Muszkiewicz Reader

Even deeper, for children, math looms large; there’s something about doing well in math that makes kids feel they are smart in everything. In that sense, math can be a powerful tool to promote social justice. “When you have all the kids in a class succeeding in a subject, you see that they’re competing against the problem, not one another,” says Mighton. ‘It’s like they’re climbing a mountain together. You see a very healthy kind of competition. And it makes kids more generous to one another. Math can save us.’

It will take independent-minded educators to use Jump and see if its results can be replicated in more classrooms and schools. It’s hard to imagine what society might look like if we could undermine the math hierarchies that get solidified in grade school. These patterns tend to play out across society, often in negative ways. Wasn’t it the whiz kids who invented financial derivatives and subprime mortgages? And how many adults got themselves into hot water with their mortgages because, at bottom, they didn’t really understand the risks?

‘But you know, all presidents done something good. Well, most of them. Except that last one.’

[Walter] Breuning, a self-described Republican, meant President George W. Bush.

‘He got us into war. We can’t get out of war now,’ he said. ‘I voted for him. But that’s about all. His father was a pretty good president, not too bad. The kid had too much power. He got himself wrapped up and that’s it.’

…

‘I think every change that we’ve ever made, ever since I was a child — 100 years — every change has been good for the people,’ Breuning said. ‘My God, we used to have to write with pen and ink, you know, (for) everything. When the machines came, it just made life so much easier.’

…

Breuning talked current affairs with the other residents. One of his main causes was to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘War never cured anything. Look at the North and South right today. They’re still fighting over the damn war. They’ll never get over that,’ he said.

What puzzles me is why there isn’t more indignation. The Tea Party is the most indignant domestic political movement since Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party, but its wrath is turned in the wrong direction. It favors policies that are favorable to corporations and unfavorable to individuals. Its opposition to Obamacare is a textbook example. Insurance companies and the health care industry finance a “populist” movement that is manipulated to oppose its own interests. The billionaire Koch brothers payroll right wing front organizations that oppose labor unions and financial reform. The patriots wave their flags and don’t realize they’re being duped.

One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace’s library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.

Much of Wallace’s work has to do with cutting himself back down to size, and in a larger sense, with the idea that cutting oneself back down to size is a good one, for anyone (q.v., the Kenyon College commencement speech, later published as This is Water). I left the Ransom Center wondering whether one of the most valuable parts of Wallace’s legacy might not be in persuading us to put John Bradshaw on the same level with Wittgenstein. And why not; both authors are human beings who set out to be of some use to their fellows. It can be argued, in fact, that getting rid of the whole idea of special gifts, of the exceptional, and of genius, is the most powerful current running through all of Wallace’s work.

He compares capturing the sounds of speech to what it’s like when standing on the shore of a lake in a heavy fog and hearing the sounds and rhythms of conversation coming across the water, but understanding none of the actual words.

Once Graham has the poem’s subject and its sounds and rhythms, he adds the words.