Jekyll2024-02-25T12:26:40-05:00https://benjamindkilleen.com/feed.xmlBenjamin D. KilleenPh.D. Student, Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins UniversityBenjamin D. Killeenkilleen@jhu.eduRoadlocked2021-08-24T00:00:00-04:002021-08-24T00:00:00-04:00https://benjamindkilleen.com/posts/2021/08/roadlocked<p>“How do you keep yourself from just flooring it?”</p>
<p>Dad laughed at my question. “I guess you just get used to it.”</p>
<p>The one-way roadway begged me to go faster. SUVs on either side both faced the same direction. Overhanging branches created the impression of endless tunnel, with its unmarked asphalt speeding toward a singular vanishing point. Everything about the street, how wide it was, how straight and smooth and black, expected speed — except some tiny sign? The black-on-white lettering obviously lied. If I were driving my dream car, a Tesla Model S, I would rip this local autobahn from 0 to 60 in 3.1s. Even Dad’s Infiniti G20, a four-door sedan too-hot leather seats and a finicky AUX cord, deserved to seize the road. It felt ridiculous to plod along at 15 MPH.</p>
<p>Of course, I resisted my inner speed racer. It was my first time driving with my permit, and I felt uncomfortable operating such a large machine. In general, I preferred to walk or ride my bike. However, a bicycle doesn’t get very far in Webster Groves, the suburb of St. Louis where I grew up. There, the same roads which looked so inviting from the driver’s seat transform to uninviting hellscapes on a bicycle, and disappearing sidewalks next to five line Franken-streets made my own two feet the most unpleasant form of transportation available. I hated waiting for a ride. I hated other people’s podcasts. I wanted my own freedom. I thought that freedom meant a driver’s license and a car.</p>
<p>The reason I equated the two was the nature of the space I lived in. The car has so ingrained itself into our culture that we hardly bat an eye at the assumption made by double-door garages and employee-only parking spots: that everyone must have a car. To “go” is to drive. Where once commuters took crowded trains to work, they now enjoy a private cabin in their SUVs. Where children once would walk to school, a parent now must take a shift on car-pool duty. We have made these places that exclude those who do not drive, either because they aren’t old enough, can’t afford to, or choose not to. We have made these places that are roadlocked.</p>
<p>The roadlocked neighborhood is easily identified by several key characteristics, from which other problems spring. First, it has deficient walking paths. I do not mean it has no paths — although that is certainly the case in many places — or that its internal sidewalks are not serviceable. Rather, the roadlocked area is surrounded on all sides by highways or arterials, whose sidewalks are ugly and unpleasant. One feels out of place next to a 40 MPH river of aluminum. Indeed, one fears for one’s life. The sidewalk that connects a roadlocked place to other areas is an afterthought, built to satisfy the barest minimum of what a street should look like, so that in making walking technically possible, city planners may dedicate no more energy to those inconvenient individuals who do not drive. After all, they themselves are drivers. Who would want to walk?</p>
<p>Second, the transportation infrastructure focuses on personal vehicles at the expense of all other forms of transportation. A neighborhood may have footpaths in abundance, but without buses, railways, and protected bike lanes to augment them, its residents will feel that they should own a car regardless. If a roadlocked space has any non-car routes to speak of, they are afterthoughts like sidewalks. The buses are late due to traffic, and the trains run so infrequently that one’s own schedule serves the timesheet, not the other way around. The bike lanes, often shared with buses and prone to disappearing for some blocks, are so dangerous that only experienced cyclists dare to use them, and the lack of covered racks to lock up one’s bike makes the whole endeavor dependent on the weather. It’s much simpler to drive and not have to worry.</p>
<p>Finally, the grocery stores that serve a roadlocked space are far too big. One might think that this condition benefits consumers, who enjoy the choice of fifty kinds of Jiffy peanut butter, but in fact it serves the interest of the grocery chains. Logistics networks benefit from fewer points of sale, and a larger store provides more opportunities to advertise to shoppers, who must navigate a maze of sponsored products, ice cream by bananas, separate sections for organic — all on a circuitous route designed to be as long as possible. It’s exhausting. To stay sane, one relegates one day a week to the unpleasant task, so one ends up buying a whole week’s worth of food at a time. This is far too much to carry. Even if the sidewalks were Parisian and the biking lanes abounded, one would still have to drive just to eat.</p>
<p>Together, these characteristics ensure that roadlocked places are so inconvenient as to be uninhabitable without a car. The residents, who drive, have no incentive to change the space they live in, even while the problem festers. Shopping malls spring up which are inaccessible on foot. Urban sprawl ensures that endless highway projects will do nothing but make traffic worse. Carbon emissions due to transportation continue to climb. We can’t escape; the people love their cars.</p>
<p>Six years ago, I moved from Webster Groves to Chicago, Illinois for school. There, I experienced for the first time what spaces felt like when they weren’t so heavily dependent on the car. I got used to public transit networks built to serve the population as a whole, not just those who couldn’t afford to drive. Transit and bike paths provided not just alternate routes but, in many cases, better routes than roads. Countless times, my friends and I took the 55 to Garfield station, transferred to the Red Line, and got off at Cermak-Chinatown for dim sum and some late night boba, because it was quicker and easier than driving. We would catch the six bus to the river, near Magnificent Mile, and the South Shore Line to Indiana Dunes for the day. For exercise, a friend and I would jog out to the Point and back, or cycle on the Lakefront trail, traversing dedicated paths and pedestrian tunnels. Grocery shopping, though still a chore, could be done in frequent, shorter trips to Hyde Park Produce, up on 53rd Street. I developed a new expectation: my own two feet (and Google Maps) could get me where I wanted to go, and I could carry what I needed with me.</p>
