Week One!

Seaux much went down at Tulane last week and over the weekend! On Friday, we officially moved in the largest freshman class that Tulane has ever seen and they've hit the ground running this week in their classes. I always love the excitement you see on campus in the first week of school.

Lots went down last week during Explore, Greenie Camp, Move in Day, etc. I'll take you on a photo journey. Let's go!

Yes, I am biased. but I think Greenie Camp is the best of the best of the pre-move in day activities. Where else can you eat breakfast at the President's home and then hatch baby alligators the same day?

And top it all off with a great dinner at Commander's Palace? Here is the GC staff and Orientation Coordinators 

With two of my favorite New Orleans first year students, Bri and Jeremy 

Here is the Hollywood South NOLA track in Jackson Square. 

Here's the Lagniappe track led by none other than TulaneOwen

Hollywood South @ Second Line Stages, where American Horror Story and Django Unchained were filmed. 

And then it was move in day! I moved myself in. 

Here I am with a few of my Los Angeles first year students. 

And here is Team Admission helping our students move in

Some of the Sig Ep guys helping move. 

Here I am with Smita, the Assistant VP of Student Life. We got to co-MC the Welcome to the Wave event. It was the first time the class of 2020 would all be in the same place together as a class. It was awesome getting to be the hype man! 

From there, things just kept rolling. I spent the day Sunday around an hour west of New Orleans in Denham Springs. You probably have heard all about the historic flooding that affected parts of Louisiana this month. There is a lot of work to be done to get the 40,000 displaced families back on track; believe it or not, this is the worst US disaster since Superstorm Sandy. Across the board, Tulane's been doing some work to help people get back on their feet. Yesterday, Tulane got ranked the #1 school in America for students involved in community service, so when I headed out to help gut flooded homes in Denham Springs, I wasn't surprised to meet a group of 15 students from the Kappa Sig chapter at Tulane assisting a family with their demolition work. The group I went with was filled with Tulane medical school students there to lend a hand; we went up with GoodWood NOLA, founded by Mike Dalle, one of my Tulane fraternity brothers.

If you are here in NOLA and want to help, there are many ways to get involved but the two best things you can do are monetary donations or heading out there to help gut some homes. The Tulane link can help connect you.

Tulane Kappa Sig

Here is our GoodWood NOLA group

Gutting

Cleanin' up 

Reminded me a lot of post Katrina NOLA

But people are in good spirits, despite the food. Here is Penny and her husband Keith, who despite losing everything in the flood, were kind, happy and welcoming. We spent the day gutting their home and salvaging what we could. 

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Int'l Essayists: Colin Hosten - Home and Back Again, with V.S. Naipaul

Home and Back Again: The Immigrant Perspective

A Conversation with V.S. Naipaul

It seems deceptively trivial for essays by and about non-American writers to be anchored by themes of immigration, home, and belonging. We may not be from here, but here, especially as it might be similar to or different from there, still consumes us. To be fair, though, it’s not just us: the majority of our readers in the U.S. are, after all, American. The idea of belonging, what it means to have a place to call one’s own, is one that transcends nationality and ethnicity. We all know there’s no place like home. And perhaps that is why we turn to the non-American writer time and again to help us explore such themes in literature. Immigrants tend to have a particular eye and sensibility for parsing the vicissitudes of place. We often live in two places at once: the place where we exist physically, and the one we conjure in our mind’s eye whenever someone asks, “No, where are you from?” which itself may not be real place that exists in the known universe, but rather some contortion of the space between where we live and where we were born. You can observe this dichotomy among every stripe of immigrant in the U.S., even the Canadian, but it is especially poignant when this sense of duality is also reflected in the language. The immigrant speaks English—very articulately, at that—at work, at school, among friends and neighbors, then switches to her native tongue inside the house, with family, on the phone with relatives. A sometimes unconscious code-switch that acts like an instantaneous teleportation device.

When I left Trinidad at eighteen to go to school in Atlanta, I had only a vague, if persistent, sense that I would not be returning “home” anytime soon; yet I still found myself seeking solace in literature that echoed the sounds and expressions of my homeland. English is the official language of Trinidad in the same way that it is an official language of Wales; it’s difficult to follow along if you’re not from there. The particular flavor of the local accent and dialect is even more tricky to capture in writing, which is part of what makes V.S. Naipaul such a singular writer. He is not the only one to tell compelling stories using Trinidadian patois, but for me, he was the first, particularly striking at age eleven, when my literary explorations had thitherto revolved around foreign people living in foreign places, to read the seminal book Miguel Street and recognize in characters such as Bogart, Eddoes, and Titus Hoyt, people I might encounter around the corner.

I returned to Miguel Street many times in college, but found that sense of recognition increasingly complicated by a more sophisticated literary awareness that made it harder to separate Naipaul the writer from Naipaul the person. He has a somewhat complex legacy in Trinidad; he is arguably one of the most accomplished writers of the twentieth century, our lone Nobel laureate in Literature (some lay claim to Derek Walcott, who, though born in St. Lucia, lived in Trinidad, and married a Trinidadian). Yet Naipaul himself has all but disowned Trinidad as the land of his birth, professing fealty instead to England, where he migrated after leaving Trinidad at the age of eighteen, like I did. (We won’t even get into some of his more colorful statements regarding gender here.) They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes; perhaps you shouldn’t read their promotional interviews either. Suffice it to say that reading Naipaul now left me feeling more disconnected. I couldn’t understand how someone who wrote so beautifully could say such ugly things.

I found some of the answers I was looking for in his nonfiction, which I didn’t discover until well into adulthood. The Middle Passage in particular, his essential travelogue about Trinidad and the West Indies, reminded me of a series of essays I wrote in graduate school about my own ambivalence about where I’m from. The first essay in that series, called “Homeland,” begins with the line, “I don’t think I can ever go home again,” and charts my ongoing attempt to reconcile my existence as a citizen who feels more at home in another country. One of the first people Naipaul introduces in The Middle Passage is a man named Mr. Mackay, who laments, “You can’t blame some people for not wanting to call themselves West Indians.” Perhaps, in this regard, I could find some common ground with Naipaul after all. Trinidad is a unique and beautiful island, perched three miles off the coast of Venezuela at the southern tip of the West Indian archipelago. The country is rich in diverse culture, food, music, festivals. The beaches admittedly aren’t the best in the Caribbean, but they’re still magnificent, and its location so close to the mainland (besides propping up the oil and natural gas industry) creates a vibrant set of flora and fauna that sustains a small but growing ecotourism business. Locals joke that God must live somewhere on the island for it to be so charmed. I don’t know about God, but certainly many of his followers do, which in part made it a hostile place to grow up as a gay man. Partly because of its colonial history, partly because of its religiously conservative culture, and partly because it is still figuring itself out as a relatively young republic—the end result is that I fled the island and made a new home for myself in Connecticut, where I can be married to the man I love without fear of legal or other reprisal.

That’s my rationale, anyway—what about Naipaul? How does he account for the severity of the statements he has made and written about the island of his birth? In The Middle Passage, Naipaul has captured some of the finer notes of the angst, anguish, and ambivalence almost every immigrant experiences at some point in trying to reconcile the old country with the new, so why don’t we just ask him, and let him answer in his own words:

CH: You use an epigraph in The Middle Passage from James Anthony Froude, who writes, “There are no people [in the West Indies] in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own.” Do you agree with some of your critics that you have been unnecessarily harsh in your depiction of the West Indies?

VSN: Nothing was created in the British West Indies, no civilization as in Spanish America, no great revolution as in Haiti or the American colonies. There were only plantations, prosperity, decline, neglect: the size of the islands called for nothing else.

CH: But is that all there is to it? Is there any historical context can help us understand the present?

VSN: How can the history of this West Indian futility be written? What tone shall the historian adopt? Shall he be as academic as Sir Alan Burns, … setting West Indian brutality in the context of European brutality? … The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation, and nothing was created in the West Indies.

CH: You were created in the West Indies, in Trinidad. Can you find nothing in Trinidad’s history worth exploring?

VSN: Outside the Royal Victoria Institute in Port of Spain an anchor, still in good condition, stands embedded in concrete, and a sign says this might be the anchor Columbus lost during his rough passage into the Gulf of Paria. So much, one might say, for the history of Trinidad for nearly three hundred years after its discovery…. In Trinidad society never hardened around the institution of slavery as it had done in the other West Indian islands; there was no memory of bitterly suppressed revolts.

CH: You’re referring to the fact that Trinidad was colonized by the British shortly before they ended the slave trade, which accounts for the influx of “immigrant” workers from India, China, and the Middle East.

VSN: In the immigrant society, memories growing dim, there was no guiding taste. As you rose you evolved your own standards, and they were usually those of modernity.

CH: Modernity?

VSN: Trinidad considers itself, and is acknowledged by the other West Indian territories to be, modern. It has night clubs, restaurants, air conditioned bars, supermarkets, soda fountains, drive-in cinemas, and a drive-in bank. But modernity in Trinidad means a little more. It means constant alertness, a willingness to change, a readiness to accept anything which films, magazines, and comic strips appear to indicate as American…. To be modern is to ignore local products and to use those advertised in American magazines. The excellent coffee which is grown in Trinidad is used only by the very poor and a few middle-class English expatriates. Everyone else drinks Nescafe or Maxwell House or Chase and Sanborn, which is more expensive but is advertised in magazines and therefore acceptable.

CH: Does this, then, create a double standard? You are admonished for criticizing local culture, yet locals flock to foreign products whenever they can?

VSN: For a long time in Trinidad there has been a campaign against poems about daffodils—daffodils in particular—because daffodils are not flowers Trinidad schoolchildren know…. To the Trinidadian mind, however, no absurdity attaches to the presence of being American in Trinidad; and while much energy has been spent in the campaign against Wordsworth, no one has spoken out against the fantasy which Trinidadians live out every day of their lives.

CH: Which fantasy is that?

VSN: The Negro in the New World was, until recently, unwilling to look at his past. It seemed to him natural that he should be in the West Indies, that he should speak French or English or Dutch, dress in the European manner or in adaptation of it, and share the European’s religion and food. Travel-writers who didn’t know better spoke of him as a “native,” and he accepted this…. Africa was forgotten…. This was the greatest damage done to the Negro by slavery. It taught him self-contempt. It set him the ideals of white civilization and made him despise every other…. Twenty million Africans made the middle passage, and scarcely an African name remains in the New World…

“The creole slaves,” says a writer of 1805, “looked upon the newly imported Africans with scorn, and sustained in their turn that of the mulattoes, whose complexions were browner; while all were kept at a distance from the intercourse of the whites.”

CH: Should Trinidadians examine their own prejudices before becoming self-righteous about yours?

VSN: Grenada, immemorially, has been as funny a word in Trinidad as Wigan is in England…. The attitudes to immigrants are the same the world over—the stories about West Indians in England (“twenty-four to a room”) are exactly matched by the stories about Grenadians and others in Trinidad. 

Modernity in Trinidad, then, turns out to be the extreme susceptibility of people who are unsure of themselves and, having no taste or style of their own, are eager for instruction.

CH: This is not endemic to Trinidad or the West Indies, is it?

VSN: West Indians are English-speaking and when confronted with the foreigner display the language arrogance of all English-speaking people.

Naipaul’s responses bear the characteristic cleverness and authority of someone who sees himself as rational and impartial. His writing is self-aware, precise, allowing the readers to infuse their own judgments, humor, irony. He is above the moral whims of other human beings. Or is he?

CH: You’ve written than on your return to the island in 1960, as soon as the ship docked at the quay, you began to feel an “old fear” rise up.

VSN: I was distressed, not so much by the familiarity, as by the feeling of continuation. The years I had spent abroad fell away and I could not be sure which was the reality in my life: the first eighteen years in Trinidad or the later years in England.

CH: What was so distressing? What were you afraid of?

VSN: I had never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to…. I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical. The only professions were those of law and medicine, because there was no need for any other; and the most successful people were commission agents, bank managers, and members of the distributive trades. Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes.

