Dr. Metablog

"I Love a Tall Girl"

I never "got" T. S. Eliot. When I first became serious about poetry and "intellectual" stuff, in the 50s, Eliot was the presiding grand khan of English literature. Because Eliot liked Donne, my teachers liked Donne. Because Eliot was down on Milton, my teachers were down on Milton. Eliot had pronounced that "a dissociation of thought and feeling" occurred in the later seventeenth century, and we all tried to interpret literature in the light of that putative, imaginary divorce. Eliot discovered that Shakespeare's Hamlet was a failure because it lacked an 'objective correlative." We were enjoined to wonder exactly where that OC had gone. Nevertheless, I thought Hamlet was an exciting success and still do. So do many discerning readers.

To me, Eliot's criticism was mysterious and his poetry was incomprehensible, unmusical and occasionally repellent. "The Waste Land," his masterpiece, was to me obscurantist, pretentious, show-offy and shallow. And yet I was unquestionably an outlier. I studied the "Four Quartets" for weeks under the able direction of a serious teacher and scholar, Arthur Mizener, but in the end there was nothing there for me. My own insufficiency?  Perhaps.

I could not get around Eliot's public positions ("I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics"). To me, these views were fringe, absurd, reactionary, borderline fascist. Eliot was puritanical about sex, looked down his Brahmin nose at people not of his class (see the Sweeney poems) and couldn't abide Jews.    

When I taught a course called "History of Poetry in English," which I did for many years, I would skip from the undeniably great poets of the World War I generation (Brooke, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Thomas, Owen, Graves, Hardy) right to Yeats and Frost, leaving Eliot in the deep lurch, possibly to the consternation of my more sophisticated students.

So it gives me great pleasure to say that I've finally found a poem by the old pretender that tickles me. It celebrates his second wife, whom he married in 1957 when he was sixty-eight and she was thirty, and remained unpublished until it just now appeared in the second volume of the new Johns Hopkins edition. It's not exactly juicy, but it seems to be honest and forthright:

I love a tall girl.

When we lie in bed

She on her back and I stretched upon her,

And our middle parts are busy with each other,

My toes play with her toes and my tongue with her tongue,

And all the parts are happy.

Because she is a tall girl.

To me, this brief lyric is worth forty Quartets.

Althea Goss Pearlman (1939-2016)

Althea Goss Pearlman, 76, of Boulder, died February 10, 2016 at AltaVita Memory Care Centre in Longmont where she had resided for the last two and a half years.  

 
Althea was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1939 to Daniel Goss and Anne Krull Goss, both teachers of mathematics. She was raised in Utica, New York and graduated as valedictorian from Utica Free Academy in 1956. She held degrees in mathematics from Cornell University (where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa) and Harvard University. She married Elihu Hessel Pearlman, whom she had met in a first-semester chemistry class, in June, 1960.

  
Althea had many interests but her life revolved around her two passions: teaching and family. Althea taught mathematics at Ithaca High School in Ithaca, New York, at Warren Junior High School and Newton South High School in Newton, Massachusetts, at the City College, CUNY, in New York City, at Platt Junior High School in Boulder and, for twenty years, at Boulder High School. In 1991-92, she was an Einstein Congressional Fellow in Washington, D.C, serving as an advisor to the House of Representatives on mathematics teaching. She also spent four years as a Clinical Professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she acted as a mentor and coach to prospective teachers. For Althea, teaching was not a job or a profession, but a calling. She was an artist whose medium was chalk and blackboard. She accumulated a wall full of teaching awards, including, most notably, the Presidential Award for the Teaching of Science and Mathematics (1987), but was most gratified not by certificates but by appreciative letters from students whose lives she had influenced.  

Althea was an excellent and loving wife, mother, and grandmother. She is survived by her husband, with whom she enjoyed a deep, spirited, and ever-evolving love for more than half a century, by her children Nathaniel, Benjamin and Eve, by their spouses Connie Chang, Kyla Holcomb Pearlman, and Jonathan Soglin, by her seven grandchildren: Talia and Oliver Soglin of Alameda, California, Ella and Lola Pearlman-Chang of Washington DC, Luke, Caleb and Asher Pearlman of Boulder; and by her sister Paula Goss Gombas and husband Allen Gombas of Lyman, New Hampshire. Althea's sister Phyllis Goss Murray died in 1998.

   
Althea's ashes will be buried in the family cemetery in West Bradford, Vermont.  A memorial event in her honor will take place in the auditorium of Casey Middle School, 1401 High Street, on Saturday, March 5, at 3:00 P. M.

The family would like to thank the skilled and sympathetic caregivers at AltaVita and at New Century Hospice who made Althea's last years as comfortable as possible.

Should anyone wish to make a gift in Althea's honor, the family recommends the Althea Pearlman Memorial Fund at Boulder High School. Checks should be made out to Treasurer, Boulder High School (at 1604 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80302) and designated "Pearlman Memorial." A scholarship will be awarded annually to an outstanding student of mathematics. 

More New Orleans Dialogue

At a restaurant at the corner of Jena and Freret, the over-tattooed waitress, acknowledging our appreciation of the greens, fennel and kumquat salad, said, memorably, "People do not understand the beauty of the kumquat."  An excellent instance of found poetry. And all the more brilliant in context, because I myself once asserted that "kumquat" is the most obscene-sounding word in the English language. 

New Orleans Streetcar 0verheard Conversation.

Cheerful, lively 70ish woman:  "I was alone for thirty years. I didn't even have a date. He (man in a Mardi Gras green bowler hat) grew up in a French-speaking family in Rhode Island,  We shacked up for a couple of years. Then he wanted to get married. At our age it's all about finances, so I said, why not?  He's funny. He's very good to me. He likes to do things. We live six months of the year in Arizona and six months in Alaska, fifty miles south of Fairbanks. There's good fishing. We're just here for a couple of days. We're going on a cruise in the Caribbean. Now we're on our way to find a restaurant that has the best hamburger in the entire south, he says."