<p>Thus, I have lost my dream of driving. Having glimpsed a world beyond the roadlocked suburb where I grew up, I dread the possibility of going back. I envy those New Yorkers with their subway system, and I pity Angelenos with their schedules ruled by traffic. Two years ago I moved to Baltimore for grad school, where I found a city somewhere in between St. Louis and Chicago, on the roadlocked spectrum. The sidewalks are narrow but almost always present. The grocery stores are large, but now they offer free delivery. There are even protected bike lanes beginning to appear, like fairies no one quite believes in. I wish they would build more.</p>
<p>Recently, I visited the suburbs in Maryland to house-sit for a family. I used their car to commute, as one of them does, into downtown Baltimore, and I shopped at grocery stores the size of airport hangars, near their home. I even jogged along the Baltimore-Annapolis trail starting from their house, a route which necessitated running on the roadside in two separate places. (I assumed the sidewalk would connect their enclave on the Severn to the trail. It did not.) I enjoyed the water, the nature, and their beautiful home, but in the end, the experience reinforced the idea borne from four years in Chicago.</p>
<p>I do not want to own a car. Ever. Not even a Tesla Model S.</p>
<p>In looking at places as either roadlocked or not, I have come to view the car as ugly and unnatural. It preys upon our cities like a parasitic worm inhabiting the small intestine. Voracious, it consumes the avenues. Unsatisfied, it gobbles up the undigested promenades and puts up strip malls in their place. We tell ourselves, “It’s so convenient.” Then we waste away on interstates staring at red taillights, trying to alleviate our boredom. Our long commutes are deathly numbing, but at least we have our podcasts.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the places we inhabit are no longer built for us but for hulks of metal many times our size. The reason that a local road with a 15 MPH speed limit looks more like a race track than a neighborhood is obvious. It was designed that way. We believe the car represents personal freedom, but we have fashioned spaces where the freedom not to drive is dead.</p>
<p>Ford have mercy.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Originally posted on <a href="https://benjamindkilleen.medium.com/roadlocked-bce7c0f7322a">Medium</a>.</em></p>Benjamin D. Killeenkilleen@jhu.edu“How do you keep yourself from just flooring it?”How to Take the Train2021-03-10T00:00:00-05:002021-03-10T00:00:00-05:00https://benjamindkilleen.com/posts/2021/03/how-to-take-the-train<p>The Amtrak overlooks a lot of cornfields in between Chicago and St. Louis. Of course, there are
also creek beds, interstates, and cul-de-sacs; minor league baseball stadiums; and a graffitied
concrete beam at Union station which reads, “Have a great day.” However, the train’s predominant
view consists of corn: row after row of that patchwork Midwest quilt knitted in the Earth. It was
strangely captivating.</p>
<p>I used to take the Amtrak at the end of every quarter. I could have driven, if I owned a car, or
flown from Midway airport, but the Southwest flight cost \$138, while a single seat on the Texas
Eagle, a double-decker corrugated tin snake with polyester blue curtains and no wifi, sold for
\$27. It was a slow ride. The lone star locomotive never exceeded 90 mph on its southward journey,
and it ran the risk of breaking down or sharing track with sluggish freight trains, which for
arcane reasons actually had priority over passenger rail. Over my four years in Chicago, I
experienced numerous delays. In fact, my family grew so accustomed to late arrivals that they began
timing their pickup based on Find my iPhone rather than the stated schedule, so as to occupy that
pale-fluorescent waiting room inside the Gateway Transportation Center for as little time as
possible. In one instance, my 9 A.M. departure broke down just outside of Joplin, at 9:40. I
spent the next twelve hours texting back and forth about the second engine breaking down as well,
the linkup with 11:30’s Texas Eagle to the rescue, and the lack of horsepower that resulted in our
combined ten-mile-an-hour crawl across the snowy fields of Illinois. It was December. My family had
tickets to <em>A Christmas Carol</em> at 8:30, well after I was scheduled to arrive, but I didn’t make it.</p>
<p>After that, we paid the Southwest fee whenever my arrival coincided with scheduled plans. I took
the plane for Christmas parties in St. Louis, Thanksgiving in Kansas City, and vacation in the
north woods of Wisconsin. At the same time, I was forming connections in California, where I have
twice interned, and Maryland, where I ended up after Chicago. Thus, I have endured the airports of
a dozen Midwest towns, as well as those of both the far-flung, non-flyover coasts this country has
to offer. I can confidently call myself a fair reviewer of the airborne mode of travel, at least
domestically. While flying is convenient, to be sure, the experience leaves much to be desired.</p>
<p>Where the airplane excels in timeliness, the Amtrak offers refuge. Those cardboard cutouts that
Southwest calls chairs can hardly hold a candle to the deep cushions and Lazy-boy leg rests that
have lulled me half to sleep on more than one occasion, aided in no small part by the gentle
swaying of the Texas Eagle’s upper deck and the choruses of <em>Transatlanticism</em> playing through my
headphones, unimpeded by the roar of Boeing jets or babies crying. Indeed, despite its tardiness,
the train itself came to represent a homecoming in my mind just as much as St. Louis itself. Such
was my exhaustion at the quarter’s end that slumber sometimes carried me from one downtown into
another. Otherwise, I entertained myself with leisures I could not enjoy while classes culled my
time, such as several Netflix seasons or a single game of Civilization VI. Once, in an unusual
burst of train-bound productivity, I started programming a <a href="https://github.com/benjamindkilleen/functional-rubiks-solver">Rubik’s cube
solver</a>, a tricky project which would
occupy my holiday hours in between family gatherings, simply for the fun of it.</p>
<p>In this manner, the train ride always accomplished what flying tends to fail at: transition. A
plane is like a hotel elevator, ferrying strangers from one carbon copied hallway to another,
leaving little impression of having actually moved other than a ringing in the ear. Hotel hallways
are identical by design, and airports, despite their innumerable idiosyncrasies, possess an
overwhelming sameness. The same cannot be said of train stations, which, in addition to being
generally more charming, inherit character from their surroundings. Even the Gateway Transportation
Center, a soulless grey slab squeezed beneath the interstate, boasts a riverside view of downtown
St. Louis on approach. I used to end every journey home with a view of the Arch’s ghostly gleam cut
right across the moonlit Mississippi, seeming more like a mirage than a reflection. Every city has
a tarmac. Only my hometown has that particular stretch of track.</p>
<p>Even the great engine failure of December 2016 stands out fondly in my memory. Dad, not wanting me
to miss <em>A Christmas Carol</em>, decided to intercept my Franken-train in Springfield or maybe Lincoln,
depending on its progress. These were optimistic estimates. Dad passed through Springfield without
stopping, and in Lincoln he called to confirm the locomotive was still crawling through northern
Illinois. Hours later, he finally reached me in Bloomington-Normal, a college town situated halfway
between St. Louis and Chicago. I disembarked in downtown Normal, and the train slouched on without
me. Christmas lights lit up the wintry night. I found Dad’s SUV in the parking lot and loaded my
bags into the trunk. The two of us exchanged a warm hug. By then, we had no hope of making the
play, so Dad looked up an Irish pub on Apple Maps and bought me dinner. I devoured it
hungrily. Then we drove the whole way home, catching up on politics, extended family, and the
latest television drama while just outside the endless snow-covered cornfields swallowed up the
nighttime highway’s scattered light and faded toward the flat horizon.</p>
<p><img src="/images/cornfield.jpg" alt="Image credit: https://www.tumblr.com/register/follow/newoldstockphotos" /></p>Benjamin D. KilleenThe Amtrak overlooks a lot of cornfields in between Chicago and St. Louis. Of course, there are also creek beds, interstates, and cul-de-sacs; minor league baseball stadiums; and a graffitied concrete beam at Union station which reads, “Have a great day.” However, the train’s predominant view consists of corn: row after row of that patchwork Midwest quilt knitted in the Earth. It was strangely captivating.How to Get Pinned2020-12-26T00:00:00-05:002020-12-26T00:00:00-05:00https://benjamindkilleen.com/posts/2020/12/how-to-get-pinned<p>Eight months out of the year, most people called it the multipurpose room. It had the proportions
of a dance studio or a chemistry lab – although it was neither – and inhabited the same basement
hallway as the weight room and the lockers, containing neither weights nor changing areas. Two
collapsible pitching cages hinted at one function, tucked against the near side wall, but for the
most part their rolled-up turf served as a convenient bench for changing out of tennis shoes, not
in use. Above these, gray steel beams supported the corrugated ceiling, covered in an insulating
foam. The foam was peppered with tiny black dots, which once served as the only entertainment
during a mandatory screening of “Your Body,” that the Health teacher showed, using a TV cart as
wide as the doorway, well-equipped with both video-cassette and DVD players, minus one remote. We
sat on the floor, since the makeshift classroom had little in the way of seating. It was not, after
all, really a classroom.</p>
<p>Even during those eight months, however, the walls of the multipurpose room reminded visitors
exactly what that place became, for four long months, and really always was. Health had other
classrooms; the pitching cages could conceivably be moved upstairs; but the orange crash padding,
bolted into concrete and seemingly out of place between cheap, blue-white floor tiles and
pale fluorescent lights, was permanent. It really belonged. In later years, the room would take on
other fixed signifiers of the same function: a painted-orange “champions corner” in the back left,
a peg board and seven pull-up bars along one wall, and in the middle of these instruments a
hand-painted mural of the team’s logo emblazoned with our unofficial name, “Currahee Wrestling.”</p>
<p>The logo didn’t say “Statesmen” anywhere, although it maybe should have. The statesman was
Webster’s official mascot, a somewhat abstract figure for high school sports. The signature top hat
and twirling baton which adorned football players’ lettermen jackets had no obvious connection to
the idea of a civil servant and, in any case, struck everyone as meaningless if they made any
impression at all. Certainly, the statesman didn’t inspire us. We didn’t don “Statesmen Wrestling”
hoodies like plates of armor against the appraising glances of the Such-and-Such High School
Eagles, Wolves, and Wildcats that populate St. Louis County, and we certainly didn’t let loose that
vague, uninspired monicker like a wild war cry when nothing else could capture the primal blend of
camaraderie, pride, and dread which descended after weigh-ins. Instead, we grunted “Currahee,” and
everyone who heard us wondered what it meant.</p>
<p>To this day, I don’t know exactly what inspired Coach to change the name, separating his wrestlers
from the other sports at Webster. Perhaps he objected to the gendered nature of the term, which
would have excluded our female members in spirit if not in practice. I do not know. Perhaps the
vaguely nationalistic flavor of a “state’s man” rubbed him the wrong way, possessing too large a
meaning and also too little for young wrestlers to carry with them on the mat. Coach James Lemay
preferred the meaning of “Currahee.” He chose the word based on an episode of <em>Band of Brothers</em>,
where the 101st Airborne runs the Currahee mountain: three miles up, three miles down. Derived from
a Cherokee word, “currahee” translates as “We stand alone together,” a fitting motto for a division
of paratroopers who dropped behind enemy lines with no support except each other. James Lemay
wanted it to fit his wrestling team as well, when they walked out on the mat.</p>
<p>On the first day of practice, the multipurpose room transformed into the wrestling room. The team
would drag the mats out from the storage closet and tape them down, to remain there for the next
four months. This was no simple matter. Each mat weighed more than seven freshmen could carry and
offered little in the way of handholds. It required extraordinary coordination of mostly new
recruits to maneuver through the doorway, which the upperclassmen provided by directing the younger
boys and two or three young women, also new, to grip the sides and tilt it back, slowly. Lift with
the legs. Don’t scrape on the door handle.</p>
<p>Eventually, we finished the mats and got ready for practice. We shed our shoes and applied
antibacterial foam to arm and leg and face and neck. For warmup, we jogged for ten minutes in a
tight circle around the room, during which exercise the coaches, the upperclassmen, and the
occasional daring freshman shouted, “Ten, ten, and ten.”</p>
<p>Instantly, everybody dropped, as if the coach or boy or girl had been a commanding officer of our
namesake paratroopers announcing incoming fire, and fell into ten push-ups, ten crunches, and ten
v-ups. We did them quickly. No one wanted to be the last one with his back on the mat, still
counting dots on the ceiling.</p>
<p>After warmup, one of the wrestlers led the stretch. Ten seconds touch your toes. Ten seconds arm
circles. Down on the ground and crack your back, then bridge up on the back of your head. Keep that
head up. Neck stretch. Roll it out.</p>
<p>“All right, circle up,” Lemay said when we had finished. By this he meant gather in a tight
semicircle in the center of the mat, either standing or sitting at attention, on one knee. You
weren’t supposed to sit at ease, on your butt. Some of the freshmen didn’t know. They quickly
learned by imitation.</p>
<p>James Lemay stood in the center. The man had a commanding presence without really trying. His
workout shirts were never big enough for his biceps, which were tattooed with some Chinese
characters and a stylized Boba Fett, all in black. He had a round face and a bald head that nestled
in his thick neck like a silverback gorilla’s. Cleanly shaven, the man looked almost cherubic, and
he smiled broadly at the number of new faces.</p>
<p>Lemay had a short speech on the first day. The longer speeches would come later, about pushing
through and eating right – not starving ourselves but not wolfing down a plate of brownies the
night before a meet either – and about the mentality of wrestling. The longer speeches always had
to do with mentality. But early on, short speeches left time for long conditioning, which was more
important.</p>
<p>“This is a hard sport,” he told us. “Every year, I ask myself if I should go easier on you
guys. Maybe then more of you would stick around. But then I would be doing you a disservice, when
you go out on that mat. If I don’t push you harder than you can push yourselves, that’s how you get
pinned. And then you’re the guy with his back on the mat still staring up at the ceiling, wondering
what the hell happened, while the other guy is getting his hand raised. Or girl.”</p>
<p>The upperclassmen nodded along with the speech, while a good number of freshmen wondered if we
should be here. I was one of them. Before that Fall, I had never even thought about wrestling. I
wasn’t particularly athletic, except for a recurring bout of springtime baseball, and had other
interests. I was awkward, bookish, and still carried fifteen pounds of baby fat underneath a curly
mop of reddish brown hair which could have been a bird’s nest. Really, I had no business stepping
foot in that single-purpose room at all, except perhaps for Health class, and in my gut I knew I
wouldn’t be there long. Somewhere, the back of my head was already planning how to quit with some
dignity, maybe join the chess club.</p>
<p>Practice had a rhythm to it. Lemay or one of the other coaches demonstrated a move, and everyone
emulated it. Shooting the leg, you wanted to plant your foot and propel over the attacking knee, to
grab their ankle. At first, we drilled against invisible legs in rows of eight, shooting successive
shots from the batting cages to the orange padding, rolling over each knee with smooth intensity
until we smacked into opposite wall, jogged back to the beginning.</p>
<p>New exercise: holding a squat position for two minutes at a time. On the mat, a wrestler maintains
a low stance that sets their quads on fire but made them more difficult to attack. You could always
tell when your opponent was ready to get pinned when they started standing taller, exhausted.</p>
<p>Next move: sprawl. When someone shot on you, you wanted to get your legs out of the way. You did
that by slamming your hip down on their shoulder, with the full intention of slamming it into the
mat. Without an actual attacker, that was what we did. Coach shouted, “Sprawl!” and two dozen hips
hit the ground like an avalanche, only to pop back up, squat low for another fifteen, fourteen
seconds before – “Sprawl!” – we dropped again.</p>
<p>At this point, even the upperclassmen struggled. The whole team was tired. We straightened whenever
we felt like we could get away with it, and our clean sprawls devolved into half-hearted
flops. Now, if not before, we knew why wrestling was the only sport at Webster that didn’t
hold tryouts. It didn’t need them.</p>
<p>At the end of it, practice still wasn’t over. “Start running,” Lemay said.</p>
<p>Wearily, all of us got up off the mat and started a light jog around the edge of it. Coach stood in
the middle of us, arms folded, contemplating how to end practice. We had another fifteen
minutes. He seemed content to let us run it out.</p>
<p>Then one of the seniors shouted, at the top of his lungs, “CURRAHEE!”</p>
<p>It was so surprising that the freshmen didn’t know what to do. The response came from sophomores
and juniors, who echoed, “Currahee!”</p>
<p>“CURRAHEE,” the senior repeated.</p>
<p>This time we all joined in. “Currahee!”</p>
<p>“WE,” he continued.</p>
<p>“We!”</p>
<p>“STAND.”</p>
<p>“Stand!”</p>
<p>“ALONE.”</p>
<p>“Alone!”</p>
<p>“TOGETHER.” The senior’s breath almost gave out on the final syllable, but we echoed him all the same.</p>
<p>“TOGETHER!”</p>
<p>We kept running until the clock said 5:25. One of the freshmen even dared to lead another round of
“Currahee.” One of the young women, I remember.</p>
<p>“All right, circle up,” said Lemay, when it was finished. He seemed satisfied.</p>
<p>He spent the last five minutes of practice going over logistics. Practice started at 3:00 P.M.. It
ended at 5:30, but everyone should shower after, so plan on being done by 6 P.M.. Saturday
practices were optional, but unless you had a family reunion somewhere in Kansas, you should
probably be there. No ride? Run. Too far? Coach or one of the upperclassmen would come and pick you
up and bring you breakfast if necessary. Lemay didn’t want anyone left out.</p>
<p>I listened in a daze, breathing hard. I barely heard when Lemay called us into a huddle.</p>
<p>“Now, practice is over,” he told us, with all our hands in the middle. “But do you see that
corner?”</p>
<p>It was the back left.</p>
<p>“That’s the champions corner,” Lemay said. “Practice is over, but if you want, you can do fifty
pushups at the end of practice. Totally up to you. Now, ‘Currahee’ on three. One, two, three–”</p>
<p>“CURRAHEE!” we shouted.</p>
<p>I couldn’t believe practice was over. It felt like eight hours, not two and a half. The next day
would be worse. We wouldn’t have to waste time at the beginning, pulling out the mats. I thought
about quitting again. I didn’t think I could do this every day, for the next four months. The
prospect of a tournament was terrifying. I didn’t know any of the other boys.</p>
<p>But instead of just leaving, I jogged over to the champions corner. Fifty pushups wasn’t that many,
and you could take however long you wanted. Quite a few wrestlers were already there, clustered
tightly. They counted to fifty with bated breaths, some of them rocking the reps like it was a
race, others taking their time. They broke fifty into five sets of ten, two of twenty five, or two
of twenty and one ten. It didn’t matter. They still did them together.</p>
<p>Without my asking, one of them made room for me. I threw my hips back and dropped to the mat. I
could barely lift myself back up again, but I did. Fifty push-ups later, I headed off the mat. I
would be back. I still believed I would probably quit eventually, but I could do one more day, one
more week.</p>
<p>Currahee, after all.</p>
<p><img src="/images/lemay.jpg" alt="Coach James Lemay, at the 2015 Missouri State Championships." /></p>Benjamin D. KilleenEight months out of the year, most people called it the multipurpose room. It had the proportions of a dance studio or a chemistry lab – although it was neither – and inhabited the same basement hallway as the weight room and the lockers, containing neither weights nor changing areas. Two collapsible pitching cages hinted at one function, tucked against the near side wall, but for the most part their rolled-up turf served as a convenient bench for changing out of tennis shoes, not in use. Above these, gray steel beams supported the corrugated ceiling, covered in an insulating foam. The foam was peppered with tiny black dots, which once served as the only entertainment during a mandatory screening of “Your Body,” that the Health teacher showed, using a TV cart as wide as the doorway, well-equipped with both video-cassette and DVD players, minus one remote. We sat on the floor, since the makeshift classroom had little in the way of seating. It was not, after all, really a classroom.How to Have an Opinion2020-11-10T00:00:00-05:002020-11-10T00:00:00-05:00https://benjamindkilleen.com/posts/2020/11/how-to-have-an-opinion<p>Professor Lyons possessed the sort of casual self-importance which only former consulting attorneys
and underpaid professors are capable of. He had elbow patches on his jacket. His favorite movie was
<em>The Big Lebowski</em>. Every day, he carried a leather messenger bag stuffed with graded papers,
syllabi, that day’s reading, and several cans of green La Croix, which he drank periodically
throughout the class while one or another “that kid” spouted their opinion – as if the
Wisconsonian sparkling water lent him willpower to listen.</p>
<p>The students in my section were ill-prepared for the likes of Prof. Lyons. We had just spent the
Winter quarter under the tutelage of an easygoing Indian man who brought coffee and donuts to class
and seldom bothered with who had actually done the reading. Naturally, we loved him. Although no
one ever intended to skip a single sentence of Rousseau, very often Analysis midterms or modul UN
prep had higher priority in terms of long-term importance. By about seventh week, however, almost
everyone had gotten used to the kind man’s leniency, and an awkward silence stretched for thirty
seconds or more after he asked, “What is the Third Estate?” to no avail.</p>
<p>The kind man almost always answered his own questions, a fact which everyone knew but that didn’t
stop us from squirming uncomfortably while he waited for someone to volunteer a response. He never
called on someone, perhaps afraid of embarrassing them. At the time, I was grateful. Afterward,
though, I wondered whether the man did us a disservice. His teaching was unobtrusive – on our
minds as well as our priorities – and so we learned comparatively little.</p>
<p>Not so, with David P. Lyons.</p>
<p>On the first day of class, Prof. Lyons informed us that he believed in fairness, and since
propriety dictated that he go by his title, we should go by ours. In his class, I would be
“Mr. Killeen,” not merely “Benjamin.” Similarly, I came to know my classmates almost exclusively as
“Mr. Tyler” or “Ms. Bell,” et cetera, requiring the slightly awkward exchange of given names on the
instances we met each other outside class.</p>
<p>Prof. Lyons’ syllabus let us know what kind of class he intended to teach. Unlike his predecessor,
he intended to call on someone if the conversation lulled. He might ask about the importance of
associations in Tocqueville or what Nietzsche meant by master versus slave morality. If the answer
failed to impress, he reserved the right to ask any one of us to step outside and not return until
we had done the reading. He never exercised this right to its fullest extent – actually tossing
someone out – but the fear of such humiliation motivated us to prioritize his assigned readings as
much as any midterm.</p>
<p>However, I do remember one occasion where he came very close. “Mr. Daniels,” he said, at the
beginning of class. “What does Marx mean by relative surplus value?”</p>
<p>The poor student grasped at straws while Lyons prompted his slipshod memory, all the while claiming
that he couldn’t remember because he had read the passage so late at night. Maybe he was telling
the truth, or maybe he never touched the reading. Either way, he failed to impress. Gradually, a
deep sense of dread settled over his empathetic comrades, some of us too well aware that on another
morning we might have been just as unlucky. Helpless, we waited for the moment when David Lyons
would exercise his right.</p>
<p>Finally, Prof. Lyons had had enough. “Mr. Daniels,” he said. “I’m going to ask you this, and I
trust you’ll answer honestly.” He paused.</p>
<p>Mr. Daniels nodded for him to continue.</p>
<p>“Did you do the reading?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” said Mr. Daniels, but his tone of voice sounded unsure, as if he asked “Yes?” rather than
asserted it.</p>
<p>The professor took no notice. “All right then,” he said, and he opened the question to the room.</p>
<p>It must be understood that Prof. Lyons viewed his syllabus not so much as a guide for students to
do well in his class but rather as a social contract, which all of us agreed to by staying in the
course. I should mention that not everyone did stay. The girl in Model UN dropped David Lyons on
day one, but he didn’t seem to mind.</p>
<p>Later in the quarter, I happened to run into her. “I wasn’t down for that,” she told me, when I
asked about the class. “Just, no.”</p>
<p>On its own, a harsh syllabus perhaps means very little, since so many professors treat the document
as more aspirational guidelines than actual rules. More Declaration of Independence, as it were,
than Constitutional Amendment 27. The difference was that Prof. Lyons enforced his syllabus. Or
rather, he readily reminded us of the particulars we agreed to, on the occasions we forgot.</p>
<p>I remember one instance in particular. Ms. Bell had begun the discussion by disagreeing strongly
with Marx’s definition of value, namely that an object’s value depends solely on the labor that
goes into its production. Prof. Lyons didn’t want to debate the issue. After several attempts to
redirect the conversation, he reached into his messenger bag, withdrew a copy of the syllabus, and
got up from his chair. Ms. Bell kept speaking. Lyons marched around the table to her seat, which
was just next to mine, and laid the syllabus in front of her.</p>
<p>He pointed to a specific paragraph. “Read that,” he said, interrupting her in mid-sentence, “and
if, after reading it, you still feel that your question merits time in my class, I will be happy to
address it.”</p>
<p>I could see the paragraph he pointed to. I couldn’t help but read it alongside Ms. Bell, while
Prof. Lyons returned to his seat. It read:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All of the texts we will read this quarter come from times very different from the present. As a
result, the authors of these texts will make at least some claims with which you will no doubt
disagree. When that happens, keep in mind that all the texts we will read this quarter contain
some of the most important thoughts the human race has ever produced. Consequently, when
disagreements between an author and you arise, try to understand (1) why an author has made the
claim with which you disagree, (2) the broader purpose or purposes the author might be seeking to
accomplish by making that claim, (3) what is at stake in both that claim and your disagreement
with it, and (4) the weaknesses and limits of your own position. The more honest you are with
yourself on this last point, the greater the benefit you will derive from our readings.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After reading this paragraph, Ms. Bell fell silent. At length, the conversation moved on, and when she
spoke again, after some time, she did not raise the same complaint.</p>
<p>Over the quarter, I got the sense that Prof. Lyons cared more deeply about imparting some sense of
truth on his students than about the particular content he was teaching. I do not mean “truths,”
such as those particular truths that Marx or Tocqueville put forth, but “truth” as a concept in of
itself: the idea that some positions are inherently correct, others are wrong, and still others can
be argued. Recognizing these categories is difficult. Yet Lyons clearly considered it a much more
crucial skill than explaining anything John Stuart Mill had to say in <em>On Liberty</em>. Often, he
quoted the line from his favorite movie, “That’s just your opinion, man,” sometimes ironically,
often directed toward himself, and now and then as a gentle reminder that one or all of us might
simply be wrong.</p>
<p>Of course, David Lyons himself had some very strong opinions. In “Guidelines for Written Work,” a
separate document which he distributed alongside the syllabus, Prof. Lyons listed several
“contemporary barbarisms” of modern writing. These included the word “impact” used for anything
other than physical objects literally striking one another, and “proactive”, which made one sound
like a management consultant trying to fit more syllables into every word. Plain, honest “active”
worked just as well. Lyons also disliked words like “incentivize” and “problematize,” which,
according to him, “add nothing to the English language” and “instead tend to rob the language of
other useful words and reduce the tools we have available for thinking about the world.” To break
such bad habits, Prof. Lyons removed one third of a letter grade for every instance of these
barbarisms.</p>
<p>I imagine Prof. Lyons would object to my characterizing his positions on writing as mere
opinion. Indeed, I believe that following the “Guidelines” made me a better writer. Yet the
distinction between these particular opinions and “just your opinion, man” illustrates the kind of
truth that Prof. Lyons cared so deeply about. Over the objections of his students, many of whom
felt that “impact” worked just fine as a synonym for “affect,” he imposed the guidelines because he
could support them. He pointed to the appendix of George Orwell’s essay, “<a href="https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app">The Principles of
Newspeak</a>” as the basis for his guidelines,
an elegant and enjoyable piece of persuasive writing which Orwell included in the appendix to
<em>1984</em>. Along with Prof. Lyons, I highly recommend it.</p>
<p>A different section of the Guidelines perhaps servers as a summary of David Lyons’s philosophy on
truth. At least, it speaks of the truth insofar as it can be argued. He advises any would-be writer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Avoid unfounded assertions. Occasionally students will simply claim that the world in which we
live, especially human life, is a certain way and then proceed to write a paper as though that
assumption were true. One problem with this approach is that most really interesting claims
about human life can be contested. Accordingly, when you feel tempted to write a statement like
“all human beings yearn for [insert nebulous value here],” ask yourself at least three
questions. First, how do I know such a claim is true? Second, might there be evidence that runs
counter to my claim? Third … what do I mean by [nebulous value]? You might then find yourself
highlighting the text in question and hitting “delete.” There is no shame in that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Prof. Lyons reviled weak opinions. This is not to say he never had any, I should think, but rather
that he worked hard to strengthen or remove them. He constructed his positions out of more atomic
truths, such as what Hume actually wrote, and sought out others’ arguments to test against his
own. Thus, one could hardly say to David Lyons, “Yeah, well, that’s just your opinion, man,”
because it was seldom just <em>his</em> and never <em>just</em> an opinion.</p>
<p>On the other hand, David Lyons readily admitted when multiple arguments made sense, even if he
preferred one above the rest. On the last day of class, the assigned reading consisted of neither
Marx nor Nietszhe, nor even Hannah Arendt. Instead, we discussed the graphic novel <em>Watchmen</em>, by
Alan Moore.</p>
<p>“So,” Prof. Lyons began. “Who is the hero of <em>Watchmen</em>?”</p>
<p>This was the essay prompt on <em>Watchmen</em>. It was deceptively open-ended, with any number of possible
answers. Should one choose Dr. Manhattan, the blue man with god-like power to manipulate matter?
