800 Words: Sense of Place

Biddeford, Maine: I have just gone on the first solo road trip of my life - up the East Coast, the one part of the world, save Israel which is really a small sliver of a part of the world, that I know with anything more than passing familiarity. After days spent on the couches and spare rooms of different friends and their spouses, I arrived yesterday morning at the house of my college best friend, whom after three years in Baltimore may still be my closest friend.

Even now, one-third of the way through my thirties, my mind still sees the years 21 and 22 as a very brief golden era. I was probably as miserable (or at least barely less) than I ever was. But there was something about the group in which I felt at home - a shared ethos, common values, a weirdly earnest cynicism, and a determination to have funny things to say about serious matters and serious things to say about funny ones. I probably didn't even know many of the friends I associate with those two years yet particularly well, and yet those two years set the stage for any consolation that came in later years that offset the misery that returned nearly unabated until I came to Baltimore. Inevitably, such groups can't last long, and much to my dismay, everybody dispersed to where life had to carry them. The loss was inevitable, it was also painful for a guy who direly needed a better period.

I love, truly love, my good friends in Baltimore. But I do not share many of their values, and I disapprove as strenuously of their values as I don't doubt they do of mine. I've written so many times about the differences that they require no revaluation here, but for the record, the values of Smalltimore are every bit as rotten and corrupt as the places from which we all had to so direly wish to escape in order to find ourselves amongst each other.

Even so, I worry that if my life yet again takes a sharp downward turn, I may yet view these first few years in Baltimore with the exact same halo, and I want it on the record here that if I start viewing those first few years in Baltimore surrounded by a gold plate, it wasn't at all like that, just as the last two years at AU weren't at all like that. A set of circumstances conspired to make those years only slightly less miserable than the years surrounding them. The anxiety attacks with their hand tremors and hyperventilation, the omnipresent facial tics, the helpless addiction to food, the physical pains and ailments, the compulsive going through money like water, the total inability to create the person you wanted to be, was exactly the same as it ever was. It only seemed, for a brief moment, like the fog was lifting, and you were finally, if ever so briefly, on the path to being that delusional image of a person you wanted to be.

In retrospect, there was one thing which all the people from those AU days shared: a shared devotion to, or at least an inability to escape, a certain place - a place different for each of us, but startlingly similar in particulars as all places are to the people who grew up in them. We all loved those places, even as we often hated everything about them. The roots haunted us all, the places from which we hailed gave us the wings they chose for us even as they tore asunder any wings we might have wanted to obtain on our own.

Over the years, I've traveled plenty of times to my friends' towns of origin. I've travelled so often to Biddeford Maine, or Toms River New Jersey, or St. Mary's Pennsylvania, that hometown friends of my friends have become friends of mine. I'll probably never have opportunity to visit other such hometowns of old friends like Watertown, New York or Homestead, Florida. But what I inevitably return to is that each these places are true places, with genuine senses of place within them, whereas my hometown is just a makeshift place that Jews settled because they were not from anywhere else.

When you go to Biddeford, Maine, you see a place worth preserving exactly as it is. You see the still waters of the coastline running against rocky cliffs of every color, both of which rub up against beaches that seem to stretch into infinity. Turn your head slightly away from the shores and you see land too pristinely green for a kid who grew up going the Delaware beaches to believe could exist within the same sightline. Life is calm and peaceful, surrounded by natural beauty at every turn, and every day as relaxing as a vacation. Everything about this place seems as quiet and untroubled as the landscape. A Jewish kid from Northwest Baltimore can't help wonder how a person could ever be so lucky to grow up in a place so beautiful.

When you go to Toms River, New Jersey, you see a similarly seaside town - far more ethnically diverse than Biddeford, but not nearly so attractive aesthetically. And yet the diversity gives every possible amenity, and makes life into a never-ending soiree. If you want to go to a beach, everybody seems to know someone who has their own piece of private beach where you can lie and swim, practically undisturbed. If you want a good meal, you visit the restaurant of your friend who became a chef. If you want entertainment or culture, you take a simple drive to Philadelphia or New York. If you want to hang out, you call the friends you've grown up and gone to the same gatherings with since you were in high school.

