Carol Bergman

Julia Angwin, an award winning former Wall Street Journal reporter who now works for the independent news organization ProPublica, signs the flyleaf of her recently published book: “It’s an honor to be caught in the dragnet with you.”

Like several investigative journalists these days, she is concerned for the safety of her sources, many of whom are whistleblowers who may very well lose their jobs if they talk. The safeguards for Federal whistleblowers are nearly non-existent so Ms. Angwin is constantly searching for unorthodox ways to set up meetings. She sends snail letters, buys burner phones, uses secure electronic drop boxes and Duck Duck Go as her search engine.

Snail mail is cumbersome and problematic for a reporter working to deadline. On a recent trip to Washington DC, some sources didn’t answer her burner phone because they didn’t recognize the number. Several appointments fizzled. And this is one of many frustrations for journalists since dragnet data collection and other new technologies have outpaced our understanding of their damaging effects to the free flow of information in our democracy.

And what does this data collection consist of? Everything and nothing. And this is a paradox, of sorts. We release information to the cybersphere but have little knowledge of the day to day lives of many in our neighborhoods, in our country, and elsewhere. How many Indians know about the poor people behind the retainer wall next to the airport in Mumbai? There are 90,000 of them, collecting recyclable garbage from the airport hotels. It took a reporter, Katherine Boo, to expose the corruption and disdain of the Indian government in her Pulitzer Prize winning book: “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” I am just reading it now. I had no idea. I was blind and ignorant of this horror on the other side of the world. So, yes, drag the net and collect data—which costs billions by the way—and then--is it asking too much?-- do something with it for the common good.

Should all writers be concerned? The answer is yes. Should all citizens? Yes.

These rhetorical questions were addressed on Tuesday night at Fordham Law School by Ms. Angwin and a distinguished panel moderated by Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of PEN American Center. Unlike other in this series, “Balancing Security and Social Justice,” the audience was a bit sparse. True, the weather was balmy, spring in the air, but I worried that the 24-hour-news cycle’s interest had waned. It would pick-up again if Edward Snowden returned to the US, was arrested and indicted. Hero or traitor? The arguments on both sides are fraught and heated. But at least we won’t be tossed into jail for arguing.

And that is the point, or one of the points, so far as I am concerned. Now that dragnet surveillance of both our trivial and important “information” has been exposed, we are able to talk about it, write about it, and attend panel discussions. For this basic human Constitutional right, we have to thank our Founding Fathers, and Benjamin Franklin, one of our first whistleblowers:

http://allthingsliberty.com/2013/12/benjamin-franklin-americas-first-whistleblower/.

Venceremos.  Read More 

1. Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.
2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.
4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two
evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
5. After 10 hours in school, teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
7. Every teacher should lay aside from each day’s pay a goodly sum of his earning for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society.
8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.
9. The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.

Taken from One-Room Schools of Knox County, by the Knox County Retired Teachers Association


I started my teaching career in an Oakland, Ca high school, far from 19th Century Knox County, KY in time and place, far from the contemporary one-room or open-air schoolhouses in Afghanistan or Central Africa, their orthodoxy, their restraints, their children studying earnestly by rote and recitation. Most of my registered students were either football players, cheerleaders, truants, or members of gangs. They were privileged, if only they had known it. Far from war zones. Far, still, from economic hard times. Yet they were accustomed to boredom at school, and rage at their teachers, expressed as belligerence, or indifference. They cheated, threatened, fled. The words effort and self-respect were lost to them.

According to my California State Teaching License (Secondary) I was qualified to teach English and American History. There were required text books, a state curriculum, and too many desks crammed into a box-shaped room, albeit a clean one. It was before the days of high security, but there were incidences--kids packing, kids threatening, kids expelled. I took a look at my contract, consulted with the beleagured principal, the brain-dead, burned out heads of my departments and my union, and decided I could risk doing what I wanted. The kids—and I was still nearly a kid—were restive. I was over-confident, politicized. I knew I’d only be at the school for a year; my husband and I were headed to Europe, graduate school, travel, writing. So I tore the envelope, I made my own plans. The challenge was to make theater out of the classroom, to bring it alive, to make it real.

All that year, I went to bed at 9 p.m. and woke at 3 a.m. to read what my students had written; they submitted 500 words a day. Needless to say, I had more than one class and each class had more than 25 students. Because I was so young, I dressed in suits and pulled my hair up into a sophisticated “do.” I carried a bag lunch and never left the classroom; my door was always open for conversation and consultation—with other skeptical teachers, with students. In my English class I broke the desks out of rows into a seminar style and placed a Socratic stool at the center. I read up on Socratic dialogue and danced patterns onto the chalk board. I invested in an anthology of short stories and began the term with Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” I insisted that my students write all day long, that they take notes on what they were thinking as they worked and talked, what occurred to them. And not just in my classroom, in every classroom. In my American History class, we made costumes and conducted a Constitutional Convention. The ancestors of my students would have been slaves. So how to deal with that? More conversation. Word got out and some of the truants returned. Here was a teacher—little ole me—who understood something the “ school system” didn’t. No test at the end of the year could measure this. Most of all I was touched by the effort the students made, how much they wanted to learn. I had heard they were lazy—far from it. They worked to exhaustion, and so did I.

And it is with the memory of this wonderful early teaching experience—and many others since—that I enter my classroom at NYU every term. I am always so happy to be there, to meet my new students: who will they be? What will they be interested in? Will they commit, make effort, respond well to the constantly evolving, dynamic classroom? Will they continue writing when the workshop is over?
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A friend gave me “The Gorgeous Nothings,” an art book and scholarly work I would not have bought for myself, therefore, the perfect gift. I never liked Emily Dickinson’s poems when I was forced to read them at school; now I adore them. “The Gorgeous Nothings” is a collection of 52 poems, or drafts of poems, scrawled on opened envelopes. The hypothesis is that Dickinson was 1/being frugal and using whatever scraps of paper were to hand and/or 2/ creating visual as well as written poems. The distended and upended envelopes resemble birds in flight, birds migrating, resting, tension before flight. Dickinson loved birds. And these poetic notations, unlike the books (“bound fascicles”), are multi-media presentations.

For all her puritanical frugality and discipline, Emily Dickinson, we learn here, was a free-thinking artist; these are fugitive, ephemeral writings. She was courageous, she was inspiring. And she has inspired me. In her honor I created my own experiment last night: I asked my hard-working, earnest students to bring an envelope to our first workshop class to see what they would do with it when I asked them to use these fragile physical entities (that brown and brittle with age) to record three subjects they’d like to write about. I haven’t studied them all as yet, but a cursory glance suggests that the experiment came too early in the term and that everyone was attempting to stay within the confines of the closed envelopes without tearing them apart. I’ll have to conjure different instructions for the end of term. Or perhaps I won’t have to. By then the students will be as courageous and inventive as Emily Dickinson.
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I met Pussy Riot’s lawyers at an event at the NYU law school last spring and was inspired by their story. Now these brave women—protest performance artists I would call them-- have recovered from their incarceration and are in Sochi demonstrating against the autocratic Putin regime. Though their staged events may seem silly, their intention is deadly serious. Hopefully, it won't kill them.

Whenever I hear about a police state suppressing artistic expression, I have nightmares. The fear of such suppression—self-censorship—gives me even more nightmares. There is no reason for us to be timid, none at all, yet fear of exposure is a constant in a writer's life even in a Great Democracy such as ours. And we do have to remain vigilant in a democracy, despite our Bill of Rights. Thus, all the necessary conversation right now about surveillance.

Students arrive in my workshop—and I will have a bunch of new students next week—eager to find their voices and their subjects. It is their mandate, I tell them, to speak loud and clear about whatever interests or moves them, and to shuck the editor on their shoulder telling them not to write about this or that. We don't live in Russia. We don't live in China. We are as free as we dare to be.  Read More 

Life can be a twisted skein of snow-laden branches sometimes. And then the weather clears.

I spent most of yesterday reorganizing my atelier. I shifted furniture and unloaded books from the garbage bags where they have been fumigating. They have survived and so have we. Standing in the lobby commiserating, one of my beleaguered neighbors said, “Bed bugs hijack your life.” I agree. Apart from the exhaustion of constant laundry, vigilance, and visits from the exterminator twice a month, we have been living out of plastic bags. And still are. The vigilance can’t stop.

So its hard to concentrate at times, hard to write. I finished a short story over the holidays, sent it out to several readers, and am about to submit, the perfect labor intensive activity for yet another snowy day. I had talked to my agent about submitting using a male pseudonym as the story is edgy and told from a male POV. This is more than an experiment, it’s defiance. Though it’s 2014, male writers are often taken more seriously by editors, even female editors. Why? An anthropologist or psychologist will have to answer that question. Is the same true in England? I’m not sure. I lived, worked as a journalist, and published there for many years without a glitch.

I remember, not so long ago, I wrote an essay about the Golden Gloves competition at Madison Square Garden. Women were competing and I was struck-- almost literally at ringside—by their skill, their tolerance for blows, the blood. I wrote an essay about my ambivalence—admiration and horror. I also had fears for the health of their breasts, albeit they were protected by purpose-built shields. I could feel every punch on my breasts.

The article was well written, I knew that, and it was raw. But I couldn’t place it until I buried my first name in the initials CB: CB Bergman. The editors that wrote back to me assumed I was a male reporter. Their responses were immediate and chatty. Inadvertently, I’d been invited into their sporty club. And that was the point: women were now in the ring. Except the editors thought I was a man.  Read More 

It was my husband, Jim’s, suggestion to go completely digital. And it happened on Sunday when the breakfast table was spilling over with paper, most of which we were not interested in reading, especially the advertisement inserts. So much paper to recycle and we are only one family, we said. Let’s think about the drought in California, the shortage of water, the erosion of our earthly forests. And we agreed that the digital revolution is good for the environment. As the NY Times account is in my name and I have an educator’s rate, I made the change—in just a few seconds. The speed of our lives is incredible these days, no?

Though I have often browsed the NY Times online and I have a Guardian app on my phone, this morning was the first morning that I sat at my computer reading the newspaper completely online. Apart from the flashing advertisements, it was a pleasant experience. I could skim or read the whole article, and then browse the blogs—well written, much longer first person amplifications of the news. They are good.

In my early reporting and book reviewing days, I became competent at writing to strict deadlines and word counts. I still think both are a good disciplines for writers and I insist on word counts in my workshop. What can we do in the space we have? But there are also frustrations when word counts are limited; the capaciousness of blogs enables more thoughtful reporting.

As for the NY Times Crossword, which my husband has finished almost every day since we met, its absence on our first digital morning was a notable sensory deprivation. No pen, no paper. And though I have since found out that the crossword can be done online for a small fee, that does not feel the same. So on the way home from my swim yesterday—I get my best ideas in the pool—I stopped at one of the only three dimensional Barnes and Nobles left in the city and bought a book of NY Times Puzzles in hard copy. My husband was grateful.  Read More 

It’s the 10th anniversary of FB and, in celebration, they have collated our photographs to make a personal "lookback" movie, and they have asked us to share them on our timelines. But they haven’t obtained anyone’s permission from their thousands and millions of happy users. Is this innocent, or not? True, we are free to share or not share our FB “home movies,” and, according to a report in the newspaper today, we may soon be able to edit our movies. Does this also mean that we’ll be able to ditch the schmaltzy music, or ask the FB “automatic” collating film-making machine to delete?

The question of permission and ownership on the web is of great fiduciary concern to all artists—writers, visual artists,photographers and musicians. Why? Because we create work, own the copyright to that work, and want to be paid for it. Unless we decide to give it away.

And who started the “let’s flood FB with poetry and visual images gig?” Unless a work has outlived its copyright and is in the public domain, this is illegal. FB is a well regarded and well known company. At the very least, they are in a position to enforce copyright law. Why don’t they? If they are scanning this post, perhaps someone in FB cyberspace will answer. Otherwise, I am sure, eventually, they'll have to answer to the organizations that represent artists, photographers, writers and musicians.

In the meantime, I will Google my name every once in a while and track down various institutions and companies that have stolen my copyrighted work. And I won’t be posting a Facebook generated “movie” to my timeline.

Happy Birthday anyway.  Read More 

I was in the car during a freak, unpredicted ice storm, my son-in-law driving, when he asked me what I was working on. We were in the midst of a scary situation, the road a slick rink, my daughter in the car behind with my husband, inching forward in convoy. At first—anxiety riding high—I thought he was trying to distract me, but then he continued to discuss a new Kingsolver novel he was reading and his next question was so astute—for a reader who is not a writer—that I was in awe: “Is it difficult to write from multiple points of view?”

Of course the answer is “yes.” But why? Well, I had to explain that when we first begin to write, it’s much easier to see everything from the prism of our own experience, to write in the intimate first person. (And this is true of both fiction and nonfiction.) Or, alternatively, we’ll establish an omniscient third person narrator who sees and knows everything. (And this is also true of both fiction and nonfiction.)

These days, neither choice satisfies, and I have an hypothesis about why this is so, as follows: We’ve changed. We’re more tolerant. We’ve evolved. We listen more to multiple points of view.

Of course, this is just an hypothesis and it’s from my POV. But I was around when a major shift took place in the newsroom—more women, more minorities—and the “girls in the balcony,” as they were known in the Washington press corps, were finally let onto the floor of Congress to report. The story of pay and opportunity equity for women in the balcony, and the New York Times in particular, is told by Nan Robertson in her page turning book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Girls-Balcony-Women-Times/dp/0595154646

It was originally published in the 1990’s and reissued in 2000, not that long ago. And it’s not so long ago that women were relegated to the society pages or the home pages. As for minorities in the newsrooms and on broadcast TV, they were non-existent until the late 1960’s, if memory serves. Progress came only after a civil rights struggle and changes in the law.

Do women have a more expansive consciousness? Do they have a larger appetite for uncertainty? For multiple points of view? Because as soon as women and minorities entered the newsroom and the boards of publishing houses and academic towers, narration changed.

When white men did most of the news reporting and essay writing, their voices were often omniscient. Then came the women’s movement and the New Journalism—Wolfe, Didion, Mailer, Thompson—which established a new narrative persona—more peripheral, the reporter in the action and reporting the action. It demanded humility, not omniscience. And we can still feel this tectonic shift today in poetry, memoirs and blogs, such as this one. Needless to say, I’m grateful for it.  Read More 

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” James Baldwin

And to this I would add: your joys, your accomplishments, your expectations, your hopes. And I would change the pronoun to “our,” as Charles Blow did in his very personal New York Times blog post today, a touching account of his first encounter with books. It reminded me of my mother’s stories about her childhood library which was immodest for a struggling Viennese family—middle class in its aspirations, but not in its day to day life. Her mother—my grandmother—worked as a sales “girl” in a glove store, family owned, but not immediate family. And her father—my grandfather—was a traveling salesman, selling the gloves to retail stores. And when he returned from his trips, he always brought my mother a beautiful leather-bound book, which she cherished, and read avidly. In absentia, the books gave her courage and comfort when her father was away. And they became a sizable library, all left behind when my mother escaped the Nazi advance after she graduated from medical school, the first woman in her family to go to university.

