Oxford by Matthew Rice

   Matthew Rice, with his beautiful illustrations of Oxford architecture, reminds me of an earlier book titled 750 Years of Paris. In a city with old buildings, the history is preserved, not only to show the city’s origins, but how it has changed over the years. In this book, the watercolor illustrations of Oxford buildings go from the earliest standing structures, to the modern era. We learn how the city was dominated by the famous school from its earliest days, and how the students and teachers were a major influence on the community. He writes how Oxford is ringed with green pastures, and since it never industrialized, it avoided the pollution and overcrowding of the other English cities. One other blessing of non-industrialization is the lack of crime.

   This book teaches us a lot about how and why Britain retained its storied history. Take for example Godstow Abbey, of which only a wall remains. The ruins sit in a field and haven’t been torn down, so it remains there as a reminder of what the town used to be. One reason for its posterity is that there was no building boom (no factories means no housing demand) so nobody was desperate to clear the land. Then you had the landowners, who liked having mock ruins, or “follies,” in their gardens, so having a real ruin was even better. At the most recent, you have the National Trust, set up to preserve the lands and ancient homes (or take them off the hands of dirt-poor aristocrats who can’t pay the inheritance tax).

    Differences in architecture abound in the city of Oxford. Christchurch Cathedral is built in the Gothic style, with arches, columns, flying buttresses, and huge windows, while St. Cross and St. Ebbe’s are built in the earlier Saxon style after the Norman conquest of England. The Saxon style has similarities to Romanesque architecture, with heavy doors, thick walls, small windows, lack of décor, and a generally defensive structure. Their sturdy build is in line with their second use as a secure building, as the Saxon and Norman eras were a period of instability. 

   In another nod to history, England’s architects were often loath to let go of old styles, which is why some of the houses look older than they are. The Beaumont Street houses were all built in the 1820’s, and designed to look like the St. Gile’s houses, built a century earlier. No. 78 Woodstock road, built in 1892, looks a lot like Hampton Court Palace; it has red brick walls, peaked windows, and a stone arch entrance. Oxford’s free-standing stone towers were part of the city walls but were left behind when the walls were torn down years ago. Over the years they’ve been refurbished with new material, but their original styles remain. My research shows that in the 1800’s, the Church of England sold off a lot of the small old churches, and the new owners kept them intact. Many of the older churches have been converted to restaurants, preschools, and gift shops. You can say that oxford’s buildings are a curious mix of old and new.

    The illustrations have a very warm and intimate tone, less of an architectural drawing and more of a children’s book illustration. I think that the author could do a version of this as a picture book, to teach children about Oxford’s history.

Organized Money by Keith Mestrich and Mark Pinsky

   Robert Kiyosaki, in his Rich Dad books, says that the rich can make their money work for them. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe half of what Kiyosaki says but he has a point here; of you have a strong grasp of how money works, then you have a strong chance of sustainability. If you think of loans (or worse, credit cards) as a money tree, they you’ll lose the game. You have to know where the money goes.
    Both of the authors of Organized Money are financial experts, working towards the goal of community development through money management. Throughout the book they give you a tour of anti-conservativism, and a strong dislike for President Reagan’s policies in the 1980’s. They describe him as having wiped out all of the New Deal programs, especially the ones that regulated banks and prevented interdependence. However, they are not so warm to President Clinton either, because he signed further legislation that further deregulated the banks.

   I don’t agree with a lot of their opinions, however. They write that conservatives oppose a woman’s right to choose, racial integration, and the extension of personal rights. But what about the conservative who does in fact support women’s rights, yet opposes spending public money on a Women’s Studies program at a state college? What about the America who has no problem with non-traditional gender roles, and doesn’t object to a boy wearing a dress to school, but is irked at having to find gender-neutral books for the school library? Does that make the person a sexist?

    Another theme of this book is the notion of “be wary, government help comes with a price.” They use, as an example, President Trump’s Investing in Opportunity Act of 2017. Why would the most conservative president in history want such a program? Why would Trump, of all people, want to invest in low-income communities? The answer is that he doesn’t! It’s just another way for him to exert (conservative) government control over how the money is spent on a low-income community. Those who assume the money will go to daycare and preschool, will find the money going to the county jail. However, I do believe it was the (conservative) President Reagan who warned us to beware of anyone who says “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

   These guys give no usable advice on how to make the system work for progressives. They make no mention of how to avoid bad debt, nor do they advise against money-wasters like credit cards and Christmas shopping sprees. Have they been to Kmart (or FAO Schwartz, or Walmart) in the week before Christmas and seen people filling their carts with junk? With loads of gifts for other people? Things that will end up never being used? All of this while struggling to pay the rent? It’s a sad thing to see, and even sadder to see how these two financial experts wasted their time on this rant of a book. Better they should use their time to start a financial counseling program for the poor.

