Who Are They Going to Be?

Proposing a grand experiment.

I intended to get back to writing more directly about books and reading this week, but then I got stuck on this video by the band The Smile for their new song “Friend of a Friend.”

My brain is stuck on the questions of how and what we learn, probably because of this book I’m working on, but also because it’s a question that’s never far from the front of my mind. Two weeks ago I wrote about how diving into the Newberry medalist books “showed me the world,” last week I mused on the idea that maybe “genius” as a state of being doesn’t mean much, and that mostly what we’re seeing is the intersection of passion and practice.

School and schooling are largely governed by behaviorist principles. Students who follow the rules and hit the standards are rewarded by the system, others are not. This has always been the nature of school and schooling, but the era of standardization and assessment kicked off by No Child Left Behind has made the definition of what it means to succeed in school increasingly narrow. I think this is a terrible problem which leaves students both stressed about and disengaged from school, the worst of both worlds. It’s not great for teachers either.

Anyway, “A Friend of a Friend” by The Smile. Folks might recognize the bass playing singer in the video as Thom Yorke, front man for Radiohead. The guy hunched over the piano like Schroeder in a Peanuts cartoon is Jonny Greenwood, multi-instrumentalist in Radiohead and Academy Award nominated film composer (working on the recent films of Paul Thomas Anderson). The dummer is Tom Skinner, primarily a jazz guy who has an amazing touch on the instrument.

The video is directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, et al), and for those who have not yet done the sensible thing and watched it, it opens with a group of primary school students entering a small theater, the melange of their boisterous voices over a background of stringed instruments sounding somewhat like the tuning before a performance. The Smile wait on stage, somewhat sheepish and uncertain. The kids clamber into their seats, jostling each other, curious and open to whatever is to come.

The orchestral sounds drop suddenly as a previously frozen Thom Yorke comes to life playing a somewhat bouncy melody on the bass, singing the opening lyric to his own accompaniment:

I can go anywhere that I want
I just got to turn myself inside out and back to front

The piano kicks in at the second couplet, the drums with the third, and we notice that the bouncy tempo of the melody contrasts with the minor and 7th chords used to construct it. It is somehow simultaneously jaunty and melancholy.

As the band plays, Paul Thomas Anderson intercuts scenes of the children watching The Smile. We see them smiling, blank faced, fussing, crawling over each other, watching the band, watching their neighbor, blowing air out of their cheeks.

At the 1:26 mark of the video at the left edge of the frame we see a boy, fists clenched, chest and head forward looking like he’s shouting towards the stage. This is more like a kid screaming at the soccer (football) pitch, than an observer of a somewhat subdued musical performance. He turns to a dark-haired girl in overalls and a striped shirt sitting next him and seems to bellow in her ear before craning his head upward and looking like a wild man, howling at the moon.

The girl does not flinch. (Though there may be a hint of side-eye.)

I’ve watched this video 40 or 50 times since I was first introduced to it by

Austin Kleon

via social media and the questions I can’t shake is: Who are those kids? Who are those kids going to be?

The entire video is a series of cuts between the band performing and the children in the bleachers, seeing their apparent reactions to watching this rather strange band perform this rather strange song. I say “apparent” reactions because I should acknowledge that we don’t know that there is a one-to-one correspondence between what we’re hearing in the song and reactions of the children in the moment on screen. At times we do see from a perspective behind the band shooting towards the kids, showing the band in the foreground, but even that doesn’t make the absolute relationship between the music and the response a certainty.

Nevertheless, even if Paul Thomas Anderson has - as I suspect - very carefully edited the footage to create a story, it’s clear that the children are simply doing whatever it is they did on that day at that time. Because of this, because of the freedom on display in these children’s behaviors I find some portions of the video powerfully, inexplicably emotional.

At the 3:05 mark, the camera shows a boy and a girl sitting in the back row apart from others, both sitting upright, paying polite attention. The camera pans right to show one of the older kids with her arm around a younger one. They look enough alike that I’m imagining them to be sisters. A girl in glasses with two tendrils of hair perfectly draped over her face sways to the music unselfconsciously, her face squishes for a second, moving her glasses higher up on her nose, something I find myself doing when I’m writing and don’t want to pause to take my hands off the keys.

Some kids are indifferent; some are clearly transfixed. Some are tired. Others are bursting with energy. One boy sleeps with his head pressed into the shoulder of the boy next to him. As the music intensifies, flashing lights kick in around the room, we see the children clapping. When the band finishes, the children cheer. In the extreme foreground of the shot Thom Yorke bows with a flourish before turning away from the mic grinning, clearly pleased. The camera moves to the boy who earlier was shown to be shouting at the moon. He is standing and shouting again, and my lip reading and listening as attentively as I can while playing the final few seconds of the video over and over makes me believe he’s saying: We want more!

Who is that kid? What’s he going to be?

I started envisioning an experiment inspired by Michael Apted’s Up series documentary. The project was designed to track the impact of social class on the children of Great Britain. Some of the kids are upper crust, attending British “public” (the equivalent of U.S. private schools) while others are at schools supported by charities or living in rough, working class neighborhoods on a knife’s edge of poverty.

The series started with Seven Up! in 1964, which brought a group of 20 children together to see the similarities and differences in their behavior. Originally intended as a one-off, the series continued with Seven Plus Seven and then 21 Up, 28 Up and so on, up to 63 Up, which aired in 2019. Fourteen of the children who started in Seven Up! participated in the future installments, with only a handful dropping out along the way, providing a fascinating look at a group of people over time as they attempt to live lives of meaning and happiness. One of the things that the series makes clear is that coming from a higher social class is no guarantee of a life of meaning and happiness, though it offers significant advantages in terms of material security.

In my theoretical experiment, rather than selecting kids to follow in seven year increments based on their social class, we will select them based on their different reactions to the performance of “Friend of a “Friend” by The Smile. Let’s follow the silent concentrators along with the in-seat be-bopping to the beat-ers. Let’s follow the bored, the hyper-stimulated, and someone in-between.

Will the one slapping her knee to the beat be a drummer? Will the one staring at the ceiling lost in private thought be a writer or philosopher? Who will they love? Who will they hate? What will thrill them? What will disappoint?

(Maybe someone knows Paul Thomas Anderson and can get this newsletter to him and see if he might be interested in doing it himself, or sharing the footage with another filmmaker. Why not? Stranger things have happened.)

I cannot even begin to imagine how the different behaviors will map to who these children are and who they will become, or maybe there is no map at all and I’m guilty of generalizing.

I don’t want to be guilty of generalizing. I want these young people to continue to display their full selves in all of their wonderful variety. I’m betting that if you assembled an audience of kids even a few years older you would not see such variety of behaviors and reactions, that everything would be more controlled. That would be school doing its work, reining them all in to the narrowed paths we’ve judged must be walked in order to be “successful.”

You’ve likely read a lot about “learning loss” in the wake of the pandemic, and the worries about increases in negative student behaviors around order and discipline in schools. I don’t intend to deny the problems these things are causing, but I’m struck by the idea that maybe what we’re seeing in terms of behavior is not learning loss, but lack of practice at squelching their natural responses to experiences that seem bad, that don’t make sense.

I could be wrong, but that possibility is on my mind.

Who are these kids going to be?

I have no idea, except maybe that kid yelling at the stage. He’s going to be the next Thom Yorke.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I wrote about a new book looking at the problem of the suburbs, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unravelling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold.

The Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction has announced its longlist of nominated titles.

The title of Taylor Swift’s next album, The Tortured Poets Department, launched a wave of discourse wondering if the title is grammatically correct.

Sam Altman announced on Twitter that OpenAI (ChatGPT, et al) generates 100 billion words a day and he needs $7 trillion to pay for computer chips that would power AI. These people aim to destroy the planet in the name of creating a godlike super intelligence that may instead drown us in spam. Maybe we can collectively so something about it.

The New York Times recommends nine new books this week.

If you’re at all curious what the revision process for a book looks like and what it means, at least for me, I explored some thinking on the subject at Inside Higher Ed.

It was announced this week that the writer Gabe Hudson passed away from complications from undiagnosed diabetes and chronic kidney disease. His loss continues to be felt.

Via McSweeney’s this week, “Pitching PBS My Refreshingly Violent Twist on Antiques Roadshow” by Dan Kennedy.

Recommendations

1. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
2. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
3. Starman by Sara Douglass 
4. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
5. How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

Reva K. - Seattle, WA 

Reva likes some magic in her stories and doesn’t seem to mind something with some heft to it, so why not go to one of the all-time greats, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

1. Us Against You by Frederick Backman
2. The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
3. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
4. Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
5. Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West by Lauren Redniss

Rebecca G. - Brooklyn, NY

This list looks like a good fit with a novel that’s got heart and humor, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins.

1. Calypso by David Sedaris
2. The Black Period by Hafizah Augustus Peter 
3. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin 
4. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion 
5. The Woman in Me by Britney Spears 

Rachel W. - Philadelphia, PA 

How about a very funny collection of essays that displays a unique mind at work? That book is Jennifer Traig’s Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood.¹

Had a lovely time this week speaking with the folks at Aims Community College in Greeley, Colorado about the challenges of teaching in an AI world, but had a less lovely time trying to get back home as United’s planes kept being taken out of service, leaving me stranded in Chicago overnight.

Fortunately that’s where Mother Biblioracle lives, so we had dinner and she sent me home with a care package of chocolate brownies when I made my way the rest of the way home the next morning. Not bad, not bad at all.

Another busy week for yours truly so not sure if I’ll get to the Wednesday recommendations, but once this book revision is in I vow to make it through the entire backlog.

I’m at that point in the revision process where it all feels very dialed in and it’s like the picture of what I’m trying to achieve has finally come clear. This was preceded by several weeks of wheel spinning. I wish I better understood what triggers the unlocking of progress, but over the years, I’ve come to believe that you just keep going to well until suddenly the good stuff appears.

Thanks for reading, I’ll see you all next week, and if there’s anything on your minds, please share in the comments.

John
The Biblioracle

1. All books (with the occasional exception) linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income for this year is $20.20.