Culture Watch
In this issue:
BOOKS
"Lili" is
an affecting and stylish first novel about a woman's search for love
and redemption in 20th century France. The surprise lies in how and
where she finds it.
SWW
Talks With....
At night, Beverly Goldberg curls up at home with history books.
By day, she's at her vice-presidential office at the Century Foundation:
An interview with the author of Age Works, her book on corporate
America's response -- or lack of it -- to an older workforce.
AND
CONSIDER THIS
Dreamland, a documentary to air later this month on the PBS
series POV, goes beyond the glitter and glamour of Las Vegas to
explore the sadness and despair of the compulsive gambler.
SWW
Talks With...Beverly Goldberg
Lunch with Beverly Goldberg means
a menu with much more than several inviting choices of salads. For
starters, there are the issues of retirement, older Americans in
the workplace, the aging of the baby boomers, the presidential debates
and the future of Social Security. As vice president
of The Century Foundation (http://tcf.org),
a 80-year-old non-profit think tank in New York City that examines
America's economic, political and social policies, Goldberg understands
not only how the gears of the nation work but when and how they
need to shift. Over a mid-day meal in the sunny library of
the foundation's restored Manhattan townhouse, she talked
about corporate America's response to the growing number of older
employees and the urgent need to re-think the workplace. It's the
subject of her latest book, "Age Works: What Corporate America
Must Do to Survive the Graying of the Workforce" (Free
Press; $25), and challenges companies to find better ways to make
use of older -- and more valuable than ever -- employees.
Her book succinctly lays out the
dilemma. By 2005--a date not all that far away -- "the painful fact
is that labor force participation by those over fifty-five will
have to increase by about 25%. This means that corporations
will have to do something to attract and retain millions of older
workers if they are to survive the demographic shock wave.''
Echoing her conviction, a July 30 editorial in The New York Times
pointed out that the corporate gatekeepers" have been doing their
best to push older workers out for years, because they are paid
more than younger ones. As the boomer generations begins turning
55 next year, corporate America should be finding ways to retain,
retrain or rehire old workers.''
In an op-ed piece that appeared in
the Sacramento Bee in March, Goldberg stressed that it's
not true that older people don't want to work. They do, but they
"want to retire from the stresses and demeaning attitudes that are
a constant in corporations.'' She suggests that corporations
try to restructure schedules for older people, offering them seasonal,
flexible, part-time or temporary employment. By shifting people
who are nearing retirement to consulting or mentoring roles, they
are granted an easier segue into their new life while the company
makes maximum use of their experience and their knowledge of the
corporate culture. "Right now,'' Goldberg says, "the most highly
wanted skills -- if people are sensible in hiring -- would be flexibility,
willingness and excitement about learning.'' And, she goes on, it's
a "myth'' that those qualities can't be found in older workers.
As for learning new computer skills, she contends that "the difference
between training a 35-year-old and a 50-year-old is nothing.
But a 60-year-old may be thinking,
"I'm going to retire in a few years and I've learned six different
programs in two years, and I'm tired of it.'' Older people aren't
the only ones who feel that way. She hears similar complaints from
younger people, recalling the words of a 40-year-old human resources
director who told her, "If they make me go to one more boot camp
I'm quitting."
Everywhere, she observes, young overworked employees feel they are
ready to "crash and burn,'' and asks, "How is that different from
older people who say, 'I'm going to check out retirement for a while?'
"
Checking out retirement for herself will
not be on Goldberg's personal agenda for some time. She enjoys what
she does at the Century Foundation. "We do a lot of what I think
is valuable work here,'' she says, and right now the seeming endless
process to elect a new occupant for the White House is an especially
absorbing time. "We were the people who helped set up the presidential
debates,'' she says, referring to the foundation's role in establishing
the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. "We're very proud
of that and our work on Social Security. It has made such a difference
in the lives of so many people and because people contribute it
is not charity.'' Long before Messrs. Bush and Gore were born, the
foundation (then known as the Twentieth Century Fund) was weighing
in on the goals--and the flaws--of the ideas being put forth about
the government-administered pension system, urging in 1937 that
the system be expanded to every adult with benefits to be paid for
by general taxes. (The original 1935 Act excluded almost half of
the nation's workers, including farm
and government employees, and workers' wages were taxed to fund
the system.)
The good news now, she
reports, is that contrary to many gloom-and-doomsayers, the sky
is not falling. "Social Security is not a system in major trouble,''
she is pleased to say, "and we have been fighting that idiocy.
The whole notion of the need to privatize it to save it is a wonderful
gift to Wall Street, but who wants uncertainty? It's the one leg
of the retirement stool that everyone counts on to stay solid. It
protects people whom others care about and who may not be so well
off.'' She offers as an example a young person or couple living
somewhere in the middle of the country with a parent whom they help
out financially a little but mostly gets by on monthly Social Security
checks. "The difference in their life if that wasn't being paid
to Mama or Papa would be enormous.'' The foundation's newest
study, Social Security: Beyond the Basics, warns that "The
most radical suggestions for change in Social Security--especially
schemes to privatize it--are neither necessary nor practical.''
Before coming to the foundation,
Goldberg had worked in publishing and administration, and when she
was asked to join it more than 20 years ago, the fit was perfect.
All her jobs have seemed tailor-made. She went straight from post-graduate
studies at City University of New York to Washington Square Press
to
vet a collection of Victorian literature. The self-confessed 'history
buff' was looking at a manuscript of the firm's new dictionary of
American history and spotted errors, and "So,'' she says, "they
asked me to vet that too.'' She spent several years there
and at other firms, among other duties, working on a new edition
of Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia and heading editorial services
for a textbook publisher.
Along the way, she married, raised
a son and daughter and was divorced. She has written three previous
books, including the useful "Overcoming High-Tech Anxiety:
Thriving in a Wired World." A whiz at the computer, she does
much of her research online. "It's the only way to go,'' she says.
"I know that. But I love to curl up with books at night. I enjoy
a good, thick history book or an analysis of what's happening in
government. This is where my heart is.''
A personal hero for Goldberg is her
mother, Bessie. "This is a woman who loved to work,'' says Goldberg.
With her two younger sisters, Bessie learned bookkeeping during
the Depression and worked to help her large family survive. She
stopped after marrying--her husband didn't want her to work--and
took care of her four children and volunteered with school and community
organizations. As a widow of 70, she began volunteering almost full-time
at a hospital near her home in Staten Island and with the local
chapter of Senior Olympics. "She does everything and a lot of it
involves her bookkeeping skills,'' says her daughter, who has dubbed
her "Volunteer of the Century." Now 90, Bessie lives by herself--a
son nearby assists with shopping--and every evening Goldberg phones
to see how she is. She also rings Bessie's two sisters, in their
late 80s, and the daily calls are reassuring. "They know that
someone will be aware if something is wrong,'' says Goldberg.
As people live longer, caring for elderly
parents will become more of a dominant issue, especially for the
baby-boomer generation. And when they in turn are suddenly eligible
for senior-discount fares, they will influence the way aging is
viewed. But be careful, warns Goldberg, it would be a mistake to
view the boomers as mere clones of each other, marching in lockstep
toward their golden age. The oldest among them, those born in the
late '40s, were formed by the ethos of World War II, and she says,
"they are a little more comfortable with the idea of aging than
this next group is going to be.'' The next group is more resistant
to the notion of aging, and Goldberg muses, "I wonder what effect
they will have?" But that's another story, and one that she may
someday write.
Lili by Abigail De
Witt
(Northwestern University Press; 307 pages; $26.95)
For a child, an awareness of the self existing in time and space
bursts into consciousness with the sudden, startling brightness
of a flashbulb going off. With a single sentence, the gifted Abigail
De Witt crystallizes the moment for four-year-old Lili Ravaudet:
"There were swallows circling above the blackberry brambles, swallows
circling out toward Paris, rising and falling, and the tiny leaves
of the vines were thick and cool beneath Lili and she remembered
it: I am alive." The 20th century is just beginning, and Lili,
who lives with her family in the countryside just outside Paris,
devoutly believes in God. She will be a nun, she thinks, and when
she dies, will go straight to Him. Within a few years, France is
at war, and the deaths of a much-loved cousin and her older brother
André have reduced her innocent faith to ashes. God does
not exist, she thinks, but for the rest of her life she will seek
the deity whom she had first understood as the warmth and sweetness
of her mother's embrace.
The arc of Lili's life--from childhood
through marriage, motherhood and a passionate affair with a woman,
through war's devastation and the solitude of old age-- extends
across most of the past century. The current of the swiftly changing
modern world sweeps her along, but she retains a capacity for love
and a fierce hunger for life. De Witt has a keen eye for the sensual
detail and an unblinking ability to reveal a woman's deepest and
most secret desires. The once devout Lili grows up to become an
atheist and teacher of philosophy in Paris, haunted by guilt. There
she meets Pierre, a geography professor who had spent some time
in an asylum and is nearly as withdrawn from the world as she. They
become lovers, and "Then for weeks,'' De Witt writes, "she hardly
thought at all anymore, she was so drenched in sex. All night long,
she lay with him in her narrow bed and her skin ached.'' Pierre
would one minute cover her with kisses, and then the next, grow
cold and blank. They marry and on a trip to the sea, Lili notices
the way he "could vanish midsentence almost, his body still there
but his voice and eyes empty…and yet when he returned, laughing,
swing her around--there was on one in the world like him, then,
no one so frank so unembarrassed, so true." They have a son, Claude.
Lili is blind to the obvious truth that he is disabled. In the child's
long pale body, fair hair and wide lavender eyes, she finds a restoration
of innocence. Pierre no longer makes love to her, but the
couple goes on together, tending their child with tenderness and
concern. One day, Lili encounters an old school acquaintance,
Paule Jacobe, whom Lili remembers only as a shy and fat little
Jewish girl with enormous eyes. Now Paule is a smartly dressed beauty
woman with curly black hair and smooth olive skin. They begin an
affair, but it ends when Paule decides that her spiritual
quest must be taken on the path of the solitary and the ascetic,
"not to be possessed by one's lust, to be possessed only by God.''
In the cruelty of the World War II, many
of Lili's family members are killed. Paule and her brother
Marcel are sent to Auschwitz. At the end of the fighting, Lili goes
each day to the Paris train stations as the prisoners return,
and one afternoon, sees a group of Jewish women arriving. Writes
De Witt: "They looked like the men--hairless, blind seeming, fleshless--except
they walked a little differently, their necks craning forward, their
shoulders curved around what was left of their breasts.''
A ravaged woman, nearly a skeleton, steps forward, and Lili recognizes
Paule. Pierre and Lili take her to their apartment and slowly
nurse her back to health. When she is strong, Paule, a convert to
Catholicism, enters
a convent.
As the years pass, Lili faces more
loss: Claude dies and Pierre slowly succumbs to madness. The last,
affecting section of the book is almost a coda, with Lili
an old woman living once more in her family's country home. After
falling asleep outside, she wakens early in the morning. "She was
eighty-three, but she did not feel old at this still hour, sitting
in the garden of her childhood. She closed her eyes for a moment,
and when she opened them, the sky was flushed, rose, scarlet, tangerine:
a gold light slanted through the chestnut tree.'' Her fury
spent, Lili retains her appetite for life; it has been the secret
that sustained her. The guilt of failure-- the fear that she has
not loved enough--dissipates.. She had never given up on those she
loved--not Claude, not Pierre, and not Paule--and in that
is the seed of her redemption. Like a composer De Witt introduces
subtle changes of tone and mood as she continues to build emotion.
Her story of Lili Ravaudet will remain in the memory. just as the
sound of the final chord echoes in the heart long after the music
stops.
Television
Dreamland Produced by Greg Little; Directed by
Lisanne Skyler
Point of View (POV); PBS
The
Las Vegas most of us know is an island of gaudy architecture, flashing
neon signs and flashier entertainment where a quick if expensive
thrill can be found by dropping a little at the tables or chasing
luck at the slot machines. But behind the surface gleam and glamour
are the casinos, gambling halls and pawnshops that thrive on the
patronage of residents like Lou Gerard. At 75, the likable Los Angeles
tailor had a cheerful fantasy about life after retirement. He is
happy about closing up his shop in Los Angeles and moving to Las
Vegas, where he plans to work part-time, socialize and, he explains,
"do a little gambling.'' Sounds harmless enough, but for Gerard,
as for other compulsive gamblers, a little turns out to be a lot.
In the pleasant desert dreamland,
the lonely Gerard soon has little interest in anything but getting
a winning hand at one of the 55 blackjack tables at Binion's Horseshoe
casino. "I block everybody out,'' he says, "it's just me and the
dealer.'' According to a Las Vegas psychologist who treats
gambling addiction, "Lots of the gambling in Las Vegas doesn't have
much to do with money, fun or socialization. It has to do with escape.''
That was true of another local, Carole O'Hare, whose game was video
poker. "I could stop feeling when I gambled,'' says the mother of
three sons, who would play all night and then phone her sons in
the morning from a casino or bar and tell them to get ready for
school. Exhausted financially, physically and spiritually, she considered
suicide. It wouldn't have been uncommon, had she succeeded.
More than any other addiction, Dreamland's makers tell us, compulsive
gambling has the highest number of suicides, and Las Vegas has the
highest rate of suicides in the nation. Instead, she joined Gamblers
Anonymous. She has gambled since 1990 and is executive director
of the Nevada Council on Problem Gambling.
Of late, "compassionate'' has
become an over- and misused word, but it best describes this revealing
documentary. The one-hour program on PBS's POV series (www.pbs.org/pov/)
zeroes in on the sad underside of Vegas and the locals who in one
way or another, win or lose, are dependent on the gaming business.
For a taxi driver, it has meant a good life, but his son David,
who is a dealer at the Tropicana, has a more skeptical view of the
city, especially its recent incarnation as a vacation spot for the
whole family.
"With 24-hour gambling, 24-hour drinking
and legalized prostitution 50 miles away from here, we're not a
family town,'' he argues. Skyler steers clear of preachy moralizing
and allows the people her camera follows around to speak with candor
and eloquence about what it's like to be consumed by the irresistible
desire to gamble and to live where it can be done at any hour of
the day or night and in the supermarket as well as the casino. Dorothey
Elaster, a good-natured taxi dispatcher, calls the slot machine
an iron pimp. "When you walk into a casino it calls your name. It
talks to you.'' Reality sets in, she says, when you walk out into
daylight and say, "God, I'm broke.'' Realizing that her addiction
was no different from that of her children to crack cocaine, Elaster
got to Gamblers Anonymous. Newly confident, she is slowly paying
back the debts accumulated from the gambling years (Dreamland
on POV is scheduled for airing on most PBS stations on Aug.
22, at 10pm ET. Check local listings.)
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