What about Ozymandius, who undoubtedly saved the most lives but sacrificed millions in the process?
Should a hero believe in right and wrong? If so, then the black-and-white Rorshach stands alone by
sticking to his principles.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the choice depended on one’s definition of “hero,” but that didn’t mean that every
choice was reasonable. We would be graded on the soundness of our argument. Thus, Prof. Lyons urged
us not to argue on behalf of Edward Blake, the amoral vigilante with little regard for human life,
whose grisly murder paints the opening pages of <em>Watchmen</em> red. Edward Blake was not the hero,
plain and simple. Any opinion that argued as much would likely fall short of the high standard by
which David Lyons estimated truth. That is to say: reasoning.</p>
<p>Opinions based on such a firm foundation are not so easily dismissed as <em>the dude</em>’s oft-repeated
abnegation would like to assert. The choice of <em>Watchmen</em>’s hero was definitely up for debate, as
most matters of opinion are, but that didn’t make every position debatable. No one claimed the
comedian as their hero. Moreover, no one felt so strongly about their own position that they were
unwilling to adopt someone else’s definition of “hero,” in order to understand their
argument. Thus, we reached a closer approximation of truth, on that hot Tuesday morning in May,
while David Lyons listened thoughtfully, all the while drinking his La Croix.</p>
<p>David Lyons, for his part, thought the hero of <em>Watchmen</em> was Bernard, the ordinary man who sold
newspapers on a street corner in New York. He told us at the end of class, not particularly
bothered that no one shared his opinion.</p>
<p>“Have a good summer,” he added. “Keep in touch.”</p>
<p><img src="/images/regenstein.jpeg" alt="The stacks in the Regenstein Library, where I wrote my papers for Classics." /></p>
<hr />
<p><em>The names of the students mentioned have been altered to respect their privacy.</em></p>Benjamin D. KilleenProfessor Lyons possessed the sort of casual self-importance which only former consulting attorneys and underpaid professors are capable of. He had elbow patches on his jacket. His favorite movie was The Big Lebowski. Every day, he carried a leather messenger bag stuffed with graded papers, syllabi, that day’s reading, and several cans of green La Croix, which he drank periodically throughout the class while one or another “that kid” spouted their opinion – as if the Wisconsonian sparkling water lent him willpower to listen.How to Hold Office Hours2020-10-05T00:00:00-04:002020-10-05T00:00:00-04:00https://benjamindkilleen.com/posts/2020/10/how-to-hold-office-hours<p>Professor O’Leary wore circular spectacles and a wide brimmed wizard’s hat. Actually, it may have
been a modest bucket hat, but the man so much resembled a wizard himself that the gray conical cap
seems more likely in my mind.</p>
<p>Peter, as he preferred to be called, spent Tuesdays on campus. He taught a number of courses in
creative writing, including the succinctly titled <em>Wizards</em>, and the much beloved <em>Intro to Genres:
Science Fiction</em>. Among undergrads, <em>Wizards</em> and <em>Sci-fi</em> had an awe-inducing reputation. I just
barely managed to secure a seat in both, first by carefully planning my schedule (second years get
priority for the arts) and later by emailing Peter two minutes after classes dropped to check if
any seats had opened up. Eventually one did.</p>
<p>Peter’s core courses were highly sought-after but not for the usual reasons. Already burnt out
pre-meds and comp-sci majors preferred to fill our arts requirement with something somewhat
lighter. We felt we had insufficient energy, between lab reports and breadth-first-search and
figuring out what Hobbes meant by the “State of Nature,” to take on an unnecessary challenge. <em>Art
History</em>, as an alternative, reportedly involved mere rote memorization; the drama department
offerings had an almost legendary dearth of weekly readings. <em>Wizards</em>, on the other hand, assigned
a different book for every Tuesday, on top of writing assignments for workshop. Yet Peter’s
waitlist was never empty.</p>
<p>Perhaps, this was because the pre-meds and comp-sci majors desperately needed a class like
<em>Wizards</em> or <em>Sci-fi</em>, demanding though they were. We needed to create a space, within the highly
structured world of academia, for something we loved. <em>Wizards</em> made room to think about old sages
with walking staffs and pointy hats with the same rigor as delta-epsilon proofs on dusty
chalkboards. While <em>Intermediate Mechanics</em> introduced first order constraints, <em>Sci-fi</em> gave us
free reign of the cosmos. Peter welcomed these students warmly, perhaps understanding what drove us
to take his course better than we understood ourselves. At the beginning of the quarter, he had all
of us introduce ourselves: who we were, where we were from, and what we studied. By the end, he
always wore a delighted grin at the diversity of majors in attendance.</p>
<p>In both classes, the professor conducted on-on-one meetings with his students. Lacking an office on
campus, he invited us to stroll around the Midway, a twenty-five or thirty minute circuit, in spite
of the purportedly unpleasant Chicago winter. The chill added urgency to our conversations. He
would apologize for the snow before he asked about our hometowns, our novels-in-progress. As we
shivered in the wind, he listened to our answers. Peter O’Leary possessed that rare quality, which
is so common among authors and yet so rare among professors, of being an attentive listener. For
young authors, used to scrawling their manuscripts with the bedroom door closed and the curtains
drawn, late at night, after the folks fell asleep in front of Netflix box, and the dog stretched
languidly across that patch of hardwood floor above the boiler, for us his engagement felt
unreal. Also, it meant the world.</p>
<p>For final projects, Peter gave two options. First, we could polish our workshop pieces and assemble
a portfolio, which was typical of creative writing courses. Alternatively, he encouraged us to
submit personal projects or partial manuscripts, as long as they were somewhat related to the
course material. The single-spaced pages of constructive, <em>usable</em> feedback which resulted from
these submissions are, I imagine, more scrutinized by his students than lines of the Illiad by
classical scholars.</p>
