JONATHAN D FITZGERALD

Yesterday, it happened. A student hit me with the question that many educators dread, "When are we ever going to use this in life?"

I love this question. I don't dread it at all. I eat it up.

I had just shown my freshman composition class part two of the incredible "Everything is a Remix" video series by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson. The premise of the series is, as the title suggests, that everything comes from something else. The portion we watched yesterday shows side by side shots from the Star Wars films and the source material that George Lucas culled in order to create his movies. I'm not sure if Ferguson is aware of the textbook I use for this class, somewhat cheesily called Remix, but his video series provides the perfect multimedia companion to it.

But, based on the fact that my students read essays in Remix about celebrity culture, suburban living, video games, and Facebook, it's always just a matter of time before they question how any of this is relevant for their future. Oh, they enjoy the conversations we have in class, but I can always sense -- especially among the sharper students -- a growing worry that I'm wasting their time.

So, at some point in the semester (we're just about a week away from spring break at this point), someone will ask the inevitable question. She may have well lit a long cartoon fuse leading to a stack of TNT. I exploded.

"Why are you in college?" I asked.

"So I can get a job after," she answered.

"What's your major?"

"Social work."

"You want to be a social worker?"

"No," she said. "I'm switching to pre-med."

"You want to be a doctor."

"I don't know."

Got her. "Okay," I smirked, "assuming you decide you don't want to be a doctor, let's say you decide you want to go into banking or teaching or some other thing. Do you think you'll be able to get a job?"

"I guess. If I have a degree."

"So, even though your degree doesn't really apply to what you want to do, you still think it will get you a job?"

"I guess."

"I think you're right," I told her. "That is because the value of your college education isn't career training. No one is going to ask you what courses you took. That doesn't show up on your resume."

Blank stares from the class, so I continue, sounding more and more like a fiery Southern Baptist preacher but with a decidedly more liberal message.

"The value of a liberal arts college education -- to you, to employers -- is that you've spent four years in a place where you were forced to consider new ideas, to meet new people, to ask new questions, and to learn to think, to socialize, to imagine. If you graduate, you will get a degree, but if you are not a very different person from who you are today, then college failed."

I think they were shocked to hear me talking like this. But, I think they liked it a little too, to have someone put their entire experience in perspective.

I told them that by the time I graduated from my own Christian liberal arts college I was a changed person, a better person than the one who entered four years prior.

"What kind of person were you before college?" a particularly inquisitive student asked.

"A knucklehead," I replied.

I really believe this stuff. I know that this isn't a universal view about the value of college, but it's the reason I teach. I went on to explain the practical side of what we were doing as well. Because I teach writing, I can insist that the skills they pick up in my class will serve them well throughout the rest of their college careers as well as whatever jobs they end up in after. I made it clear -- as I have many times already throughout the semester -- that the concept of remix (studying the work of others, combining it with their own thoughts, and outputting a new creation) is how all good writing works. But all of that, I insisted, is secondary to the importance of changing and growing as a person in college.

This group of students caught me at a particularly pertinent time to launch into this lecture about the value of college; I just finished one of the better novels I've read in a long time, Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot. If you're unfamiliar with the novel, it's best summarized by saying it's about a love triangle between three college students at Brown University. Madeleine is an English major who loves Romantic literature, Mitchell is a religious studies major who is in love with Madeleine but is hopelessly one of those guys that girls always consider "just friends." Leonard is Madeleine's boyfriend. He's a biology major and he suffers from manic-depression.

The Marriage Plot shows college as a time when students do precisely what I insisted college students do. In a review of the novel for Books and Culture, my friend and sometime editor Naomi Schaefer Riley writes this of college, "It was time that was supposed to be (at least in part) spent in pure intellectual pursuits, time to read the books that you probably wouldn't get to when you had a family to support. Time to think about big ideas and talk about them with friends in the middle of the night. And even, clichéd though it may sound, time to search for meaning in life."

Riley, who has written extensively about contemporary higher education, thinks this description refers to a distant past, "However college students are spending their time these days, they are not, generally speaking, engaged in this search."

Though Riley's probably right in the global sense -- she has, after all, been researching this stuff for over a decade now -- this belief about what college is supposed to be remains my inspiration to teach. It's what makes me want to push my students, stretch their minds, and even -- sometimes -- make them uncomfortable.

I believe in a college education for the same reason anybody believes in anything -- because it has worked for me. To be certain there is a lot that is wrong with higher education, but I take this as a challenge. To try to be something that is right about it.

I imagine that my inquisitor thought about what I said for a minute or two yesterday, and then I dismissed her, and then she went to lunch, and didn't think about it again. Which leads me to my favorite thing about this process of transformation that happens in college: it is magic. It's not quantifiable, there's hardly ever a specific moment when everything changes, it happens slowly over time. But if my colleagues and I do our work well -- the magic will happen.

This post originally appeared at Patrolmag.com.

A few weeks ago, after 10 years of running a bed and breakfast, my parents sold their inn, their home. In a way, that was always part of the plan. A ten-year plan.

I was a freshman in college when they called me with the news that they were considering buying an inn. I think I laughed at them, not because I didn’t think they could do it; I was sure they could. Rather it struck me as funny, I suppose, because, who does that? Who compensates for an impending bout of empty nest syndrome by filling the nest with strangers?

And yet they were serious. Within weeks, my sister, then a junior in high school, and I were visiting beautiful old houses in the town of Rockport, Massachusetts. We had family in Rockport, had spent summers there, and the fact that my parents wanted to live there was perhaps the least surprising thing about the whole ordeal. I don’t remember the specific factors that led to their choice, but my folks eventually chose an old gray colonial with maroon shutters on Mount Pleasant Street. The Sally Webster Inn it was called, after the last surviving child of the house’s builder.

My parents were natural innkeepers. Even before they moved to the inn, they were known for their hospitality. My mom is an ever-flowing fountain of conversation. She has a particular penchant for eliciting the most intimate of details from her conversation partner, never in an “I-can’t-believe-I-admitted-that” kind of way, but rather a “thank-God-I-have-an-outlet-to-speak-what’s-on-my-mind” way. This is why many visits to the Sally Webster, for many travelers, ended with a hug from the innkeeper. My dad, though less of a conversationalist, knows how to turn it on. He’s a charmer who can transform his whole body — facial expressions, posture — into a welcome sign. Though, most often, the smile became more real when he was no longer required to wear it.

For our part, I’m sure my sister would agree that being in college and having an inn for a home had many benefits, and a few downsides. The downsides were obvious and easily overcome: strangers in your house, the necessity to be quiet. But the benefits were enormous. As my college was a 20-minute, scenic drive from the inn, my friends and I were there often — to hang out, do laundry, eat free meals, and for many of us, to work. My parents employed nearly every one of my friends in college and, in some cases, for years after as well.

During those years and the several that followed, the most significant, as well as many seemingly insignificant, events of my life played out against the backdrop of the Sally Webster Inn. In college there were late night conversations that launched lifelong friendships, cigarettes smoked on the roof to the rhythm of college-deep thoughts, beach days that had their beginning and end at the inn, annual parties when the business was closed in January, and even concerts in the living room. Later, graduation parties, birthdays, and weddings of friends and, eventually, of me to my wife, and my sister to her husband, happened at the inn.

In my memory, the inn was more than the location of these stories; it was a character in them. And, of course, there’s a great tradition of houses as actors in literature. From the insidious house in Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart,” to the summer house in Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse, and into film like the great building in Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums, or the analogous father/house in Life as a House.

Sally, as we affectionately referred to the inn, was alive with anthropomorphic personality. There was a picture that hung in the living room of Sally Webster herself, mean as hell and scary. And each of the rooms were named for her and her siblings, Caleb and Rhoda, Esther and William, Prentiss, Apollo, and Hannah, and decorated in such a way that gave each a unique persona.

Over the years my parents redecorated each of the rooms, keeping with the décor of the time period, but infusing Sally with a bit of Kathy and Fitzy. In this way, the inn provided the most physical embodiment of home possible. When my wife and I visited we sometimes felt like we had gone back in time due to the age of the house and the antiques, but more than that, we felt that we were literally inside our family, living within my parents. Certainly there is some Freudian satisfaction in this, but call it what you want, it felt like home.

The last time we visited, I found myself inadvertently avoiding the inn. I didn’t drive by it if I could help it, which meant I only saw it once. Already, I noticed, it felt less like home. My parents stayed in town, moving only a few houses down the street, and it was as if that Old Testament cloud that represented the spirit of God to the Israelites had lifted and begun to move on. Over the time, I suspect, this feeling will grow as the new owners remake Sally in their image, and my parents settle into their new home.

And that is one of the great things about old New England houses — every individual or family that inhabits them leaves their impression on the place. Maybe it’s something about the materials used, perhaps wide plank pine floors absorb personality better than the composite materials used in many new houses. There could be something to the old adage, “They don’t build them like they used to,” if the way they used to build them had some kind of mystical quality. Maybe that’s not it at all, but there was something extraordinary about the Sally Webster Inn, I think, something not quite explainable.

There will be other houses that live like characters in my life; I suppose when my wife and I finally get around to buying a place of our own, that’ll be a big one, but I find it hard to imagine a place with more personality, more spirit, than the Sally Webster Inn. Goodbye, Sally Webster.

For most of my life I have delighted in my identity as a New Englander. At different stages, this meant different things. When I was very young it meant I came from the place in America where the history was made. I remember feeling prepubescent pride as my Cub Scout troop traveled to Plymouth, Massachusetts to see the Mayflower and Plymouth Plantation, a replica of the pilgrims’ settlement there. In my backyard I dug for what I hoped would be arrowheads from Native American tribes, and even created short stories about the history of my hometown.

As I got a bit older I loved being from the same place as John F. Kennedy. I loved that my name referenced his. I was proud of my part-Italian, part-Irish ancestry and fancied myself the very embodiment of a Bostonian — not the Boston Brahman type, of course, but the working class, fresh-off-the-boat-and-now-we-own-this-town kind of Bostonian.

In college I moved further north of Boston and claimed the beaches, the rocky cliffs, the wooded forests, and open fields as my own. In autumn there was apple-picking; sledding in the winter. The spring couldn’t be appreciated, I was sure, without having lived through a Nor’easter or two, and the summer brought with it boiled lobster dinners and night walks on the beach.

When my wife and I moved to New York City (well, Jersey City, really) over two years ago, I felt strongly about bringing New England here with us. We proudly told visiting friends as we toured them around the city that our favorite places were those that most reminded us of Boston. And in the summer and fall we made near-weekly trips back to our former home so as to not miss what we loved best.

Recently, though, a change is beginning to take place in my perception of my identity. It’s not that I’m becoming a New Yorker. No, in fact I probably have a stronger aversion to that word now then I ever did while living in Boston. I could never feel pride in being a New Yorker as, it seems to me, I could never truly be a New Yorker. None of us transplants can. The only New Yorkers are those people who were born and raised here. But those aren’t the people who like to tell everyone that they’re New Yorkers. Rather, it’s the transplants who so perpetually self-identify. They come to the city, spend a few years dressing up and going to work, before returning home, back to the South or Midwest to live out the rest of their days reminiscing about when they were New Yorkers.

I could never be a New Yorker. Rather, there’s something about living in New Jersey. There’s something about living in a place that is always the brunt of a joke — a punch line — that really grows on you. I’m tempted to say that this effect is particularly felt by a former self-deprecating Bostonian, but I see it taking hold in all kinds of people that move here from all over the country. I never cared much for Springsteen, but I love him now. My wife and I admire the raw and unexpected beauty of the rows and rows of those shipping cranes that hunch over Newark Bay as we drive south down the New Jersey Turnpike.