CH: And you, the writer, were not considered a hero…

VSN: Such skills were not required by a society which produced nothing, never had to prove its worth, and was never called upon to be efficient. And such people had to be cut down to size or, to use the Trinidadian expression, be made to “boil down.” Generosity—the admiration of equal for equal—was therefore unknown; it was a quality I knew only from books and found only in England.

CH: The island enjoys a burgeoning literary scene today—do you think there is newfound space and regard for writing as a vocation?

VSN: Living in a borrowed culture, the West Indian, more than most, needs writers to tell him who he is and where he stands. Here the West Indian writers have failed. Most have so far only reflected and flattered the prejudices of their race or colour groups…. To the initiated, one whole side of West Indian writing has little to do with literature, and much to do with the race war.

CH: Again, this seems harsh. Aren’t you implicating yourself as a writer with that indictment?

VSN: No writer can be blamed for reflecting his society. If the West Indian writer is to be blamed, it is because, by accepting and promoting the unimpressive race-and-colour values of his group, he has not only failed to diagnose the sickness of his society but has aggravated it.

CH: You’ve written extensively about race relations in Trinidad, indicating that you identify more with your Indian ancestors than with the island of your birth. How much did that factor in to you wanting to leave?

VSN: We were of various races, religious, sets, and cliques; and we had somehow found ourselves on the same small island. Nothing bound us together except this common residence. There was no nationalist feeling; there could be none. There was no profound anti-imperialist feeling; indeed, it was only our Britishness, our belonging to the British Empire, which gave us any identity.

CH: Is that why so many Trinidadians flocked to England in the 1950s and ’60s?

VSN: Pursuing the Christian-Hellenic tradition, the West Indian… never seriously doubted the validity of the prejudices of the culture to which he aspired. In the French territories he aimed at Frenchness, in the Dutch territories at Dutchness; in the English territories he aimed at simple whiteness and modernity, Englishness being impossible.

CH: Yet you identify as English now…

VSN: With the emphasis on America, English things are regarded as old-fashioned and provincial.

CH: Well, it can come off a little stodgy compared to the warm, tropical climate in Trinidad…

VSN: Columbus… had discovered, he wrote Ferdinand and Isabella, the approaches of the terrestrial paradise.

CH: And what did you discover, on your return trip in 1960?

VSN: It seemed to me that I was seeing the landscape for the first time. I had hated the sun and the unchanging seasons. I had believed that the foliage had no variety and could never understand how the world “tropical” held romance for so many. Now I was taken by the common coconut tree, the cliché of the Caribbean…. I had never liked the sugarcane fields. Flat, treeless, and hot, they stood for everything I had hated about the tropics and the West Indies… Now, in the uneven land of Central and South Trinidad, I saw that even sugar cane could be beautiful.

His descriptions cut to the heart of a longing I have not quite been able to express since leaving my homeland. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone…

CH: Absence, it seems, can make the heart grow fonder…

VSN: Everyone has to learn to see the West Indies tropics for himself.

CH: Could you ever go back, now that you’ve learned to see it for yourself?

VSN: Trinidad was and remains a materialist immigrant society, continually growing and changing, never settling into any pattern, always retaining the atmosphere of a history of enduring brutality, in the absence of a history; yet not an expanding society but a colonial society, ruled autocratically if benevolently, with the further limitations of its small size and remoteness. All this has combined to give its special character, its ebullience and irresponsibility. And more: a tolerance which is more than tolerance: an indifference to virtue as well as vice. The Land of the Calypso is not a copywriter’s phrase…. If curiosity is a characteristic of the cosmopolitan, the cosmopolitanism on which Trinidad prides itself is fraudulent.

CH: You don’t believe the island has made any genuine progress?

VSN: This sophisticated play-acting is part of that Trinidad taste for fantasy, which finds its full bacchanalian expression on the two days of Carnival.

CH: In Carnival, at least, there is a legitimate claim to a festival that sets a world standard?

VSN: It is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. The calypso is a purely local form. No song composed outside of Trinidad is a calypso. The calypso deals with local incidents, local attitudes, and it does so in a local language. The pure calypso, the best calypso, is incomprehensible to the outsider. Wit and verbal conceits are fundamental; without them no song, however good the music, however well sung, can be judged a calypso. A hundred foolish travel-writers and a hundred “calypsonians” in all parts of the world have debased the form, which is now generally dismissed abroad as nothing more than a catchy tune with a primitive jingle in broken English… For this bastardization Trinidadians are as much to blame as anyone. Just as they take pleasure in their American modernity, so they take pleasure in living up to the ideals of the tourist brochure. They know that they are presented to the world as the land of calypso and steel band. They are determined that the world shall not be disappointed; and their talent for self-caricature is profound. The Americans expect native costumes and native dances; Trinidad will discover both. Few words are used more frequently in Trinidad than “culture.” Culture is spoken of as something quite separate from day-to-day existence… It is like a special native dish, something like a callaloo. Culture is a dance—not the dance that people do when more than three of them get together—but the one put on in native costume on stage…. Culture is, in short, a night-club turn. And nothing pleases Trinidadians so much as to see their culture being applauded by white American tourists in night-clubs.

I have to admit that some of this “culture” played a part in my leaving the island, specifically the culture of homophobia. This is where I think I can begin to understand Naipaul’s stoic stance, even as I sympathize with the reactive indignation of my fellow countrymen.

CH: You’ve written about “the need to escape” Trinidad, something I felt keenly as a gay teenager. Whenever I get nostalgic—about the food, the weather, the landscape, my family—I remember that I would not be able to live my life as a married, gay man there. It can be at once frustrating and heartbreaking, feeling that you can never really go home.

VSN: There is no set way in Trinidad of doing anything. Every house can be a folly. There is no set way of dressing or cooking or entertaining. Everyone can live with whoever he can get wherever he can afford. Ostracism is meaningless; the sanctions of any clique can be ignored. It is in this way, and not in the way of the travel brochure, that the Trinidadian is a cosmopolitan. He is adaptable; he is cynical; having no rigid social conventions of his own, he is amused by the conventions of others. He is a natural anarchist… If the Trinidadian has no standards of morality he is without the greater corruption of sanctimoniousness, and can never make pleas for intolerance in the name of piety…. Everything that makes the Trinidadian an unreliable, exploitable citizen makes him a quick, civilized person whose values are always human ones, whose standards are only those of wit and style.

