Paula Anne's Reading Log

Teacher’s Lesson

as people get older it seems
the pattern is to stack up experience
hordes of it, we’re basically
living memory machines

memory is so important
at school i witness daily
alongside my colleagues
the peculiar case
of children poor in
memory, some reason
very low on memory power. 

I have many such students.
It is not because I am a special

education teacher; others
share the load with me. 
I can think of at least one
specific student like this
in each grade, definitely
too many for everybody! 

What I wanna know is:
What causes this in children?
How can I best serve this population?

Has it always been like this, is this
how people really are, especially
so far impoverished on different
levels and aspects of life and how the
odds have always been against
those who are not part of

the proverbial 1%?

MINOR CHARACTERS-Joyce Johnson, up to p.93

I have to admit: I first became familiar with Joyce (I would like to speak of the writers on a first name basis as I consider them fellow colleagues, and in some cases, older sisters.  Is that pretentious?) in the book WOMEN OF THE BEAT GENERATION.  I saw a picture of her there

and it reminded me of another long blonde-haired jewess young artist person in my life…Erin.  The one my old boyfriend Luc joined with after me.  Also, some time later I was in the laundry mat looking up something interesting to listen to while folding clothes and found Joyce’s son, Daniel Pinchbeck, giving a lecture somewhere on psychedelic drugs.  I thought I could seriously ask him about shamanism and the Blue Lotus, so I emailed him a thoughtful letter only to get a curt response: “I don’t know anything about that, sorry.”

So my experience with her son, coupled with me connecting Joyce Johnson in my head to Erin Joyce (same name!  how about that?) led to some resistance in learning any more about Joyce Johnson herself, or reading anything she wrote.

However, the other day my dear college professor/mentor Jack Shepard phones me, telling me he’s sending me Minor Characters, the book she wrote as “a coming-of-age in the Beat Generation.”  He says he would be interested to have me read it and hear my thoughts.  Eh.  What the heck.  The Pinchbeck experience is in the past.  Lucas is in the past.  So I read it.  I kind of wanted to finish it before I get the other books Jack is sending me…

I found myself really relating to her story.  As a young girl, she had to trek on subways to get to Greenwich Village, to the artsy part of town.  She struggled with fitting in, with having duality in her identity (straight-laced, only daughter of even-straighter-laced conservative Jewish parents who wanted their daughter to grow up to be a musical composer by day.  Once a week, by night, she put on her hipster earrings and hang around the scene, observing.  Oh the longing she must’ve felt).  I understand this.  It reminded me of my own experience….when I first started hanging with Lucas and his friends….how I would drive 40 minutes every night from Alief to Downtown Houston, where Lucas would play shows, and afterwards party with him and his friends…or watch his friends play music here/there…the endless warehouse parties we’d used to go to…him so drunk he could pass out right where he was…the debauchery I wasn’t used to, then, all new to me…and a lot of the times I felt out of place too, like Joyce did hanging around the Village.  She’d look at the other girls, how effortlessly cool they looked…I did the same thing in my own experience…and how she often “hung back,” I did the same thing.  A lot.  However where Joyce was comfortable not fitting in, I really wanted to.  Because I really wanted to be with Lucas. I called it Lucas-world.  Funny, huh?

Anyway.  So her story has a lot of very important elements of the female experience.  I felt very connected to her story on the “observing” part.  I’d always considered myself an Elizabeth Bennett in the scene, like she did.  There was one part in it where she said being an observer was something safe—like if she ever found herself too much a part of something, and it felt bad, she can always step back from it.  “Oh I’m just observing,” she’d say.  Very interesting.

Another reason I am so interested in her story is because she shows us how hard it was for young women at that time (1950s) to find themselves…they were being fed this idea that they should follow the prescribed “school-then-marriage-then-starting a family” routine.  Everyone was in on it: the media, their family, generations before them everywhere they looked.  At one point, she said that Elise’s apartment, as dreary as it was, symbolized this freedom that she was a bit jealous of.  Freedom.  Sexual freedom, social freedom, whatever it was.  I understand, I know how hard it is to not have role models for the thing you’re striving to achieve for yourself.  You question yourself a lot, preoccupied with details that really don’t matter….I know.

Her and Elise make unlikely friends.  Maybe because they’re both into “Bohemianism” and come from uptight Jewish households.  And they were the only child in their families.  They even had a crush on the same professor.  But I reckon this is where the similarities end, because while Joyce would play it safe and not get too deep in the scene, Elise wanted to be a real part of it…because wanted to be with Allen (wow that’s twisted, sounds like what i said earlier about me wanting to fit in to be with Lucas).  She was kind of self-destructive however (I am not), setting impossible goals for herself (final term paper on an impossible T.S. Eliot poem, falling in love with a married professor and with the raucously gay Allen Ginsberg).  I’m afraid any minute now I’ll turn the page and there it’ll be, Joyce coping with the death of her best friend.