There’s a dull shine to the people who were born and raised here, like brushed metal. They’ve heard all the jokes but, at the end of the day, they love living in a place that has easy access to New York City and Philadelphia, the Shore and the Poconos. Mock all you want, they say to the rest of the country; it is your aversion that keeps us pure.

Here in Jersey City this “Jersey-ness” manifests itself in not quite a chip on the shoulder, but an understanding: we are all here for the same reason. We don’t need to feel cool. We want more space. We love to have a good time, but want it quiet where we sleep. And, most importantly, we’re here for the long run. People in Jersey City aren’t here to fulfill a life-long dream of living the city life, or, if they were, they’ve changed their mind. You don’t have access to any of the superficial benefits of living in New York City. If someone asks you where you live and you say New York, you’re lying. If you say New York City, you’re within your rights (I say I grew up in Boston though I grew up ten minutes outside the city), but the follow-up question is always “What part?” and Jersey City is never the right answer. If you live here, it’s not for the cool factor.

And yet, there’s plenty to feel cool about. Read Junot Diaz or marvel at the way life-long Garden State resident John McPhee describes his home state. Listen and identify with any of the angsty Jersey performers, from the original, Frank Sinatra, to Springsteen, to the punks like The Misfits or Patti Smith, the Fugees to The Gaslight Anthem. Hell, if angst ain’t your thing, Jersey even gave us the Jonas Brothers.

But none of that is really the point for Jersey residents. You can see this in the way they welcome newcomers. I’ve heard stories of how people never fully integrate into some states, Maine for example. I used to try to convince my wife that we should move to Portland, Maine until a friend who grew up there advised against it. “They’d never accept you,” he assured us. Jersey residents, on the other hand, have this subtle kind of welcome. It says, “Okay, you’re here now. Don’t make a big thing of it.” This is precisely why we hate “Jersey Shore.” We get it. People come from all over to vacation on the shore — just be quiet about it.

Eventually, my wife and I often think, we’ll head back to our beloved New England, back to Massachusetts. That is, after all, where our families live, where our roots are. But I can say with a hint of certainty: if, by some chance two years ago, we hadn’t made the decision to forego Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Queens, if we had spent these past couple of years trying, fruitlessly, to convince ourselves that we were New Yorkers, we would’ve packed up and moved home by now. Instead, we find ourselves identifying with the families more and more that have made Jersey City their permanent home; we visit open houses “just to see” and spend lazy afternoons browsing real estate websites, thinking, We could start our family here, maybe.

The other night I found myself in a conversation that I may have found rather ordinary between 2004 and 2007, back home north of Boston or some other semi-cosmopolitan place, but which felt completely irregular in 2010, in mid-town Manhattan. A friend was trying to decide if he should join Facebook.

“I only entered my email address and name and somebody already found me,” he complained.

His wife, my wife, and I, all of whom have been on Facebook for years, played along. We worked through the pros and cons. Keeping in touch with old friends that so frequently come and go in New York City: pro. Inevitably losing countless hours of productivity at work due to incessant status-checking: con.

In due time, the conversation moved to the inevitable gripes of those of us who are Facebook junkies. We complained about the users who are guilty of indulging too much information, the moms who don’t understand the difference between a public wall post and a private message, and the “friend invitations” you’d rather not receive. Aloof to all of this, our newest potential member listened in and asked the question that really is at the heart of social media: how do I know what I should and should not post on Facebook?

A recent essay in The New York Times Magazine considers this question, though in a round about way. The article, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” by Jeffrey Rosen, laments that the Internet has made it next to impossible for a person to control his or her identity or identities.

The piece begins with the oft-told story, well on its way with a few years and a few embellishments to becoming urban legend, of teacher-in-training Stacy Snyder who, weeks before she was supposed to be certified as a teacher, was booted from her school because salacious photos showed up on her MySpace page (this was 2006, so, okay). From there, Rosen goes on to identify the crisis: the difficulty in this brave new world of redefining oneself, particularly in different contexts. He follows his exegesis of the problem with a variety of potential solutions; from something called “reputation bankruptcy” to expiration dates for files so that after a number of years troublesome photos like those that got Ms. Snyder kicked out of school, will just disappear.

Rosen takes the reader through a brief survey of humanity’s relationship to self-identification, explaining that throughout most of human history, it was nearly impossible for one to change the way he was perceived as his identity was wrapped up in community, occupation, or class. Then came the blessed Enlightenment. Finally mankind could free himself of the pesky need for community and stand on his own as the “self-made man.” Equipped with this new ability to easily identify and re-identify one’s self, scores of Europeans emigrated to the United States, stuck flags in the ground, built McMansions and office buildings, put up fences, created cubicles, kept secrets, had affairs, and got away with it.

When the Internet arrived on the scene, some thinkers began to imagine how this network of connected computers could continue to keep us apart. But the opposite has proved true. The social network is the new village and a collection of photo albums, blogs, status updates, tweets, and fan pages have unified our disparate identities, even matching rather accurately our offline selves. With this, the public square, once a literal location but most recently the stuff of nostalgia has been resurrected, albeit online.

The bulk of Rosen’s article is dedicated to ways to fix this perceived problem. How can we get back to the good old days when I could be one person to my family, another to my friends, and yet another to co-workers? How can we regain the ability to redefine ourselves as often as desired? He wonders will the solution be “technological? Legislative? Judicial? Ethical? A result of shifting social norms and cultural expectations? Or some mix of the above?”

Did you catch that one right in the middle, ethical? Note it, because it’s nearly the last time a solution that involves personal responsibility is mentioned. What expiring files, companies hired to monitor one’s online identity, and even an onscreen anthropomorphic widget giving stern glances as a reminder to be careful online, have in common is: outsourcing responsibility. There’s nary a suggestion that amounts to if you’d be embarrassed if your co-workers saw you doing this, don’t do it, or, at least, don’t post it online. Rather, Rosen suggests that the Internet’s memory should be erased, noting that even the God of the Talmud forgives and forgets. Here, he nears an ethical answer, suggesting that our society could benefit by being more forgiving. And perhaps we will, not despite our permanent online identities, but because of them. We’ll all have one or two embarrassing pictures in our wake.

But what truly is missing from Rosen’s article, and indeed, from much of the conversation surrounding our new online identities, is the opportunity that this presents us to enter into a new morality. Call it Facebook Morality. When my friend who is considering joining Facebook asked how he should know what is appropriate to post online, I offered him this methodology:

“Imagine Facebook is a room filled with everyone you know,” I suggested. “And then imagine shouting whatever it is you consider posting at the top of your lungs. Or,” I continued, “think of the person in your life who is most likely to be scandalized by a picture or a link, a grandparent or former teacher, and then imagine showing it to him or her.”

This new morality, then, is not one dictated by individual conscience. You may think, “Sure I had a wild night last night, but I don’t regret any of it.” But that is different from thinking,”I had a wild night last night and I think everyone should have to experience it.”

In her essay “On Morality,” from her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion writes of a kind of “wagon-train morality.”  This she defines as the social code that dictates our collective responsibility to each other. To Didion, morality is not created in an individual’s conscience and thus relative from one person to the other, rather it is “a code that has as its point only survival, not the attainment of the ideal good.”

Facebook Morality isn’t an attainment of the ideal good; it is a reach toward our collective survival. Perhaps it is wrong to drink to excess, but Facebook Morality is not primarily concerned with that. Rather, it is concerned with the way in which the portrayal of a person drinking to excess may compromise his or her community. Therefore, Facebook Morality makes the decision to post or not to post, a moral question. It also opens up the opportunity to question behavior, providing a practical standard for one’s actions before sharing is even an option.

There is a new morality on the rise in American culture. It goes hand in hand with a new sincerity. And it is these, rather than new technology, which will provide the solution to our “collective identity crisis,” as Rosen calls it.

Here a parting word, a kind of benediction from a great moral teacher, the late Kurt Vonnegut, from his last collection of essays before he passed away, A Man Without a Country, seems fitting:

“Save our lives and your lives, too,” he writes. “Be honorable.”

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been teaching arguing, or persuasive, essays in my freshmen composition courses. I save this format, along with evaluating essays, for last because in some sense they utilize all the skills that the students have picked up through the practice of writing, remembering, observing, and explaining essays in the previous weeks and months.

That’s one reason why I save these types for last, and it’s the better reason. The other reason is that I know from experience that it’s hard to keep everybody’s attention – the students’ and my own – focused in the waning weeks of a semester, particularly a spring semester when the weather is warming and summer vacation is on the horizon, and arguing and evaluating essays are my, and often my students’, favorite types to read and write.

I assign several readings for each essay form, chosen because they are prime examples of the particular type and though they often change, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” has a permanent home in the arguing section of my syllabus. For those readers who have not sat through a semester of class with me (or any countless other composition courses that utilize King’s classic text): it is an epistle written while King was in the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama after being arrested for taking part in non-violent protests there. The letter is a response to “A Call For Unity,” a statement published by eight white Alabama clergymen in which they conceded that injustices were taking place, but that protest, even non-violent, was not appropriate and that proper, legal means should be pursued.

King states his case in no less than nine points (he even apologizes at the end for writing so much and makes reference to the fact that there’s not much else to do when one is in prison). There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the greatest arguing essays ever written, offering some of the most airtight arguments ever made. The now famous line, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” appears in this text.

What I have never known about this essay, and still to this day cannot say for certain, is what effect this text had first on its intended audience, the signatories of “A Call for Unity.” I know that every time I read it I get chills and that most of my students come to venerate it, but as far as I can tell from my admittedly very limited research on the topic (Google “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and, most unfortunately, over 95% of the results are for free term papers on the essay) there is not much written about whether or not it “worked.”

Now, of course, to a certain extent it did work, as did MLK’s social action, speeches, and sadly, his death, in addition to the work of countless other civil rights advocates, but whenever I think specifically about the impact of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I can’t help but wonder if it actually changed any of the clergymen’s minds, or had a life-altering affect on any residents of Birmingham.

And I wonder about this in regard to many arguments I hear made, debates I witness, and apologists I read. Do all these words, all this time spent building a case, ever actually work to convince somebody that the position that they hold is wrong and that they should exchange it for another, more correct stance?

And yet, I know that people do change their minds. I don’t know how I would describe myself politically prior to 2001, but I know that whatever it was (must’ve been somewhere between far right and right of the center, as that’s where my parents, church, and educators were coming from), by 2002, my views were very different from those of the people that had an influence on me in my youth. I can point to a few definitive books I read (Franny and Zooey, On the Road . . . yeah, I know), and some very important people I met, conversations I had, and things I experienced (studying in Kenya was big in this regard), but I can’t point a finger to any one thing as the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I’ve come to realize that, for the most part, I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, semester after semester I make my students read and write arguing essays. And then I evaluate them on the clarity of their writing, certainly, but also on their ability to form a cohesive point and defend it. I teach them about three different kinds of arguments: traditional (I’m right, you’re wrong), constructive (I’m right, and I want to help you see why you’re wrong), and Rogerian (I’m right, but you may also be right, let’s compromise), but more often than not they choose the traditional style. And I’ve had some good writers over the years, but not once has one of them convinced me of anything I didn’t already believe. Nobody wins the argument, yet I still make each student do it.

Why do I continue to believe that learning how to make an effective argument is important when I really think it’s not a good argument that changes a person’s mind but a series of events, experiences, and lessons learned? Perhaps some of those influential books, essays, and stories that I read back in 2002 were argumentative in nature, and certainly my views grew more nuanced and I became more certain of what I was coming to believe through arguments, but not to the point where I feel comfortable saying an argument changed my mind.

It’s a scary thing to change one’s mind, to admit that the beliefs and values one clings to may not be as deeply held as once thought. And for a person so often prideful as I am, it is also a deeply humbling experience to reevaluate and to be found wrong. I know this is the case not simply based on 2002, or even on any of the hundreds of minor changes and course corrections that I’ve made in the years since, but because I fear it may be happening again.