CH: I will say I’ve seen great strides toward more inclusiveness in the past twenty years. I think legislative progress will continue to be slow and labored, but general attitudes have become much more accepting and understanding of difference.

VSN: Change must come from the top. Capital punishment and corporal punishment, incitements to brutality, must be abolished. The civil service must be rejuvenated…. The need to be efficient will change some of these attitudes. An efficient civil service is in some ways a considerate civil service.

I feel as though I understand the man on a more nuanced level now. Does his prose sting a little to those who may not want to reflect on its meaning? Sure. Is the sting of him being right, at least on some level, even more discomfiting? Absolutely.

CH: Thank you. You get your share of flak for being outspoken against Trinidad, yet there are so many citizens like you, like me, who have left the island with no intent to return. We live, as immigrants tend to, a dual life, our minds existing in a place where our feet were not born, so that we sometimes feel unanchored, unsure of even whether the life we live now exists in the same universe as the one we left behind.

VSN: Port of Spain is the noisiest city in the world. Yet it is forbidden to talk…. In a private home as soon as anyone starts to talk the radio is turned on. It must be loud, loud. If there are more than three, dancing will begin. Sweat-sweat-dance-dance-sweat. Loud, loud, louder. If the radio isn’t loud enough, a passing steel band will be invited in. Jump-jump-sweat-sweat-jump…. In the street people conduct conversations at a range of twenty yards or more; and even when they are close to you their voices have a vibrating-fork edge. You will realize this only after you have left Trinidad: the voices in British Guiana will sound unnaturally low, and for the first day or so whenever anyone talks to you, you will lean forward conspiratorially, for what is being whispered is, you feel, very secret. In the meantime, dance, dance, shout above the shuffle. If you are silent the noise will rise to a roar about you. You cannot shout loud enough. Your words seem to be issuing from behind you. You have been here only an hour, but you feel exhausted. Your head is bursting. It is only eleven; the party is just warming up. You are being rude, but you must go. 

You drive up the new Lady Young Road, and the diminishing noise makes it seem cooler. You get to the top and look out at the city glittering below you, amber and exploding blue on black, the ships in the harbour in the background, the orange flames issuing from the oil derricks far out in the Gulf of Paria. For a moment it is silent. Then, above the crickets, whose stridulation you hadn’t noticed, you begin to hear the city: the dogs, the steel bands…. All through the night the dogs will go on, in a thousand inextricably snarled barking relays, rising and falling, from street to street and back again, from one end of the city to another. And you will wonder how you stood it for eighteen years, and whether it was always like this.

Colin Hosten is an expatriate writer, because that sounds fancier than immigrant. His work has appeared most recently in The Essay Review, OUT Magazine, and Spry Literary Journal. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, he currently lives with his husband in Connecticut, where he is a children’s book editor and a lecturer in the undergraduate writing program at Fairfield University. See more at colinhosten.com. Find him on Twitter @colinhosten.

Craig Reinbold is a regular contributor to Essay Daily and is curating this Int'l Essayists column. He would love any suggestions, thoughts, comments: @craigreinbold @essayingdaily

Other pieces in this series:

David Carlin on the Essay big and small (in lieu of nametags and a party)

Aurvi Sharma on the Body Patchwork, the Text as the Body / the Body as the Text in Meatless Days & the Kamasutra

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Morality

Clearly, justice must be the same for all, but is this not true also of morality? Yet for some people, under certain circumstances, this is hardly the case. There exist certain persons by whom morality can be uncontestedly flouted.

Profession has much to do with it. One of the callings where truthfulness, i.e., morality, is cheerfully trampled on, is, of course, advertising. Which, even more than social intercourse, elicits unconditional superlatives. The only thing that could achieve honesty in much advertising would be consumer skepticism among a vast majority of people. Too bad that the human brain does not come with the motto “Caveat emptor” imprinted upon it.

Scarcely behind advertising in lack of morality, i.e., truthfulness or honesty, is politics, where that virtue is practiced with notable parsimony. Or, in the case of someone like Donald Trump, where, it seems to me, its cousin amorality thrives from bottom to top, by which I mean his hair, its color quite possibly trumpery. I consider its lack of morality equal to that of a codpiece for Elizabethan trousers, or a microphone for toady’s pop singers.

But, to be sure, not only Trump’s blondness may infringe on morality; a passel of others of his shenanigans are far guiltier, as are those of  a good many politicians. Most smelling of hypocrisy is politicians’ abuse of religion. Hardly one who does not claim God to go arm in arm with him, backed up by little more than Sunday churchgoing. Christianity provides a standard moral masquerade. Not that I dispute the zeal of born-again Christians and Tea Partiers, but I wonder whether it is not, like taking up arms against the government, self-righteousness or self-interest: a facile grab for power among the socially and morally underprivileged. Holier than thou is usually less than holy.

This is not to say that genuine religiosity among politicos is out of the question; there must, after all, be a needle in some haystack. I just wish it weren’t in numerous cases so ostentatious and perfunctory, a set of down-at-heal cliches.

But the presumable apogee of immorality thrives among lawyers. The criminal lawyers  at any rate seem at the very least amoral by profession. If you attend a play in which the word “lawyer” is so much as mentioned, you are assured of  a gust of audience laughter. The only thing comparable is when one character, after a lengthy tirade by another, responds with “No shit?” But even that is becoming less sure-fire than “lawyer.”

True immorality does invade seemingly unlikely places such as sports.  Although much reprehended and steadily contested, doping will, I suspect, never be wholly uprooted. But there are other ways of cheating as well, in a field you were not expecting it. After all, is not sport, going all the way back to ancient Greece, supposed to be a noble, unblemished pursuit of excellence, implied by the very word “sportsmanlike”?

                                                                                                                                                        Based on the assumption of mens sana in corpore sano, our athletes are meant to be looked up to not only on the playing fields, in stadiums, swimming pools, ball parks, arenas and wherever else professional sports are practiced, but even in the private lives of these glorified and spectacularly remunerated winners, enjoying adulation from millions of fans. Unfortunately, the mens sana is harder to come by than the  corpus sanus. In their private lives, we get everything from wife beaters to victims of fabricated muggings near the 2016 Rio Olympics. In Ryan Lochte’s apology even the recurrent term “overexaggerated” for lying is a moral fiasco.

I will skip over such heroes of our times as rock stars, of whose moral grandeur Jimi Hendrix offered as sole example their having taught countless groupies how to give better head. But what about actors then, the nearest approximation to rock stars? Are they not likely to carry the pretense of their finest roles over into their daily lives? There has of course been the notion that big stars, like their producers, enjoy the privilege of the casting couch, whereby pretty women get their roles, especially in the movies, on their performance on that piece of furniture rather than on screen or stage. This, by the way, is a histrionic area in which nowadays handsome young men seem to have rather taken over in defiance of the phrase “ladies first.” In any case, in our more permissive era, any type of sex advancing one’s status is considered perfectly comme il faut.

Certainly sleeping with the director has become pretty much established, almost de rigueur, which reminds me of the case of a famous British actress telling me that she does not figure in the memoirs of a famous director with whom she would not go to bed, whereas another, equally famous but also more willing actress prominently does.

All of which brings me to my profession: what about morality in critics? I have been praised by an academic as the one critic who writes exactly what he thinks, which I would consider a minimal requirement for the job, but given what most of today’s reviewers are like, may indeed be a distinction. These reviewers—they scarcely rate the honorific critic—let pass altogether too much twaddle, it hardly matters whether out of fear of losing their jobs or out of authentic benightedness  and genuine poor taste.

In his biography of Pauline Kael, Brian Kellow quotes her as saying about film criticism, “You don’t have to know what John Simon does to be the best at it,” by which criterion she certainly qualifies as one of the best. I maintain that no kind of ignorance is bliss in criticism, and that there less is definitely not more. What is most often held against me, along with alleged homophobia and undeniable taste for good looks in performers is, I’m afraid wit, which admittedly hurts the recipient but regales the discriminating reader.

In his interesting anthology “The Critics Say . . .”  Matt Windman quotes Elisabeth Vincentelli (formerly of the Post, now of the Times) about me: “He’s such a great stylist and writer, but his meanness is just too much. It was delicious to read, but sometimes it got in the way of his critical acumen and that kind of spoiled the pleasure in reading him. I didn’t feel like there was any generosity behind it. He often wrote about very real issues that nobody else would touch—the stuff that’s very tricky to deal with—but he wrote about it with such a lack of empathy.’

Well, I wouldn’t trade my lack of empathy for all the king’s horses and all the prevalent critical horseshit. I take comfort from the good things Woody Allen says about me in the new, excellent biography, “Woody,” by David Evanier. In spite of my rather sharp criticism of some of his movies , he thinks that “Simon’s film criticism would endure more than that of any other critic.” And in my copy of the book he wrote “To John Simon—Thank you for keeping me and all of us in movies and theatre honest, Woody Allen.”

 And so, I think, the truly moral critic can adapt Falstaff’s “I am not only witty in myself, but also the cause that wit is in other men” as “I am no only honest in myself, but also the cause that honesty is in other men.” And women, too—ask my friend Betty Buckley, or, were she alive today, Madeline Kahn, who had her breasts diminished because of something I wrote about them.

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B2 Certification/ CAE: Letter of Complaint Sample 2016

Submitted by Miriam Ortega 

# of words: 190

Dear Sir/ Madam

I am writing to complain about a two week holiday to Wales that I booked for me and my family through your company (booking reference G29576).  

According to your brouchure, the cottage where we stayed was supposed to be "3-star accommodation with only 5 minutes acces walk to a sandy beach". Unfortunately, this was not the case, not only was the beach 30 km far from our accommodation, but it was also dirty and full of stones, which made our stay there quite uncomfortable.

With regard to the house equipment, we were dissatisfied too. There was not hot water and the light from the garden did not work at all, so we could not enjoy it at nights.

I demand some kind of compensation from your company, as you did not deliver what you promised. I believe a discount for our next trip or a 50% refund would be totally fair in this situation.

I also recommend that you solve the hot water and electricity problem before the next group of tourists arrive. Is either that or making the description from location and facilities a lot more realistic.

Yours faithfully,

(Full name)

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CPE Exam RESTAURENT REVIEW: Kaidi Kitchen (Mylapore)

Submitted by Monika Agarwal

# of words: 280

TASK : 

Your local newspaper is asking its readers to write a review of a restaurant where you have eaten recently and would recommend to others.

Write your review in 280-320 words

CPE Exam 

RESTAURENT REVIEW: Kaidi Kitchen (Mylapore)

‘Kaidi Kitchen’ is a restaurant in the centre of Mylapore city. It is one of my favourite places to enjoy a meal because of its original decoration, a prison cell, and the fact that it attracts a young, international, artistry and interesting crowd as well.  

As you enter the venue you are welcomed by a very attentive staff of waiters, who are dressed up as jailors. They will take you to the table you are assigned to and tell you all about the prison´s menu. But if you are fearing you will get mouldy bread and a piece of old chewy cheese to eat, you are totally wrong. This has to be the first jail where prisoners eat like kings. 

The menu offers a wide variety of mouth-watering starters. I had the cheese fondue accompanied by nachos, while my parents had Greek cottage cheese accompanied by crispy chilli baby corn. They were literally to die for. The main course was India inspired and consisted of Schezwan noodles and vegetable Manchurian, which was also delicious. It all was followed by baked Rasgulla for dessert.

All the products were fresh and the dishes had the taste of home-made food. The chefs take great care in selecting the best seasonal ingredients. The restaurant also provides a large selection of the best cocktails in town, which I found pricy but worth paying for.

Despite the high price of the food I would definitely recommend this restaurant. I found out that the charming waiters are also trained actors, so that and the quality of the food, make the place doble special. I no-doubt advise everyone to go to Kaidi kitchen.

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Sexual Identities

If you are applying to Tulane this fall, you might have noticed a new question has been added to the application this week. It's a totally optional question, but one that I am very proud is now a part of the application process. The question is about sexual identity--Tulane applicants are now able to indicate whether they affiliate as bisexual, gay, lesbian, pansexual, queer or questioning. A couple of things I want to note about this:

The question is totally optional. Whether you affiliate as one of the categories or as straight, it is completely and totally optional if you'd like to answer the question.

The question is completely confidential. The students who chose to disclose this information will receive information only from our Office of Gender and Sexual Diversity if they enroll at Tulane.

Your answer will not be a part of the admission decision. No matter what you select, it won't work against you in any form in the application process. I know, that goes without saying, but wanted to make sure that was clear.

This is something that our new Vice President of Enrollment, Satya Dattagupta, is very much in support of. "Supporting students is my priority, " Satya said. "The question is optional. Answers will be kept private and secure and will not be used in the admissions selection process or for a discriminatory purpose.  They will be used to connect incoming students with resources and communities on Tulane's campus should they seek it."

Adding this question is in line with Tulane's mission to be a compassionate, inclusive and progressive institution. It also lines up with some of the new diversity initiatives that we have begun to incorporate in the office. We've been working with our colleague Red Tremmel in the OGSD and both the Office of Admission and the Office of Multicultural Affairs, which houses ODSD, are excited to have this option on our application.

Any questions, send them my way!

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F.A.Q: CPE Exam Idioms and Phrasal Verbs

Hello

My name is anthony and I am an avid student.
I am now getting ready for the CPE in December, nonetheless I must say that I am terrible at adv idioms and phrasal verbs (I  mean the advanced one often required in the exam), do you have any suggestion of articles, magazines or even books so that i can get the message across easily ?

Regards =D
Anthony


CPEsamplewritings:

Hello Anthony. There are a couple of posts about idioms, sayings and phrasal verbs in the blog. Let me just share the links with you:

Idioms from A to Z
http://cpesamplewritings.blogspot.de/p/idioms-from-to-z.html

Idioms with Animals

http://cpesamplewritings.blogspot.de/p/idioms-with-animals.html






Phrasal Verbs

http://cpesamplewritings.blogspot.de/p/phrasal-verbs.html


I hope it helps and thanks for writing and following the blog.

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James M. Chesbro on Arrivals and Invitations

Inescapable Booming: On Arrivals and Invitations

The mind, the mind—it’s probably not what first comes to mind when one thinks about the personal essay, but it’s certainly on the mind of essayists who write about it.

-Carl H. Klaus

Sam lived across the street from our first house. His arrival in my imagination this morning, as I woke before the three children to write, surprised me, since we moved a few years ago and now live across the street from woods. For some reason, when I was trying to decide what to write about, my eyes wanted to find him leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette. I was debating whether to begin something new or go back to an essay I started about my father when I lived in our old house, where, between sentences, my eyes often rested on Sam washing the school bus he drove, or edging his lawn, or standing under his portico wearing black slippers, gray sweatpants, and an undershirt, exhaling smoke. I’m so often going back to drafts of material about my deceased father that perhaps this morning’s unexpected delivery of memories of my former neighbor constitutes the kind of material most worthy of essaying, as it elevates the chances for revelations. Or, maybe Sam sprouted to the surface of my mind like a fallen acorn that bursts in the earth after so much rain because I had recently read Steven Church’s essay “It Begins with a Knock” from his collection Ultrasonic, where he recounted the times he “got a true window into” the lives of his elderly neighbor, Myrtle, and her boy friend, Larry, and sought to “figure out how to see myself again in the reflection.” Like Myrtle, Sam was in his seventies. And if I wanted to ruminate from a fresh perspective, how much differently must my life have looked for Sam when he peered out his windows into mine. We were different races, different generations, and came from different parts of the country. I sought periods of quiet to write when my babies and toddler slept, while Sam was alone most of the time. Perhaps my mind wanted to locate Sam again because essayists need to populate the landscape of reflection with people. Insights are abstractions, after all, and they arrive for the reader through the engaging concrete forms of characters, outfitted in the recognizable attire of lived experience.

Sam invited me into his home once. He met me in the street, under the motionless oak tree branches in front of his house, like he had done many times, except I could tell something was wrong by the hurried way he spoke. “You know any carpenters? Do you have a handyman I could call?”

“I don’t really have one, no.” I said. “Why? What’s up?”

Sam turned and waved me in the direction of his front door. “Let me show you,” he said.

I wiped my feet on the welcome mat and gazed briefly up the stairs that bisected the two main rooms. The smell of smoke lingered in the rugs, couches, and cloth-covered chairs. The wood floorboards creaked under our footfalls through the small dining room where stacked mail and newspapers sat on a table next to two candleholders.

“Here’s where they tried to get in,” he said when we reached the kitchen. “Busted right through the doorjamb.”

Earlier in the day, Sam said, our neighbor, Janice, saw two men walking in the Rooster River, which wasn’t so much a river as a weed-filled creek that wound its way through the neighborhood and under roads. The men must have fled once Sam’s alarm went off. We both stood there, staring at the cracked wood and the broken glass at our feet.

“I gotta get this secured by tonight,” he said. Turning to look at me, with hands on hips he added, “And it’s already getting late.”

I imagined the two men in the creek, hunched over between the cover of tall weeds, stepping around puddles, making plans with deep whispers of intention. After a snowfall, men would bang on the door and offer to clear the steps, sidewalk, and driveway. Hungry for a buck. Their hunger rapping the door, the clank, clank, clank of the knocker reverberating against the doorjamb, through the wood frames of our walls. I never opened the glass storm door at their clanking, the desperation on their faces turning to anger at my shaking head. It was those faces that came to mind when Sam mentioned the men in the creek.

Untrodden stretches of snow delivered a semblance of isolation, even though we lived on just .11 acres of land, with houses on all sides. A calf-high snowfall offered temporary stillness, and the illusion of remoteness, of open landscapes, of privacy and safety—until the rapping at the door. The oldest child found me in the kitchen. “Dad,” was all he said, his face searched mine to make sense of the sudden violent sound. In our house, snow days meant working from home, while children watched cartoons and ate pancakes in fleece pajamas. To others, however, the clanking was a relief, a way out of the driveway and onto plowed roads.

