The Two Rs

Reading Across the Curriculum and Against the Grain

2011-11-27T11:45:00.000-08:00

The other day when I was tutoring a sixth grader, I found out that she had never heard of the theory of evolution or of Darwin. She was asking a lot of very good questions about how language evolved, who invented it, etc, and I mentioned the fact that nobody knows, for example, if Neanderthals had language, and that some primates seem able to learn sign language. She had never heard of Neanderthals. I said that they were a species of hominid that lived in Europe till around 50,000 years ago and then went extinct. I thought her eyes would pop out of her head when I said that! She seemed amazed that there were other kinds of "people" besides Homo sapiens. I mentioned that all hominids were primates, and that chimps, gorillas, and humans were probably descended from a common ancestor, the so-called "missing link." She was intrigued and amazed.

So yesterday when I went to her house, I brought a book about human evolution called The Human Odyssey: Four Million Years of Human Evolution. She snatched it from my hands as if it were a banned book, which in a way it is. In Texas, as in many other American states, teachers shy away from discussing evolution because it can get them in serious trouble. A school administrator at the state level was fired for being critical of "intelligent design." It is not exactly illegal to teach the theory of evolution in Texas, but since both Governor Perry and former Governor Bush expressed support for "intelligent design," it is risky for teachers to touch the subject at all. I imagine that most of them just skip that chapter in their textbooks.

Textbooks are a very contentious battleground in Texas. Texas is the second-largest market for school textbooks in the country, and if a textbook is adopted in Texas, it is a success for publishers. But an elderly couple in Texas, Mel and Norma Gabler, has for many years held a stranglehold over the content of Texas textbooks: if they decide a book is "anti-family" or "anti-Christian," it effectively cannot be adopted in Texas.

I have always wondered why students read widely outside of textbooks in English class, but not in history or science classes. Even if they have a textbook in English class, it is usually an anthology of primary sources. Not so in history or science. But history and science textbooks for elementary and high school students are so dumbed down, and so watered down, so as to avoid offending the Gablers and their ilk, that one's eyes glaze over trying to read them.

This is nothing new: history textbooks for children in the South for many years elided the real reasons for the Civil War: slavery. Although Southern politicians, when the war began, stated clearly that the purpose of the war was to preserve slavery, after the war some revisionism set in: it was said that the purpose of the war had been to preserve "states' rights." I remember as a child reading a book about Nathan Bedford Forrest that never mentioned slavery; it said the war began because Lincoln was elected! Well, sort of...

At some point--maybe about sixth grade, in 1966--I realized that the adults were hiding something from me, and I set about to find the truth. I read every book I could find in my grandparents' house about the Civil War. But alas, they were all military histories, with almost no information about slavery or the political economy of the antebellum South, much less about the Jim Crow South that I still lived in. I heard about Jim Crow in 8th grade--they could hardly hide it from us by 1968--but I still didn't understand what it meant. I didn't understand that segregation had been de jure, and that blacks had a hard time voting. Textbooks back then didn't explain all that, and I could not get the real books I needed to understand the underpinnings and history of my own society. The situation was urgent, as the Civil Rights Movement was active in Nashville, to the point one time that riots were feared and tanks were parked, just in case, not far from our house. I knew something big was afoot, but the grownups--teachers and parents alike--were not talking. There was a Big Secret, clearly.

(There was at least one book that arrived in my parents' house, courtesy of the Book of the Month Club, that could have filled in some of the gaps in my understanding: The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron. But that book was snatched away almost as soon as it arrived, and my mother told me that it was unsuitable for me to read. She was probably right that it shouldn't be on the reading list of seventh graders.)

So, what does all this have to do with a book about human evolution? The new battleground for the hearts and minds of children is not in the field of history any more: kids know all about the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, the Middle Passage, and Jim Crow now. What they DON'T know, in many parts of the country and in a great many schools, is that there is no real argument among scientists about whether or not Darwin's theory of natural selection is largely true. It is true. Yes, it is a "theory," but there is a big difference between a "theory" in science, which can be tested with experiments, and literary theories, for example, which are just somebody's opinion. The theory of evolution is not just an opinion, and there are not really "two sides" to it, as the Intelligent Design proponents would like for your kids to believe.

It's obvious why white teachers and parents in the South tried to hide the reality of racism from white children: they knew it was indefensible, illogical, and inhumane. Maybe they were even a bit ashamed of it. But why do so many Christian teachers and parents now want to hide a scientific reality from children? Most Christians don't dispute gravity, or that the earth revolves around the sun. Why do they pick on Darwin?

I can't claim to have a definitive answer on this, but I have some guesses. My most charitable answer is that for some people it is genuinely troubling to consider the possibility that God didn't personally create them for a purpose, but instead, evolution rather randomly generated trial balloons, as it were, and then popped some of them through natural selection. The survivors are the ancestors of you and me. Evolution does not have a grand purpose or a grand design for anybody, including you. It just is. I can live with that; I think it's kind of humorous, actually, perhaps in a dark way. It has a Dada quality to it that I like. But it's not for everybody.

There is some evidence that there are some real hard-core Christian believers who think that the Enlightenment was a big mistake, and that we should return to some sort of theocracy. For these people, science, democracy, secularism, and "materialism" are the enemy and must be discredited and then destroyed. This is very scary, but I don't think Americans will go for it, when push comes to shove.

My best guess is that the majority of politicians and public figures who support the teaching of Intelligent Design as a comparable and competing theory to the theory of evolution are just extremely cynical exploiters of a potent wedge issue. For them, the controversy over the teaching of evolution is just another emotional issue to exploit, like abortion. They know that poorly educated people can easily be whipped up into a paranoid frenzy about the possibility that their kids are being taught by atheist teachers who want to persuade the kids that the Bible is wrong, and who want to abolish Christmas, or the Bible, or both. This exploitation of ignorance for political purposes, coupled with the abetting of more ignorance, is contemptible. It hurts our country by depriving children of a complete science education.

There is also the possibility that some right-wingers believe that by discrediting science generally, they can discredit climate science, which they see as a threat to untrammeled capitalism, and oil revenues more specifically.

Luckily, there are books other than textbooks. I hunted them down during the Civil Rights era, and although I was not particularly successful at finding books then that answered my questions, I did find such books later in life. Faulkner finally clued me in as to what had been going on for a couple of hundred years in my part of the world. So hand out all the non-textbooks you can find to kids, and not just Harry Potter books, but non-fiction books about history and science. They aren't reading them for school.

Women's Book Clubs: Why or Why Not?

2011-11-19T05:48:00.000-08:00

I belong to a venerable neighborhood book club: it is at least thirty years old, and some of our members have been in it almost that long! I like the fact that it's a neighborhood book club, and that we arrive on foot at the hostess's house, and we can walk home together. Last night I walked just around the corner to my neighbor's house to go to the meeting. It was nice to see her family photographs and to get to know her a little better.

Almost all of my women friends over the age of about thirty belongs to a book club. But none of my male friends do. It seems to be an accepted fact of life in America that only women join book clubs. It's not that men don't read: some of my male friends read a lot. But they don't seem to feel a need to discuss what they read with other men, and only other men, in the way that women seem to want to discuss their reading with other women.

Or maybe men just don't like to be told by a group what to read. I know at least one woman who doesn't belong to a book club for that very reason: she likes to choose her own reading matter. I like to choose my own reading matter too, but I can squeeze in a group book from time to time. (I don't read all our book club's selections, because I am often out of town for the meetings. Also I don't read the books that I don't think I am going to like.)

It's an interesting difference between men and women: women like to read books together and then discuss them. Men don't. Maybe the reason is just that women like to talk more?

Another reason we don't have co-ed book clubs may be the fact that women's book clubs seem to read mainly books about women! In fact it seems that there is an unlimited market for contemporary fiction that is written quite specifically for women to read in groups. I suspect that The Help was such a book; it was written not only for women to read together in their clubs, but so that the movie rights would be bought (for a huge sum) and then women could go to the movies together! A money-maker all around.

These contemporary "chick books" often revolve around some way in which women are, or have been, oppressed. There are oppressed women in The Help, of course. Another mainstay of women's book clubs is an awful, treacly novel called Snowflower and the Secret Fan. I will admit now that I read that book even though I hated it. It was about foot-binding in China. I've read other, non-fiction books about foot-binding, and I don't object to reading about it in principle, but this book's title put me off from the beginning, as it sounds like a book written for "young adults," aka seventh graders. Maybe it reminded me of a Nancy Drew book like The Secret of the Old Clock. But at least that one wasn't called Nancy Drew and the Old Clock.

There are cultural, regional, and ethnic subsets of books about how women have been oppressed: there are books about slavery and Jim Crow, and Holocaust books, and foot-binding books, and probably child-bride books, and certainly books about Muslim girls who can't go to school (Greg Mortenson's books are another mainstay of women's book clubs.) Last night we were brainstorming about new contemporary novels to read, and I was thinking to myself that maybe I should propose a book about Hillbilly-American women (my own regional and ethnic group), but the only book I could think of right away was Winter's Bone, which is about Kentucky people who cook meth. That didn't seem to stack up well next to the Holocaust survivor books, so I didn't suggest it. It might encourage invidious comparisons. Also, there are a lot of men in that book, and a man wrote it. (On the other hand, there is a movie based on it. But it's really violent.)

OK, so men don't belong to book clubs because (1) they don't need to discuss their reading with other guys or women; and (2) they don't like to be told what to read; and (3) so many books these days are about how mean men are to women. What can we do to change this? Do we need to change it?

Maybe not! Maybe book clubs are the new beauty parlors. Women don't spend hours in the beauty parlor any more chatting with other women; we don't have time. We just get our hair cut at Walmart in fifteen minutes and continue on with our duties. And because we are so busy, we barely have time to talk to our friends without some excuse like a book...about other women's lives! This is, of course, different from the seventies, when women in consciousness-raising groups talked about their own lives. Maybe a book club where we talk about pretend women is as close as we can get these days to a real feminist discussion.

And that brings me to another weird thing about book clubs: we sit around talking passionately about people who aren't real! As an English major I feel as if I'm betraying my tribe by saying that it's weird to talk about fictional characters as if they were real and to judge their behavior by our own moral standards. After all, the novel from its very beginning has been about the moral dilemmas of female characters. Jane Austen practically invented the modern novel single-handedly. And Elizabeth Bennett is as real as any person who's ever lived, to me anyway.

One day I was thinking about whether Elizabeth Bennett is real or not, and if so, in what sense. She lived a long time ago (in the early 1800s); I've heard a lot about her (from one book and a lot of movies); and she's probably a composite based on people who actually lived. In that sense, she's not that different from Mary Mump, or Sadie Hunt, or Uncle Jack, people in my family that I've heard a lot about, but that I never met, because they died before I was born. Some of my ancestors and extended ancestral family are like characters in a book to me: I've heard a lot of stories about them, and they lived a long time ago, and the stories have probably been embellished and exaggerated as the years have gone by. I always think of those people as real. Maybe stories about real people--embellished over the years, handed down--are the roots of modern fiction. So in that sense, Elizabeth Bennett is as real, in a way, as my great-grandmother, Jenny Shannon.

Still. Nowadays, when the real world is falling apart, and real people's problems are so acute and dramatic, fiction often seems superfluous. Sometimes talking about fictional people seems like sort of a waste of time. But maybe the test of good fiction is whether it can seem compelling enough to NOT be a waste of time. I never feel as if I have wasted time on something superfluous and fictional when I read Faulkner, for example. Those characters ARE real, based on stories Faulkner's grandparents told him, and on his research into the history of the South through the ledger books, for example. For some reason, though, we don't read Faulkner in our book club. Or Jane Austen. Or any other old books. Maybe we should.

Language Arts? Pleasure and Song

2011-11-15T04:46:00.000-08:00

English teachers in the elementary grades are now called "language arts teachers." But it's hard to feel as if you are teaching anything like "art" when all you do is drill kids on rules about commas, or make them memorize the definitions of vocabulary words like "ubiquitous."

I was thinking about this as I drove out to my tutoring gig in Katy, TX. I tutor a sixth grader who is preparing to take the ISEE test, which is a test that private schools require for admission. The ISEE test is your usual fill-in-the-bubble test: you match words with their closest synonym, or you find the words that "best complete the sentence," or you read a passage and make inferences. None of it has much to do with art. Or pleasure.

It's a long drive, so I burn CDs to play in the car, or I listen to NPR. On my way to Katy on Sunday, I heard a review on NPR of a new album by Miranda Lambert, an up -and-coming young country music star in my home town of Nashville. On her new album, she covers that great song by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, "Look at Miss Ohio."

Oh me, oh my, oh
Would you look at Miss Ohio
She's a-runnin' around with the rag top down
She says I wanna do right but not right now.

I thought that was one of the best hooks I've ever heard. I just kept singing it for days, out loud and in my head.

It turns out that my student is also a country music fan. She loves Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift was recently described in a New Yorker article as a song-writing prodigy, of which there are not many in Nashville. She started writing songs as a young teenager, and she is a "poet of teen angst," as the New Yorker author says. Why don't we have more of these? Rimbaud wrote his entire oevre before the age of 21.

Maybe because school has drained all the pleasure out of language for young people. Getting back to that wonderful song by Welch and Rawlings: what makes it great is the alliteration, for example in the third line: "runnin' around with the rag top down." But the way they rhyme "oh me oh my oh" with "Miss Ohio" is pretty brilliant too. It's likely that the character in the song is not literally the winner of the Miss Ohio contest. But we can see her: a young woman, probably, running away from a small town in Ohio, headed for Atlanta and some adventures, the song implies, in her convertible with the "rag top down." Then, "I wanna do right, but not right now." The two meanings of "right" that create a wonderful irony: "right" as in morally right, and "right now," as in instantly. In other words, instant gratification is almost always in conflict with what you're supposed to do, and that little line captures that entire idea so economically and wittily. (It also conjures up that joke about "Mr Right" versus "Mr Right Now," and you can imagine the character pursuing the latter rather than the former.)

You don't need a big vocabulary to derive pleasure from this tiny poem. Or for that matter, from this one:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Again, a song with a great hook! By Bill Shakespeare, who would have made it big in Nashville had he been a singer/songwriter.

Again too, it's the delicious alliteration that makes it so pleasurable and memorable. In his memoir, Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt talks about how he rolled those words around just for the pure pleasure of how they literally felt in his mouth, and for the pleasure of the sounds. It's not just the alliteration: it's also the end rhyme and the rhythm of the words. Significantly, this is a song in The Tempest, not dialogue in the play, a song sung by a sort of fairy or sprite named Ariel. (A sprite sort of like Taylor Swift or Bjork.) Song lyrics are often more loaded with pure aural pleasure than poetry that is meant to be merely read or spoken. Nowadays, very little written poetry even rhymes. But songs do.

Young people love pop music and song--country music, rock, rap. Maybe English teachers should pay more attention to that and talk with their students about where the pleasure comes from: talk more about poetic devices like alliteration, end rhymes, internal rhymes, meter, etc. Poetry--even very academic, formal poetry that seems meant only to be read--comes from song. Epic poetry, even, was sung, and the long stories that epic poets told are the ancestors of short stories and novels. All literature, you could say, goes back to popular song. As they say on the classical music station, all music was once new music.