I’m halfway through famed (infamous?) evangelical author Brian D. McLaren’s latest offering, A New Kind of Christianity. The book has attracted a lot of attention, mostly because of the overwhelming wave of extremely negative reviews it is garnering from other evangelicals. I’ve read McLaren before but, based on some of the commentary I’d heard about this book, even I approached it with some trepidation, with a bit of fear that he may have gone too far.

McLaren’s book is an argument, an apologetic. If I had to classify it for my class I would say it’s somewhere between a traditional and a constructive argument. The details of his case for a new kind of Christianity are the subject for a different sort of essay, but suffice it to say, his argument is made well. His points are clear and rational and, most importantly in an arguing essay, he appeals to what the reader may have already thought or believed though may never have given voice to.

This is a tactic I encourage my students to use, one that Martin Luther King, Jr. used miraculously. It involves knowing your audience and making an appeal to them that is both respectful and transformative. McLaren knows me. Like King knew his fellow clergymen, McLaren knows his left-leaning evangelical.

I can’t say where this will all end up, or where I’ll be when the pieces land. But I can say that I’m beginning to believe more fully in the power of the arguing essay. I can say that I’m beginning to change my mind.

When I was a child, I wore many hats – in precisely the way the clichéd expression means. Early photographs show me sitting on my father’s lap, arms outstretched, driving a pretend fire truck with the red, oversized backward cap of a fireman digging into my dad’s chest with each imaginary bump that my truck encountered.

Other days I was a policeman, my grandfather’s old Massachusetts Registry police cap balancing precariously on my tiny head. As I grew older, the hats became more creative. Gone were the days of occupations that I could actually grow to become; the hats turned to masks of Spiderman, Optimus Prime, Batman, and so on. And there were costumes as well, for those characters that didn’t don a hat or mask. I was Luke Skywalker, Michelangelo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, an officer on board the Enterprise, Peter from the Ghostbusters, and at one point I even brought back the hat as Dick Tracy.

I wore these hats, sometimes several within the same day, but there was one rule that I never broke. When I was wearing my Batman mask, I couldn’t also be Spiderman. When dressed like Luke Skywalker I would never encounter Captain Picard. The Ninja Turtles and the Ghostbusters, though both inhabitants of New York City, would never meet. This is all to say that I was only ever able to understand my identity as one character at a time.

If you ask Steph, my wife, not much has changed from this little hat-wearing boy to the present day me. I still wear many hats, and as was the case then, often all on the same day. At any given time I can be a writer, professor, web developer, scholar, or tutor. But just as two characters from different stories could never meet when I was playing dress up as a child, so is it near impossible for me to join my many identities today, an awkward situation since they all are, obviously, linked. With the exception, perhaps, of web developer, there is a direct correlation between each of these hats, and yet I still struggle to self-identify.

I constantly ask myself that familiar question: What do I want to be when I grow up? Which of these hats will win the day and define me throughout life? I actively ignore what I know to be true every time Steph insists that how I live now, with all my various identities, is probably how it’s going to be.

I fall victim to a situation that plagues many more of my generation. In his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman explores this problem in light of what probably is its actual cause: popular culture. For Klosterman and his generation the source of this desire to typecast oneself is the long-running MTV series The Real World.

His essay “What Happens When People Stop Being Polite” explores the way in which people he knows have become more and more like characters on that hit television show as the years went on. He gives some leeway to the first season as perhaps the only time when the characters didn’t start out as a certain type, but acknowledges that it is precisely those first cast members who, by the end of the season, set up the archetype that the would define future casts, and, eventually a generation.

Klosterman rightly identifies the heritage for the “Real World” brand typecasting as the films of the recently deceased screenwriter and director John Hughes. Certainly the teenagers that shared a Saturday detention in The Breakfast Club were written not so much as fully realized, complicated people, but as specific character types which, through a strange intermingling of their continued use in movies, television shows, and books, and the easy adoption of these stereotypes by actual people, have come to represent the sum of personality types for Americans under 35 years old.

The advent of these character types (and arguably they have been around in some form or another long before Hughes or MTV crystallized them and made them fixtures of the 20^th century) has created a reality in which genuine, living, breathing people do not need to ever go through the life-long process of discovering who we actually are.

Rather, I can simply choose: “I’m the rebel.” Presto! All I need is a new wardrobe, which, fortunately, costume designers have already created and a certain demeanor, which can be adopted, and suddenly I am the Rebel. And, just as I was only ever one character as a child, so too, need I only ever model one archetype.

Since the 1980s, we can probably identify successful media by the extent to which they introduced a “new” character type to the popular consciousness. Certainly we have come a long way since those five Hughesian character types. The Real World created variations on them, as have many other popular books, movies, musicians, and television series. Now, if everyone around you fits into some variation on the “jock” model, by following the “artist” model, you can actually feel like an individual.

Though in America it is perhaps easiest to illustrate this identity crisis in light of popular culture, I am particularly interested in the way that it manifests itself in other parts of the world. I am currently immersed in the long process of writing a paper to be presented at an academic conference (that’s my scholar hat you’re seeing) about the various “new” cultures that are emerging among contemporary African youth as seen in the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of, most famously, Purple Hibiscus.

Very generally speaking, for post-post colonial Africans, this struggle to self identify is certainly tinged with influences from American popular culture, as it is throughout the rest of the world, but more seriously it involves the reconciling of long-held traditional cultures with the imposed culture of whatever colonial power occupied a particular African country until, in most cases, the 1960s. In many ways, this tumultuous struggle is also embodied in the lives of immigrants who must work out the way in which their former selves can coexist with their adopted country and new identity. But it is particularly interesting to see this play out in African countries, as the new identity was not chosen, but thrust upon people. And the implications of this continue to be dealt with almost half a century later.

In Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, the way in which her characters interact with Catholicism, the religion of their former occupiers, is particularly fascinating. Throughout the novel, it is clear that those characters that can more fully connect Catholicism with their cultural heritage live more balanced and fulfilled lives then those who cannot find a point of reconciliation. These characters recognize that they are never just one thing. At any given moment they embody the traditional culture that is their inheritance as well as the imposed Western culture that is slowly taking over. Rather than struggle to resist and allowing several selves to occupy one body, these characters and the generation of Africans for whom they are avatars adapt and in the process create a new, hybridized culture and, often, language. A fantastic example of this is Kenya’s “shang,” which mixes Swahili with a kind of street-English.

So it must be, albeit less dramatically, with us, with me. Despite the fact that it is easier to adopt one archetype or another as the starting point of my identity, I am not just one thing or another. I, too, am made up of several selves.

In the late 1980s, a popular ad campaign created by the advertising agency Weiden + Kennedy transcended its given purpose of selling sneakers and lodged itself permanently in the annals of popular culture.

Just Do It.

But what it did was more, even, than become a household phrase. For many in the United States, including those in the small, charismatic church my family attended when I was growing up, it synthesized all that was wrong with the world into three short words.

And Nike wasn’t the only company to turn the sixties credo – “If it feels good, do it” – into a marketing slogan. To this day, the refrain, “Why ask why, try Bud Dry,” echoes in my head, long after Budweiser ceased production of the beer the ad was hawking.

These ads and the countless others espousing the same kind of “don’t think, act” mentality, coming as they did as the twentieth century came to a close, illustrate perfectly what the Irish philosopher George Berkeley put forth in his rather bizarre book entitled Siris, written in 1744. Berkeley suggested, as many others have since, that philosophy, though it may be considered and debated in academia, far from popular culture, actually rises from and informs the culture at large.

Berkeley said it thusly:

Prevailing studies are of no small consequence to a State, the religion, manners, and civil government of a country ever taking some bias from its philosophy, which affects not only the minds of its professors and students, but also the opinions of all the better sort, and the practice of the whole people remotely and consequentially indeed, though not inconsiderably.

That is, “If it feels good, do it,” “Just do it,” and “Why ask why, try Bud Dry” rose to such popularity precisely because they captured he prevailing philosophical wind of the day: modernism. We need not ask the hard questions or consider our actions – the consequences, if there indeed are any, are irrelevant in the face of our desire.

In art, film, and literature, this mentality translated into a visual aesthetic disinterested in beauty, movies that settled deep into the despair of a Cold War world, and books that reveled in the kind of freedom and carelessness that only comes from acting on impulse.

Many fault postmodernism with opening the door to moral relativism, but this “whatever floats your boat” mentality was born of modernist philosophy, and then exposed by those responding to the later movement. The line between modernism and postmodernism, both in theory and in time, is blurred, but one thing is certain: in the last decade, we’ve subtly begun to move away from the lack of interest in morality and the relativism so prominent in the twentieth century.

Is this a result of the simple pendulum swing that writes history? Is it a response to the events of September 11, 2001, when something so evil happened that a moral reaction was necessary, if not inevitable? Has the moralizing of religious fundamentalists – Christian, Muslim, and Jewish – taken hold?

Whatever the reason, the evidence is undeniable. In every cultural corner, moral questions are asked – in film and television, visual art and advertising, comic books and cartoons and literature.

In the last month or so, Paste has published “Best of the Decade” lists on its website (and in its most recent print issue). Surveying the lists confirms this assertion: many of the most critically acclaimed books, movies, albums, and television shows all dared to raise questions of morality.

A couple of standouts from the best books list are notable because, in some ways, their attention to questions of morality is what exactly what makes them noteworthy. As Paste points out in its synopsis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it is both “meditation on the human condition” as well as post-apocalyptic “adventure book.” But each adventure is underscored by the weight it carries, raising questions of morality to the literal level of life and death. As in his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, McCarthy creates a space that is devoid of any sense of right or wrong, in which his characters struggle to reclaim their morality and, ultimately, their humanity.

McCarthy’s books explore questions of morality through fiction, but number 10 on Paste’s list, the late David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction collection, Consider the Lobster, parses the issue in essay form. Until about halfway through, the title piece is a beautifully crafted but otherwise standard bit of reportage of the Maine Lobster Festival. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Wallace asks his reader (the piece was originally published in Gourmet Magazine) if it is “all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure.” And with that, a conscience is thrust into the reporting and the actual feelings of a crustacean are considered.

A more recent release (not on Paste’s list),Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, extends Wallace’s question to include all living things and, along with “Consider the Lobster,” illuminates one of the more interesting aspects of this trend toward moralism. This is not a return or a pre-modern kind of soul searching. The questions that are being considered in the twenty-firstcentury are very postmodern concerns. Look to the places where claims of morality are made the loudest, and often most convincingly, and you will find that they are not necessarily voiced by the traditional sources of moral indignation: religious organizations. Rather, the questions at the forefront are about the environment, treatment of homosexuals, access to health care, and the responsibilities of wealthy countries to their counterparts in the developing world, to name a few.

Though these questions make their way into the mind of Americans through books, they enter the popular psyche more forcefully through the more readily-consumed media such as television, film, and music. Paste‘s top twenty TV shows reveal intense interest in questions of morality played out in diverse genres from science fiction (Battlestar Galactica, which dealt weekly withissues ranging from discrimination to suicide bombers), to animation (The Family Guy filled the space that The Simpsons occupied in previous decades), to talk shows (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report;Oprah did not make the list, but is another prominent example). And, of course, standout, thought-provoking dramas such as The Wire, Lost, and Mad Men make the list. What did not make the list: any “show about nothing.”

As for film and music, Paste offered fifty of each, but the list-toppers serve to illustrate the point. In film, Fernando Meirelles’ City of God took the number one spot, and in music, the album Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens claimed top ranking.

I don’t pretend that the first decade of the twenty-firstcentury is somehow a more “moral” decade than its predecessors. (I’m not even sure how one would make that assessment.) But while in the recent past, questions of morality have been the exclusive territory of religious organizations, a veritable non-issue in the ivory towers of academia and the popular imaginations of American artists, they are being asked again with increasing fervor and a tremendous range of concerns.