Kids At Work by Emir Estrada

   Few American teenagers have jobs these days; some blame it on the decline of retail, and others blame it on kids having too much homework. Emir Estrada, in an extensive study, finds that this is not the case with the children of Hispanic immigrants, often in this country illegally. In Los Angeles, a sizeable number of Hispanic kids work as vendors, under their parents’ tutelage, and still graduate high school. Though they attend school full-time, they spend afternoons and weekends minding the stalls (rarely licensed) and contribute to the household income, rarely cutting into their schoolwork. Though he believes the ethnic and cultural backgrounds are not the sole explanation for this phenomenon, he does find that it exists almost entirely among the Hispanic population, not the Chinese, Indians, Armenians, or Koreans in Los Angeles.

    This book got me thinking about the work-versus-school choice in this world, often debated in the UN. The image of third-world kids working instead of going to school always leaves us outraged, and why wouldn’t it? Why would anyone think it fair, that a teenager should have to work instead of going to school, losing any chance of a good future, and probably not even getting to enjoy the money he/she makes? But on the streets of LA, Hispanic teens are working and doing well in school. The author interviews a 13-year-old girl, who says that her peers have too much time on their hands, and it gets them in trouble. Her afterschool vending teaches her to communicate, focus, be aware, measure, keep accounts, be responsible for the goods, and stick to a schedule. While she (and other teen vendors) acknowledge that there are rude customers, the kids learn a valuable skill – communicating with adult professionals – which will serve the kids well in college applications and job interviews.

   One of the teen vendors, Adriana, allowed Estrada to print her schedule, listing her school arrival/departure times, he daily location of her stall (staggered, probably to avoid the cops) and the revenue for each day. While some kids make fun of her, most of them envy her. The chapter titled If I Don’t Help, Then Who Will is all about juggling work, school, and caring for siblings, and it can be highly educational. Some of the teens, like 18 year old Martha, lament the lack of leisure in their lives, especially since her classmates are all rich! She goes to a Catholic school, which her father pays for in full, and her vending gig allows him to devote his whole paycheck to her tuition and the mortgage. Her classmates assume her father is a drug dealer because she won’t say what he does, but at the same time, she has no idea how screwed up the Valley kids can be!

    I’d like to recount from personal experience, how I saw the results of kids having no work at all. A thirteen-year-old, from a rich family, had everything except skills. When it came time to apply to high schools, the essays were all about “afterschool activities that show dedication to learning” or “a skill that you could teach to others,” or “solving a serious problem on your own.” Now let’s see, what could this boy do? Playing Fortnite online was not going to impress the principal, nor would softball. He couldn’t cook, do laundry, or shop for groceries. In every upper-class family, it was the same thing; they spent all their time at school and homework, the housekeeper did the chores, and they spent their time playing video games, skateboarding, online, or in front of the tv. But then I had a student, Maria, who lived in a crammed apartment with her extended family, and had to help out in her father’s store. She wrote her essay about taking inventory, keeping the books, signing for deliveries, stacking the rack, cleaning floors, cleaning the sidewalk, getting rid of the bums, painting over graffiti, and sorting the produce. Needless to say, she had offers from a lot of good high schools.

    Remember the scene from Back to School, where Rodney Dangerfield schools the snobby professor on how to really run a business? Remember how the other students all turn to him and start taking notes, while he talks about all the under-the-table wrangling needed to build a factory? The reason he knows more than the professor of business is that he’s the only one there who’s ever been in business! If you go to an Ivy League school, the professors are all lifelong academics, but in a working class community college, the professors are all industry professionals. Your local junior college has instructors who have current work experience with the subjects they teach, and they know the score. This book dwells on the question of whether or not a young American can juggle work and good grades, and after reading this book, I say the answer is yes, they can! The reason they do well in school is that they have more to write about. They do well in math because they have to keep the accounts. They do well in social studies because they experience every known personality. They impress their teachers because they are not lazy. Let’s face it folks, work makes your schoolwork better.

Apple Tree: Writers on Their Parents

    I remember reading the essay On Seeing England for the First Time by Jamaica Kincaid, and that essay touches on all that she inherited (or didn’t) from her parents. One of the things they try to give her is their love of England, a place that (a) they never visited, (b) hadn’t given them anything, and (c) she rejects the first time she sees it. After reading Kincaid’s ode (or if you prefer, a fast eulogy) to England, I read Amy Tan’s essay Mother Tongue, which is also about the author’s parents. In Mother Tongue, Tan’s mother is taken for a fool when she doesn’t use English, when in fact she is quite shrewd. She uses the façade to trick snotty Anglo-Saxons into dropping their guard. In every memoir I’ve read, the author’s parents are a strong influence (for better or for worse) and in this collection, 25 authors recount their experiences with their parents. Yet in each essay, the influence can be one of acceptance or rejection.

    Not all of the essays in this book give much in the way of literary value, but the one by Angelique Stevens really got my attention. Her family moved constantly (like Jeanette Walls in The Glass Castle) and her mother an avid reader, yet she spent most of her daughter’s life in the looney bin (like Allen Ginsberg’s mother) in Rochester, New York. Now for those of you unfamiliar with Rochester, it’s a run-down and crime-ridden city in Upstate New York, right on Lake Erie, a prominent member of America’s Rust Belt. Like Swansea was to Dylan Thomas, Rochester is “the graveyard of ambition” on most levels. The author’s family lies in that graveyard, as her father was a lifelong alcoholic, and her sister became a prostitute to pay for a crack habit, but at least the author went to college at age 27. Her adult life consists of dealing with her parents’ breakdowns, and when they die, it’s of no issue to her; she treats her father’s burial as though she were giving away an old sofa. When her mother dies, she barely mourns, yet she is surprised by the great books found in the apartment – Hemmingway, Twain, Baldwin – that her mother kept on the shelf all her life. The first irony is that these cheap little books are desired by ragpickers more than clothes or furniture. The second irony is that all those writers came from dysfunctional families. Just like hers.

    Some of the authors, like Avi Steinberg, question their family traditions. Steinberg’s family moved around a lot (am I seeing a pattern here?) including a stay in Israel, where his mother was a zookeeper. She was also a bit of an underachiever, never staying in any place long enough to make a career for herself. Now here is where the author is unsure: was she a restless adventurer, or was she trying out every kind of job to find one that suited her? Then he goes into how Judaism is patriarchal, and the idols that the Rabbis despised were often female (okay, most Semitic deities are female) and it was the men who made the decisions. He uses, as an example, Rachel refusing to get off her seat because she was menstruating (another irony, because in biblical times, menstruation was the only excuse a woman had to disobey her husband). The author’s mother came from an abusive home, so the constant moves may have been a way to avoid structure and control. Both Stevens and Steinberg are the product of crazy intellectuals.

    I’m not so sure if it’s worth having Kyoko Mori’s essay in this collection, as she has written two books on the same story already. The first was her autobiography, published in the 1990’s, and then a teen novel, which was basically a fictionalization of the autobiography. She doesn’t offer much in the way of new insights into her abusive childhood, which I will not spend time going into. Most of the authors included in this book had a lousy experience while growing up, but so did a lot of other great memoirists. Tobias Wolfe wrote about his horrible childhood, and it became the 1988 memoir This Boy’s Life, now considered a classic. Jeanette Walls recounts her crazy childhood in The Glass Castle, and the recent memoir titled Educated, by Tara Westover, is all about growing up in a survivalist family in the mountains. Andre Dubus III (son of the great Andre Dubus II, and neither are featured in Apple Tree) wrote in his memoir about how his college professor father left the kids to suffer in a violent town. The memoir, titled Townie, is full of fights, parental neglect, and deprivation. Same thing with Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future. Same thing with David Smalls’ Stitches.

   In the grand scheme of memoir, I assume that a lousy childhood makes for great writing. But are there no writers out there with great childhoods? Is there no great memoirist whose life wasn’t stinky? Lucy Knisley’s Relish (okay, it's a comic, but it's still about her life) is a great celebration of food and eating. She learned good things from her parents, and while her childhood had ups and downs, the contrast between the enjoyable and the lousy were part of the learning. The contrast between good and bad creates a greater dynamic, and contrasts and conflict are a major part of literature. The great memoirs, like This Boy’s Life, are not just about having a lousy life, but surviving one.

   Stories that are only about bad things are not interesting, nor can we learn from them. You can’t know your life is bad unless you see a good one too.