I could just say, put the "art" back in language arts, and then pleasure would follow. But it's not that simple, because pleasure has become suspect in most of the arts, including visual art. In academia, art teachers often chide students for making art that is too pretty. Continental theory has been at work for several decades now, on the project of making people feel guilty or somehow politically incorrect if they get pleasure from visual art. It's a bourgeois pleasure that we're supposed to feel ashamed of.

Well, enough of that. A lot of contemporary visual artists are now ignoring their art school teachers and making stuff that actually looks good. English teachers, take note: pleasure is back. It never went away on the radio, and your students know that. Throw away the lists of Latinate words and get out your good old Anglo-Saxon words. They're fine. They'll do. Write some songs with good hooks. Read novels aloud in class. Act out plays. No more bubbles and number two pencils!

How to Build Vocabulary

2011-11-08T07:29:00.000-08:00

James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary

Right now I'm tutoring a girl who is trying to improve her vocabulary. Having a big vocabulary is important on a lot of standardized tests, so it's a common obsession of parents and teachers.

When I was in elementary school, we had a series of books in the Word Wealth series that were supposed to teach us vocabulary. We had to memorize the definitions and use the word in a sentence and so on: the usual drills. But I don't think it worked very well. I remember one word in particular: facetious. Word Wealth said that it meant, "inappropriately witty." I was sort of a class clown, dying to be witty at all times, and I couldn't imagine an inappropriate time to be witty, except maybe at a funeral or something. But apparently that's not the only time you could conceivably be "facetious." I kept asking my English teacher about it, and she really couldn't explain when you might say, appropriately, "I was just being facetious."

Many years later, though, I did understand what "facetious" meant and even started using it. It doesn't really mean "inappropriately witty," although that might be as close as you can get to defining its present usage. But when the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) was written, there was nothing pejorative (another vocabulary word that I struggled to understand) about the word "facetious": it meant "characterized by, or addicted to, pleasantry; jocose, jocular, waggish. Formerly often with laudatory sense: Witty, humorous, amusing..."
Ok, there's a slight hint there in the word "formerly" that facetious is not quite as great as it used to be. Maybe people are just too serious these days? After all, quotes the OED, "the medieval carvers were many of them facetious fellows." A guy named Mickelthwaite said that. Anybody with a name like that must have thought wit was always appropriate.

I've been thinking about all this as I strive to impart to my sixth-grade student the nuances of meaning of such words as "accede" or "abdicate." I told a long story about the abdication of Edward VIII, which he did to marry Mrs. Simpson, a very interesting story in part because it led to Queen Elizabeth II becoming Queen, and it was the back-story in part to the whole drama about Charles and Diana and Camilla, and even to the marriage of William to a commoner. The royals have evidently learned from their history, although it took them a long time to get the message.

The problem was that for a twelve year old this story was not as rich as it was for me, because she could not remember the death of Diana or the whole drama surrounding it. I am beginning to think that words acquire their patina of meaning over a lifetime. All the times you have heard that word used, something "stuck" to it, and now for you that word has a very personal meaning. It's as if it picked up a scent from all its previous contexts.

Context is key. Learning words out of context is just rote memorization. I keep telling people that they just need to read a lot, to improve their vocabulary painlessly, but nobody really seems to want to do that. I guess it takes too much time, and it seems as if memorizing definitions is a short cut. But it doesn't really work: the word is not yours unless you have handled it, kept it in your pocket, got it out to look at it like a magic rock, thrown it at other people, kept it in a drawer of your desk.

One thing I like about the OED is that it gives you some of that fast, if you're in a hurry. You can look up any word and find out how somebody used it three hundred years ago. I just opened it at random and looked at the word "excavation." In 1751, somebody named Chambers wrote, "The excavation of the foundation of a building...is settled, by Palladio, at a sixth part of the height of the whole building." Palladio! Really? What a useful rule of thumb, for when I build my chicken house! But, is that just in Italy, or everywhere? What about on the Gulf Coast?

If the word "excavation" was new to me, just thinking about all this--how to really use it, and use the information associated with it--would make it MY word. A word doesn't exist in a vacuum. It comes trailing clouds of glory, as it were. There's no short cut to being able to feel that aura: you just have to read a lot, and if you're in a hurry, play with your magnifying glass and the OED.

Home-made Journals

2011-09-22T06:19:00.000-07:00

I fill up a sketchbook with my journal writing about every two to three months. I've been thinking about how to avoid having to buy these journals so often. Maybe I could make some books?

I took a book-making class some years ago at the Glassell School in Houston. But we didn't learn about the kind of book I've been thinking of making: the book made by binding single sheets, rather than by stitching folded folios together. Fortunately, there is a book about binding single sheets: it's called Smith's Sewing Single Sheets, by the great bookmaker and bookmaking book writer, Keith Smith. I have this book, and I'm studying it now.

It might be possible to simply find a great deal of usable paper by saving junk mail letters with at least one empty side. These could be bound together, and the written-on side could be re-primed with gesso for painting or drawing, as in an altered book. But of course, it's also possible to make your own paper, another thing I want to learn. I could get newspaper out of the dumpsters for the pulp, or use fibers from plants around my farm, or both!

Of course, making journals by hand from found materials won't solve the storage problem: I am running out of storage space for my journals. But it won't be too hard to make more bookshelves, I think.

How to Get to Work

2011-09-18T06:32:00.000-07:00

How to Get to Work

Turn right on Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard,

Drive past the huge metal chicken that has a hen’s body and a rooster’s comb on its head,

The product of art students who’ve never seen a real rooster or hen;

Drive past the grass-less park with the old black men and their pit bull pets—

“Don’t let your dog come over here. My dog is not social. Do you understand?”

An old woman hobbles along the path on the edge of the park, a stick in her hand

To ward off the pit bulls.

At the corner turn left on Old Spanish Trail

In front of the abandoned gas station.

(If you need gas, you should have driven to Midtown, where you can safely buy gas.)

Go under the railroad trestle

But not if it just rained, because the puddle is deeper than you think and your car will stall out.

Somebody got swept into a culvert and drowned.

Drive up the little hill past the chemical plant—at least I think that’s what they make there—

On your left is some tall grass and the concrete-lined, so-called bayou

Where somebody must have died because there’s one of those home-made crosses with teddy bears and plastic flowers.

Did he get shot? Was he in a wreck? Did she drown?

On the right is a grey metal building and a fence with concertina wire,

Around what I think is a junk yard.

Nobody ever walks there, so don’t try it.

Some big loops of spray-painted graffiti arc across the walls of the building.

Once I saw a man standing there.

Further down on the right is one of those old motels from the fifties—

The Texas Motel. I think some people live there.

Then the bayou. They fixed the bridge

And it’s pretty nice. Stop at the three-way intersection. Wait for the light.

Trucks come in from your right and you can’t always see them.

Pass the used car lot where “Your Job Is Your Credit,” or used to be—

It went out of business—the cars are gone but the strings of colored plastic flags are still there.

Pass the bus stop where a woman stands with a baby in her arms, and four kids under the age of six, each one slightly shorter than the next oldest one, wait.

Get onto the ramp for I-45. Speed up.

But stay in the right lane. See the bayou on your right, and a heron pick at a dead fish.

The anhingas spread their wings to dry, standing on a black log.

A white plastic bag floats downstream.

Go over the bridge. Below on the feeder road,

A woman hurries along the narrow concrete sidewalk, in red plastic shoes, tugging a child’s hand.

“Tomo Mi Mano, No Mi Vida,” pleads a big-eyed child on a billboard.

The reason is, there’s a family planning clinic somewhere around—

Oh, there it is. An angry-looking white person is sitting in a lawn chair in front of it,

Holding a sign with something written in magic marker on it,

But it’s not, “Homeless Please Help Anything Helps God Bless.”

You will see that sign later on your way home.

Pass the big yellow sign with black letters that says “Cambiamos Cheques,”

And the beauty school, where young women wait for the doors to open,

and the pale bald mannequin heads wait inside,

And the wholesale restaurant supply place,

And a little church that used to be a Mexican restaurant,

And a pawnshop, and an adult video store.

You exit at Woodside Avenue,

But there are no woods at its side.

There are men—a lot of them—waiting in groups at the front of the Home Depot parking lot,

Some crouch, most stand. They smoke and drink coffee from Styrofoam cups.

A lady with a cooler sells them breakfast tacos and tamales.
They sort of flirt with her, but she’s old, and they are mostly very young.

Stop at the end of the exit ramp. Here you have to turn left,

But be careful: wait for the green arrow and look out for the young woman

With long black hair and a clear plastic backpack who’s trying to cross in front of you

And the old man on a bicycle who’s trying to dodge the broken glass under the overpass

Which you also have to drive under.

On your left is a tangled pile of black plastic-coated wire that has sat on that concrete curb at that intersection for five years. Who knows why.

Don’t look at it.

Turn left under the freeway and stay in the left lane,

Turn left again, looking to your right first because of big trucks coming off I-45,

And then immediately get in the right lane, when you’re in front of the James Coney Island,

Because you have to make a right into the college parking lot.

Wave to the cop in the parking lot, and then drive around to where it says “Faculty and Staff.”

There’s a chain-link fence there, trapping a tree against the bank of dirt—

the tree’s bark and body is growing around and into the chain links.

A crushed plastic soda bottle is caught there too, and a tampon.

Ignore these things. Park and lock your car.

Go back and check to make sure it’s locked.

Shoulder your backpack; grasp your book bag and lunch bag.

Walk to the front of the door of the Angela Morales building.

Watch out for the girl in the motorized wheelchair who is coming out as you go in—

Her head and trunk are the size of a normal girl’s, but her arms and legs are like a baby’s: short fat stumps. Nevertheless, her fingers work.

Her mother waits for her in a van equipped with a wheelchair lift—

But her mother lifts her tenderly out of the chair and carries her to the passenger seat in front,

And all the wheelchair lift does is it lifts the enormous motorized wheelchair into the van.

(The girl operates the wheelchair by pushing buttons on the right armrest.)

Go inside the building. On the left is the main door to the writing center, where you work.

But it doesn’t open.

Go down the hall on your left. Say hello to the lady who cleans the bathrooms.

Go in the first door on your left. Turn on the lights in the room.

Go to the front door and open it. Prop it open with the trashcan,

because we can’t figure out how to make it stay unlocked.

Go back in the writing center. Put down your stuff.

Go to the window and look out. Fifty feet away, you see the freeway, and the cars rushing by.

People trying to get to work.

Free fonts!

2011-08-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

Hi, this is my new font, curly Q.? Yes, you can download it free at "Outside the Line," a cool site run by a girl named Rae who makes cool fonts and sometimes gives them away.

Here is her site.

I think it would be fun to experiment with making books of poetry or whatever with this font.

"Luxury Goods"

2011-08-05T07:05:00.001-07:00

Luxury Goods

Lying around reading The New Yorker

On hot afternoons is a luxury;

You read about ugly architecture,

I read about ancient philosophy.

Apparently Lucretius Carus thought

The world was made of tiny atomi,

And seven hundred fifty dollars bought

Some shoes in New York City recently.

I myself own a lot of blueberries

In quart-size mason jars in the freezer

Also goat cheese, and cherry tomatoes

In the garden to pick at my leisure.

Luxury is in the nature of things;

No shoes, no shirt: millions of blueberries.

Wild Thing

2011-03-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

I recently watched the movie, Where the Wild Things Are, on DVD. I loved the book when my son was a little boy, and he did too: we read it over and over, and he had some stuffed toys based on the lovable monsters in the book. I knew that Dave Eggers had been one of the script writers, so I knew it would be good.

And it was! Visually it was great: the monsters are like big muppets, but with much more expressive faces than Grover and Big Bird, thanks to animatronics. And it does justice to a truly great children's book, although it takes a lot of liberties with that original short picture book. In the original book, a little boy wears a wolf suit, creates some mischief, and gets sent to his room. The room turns into a forest, and he sails on a boat (while apparently still in his room) to an island where there are big Wild Things even more mischievous than he is. He is crowned their king, but he wants to go home, so he sails home to his room, where his supper is waiting. We never seen an adult: just Max, in Sendak's unforgettable illustrations, and the Wild Things.

The movie is a bit darker. Max seems older--about eight or nine--and he has some real troubles: his parents are apparently divorced; his older sister has some mean friends and they won't include him in their teen play or outings; his mother is distracted and worried, although loving. Also, she has a new boyfriend. All these situations, and an apparent sense of being left out or lonely, drive Max around the bend one night, and he puts on his wolf suit and goes native: he howls, he tries to order his mother about, and finally he flees civilization, like Huck Finn, and goes out Into the Wild.

But this Wild is not contained by bedroom walls. He runs out into a suburban landscape, pursued by his frantic mother, but he escapes her. (A parent watching this film is constantly mentally at home with the mother, sharing her anxiety about a child who has run off into the night!) As in the picture book, he sails to an island. The sailing scenes are particularly beautiful, as is the wonderful little wooden boat he sails in. He arrives at an island and, as in the book, charms and intimidates the little family of monsters, who make him their "king."

But the monsters in the movie, one quickly realizes, are not much different than Max's own fractured, contentious family: there is a quarreling couple; the monsters can't play nicely together without fighting; they even smash each others' "forts," just as Max's sister's friends smashed his. Max attempts to "tame" all this wildness by alternately dominating and befriending the monsters, but it doesn't work. The wildest Wild Thing, Carol, goes berserk and smashes up everything, and Max is powerless to stop him, at which point the other Wild Things realize that Max is no king at all, but "just regular."

This may sound a bit trite, but somehow it is moving. Max's distress at home, before he runs away, is acute: his little face looks so sad at times that it almost broke my heart. And you can see that his rage and temper tantrums, while justifiable in part, are frightening to himself. He stands at the cusp of that time in childhood when one must "put away childish things," when kids stop playing pretend and dressing up in wolf suits, and start learning to put aside their own narcissism in order to get along with others better. But it's so hard!

Max's kingship is a kind of metaphor both for his desire to master his own impulses, and his desire to not have to master these impulses: to remain a little willful tyrant all his life, saying lines like, "Feed me, woman," to his mother while standing on the kitchen counter. Who wouldn't love to be an infantile, demanding King one's whole life in a way? The monster Carol, who is always "out of control" but is also the most visionary and creative of the monsters, seems to represent Max's--and everybody's--Inner Child, both passionately creative and capable of destructive infantile narcissistic rage. Max can't control Carol; he can only admit, belatedly, that he is "just regular."

The key moment in the movie happens when Carol is raging through the forest, breaking trees, and trying to catch Max, threatening to eat him. The Inner Child has become a real monster, capable of destroying everything! Max runs to K. W., the rational, calm, maternal female monster (and beloved of Carol), and she hides him by swallowing him! Max dives into her capacious mouth, and we see him inside her stomach (or is it her womb?), listening while she quarrels with Carol. Later, she symbolically gives birth to him by drawing him out of her mouth, all wet and a bit traumatized, but safe. At this point Max says, "You don't need a king. You need a mom."