A recent visit to Nike’s website turned up no sign of the old “Just Do It” mantra. Rather, a different kind of urging (in support of the Product Red campaign) is prominently displayed. It prods the viewer to “Lace Up Save Lives.”

My grandfather is dying again. I know because my mom called. And she knows because Aunty Cathy called her. This is the fourth time in two years my mom has called me with this news; the fourth time, she got the call from Aunty Cathy.

He’s not well – there’s no doubt about that. Papa’s battled just about every kind of cancer and has come out the victor each time. He’s tough. Small, but tough. Everyone in my family is small. Papa’s 5’1″, like me. My dad, the giant, is a mere 5’6″.

But not all of us are as tough as Papa. When I close my eyes and say his name I see us sitting at the kitchen table in the house that my dad grew up in, that Nana and Papa still live in. Papa’s holding his fists up in front of his face and kind of grunting. He wants me to do the same. I’m six. I raise my hands like his, my little knuckles sticking out like the tiniest mountain range.

“No, not like that,” he says releasing his stance to fix mine. “Here, higher. This is your shield. This keeps you safe. ”

I follow his lead, elevating my fist until he’s satisfied and resumes his stance. “Good. Now punch me.”

I look at him cockeyed. He answers before I ask, “C’mon, do it. You won’t hurt me, I’ll show you. C’mon. When I was a boxer in the army I could block anything.”

So I do it. I let one fly. A quick shot with my . . .

“Left! What are you throwing your left for?” he says as he blocks my slow motion punch. “Are you a lefty? Dot!” he shouts to my grandmother who’s only a few steps away at the stove, stirring sauce or something. “Dot, I think Jonathan’s a lefty.”

He’s laughing at me and I’m not sure why but he tells me its okay. He can teach a lefty to fight. He takes a swig of beer, Budweiser then and now, and resumes my lesson.

Papa was never a boxer in the army. This came out some years later. Nor did he see any action in World War II. The round scars on his stomach and chest that he said were bullet holes were not. Burns from working all those years at the naval shipyard, but not bullet holes.

He used to draw ninjas. This is a skill he told me he picked up from drawing the real thing, when he was stationed in Asia – which, of course, he wasn’t. But he could draw them well. Masks with slits for the eyes and bandanas waving in the breeze. He could draw long sharp kitana blades that gleamed with the light of a distant sun. I tell this to my wife as we drive through Boston to visit him in the hospital.

“How did he know what a ninja looked like, then?” Steph asks as we drive. I don’t know.

When we get there, Steph leads the way. I hate hospitals, but she was working with the elderly at the time. We make our way to the third floor where my mom told us we would find him. Room 313. We peek around the corner of the doorway to see him sitting up with one of those trays-on-wheels set over his legs. He has a plate full of food in front of him but he’s only eating yogurt.

“Yogurt as an appetizer?” I ask, assuming his food has just arrived.

“No.” He answers without looking up. “As dinner.” And finally his eyes lift from the nearly empty cup he’s been scraping with a plastic spoon. “Paul,” he calls out to me.

“Ah…” Is all I get out before he says, “Jonathan. I mean Jonathan.” And to himself, “Why did I call you Paul?”

He urges us to sit and so we do, I directly below the television and Steph beside his bed, nearer to him. We ask him how he’s feeling, how they’ve been treating him in the hospital. He answers that he’s not feeling so great but the hospital staff is nice. He tells us about a nurse that’s been taking care of him. He’s convinced she has a thing for him. I don’t doubt it; he’s a charmer.

There’s a side of Papa that resembles your typical Irish-American – think the characters of Frank McCourt or, more regionally accurate, Dennis Lehane or James Carroll. One of our family’s favorite stories involves beer, whiskey, and a bar fight between my dad and Papa. And he probably would have been that stereotype to a tee, if it weren’t for my grandmother. For all his Irish-ness, she’s every bit Italian, bubbling with emotion and energy and, over the years, her passion for life has leaked through the cracks in his old Irish skin. When they got married in 1940s Boston, theirs was considered an inter-racial marriage.

Sitting with Papa in the gray light of his hospital room, I suddenly become painfully aware that, despite all appearances, this is the same man who tried to teach me to fight all those years ago at the kitchen table. I stare at him. He’s small now. Not the same muscle-bound, beer-bellied man I remember. He looks like the skin of that man – the skin of a once great, although not actual, boxer in the army. The skin of that man is hanging on a smaller man’s frame, like mine, perhaps.

Steph jumps in to fill the awkward silence. “So who has come to visit you, Papa?” She calls him Papa. I don’t remember he or I ever inviting her to do so, but she does. And I love that.

“Oh, they’ve all been here,” he says. “Jane, and Jilly. Jilly comes often. Jennifer’s been here…” These are my sisters. He says their names first, making sure I know I’m the last to come. I’m about to say something when he realizes what he, consciously or subconsciously, has done. “But they don’t have so far to travel as you do,” he says to me in the way of consolation.

“Dolly and Sean, Eddie, Kristen, and the kids.” My cousins and their families. “Your father’s come down a few times.” I had hoped he wasn’t actually keeping count, but it seems clear now that he was.

I change the topic and though I’m not sure how we get there, suddenly we’re talking about his mother and brothers. We’re talking about Ireland and the plot of land he signed away years ago, sitting at that kitchen table at his house in Roxbury, to cousins in Ireland after his father passed away.

“Jonathan, whenever we went there and saw what I blindly gave up,” he looks, for a moment, regretful. “Ahh, we could never live there. Boston’s our home.”

When it’s time to leave we tell him that we’ll see him soon, but hopefully at home. He looks doubtful. He looks, in fact, like he’s thinking we won’t actually see him again. He kisses Steph on the cheek and tells me how beautiful she is. He says goodbye and calls me Paul again.

In perhaps the most memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is captured by the ruthless symbiotic alien race, the Borg. The Borg assimilate Picard into their collective, making him part machine and all evil. I remember sitting too close to the television, watching nervously from the floor in the living room of my family’s apartment in Malden, a working class suburb of Boston. Clutching a Star Trek action figure in each fist, I was transfixed; what would become of my beloved captain? It was a two-part episode, a cliffhanger. Part One ended the season in the spring and Part Two didn’t air until September. It was a long, nervous summer.

As one might expect, Picard was heroically rescued by his crew and returned to his ship. The ship’s medical officer, Dr. Beverly Crusher, removed the creepy electronics that the Borg had installed in Picard’s head and by the end of the episode he looked himself again, save for some strange pigmentation where the metal had been.

But Picard was never really the same. He had experienced the Borg collective, and having done so, a bit of the Borg’s mentality was permanently etched onto his consciousness – a trait that the show’s writers exploited in the following seasons and in the 1996 feature film First Contact.

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My first contact came when I was seventeen years old. I was a senior in high school when I started dating Sarah. She was this sweet blonde girl with freckles all over her face. She always wore jeans or corduroys and a button up shirt – always.

Her family, the Borgs, were originally from Texas. Mr. Borg brought the family to New England when his company moved here. They settled in a large cube-shaped house in a small town about an hour west of Boston. Sarah went to school with my sister which, embarrassingly, is how we met. We only dated for six months but in those months I found myself in locations and situations I had never experienced before. And by the time they moved back to the South, back to the Collective, I was a changed man.

Growing up, and right through high school, the geographical layout of my world stretched no further than a few miles outside of Boston. I had been on airplane once (to Florida, to visit my grandparents); McDonald’s was my favorite restaurant; and just about every item of clothing I owned was a hand-me-down. My closest friends and I spent our time listening to rap, rapping, reading rap magazines, and trying to live the life of rap stars. Our parents had not been to college, though most finished high school, and their greatest accomplishment to that point was securing their sons a place in a private school, a move that, they hoped, would lead directly to college.

The Borgs were rich. They owned two Ford Explorers before every soccer mom in the world had a sport utility vehicle. They went out to dinner more often than they cooked, didn’t buy anything that they hadn’t first seen in a catalog, and had poodles. The most tangible indication of their wealth to me at that time was the over-sized towels that hung in their bathroom. These towels were huge and plush and after using them I found it nearly impossible to go back to the threadbare towels, barely bigger than hand towels, which my family had been using since before I was born.

The Borgs didn’t know what to do with their daughter’s new boyfriend other than attempt to assimilate me. A month or two into our relationship, they started buying me clothes, taking me out to dinner, introducing me to their friends, and inviting me to stay over so I didn’t have to drive “all the way home.” They managed to be surprisingly subtle as they squeezed out my humble, blue-collar background and replaced it with their upper class bravado. Some things went easier than others; my Boston accent was their top priority.

“Did it take long to get here?” Sarah’s mom politely asked the first time I visited their house.

“Yah. This is wicked fah from weah I live. I’ve nevah been out heyah befoor.” I said as both Sarah’s parents visibly took a step back in horror before returning polite smiles to their faces.

To look at pictures of myself over those six months tells the story. In the photo from my first date with Sarah I’m wearing a baseball cap, an oversized shirt and baggy jeans – my dad’s actually – sagged so the crotch was near my knees. The pictures from New Years Eve show me in my first item of clothing from Abercrombie & Fitch, a sweater Sarah bought for me for Christmas. And finally, in May at my high school graduation I stand flanked by the Borgs, cap and gown slung over my arm, in Dockers khakis, a tucked-in white collared shirt, and a blue sweater vest.

Within a month it was over and they were gone. They hated Boston and hated the cold, and so Mr. Borg jumped at the first job that opened up anywhere in the South. They moved to Atlanta, selling their house with all the furniture still in it.

It was only a few months, so many years ago. But like Picard, being absorbed into the Borg collective for even a short time left me changed forever. On the outside, my clothes were different and more expensive, I purged myself of the Boston accent, and had shorter hair, but something deeper, more fundamental to who I was, had changed as well.

Growing up in Malden, surrounded by friends and families who were like me in just about every way that mattered, I hadn’t had much contact with many affluent people. It’s not that I didn’t know they existed – surely I must have come across some families like the Borgs before Sarah – but they hadn’t left any kind of impression, and I hadn’t deemed it necessary to form an opinion. But I had seen the other side. I knew now what was wrong with the way I grew up, and my friends, and the way they grew up. I knew how uneducated my parents sounded when they talked. I was embarrassed.

I spent my first semester of college hiding in my dorm room as often as possible, emerging only to go to class or dinner. I didn’t know who I was anymore, and I couldn’t stop myself from trying to figure out where I fit in, and where others fit in. What was my roommate Seth’s family like? They were from Long Island. Did that mean they had money or were they just too poor to live in Manhattan? What about Dave? He came from Santa Barbara. I had never been there but if Saved by the Bell was any indication of life in Southern California, he must be rich. And who, after all, was I? Only a relatively short distance from where I grew up, but at college, in the country.

Jay, my best friend from high school, went with me to college, but he didn’t seem to have any of the same problems fitting in. He made plenty of friends and never seemed to recognize that they came from places very different from Malden, places where everyone’s parents had gone to college, where unemployment checks are rarely collected, and where cars are given as birthday presents. And that was the difference. He hadn’t been abducted by the Borgs. He hadn’t been made to feel uncomfortable by the other side, made to feel inferior. So he was able to blend in like I would have, if I wasn’t sure it was impossible to mesh so easily with people from such different backgrounds.

I almost transferred to a college in Boston, thinking if I went to school in the city I may be able to reconnect with the person I was before the Borgs made me into somebody else. But I had the clear sense that running wasn’t an option; the problem was inside of me. The remains of the Borgs’ implants were still fixed deep, and no matter where I went, the way I saw people was permanently altered. It was the feeling that I no longer had a home. College felt foreign; I felt like an imposter. But how could I go back to Malden, back to that second floor apartment I had grown up in?

Ordinary college-sponsored activities, like bowling or the movies, left me perplexed. At the end of a seemingly endless night of searching out a group that I could belong to, I would lie in bed scratching at my temples. “What had gone wrong? Why is every conversation I have with everybody so awkward? Why can’t I just be me?”

And that, I found in time, was the key. Somewhere inside, perhaps laying dormant, was the kid from Malden who had always had friends, who was always up for anything, who was fun. I had to find him, bring him out, try with everything in me to set aside the filters I had been applying to every person and situation I had encountered since arriving at college.

It’s a continuing process. Several years after Captain Picard’s assimilation and subsequent rescue, he reencounters the Borg in First Contact and has to come to grips, all over again, with his onetime abductors. I’ve not seen the Borgs since they moved, but all these years later the strange pigmentation from their machinery still lingers. I remain caught between two worlds. Ill at ease in Malden, I chose to remain in that college town for a while. I tried for a year, in graduate school, to return to Boston, but I found that even there, in a somewhat familiar environment, I was far too changed for it to ever be the same.

Memories of my time on the other side haunt me – the towels, the poodles, the sweater vest. I’ve left those behind. Until moving to New York City not that long ago, I never seemed to have a reason to travel west of Boston. I’ve traded those things for Birkenstocks, corduroys, and wool hats. I’m somewhere in the middle now. Different, and aware. Suburban, and educated. And yes, somewhat assimilated.

Every time I fill my car with gas I think, “I could go anywhere.”

I know it’s silly. I know I can’t really just up and go. But to me a full tank of gas means possibility – the chance to throw some essentials in the backseat and take off. That spindly orange needle pointing at the big “F” suggests the freedom of the open road.

This all has a very definite origin – well, an origin and an inspiration.

The inspiration is the road novel. Chief among them in my mind is Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, but all stories of travel are perennial favorites because the best of them make this feeling – this experience of freedom, excitement, and corroboration – tangible. Like the “buddy comedy,” the “coming-of-age novel,” and the “rags to riches” story, a travel story – a road novel – captures a feeling that is impermanent and fleeting and makes it last, available on demand.

To discover the origin of my wanderlust we must travel back in time seven years to 2002, when I was a junior in college. That spring I participated in a semester abroad, but I didn’t go to Oxford as many of my fellow English majors did, or France or Italy, or anywhere in Europe that students tend to. No; I joined a small group of American students at Daystar University in Nairobi, Kenya.

There is not space here to describe all that that trip meant, how it shaped my life and set me on a course that has already led me back to Kenya once and will undoubtedly land me on the African continent several more times. I’m hooked. That happens.

But this isn’t about Africa. Rather, this is to say that when I returned home from Kenya in the summer before my senior year, I had a lot to think about. I had seen the extremes of utter poverty and absolute beauty often reported by those who have been to East Africa. I had to reconcile my beliefs with all of this, and my attitude about money and possessions. There was much to think about.

There was one thing I was certain about, however – one privilege among many to be grateful for that I did not need to force myself to reconcile with what I had just experienced. That is, specifically, the knowledge that having a car with a full tank of gas is one of the greatest gifts my short life in the United States had afforded me thus far. Of course, I was grateful for my family, for all of my freedoms, so on and so forth, but the freest free I could feel was found behind the wheel of my ailing 1988 Volvo sedan.

Last weekend, my love for the freedom of the open road – and that love’s origins – came to a wonderful nexus when I reunited with some of my fellow students from our 2002 semester in Kenya and we took to the road together.

My friend Brian came from Boston and met Jason at his parents’ home in Nyack, New York, before collecting me from my apartment in Jersey City. From here we drove out of New Jersey, the Manhattan skyline dissolving into dusk in our rearview mirror, across the East Coast Mammoth that is Pennsylvania and up to Cleveland, Ohio where we were joined by Courtney, who flew in from Seattle, Washington (surely, a tank full of jet fuel must invoke a similar, probably stronger, feeling in pilots).

We had some calls to make around Ohio, people to visit, universities to tour, and years worth of living on which to catch one another up. There is hardly a better place to reconnect with old friends and share stories and reminiscences than the road.

And this is precisely what the road novel teaches us. Whether it’s Sal and Dean speeding their way across the Midwest in On the Road or Jonathan Safran Foer’s quest through the Ukraine in Everything is Illuminated, being in transit paradoxically allows us the opportunity to pause as it is a temporary state acted out between here and there, two places where, presumably, the business of life awaits.

On the Road is a definitive travel novel, and certainly among my favorites, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Many other great road stories come to mind: Into the Wild by John Krakauer, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thomson, many books by Paul Theroux or Bill Bryson – and for the post-apocalyptic traveler, there’s Cormac McCarthy’s recent masterpiece, The Road.

These books and the many, many others in the genre succeed precisely as they nail down the very unpredictability of travel, the adventure waiting, literally, around every turn.

Several years ago, in what could be called a rehearsal for this most recent, more comprehensive reunion of fellow travelers who met in Africa, Jason and I drove through the night, again from Nyack to the same destination in Ohio: a tiny town called Medina where every August a pig roast is held and friends from far and near are reunited. On that trip, as Jason drove and I tried, fruitlessly, to sleep in the passenger seat, we came across a car wreck that had occurred only moments prior to our arrival.

We found a teenager, just slightly younger than we were at the time, barely conscious and bloody in the mangled shell of his Volkswagen hatchback. He had fallen asleep and collided with the back of a tractor-trailer. Jason, a trained paramedic, cared for the man, who we learned was on his way to college, and I called the police. When the police and ambulance arrived and Jason’s help was no longer needed, we returned to our car, resumed our trip, wordless as we continued to drive through the misty Pennsylvania morning.

It was a reminder of what makes the road so alluring and potentially so dangerous and what makes books that capture the experience so wonderfully engaging. Anything can happen on the road. The freedom one feels while traveling overland at 80 miles per hour, with a full tank of gas and only a vague sense of what lies ahead, is directly related to the mystery, the unknown, the potential joy as well as the danger.

Courtney, Brian, Jason and myself all made it to our homes safely. We sped around Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. and New York with windows down, listening to music, telling stories, and laughing. For three days we reveled in the freedom of the road. But on the fourth day, back at home with an empty tank of gas and work waiting in the morning, I scanned my bookshelves for The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators and Waiting Rooms, a collection I had purchased years ago after returning from another trip for precisely this reason – to make the trip last just a little while longer.

This was going to be a very intelligent article. After using this space previously to gush about summer blockbusters and iPhones, I meant for this month’s subject matter to be smarter – or, at least, headier.

I fully intended to go for that most of academic of topics, the kind of thing you would have to read in one browser tab with Wikipedia open in another. Nothing less than the plays of the Bard himself – and, specifically, his comedy Twelfth Night – as recently and majestically performed by The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park in Manhattan’s Central Park was, you must know, my starting point.

Except, it’s Monday night and Monday night is (for those of you who still pay for cable) the night that the SciFi Channel airs four hours of back-to-back episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

So I have Star Trek on the brain, and yet I do very much want to share thoughts on this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park. And, if you’ll bear with me, I think we will find more connections between the works of Gene Roddenberry and those of Shakespeare than just the actor Patrick Stewart.

I assert that the plays of Shakespeare are heady and academic with my tongue in my cheek. The way Shakespeare is taught in high schools – and in some cases, colleges – is a misreading of what the man’s purpose was, what he meant for his plays to do. In this way, and without too much uncomfortable stretching, we come to our first similarity between Shakespeare’s plays and the continuing mission that is Star Trek: they are dramas performed in distinct acts, and they have it as their purpose to entertain, enlighten, and engage their audience.

It’s just as difficult to summarize the plot of Twelfth Night as it is to attempt to explain how time travel works in the Star Trek universe. I will say that Twelfth Night involves not one but two cases of mistaken identity, cross-dressing, possible homosexual relationships, and one of the greatest and least understood phrases Shakespeare ever wrote, at least contextually:

Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.

As it turns out, in the context of Twelfth Night these words are not spoken by way of motivation, as they often are used in our culture; rather, they are part of a ruse, a plot to embarrass a character that neither the audience nor the other characters much like. And, in the hands of the excellent cast of The Public’s presentation, this line actually carried with it the appropriate measure of innuendo as well. In short, even this most inspiring of moments, this most serious and heavy charge is, in context, a joke, a bit of entertainment.

Another very important similarity: both works are heavily influenced by their predecessors. At one time among so-called Shakespeare scholars it was very popular to actually try to debunk the Bard. People saw obvious similarities between Shakespeare’s plays and a number of sources that came before him (or, in the case of Christopher Marlowe, works written contemporaneously) and drew conclusions, painting Shakespeare in many shades of crook from plagiarizer to front man to myth.

These days (read: postmodernity) most accept that every story is a re-telling of some story that came before it, or, as my mother and King Solomon like to say, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” And this is fine with us. It is expected. We don’t and shouldn’t tolerate plagiarism, but we also do not fly off the handle every time something seems like something else.

For a more recent example, see the almost-conspiracy around that other widely read British author, J.K. Rowling. At the height of her fame (is she still at the height? will she ever come down?) many people accused her of lifting her tale from Adrian Jacobs’ The Adventures of Willy the Wizard. This is still being worked out in the courts, but barring some major shift, in perpetuity no one will care much that there once was a story about a wizard named Willy that bears many similarities to the more famous Harry.

Star Trek, too, is packed with other people’s stories, be it highly inventive retellings of Greek classics, verbatim performances of Sherlock Holmes and even, it turns out, many examples of Shakespeare’s plays being appropriated and adapted to the twenty-fourth century.

Shakespeare’s plays can be crude and funny, sad and moving, mystical and romantic, and any combination of these things. Mostly, though, they do what the best stories do. Elizabethan English makes them seem untouchably highbrow, but even this would have been funny to Shakespeare because much of his language, to his contemporaries, would have seemed base and coarse, as it suited the characters.

Imagine what the English language will sound like 400 years into the future; imagine how the works of Gene Roddenberry will sound to readers then. Will they be any more “highbrow” because they’re old? Certainly not.

Admittedly, Star Trek probably won’t be read or performed like Shakespeare’s plays are today. I don’t see there ever being a “Roddenberry in the Park.” Shakespeare is certainly on a higher level, but let’s not put him too high up on the pedestal.

Twelfth Night in Central Park ended its run on July 12, back here in the 21st century. It was truly fantastic, with an amazing cast that featured Anne Hathaway opposite several well-regarded Broadway actors. If you missed it, take heart: Shakespeare in the Park will be back next summer with Othello, and in the meantime The Public Theater’s next production, The Bacchae by Euripides, begins August 11.

And Star Trek: The Next Generation is on the SciFi network every Monday night. Make time for both, make time for it all: the plays of Shakespeare, the space operas of Gene Roddenberry, the blue notes of Miles Davis, and the crooning of Duncan Sheik. Find entertainment, enlightenment, and engaging stories wherever you can; really, they’re all around us.

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When you see the cover of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ 2010 memoir Losing My Cool, you’ll find it difficult to believe that he has, in fact, lost it. And even more so if you have the chance to meet him in a hip SoHo café, as I did a few weeks ago. With a knit hat on his head and a scraggly beard wrapped around his chin, Williams has still got it. And yet it’s not the kind of cool he grew up admiring.

As a mixed-raced child — Williams mother is white and his father is black — a pivotal early experience in which he was perceived as white and rich by a black woman in a “working class section” of Plainfield kindled in him a strong desire to be black. And it wasn’t enough to just be black. What he learned from the other boys in the barbershop that he patronized twice a month was that he had to learn to talk, walk, and carry himself with a particular kind of swagger, as defined by the 1990s hip-hop artists he and the other boys came to idolize.

But Williams, who is speaking tonight at NJCU, was different from those boys, and from the rappers they admired, in more ways than simply his mixed race; Williams’ father — who they called Pappy — held a PhD in sociology. His parents moved from the West Coast, where they met in what Williams describes as “the West Coast front of what at that time was called the War on Poverty,” to Newark, where Pappy ran anti-poverty programs for the Episcopal Archdiocese before opening his own academic and SAT preparation business out of their home in Fanwood. Pappy’s instruction was not limited to paying customers; from a very young age both of his sons, Thomas and his brother Clarence, were subject to a rigorous extracurricular study schedule.

It was Pappy’s persistence and his love, Williams says, that made it possible for he and his brother to escape the fate that befell so many of his peers who bought fully into the lie that is manufactured and sold to them by hip-hop culture. Hence, the subtitle of Losing My Cool is “How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture.”

Williams doesn’t hate hip-hop culture, and he’s careful to prove that it is still a part of his life. (See, for example, the playlist that he posted on his website.) But, he is critical of it. His memoir, in fact, began not as a memoir at all, but as a bit of cultural criticism. Back in 2007, while a student in NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism graduate program, he was asked to write an op-ed piece as a class assignment. The essay he wrote, which was eventually published by The Washington Post, sought to separate black culture from hip-hop culture, as he noted, they had become conflated since the 1980s.

His professor at NYU, the author and journalist Katie Roiphe, was impressed with her student’s work and suggested that the argument he was making — that what many perceived to be black culture was really just street culture, and that street culture was not the best representation of black culture — could be more thoroughly expressed in a book-length work. With her encouragement, he took a semester off from NYU to write a proposal. After several months of writing and rewriting he secured an agent and then interest from no less than eight publishers.

As he composed his argument, he found that an effective way to flesh out each of his points was with a bit of personal narrative, anecdotes from his days growing up in North Jersey. It became clear as he worked with his agent on his proposal that these stories were the most captivating moments. The publisher he ended up choosing agreed that, as Williams puts it, “It’s probably not that interesting to read a whole book that’s an op-ed, or just an argument.”

As he shifted the direction of his book, he matched his reading to the style and tone he sought for his argument. He read a lot of James Baldwin, who he aptly describes as a “serial memoirist,” as well as fellow Jersey writer Junot Diaz, and Joan Didion and Ralph Ellison. From Ellison, he says, he learned how to approach his own argument effectively. In addition to his literary influences, the voices of his professors Roiphe and Paul Berman, and that of his father, informed his style and, he notes, allowed him to teach himself to write a memoir as it was happening.

From the very first chapter of Losing My Cool, New Jersey is more than just the setting, it becomes a character itself, informing and creating the world in which Williams came of age. Williams attributes this to what he calls Jersey’s provincialism. That is, even though it is at the heart of a major metropolitan strip that runs from Boston to D.C., one can feel rather insulated in the suburbs. He notes that the limited engagement he experienced with outside cultures, beyond the immediate hip-hop culture he and his friends adopted, is necessarily a result of place.

But more important to Williams than place is circumstance. He acknowledges that many people do not have the same advantage that he had in his highly educated and strict father, and yet he acknowledges that to a certain extent, an individual must be responsible for bettering him or herself. Quick to offer a helping hand, however, Williams acknowledges that as a writer he has the opportunity to put forth a positive example.

“As a black writer, it’s almost a moral obligation to show that there are different ways of being black than you’ll see on Black Entertainment Television,” he says, acknowledging that he doesn’t have the perfect answer, but hopes to be one of many positive examples.

The heart of Williams’ argument is actually inspired in no small way by Plato’s notion of “Allegory of the Cave,” the idea that many people are like prisoners trapped in a cave staring at the shadows on the wall and believing that what they are seeing is reality. The philosopher, Plato says, has the ability to see from outside the cave, to recognize that the shadows are cast by events happening behind the prisoners and the true form of reality is more than just the shadows.

“There are good things and there are real things and it takes thought and sense of purpose to seek those things out,” Williams says. “Kim Kardashian is on the cover of every magazine right now, and that’s a shadow.”

His Platonic reading carries into hip-hop culture as well. He has come to believe that the best way to encounter that culture is with an ironic tone — not ironic in a funny sense, but in the sense that “there is a difference between what is being said and what is meant,” he explains. “You don’t actually have to believe that keeping it real means that if someone looks at you the wrong way you have to respond in a violent manner.”

Though many already look at hip-hop with this detachment, it was a lesson Williams had to learn with the help of his father and his insistence on education.

Williams will be speaking on this very topic this evening at New Jersey City University. Additionally, he will be reading from his book and talking a bit about how he came to write it. This is one of many speaking engagements for Williams since the book was published last year; in each lecture he makes an effort to be the positive example that he insists young people need. He talks, particularly, to young men and women of color and reminds them that there are many ways to “be black.”

“Young people respond to that,” he says. “They’re happy that someone who is not 75 years older says that to them.”

THE DETAILS

Thomas Chatterton Williams will be speaking at the Michael Gilligan Student Union at NJCU tonight at 5PM. His book, Losing My Cool, will be released in paperback on April 26.

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All photos: Edwin Hadi

Earlier this month, thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses descended on Journal Square for their annual convention, this year centered on the theme “Remain Close to Jehovah.” Similar meetings will take place at a variety of locations all around the world throughout the rest of 2010 and into 2011. In the tri-state area the gatherings will continue through September.

At the Jersey City location, however, attendees had the unique opportunity to meet in a very special place, the historic Stanley Theater.

The Witnesses acquired the Stanley in 1983 and renovated it in time for the formal dedication of the building in 1985. Remarkably, because no one in the organization is paid, all the work was done by thousands of volunteers.

Though the Stanley is used regularly as the Assembly Hall for Jersey City Witnesses, it was especially effective in providing an elegant as well as spacious setting for the convention, which gathered an estimated 3,000 attendees on each meeting day, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Nearly every space of the expansive theater was put to use for the convention, with the main events taking place in the auditorium. There, on any given hour of each day, attendants could hear symposiums and sermons relating to the theme, as well as experience some special events such as baptisms and a drama production.

According to Howard Carroll, a news service overseer for the Hudson County circuit of Witnesses, an effort was made to make non-members in the area aware of the conference and to welcome them, via a flier emphasizing the free admission and the lack of collections taken. “How can you draw close to God?,” it read.

Although it is unclear how many guests responded to this invitation, if they did attend, they’d likely be easy to spot. Even on the balmy Saturday afternoon when I visited the convention, all the Witnesses were dressed in formal attire — suits for the men and dresses for the women. Carroll explained that Jehovah’s Witnesses dress up to show respect, similar to the way people used to dress up for ball games and, appropriately for the venue, movies.

Yet, despite the serious, solemn dress, every Witness I spoke with was full of joy and excitement for the conference.

Many, like 19-year-old Britney from Paterson, cherished the opportunity to reconnect with old friends that they may not have the opportunity to see often. She was born into the organization and baptized 11 years ago.

“I get to see a lot of the friends that I only get to see on these occasions,” she said. “Even if you don’t get to personally talk to them, you do feel a certain kind of spirit just being around them.”

Shawn from Clifton, another lifelong Witness, expressed a similar sentiment.

“Getting to see all the people who are doing the same thing as you is very encouraging,” he said, adding that the actual information was a big draw as well. Many of the other attendees referred to the support that comes from the various speakers, who give them tips and advice on how to be a better Witness.

Perhaps one of the most striking things about the convention from the perspective of an outsider was the diversity represented by the attendees. People of all ages and races filled the theater and the adjoining rooms, including overflow seating for those who could not find a seat in the main auditorium.

Bobby Irvin, a Jamaican musician and old friend of the late Bob Marley, summed up the experience of the convention using a famous phrase of Marley’s.

“Everybody is just in one love,” he said. “In Oneness.”

Irvin looked around the theater as crowds began to pour out of the auditorium and as a line of new converts shuffled into a shallow pool for baptism.

“It’s very beautiful,” he added with a smile.

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It may seem unlikely, but I’m a hip-hop head. Old school. From the time I can remember listening to anything, rap was there. I didn’t grow up in the inner city, but I didn’t grow up in the suburbs, either. If there was such a thing as the outer city, that’s where I’d be from. But even there, in the outer city of Boston, in my mostly white neighborhood, I got into rap.

Obviously, I don’t say this to make the case that I’m some kind of early rap adopter or that my musical tastes, even as a young child, were extremely overdeveloped (or, underdeveloped, depending on your view), rather I note that to indicate that by 1987, less than a decade after hip-hop’s inception, it had reached me where I was, and taken hold.

Hip-hop is just over 30 years old now, only slightly my elder and that of the millennial generation, but the impact that it has had on the world, and specifically on the United States, is immeasurable. It has reshaped our country’s landscape, revolutionized race relations, redefined popular culture, and, according to Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, it has given rise to a new majority.

This and much more will be Chang’s topic when he comes to speak at New Jersey City University on Monday, April 19. As a featured guest in NJCU’s University Lecture Series, Chang will give a lecture entitled “Hip-Hop and The Colorization of America.”

Jeff Chang has been described as a “radical historian,” and this is true, as long as the full meaning is attached to both words. That is, by covering topics most often overlooked by academia, Chang has cut out a niche for himself conducting serious (but not stuffy) academic research in areas traditionally labeled and looked at as simply popular culture. The Chicago Sun-Times called Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop “the best-argued, most-thoroughly researched case for hip-hop as a complete and truly American culture.”

In addition to his work in history, Chang also writes for several magazines, including Vibe, for which he covered the 2008 presidential election and penned the magazine’s cover story on Barack Obama. Additionally, he has written for The New York Times, Mother Jones, and The Nation, and he served as the Senior Editor of 360hiphop.com. On top of all of this, Chang is credited with founding the independent hip-hop label SoleSides (which became Quannum Projects) and launching the careers of several of underground hip-hop’s most influential MCs and DJs.

The NJCU lecture will combine the focus of Chang’s study of hip-hop from Can’t Stop Won’t Stop with the subject of his forthcoming book Who We Be: The Colorization of America, which investigates the change in American culture after the civil rights era.

You can bet I’ll be at this event (and not just because I teach at NJCU). In my hand I’ll hold a notebook and pen to vigorously take notes, and on my feet, of course, will be My Adidas.

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All photos: Edwin Hadi

On Tuesday night many of Hudson County’s business owners gathered at the former Jersey City Medical Center (or as it is now known, The Beacon) for the inaugural event of the Hudson County History Series.

The evening began with a short lecture by Changing Jersey City authors Cynthia Harris and Leon Yost, in a newly restored lecture hall. Ulana Zakalak, The Beacon’s Historic Restoration Consultant, explained that the hall, like much of the complex, had been in a state of complete disrepair. Water stains and faded paint marred the walls and ceilings where now, due to meticulous research including analyzing samples to determine the original paint colors in the room, shimmering golds and rich blues recreate the art deco look of yesteryear.

After the lecture and then some socializing and snacking on hors d’oeuvres, guests were treated to a tour of some the more intricately rehabilitated features of the Beacon, followed by a sneak peak at the ongoing restoration and development of the property.

Zakalak headed up the historical portion of the tour, showing locations such as the original entrance to the hospital which boasts a bas relief sculpture lining the room entitled “From Myth to Medicine,” the lobby, the new community library and perhaps most exciting, notorious former Jersey City mayor Frank Hague’s office on the ground floor, which has been converted, appropriately, to a poker room.

From there, George Filopoulos, president of Metrovest Equities, the real estate company that owns and operates The Beacon, treated guests to a sneak peak of the newest renovation to the complex, the Mercury Lofts building. The tour included a look at a 3,700 square foot sample loft that covered half of the space on the building’s second floor as well as a walk through much of the yet to be renovated space.

