Stephen Guy on Lapham at RMC.
On Wednesday November 19 we trudged over the drawbridge to the Royal Military College to see Lewis Lapham, former editor of thoughtful lefty staple Harper’s and current editor of windbagular doorstop Lapham’s Quarterly. His little talk, in a brocaded and be-mezzanined hall in the building abutting the school’s parade grounds, was titled “Playing With Fire,” and it was a lucid but unabashedly elitist argument for higher standards of public education in the United States. Lapham wears his 78 years as lightly as a life full of deadlines and arguments could reasonably allow, but he was still sounding pretty septugenarian. They turned the volume up and we could hear better. While it was cool to bask in his eminence for a little while, it turns out that his arch and masterfully-crafted sentences are better absorbed from the page than from the PA.
The crowd, on the other hand, was totally amazing. About two hundred completely unfamiliar very-late-middle-aged fans of Lapham’s signature erudite wit rubbed elbows with RMC students in dress uniform and a very small handful of us usual punks. Who were these grey hairs, and why have I never seen them at the LCBO or Tara Natural Foods? We thought that they might have been from Ogdensburg or Watertown. Or maybe Brockville. It is more likely that they were RMC faculty. We loved them!
Yeah, who are those grey hairs? Did they ask slow cranky questions during a Q&A period? Maybe they’re the same people who would buy a $15 frozen dinner from The Kitschen.
The were definitely cranky and they would definitely lunch at the Kitschen. Come to think of it they were also very slow when they were exiting the building.
My favourite question period exchange went like this:
Cranky older guy: “What do you think Obama’s chances are?”
Lapham: “Pretty good.”
Laughter.