Aha! Freud's neat little trinity of Id (the raging, nonconformist Inner Child), Ego, and Super Ego never included The Mom, now, did it? One always assumed that the Super Ego parent was a father, as indeed Freud conceived of it. Max had tried to be the paternalistic, domineering Super Ego--the King--and failed. It didn't "get rid of the sadness," as the monsters begged him to. He couldn't stop their fighting or their destructiveness. (Even Freud admitted as much, in Civilization and Its Discontents.) It seems that K.W., the mom, is the only one capable of that, through her gentle kindness and inclusiveness.

So Max remembers his own mom, almost like Odysseus waking out of his dream on Calypso's island and remembering Ithaca and Penelope. He rushes down to the sea and sails away in his boat, leaving the grieving monsters behind. His mother, as we can imagine, is very glad to see him. It's not clear how long he's been gone in her world: fifteen minutes? days? She looks very tired, though, as if she's been crying for days and many nights. But apparently no police were sent to find Max. He arrives like Odysseus, unsought-for, but recognized by the one important person.

The "moral" of the story seems to be that connection and love are the only things that can tame the wildness without crushing it out of existence. Domineering kingship--trying to crush the Inner Child, the Wild Thing within--didn't work; it just made the situation worse. The mother's calm presence and waiting for the storm to subside are the magic needed to help Max grow out of his narcissistic rage and into a more social being, happily. This is pretty much what child psychologists say about the narcissism of early childhood: a heavy hand can just perpetuate the narcissism into adulthood; while no containment at all of the rage--the sleep of reason-- also can create monsters. Max's mother is "just right."

This movie spoke to me so strongly in part because I've been thinking about place of Wildness--or rather, its absence--in modern urban life. I miss, literally, the call of the wild when I'm in Houston: that thrilling sound of coyotes howling at night that I hear at my farm in Tennessee. I'm working on a series of photographs called The Call of the Tame, about domesticated animals. Humans are a kind of domesticated animal: we've domesticated ourselves. And there's a loss in that. So the Wild has a mystique, the mystery of a kind of lost paradise of the ancient past, or even one's own childhood.

I'm also re-reading Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, which trades in some of the same familiar tropes that Sendak used brilliantly in his original picture book: the lone male child going on a kind of vision quest on a boat, to a place where you can be wilder and crazier, where none of those irksome laws exist, and then finding that you miss the rules. I guess Where the Wild Things Are is kind of like Heart of Darkness for little kids, in the same way that Lord of the Flies is Where the Wild Things Are for middle schoolers. At any age, we need our myth of the Noble Savage, but when we actually meet, or become, him, we sort of balk and have second thoughts. It's a conflict that can't really be resolved. Mistah Kurtz, he may be dead, but the desire to "light out for the territory" never dies.

Ree Dolly, my hero

2010-07-13T10:55:00.000-07:00

When a book keeps you up all night thinking about it after you've finished reading it, it has to be a powerful book. This book by Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone, scared the bejeezus out of me, as one of his characters might say, and I couldn't go to sleep till after midnight, worrying about the characters. And not just because it's "noir": it's because it's "country noir," as one reviewer put it. It situates the violence and darkness not in its usual urban environment, but in my home: the rural South.

OK, so Faulkner depicted a lot of violence and darkness in the rural South too. What else is new? Well, the setting here is the rural South, circa early 21st century, a bit closer to home for me than the Mississippi Delta in 1910 or 1830. And I'm sorry to say that the villains are instantly recognizable. They are the men who used to make moonshine in the past and have now diversified, first into marijuana growing, a fairly harmless pursuit in the seventies, and now into the cooking of meth, or crank, as it's called in the Ozarks apparently. We still mostly call it meth in the Upper Cumberland. A few years ago it was a huge problem here. Young people were losing their teeth over it, and losing custody of their small children. But fortunately for us, Mexicans started making meth better and cheaper, and those "jobs" went south over the border, like the jobs in the shirt factories that used to be here.

In Winter's Bone, Daniel Woodrell makes the world of white rural poor people very vivid and exact, down to the last detail, of the interiors of their houses for example: the old woodstoves, the guns lying casually on the kitchen table next to bags of pot and crank, the inherited old clothes, the cut-off shirt sleeves, the junk food bought as cheaply as possible, and the still-useful relics of an older, more self-reliant past like a wooden "skinning board" for skinning squirrels. He is also very good at describing the way beaten-up poor people look: the missing ears and teeth and fingers, the limps caused by gunshot wounds, the pallor caused by days and nights of living on drugs, beer and cigarettes. Even the smells of people--the bail bondsman smells "like town"-- are instantly believable. His transcription of their speech is dead-on. This is what makes or breaks a novel about the South, I think: the writer's ability to remember and transcribe the unique speech patterns and vocabulary of Southerners, which varies a lot regionally. Flannery O'Connor was a past master of this, as was, of course, Faulkner. But it's not that easy to do without sounding condescending, as if you are writing "dialect." Woodrell never condescends. His third-person narrator's voice participates in this voice too, so as not to distance itself too much from the main character, Ree Dolly.

And what a character she is. She is absolutely, totally real and memorable. She was the one I stayed up late worrying about. She is a teenager when the events of the story happen, but she has already had to assume responsibility for feeding and caring for her two little brothers and her mother, who has gone crazy. Her crank-cooking dad is absent, run off to escape prison. The family home, inherited by her mother, has been put up by her dad for his bail bond. So she has to find him, make him appear in court, or prove he's dead.

This task takes her on an odyssey through her broken-down neighborhood, meeting scary character after scarier character, like that baby bird in Are You My Mother? She seems as vulnerable as that baby bird, only she's looking for her no-good daddy, ironically to bring him to justice to save the family home place. The bad guys she meets are mostly men. Her own uncle is one of the scariest. Frequently these encounters lead to a slapping at the least; once she's knocked down some stairs; always she's threatened and told not to ask so many questions. Her courage in persisting in this do-or-die effort to save her home, the ancient trees on the hill above it, her crazy mother, and her not-yet-mean little brothers is both admirable and reckless. And people tell her so. But she seems to feel she has no choice but to risk venturing into the dens of these crank crooks, asking them, in effect, if they have killed her father or know where he is hiding.

The fact that in the end she doesn't give up or die trying means that this is a novel where things mostly end happily, rather than real life, where it's just one thing after another with no real denouement. In real life she would have gotten scared off; there would be no real resolution to the mystery of what happened to her father; she would join the Army, and her brothers would be adopted by a relative, her mother dropped off at the local mental institution. To Woodrell's credit, for a while it seems as if this might be the way it ends. But again, this is art, not life, and something like a satisfying victory is achieved, although the reader knows it's fragile.

You can't help admiring this amazing young woman and her sheer physical courage, tenacity, stubbornness, endurance, and all-round know-how: she can shoot a squirrel out of a tree and skin it; she splits wood expertly; she negotiates with the bail bondsman. It's all the more gratifying to think that a man wrote this wonderful portrait of a young woman; it's not a woman writer fantasizing about what she would have liked to have been. When I was a little girl, I loved the Caddie Woodlawns and Pippi Longstockings of my fiction world: the strong, independent little tomboys. Ree Dolly is a more realistic, grown-up, contemporary version of those little girls: Pippi grown up not just to lift horses onto a porch, but to fight hardened, ruthless, meth-addicted rednecks. And win.

The Stressful Serengeti

2010-07-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

Nature is supposed to be calming. We are urged to take vacations in

"nature." But people who spend a lot of time in "nature" know better. Nature is not good or bad; it just is. And sometimes it's violent and dangerous, and that's not just hurricanes: sometimes your fellow organisms can be a pain in the butt.