This event was the first in a series that promises to go above and beyond the kind of affairs that the Chamber of Commerce regularly hosts by offering business networking opportunities with a side of history.

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James Fisher is the kind of history professor you wish you had. Sure, he looks the part, round glasses and floppy hair, but what most recommends him is his energy. Not energy as in some kind of new age-y good aura, but literally his enthusiasm and passion for his subject, whether that be history, theology or the subject of his latest book — wherein all his other interests seem to merge — the Port of New York. 
As a New Jersey native, the often-untold stories of the mostly Irish waterfront workers on both sides of the Hudson River are a source of endless fascination to Fisher, and, whether talking to him about it, or reading his book, his excitement about the subject is contagious. 

On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York, Fisher’s fourth book, was published last year by Cornell University Press and is the result of over ten years of research, interviews and writing begun when Fisher and his wife lived in the Midwest and completed after they moved, with their son, back to New Jersey.  

In many ways, Fisher sees the composition of On the Irish Waterfront as a joining of often-disparate fronts. In addition to the backing of Cornell University Press, the book was funded by a grant from the University of Notre Dame and joins two disciplines that don’t often meet, American Catholic studies and American history. 

The book chronicles the lives of the major, predominantly Irish, politicians, gangsters, union leaders and priests whose combined stories inform the broader history of the region in the early half of the twentieth century. Fisher points out that due to an almost unbreakable code of silence on the docks on either side of the Hudson, prior to the writing of this book not much of this story has been told; the most notable exception being the Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando. And the film itself factors into Fisher’s book in a large way as he details the true story behind the movie, that of “labor priest” Father John Corridan, depicted in the film by Karl Malden. 

“I’m one of those characters who …” Fisher pauses briefly to consider his words before continuing. “I’m probably a little quirky and I do these off-beat kind of things, but I like the idea of being part of a communal enterprise. I like the idea that it was part of a series at Notre Dame which was designed to put the Catholic American stories into the mainstream of American historical narrative more than they ever had before.” 

And certainly this “communal enterprise” is one of the features that make the book most accessible to a wider audience. There is plenty of rich information for history buffs and those with interest in Catholic social teaching, but there is also a particular appeal for those of us whose lives, like those of the characters he profiles, straddle the Hudson.  

The importance of Jersey City on the culture of the waterfront is not lost on Fisher. Pointing out that it was often ignored by the New York media, he posits that the most powerful figures in the history of the waterfront were those, like infamous Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, that had controlling stakes on both banks of the river. This fact, he adds, was really only ever known to Hudson County residents. 

“People like Hague and others who were here, they always had a lot of action going over there,” Fisher says. “It never worked the other way. Nobody from the West Side of Manhattan ever said, ‘I want to get into the Jersey City market.’ But if they had, they would have understood that that was, of course, the key to control and authority in the port.” 

As Fisher sees it, the importance of Jersey City in the region has not dwindled since the heyday of the waterfront, though it has changed. The legacy of that time, he says, can be seen not only in the fact that Irish-Americans have always played a part in Hudson County politics, including our own Mayor Healy who Fisher says is a “kind of liberal incarnation of the old school,” but also in the influence that Jesuit education has had in the region. 

“In every American city like this there was pressure on the Jesuits to move their schools and colleges out of these urban settings, but in almost every case they refused. They dug in,” he explains. “So the Catholic scene in Jersey City really did help make this transition. To make the change,” he says, referring the city’s urban renewal. 

James Fisher, himself, has become a part of the story through his role as professor of American religious history in the Theology Department of Fordham University, a Jesuit school. And he uses his classes as an opportunity to inform his students not only of the significance of Catholic education in the region, but also the important place of Manhattan’s West Side on the story of the port, which he does by taking his classes to the piers.  

More personally, Fisher also fits into the Irish-Catholic history of the port as a kind of outsider-insider. His family has strong roots in the area, his mother grew up in Hudson County and his father attended Saint Peter’s Prep in Downtown Jersey City, though Fisher did not grow up in Hudson County and, for that reason has always felt “somewhat estranged.” 

“I grew up in eight counties in New Jersey,” he adds. “My family was the upward mobile Irish descendancy, post-war. But all my relatives grew up around here, so there’s a little bit of that distance. I don’t make any claims to being an insider. But I’m the product of it in a way … Spiritually, emotionally as an Irish-Catholic, this is where I’m from.” 

Last fall I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Fisher at Saint Peter’s College in which he tailored his talk toward his Jersey City audience and affirmed the place of the city in not only the region’s history, but also in the story told in his book. That evening, Fisher was particularly personal about his family life as well, perhaps because he was in the company of many friends and colleagues (he taught for a while at SPC and his wife teaches there still), or because his son, who is autistic, was in attendance. 

“This book would not have been written without Charlie,” Fisher said of his son. 

“Seeing my son’s experience and some of our experience advocating for him and his education got me out of myself for the first time in a way that I could look more broadly at political systems,” he says when I talk to him later. “It offered a broader perspective, gave me a little more compassion and humility.”

“I just know it made me a better person, so there had to be some consequence,” he concludes.
 
This compassion and humility is evident not just by Fisher’s preference for talking about his family or his subject matter over himself, but it’s also evident in his writing. Reading his book, it’s clear that Fisher is aware that he is dealing with the lives of real people. He never reduces them to caricatures or stereotypes. 

James Fisher’s success in the On the Irish Waterfront is a direct result of his passion for history and theology, yes, but also for education, art, and, ultimately, for the people of the region.

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This holiday season you’ll have plenty of opportunities to revisit the classics, whether for you that means A Charlie Brown Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, or, as it is in my family, the musical version of A Christmas Carol starring Albert Finney and simply titled Scrooge. And when there are days where the temperature reaches into the mid-60s in early December, these old standbys are often the most tangible manifestation of the season.

Here in Jersey City a new, if not somewhat unlikely, story is quickly climbing to “classic” status: today marks the opening night of local “theater in the raw” group J CITY’s third-annual performance of “A Tuna Christmas.” This play, with its funny name and Texas setting has proven to be the perfect addition to the holiday season, like the amusing Southern cousin you only get to see around Christmastime.

The plot centers around an annual yard decorating contest in the little town of Tuna, Texas. It would seem that the contest is the victim of a saboteur, referred to by the locals as the “Christmas Phantom.” The town’s people of Tuna are represented by 22 unique and hilarious characters, played entirely by the two male cast members, Kellis Carroll and Clay Cockrell. As I sat and watched the play during dress rehearsals this week, I met a couple of little people, two very well-endowed women and their love interests, a couple of old ladies and, of course, the town’s passionate — and high maintenance — theater director.

Our town’s theater director is J CITY’s Sandy Cockrell who, with her husband Clay, and Kellis, are the three founding members of J CITY, which officially launched in 2006. Sandy and Clay moved to the area thirteen years ago and began performing and producing plays in New York City. It wasn’t until about four years ago, however, that they made the decision to make their theater company’s home here in Jersey City. Homeless for several years, the theater company staged plays wherever there was space.

“We were doing shows when a space opened up,” Clay says. “They invited us to the courthouse, in the rotunda. When a space opened up, that’s when we would get to do a play.”

They also performed at Grace Church Van Vorst before landing in their new home at St. Michael’s Church in Hamilton Park. Meeting the pastor of St. Michael’s, Father Vic as he’s commonly called, was a “miracle,” Sandy says.

“[During] Cinco de Mayo at The Merchant, we met Father Vic,” she continues. “He’s been so generous in saying, ‘Come down, and when you got on your feet a little bit you can donate to the church, what you can.’”

For “A Tuna Christmas,” J CITY transformed the church basement into a stage onto which the actors and audience cast their imagination and, in short time, are able to see whatever the scene calls for, be it the inside of a small restaurant or the living room of a house.

This will be the third year that J CITY has performed “A Tuna Christmas” and the third time Sandy has directed and Kellis Carroll has acted in the production. Clay explains that when they first produced the show, J CITY had just started up and his responsibilities as executive producer took precedence. But when the other actor moved away, he took over and, as Carroll notes: “He fit all the costumes!”

When this trio chooses the plays they will perform in any given year, Carroll explains, they select scripts that contain a universal truth. “Everyone can know there is a truth being told,” he says. “We tell a story simply, but in a sophisticated way.”

Clay adds that when Sandy reads through scripts, she picks those that she not only wants to do, but ones “she has to do.” He points to the group’s last production, a jarring piece about marital infidelity entitled “Passion,” as an example.

“This is too hard,” he says he cautioned Sandy. “It’s a really scary script that’s so raw.” But, he says, each time she responded: “We have to do this.”

“A Tuna Christmas,” on the other hand, is more lighthearted and fun, more suited to the holidays.

“It’s a total comedy, almost to the point of farce.” Carroll, who is originally from Texas, explains. “[But] there are also these small poignant moments that come out of nowhere and grab you.”

“A Tuna Christmas” opens tonight at 8 pm at The Underground Theater at St. Michael’s Church (252 9th St.). The show runs Wed.-Sat. until Dec. 19. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased online.

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On a rainy Saturday afternoon in Jersey City one might wonder what to do. Extend brunch well into dinnertime? Stay home and catch up on missed episodes of your favorite shows on Hulu? Venture out into the rain to get going on the Christmas shopping you’ve neglected to start?

Sure. Yes. Those are all good options, but this past Saturday there was a better option, and one that, I’m afraid, not as many of us took advantage of as we should have — “Designer Days: Handmade for the Holidays” at the Jersey City Museum.

The atrium section of the museum was transformed into a veritable shopping mall of gift ideas — all local, green and artsy — from members of the Jersey City Craft Mafia and _gaia. There was a wide assortment of jewelry, clothing, hats, ornaments and original artwork on sale, all expressing the diversity and vivacity of our little city.

And if that wasn’t enough, I had the chance to attend a lecture by Leon Yost and Cynthia Harris in which they showed slides and commentary from their new book Changing Jersey City, A History in Photographs. The slideshow took the audience on a tour through long-forgotten rooms in the old Jersey City Medical Center, on a ride on the old elevated train, to the locations of the oldest public schools in JC and face to face with many of the people that made our city what it is today. (Unfortunately, I missed our mayor’s musical performance of holiday tunes — but you can’t win ‘em all.)

The overwhelming impression I had as I walked back home through the rain to my apartment is that there is so much here in Jersey City that many of us don’t know a thing about. There’s the history which some great writers and historians are doing their best to make us aware of, from Bob Leach to Yost and Harris to James T. Fisher, an author I’ll be profiling here in a couple of weeks.

But in addition to the history, there’s an entire present that too many of Jersey City’s residents know too little about. There are events like “Designer Days” going on all over the city, there are artists and craftspeople, musicians and writers, theater groups and scholars doing work here that is worthy of so much more attention than they receive, due, in no small part, to our proximity to our overbearing big brother.

But the good news is we can remedy this. Check the calendar here at JCI for the latest on events, read the daily News Roundups and Best Bets, read the other local media, and get involved in what is going on in our city.

In her presentation, Harris showed pictures of well dressed young people sitting around a checkers board at one of the city’s many athletic clubs of yesteryear. She noted that in lieu of anything better to do, this is how our historical counterparts passed the time. And she showed a picture, and explained the use of, a dance card.

But we don’t need checkerboards and dance cards; there’s so much going on, all we need is to be a part of it all.

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Photo: Tatsuro Nishimura

Flood Warning! If the New York Times is to believed, residents of Jersey City should be prepared for high waters beginning today.

Sure, the forecast calls for rain, but that’s not the half of it. Today is also the opening night for The Attic Ensemble’s presentation of Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2006 tear-jerking play, Rabbit Hole.

The play is rooted in the deep sadness that comes from the death of a small child that takes place months before the play’s opening scene. “[It] inspires such copious weeping among its audience that you wonder early on if you should have taken a life jacket,” the Times noted in 2006.

The Attic Ensemble’s presentation marks the directorial debut of Brendan Applegate, a native of Elizabeth, and three-season veteran of the theater group. Applegate joined the Ensemble after losing his job and subsequently responding to an open casting call. He joined the show and, as he says, “I haven’t left since.”

In the intervening years Brendan has participated in all aspects of producing a show, both onstage as well as behind the curtain. He is particularly excited about staging Rabbit Hole, because of “the cast and the wonderful material that we get to work with.” Plus, he quips, “It’s a real comedy.”

The Attic Ensemble has been putting on plays, poetry readings, stand up comedy nights and fund raisers in Jersey City for 39 years. From its humble beginnings in an attic space in Jersey City the group continued to grow and relocate to various venues around town, now taking up residency at the Barrow Mansion on Wayne Street.

It’s not always easy for the Attic, or for any arts group in Jersey City, to lure residents out of their homes, or, in many cases, away from Manhattan, to see a local performance. But, as Applegate points out, “It’s a lot cheaper to come to your backyard and see a great, high caliber show, instead of going to the city.”

With this performance, the ensemble sought a play that would challenge not only the audience but the performers as well. Typically, Applegate says, when a play is selected a few things factor into it: will it bring variety to the season, will it help the theater group reach new goals and higher artistic pursuits, and does it introduce a new and exciting challenge? Ideas are submitted to artistic director, Art Delo, and he proceeds to put together a schedule for each season.

As the second show in the Attic Ensemble’s 2009-2010 Mainstage Season, Rabbit Hole “is a vehicle for a strong season,” Applegate explains. “It holds up.”

There was a strong turnout in response to the casting call for Rabbit Hole and from that field three actors who are new to the company join two Attic alumni in the production. At a dress rehearsal just a couple nights before the play was set to open this week, the inside of the Barrow Mansion was transformed into a modest, quaint home. It is in this home that Lindsay-Abaire’s story of overcoming heartbreak unfolds. And it is there that the audience, as Brendan Applegate puts it, “gets two spend two hours outside of their lives, and in someone else’s.”

Rabbit Hole
Written by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Brendan Applegate, presented by The Attic Ensemble.
Opens at the Barrow Mansion (83 Wayne St.) in Jersey City on Friday, Nov. 13.
Tickets are available by clicking here or visiting www.atticensemble.org.

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Cynthia Harris and Bob Leach chat with festival-goers (Photo courtesy the Jersey City Free Public Library)

This past weekend’s rainy weather did little to dampen the spirits of the city’s bibliophiles as evidenced by the consistent stream of traffic flowing through Saturday’s second annual book festival held at Van Vorst Park.

“Surprisingly, it turned out well,” Jersey City Free Public Library assistant director and festival chair Sonia Araujo said on Saturday, noting that people turned out despite the weather. “It seems to be flowing. People stay awhile … they’ve spoken to the authors. And the authors have sold their books and did their signing. Bottom line is we’ve done well. We met our goal.”

Though some of the authors and attendees made longing references to last year’s beautiful weather, they too shared Araujo’s optimistic outlook. “The rain sort of dampened things down, so to speak,” Steven Hart, author of The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway, punned. “But we’ve had a pretty steady flow. I’ve sold a few books.”

This year’s festival was titled “A Tale of Our City,” and surveying the broad range of topics covered by the writers in attendance certainly tells a story about the varied interests and the diverse population of Jersey City. Meandering from table to table, one was likely to come across super-hero children, teen prodigies, African belly dancers, recovering workaholics and, of course, corrupt politicians.

The variety didn’t stop with the subject matter however. This year’s festival hosted authors in such varied genres as memoir, narrative nonfiction, self-help, fiction, children’s stories and even a couple of graphic novels.

In addition to selling and signing books at their individual booths, most of the writers in attendance had the opportunity to read from their works. These presentations had the quality of making even more personal the authors’ words. In some cases this meant interjections in between written sentence to explain or simply orate tangentially, in other cases the weight of the words in some of the more intense works brought the author to tears. Such was the case with Patricia Je, author of The Long Road Here, a moving account of Pherrys, a victim of child abuse.

Each author was extremely willing to engage their readers and potential readers, cordially thanking them for their interest and answering any questions that might arise. The Independent took advantage of this opportunity for full access to Jersey City’s best and brightest authors. What follows is a brief survey of the writers in attendance on Saturday and their works, organized by subject matter.

Our Storied Past

The most popular subject matter at the book festival was, without a doubt, Jersey City history. And perhaps the most popular author to write on the subject in Van Vorst Park on Saturday was Helene Stapinski. Her book, Five Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, first published back in 2002, is in its ninth printing, is used as a textbook for college courses on New Jersey history and garnered her a modicum of celebrity on its release.

“It’s about corruption in Hudson County,” Stapinksi explains, “and all of the small time criminals in my family.” She says the book asks the question: “Is it because of the corrupt nature of the town that people steal stuff, or is it that people who do illegal things put those people in office?” She works through this question by weaving her own family’s history into the fabric of the history of the area at large.

On Saturday, however, she read from her new book Baby Plays Around, which tells of her days playing in a rock band on the Lower East Side in the 80s. She showcased a passage about her first true love — which we found out was not a person but her brother’s drum set.

Stapinski says a third book is in the works. “I got two kids too,” she says. “And I freelance; I do stuff at the Times. It’s hard to keep all these things in the air at one time, but it will be out.”

Stephen Hart says The Last Three Miles tells the story of “the first superhighway project in America, which was the Route 1 extension. The last portion of it was what is now known as the Pulaski Skyway.” A bloody labor war erupted around the construction, involving none other than Jersey City’s most notorious mayor, Frank Hague.

“It also deals with the rise of the automobile,” Hart continues. “This really was the first superhighway in America. And for that reason it was designed along engineering principles from the railway.”

This, he reasons, explains why the Skyway has traditionally been considered such a treacherous drive, a fact he got to know well while living in Jersey City during the 80s and working in Hoboken later.

The fascination, particularly in the Hudson County area, with the subject matter of his book has prompted Hart to consider writing a “full length biography of Hague, a real serious, straight out and thoroughly researched” account of the famous political boss’ life.

Other writers making Jersey City’s history their focus were Charles Caldes, author of a number of books about railroading and two in particular that deal with local matters in both pictures and text. Jersey City’s Journal Square tells of, as Caldes puts it, “the greatest 12-14 acres in the world, in its day.” Caldes is also the author of Jersey City’s Hudson River Waterfront, Book One: The Pennsylvania Railroad. Both books are full of amazing photographs that tell the city’s history in brilliant visual detail.

And of course local storyteller Bob Leach made an appearance at the festival with his book Frank Hague and the Lucky Horseshoe as well as two new books entitled The Parade of the Shantytown Dead and How Frank Hague Became a Hero. Leach was joined at his table by Cynthia Harris, manager of the library’s New Jersey Room and the co-author (with photographer Leon Yost) of the forthcoming Changing Jersey City: A History in Photographs, to be published later this month by Schiffer Publishing.

City Comics

Perhaps two of the most interesting offerings at this years book festival were from authors in a non-traditional media, the graphic novel. Amy Bogin, who moved to Jersey City several years ago from Central Jersey, has been documenting the past year of her life as a web comic at www.glassurchin.com in which she appears as a spiky hedgehog and her friends and family appear as other animals.

She recently compiled the first 140 comics into a book entitled The Glass Urchin, Book 1: Milkshakes and Highways. “This book has a story that anyone can read, but it also has a little bit of a local flavor,” Bogin says. “I love Jersey City. It inspired me.”

The book will be available on Bogin’s website as well as the original web comics and she continues to update the site twice a week with new installments.

The Glass Urchin will appeal to a mature comic book reader, young adults who can identify with her characters’ job struggles, relationships and outlook on life. Another author at the book festival, however, had more of a traditional comic book reader in mind for his audience: children.

Anthony Fletcher, who signs his work Artoni, was at the book festival to promote his entertaining and educational comic, C2 and Posse: Inner City Heroes. “It’s the first of its kind to portray inner city teenagers of different ethnicities as heroes,” he says excitedly. “They’re heroes because they’re embracing, developing and using human attributes, which become their superpower … And there are no guns.”

Artoni has lived in Jersey City for about 12 years, working out of his apartment doing graphic design for several Manhattan fashion companies, but with the debut of C2 (pronounced C Squared), he is “going national,” with national distribution and trying to build up his company Artoni World Productions.

The C2 mission statement is “Waking up mankind, one mind at a time,” and this mirrors Artoni’s goal to use his comics as a means not only of education for children, but also for education.

Here to Lend a Helping Hand

Several authors at the book festival were promoting self-help or inspirational books. Dustin Dumas Weeks worked in the investment banking, currency trading and technology fields in Europe, New York and Silicon Valley. In a short period of time she lost her job, found another and then was laid off from that job as well. The experience offered her a moment to take stock of her life.

“I reflected on ‘What can I do differently?’,” she says of that time. “I was working 80 hours a week.”

She began by making a list of the things that “will never happen to me again.” That list became her book, Lessons from a Recovering Worker Bee. It features 26 lessons “on how to maintain your work/life balance while also accelerating your career.”

Weeks self-published the book and had influence on every aspect of its creation from the manuscript to the layout to the cover design. She was fortunate enough to receive endorsements from real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran and BET founder Bob Johnson.

Sheila Allen knows something about work/life balance as well. As the wife of a local pastor, Allen made it a priority to manage her time in such away that neither her family nor the church was shortchanged. Her book, Career, Ministry and Family: Can They Complement Each Other? explores this tension and offers suggestions for people struggling to find that balance between a profession, a family and even a ministry.

Several more authors at the festival were promoting works of fiction, like Jessica F. Baggett, a New Jersey City University sophmore, aspiring filmmaker, musician and writer who garnered attention from the local media when she recently published her first book The Keys to Life, which is about a teenage musical prodigy.

Sandra Catena, author of The African Belly Dance, crafted a tale about an Italian American from Newark who shocks her family be becoming a belly dancer. The book meticulously describes the art of belly dancing before taking a turn toward mystery novel set against an exotic West African backdrop.

New to the writing scene was Jane Pedler, who was at the festival as a first attempt to share her writing with the world. She had several homemade short story packets on sale, each story inspired by tintype photos of anonymous people that she buys on the internet.

Early in the day Mayor Jerramiah Healy could be seen perusing the authors’ tables and meeting attendees, himself braving the rain to appreciate Jersey City’s burgeoning literary scene. (The event was a joint effort between Healy’s office, the library, the City Council and the Division of Cultural Affairs in conjunction with the Van Vorst Park Association.)

Plans for next year’s book festival are already in the works and, according to Sonia Araujo, seven authors have already signed on.

“Jersey City needs this kind of thing to promote the arts and literacy,” Araujo says. Continuing with a proud smile she added: “This is a wonderful event.”

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Ahh, September: the air is getting cooler, the kids are going back to school and local authors are making their way out of the Free Public Library and into Van Vorst Park for the second annual Book Festival, or “A Tale of Our City,” as it’s being called.

Authors with areas of expertise ranging from rock and roll, baseball, Jersey City history and folklore will be reading from their work and answering questions. In addition there will be a special area for children, an opportunity to sign up for library cards several vendors, music and even belly dancing.

The Independent, which is a sponsor of the festival, will be there meeting and interviewing as many attendees and authors (including Bob Leach, who we featured a few months ago and who will be in attendance), culminating in a full rundown of the day’s events.

Come out to Van Vorst Park on Saturday between 10 am and 4 pm to celebrate Jersey City’s rich literary heritage and meet the authors that are writing us into the future.