Professor Chiasson's speech to class of 2010
I want to thank the class of 2010 for asking me to speak to you today, at this most glorious time of the year, in this most gorgeous spot, as you get ready to leave the great College you love. [As some of you know, today's speaker was to be one of the world's best and funniest counselors, Ann Velenchik. Ann works the way customs works: she checked you in, four years ago at orientation, made you declare all your pettinesses and myths about yourself, straightened you up, lightened you up, and sent you off into Wellesley-land. She's recovering now from illness, and so I'm working customs for her.] It is a little daunting to be handed this great responsibility. Luckily, you are drunk.
So, en route to your life, I wanted to give you some advice you could actually use. It's hard, because I'm not an advice guy. I'm not big on generalizations. If I were to give you advice, it would be something so specific as to be in fact useless. I could tell you, for example, to order the chicken cheesesteak at Kountry Kart Deli on Main Street when you visit Burlington, Vermont, my home town. I commend it to you: the shaved chicken breast and melted american cheese, the tangy sweetness of the grilled onions, the spongy roll soaking up the juices. But you may never visit Burlington. You may be a vegetarian. You maybe, frankly, are about to puke.
Or, I could recommend a piece of music. I could say, go listen to Naive Melody by the Talking Heads, either the live version from Jonathan Demme's consummate concert film Stop Making Sense or, if you prefer, the studio version, on Speaking in Tongues. You might already know and love that song. It sometimes seems to me that I have lived whole years inside that song. What I know about inhabiting resignation, allowing sadness to turn over very, very subtly into sweetness, about the value for others of cheering oneself up, I learned from that song. But you might not like it; certainly I can imagine someone's finding David Byrne's manner a little odd, a little distracting.
Or a film. I could say, go watch the 1962 proto-sci-fi film by the great French director Chris Marker le jettee. But you might not agree with me that it is a masterpiece. For one thing, it's not even really a movie: aside from a single sublime sequence where a woman opens her eyes, it is otherwise just still photos strung together with a voice-over. But there are faces in that film that I will never, ever forget, that I think of every day.
Speaking of faces, I could, if I were giving you advice, tell you to go and look at the great portrait by the German painter Gerhard Richter of his niece Betty, from 1991. What an unusual portrait it is: for millenia, artists have done portraits of people facing them. Richter is the first painter I know of to have had his subject turn away. What we see is the back of Betty's head, her hair gathered into a bun, and the astounding cream and raspberry colored sweatshirt she wears.
These are all very specific things, things you may never even have the opportunity to experience. But this is my point, exactly. I want to encourage you today to develop an archive of free or inexpensive things you can safely want. I want you to want them, and I want you to devote what would seem an imprudent amount of your time getting them. I don't mean fame, or success by any conventional measure. I mean this: Things to eat, things to listen to, things to watch, things to see. When I look at my life, the facts, including the fact of having been to college, then graduate school, seem very abstract. I don't remember much about my version of the moment you are experiencing now. It seems to me we had a senior lunch, like this one, and I'm sure we had a speaker. I couldn't tell you who that was, or a single thing he or she said. May you, too, live a life blissfully free of even the slightest recollection of me.
But I can tell you what I liked to eat in those days. In Amherst, Massachusetts, there is a pizza place called Antonio's, a place with extraordinary slices, some of them quite demented, like a slice with spaghetti and meatballs on top of it. Let me say that again: a slice of pizza with spaghetti and meatballs on top. I will allow you to sketch the relative state of sobriety of a person who craves such a thing. Nevertheless, it exists. As does something called the 'Roni calzone, from DP Dough, on south pleasant street: a kind of edible football with cheese and pepperoni inside of it. Do yourself the favor: 413-256-1616. At my class day, I am certain that I either had eaten one of those things or was intending to do so. And probably I had a little work to do, later that day, getting myself mentally ready to tackle the 'roni.
I can say with almost total certainty that, in the days leading up to my commencement, I was looking at a book I owned about Joseph Cornell boxes. Cornell, perhaps you know this, lived with his mother and disabled brother in a house on the amazingly named Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, where, using old materials he found in city antiques shops and markets, he assembled a homemade sense of the world in the form of little wood and glass boxes. Images of those boxes used to keep me company at boring occasions, and to me, in those days, practically everything was a boring occasion.
As I recall those few days surrounding my commencement, the Cornell, the 'roni, the music I loved--mainly Minutemen's amazing double lp Double Nickels on the Dime, and the first few verses of Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna," (ain't it just like the night to play tricks/when you're trying to be so quiet) plus, of course, the books and (I am intentionally not mentioning poetry) the poetry I carried around and had memorized, I don't remember any of the official pomp and circumstance. My head was pretty full, my stomach too, of things I craved and could have either for free or very cheaply. This was even before the internet, mind you--I had seen the Chris Marker film exactly once, in the basement of Frost library. Today, I sometimes watch it, or part of it, a few times a week, on my phone.
Things to eat, things to listen to, things to watch, things to read. This is the primary material in life. And friendships, and love, are at their best when they hold this stuff in common. Whenever I see my good friend Jeff, we talk about fried clams. Why, now? He lives in New York, I live here, but wherever we are, we could be on the moon, we talk about fried clams. Is it because fried clams, especially those at Woodman's of Essex, in Essex, MA, are sublime, the silky bellies playing against the crunch of the batter?
It is. Please don't puke.
But it is also because friendship, at least the kind I like to have, turns on a certain kind of over-specific pleasures that are non-exclusive (if I lost my job, I could still afford fried clams) and repeatable (Woodman's has been around for 100 years, and it ain't going nowhere). This is the pleasure of songs, of poems, of movies, of sandwiches. You want these things and, with a little effort, you can have them. People who know me know I hate to travel: in fact, I don't ever go anywhere. The reason is this: I so prize repeatability and thrift, that these underline, all bold, all caps special experiences leave me dry.
I am of a certain generation, old; from a certain part of the world, New England; and of a certain gender, male; such that earnest displays of emotion give me the creeps. It's just the sort of repressed creature I am. But add a fried clam to the mix, and I become a quivering jelly-mass of emotions: I believe in friendship, and ritual, and the moral right to pleasure, and the small stays against passing time. I feel, eating a fried clam with a buddy, that I could die that instant and have lived life to the fullest.
What you realize, when you get to be around my age, in the middle way, the middle of Dante's dark wood, is that you have a whole counter-biography composed of stuff you've eaten, read, listened to, looked at, in some ways more vivid than the "official" record--your collected addresses, your degrees, your job (or lack thereof) your big, fancy purchases. I don't have a lot, but what I do have that I've paid money for, usually, sadly, factors out. But this other trove of free things or extremely low-budget things is constantly on my mind. It pains me, some days, not to have listened to the Neko Case song "Star Witness"--literally pains me. And I could tell you some stories about driving long distances for food that would give you cause to worry about my sanity. Don't even get me started about Jenny's Special at Five Islands Lobster Co in Five Islands, Maine, about 5 hours from Wellesley if we leave RIGHT NOW.
Life is long, and you spend much of it alone. What you fill that aloneness with is up to you: you can fill it with envy, or jealousy, or resentment, or with mere logistical planning, or with worry--I certainly spend many, many moments lost in all of the above. Or you can treat your inner life as merely a zone for imagining your outer circumstances: I've done plenty of that, imagining prestige, success, worldly triumph, glory, and all the rest. But I hate myself when I do it, and sometimes, when I am very, very down, it is because I simply have lost the ways I once had of being carried away by all those free or low-budget and repeatable experiences I am recommending. It is true: one has days when even poetry, even a slice of pizza with spaghetti and meatballs on top, fail to console. My dear friends, when you hit those dark patches, get thee to the weirdest, most out of the way and amazing falafel place, and order what the chefs eat.
What I would say to you about Wellesley is this: you will never again take a test here or write a paper here. When you return to your dorm, five years from now, the freaky aliens greeting you will tolerate your curiosity, but don't go pokin' around in their stuff. Your specific impress upon this place will in some ways be gone. But what is rather amazing is this: Wellesley will have entered this category of pleasures that are free and low-budget (the alumnae office would prefer I cut that sentence) and repeatable. There will be experiences here you can do over and over, and doing them, at monthly, yearly, whatever intervals, will begin to mark time. And thinking about Wellesley will enter that special zone marked off for all things one wants and can have with a little effort, a LITTLE exertion, perhaps a little expenditure. Like a favorite song, or like a favorite sandwich.
So now we get to the advice part, which I hope you will ignore, since, I hope, you are too busy thinking about some song you love or sandwich you crave. My advice is this: in addition to finding low-budget sandwiches, works of art, songs, poems, and movies you love, find good swimming holes wherever you go. This can now be accomplished with depressing ease by using things like google earth, but in the old days, you had to drive, and interview the locals, and keep a look out for sunny breaks in the roadside woods. If you were successful, though, you were treated to something extraordinary: the coolest, cleanest water, some cliffs to jump off of. When you've found a swimming hole, you've uncovered the secret soul of a place. Then, usually, a bunch of scary looking rednecks show up.
One more thing: for a special occasion, just once every few years, go to Bemmelman's Bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, and have a martini. It is dark. The guy is playing a Cole Porter song on the piano. The walls were done by Ludwig Bemmelman, of Madeline fame. It isn't your life you are living, but you will be in the company of other people living some abstract idea of life nobody ever actually led.
They bring your drink in a little test-tube like receptacle sitting alongside the cocktail glass in a nest of ice. The potato chips are very salty so as to entice you to have a second drink. Ah, but if you do that, my friends, no piece of advice will have entered a zone where nobody's counsel, not even Ann's, will do you any good.
So, en route to your life, I wanted to give you some advice you could actually use. It's hard, because I'm not an advice guy. I'm not big on generalizations. If I were to give you advice, it would be something so specific as to be in fact useless. I could tell you, for example, to order the chicken cheesesteak at Kountry Kart Deli on Main Street when you visit Burlington, Vermont, my home town. I commend it to you: the shaved chicken breast and melted american cheese, the tangy sweetness of the grilled onions, the spongy roll soaking up the juices. But you may never visit Burlington. You may be a vegetarian. You maybe, frankly, are about to puke.
Or, I could recommend a piece of music. I could say, go listen to Naive Melody by the Talking Heads, either the live version from Jonathan Demme's consummate concert film Stop Making Sense or, if you prefer, the studio version, on Speaking in Tongues. You might already know and love that song. It sometimes seems to me that I have lived whole years inside that song. What I know about inhabiting resignation, allowing sadness to turn over very, very subtly into sweetness, about the value for others of cheering oneself up, I learned from that song. But you might not like it; certainly I can imagine someone's finding David Byrne's manner a little odd, a little distracting.
Or a film. I could say, go watch the 1962 proto-sci-fi film by the great French director Chris Marker le jettee. But you might not agree with me that it is a masterpiece. For one thing, it's not even really a movie: aside from a single sublime sequence where a woman opens her eyes, it is otherwise just still photos strung together with a voice-over. But there are faces in that film that I will never, ever forget, that I think of every day.
Speaking of faces, I could, if I were giving you advice, tell you to go and look at the great portrait by the German painter Gerhard Richter of his niece Betty, from 1991. What an unusual portrait it is: for millenia, artists have done portraits of people facing them. Richter is the first painter I know of to have had his subject turn away. What we see is the back of Betty's head, her hair gathered into a bun, and the astounding cream and raspberry colored sweatshirt she wears.
These are all very specific things, things you may never even have the opportunity to experience. But this is my point, exactly. I want to encourage you today to develop an archive of free or inexpensive things you can safely want. I want you to want them, and I want you to devote what would seem an imprudent amount of your time getting them. I don't mean fame, or success by any conventional measure. I mean this: Things to eat, things to listen to, things to watch, things to see. When I look at my life, the facts, including the fact of having been to college, then graduate school, seem very abstract. I don't remember much about my version of the moment you are experiencing now. It seems to me we had a senior lunch, like this one, and I'm sure we had a speaker. I couldn't tell you who that was, or a single thing he or she said. May you, too, live a life blissfully free of even the slightest recollection of me.
But I can tell you what I liked to eat in those days. In Amherst, Massachusetts, there is a pizza place called Antonio's, a place with extraordinary slices, some of them quite demented, like a slice with spaghetti and meatballs on top of it. Let me say that again: a slice of pizza with spaghetti and meatballs on top. I will allow you to sketch the relative state of sobriety of a person who craves such a thing. Nevertheless, it exists. As does something called the 'Roni calzone, from DP Dough, on south pleasant street: a kind of edible football with cheese and pepperoni inside of it. Do yourself the favor: 413-256-1616. At my class day, I am certain that I either had eaten one of those things or was intending to do so. And probably I had a little work to do, later that day, getting myself mentally ready to tackle the 'roni.
I can say with almost total certainty that, in the days leading up to my commencement, I was looking at a book I owned about Joseph Cornell boxes. Cornell, perhaps you know this, lived with his mother and disabled brother in a house on the amazingly named Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, where, using old materials he found in city antiques shops and markets, he assembled a homemade sense of the world in the form of little wood and glass boxes. Images of those boxes used to keep me company at boring occasions, and to me, in those days, practically everything was a boring occasion.
As I recall those few days surrounding my commencement, the Cornell, the 'roni, the music I loved--mainly Minutemen's amazing double lp Double Nickels on the Dime, and the first few verses of Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna," (ain't it just like the night to play tricks/when you're trying to be so quiet) plus, of course, the books and (I am intentionally not mentioning poetry) the poetry I carried around and had memorized, I don't remember any of the official pomp and circumstance. My head was pretty full, my stomach too, of things I craved and could have either for free or very cheaply. This was even before the internet, mind you--I had seen the Chris Marker film exactly once, in the basement of Frost library. Today, I sometimes watch it, or part of it, a few times a week, on my phone.
