Humanities

There was a new class being offered and it was absolutely a big deal. Something like seventy students, juniors and seniors in one room. Three teachers (two of them I remember well: the whip smart—in a sometimes scary way—Sally Schultz and Shelley Washburn, who benignly tolerated my overwrought teen-age poetry long enough to be an encouragement). Humanities: history, literature, art. Intimidating: ancient Greek tragedy? Roman Empire? Dante’s allegory? And the people: all of the straight-A masters who blew through calculus as sophomores; the ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ as I believe they self-proclaimed; the cool publishers of ‘Death Quarterly’ (Garrick, Steve, Glynnis, et al.). Impossible set of variables. The room was in a corner by the auditorium, near a remote alley of lockers, free of the blaring orange metal and gray-brown linoleum of the main halls and the gladitorial social combats. Ah, Lincoln High, Lincoln High, for you we live, for you we die. This room had a wall of windows towards the field, and inside, risers, with rows of terraced chair-desks. Stadium seating for the cerebral circus. The whole idea—once it began—was intoxicating and scary. Actually understanding the cultural and intellectual history of Western Civ (or at least the thumbnail sketch) was much different than the kind of intense immersion into single authors or books that passed for being smart. Sure, I could talk about ‘Moby Dick’ or Jack Kerouac, but thinking about how Antiquity bubbled back up in the Renaissance and its slide into the Enlightenment and how Ovid or Petrarch or Shakespeare or Keats were related or how Gothic contended with Rococo or Romanticism seemed impossible. How could anyone get Fragonard? By the way, it was very cool to make fun of Rococo in Room 189 that spring—the fat girl on the swing flipping her tiny shoe off was too much. And the whole course was too much sometimes: between my magpie like darting attention to girls and my systemic devotion to R.E.M. (fostered by Alice Vosmek and Joanie Menefee), all of the high culture, real culture, serious business was beyond me, like a Golden Retriever staring at a passing satellite. I would learn it, but getting it seemed beyond. And I assumed beyond any of my friends. Impossible.

Either before class or after, as the desks rumbled and backpacks rustled, Karen pulled me aside. Ostensibly, I think we were planning a movie or me coming over (I always went to Midmar—she never came to Montgomery), but she had a Walkman in hand and really wanted me to hear something. Assumption was that it would be something I knew from the vaguely 80s college rock genre. O, how cool we were. Or it could be one of the bands that Karen liked but I had not yet (or never would) acquire a taste (Frank Zappa is the stand-out in this category). Not even leaving the room, most people had filed out, she smooshed the headphones on me, rewound the Memorex tape and intently stared at me as she pressed play. It was piano, classical piano. It was fast and contrapuntal and complicated, starting and stopping on a dime and then driving. It kind of freaked me out because I didn’t get it: mathematical, but grand, precise, wordless—how could anyone play that quickly, correctly, gently and forcefully at the same time? And I didn’t get how Karen could have found out about this stuff, listened to it, liked it, and liked it enough to have a favorite song that she had to have me listen to. Impossible. It was short. She rewound. ‘Again?’ I thought we should leave the room. ‘So?’ I remember telling her I thought it was kind of crazy, but that I didn’t get it. Chihuahua and Halley’s Comet. We planned to go to her house later on. There she showed me the brown LP sleeve, with a baroque coffee table, a jigsaw puzzle of wild haired Beethoven, and some guy, Glenn Gould’s name in 70s font. She must have borrowed the record from her dad or picked it up in a bin downtown somewhere. She did that. She pulled that stuff all the time.

The piece she played by Glenn Gould (later, after the Gould movie came out, she got really into his Bach recordings, but it was Beethoven back in the 80s)

Beethoven 'Seven Bagatelles Opus 33 No. 7' played by Glenn Gould


She didn't play this one--it wasn't the one that she was obsessed with in Humanities--but it is the one that wrecks me now that she is gone

Beethoven 'Ten Bagatelles Opus 126 No. 3' played by Glenn Gould