And it’s interesting that I haven’t written about this in a long time. Perhaps it was Charles Blow’s blog post that jogged memories of my mother’s re-created, re-invented library, first in New York where I grew up, and later in Westport, Ct. after she and my stepfather—in European fashion—retired “to the country.” The bookshelves had to go up before anything else, and if anyone wanted to borrow a book, the librarian—my mother—had to check it out in her indelible mental ledger. As she aged, she became even stricter about lending books, almost obsessively so; they had become a metaphor of both loss and security.

“And you will return it, soon?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And if you do not, I will call you.”
And so on.

The parsimony of lending did not extend to gifts. If she liked a book, she bought copies for her children, grand-children, and friends. And signed them, often with the words: “This is one of my favorite books.”

In her old age, my mother lost most of her sight. She could no longer pull books off the shelf, or read them. But she went to her local Barnes & Noble all the time, and she belonged to a book club. My sister and I tried to shift her to audio books, to no avail. Finally, I found a wonderful man to read to her and talk to her. A book was not a book unless there was a discussion about its characters or the events described.

My mother was bi-lingual, but shifted entirely to English as a reader. Oddly, though, she never liked poetry in English, but when I began to memorize poems, I would practice on her during my visits. These oral/aural experiences echoed the Greeks, who my mother had studied in high school. I was declaiming what was on the page, and this legacy had a mythic feel. She recognized quickly that most poems revise the ancient themes of life and death and love. She was captivated. Soon we were able to touch on her own end of life “issues” and how she wished to depart from this world beyond the documents that had been signed. It was literature that helped us do that.  Read More 

I don't know why I picked up “East of Eden” the other day, an unconscious motivation perhaps. Consciously, I was weary of reading on my Kindle and longing for the sensory experience of paper, paper page turning, and heft. 601 pages of Penguin’s centennial edition—in celebration of Steinbeck’s birth—is heft. The design of the paperback cover echoes the original hardback edition: It has flaps, there is an evocative etching on the top of the cover, and the edges of the pages are scored. This creates an illusion of freshly cut pages, the obligation of the reader in the past. Once cut and turned, the pages feel “thumbed.”

But what about the story and the writing? Has it held up? Has it stood the test of time? Is it now a classic?

Like most American school children of my generation, I had read “Of Mice and Men” in school at an age when it would have meant absolutely nothing to me. I think this was true of many classics on the curriculum in those days. (The other that comes to mind is Wharton’s “Ethan Frome.”) I have no recollection of how the book was taught, what it was about, or the questions we were supposed to answer for homework. I thought it curious that my parents had “Cannery Row” on their shelves, but was not curious enough myself to pull it down. A yellow cover with blue lettering, I remember, and the fact that my mother had read it in one sitting. Much later, the year I got married, I read “Grapes of Wrath” as we traveled across the country and loved it. But I never returned to Steinbeck after that. So why now? A third into the book, and unable to put it down—the writing and the story both compelling—I went online to the Nobel Prize site to listen to Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Banquet Speech in which he says:

“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”

Inspiring thoughts for me as I have just published a novel—“What Returns to Us”—set in 1945, the beginning of the Atomic Age. I do feel, too strongly at times I know, that writers and artists have an obligation to tell the truth, to illuminate, and to write from the heart as well as the head.

“East of Eden” was published in 1952, soon after the end of World War II and the unleashing of America’s weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb. Steinbeck traces America’s history in this epic, beautifully written novel from the 19th century onward. It raises many questions about our frontier history, the loss of civility and a higher purpose, the origins of evil, and what it means to be human. The book is loaded with gorgeous descriptions, deep character portraits, humor, and compassion.

We can’t all be working on such a large canvas all the time, or even some of the time; that would be hubris. And we cannot sit down to write with the intention of creating the great American novel—Mailer’s ambition—or the great anything. Our writing lives are a daily practice, keen observation, and the quest for psychological and historical truths.  Read More