Provincial though these places may seem to people who've never been there, being born to places like them is better than living any big city, and worth the lifelong fight it takes to preserve everything that's worthwhile about them. Hopefully, your children can soon enjoy all the things that enliven your time upon this Earth just as you do now.

But for a Jew who wants to truly be a Jew, there is no such truly defined place from which to hail. For all Pikesville's Jewish concentration (and it's the largest concentration outside of Israel), it's just a makeshift Jewish community that people come to because Jews live there, and leave without a second thought when better opportunities arise. It's not particularly attractive, nor is it a place where people are particularly nice to each other, it's simply a place where some Jews feel free to be Jewish without judgement. Such a place is the long-cherished dream of those who might fancy themselves "Jewish separatists", and for those who dreamed of it, it is very much a place worth defending. But for those of us who look at the fanaticism which such a dream engenders, for those of us who disapprove of the right-wing paranoia and religious fanaticism such a place can't help but breed, it is a place we can't help longing to escape, even as we feel gratitude for everything with which it provided us.

Being a Jew, by definition, means that there is no place where you should feel truly at home. There is no place on this planet where a true Jew feels accepted, and I doubt there ever will be. Many Jews thought that America, not Israel, is the true Promised Land where we can be integrated among the American population, but for many Jews integration turned out to be the same as assimilation - once you're fully American, you're no longer fully Jewish. And for all New York's Jewish heritage, it will always be a scattered, multicultural place. According to Lenny Bruce, if you live in New York, you're automatically Jewish. But if your primary attachment is to New York, then your religion is New York and there's no room for a second primary affiliation. If you live in Israel, your right to existence is questioned on a daily basis by the world, and living among other Israelis, your existence is a life permanently in conflict. Even if Israelis weren't known for being of an extremely abrasive and confrontational temperament, the challenge of creating and sustaining a productive, dynamic country in the desert, among people who wish us dead and a world that expects us to accept that wish without objection, would make any Jew who lives in Israel feel extreme rancor.

There is nothing comfortable or harmonious about a Jewish existence. I don't know the origin of the term 'People of the Book', but being a Jew is the definition of being at home nowhere but in your own thoughts, and a properly applied mind is an extremely turbulent place to live. Whether among themselves or among non-Jews, Jews thrive best in an atmosphere of conflict, defiance, opposition. Wherever we're from, our sense of place will always be filled with tension, and tension is the lifelong burden which every Jew takes on himself. There is no inner harmony to Judaism, and no sense that life should be fun. There is only constant debate and argument. The hightened state in which argument exists produces many crucial things that improve the quality of life, but it is not a life to be enjoyed.

800 Words: The American Lycee - A Syllabus - Grades 7-9 - American Stories

Submitted without comment or explanation.

Grade 7 - The Television Era: 1999-

The Sopranos

Freaks and Geeks

The West Wing
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Malcolm in the Middle
Monk

Futurama

24

The Daily Show
Six Feet Under

Family Guy (second incarnation)

The Shield

South Park

The Wire

Arrested Development

Deadwood

The Office (British and American)

Lost
The Colbert Report

Friday Night Lights

How I Met Your Mother

Mad Men

Breaking Bad
True Blood
John Adams

Louie

Game of Thrones

Homeland

Girls

Additional Texts:

Movies:

Three Kings

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Social Network

Elephant

The Dark Knight

WALL-E

United 93

Juno

Little Miss Sunshine

Thank You For Smoking

Up In The Air

There Will Be Blood

Brokeback Mountain

Gran Torino

Books (to be studied either complete or in excerpts):

Non-Fiction:

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Freakonomics by Steven D Leavitt and Steven J Dubner & Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Outsourced Self by Arlie Russell Hochschild 

Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

“A Problem from Hell” America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals by David Halberstam

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer & Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10th, 2001 by Steve Coll

The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

The Closing of the American Mind by Alan Bloom

How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer

The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington

Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman & The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria

Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Journalism by Paul Krugman
The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren

Republic, Lost: by Lawrence Lessig

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips

House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger 

Fiction:

The Koran

Atlas Shrugged & The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Anne Proulx

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Plays:

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

Avenue Q

In the Heights

Grade 8 - The TV Era: 1983-1999

Cheers
Frasier
Late Night with David Letterman
St. Elsewhere
The Golden Girls
Moonlighting
NYPD Blue
The Cosby Show
A Different World
Picket Fences LA Law
Law & Order
Star Trek The Next Generation
Family Ties
Murphy Brown
Saturday Night Live
Married With Children

The Simpsons

Seinfeld

Twin Peaks

The Larry Sanders Show

Homicide: Life on the Streets

The X-Files
3rd Rock from the Sun
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Beavis and Butthead
King of the Hill

Animaniacs
Daria

The Drew Carey Show

Everybody Loves Raymond

Friends

Ellen
Will and Grace
Spin City
Ally McBeal

Sex and the City

Additional texts:

Movies

Jaws & Star Wars

Close Encounters of the Third Kind & ET

Blue Velvet & American Beauty

The Breakfast Club

Do The Right Thing

Hoop Dreams

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Forrest Gump

Glengarry Glen Ross

Hotel Rwanda

Wag the Dog & Primary Colors

Dazed and Confused

Books:

Non-Fiction:

Speeches and Letters by Martin Luther King Jr.

Autobiography of Malcolm X

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed Along With Our Families: by Philip Gourevitch

Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

The End of History by Francis Fukuyama

The Age of Reagan 1974-2008: A History by Sean Wilentz 

The Starr Report by Kenneth Starr

Power and the Idealists by Paul Berman

What's The Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank 

Capital by Karl Marx

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater

The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

Twilight of the Common Dream by Todd Gitlin

The Big Con by Jonathan Chait


The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stieglitz

America: The Book by Jon Stewart

Ashes to Ashes: America’s Cigarette War, The Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

Fiction:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Watchmen by Alan Moore

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Rabbit is Rich & Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Plays:

Angels in America by Tony Kushner

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

Fences by August Wilson

Speed-the-plow by David Mamet

Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim

Assassins by Stephen Sondheim

Grade 9 - 1962-1983: The Film Era

The Manchurian Candidate

Dr. Strangelove

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Graduate

In the Heat of the Night

The Dirty Dozen

Bonnie and Clyde

The Producers  
Blazing Saddles

2001: A Space Odyssey

Easy Rider

Midnight Cowboy

M*A*S*H
Five Easy Pieces
A Clockwork Orange
Dirty Harry
Patton
Serpico

The Last Picture Show
McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Little Big Man

The French Connection

The Godfather Epic

Mean Streets

Badlands

The Conversation

Chinatown
The Long Goodbye

Nashville

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Rocky 
Taxi Driver 
All the President's Men

Network

Annie Hall & Manhattan

The Deer Hunter & Apocalypse Now
The Shining
Blowout
Raging Bull

The Right Stuff

TV

The Andy Griffith Show

Bonanza

The Brady Bunch

Dragnet

Get Smart

Hogan's Heroes

Mission: Impossible

Star Trek

All in the Family

Mary Tyler Moore

Taxi

The Carrol Burnett Show

The Jeffersons

Good Times

Books:

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan

The Making of a President by Theodore H. White

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson

Ghandi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Non-Violence by Erik Ericksen

Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History by Norman Mailer

Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

So Human an Animal by Rene J. Dubos

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan

On Human Nature by E. O. Wilson

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

The Imperial Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

Fiction:

Herzog by Saul Bellow

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth and Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

Theater:

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George by Stephen Sondheim

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying