About Jeffrey Frank
Jeffrey Frank is the author of four novels, most recently Trudy Hopedale, and co-author, with his wife Diana, of The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation From the Danish. He lives in New York, where he is a senior editor at The New Yorker.
Recent Posts
Jeffrey Frank has made 1 posts
Previous Entries
- War is Over (if you want to believe it)
- 2666 and “Jupiter and Semele”
- Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream, by Javier Marias
Recent Comments
The link to the project is available here:
http://www.thegoldennotebook.org
– Kirsten
on “The Institute for the Future of the Book announces a Public Conversation on....”
Go Bud! Thanks for this wonderful expression of your vote. I think your assessment of McCain’s foreign policy is too kind - if you read through this article in The New Yorker (current issue) you’ll hear what his old buddy and fellow Republican has to say about it: http://tinyurl.com/6e7k6o
I’m off to PA tomorrow to canvass and then round up voters on 11/4. Our votes have never been so critical to the future of the world…
– Paco
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
The number one thing schools can do to improve student learning is to focus on parent involvement. School leaders must start publishing not only math and reading scores but also percentage of parents attending meetings and participating in the classroom. They should spend money on workshops for those parents who have for generations been excluded from participating in a meaningful way. Schools are run on middle class values. People from poverty have no way of understanding those values unless we clearly communicate them.
–
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Both Republicans and Democrats know that a certain amount of taxation is necessary. The only difference is, they only think it’s fair when it pays for things they want.
People who are really into the Space Program want taxes to fund NASA. Almost everyone wants some taxes to fund the military. A lot of people want taxes to fund interstate highways, whether for vacation travel, to visit loved ones, or to move products from factories to distributors to stores. If you are the governor of a state that needs disaster relief, you want disaster relief, damn it, whether you are Democrat or Republican. Some people want tax money for schools because they believe, however corny it may sound, that children are our future. Some people want taxes to provide health care to more people because, in the long run, this makes a stronger America. That’s why we have polio and small pox vaccinations! Remember? If you are a millionaire living in a gated community, you have to go outside sometime. Do you want to catch polio because you said, “Let the peasants fend for themsleves?” If a kid is failing in school because of poor eyesight or an undetected illness, I would rather pay taxes to help the child become a productive member of society, rather than later when taxes are used to subsidize emergency care for the indigent, welfare, or even the criminal justice system and prison.
What are Republicans so afraid of?
– Bill Ectric
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
This, probably, is the most heartfelt personal account on American Elections in the wake of the financial crisis that I have read so far. I guess, like many others round the world, that you made the right choice.
I guess, there will be few with doubt that Bush not only failed as a President, but committed blunders, intentional or otherwise, which has changed the face of the world for the worse. If not for anything else, a non-republican victory is essential as no-one needs a President who will need to defend the decisions of Bush. McCain will, so let him out.
I am an Indian living in India and have been hoping Obama wins. As an Indian, that’s not an intelligent wish, for Obama and the Democrats in general have been against stuff like outsourcing which today provides jobs to a good number of Indians and brings in good foreign exchange home. However, I doubt if any consideration can make one chose McCain over Obama. It would defy intelligence.
– BookCrazy
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Actually, Michael - there are things that are working. You lost me at “studies show...” My wife is a public school teacher here in New York City who has taught at “inner-city” schools as well as other schools in the city (that we don’t assign politically-correct euphemisms to). She’s taught five year-olds who have suffered gunshot wounds, who couldn’t afford proper medical care or lived in shelters or who were being raised by their grandparents because their parents weren’t around. As a teacher, don’t you think that those schools where teaching only happens amidst security concerns and a disruptive environment could use extra help? Those teachers are overwhelmed! They would certainly benefit from smaller class sizes and basic money for supplies and books or additional para-professionals that I assure you are not generally being seen. After-school programs are critical for these kids to get extra help, books etc when the parents are working. These are simple solutions but powerful - they are not free. Whether or not that creates better performance on standardized tests, I don’t know and truthfully, I don’t care. I do know that we need to bring up the poorer schools somehow and without funding you’re merely shuffling. We don’t need shuffling.
Teachers are a special breed of person who are certainly motivated by something more than money, but wouldn’t you like to see teaching as a viable career option to the brightest students who might be necessarily lured into other fields? There’s a fair amount of tenured mediocrity in our schools, but I think teachers ought to be treated and paid like the professionals they are. I know teachers that can’t even afford to live in the neighborhoods they teach in. My wife, after more than ten years and advanced degrees was paid pretty well, but still no where near what she could have made in other fields (she made less money teaching than some secretaries at Merrill Lynch where I used to work).
I don’t believe that money is a panacea, but I’m tired of the handwringing in this country over how bad our schools are among people who only want to patch this or that problem up when I think we need give it the sort of weight we do war or our perennial financial bailouts. We’re throwing our best asset away. Of course, I’m also not under the illusion that any president would be able to do that, at least not overnight, but I do believe there’s a far greater chance of a renewed emphasis on education with Obama than with McCain and that line about not throwing money at the problem is just not enough because starving the problem of funds is not the answer either.
Now, take the case of the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School here in New York City (I don’t know where you’re writing from). There are horribly failing schools in the South Bronx - these are large, faceless schools with thousands of students and insurmountable security problems. What one group did with the help of grant money from the Annenberg Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was to create smaller, specialized schools within the area with a professional staff who engaged student’s families (as in going to a student’s house if they don’t show up for school) and each teacher is responsible for a core group of students. Each student can only graduate by presenting and defending a body of work accumulated during their time there. 98% of these kids go on to college, something previously unheard of in the South Bronx. So don’t tell me that money won’t help.