Sam always hired the first knockers. As a retired man in his seventies, whose sons would be my age if they had been alive, he needed help. He drove a school bus. Between shifts, during the pleasant months, he groomed his lawn and the hedges, and planted flowers. He watered and snipped them. He washed his school bus. He wiped each window with glass cleaner. He smoked on his stoop.

Meanwhile, I wrote on the couch in our living room, or at the dining room table, or, before our second child came, in the empty bedroom upstairs, and always with a full view of Sam’s white colonial with black shutters. While writing about my father, who died when I was twenty-four, sometimes, between sentences, I wondered how old Sam’s two sons had been when they passed away, both of them dying on the Fourth of July, in separate years. Sam’s life invited me to consider my own from new perspectives, though I don’t think I thought about that too much when I lived across from him. The clanking at my door was an intrusion for me, and a relief to him. He heard the shouts and cries of our children carrying out our windows, while his children were framed in the silent pictures they displayed. In our old neighborhood, one man set off 4th of July fireworks that rivaled the display presented by the city. Parked cars packed our blocks as families filled the sidewalks, walking to the show carrying lawn chairs. When my son was twenty-two months old, he sat on my knee, looking out his bedroom window, his eyes finding the exploding colors, above the rooftops. I saw Sam across the street, standing in front of his house, his head tilted toward the flashes in the night. For some, of course, holidays are an occasion of grief, rather than celebration. I wonder now how Sam and his wife, Beverly, could endure such an anniversary—the inescapable booming.

As I wrote about my father, searching for ideas, for moments that carry with them the emotional surge worthy of essaying, like the swift current of rain running over tall weeds through the creek after storms, I never considered Sam a potential character for nonfiction prose. And yet here was a man who roamed in many rooms of the human condition. A devoted man who once told me he and his wife slept in separate bedrooms. She liked the air conditioning, and he liked it hot. The more humid, the more he felt like he was back home, in the South, in the heat. “I followed her up here, though,” Sam told me. “She’s my old lady, and I support her.” He drove the school bus every weekday morning, even in the summer. His wife came home around seven p.m., and left for work after him in the morning. I suppose they ate together, before she went out in the evening to visit her mother in the assisted living home. Sam’s wife visited her mother every night. “Like I said,” Sam added after sharing her schedule, “she’s my old lady, and I support her.”

Every day, he walked along the sidewalk inspecting the finely edged lines of his lawn. After he inspected his work, plucked the dead stems from the geranium and watered the ferns, then what? What to do after washing and drying the school bus he drove, after sweeping out the dirt from the aisle left by other people’s children? His wife wouldn’t be home until seven. After he watched the news, did the trimmed shrubs and edged lawn bring some order to the long, lonely hours as he exhaled under his portico, missing the heat of his home town, all those lost years with his sons?

“The essayist attempts to surround a something—a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation—by coming at it from all angles,” writes Phillip Lopate in his introduction to the seminal anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, “wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter.” What I like about reading essays is a humble voice speaking with a sincerity that isn’t socially constructive on the sidewalks of our everyday interactions. How peculiar of Sam’s figure to appear in my imagination, leaning against a tree, across the street in the woods from my current home. I never had the temerity to ask Sam any meaningful questions about his life. The time Sam told me about his sons’s deaths, both occurring on the Fourth of July, in separate years, I told him I was sorry. He told me how many years it had been without them. And I can’t remember his exact response.

But remembering Sam, here, in the exercise of this essay, floods me with a humility I didn’t expect to experience when memories of our interactions began circling in my mind. We had child-locks on every cabinet, drawer, and door handle. Plastic outlet covers protected curious little pointer fingers from electricity. Gates barricaded the crawling, stumbling, diaper-wearing young ones from tumbling down the stairs. Remembering Sam and all those years in his childless fatherhood defuses the interior bemoaning that occurs when I grow tiresome of the children’s needs. Essayists are after an unanticipated thought, a new way of looking at a familiar subject, provoked by the desire to illuminate what it means to be human. We are truth seekers, but we can’t force our way in. For the truth belongs to everyone. That’s why we write for an audience, populating reflections with the scenes we were invited to see.

*

This year James M. Chesbro’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Washington Post, Brain, Child Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, The Collagist, Pilgrim, Zone 3, River Teeth online, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Follow him on Twitter: @Jamie_Chesbro

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David LeGault: Against The Future (As Told By the Compilation Album NOW)

1. Janet “Together Again”

Likely, you are already familiar with the Now That’s What I Call Music! Anthology series: a staple of the world of radio sugar nonsense, a callback to the days of buying albums of singles instead of picking our songs a la carte. Starting in the United Kingdom, the series has sold over 100 million albums, the most successful being Now That’s What I Call Music! 44. In the copy seen above, the first in the American series, Janet Jackson’s name has inexplicably been shortened to, simply, Janet.

2. Backstreet Boys “As Long As You Love Me”

I love the idea of collection: the ways in which meaning accrues once you get enough of something. We find significance in ordering—whether that be alphabetically, chronologically, by height or weight or assigned at random. There’s a joy in completion; every piece or number that cannot be found becomes a higher value for X. Nowhere is this more obvious to me than at my current job at a used book and music store: my assembly of the Now compilations becoming something of an obsession.

3. Fastball “The Way”

The job has been nothing if not a series of collections, of ways I’ve searched for meaning in otherwise meaningless work: I have filled photo albums with pictures and ephemera used as book marks, have filled bookshelves in my home with bizarre movie novelizations. The book of essays I’ve recently completed was narratively predicated upon my collecting of 100 identical copies of an album I had never listened to before. Despite the absurdity of such an undertaking, the amount of time involved (over three years) gave the project a ridiculous amount of weight. When I finally reached my total—when I finally permitted myself to listen to the album—the experience felt spiritual.

4. Harvey Danger “Flagpole Sitta”

What I know is that time and effort imbue a grander sense of meaning or purpose, at least as it comes to art. Timelessness supersedes timeliness.