Things to eat, things to listen to, things to watch, things to read. This is the primary material in life. And friendships, and love, are at their best when they hold this stuff in common. Whenever I see my good friend Jeff, we talk about fried clams. Why, now? He lives in New York, I live here, but wherever we are, we could be on the moon, we talk about fried clams. Is it because fried clams, especially those at Woodman's of Essex, in Essex, MA, are sublime, the silky bellies playing against the crunch of the batter?
It is. Please don't puke.
But it is also because friendship, at least the kind I like to have, turns on a certain kind of over-specific pleasures that are non-exclusive (if I lost my job, I could still afford fried clams) and repeatable (Woodman's has been around for 100 years, and it ain't going nowhere). This is the pleasure of songs, of poems, of movies, of sandwiches. You want these things and, with a little effort, you can have them. People who know me know I hate to travel: in fact, I don't ever go anywhere. The reason is this: I so prize repeatability and thrift, that these underline, all bold, all caps special experiences leave me dry.
I am of a certain generation, old; from a certain part of the world, New England; and of a certain gender, male; such that earnest displays of emotion give me the creeps. It's just the sort of repressed creature I am. But add a fried clam to the mix, and I become a quivering jelly-mass of emotions: I believe in friendship, and ritual, and the moral right to pleasure, and the small stays against passing time. I feel, eating a fried clam with a buddy, that I could die that instant and have lived life to the fullest.
What you realize, when you get to be around my age, in the middle way, the middle of Dante's dark wood, is that you have a whole counter-biography composed of stuff you've eaten, read, listened to, looked at, in some ways more vivid than the "official" record--your collected addresses, your degrees, your job (or lack thereof) your big, fancy purchases. I don't have a lot, but what I do have that I've paid money for, usually, sadly, factors out. But this other trove of free things or extremely low-budget things is constantly on my mind. It pains me, some days, not to have listened to the Neko Case song "Star Witness"--literally pains me. And I could tell you some stories about driving long distances for food that would give you cause to worry about my sanity. Don't even get me started about Jenny's Special at Five Islands Lobster Co in Five Islands, Maine, about 5 hours from Wellesley if we leave RIGHT NOW.
Life is long, and you spend much of it alone. What you fill that aloneness with is up to you: you can fill it with envy, or jealousy, or resentment, or with mere logistical planning, or with worry--I certainly spend many, many moments lost in all of the above. Or you can treat your inner life as merely a zone for imagining your outer circumstances: I've done plenty of that, imagining prestige, success, worldly triumph, glory, and all the rest. But I hate myself when I do it, and sometimes, when I am very, very down, it is because I simply have lost the ways I once had of being carried away by all those free or low-budget and repeatable experiences I am recommending. It is true: one has days when even poetry, even a slice of pizza with spaghetti and meatballs on top, fail to console. My dear friends, when you hit those dark patches, get thee to the weirdest, most out of the way and amazing falafel place, and order what the chefs eat.
What I would say to you about Wellesley is this: you will never again take a test here or write a paper here. When you return to your dorm, five years from now, the freaky aliens greeting you will tolerate your curiosity, but don't go pokin' around in their stuff. Your specific impress upon this place will in some ways be gone. But what is rather amazing is this: Wellesley will have entered this category of pleasures that are free and low-budget (the alumnae office would prefer I cut that sentence) and repeatable. There will be experiences here you can do over and over, and doing them, at monthly, yearly, whatever intervals, will begin to mark time. And thinking about Wellesley will enter that special zone marked off for all things one wants and can have with a little effort, a LITTLE exertion, perhaps a little expenditure. Like a favorite song, or like a favorite sandwich.
So now we get to the advice part, which I hope you will ignore, since, I hope, you are too busy thinking about some song you love or sandwich you crave. My advice is this: in addition to finding low-budget sandwiches, works of art, songs, poems, and movies you love, find good swimming holes wherever you go. This can now be accomplished with depressing ease by using things like google earth, but in the old days, you had to drive, and interview the locals, and keep a look out for sunny breaks in the roadside woods. If you were successful, though, you were treated to something extraordinary: the coolest, cleanest water, some cliffs to jump off of. When you've found a swimming hole, you've uncovered the secret soul of a place. Then, usually, a bunch of scary looking rednecks show up.
One more thing: for a special occasion, just once every few years, go to Bemmelman's Bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, and have a martini. It is dark. The guy is playing a Cole Porter song on the piano. The walls were done by Ludwig Bemmelman, of Madeline fame. It isn't your life you are living, but you will be in the company of other people living some abstract idea of life nobody ever actually led.
They bring your drink in a little test-tube like receptacle sitting alongside the cocktail glass in a nest of ice. The potato chips are very salty so as to entice you to have a second drink. Ah, but if you do that, my friends, no piece of advice will have entered a zone where nobody's counsel, not even Ann's, will do you any good.