– Bud Parr
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Bud - Just wanted to leave a comment about the line “Everyone knows that schools are better in districts where there’s more money.” This is certainly true, but this isn’t because the schools have money - it’s because the people do. A school with lots of money in an inner city neighborhood will not do much (or at all) better than a school with a moderate amount, because its students have to deal with all the problems of that neighborhood (drugs, crime, single-parent households, etc.). As a teacher myself, I wish that just giving money would help. But studies have shown that it doesn’t help. So we need to reevaluate just how to use the money with give to best help those students, and at least right now there don’t seem to be any great answers.
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on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Kevin, I knew I could count on you for a rebuttal. Good luck out there.
– Bud Parr
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
I won’t get into Iraq and America’s reputation abroad as that is a complicated discussion and an emotional one as well.
But I did want to point out that your point about money and education is simply not true. There is no connection between per student spending and educational outcomes. The best schools in this country don’t spend more per pupil.
It is also worth pointing out that Obama’s work in education has been marked by failure. The infamous Annenberg project failed to improve Chicago schools despite millons of dollars spent. On top of that the Federal Government’s roll in education has been ineffective at best - and full of wasteful spending - so I fail to see why more Federal dollars is likely to help.
As to health care, I really think this is one area where McCain has been treated very poorly. Prior to this election cycle many people agreed that we needed to decouple health care from employment so that you were in charge of your care and it was portable, etc.
So when McCain makes just such a proposal, and one a number of unbiased observers agree will save most American’s money, Obama attacks him with deceptive ads. McCain may have done a poor job of selling the plan, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good one.
Just my two cents.
– Kevin Holtsberry
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Excellent, Bud. I couldn’t have put it better myself. (that line about what Putin saw when he looked back is hilarious!)
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on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
On Deck +
Contributors +
Notes & Links
“It’s a great crib, no doubt, but ‘one of the most prominent critics of our time’ should surely be doing a lot more than writing a kind of student’s guide to the novel.”
– Mark Thwaite on James Wood’s How Fiction Works
“By the time I reached the ending…I could do nothing but breathlessly close the book and sit thinking…and thinking…
Dissertations could be written about this novel.”
- amcorrea on Steve Erickson’s Zeroville
“MFA programs spend a lot of time going on about pedigree. It’s how they reward their students, it’s how they laud their faculty, it’s how they judge their applicants. But education, no matter how important it is to educators, doesn’t seem to impress so much in the outside world.”
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“We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.”
- Zadie Smith on not finding a story worth of the Willesden Herald Short Story Competition.
“Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that you don’t have much privacy. Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn’t it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK’s? Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of consumers.”
– Tom Hodgkinson at the Guardian
“ How many current Bookforum readers/subscribers leaf through their copies and sigh, ‘If only they had more current events coverage’ (or sports coverage, or whatever) ? Surely almost none.”
- The Literary Saloon on Bookforum’s upcoming editorial changes. [FWIW: we heartily agree with the Saloon]
“She is the author of several books containing many words. Some people like to watch snuff movies, some people like to read Coulter.”
“On the other hand, I have to say that, as a spectator, I’m much more fascinated by the Republicans. Watching those shifty, devious, unscrupulous creatures clawing at each other in spasms of demagoguery and pander is like beholding the whole vile, fear-driven history of humanity.”
- C.K. Williams on the ’08 presidential race at The New Republic
“It’s the sort of intellect-covered-in-marketing-goo fun that warrants some serious post-festival decompression. Between rushing to take advantage of the shwag stations (read: like shopping in Bloomingdales…for free) to scheduling the evening of back-to-back Hollywood parties, it’s a wonder anyone actually has time to watch the films. It’s a version of LA slightly humbled by geography and weather – the same way the films are a version of their Hollywood counterparts, slightly humbled by budget and niche.”
- Maya Baratz writing on the Sundance Film Festival on the Flickr blog
“As a survival mechanism, and an attempt to short-circuit any retreat into the inner sanctum of art, this is perfectly okay. Yet Mr. Rieff’s discomfort with the details — surely his stock-in-trade in his previous studies of Cuba, Miami, or Bosnia — gives “Swimming in a Sea of Death” a muffled and meandering texture. Unlike his mother, Mr. Rieff is a born reporter, drawn to stories instead of the great abstractions. But since organizing his mother’s extinction into a shapely narrative strikes him as a sort of sacrilege, there is no story. There are only those same unanswerable questions, surfacing over and over in this increasingly disheveled, redundant book.”
- James Marcus on David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death
“Early in the year, John Ashbery’s 26th book of poems, A Worldly Country, appeared and assured readers of his ongoing ability to simply amaze, or possibly to antagonize, with singular lyrics that are daring even as they frequently defy definition.”
“…presuming all goes well, I will be certified as alive. Blogging should then resume in the afternoon.”
“I don’t dismiss fiction because of Tom Clancy anymore than I dismiss online criticism because of Amazon customer reviews.”
- Stephen Mitchelmore in response to James Wolcott
“(Let’s be honest: The Times Literary Supplement is hands down the premier book review. People who think they NYTBR is to any extent comparable aren’t provincial; they’re parochial.)”
- Frank Wilson, Book Review Editor, Philly Inquirer
“I only wished it were a thousand pages longer.”
- Michael Chabon on Pynchon’s Against the Day
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