Divorce theory revisited

I have often declared that given the opportunity (too positive a term?), most people would not choose their current spouse to marry again after say a decade or two. (My husband is very secure and usually has a fine sense of humor.)

The dismal statistics aside, I based my theory on personal experience. Most of the people we have been couple friends with over the years have broken the knot. “Take my wife. Please.”

I found a friend from infancy this week through Facebook. Divorced.

We counted the couples who later divorced that we have entertained (loosely defined) or were entertained by. Seventeen. This doesn’t include church and work acquaintances, which would really swell the number. Does this mirror everyone’s experience?

I researched divorce stats through the National Center for Health Statistics.   Interestingly, the age of the person matters significantly. The highest age group to divorce is 20-24, and likelihood of divorce decreases dramatically with aging. Other factors apply, too, such as education level, family background, and certain elements of religious faith among others.

How does this affect my theory? Looks like that by the time we reach 40, with only about 6% of couples divorcing, we will probably be wed for life — to the originating spouse.  The others exited stage right to become statistics in another category. Those folks would not have remarried at least not the same person and the rest of us would. In theory.

Another interesting parallel includes stats for the number of times a person marries and divorces. Second and third marriages have much less a chance for success and long-lived marital bliss. We don’t learn from our mistakes apparently.

Also, the rate of divorce decreased about a point per 1,000 from 2000 to 2007.

Dances with cats

What do sacred trees, war paint, bows and arrows, bone jewelry, whooping, hair braids, bareback riding, and bare chests all round have in common? (Hint: throw in an evil, land-grabbing cavalry.)

If you grew up with old-school westerns, not Blazing Saddles, you know all the above spell Indians, i.e. Native Americans, as they have been stereotypically portrayed in American film.

Now take the typical plot and move it to 2152 on another planet and add technological progress and you have Avatar! You also have to add tails, blue skin, and weird creatures, but those are more props than attributing character elements.

Even though the military invaders are humiliated in the end, one wonders how this can be when it has high-tech plated helicopters, etc., and the Na Vi have bow/arrows.

Reviewers have amply praised the cinematographical advancements, so I’ll simply ditto that. But the story failed to satisfy — too done. Yes, the military men were jerks, their motives repugnant, the scientists brilliant, the Na Vi exemplary noble savages, but the plot inadvertantly deprecates the “natives” by showing them simple caricatures, even folklorish in an attempt to show them superior.

December movies quick take

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Though Holmes didn’t resemble the image I had formed from the Conan Doyle short stories we read in middle school, Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are worth seeing as well as are the Victorian props and London sets. See it.

 . . . The Morgans — Yes. Though poorly received, the film was funny, if predictable (when have you seen a romantic comedy that wasn’t?) and clean with an acceptable family values ending.

It’s Complicated — Really? Golden Globe nominee? I smiled at several points, wouldn’t have missed the pot scene, enjoyed the John Krasinski scenes, and winced at the final theme of non-reconciliation. Also, I get the idea that the target market is baby boomers, now middle-aged, but that doesn’t mean we want more middle-aged skin to look at, though I was glad to see that Baldwin and Streep were realistically filled out.

Up in the Air — After the barrage of big-ticket profanity in the first scene or two, the film settles into something of a middle-aged man coming of age (finally) story. But alas. While the out-of-a-suitcase, stark efficiency apartment, air miles-consuming anti-hero is slamming traditional values and earning a living firing people across the nation, he too proves to possess an Achilles Heel of the basic human need for love.   See it.

2012 — I like that the end of the world is not caused by human idiocy. It’s the sun more or less. Giant arks transport select (rich) passengers to safety to form a new order once the waves settle.  I guess I’ve lived long enough to become skeptical of an assigned date for apocalypse — apocalypses by definition or at least connotation defy prediction. Good effects.

Blind Side — True stories, to me, to be interesting, have to be more extreme than the story of a family that adopts an underprivileged black teen and enables him to transform his life, largely through the magic of size and football. Good story. Heartwarming and worthy of admiration. It’s predictable throughout, but worth a ticket.

Poetry’s dumb

Teaching. You have to love it or leave it. Or you may love it and still leave it, which is my final(?) decision. Again.

The straw this time is a question from a student beginning an in-class essay on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which we had read and discussed and I believe is still taught in better high schools: 

“When you say clergy, what do you mean?” 

It didn’t help that a few students had handed in easily-detected plagiarized papers, one pasted from Sparknotes and two identical papers from another online site. (“We’re in different classes. She’ll never know.”)

Or that one with a late paper suggested that I could fiind her paper in the library where the copy tech probably had it ready.  Sure.  Thanks for playing.

Who owns your books?

Is anyone else appalled byAmazon’s electronic retrieval and removal of customers’ Kindle ebook purchases? I own yellowed, paperback copies of the texts in questions: Animal Farm, 1984, and Atlas Shrugged. Talk about irony. I didn’t have to sign an agreement statement when I made my purchases. With electronic texts, apparently the retail company views its texts as a “service.” (Read about how Apple checks IPhone applications. )

The bookselling giant had its reasons. Well enough. But those of us who have indeed read Orwell and Rand smell a e-rat or at least yet another potential means for invasion of liberty, monitoring of reading material being a telling starting point with totalitarian regimes.

Here’s the article  from Slate, where you can also find a link to info.  on the book by Harvard law professor, Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

in the news

Governor Sanford — It really didn’t help your image that you “love” the woman. You didn’t always love her. There was a time a while back that you were introduced. Next, well, there were the introductory activities when you might have chosen an alternative behavior.  You’d deserve more sympathy/empathy if you hadn’t revealed that other indiscretions with women are part of your secret resume. I don’t mean to be judgmental, affairs are common, but as a public figure, you open yourself to scrutiny and commentary. You’ve lost your wife, and you’ll lose the Argentinian when the next soul mate comes along. Hello . . . don’t write those sweet nothings in email for crying out loud!

Ruth Madoff — Another who will suffer collateral damage from her husband’s activities. Sad that today they’re seizing their multi-million dollar apartment. This isn’t sarcasm. It makes me feel they way I feel when the Bolsheviks confiscate Dr. Zhivago’s lovely home in the film, crowding his family into one room and burning his (make that “”the People’s) furniture for heat.

Michael Jackson — The Jackson Five never appealed. But I admit that Daughter Dearest gave me Thriller for my birthday last year. I had mentioned  something about liking the music to Thriller. And Beat It. And Billy Jean.  I just listen and and don’t look.

Canto III for the classroom

Dante’s Canto III of Inferno, which I will be teaching in the fall, poses unique challenges like most pre-modern literature beyond language and style.

I wondered what to bring to 21st-century students from this medieval epic poem which depicts a quite literal hell and its inhabitants. (I doubt that most students will believe in a literal hell since they did not, from an earlier poem’s discussion — Rich’s “Living in Sin” – believe in sin in a biblical sense.)

Canto III cantains the entry capstone’s ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YE THAT ENTER.  Early on Virgil shows Dante the “woeful people who have lost the use of the intellect or reason.” What does that mean?  Their further description:

. . . he led me in to the things that are hidden there. There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling always through that air forever dark, as sand eddies in a whirlwind (vv. 16-30).

These are the denizens who are driven in tumultuous fervor of expression (note the language/speech/sound diction) but who lack any purpose and attain no goal. Ever. They lost their ability to think, reason, and then communicate sound reason. And they suffer their desultory fate.

And I looked and saw a whirling banner which ran so fast that it seemed as if it could never make a stand, and behind it came so long a train of people that I should never have believed death had undone so many (vv. 55-57).

Plus all this activity is done with speed as people frantically run after a banner (purpose) that never is established.  Modern students will surely relate to a driven but unfulfilled world described so frequently in works with which they are familiar. (See Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” post.)

They should recognize the pitiable, relentless activity of those who have lost the use of their minds, the greatest use of which is the knowledge of truth. That, of course, is why the students are furthering their education.

Thanks for (not) sharing

In thinking about redistribution of wealth, fairness, and responsibility consider the familiar Biblical parable of the ten virgins. (Matthew 25:10-13._

 We might want to know more details about this wedding, but what is undeniable is that the author praises half of the ten: the half that were prepared with oil for their lamps and who refused to share their oil with the unprepared ladies.

The context here is Christ’s second coming and being alert and ready, but the detail of the “selfishness” of those stingy girls could have been omitted without detriment to the story. Was the author saying that we may not mooch someone’s salvation? Yes, but the other principle remains, and I find it interesting and in contrast to the usually touted attitudes in scripture.

I’m not anti-sharing, but there are situations . . .

Post 100 — a poem and a comment

Learning Curves

Driving from the city through rural countryside
to teach literature and composition — “humanities 215″
is instructive:
unprepossessing vutures hover the highway
waiting to get at a fast-food dinner–
“What times are these?” they query, though with thanksgiving.

Small deer convening,  quietly posed for a family photo,
wait for the still sister or mother
and inquire also – or maybe they know.
Roadkill is the special of the day– every day –
though with fewer casualties on the homeward route.

In the country, clouds are closer — really –
they loom relentlessly for miles — black and angry –
especially in the dead spot for cell reception –
a valley between hills of brown cattle all facing east.
 A dead car there would throw a person  
right into a game of chance –

On campus, I’m teaching Hamlet — again.
“To be or not to be . . .” 
That is the only question, as always,
for small or large unremarkable rodentia
and drivers on freeways or backroads –
even if you don’t, Hamlet, do it yourself.

The correct answer: not to be.

 

While this is the poem I had today, I promised myself to write, sometime soon, something that shows nature in a positive light. That’s harder, I think, for most poets. A good thesis might involve poets, say Frost and Dickinson, and how frequently they portray nature as friendly or dark.  They do both. Ultimately, it’s more uplifting to see only the good, but it’s not necessarily more instructive. Consider George Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” wherein the speaker addresses the body regarding preparing to die. 

Richard Everhart’s “The Groundhog” displays a similar theme as mine, though he’s a frequently anthologized pro. (scroll to the one with Eberhart’s name.) It reminds me of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” And there is a little pathetic fallacy in Frost’s “Bereft” as nature finds out that the speaker is bereft and alone.

What’s your statue?

Billy Collins writes about what his own and others’ memorial statues might look like. The speaker in “Statues in the Park” views an “equestrian” statue and thinks of someone who taught him the symbolism of such works: a horse rearing up, two legs raised meant that the rider had died in battle and so on.

From there his thoughts wander to the more common sort who live ignoble or seemingly featureless lives of pain or grief, unremarkable uses for replication in statues in parks. Naturally he thinks of his own statue — himself on his knees,  eyes uplifted in prayer, simply begging for another day.

Collins’s 2005 collection The Trouble with Poetry is a fitting read for April (National Poetry Month) since Collins has done so much for the repopularization of poetry.  When he served as American Poet Laureate in 2001, he began the Poetry 180 project, which engaged students and others in a hip, thoughtful website which archives his work and the work of other poets, mainly comtemporary.

Take a look at the table of contents of all 180 poems on this Library of Congress sponsored site for some time well spent with some gifted, but less (or never) frequently anthologized poets. And you might enjoy seeing and hearing Billy Collins read “Litany” on You Tube along with a bit of commentary. Search around for other readings. Charming.