Nobody knows this better than Robert Sapolsky, the author of A Primate's Memoir. Sapolsky has studied olive baboons in the Serengeti for decades, as a way of understanding stress in animals in general, including humans, the most numerous primates. Sapolsky went to Kenya shortly after his graduation from Harvard and began chasing olive baboons with a blow-gun, in order to dart them with an anesthetic, draw blood from them, and measure their cortisol levels to determine their stress levels. He found that being an alpha baboon was good. Duh. Being lower down on the pecking order caused a lot of stress for baboons. The lower-ranking baboons, male and female, were subjected to bullying from higher ranking baboons, and some of them failed to mate as a result. Both these things--physical abuse and isolation--make stress hormones sky-rocket, leading to stress-related diseases.

But this book is not just a parable about all the reasons not to let other people (or baboons) bully you. It's a very entertaining account of life in Africa during the eighties and nineties. Many of Sapolsky's stories revolve around his travels outside Kenya--to Sudan and Rwanda, memorably--and close scrapes and narrow escapes from bad guys and con artists in that part of the continent. The picture emerges of a beautiful but troubled continent, where desperately poor people are inured to corruption. The last, tragic chapter is a lesson in the damage that corruption can do.

During his sojourns in the Serengeti, Sapolsky's neighbors were the Masai, with whom he seems to have had a love-hate relationship. At first he wanted to BE a Masai, and he practised diligently with the spear they gave him, trying to throw it through a rolling tire. He became close friends with several Masai. But as the decades went by, Masai culture changed. The Masai turned out to be instrumental in the destruction of the baboons that Sapolsky loved. In the end, he had some sympathy for the Kenyan government, which made being a Masai warrior illegal eventually. Nevertheless, Sapolsky feels some sadness for the loss of this warrior, cow-herding culture. (He mentions parenthetically that they practiced clitoridectomy, which detracts somewhat from the romance of the culture.)

Sapolsky is a very good story-teller. He is good at pacing a story, finding the telling detail to make it vivid and usually funny, and delivering the punch line. Some of his stories are poignant as well as funny, like the story of his trip to visit the dwindling reserve where Dian Fossey's mountain gorillas lives. Fossey was apparently not as good at getting along with the locals as Sapolsky has learned to be, and he is critical, although also admiring, of her, especially since mountain gorillas were Sapolsky's first love. He switched to baboons when he realized that baboon society is more analogous to human societies, and thus better for studying social stress.

I laughed out loud several times reading this book. It's rare to read a book by an academic scientist that is so well-written and entertaining that it makes you laugh out loud. But also it made me think differently about people. I started noticing that people are really very sophisticated baboons. A lot of what goes on between people is exactly the kind of power-mongering and jockeying for position that olive baboons are obsessed with. Somehow that realization--that it's just part of primate nature to bully and resist bullying--makes it, well, less stressful. Groom your friends, avoid your enemies, make a loud noise if you need to, to scare enemies off, avoid the hyenas, and life is pretty good.

The Epigram Against Stalin

2010-06-02T06:09:00.000-07:00

In the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books, there's an article by Jose Manuel Prieto about a translation he made in the nineties of Osip Mandelstam's poem, "Epigram Against Stalin." Prieto was commissioned to translate the poem into Spanish from Russian, which he did, but he says that he was not really satisfied with the translation, that it never quite seemed to convey the power of the poem in Russian.

I had never heard of this poem, even though I studied Russian in college in the seventies. I think surely my teachers knew of it; they were Russian emigrees. This article would be a wonderful teaching tool for people learning Russian, as Prieto goes line by line through the poem, analyzing all the nuances and allusions in it that only Russians would understand. The poem turns out to be a microcosm of Russian society in the Stalin era, a history lesson in sixteen lines, and as Prieto says, a sixteen-line death sentence for Mandelstam.

Here it is translated into English:

EPIGRAM AGAINST STALIN

We live without feeling the country beneath our feet,
our words are inaudible from ten steps away.
Any conversation, however brief,
gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin’s mountain man.
His greasy fingers are thick as worms,
his words weighty hammers slamming their target.
His cockroach moustache seems to snicker,
and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam.

Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains,
he toys with the favors of such homunculi.
One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps;
he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn.
Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes,
he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead,
a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye.

Every execution is a carnival
that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight.

—Translated by Esther Allen from José Manuel Prieto’s Spanish version

The poem was written in 1934; by 1938, Mandelstam was dead in the camps. Prieto describes the poem as "an act of incredible recklessness, bravery, or artistic integrity." Why did Mandelstam do it? Apparently he spent days composing his poems in his head; only when he was satisfied with them would he commit them to paper. After he finished the Epigram in his way, he recited it to Pasternak. Pasternak was appalled and apparently said, "You have not recited anything to me and I did not hear anything and I bet you not to recite this to anyone else ever." But Mandelstam did, and eventually word got back to Stalin.

I can understand the irresistible appeal of being able to shock so thoroughly using the power of words, even if the result was almost certain death. It would be hard, if not impossible, for a poet like Mandelstam to keep his poem to himself. People make art so that their work can be seen and heard. Mandelstam himself said, "Only in Russia is poetry respected--it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"

I read somewhere else, long ago, that only in Russia are poets like rock stars. Regular people in Russia care about poetry and literature in ways that are hard to imagine in the West. In Sergei Dovlatov's story, "The Colonel Says I Love You," the narrator is stopped by a policeman, who, it turns out, only wants to know if he remembers when Akhmatova's book Rosary was published! If a cop ever asks me a question about when Faulkner published Absalom, Absalom!... well, I won't know the answer. Maybe I'll end up in Huntsville.

Prieto's line by line "explication de texte" shows why Russians care so much about their poetry: if much of it is like the Epigram, it's satisfying in ways that poetry in English rarely is. I can still pronounce the Cyrillic alphabet, even though I took Russian over thirty years ago, and so I read the words of the poem in Russian aloud to myself. Even if you don't understand the meaning, the sounds are wonderful: hard and then soft, lots of assonance and alliteration, repetition and rhythm.

But Prieto also gives you a feeling for what Russians hear and understand in this poem. Perhaps the most striking example is his explanation of this line:

"His cockroach mustache seems to snicker,"

In Russian this line is just three words, literally, "cockroach mustache laughs." Apparently there's a famous children's poem in Russian involving a huge cockroach with a mustache. Ok, I've seen those feelers on the front of a cockroach; they do look sort of like a mustache. In the children's poem, the cockroach terrorizes the animals in a forest until a bird eats him with one bite. So when Russians read the Epigram, they hear the allusion to this poem, and in their minds, a bird appears to eat...Stalin! Maybe the bird is Mandelstam? After all, both he and Stalin are dead, but the poem is still here.

According to Prieto, Mandelstam had probably thought all this through: he knew that composing and reciting the poem was suicidal, but he also knew that it would out-last him and Stalin:

"Mandelstam knew that the epigram would never be published and was trying to leave it imprinted on as many minds as possible, to keep it from disappearing with his death."

This strategy worked. Mandelstam was made to write down the epigram at his trial. This copy ended up in the KGB archives. Later, the researcher Vitaly Shentalinsky found it, and compared this version to the version that had been circulated in samizdat in Russia. The samizdat versions were identical to Mandelstam's original. As Prieto writes, "The poem had etched itself faithfully in the memories of those who heard it recited in the distant year of 1934."

The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection

2010-01-25T10:20:00.000-08:00

The Carolina Rice Kitchen: the African Connection is perhaps the most erudite cookbook I've ever read, excepting maybe The Oxford Companion to Food. And, it's a cookbook within a cookbook, or rather, a cookbook within a treatise on a specific cuisine: the Carolina rice kitchen.

Karen Hess has reproduced within her own book an early 20th century cookbook called The Carolina Rice Cookbook, by a Mrs. Samuel Stoney. It seems that Mrs. Sam Stoney's husband was one of my grandfather's cousins in South Carolina, where a lot of rice was grown in the 19th century. This was no ordinary rice; it was a special variety called Carolina Gold. Planters stopped growing Carolina Gold in South Carolina in the 20th century, because it was so labor-intensive, and the soft ground where it was grown was not suitable for machine cultivation.

But in the 19th century, particularly during slavery times, South Carolina grew a lot of rice and had a true cuisine built around rice. The European-American planters did not come from a rice-growing culture, however. Their slaves did. This is the other story behind the Carolina Rice Cookbook that Karen Hess uncovers.

She says that white planters learned everything they needed to know about rice culture and cookery from their African slaves. West Africa had a thriving rice agriculture for centuries before West Africans were enslaved in large numbers and brought to the United States to grow rice. In fact, planters especially wanted slaves from the rice-growing areas of West Africa.

It wasn't just that Africans knew how to grow rice: they also had special ways of cooking it. Hess says that in South Carolina, people cook rice differently from the way they do it in the rest of the country: they do it the African way, which is also the Indian (Asian Indian) way. In Africa and India, people don't boil two cups of water for every cup of rice, and then cook the rice in that water until the rice is absorbed; rather, they boil the rice in a lot of water--perhaps three times the amount of rice--for about 12-15 minutes, then strain the rice and put it back in the pot to "soak" or steam. The pot is put near the fire, in a warm place, or over low heat. This way of cooking yields a very fluffy rice, "with every grain distinct," which was apparently desirable. (The Chinese/Japanese way of cooking rice uses less fuel, however, because less water has to be boiled.) I have been cooking Carolina Gold rice this way since I read the book, and I like the result. (You can buy Carolina Gold at Whole Foods and other stores, because some enterprising foodie growers are now growing it again, but it's expensive.)

Another characteristic cooking method in the Carolinas was the pilau. This was rice simmered in a stock made from chicken or meat. In this case, the rice stays in the cooking liquid rather than being drained. The pilau, and jambalaya, according to Hess, came to the Carolinas from Persia by way of Provence. Many of the Europeans who settled the Carolinas were Huguenots from that part of France.

Hess does a lot of her detective work by way of etymologies. One of her most interesting speculations is about the dish Hoppin' John and its origins. Hoppin John is rice cooked with some kind of beans. In the South the bean is usually black-eyed peas, or some other pea in the cowpea family. But Hess thinks the word just means "beans with rice." The word for beans in Malay is kachang. And the Persian word for rice is bahatta. If you say "bahatta kachang" fast, it sounds sort of like Hoppin' John, at least if you are a Gullah speaker, as the African-Americans of coastal South Carolina were. Works for me.

Another interesting etymological speculation in the book revolves around one of my favorite foods, the beignets of New Orleans. Rice was not as central to the cuisine of New Orleans as it was to the cuisine of coastal South Carolina. But by the late 19th century, African-American women were selling something called "calas" on the streets, as a street food sold by street vendors. These were fritters made with rice flour, or beignets de riz. How did they get the name calas? Hess speculates that African-Americans saw them as a variation on their African akkra, or fried croquettes, usually made of ground blackeyed peas in Africa. As with Hoppin' John, some consonants got changed and transposed: akkra became akla, and, Hess says, "cala is a metathetic form of akla, a...common alteration involving transposition." (I learned from wikipedia that "metathesis" is just the rearranging of the sounds in a word, as for example saying "purty" instead of "pretty.")

Anyway, those wonderful beignets at the Cafe du Monde are French, yes, but they're also African, and they used to be made with some rice flour, or cooked rice mixed with flour.

There are also chapters on rice soups and other rice breads besides the calas, and sweet rice puddings for desserts. South Carolinians also ate the birds that ate their rice: Dolichonyx oryzivorus, Here is a charming recipe from the frontispiece of the Carolina Rice Cook Book:

"Select the fattest birds, remove the entrails, bake them whole or split them up the back and broil.
Permit no sacrilegious hand to remove the head, for the base of the brain of the rice bird is the most succulent portion. Use no fork in eating. Take the neck of the bird in the left hand and his little right leg in the right hand. Tear away the right leg and eat all but the extreme end of the bone. Hold the bill of the bird in one hand and crush your teeth through the back of the head, and thank Providence that you are permitted to live. Take the remaining left leg in your right hand and place in your mouth the entire body of the bird, and then munch the sweetest morsel that ever brought gustatory delight. All that remains is the front portion of the head and the tiny bits of bone that formed the ends of the legs. To leave more is to betray your unappreciativeness of the gifts of the gods."

Wonder if you can buy whole rice birds at Whole Foods?

Gaia's gonna get you

2010-01-03T17:43:00.000-08:00

James Lovelock is the scientist who first conceptualized the Earth as a living organism. And he named that organism Gaia. His idea was that life on Earth keeps Earth hospitable to life, generally. But sadly, as he points out in his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, the Earth goddess Gaia does not necessarily care if one species in particular--ours--survives or disappears. She may have to regulate herself by getting rid of us.

Lovelock sees the Earth as an old lady, as old as himself in fact. He is in his late eighties, and if life on Earth is 3.5 billion years old, and Gaia will die when the sun burns out in 500 million years, then she's about 88% of the way there. If a man like Lovelock can live to be 100, and Gaia's "100" is 4 billion, then she's an old lady indeed.

But she is not a loving mother; she is more like the old Hindu goddess Kali who destroys as well as creates. Lovelock thinks that the chances are good that humans may not survive the coming catastrophe of climate change. But if it's any consolation, he thinks that life on Earth will survive, and new organisms will evolve to live in its new hot state. He hopes that humankind will be able to evolve its consciousness to a different one, less predatory and selfish, and more concerned with life on the planet as a whole than simply with individual or species survival. And if not evolve, then adapt to life on a hotter planet.

Lovelock makes a good case for the fact that the conventional predictions of the pace of warming may be grossly understated. He shows how global sea level changes are a more accurate way of measuring the amount of heat that the Earth has already absorbed, and by that measure, we are further down the path of climate change than many realize or predicted. Also, the Arctic sea ice is melting much faster than scientists have predicted. Lovelock emphasizes that when it comes to climate change, change is not linear, but can be quite abrupt and chaotic before the Earth levels out into a new steady, hotter state.

Although Lovelock addresses "solutions" like solar and wind power, he does not see them as real solutions. In his view, it's all too little, too late. There are too many of us, and solar and wind can't possibly supply enough power for seven billion humans, even if they are willing to make do with less (although he certainly advises us to get ready to make do with less). He has famously touted nuclear power as a solution, but it's hard to see how this squares with his reverence for Gaia herself. Putting toxins into her system that will persist for millennia hardly seems like a nice thing to do to an old lady who's already having hot flashes.

Indeed Lovelock is a cranky old guy who for some reason seems to dislike environmentalists. The chapter "To be or Not Be Green" is a confusing diatribe against the "new breed" of environmentalists who have the gall to be more than just innocent nature lovers who enjoy a walk in the country from time to time; on the contrary, these new bad environmentalists are political lefties, "partisan and contentious." You would think that, faced with the extinction of humankind, environmentalists would be praised for going to the ramparts. But Lovelock longs for the old days when nobody knew that big corporations were injecting poisons not just into birds, but into humans also. This chapter is odd because in it, Lovelock talks about the near disaster involving CFCs destroying the Earth's ozone layer. Lovelock apparently had invented a tool that made the measurement of tiny amounts of pollutants possible, and this tool made the detection of the ozone hole possible. He seems to be glad this disaster was averted, so why does he resent the politicization of environmental issues so much? It's not clear.