<p>Having written various pieces of a novel that Winter quarter, I decided to submit a first chapter
for the final project. In the excerpt below, Peter identifies the strengths in my writing, as he
did for every student, before he moved onto some pointed criticisms, which I will omit—although
there were many—for the sake of brevity, generality, and some non-negligible insecurity.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The things that work avidly in this chapter are many. Some of the things that really stand out to
me are the energetic opening sequence, which has an absorbing cinematic quality. Philip Pullman,
in his essays, regularly cites something he learned from novelist, playwright, and director David
Mamet, who says the question he always asks himself when writing something is “Where do I put the
camera?” He means not to treat his writing as a preview to a screenplay but to be thinking always
about visual lines of sight and what the reader will be seeing as they read. In the opening of
the chapter, it’s compellingly easy to visualize what’s happening because you seem instinctively
to know where to put the camera. — Peter O’Leary</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I imagine such poignant feedback took some time to write, but Peter understood its value. His notes
inspired me to keep working on the novel, which at that time was a daunting prospect. I had “more
serious” matters demanding my energy, what with comp-sci research and graduate school looming, and
the little I’d written consisted of amorphous fragments not necessarily worth investing in. Peter
O’Leary encouraged me that they were. He understood, perhaps, that the pre-meds or comp-sci majors
like me needed an extra push to pursue something we valued if it was outside our chosen field. It
took someone like him, telling us, in order to believe we should.</p>
<p><img src="/images/midway.jpeg" alt="The Midway in winter." /></p>Benjamin D. KilleenProfessor O’Leary wore circular spectacles and a wide brimmed wizard’s hat. Actually, it may have been a modest bucket hat, but the man so much resembled a wizard himself that the gray conical cap seems more likely in my mind.How to go Casting2020-08-24T00:00:00-04:002020-08-24T00:00:00-04:00https://benjamindkilleen.com/posts/2020/08/how-to-go-casting<p>The lake is fifteen minutes from my parents’ house, which makes up for some of its other
qualities. Dense thickets and collapsing mud walls encircle the water, interrupted by abandoned
camping chairs and a mossy picnic table, which sinks into the Missouri mud. After a rainstorm, the
Meramec surges into the lake, depositing Anheuser Busch cans and Marlboro butts all along the
shallow cover, where bass like to hide. A thick, foamy film clings to the surface. Mercury levels
make the fish not-quite-edible. A park pavillion overlooks the scenery on one end, a boat ramp on
the other.</p>
<p>Dad inherited our boat from his brother’s father-in-law. “Tillie,” as the old patriarch dubbed her,
comes from modest bass boat stock. She has three wooden benches and an aluminum hull, which tends
to amplify our footsteps, scaring the fish away. One bench sports a cool fisher’s swivel
chair. Sawed-off PVC pipes serve as fishing-pole holders on the gunnel, which we never use. In her
first life, Tillie was better suited to catfishing on the Mississippi, but Dad dislikes the catfish
for sport. He fishes for the fight, not the frying pan.</p>
<p>When Dad and I decide to go fishing, usually at an inconvenient time in conflict with the family
dinner, we haul Tillie out of Dad’s one-car woodshop-garage and hook her to the Toyata. The whole
process takes less than twenty minutes. On the drive, I play hip hop or alt-rock, which Dad
sometimes enjoys, until we reach the river valley. Sometimes we talk in the car. Sometimes we wait
until we’re out on the water.</p>
<p>The lake, which used to be a quarry, has a strict “no-gas-motor” policy. This means that our humble
Tillie, so often the runt in a sea of Bass-Pro-purebreds, is actually the top dog in the midst of
canoers and paddle-boarders. She skates effortlessly from cove to cove thanks to a foot-pedal
trolling motor, powered by a car battery. Once, Dad hooked up the cables wrong, and we couldn’t
figure out why we were having such a hard time getting the boat to go forward. But most of the
time, Tillie is the envy of every fishing kayak we pass.</p>
<p>We were once in the same shoes, with less space and greater patience to work with. We caught the
same number of fish.</p>
<p>“Any luck?” Dad asks the other fishers.</p>
<p>“Not today. You?”</p>
<p>“Not a bite.”</p>
<p>The lake isn’t well known as any great fishing hole. In fact, the longest running joke in my family
is to call it “going casting.” It’s only “fishing” when you catch something.</p>
<p>Instead, Dad takes the opportunity to catch up on my life out of town. He asks about my research
and my writing. He mentions he’s been running with my sister. I’ve gotten into bouldering. The
counseling practice is looking for a bigger space. A paper that I worked on was just published. He
talks about the marriage workshop he taught with Mom and how it went well. I tell him about the
woman I’m dating, and did he ever really know what he was doing, at twenty-three? “Not at all,” he
says.</p>
<p>Mostly, we just talk.</p>
<p>Over the years, Dad and I have made a game of casting. We like to think it makes us better at
fishing, but we haven’t carried out any controlled experiment. The game is simple. As we cruise
around with our trolling motor, we cast as close as we can to the shore. The trick is not to get
hooked on a branch, which one accomplishes by flicking the wrist and flipping the bail just so. The
game stems from our competitive natures, I know, but it also creates a space for long
conversations. It results in many snags, few fish, and a great sense of accomplishment.</p>
<p><img src="/images/valley_park.jpeg" alt="Valley Park Lake" /></p>Benjamin D. Killeenkilleen@jhu.eduThe lake is fifteen minutes from my parents’ house, which makes up for some of its other qualities. Dense thickets and collapsing mud walls encircle the water, interrupted by abandoned camping chairs and a mossy picnic table, which sinks into the Missouri mud. After a rainstorm, the Meramec surges into the lake, depositing Anheuser Busch cans and Marlboro butts all along the shallow cover, where bass like to hide. A thick, foamy film clings to the surface. Mercury levels make the fish not-quite-edible. A park pavillion overlooks the scenery on one end, a boat ramp on the other.