Farewell ​to Moristotle & Co.

On Behalf of
Rolf Dumke

By His Daughter,
Sibylla Dumke,
from Olargues, France

Dear Morris, you have stimulated and showcased the works, ideas, expressions, writings, and pictures of all kinds of different and interesting people. One of them was my dear Dad, whose 82nd birthday would have been this July 16^th.

Highways and Lay-by’s

[Editor’s Note: Maik Strosahl is taking a rest, so I thought we’d revisit the interview he and I did on October 14, 2020.]

Interview:
Maik Strosahl,
poet, encourager
...trucker?

Interviewed by Moristotle

Maik Strosahl’s exquisite first poem on Moristotle & Co. appeared here a week ago today, and the second was scheduled for today...until I suggested that we have an interview instead, because I just had to get to know more about the poet who wrote “Irises across the Floor.”
    My questions arose from a short bio Maik sent me and from a reading of his first post on a blog he started last month. My questions are in italics.

Interview: Maik Strosahl, poet, encourager...

...trucker?
Interviewed by Moristotle

Maik Strosahl’s exquisite first poem on Moristotle & Co. appeared here a week ago today, and the second was scheduled for today...until I suggested that we have an interview instead, because I just had to get to know more about the poet who wrote “Irises across the Floor.”
    My questions arose from a short bio Maik sent me and from a reading of his first post on a blog he started last month. My questions are in italics.

In Remembrance Rolf Dumke

(July 16, 1941 - February 29, 2020)

A prolific writer

By Moristotle

In view of the passing of columnist Rolf Dumke, a former IBM colleague of mine sent a link to the list of Rolf’s prolific writings on WorldCat, “the world’s largest network of library content and services.” Here’s a link to Rolf’s list at Dumke, Rolf H. - WorldCat Identities.

In Remembrance of Rolf Dumke

(July 16, 1941 - February 29, 2020)

In gratitude for
“Growing Up in America”

By Moristotle

I learned yesterday from Rolf Dumke’s son Tristan that his father had passed away the day before, on February 29. Rolf suffered cardiac arrest at home the preceding Tuesday and was immediately taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, where doctors fought for his life for four days, to no avail.

Brexit: What happened?

A journalist explains it

By Rolf Dumke

I have enjoyed British novelist Ian McEwan’s excellent novels Amsterdam and Saturday and others because of their ironic, satirical portraits of British society. And now, in a February 1 article in The Guardian (“Brexit, the most pointless, masochistic ambition in our country’s history, is done”), McEwan tries to disperse the fog of nationalistic populism, or “populist stardust” that has confused debate on Brexit in the UK. In the attempt, he enumerates more than enough reasons to convince me that Brexit was a huge mistake, but how Brexit nevertheless happened remains open to discussion.

Movie Review: Apocalypse Now (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola’s failed translation of Joseph Conrad

By Rolf Dumke

I found Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) wonderful. But I think that his celebrated Apocalypse Now (1979) contains too much slaughter. And, according to a recent article in The Guardian, Coppola agrees so far as to say, “Apocalypse Now has stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people. That’s not anti-war.”

Growing Up in America

Bright College Years at Yale

By Rolf Dumke

When I applied to Yale for admission in 1960, I was one of the top boys in a big graduating class at Shaw High in East Cleveland, Ohio, where I had been learning about middle-class life in America. Yale would enlarge my scope of persons, values, and life styles to encompass the upper end of the social scale in America. During the first ten years following my immigration from Bavaria, beginning with my initial half-decade (1953-57) living in the Hough District in Cleveland, a notorious black ghetto, I would have zipped through three class environments in America: really lower, middle, and upper-middle to upper class.

Sankt Nikolaus im Kindergarten

By Rolf Dumke

As another Christmas approaches, I want to share three of my own, very personal experiences of Sankt Nikolaus. The title refers to the third of them.

British academics and elites

By Rolf Dumke

A recent interchange with a college friend over Fintan O’Toole’s essay in The New York Review of Books, “Britain: The End of a Fantasy” (June 10), brought to mind some personal impressions I formed of Britain while in Europe again after my time of growing up in America. These impressions support O’Toole’s contention that the Conservative Party’s Eton-Oxford elite have fiddled away Britain’s economic and political future out of pure intra-party skirmishes and arrogance.

Growing Up in the Two Americas

Another source of estrangement

By Rolf Dumke

Land vs. cities, as Tim Wallace’s November 16 NY Times article “The Two Americas of 2016^*” affirms, is an important division of American culture and politics, which have many sources for division.

Growing Up in America: American Movies in the 1950s (Part 4)

Publication delayed

By Rolf Dumke

[Editor’s Note: We simply could not finish Part 4 on time for publication today.]

And so...still to come:

Growing Up in America: American Movies in the 1950s (Part 3)

Hitchcock thrills with North by Northwest

By Rolf Dumke

Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful film North by Northwest (1959) is my top American thriller. It mixes up the life of Roger Thornhill – a smug advertising executive and self-contained ladies’ man, only hounded by his overly protective mother – with the violent world of cold-war espionage and counter espionage. In the bar of the Plaza Hotel, Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) – decked out, as usual, in a well-fitting suit – is called to the telephone by a bellboy and becomes entangled by mistake in a net of spies and counterspies.

Growing Up in America: American Movies in the 1950s (Part 2)

Billy Wilder, itchy and hot for Marilyn

By Rolf Dumke

The Seven Year Itch (1955). This film must have excited millions of adolescents and men in America and in the world in the last sixty years. It has an iconic scene etched in my memory. Marilyn Monroe is standing on an iron grate before a shop in New York City when a rumbling subway thrusts its way through the tunnel below, causing cool air to explode upward through the grate to swirl up her wide, white summer dress. She tries to push it down, to contain the swirling skirt and limit exposure of her thighs, smiling and giggling in delight, because the cool blast is so pleasant on a hot day.

Growing Up in America: American Movies in the 1950s (Part 1)

America in 3‑D, shaken and stirred

By Rolf Dumke

It Came from Outer Space (1953). This was the first American film I saw with my friend Gene in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square. We went because of Gene’s enthusiasm for the new 3-D film technology and my interest in Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, which I had just read, after my local librarian’s nudge to read Verne’s adventure stories rather than the Black Stallion girl’s books.

Growing Up in America: American movies in the 1950s

Prolog

By Rolf Dumke

Movies in the 1950s were an intoxicating and disturbing experience for an immigrant boy. They exposed the psychic underbelly of an America disturbed by Freud, sex, women, and crime; troubled by the Cold War struggle between patriotic Americans and communist traitors; haunted by Ray Bradbury’s and Orson Welles’s impending attacks by aliens from outer space; and unbalanced by the drama in American high schools that created or cemented social barriers, allocating dramatically different life chances among its students.

We are bringing back named recurring columns

Starting in August

By Moristotle

[Note: I’ve decided to refer to myself as “Moristotle.” That is, after all, who I am.]

We have decided to return to naming recurring columns in the sidebar^*. The reason is simple: a number of members of the staff confessed that they needed recurring columns to motivate them to write more things for the blog. And they cited a need for encouragement from me (some called it nagging) to get with it and submit something!

Growing Up in America

Jazz

By Rolf Dumke

[Links to previously published installments appear at the bottom.]

In contrast to my usually detailed memories of childhood experiences, I have few memories of my life in St. Paul’s Lutheran School in the 5th and 6th grades, which were taught by a strict, small and mousy man who drilled his pupils in arithmetic.

Growing Up in America

St. Paul’s and girls

By Rolf Dumke

[Links to previously published installments appear at the bottom.]

Notwithstanding environmental, social, and moral problems of life in and around our house in Linwood Avenue and E. 55th Street, I grew up attending a well-structured Lutheran school for the four years from 5th through 8th grades. St. Paul’s Lutheran Elementary School was located up on E. 55th, above Superior Avenue. I graduated with top grades and was awarded at our graduation ceremony the cherished blue letter P for top sportsman of the graduating class, making my parents proud.

Is vast inequality necessary?

Paul Krugman says no

By Rolf Dumke

Economist Paul Krugman’s January 15 piece in the NY Times, “Is Vast Inequality Necessary?” is a very readable argument explaining the rise of inequality in the US since the 1960s as a combination of forces: