Emily Gordon writes:
I’m interested to see what people are saying about “Prairie Fire,” the Letter From Nebraska by Omaha native Eric Konigsberg in this week’s New Yorker. The piece is about the suicide, last March, of the 14-year-old homeschooled rural Nebraska prodigy Brandenn Bremmer and his heartbroken, perplexed parents, who gave nearly all their material and emotional resources to developing Brandenn’s interests and career. There’s not much talk about the piece yet, since it’s not online and it’ll take a few more days for most people to get the current issue, but just after Bremmer’s death there was plenty of press coverage and internet discussion. Here’s the Blog of Death obituary; I’ve omitted the many links (some expired).
Brandenn E. Bremmer, a 14-year-old musical prodigy from Nebraska, sustained a gunshot wound to the head on March 15. The boy died the following day at Children’s Hospital in Denver. Authorities suspect he committed suicide.
Bremmer taught himself to read when he was 18 months old. He began playing the piano at 3 and was home-schooled from kindergarten on. At 10, Bremmer became the youngest person to graduate through the Independent Study High School conducted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Described by friends and family as a bright young man who smiled often, Bremmer dressed up like Harry Potter — one of his favorite literary characters — for his graduation picture.
Bremmer was only 11 when he began studying piano improvisation at Colorado State University at Fort Collins, Colo. Last year, he released his debut album, “Elements,” and gave concerts in Colorado and Nebraska. The day his body was found, Bremmer had just completed the artwork for the cover of his second CD, which features meditative, New Age piano music.
Like most kids, he loved watching cartoons, playing video games, riding his bike and catching fish. In January, Bremmer enrolled in a biology class at Mid-Plains Community College in North Platte, Neb. He planned to graduate from the University of Nebraska’s medical school by the time he was 21 and become an anesthesiologist.
His mother, mystery writer Patricia Bremmer, said he showed no signs of depression and didn’t leave a suicide note. Bremmer’s kidneys were donated to two people. His liver went to a 22-month-old and his heart to an 11-year-old boy.
The comments are worth reading, too, including one by a 13-year-old named Sydney Lee Smith, who appears to have been a friend of Bremmer’s. (Smith and her mother, Mary, are also quoted in this Lincoln Journal Star piece about the suicide.) More on this soon, and send in any links you find.
Also via Blog of Death: photos of an older Bremmer (he’s seven in the one The New Yorker used), and details about his piano-composition recording Elements, on the Windcall Enterprises page.
“He maybe just kind of ‘crashed’ like computers can,” and other spontaneous theories on the case from back in March, on Common Ground Common Sense.
There’s been a spirited, provocative debate on Wikipedia on the definition of “child prodigy” and which alleged prodigies (including Bremmer, Willie Nelson, and Michael Jackson) to include on the site. In a separate thread, Wikipediaers argue about whether to delete Bremmer’s page on the site, and whether Bremmer should really be considered “notable.” (The page was indeed deleted.) It’s a useful look inside the workings of Wikipedia, too. A user named Stan, a passionate and caustic advocate for deleting Bremmer’s entry, writes:
This is a very strange and sad story of child abuse, in which a boy’s parents tried to live vicariously through him by pushing him beyond his abilities, vanity-publishing his CDs and helping him with high-school homework to get him through at an accelerated pace. He cracked under the pressure and killed himself. Now that he’s dead, those close to him are still trying to live through him, this time by posting and reposting the same wikipedia article about him. I find the situation monstrous. If we have an article about how child prodigies are manipulated and exploited by their parents, we might merge this with that, as a further example, but I don’t know that such an article exists, or if such an article would meet wikipedia standards. It’s also true that many child prodigies go on to do no significant work as adults–many prodigies are simply experiencing an early spurt and turn out to be average-functioning adults. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it highlights the fact that a prodigy is not necessarily notable just for being a prodigy. So I vote to delete this once again.
“Child abuse” is very strong language for what is surely a subtler moral question. The blogger Terrette posted critical comments about the Bremmer family just after Bremmer’s death and got an email from (it seems) the same friend of the family, Mary Smith, who was quoted in the Lincoln Journal Star piece. Terrette defends her position, point by point, and makes it clear that for her the central issue is gun control:
If I may address my displeased reader frankly: I know it must suck to feel that some long-winded East Coast liberal who probably doesn’t even have kids is trying to tell you right from wrong, but please know that I read the newspapers and see the incidents of juvenile suicide and homicide tallied month after month, and the whole thing has made me wonder: What’s going on in this country? However much you’d like to believe that Brandenn Bremmer took that gun in his hands in a quiet little corner of Nebraska — a place with its own rules and customs and that, as such, is radically exceptional to things that take place on the East Coast or in regions where liberals haven’t developed a proper fondness for weapons — the fact is that Brandenn killed himself in a nation where such incidents are common and where laws regulating minors’ unsupervised access to guns are uniformly lax. Moreover, these laws are lax not because of some Constitutional right that the framers of that document set down in law so that all the nation’s children could take up arms against a potential new wave of British Redcoats, or so that seasonal hunting traditions in the Midwest would go undisturbed, but because the National Rifle Association has long targeted our politicians in Washington with its powerful lobby and thereby assured its friends gun-sale profits at the expense of all social, regional, and safety-related considerations. If the NRA could facilitate the sale of semi-automatic rifles to all the teenagers of this nation, believe me, it would. And no amount of killing of and by our children would ever allay the NRA members’ passion for peddling and glorifying weapons. Their short-sighted and self-serving claim will always be: “it’s not the guns that kill, it’s the shooters.”
Update: Hey there, googlers! Don’t be shy; what do you think of what you’ve read about Bremmer’s life and the criticisms above?
Further update: There’s an interesting discussion of Konigsberg’s piece on Gifte
d Exchange, “the blog about gifted children, schooling, parenting, education news and changing American education for the better.”
Additional note: In the introduction to this post, I’ve made a slight change to my description of Brandenn’s grieving parents. I think, on reflection, that my original tone had an unsympathetic tinge I didn’t intend. It’s often said that the death of a child is the worst pain a person can experience, and I believe it.
And: Well, everyone’s talking about it now, including John Derbyshire in National Review Online:
You know how once in a while you read something that leaves you feeling vaguely disturbed — suddenly unsettled and insecure, as after a minor earth tremor? Well, that’s my current state. The offending text was Eric Konigsberg’s piece “Prairie Fire” in the January 16 issue of The New Yorker.
…
Obviously he was a very nice kid, the sort you’d want your own kids to mix with. His suicide seems, from Konigsberg’s account, utterly inexplicable.
The suicide of a child is of course one of the major nightmares of parenting. That is one reason I, as a parent, find the Brandenn Bremmer story unsettling. If THIS kid could do it, who might not? Even aside from that, though, there is something about suicide that is deeply disconcerting to all of us. We have all known instances among our acquaintance, or, if we are unlucky, in our own families. An odd thing I have noticed is that a suicide, even of someone we are not strongly connected to, makes us angry…. I suppose this anger is just an acknowledgment of the fact that killing yourself is the most selfish thing you can do — a gross betrayal of your social responsibilities, the first and foremost of which is to exist, so you can carry out all the others. Surely the old dishonoring of a suicide’s corpse — in Christian countries, it could not be buried in consecrated ground — reflects something of this instinctual anger. Continued.
Discussion is ongoing at the New Yorker Forums. Don’t get me wrong—I think the human brain is just as wondrous as it is ridiculous and rigged—but there sure are a lot of people who use the word “gifted” to describe both their children and themselves as kids. I wonder how this plays out across the classes? Who gets to be called “gifted,” and when does the constant reminder of “giftedness” become a burden? It seems like a crude, loaded word that probably causes more problems than it solves. (I speak as a beneficiary of a groovy, ill-planned “talented and gifted” public high school track that rewarded the students who actually showed up to school with countless hours of unstructured hanging out. Fun! American history? We caught up on that later, or didn’t. True believer Mr. Ihle was the exception. Next track after TAG? “Academically Motivated.” God knows what they called the next down from that.) Feel free to argue.
Speaking of arguments, there are posters on the New Yorker Forums who say they’re close to the Bremmers and that Konigsberg misrepresented them, took quotes out of context, knew the story he was going to write before he wrote it, etc., etc. I’m sure people in that community are feeling exposed and sore, but these are familiar complaints; we all know the polls about how little people trust journalists.
[Updated:] As I remember it, Konigsberg expresses open skepticism only once, in a brief aside when listening to the afterlife theories of Hilton Silverman, who’s married to Linda Silverman of the Gifted Development Center. Antidisingenuousmentarianism typed in much of the passage (which I double-checked because I’m fanatical that way):
“Well, I can tell you what the spirits are saying,” [Hilton Silverman] said. “He was an angel.”
[Linda] Silverman turned to face me. “I’m not sure how much you know about my husband. Hilton is a psychic and a healer. He has cured people of cancer.”
“It kind of runs in my family: my grandfather was a kabbalistic rabbi in Brooklyn, and my father used to heal sick babies with kosher salt,” Hilton said. “Brandenn was an angel who came down to experience the physical realm for a short period of time.”
I asked Hilton how he knew this. He paused, and for a moment I wondered if he was pulling my leg and trying to think up something even more outlandish to say next. “I’m talking to him right now,” he said. “He’s become a teacher. He says right now he’s actually being taught how to help these people who experience suicides for much messier reasons. Before Brandenn was born, this was planned. And he did it the way he did so that others would have use for his body. Everything worked out in the end.”
I just started at that “much messier reasons” on rereading—as though the reasons are the tragedy, and the suicide is incidental. I haven’t reread “Prairie Fire,” but except for that “pulling my leg,” I don’t think Konigsberg reveals any feelings about the matter one way or the other.
In any case, all this just continues to demonstrate that the internet is—yes, Eyebeam panel, it is—a pretty effective forum for democratic free speech. I’m glad the rural, homeschooling, non-coastal subjects of New Yorker articles can respond in a widely distributed public place to what’s written about them, even if the integrity of the journalism ultimately prevails.
More discussion at Urban Semiotic.
New and interesting: A journalist tries to contact Linda Silverman about the New Yorker story for Colorado’s New West. Links are theirs.
This week’s New Yorker features a long, and wrenching, profile of Brandenn Bremmer, a prodigiously gifted 14-year-old from western Nebraska who killed himself in his bedroom at his parents’ farm last March. Figuring prominently in the story is Linda Silverman, who runs the Gifted Development Center, a “resource center for developmentally advanced children and their parents” in Denver.
Silverman, who lives in Golden, doesn’t come off particularly well in the story; writer Eric Konigsberg details her tendency to grade smart kids at IQ-levels well off the scale that most child-development experts consider valid, including a 2001 case in which she scored an 8-year-old boy’s IQ at “298-plus.” That boy was later found to have been coached on the exam by his mother. Interviewed after Brandenn Bremmer’s death, Silverman told Konigsberg that the teenager’s parents “had contacts with him after he left his body” and that Brandenn’s “mission to assist others in this lifetime may have been fulfilled by his death” (Bremmer’s organs were donated to several recipients).
Curious about Silverman’s reactions to the New Yorker article, I rang up the Gifted Development Center. Silverman wasn’t available, and a staffer named Lee Ann politely informed me that she would have no comment on the story “because of confidentiality requirements.”
“So,” I said, “I take it Linda is not talking to anyone with the press about this story.”
“We simply can’t,” Lee Ann replied.
I thanked her and hung up, refraining from pointing out that this makes no sense; any confidentiality restrictions between Silverman and Brandenn Brem
mer (who met Silverman as a young boy and attended several GDC events, according to the story) were violated by Silverman’s extensive interviews with Konigsberg, in which she discussed Bremmer at length.
The whole subject of gifted children has become a fraught one, with experts debating what constitutes “giftedness” and disagreeing how such way-above-average kids should be nurtured and taught. The example of Brandenn Bremmer is a cautionary one for all of us who suspect our kids might be brilliant. Unfortunately, Linda Silverman, at least in this instance, doesn’t seem to be shedding much light on the subject.
