WWFD (What Would Frank Do)?

"Against adolescents, the Devil doth lay all his ordnance and use all his engines."- Erasmus

I've been wanting to do something for Frank. And I heard Frank in my head: “Do something for me? Wretched child! Forget me! WRITE! YOU SHOULD WRITE!” So here goes.

When I was in high school, I used to like to investigate the different ways I could get there on the subway. Usually it was F train to 14th Street, then the ever-popular LL. (It was the LL then, not yet the L as it is now). There were various other ways the LL could be approached, probably with less efficiency, but I was new to solo subway trips, and tickled at my freedom. And sometimes on those forays, I would run into Frank. Cool, I thought, Mr. McCourt likes to change it up a bit, too. I would happily pull up alongside Frank and spill whatever was on my teenage mind that morning. It never occurred to me that Frank might change his route some mornings because he wanted some peace on his way to work. That's just the way we were with him. But Frank was always gracious about it.

Looking back at Stuyvesant in the '70s, I certainly adored Mr. McCourt, and considered myself one of his acolytes. After all, Stuyvesant was the math and science place, and we arty and literary types craved some time and recognition. Frank was where we went for that, we courted his favor, and competed jealously for his attention. But the more I thought about it later, the more I realized how little I actually listened to Frank, how little attention I really paid him, how little I took to heart. Frank suggested to me many times, both in his comments on my papers, and in conversation, that I was just skimming along, and he wanted me to dig deeper and challenge myself. “This is way too easy for you,” he scolded. It was. When I read D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, I got the snark right away, and readily emulated it in my own book reviews. And Frank, never adverse to some well-placed snark, appreciated it at first, but then started to expect something more from me. I thought snark was an end in itself at the time, and reveled in it-- after all, D.H. Lawrence does it! I never did get it while I was there, and not for years afterwards. Frank also mentioned, from time to time, in the nicest possible way, that my boyfriend was kind of a loser and not worth all the angst. Right again. But it was all lost on me at the time.

Frank was very much like a parent, just one with a lot less power over us. He was present, he listened as best he could, gave as much as he could, resigned himself to not being listened to in some cases, and quietly absorbed a lot of thoughtless blows. We never really gave much thought to Frank's life-- Mr. McCourt has a life? Problems? We just let fly at him. Poor Frank, possibly the world's greatest repository of unsought teenage confidences.

At the time, Frank was not the celebrated teacher he became. A lot of parents didn't like him. Stuyvesant parents tended to be, well, results-oriented. Frank was more process-oriented, to put it mildly. I found it deeply ironic when Mayor Bloomberg paid pro-forma tribute to Frank as a model New York City teacher. In Bloomberg World, Frank would have been a total renegade, and not tolerated. Frank represented everything that Bloomberg and Joel Klein try to eradicate. After all, we have exams to take. Mayor Bloomberg, here's your reading list. Moby Dick. The Scarlet Letter. Richard II. Rappacini's Daughter. The Canterbury Tales. Here's a restaurant review that's well-written. Afterwards, we'll take a little break, maybe sing a song, and you can get up and read something of your own to the class. By the way, what did you have for dinner the night before last? Who did you eat it with?

In my senior year, a group of my friends gave me a surprise birthday party. When they mentioned it to Mr. McCourt, he pulled out his wallet, and kicked in to the party fund. “Have it in my classroom,” he offered. So the party was in a comfortable place for all of us, Room 205. Later that year, he wrote in my yearbook. “You will stay with me until I'm called to the great classroom in the sky.” That was around the time I began to get a little peeved at him, and I got angry at the inscription. It was that jealousy, that sense of competition. The poor man had to think of something nice to write in everybody's book, and I dismissed it as phoniness (after all, I was at the age to do that). Now there was the pot calling the kettle, since something of that odor was what he complained of in my writing. And now, here it is, he's been called to that great classroom, and he's certainly still with me.

In the succeeding years, I did get mad at Frank, but I wasn't really sure why-- it just seemed to me that in some way, he hadn't been enough. I saw all his limitations. I think that I just got mad at him after leaving high school, in the way we get mad at our parents when we're teenagers. My younger brother had him for English and creative writing, and I sneered at Ed's Mr. McCourt stories. Just as Frank had been a stepstone to some semblance of sophistication for me, I had become too sophisticated for Frank. And music started to be a stronger drug for me than literature. Ed reported back to me, “Frank McCourt thinks you should be writing.” Well, screw what Frank McCourt thinks.

It wasn't until years after that that I started to think about who I wasn't mad at, and I realized that I wasn't mad at the countless teachers I had had, even at Stuyvesant, who had given me exactly nothing. They somehow escaped my wrath.

How I wish I had thanked Frank. I won't say that I never got a chance to thank him, because that simply was not true. Frank was never inaccessible. Frank was never off the map, I was. Thank you, Mr. McCourt, wherever you are. I hope it's not a classroom, because you probably had enough of that for a lifetime. But I pray with all my heart that you're singing and laughing.

Guess what, Mayor Bloomberg?

I know you felt called upon to pay posthumous tribute to Frank McCourt as a model of a New York City teacher, but trust me, Mike, you wouldn't have liked Frank. He was exactly the kind of teacher you were trying to stamp out in New York City. He wouldn't have let you micromanage him. He couldn't function that way. He wouldn't have been able to throw Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Chaucer, Hawthorne, Becket and J.P Donleavy at us that way. He couldn't have told us to write a Western. He wouldn't have had Fridays when we read aloud anything we wanted to the class, stuff we had written, and stuff we just liked. He wouldn't have been able to teach us crazy old songs that teenagers would never ordinarily know. He wouldn't have been able to ask us what we had for dinner and breakfast, or what color socks we had on. He wouldn't have been able to challenge all our unquestioned teenage preoccupations, including the literary types' (me included) romanticization of all things Irish. He wouldn't have been able to teach us to write, and teach us to read. There just could never have been time. Oh, and Frank never taught to a test.

DreamyCat

That avatar picture isn't me, of course. It's from a watercolor by Burne-Jones, my favorite 19th-c. artist. The head is of his mistress, Mary, who as portrayed in his paintings, was perhaps the most beautiful human being I've ever seen, right up there with Botticelli's Simonetta. Burne-Jones painted her as goddesses, sorceresses, angels and muses. It's a face that haunts me for some reason, since I first saw it. Here's a drawing of her.

The profile in my avatar is a warmup for his painting of her as Nimue in The Beguiling of Merlin, but I think the watercolor is better in some ways than the finished oil.

Since I last wrote, Ryan Church is on the DL, as is a cast of thousands. The Mets were 19-9 for the month of May, which should be pleasing, but life in Mets land is never serene, even when the team is ahead by ten games-- oh yeah, when does that happen?

The Mets seem to be throwing Ryan Church to the wolves. I don't understand why. They have a whole bunch of outfielders, but only two real professional ones, and Church is one of them.

Lunch at Lupa

Excellent lunch yesterday at Lupa. The wine was a Montepulciano d'Abuzzo Nicodemi 2006-- wonderful, I usually drink cheap wine when I'm not out with Dad and Adrienne. ;) For starters, the beets with pistachio, and the prosciutto di Parma. Really good prosciutto makes a big difference-- fair, OK deli prosciutto is an acceptable sandwich-filler. Really good prosciutto is an event. I go to a restaurant in Bay Ridge where they make a nice sandwich with vast quantities of very nice prosciutto. I take half of it home, and redistribute the prosciutto over two or three more sandwiches-- that's how big it is. And that's NICE prosciutto. At Lupa, they have divine prosciutto, like in Italy. One tiny, thin slice is just incredible. Two is -- I can't even describe it.

Finally I had bavette (like linguine) cacio e pepe, a simple Roman pasta dish with pecorino cheese and fresh black pepper. Couldn't have been simpler or better. Best meal in ages.