Fox’s Game Chapter 7: Jimi Hendrix and the Polish Immigrant’s Beer

Lenox Village
Nolensville, Tn

Understandin’ understandin’
Lord that’s all in the world I need
Understandin’ and a little bit of lovin’ baby
That’s all in the world I need
Misunderstandin’ an’ I know get a woman
Yeah, Lord they both have caused my heart to bleed

 Jimi Hendrix’s bluesy guitar played in the background as Kristof Tulowitzki carefully placed two steamed hotdog buns onto his plate. He then carefully grabbed his mixing bowl full of fresh broiled lobster, mayo, celery, scallions, spices, and his secret ingredient–pan fried Polish sausage. Tulowitzki enjoyed cooking more than most people enjoyed eating, especially when done to a 60s soundtrack.

Tulowitzki neatly set the table in his dining room and poured a bottle of local beer in a custom glass. He sighed satisfactorily as he sipped, swirling it in his mouth with a flourish before swallowing.

The 59 year old Chemistry professor was a mass of contradictions. His love of beer revealed not so much a desire for its affects but his appreciation of its complexities. Like all chemists he saw science everywhere, and like many chemists he saw beauty and poetry, not simply mixtures and equations. He saw food and beer as practical examples of science in use.

“We take something we use for sustenance and make it pleasurable. Some of the tastiest, most creative foods in the world come from the poorest societies in the world. Why? Because we are all scientists. Some of us just understand it better than others.” Tulowitzki’s friends heard him say this often. So did his students. The flavor combinations that animal fat, plant leaves, ground up roots, and heat could create was every bit the marvel he saw whenever he settled under his microscope to study the movement of atoms.

And though he also had a passion for beer, his love of that drink came not through chemistry but through pride in his homeland of Poland. He grew up watching his father Marek come home from work and before he would say a word to anyone, his father would open the icebox, pour himself a stein of homemade beer, and ease into his chair. It was like after that first relished sip, his family would become visible. Tulowitzki associated beer with fun times and his father’s kindness. For him beer was a connection to his past.

* * * *

On March 28, 1968, Marek Tulowitzki moved his family from Warsaw, Poland to Philadelphia, PA. He was a code breaker for the Russians during World War II. After the Eastern Bloc was formed, he worked as a high level statistician at the Polish state department. He slowly accumulated secrets and realized that if he didn’t leave, he and his family would eventually be the target of the persecution and suspicion that permeated Communist Europe.

Kristof inherited his father’s penchant for math as well as his distrust of government institutions. A week after they arrived in the US, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN. The 18 year old Polish student never forgot the violence and paranoia that would follow. And he never was able to fully disconnect what he’d experienced in his native country and what he witnessed in the first days in his new one.

Kristof became obsessed with the King assassination, trying to understand how something like this could happen in America. He followed the story, and his interest led to his fascination with US assassinations. He began to see that though the US was safer than Communist Poland, it certainly had its secrets. Tulowitzki spent his one and only year in American high school solving complex math problems and studying political conspiracies. The former shaped his future by ensuring him a scholarship to MIT, the latter shaped his worldview by showing him the possibility of the improbable.

Now a tenured professor, Tulowitzki spent his free time making the symmetry and logic he found through a microscope with his offbeat political theories. He loved discussing them, and although he articulated himself clearly, his Polish accent often made his ideas seem like the ramblings of a crank. Tulowtizki’s tall, thin frame and gray hair made him look authoritative. And his stern demeanor belied his gregarious personality. He loved to talk. And people often mistook his intensity for anger.

The chemist rinsed his dishes and placed them in the dishwasher. He then glanced at an unopened envelope on his kitchen table. His lips curved into a smile. “Fresh grilled Polish sausages and locally brewed beer, huh? This Dr. Benjamin Hoek must really want me to come.” He sat down the paper and wondered if this new research committee had anything to do with the Chemistry and Cooking course that he’d proposed for next spring’s semester.

Wisdom Wednesday: Bonus Craig Mack Edition

“With stamina like Bruce Jenner / the winner / tastin’ emcees for dinner / You must be crazy like that glue / to think that you could outdo / my one-two that’s sick like the flu” –Craig Mack, “Flava in Ya Ear”

Wisdom Wednesday: Stephen Hawking Edition

“The universe is not made of atoms, it’s made of stories.” –Stephen Hawking

Wisdom Wednesday: Walt Whitman Edition

Understand that you can have in your writing no qualities which you do not honestly entertain in yourself. Understand that you cannot keep out of your writing the indication of evil or shallowness you entertain in yourself[.] If you love to have a servant stand behind your chair at dinner, it will appear in your writing–or if you possess a vile opinion of women, or if you grudge anything, or doubt immortality–these will appear by what you leave unsaid more than by what you say. There is no trick or cunning, no art or recipe, by which you can have in your writing what you do not possess in yourself.

–Walt Whitman, Journal Entry, 1855-56

Fox’s Game Chapter 6

Foxes vs Hedgehogs 

Fido’s Coffee Shop
21^st Avenue

Julian Daniels sipped his coffee while studying what he just typed:

“The scope and manner of Jack White’s decision to parlay his music to that of international business mogul reflects his desire to not just entertain well but to exceed what society thought was possible. This thought process is reflected in detail through his lyrics.”

He yawned and rubbed his eyes. He knew the article he was writing for The Nashville Scene just needed to be informative. But that wasn’t enough. Once Daniels began looking at his writing as a craft, he couldn’t just “provide information.” He had to as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said put “the best words in the best order,” especially after writing a New York Times bestseller.

He was worried less about the article and more about his reputation. He had established high standards for himself. And he didn’t want to put his name on any writing that didn’t possess his clean, prose style. Words normally came easily, even the wrong ones. But today something didn’t feel right.

He sat in his usual spot at Fido’s Coffee Shop down the street from the Vanderbilt library. His routine was in place. But he was still out of sync. Daniels decided to work on a different writing project. He took out Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and The Fox, an 81page essay about intellectual history discussed through the prism of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Daniels used Berlin’s book as a basis for discussing martial rhetoric in fiction, which he’d present as a paper at a Military and Literature Conference in Annapolis, Maryland.

He wrote more comfortably after switching topics. He decided that Berlin’s book would also be the topic he’d discuss as small talk at Dr. Hoek’s get together whenever the conversation drifted towards academic work. Julian knew Dr. Hoek professionally, the two had worked together on faculty council during Julian’s first year at the university. He found Benjamin to be thoughtful, quiet, and amiable. But they only really interacted in small doses, so it was difficult to get a true gauge on his personality.

Daniels was eager to sample the homemade hot chicken Ben’s email had promised. And any opportunity to network with colleagues outside of school was as good as any to cancel his plans of watching the NBA playoffs in his Hillsboro Village condo. Besides, he’d be able to discuss the ideas for his conference paper with people from other disciplines. The fact that many of them may not have heard of Berlin’s book might help him see his topic from a unique angle.

Daniels liked that writing provided a means of classification, a way to draw order from the slippery nature of ideas. And Berlin’s essay provided an order of sorts. He divides intellectuals—indeed all people—into two groups: hedgehogs and foxes. Berlin states that thinkers can be put into two categories: hedgehogs and foxes. Just like the hedgehog that survives by doing one thing—burrowing—well, intellectual hedgehogs relate everything they experience into a central vision, an idea that allows them to find order in a seemingly chaotic universe. Hedgehogs often return to the same ideas, albeit in different ways.

Foxes, however, search for truth on many paths, sometimes even pursuing conflicting beliefs in hopes of making sense of the world. Figures like Plato, Nietzsche, and George Washington are Hedgehogs. Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Thomas Jefferson are Foxes. Julian found the taxonomy fascinating, even if it were a little incomplete. He thought of himself as a fox, not because he lacked any guiding principles but because he refused to think of himself as someone with just one way of seeing things.

Daniels was the youngest member of the Vanderbilt faculty. He was a Nashville native who attended Vanderbilt as an undergrad. He made a name for himself as a Yale PhD student when he expanded his dissertation into a New York Times bestseller. The dissertation, “Poetic Rhetoric: The Complexities of African American Language Through the Prism of Hip Hop,” became the book Poetic Rhetoric: Hip Hop’s Hold on Language. He became a minor celebrity in 2007, doing interviews with media outlets ranging from NPR to Newsweek. He even spoke briefly by phone to presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

His surprising success led him in a direction he hadn’t intended: the pop academic. He could be a scholar who gained fame outside of academia like Cornell West or Brian Cox. He could slide his way into mainstream culture through cable news interviews and intellectual books aimed not at other intellectuals but at the layman interested in learning more.

Here’s the rub: in academia as many other professions, there’s a tension between purists and popularists. In the field of English, it’s characterized as the philologists versus the dilettantes. The former work to further scholarship through detailed research and debate within the scholarly community, the latter wish to further the field by making it more accessible to the public through entertaining presentation and understandable yet incomplete analogies. Popularity is not always accepted at the highest levels where the most talented work. Just as musicians like Taylor Swift can gain fame while loosing respect if they aim more at producing ear candy than pushing artistic boundaries, professors could lose in respect what they gain in fame if they’re seen as doing the equivalent in their fields.

Academics, even if foxes, tended to be hedgehogs when it came to their careers. Professors could lose in respect what they gain in fame if they’re seen as doing the equivalent in their fields.

Academics, even if foxes, tended to be hedgehogs when it came to their careers. The nature of higher education led people to label themselves and label others with easily recognizable terms. This could be challenging. Daniels wanted to approach his life like a fox, not just his research. He wanted more than one avenue to success, more than one means of income, more than one way of defining himself.

         He checked his phone and saw that he’d been at Fido’s for just over 2 hours. He’d long surpassed his self-imposed daily 1,000 word minimum. As his mind eased out of the writer’s trance where the subconscious mind produces words and the conscious mind orders them, he began wondering who else would attend this off campus meeting.

There was an oddness to it. The location, the time of year, the formal invite, something that made him both anxious and expectant. Whatever it was, Daniels hoped it wouldn’t interfere with his writing.