherry and crabapple trees, certainly the locust tree I planted around Arbor Day in third or fourth grade, they are all gone now. When MM and I were dating, she included frozen cherries when cooking the ground beef for spaghetti sauce, because she had read the antioxidants were beneficial. Soon after we moved to Pittsburgh, I invited some former students over to our house and served cherries, chilled as I often enjoy them. Around that time we also enjoyed stewed cherries in a bed and breakfast in Columbus’ German Village, the one time we attended Origins. When the children were that age, I would pit cherries in my mouth before handing them over, under a vague belief that I was helping them build their immune systems. Cherries are my favorite fresh fruit as an adult, delicious in their sweetness and tartness.

The peaches we have are at that best moment of ripeness. They are dear, so I bought only four, and one remains, next to the bananas, oranges, and apples. I don’t have strong childhood memories of peaches, but as an adult there are three moments that stand out. Once upon a time, I taught intensive writing workshops for several summers at Bard College in the Hudson Valley. On the drive from the house I once rented up towards campus, there was a fruit stand in the summer where River Road intersects the highway leading up to the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. And that fruit stand, in August, had the most incredible peach pies. I stopped as often as I could. They were not made by the farmer, but rather by someone else who brought them to the stand. I have no knowledge about whether the peaches were grown in the Hudson Valley or even whether they were fresh. I just remember that the crust and the filling made the best pies I have ever had. I also remember peach cobbler from the party when my department head welcomed me to the Art Institute of Chicago, made by her mother, who grew up down South. I have made peach cobbler myself since then. But the best fresh, uncooked peaches that I ever had were sold from a truck in Georgia, just off the interstate when we were driving back home from Florida. We had a big brown bag of them and the juice ran down my arm as I was driving. I ate until my belly was full, they were warm from sitting outside.

I forgot to buy sweet corn on the cob, I’ll have to remember that for next time. As a pescetarian, I am acutely aware that this is also peak season for Maine lobster, although I don’t know if those can be delivered without incurring an incredibly high cost. How many more summers, how many more trips around the Sun to enjoy this bounty? People move on, places disappear, we should enjoy while we can.

I am home alone, except for Harry, who at the moment is in the kitchen eating kibble.

I have been alone outside. But now, with M. and S. meeting with the Boy Scouts and B. taking a rare walk on this gorgeous summer evening, this is the first moment in four months when I am the only human in the house.

While reading an article in the Chronicle early this morning (“The Campus Confederate Legacy We’re Not Talking About”, behind paywall) about the Kappa Alpha fraternity, I learned the name for the Ku Klux Klan may have originated from the Greek word κυκλος, — pronounced “KOO-klos” with the second vowel as in “soft” or “fox”. The word means “circle” and is etymologically related to English words like “cycle” and “cyclone”.

I have known Ancient Greek for nearly two decades, including teaching it at two colleges. I am out of practice, but κυκλος, is a word I have used when teaching my seminar Revolutions of Circularity. These days, knowledge of the language is largely confined to Classical and Biblical scholarship, although I did find it surprisingly handy a couple of years ago when navigating Modern Greek around Athens and the Peloponnese.

In contrast to the learned flair that surrounds Attic and Koine Greek, I have always associated the name Ku Klux Klan with the unlearned. I thought the misspelling of “clan” was unintentional and borne of illiteracy, or intentional as an appeal to the uneducated who join the organization. The truth is far worse. The replacement of “c” with “k” is a callback to the Greek letter κ (kappa) that appears twice in κυκλος.

This only goes to show that one may be schooled and yet unprincipled — or rather, perform hateful deeds even while principled.

…

Side note 1: I have always been a bit unsure how to read the replacement of “c” with “k” in the names of other institutions of the American South, such as Krystal, which apparently makes burgers similar to White Castle, and Krispy Kreme, which makes the most delicious mass-produced donuts. I just realized that Coca-Cola, based in Atlanta, uses the sound (but not the variant spelling) of the velar stop three times, just like Ku Klux Klan. But I want to be clear: as far as I know, these linguistic resemblances are absolutely not evidentiary of association with the KKK. Abstracted from any words, the K sound is appealing because it is funny; the letter K is striking because it is unusual.

Side note 2: This morning I also learned that the Proto-Indo-European root for “circle” (sker) is different from the PIE root for “cycle” (kwel) ! The closeness in sound, in both PIE and English, cannot be a coincidence. Sker is a homonym with another PIE word for “cut”, while kwel is homonymnal with a word meaning “sojourn”. Both words involve the reduplication that you hear in Greek and other languages such as Tagalog, so they allude to “cut and cut”, “sojourn and sojourn”. Still, it was a surprise to find out that “circle” and “cycle” stem from different roots.

There is a chapter in Ender’s Game where our protagonist, exhausted from endless, elaborate games of war, is sent back to Earth. As I recall, the young boy talks with his sister Valentine as they sun themselves floating on a raft in the middle of a pond in the lush green woods near their home in North Carolina.

Ever the strategist and tactician, Ender understands why the Battle School brought him back. He needed rest, but he could have relaxed anywhere, including remaining in sterile orbit. They brought him back to Earth to experience these moments, so that he would remember the beauty of what he was fighting for.

Yesterday in the late afternoon I walked around the neighborhood, through Westinghouse and then over to Frick. 

I don’t know why I don’t take long walks in the woods more often. As I left the house, Marissa warned me that it was about to rain. The rumble of distant thunder and the way the wind rustled the leaves on the trees did give me pause at times. But I grew up in this part of the planet, not so far from here, and I could see in the sky and feel on my skin that it would not be raining anytime soon.

Memories of walking among trees are emeralds on a necklace. The oldest jewels are from wandering the woods behind my last childhood home, past Mrs. Nuckols’ house, where I took piano, all the way over to the Marietta Times. There are no real trails, I don’t know if they were made by animals or how. Once when I took him back there off-leash, Mookie took off like a bolt, chasing a deer I never saw. I worried even though those woods extend far, about whether he would find his way back to me. But he did, of course, he always came home.

In truth I never explored those woods often, either. What was I thinking, what was I doing.