5. Spice Girls “Say You’ll Be There”

Perhaps that’s what draws me to this new collection: this Tower of Now. Individually, these albums are merely snapshots: an indication of what was popular in the month they were published. Absent from dates it’s hard even to give them the sort of meaning we find in the Best American Series (which, while still gives a snapshot, attaches itself to some historical/cultural context by the very nature of being assembled annually as opposed to Now’s arbitrary release schedule). Only by looking at the transition from Now 1 to 2 to 3 do we understand the shifting of pop sensibilities, only through this arrangement can we find context: a sense of where we’re coming from, a sense of where we’re heading.

6. K-Ci and JoJo “All My Life”

I find myself reading a lot of Think Pieces: opinion pieces that overwhelm my Twitter feed with links from Slate or Salon or their ilk. Perhaps it’s this nightmare of an election, perhaps these links are more easily consumed on my phone when I should be working, but I find that this sort of writing has taken over my reading life. To my detriment.

7. All Saints “Never Ever” (Single Edit)

I am wondering about how Think Pieces function. In essence, they are (at least from a base, mechanical perspective) functioning in the same vein as the Essay: there is an emphasis on developed voice or persona, on thoughtful consideration, on building scene or tension. Does the difference have to do with the conclusions made (or not made), the venue in which they are shared and distributed?

8. Tonic “If You Could Only See”

Despite the disposable nature of the NOW series, NOW 1 holds up surprisingly well, has a sense of timelessness that the other iterations lack. Perhaps it is my own subjectivity and bias, but of the entire album, only “If You Could Only See” does not register. I remember every other song and band, but Tonic could not be immediately placed, seeming almost accidental among this cataloging of late 90’s music: we capture the pure pop scene, the alt-rock world with Radiohead, even the brief swing revival as made by Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and countless other iterations of embarrassingly named daddy bands. Now 1 does miss the late 90’s Latin craze as lead by Ricky Martin, Mark Anthony, et al, and oddly enough, despite hit singles spanning the first three or four years of the series, Ricky Martin does not appear on any of the Now anthologies.

9. Hanson “Mmm Bop”

Is it the predictive nature of the Think Piece that makes it so disposable, is it something unique to its form? Although there are innumerable examples of essays written in past or present-tense, I was hard pressed to find any essays that went as far as to predict future events. The only example I could readily find was Thomas Lynch’s collection The Undertaking, where several essays speak to the way he’d like his death to be, when he’d like it to be. But as these are desires and not true predictions, even this example seems weak. Does the very nature of making a prediction decrease a work’s long-term value: that it’s either proven right or wrong before we move on? Is this the same reason we treat most science and speculative fiction as somehow less literary, of less long-term value?

10. Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Zoot Suit Riot”

Perhaps I’m so consumed with the future and its tense because—in the time between me writing this and you reading it—I am leaving my job of the last five years, moving to Prague where I will be teaching AP English courses to the children of missionaries for the next two years.

11. Imajin “Shorty (You Keep Playing With My Mind)”

My favorite essays come from a place of uncertainty, of questions without clear answers. The lack of certainty causes a dramatic tension, even melodrama in the case of foreboding where our lack of future knowledge equates with danger, with narrative excitement. Predictions—not even certainty but the confidence of it—kills the art and the artifice: it puts it on a different plain of practical knowledge. Something about that wrecks the experience.

12. Brian McKnight “Anytime”

And I come to you now from that place of uncertainty. Within the next two weeks I will be on a plane with my wife and two small children without knowing where we’ll be living, not to mention the language, the city, or basically anyone at all. I will be teaching a course I have never taught with no real preparation. Which is to say that I am looking for answers: demanding resolution even as I try to pack my life into three suitcases, as I leave a job I’ve hated that has still given me a sense of consistency, as I hold onto an earnest belief that place and self are intertwined—that by moving halfway around the world I can perhaps become somebody else.

13. Aqua “Barbie Girl”

Now is indiscriminate in its love: it cares for one-hit wonders as much as the seasoned pop sensations. Perhaps it has to do with the series’ origins overseas, but there is a heavy European influence across the Now spectrum, arguably a stronger influence than your typical top 40 station. It might be my own ignorance to the pop music scene—my musical hipster tendencies or insularity—but I’m amazed at how many of these one hit wonders are still actively touring: Aqua has released an album within the past several years; Lou Bega still has a full touring schedule in Belgium; The Venga Boys still like to party. I like to believe this all points toward our future tense: that because we don’t see or hear of something does not mean that it’s dead, that a quiet future is still a future.

14. Radiohead “Karma Police”

We could write an entire book on the song ordering philosophy of albums (perhaps even more so the mixed tape), but Now can’t be bothered with this conversation. And why should it? Chronology gives us that sense of order and time, alphabetization would be arbitrary but at least intentional. Now does not attempt to open with a hook, put its top single at #3 or close with a big ballad. Now is not constrained in the way typical albums are constrained: there was a period of time where they could release new albums monthly and has never a lacked for material or people willing to buy it. It is pure consumerism.

15. Everclear “I Will Buy You a New Life”

What matters here is how we put our own sense of order on top of it, how the tracks themselves become a way of ordering our minds, our anxieties, our grasps at significance. It is still arbitrary, but as we let the constraints push against us, we begin to whittle out their meaning.

16. Lenny Kravitz “Fly Away”

And what order can we put against the future, how to assemble or constrain that which we do not know?

17. Marcy Playground “Sex & Candy”

Which is to say that my two weeks of notice have been put in, that I tentatively have a flight out of the country set for August 15th. That despite my excitement, I am deeply bothered by the fact that I haven’t yet found a copy of Now 2 to complete the 1-20 run I’ve been attempting to assemble. That collecting matters. That individually these items make little sense, but like gravity their meaning accrues as the items accrue. That looking at the past takes on this same sense of collection and arrangement, that the future has its place, but perhaps that place is not yet here.

*

David LeGault's recent work appears in The Spectacle and Passages North, among other journal and anthologies. He will be living in the Czech Republic for the next two years, where he will start writing a book on the Sedlec Ossuary.

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