Another odd thing is the way he seems to see humankind's fouling of its own nest as somehow inevitable, given the way our species evolved. He quotes E. O. Wilson as placing the blame on the fact that we are "tribal carnivores." Well, maybe some of us are. But everything was going pretty well until some white male Europeans invented the Industrial Revolution. At the time, the Romantics knew this was a bad idea, people like William Blake, Ruskin, and William Morris. But people made fun of the Romantics much as Lovelock mocks environmentalists. And look what happened. The fact is that this disaster is the making of a few people, mostly male and mostly European.

I guess you could go back further and say that everything was going pretty well until these same male Europeans invented patriarchy, war, city states, and slavery. That's the real beginning. But however bad life under patriarchy was, life was still possible. It wasn't until patriarchy and capitalism came up with the internal combustion engine and started burning coal in large quantities that the fate of the human race was sealed.

I hope that Lovelock and Wilson are right, though, in their implication that if we become less carnivorous and less tribal, we might survive. I dream a world of matrilineal vegetarians. And Gaia, or Kali Ma, or whoever she is, might like us enough to let us survive.

Fantastic Mr Fox

2009-12-21T12:59:00.000-08:00

There's a new movie out called Fantastic Mr Fox, based on the book by the same name, by Roald Dahl. Dahl is one of my favorite writers for children: I love Matilda and James and the Giant Peach especially. There's also a great book of "fractured fairy tales" in verse, Revolting Rhymes, that I've practically memorized.

So when I heard that somebody had made a stop-motion animated version of Fantastic Mr. Fox, I had to go see it. In the book, the fox lives under a tree, and he regularly robs three farmers of their chickens, ducks, and cider. The farmers try to dig him out, and to escape, he and his family tunnel all the way under the farms and into the chicken houses, etc, where they get food for a huge underground feast with the other animals of the wood. In my book, there are hilarious drawings by Quentin Blake, who has illustrated many of Dahl's books. And Dahl's somewhat gross sense of humor are evident: he describes things falling out of Farmer Bean's ears, such as flies and bits of gum.

The original story is in the tradition of so much English children's literature: talking animals that wear clothes and live bourgeois lives in holes under trees, like in The Wind in the Willows or Winne the Pooh or the Beatrix Potter books; and marginalized "people" like the Borrowers who are invisible to the humans but rob them of small things that the people can easily spare, just to survive. Why did English writers specialize in these sorts of stories? Maybe because of the tradition of "fairy" stories: the fairies, after all, were small, not-quite-human beings that lived on the edges of gardens, invisible to the powerful humans. Some say that the fairy folk were the original inhabitants of England before the Celts arrived.

Wes Anderson, who made the film, has elaborated greatly on this tradition and updated it. All the twee elements of British children's fiction are retained: the precious miniature interiors and clothes, the bucolic countryside, the bourgois comforts of life in a hobbit or badger hole. Anderson commissioned people to make tiny knitted caps for the puppets to wear, for example, and it's a great pleasure to look at all these details. Much work went into this movie, into the making of the sets and into the laborious process of stop-motion animation, where each tiny movement of a character is photographed, then the puppet is moved a little more and another photograph is taken, and so on. It's an old-fashioned way of making an animated movie.

But in addition to all this cuteness, there's a kind of darkness in the movie's set and plot that's only hinted at in Dahl's book. Anderson brings this dark element to the fore. Dahl's farmers are obsessed, Ahab-like, with eliminating the fox; but in the movie they go beyond bulldozers and use explosives to oust the foxes from their hole. I'm sorry to say that it reminded me of our country's behavior at the beginning of the Iraq war, when we bombed civilians in Baghdad during Shock and Awe. And the animals cowering in the hole are nothing if not civilians in war time--mothers and children along with the fathers--banding together courageously to survive.

The farms in the movie are factory farms. They are surrounded by concertina wire and guarded by armed guards. Bean surveys his realm through the use of video cameras, from an underground bunker. The farms look more like prisons or concentration camps than like bucolic English countryside farms of Beatrix Potter's time. And indeed, real livestock farms are very much like concentration camps these days. And when the animals finally find a paradise full of food in the movie, it's the inside of a big box supermarket at night, where they drink juice out of boxes and eat fruit with stickers on them. Mr Fox points out that the food may not seem like real food, but the animals are surviving, and that's the name of the game: survival. A sentiment that many Americans can relate to this winter as they push their buggies through the aisles of Costco or Walmart.

Indeed there's an existential theme that persists throughout the movie: What is a fox? Mr Fox asks this question aloud and points out that it is existential. Can a fox be a fox if he never steals a chicken? If he no longer acts like a wild animal? He longs to BE a wild animal, rather than the bourgois, tamed fox journalist he has become in the movie. All those old children's books implicitly asked the same question: if animals are like people--wearing clothes and talking--are people like animals? And often, in those books, the humans were much more cruel and bloodthirsty than the animals. This is true in the movie as well. Again, many humans may have repressed the question that haunts Mr Fox: is a thoroughly tamed and domesticated human, pushing a cart through Costco, still "wild" and therefore "free"? What have we lost, in order to survive as modern humans?

Through all this seriousness, though, there's a lot of humor. The animals sometimes lapse into fierce fights, with growling and scratching, but they never say bad words: whenever they're tempted, they substitute the word "cuss," as in "Are you cussing with me?" or "That was one giant cluster cuss." They also eat ferociously, with their hands, like real animals. These sudden lapses into "animality" are funny, juxtaposed with all the gentility of their rooms and clothing. Also, there's a very funny scene where a young fox is learning a game called Whack Bat, the rules of which are so arcane and elaborate that the explanation of how it works is a parody of every over-elaborate sport you've ever tried to learn. (It also reminds you of the invented game quidditch in the Harry Potter stories.)

I also loved the music. The first song you hear is that great song, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett." Mr Fox is playing it on a little tape recorder attached to his belt, it turns out. How quaint! (Alongside all the other 19th century"quaintness" of the English children's book, but quaint in its evocation of the fifties, when Davy Crockett was all the rage, and of the seventies, when we listened to music on little tape players.) Anderson said in an interview that the fox's tail (which he loses near the beginning of the book) reminded him of Davy Crockett's coonskin hat. Also the soundtrack includes several Burl Ives songs from the fifties, songs I loved as a child, such as "Buckeye Jim," and "The Grey Goose." The latter is a song about a hunt, so it's appropriate. The little fox child is listening to the song in his room as he falls asleep.

About the loss of the tail: in the book the tail gets shot off by the farmers, and Mr Fox retreats to his hole, where Mrs Fox "tenderly" licks its stump to stop the bleeding. I suppose this was too erotic and animal-like for the movie, so in the movie she just sews up the stump instead! So, despite the daringness and contemporaneity of the movie, the book still has an edginess and naughtiness that the movie can only aspire to. That's the thing about books.

Story Corps in Houston

2009-11-29T13:45:00.000-08:00

The Story Corps mobile booth is in Houston for a month, until Dec 19. Today I went with my Peruvian friend Vilma Burwick to the Story Corps booth to record an interview with her about her very interesting life.

Vilma was born in a remote village in the north of Peru. She had a large family, and they were very close. She really did walk two hours to school every morning, and two hours back. When she went to high school, it was three hours. Her father really valued education, and he encouraged her to study.

When she finished high school, she went to Lima to go to the university there. She worked to support herself while she was in the university, and she became a lab technician at a hospital. But she wanted more opportunity, and she decided she wanted to move to the United States at some time, but she didn't know how she could make it happen.

Vilma cared for the children of a family that sometimes traveled to the United States for vacations. On one of these trips, Vilma had a long layover in the Houston airport. A mysterious man kept talking to her and flirting with her. She was scared, but after a while she came to sort of like the man. When she got back to Peru, he had sent her a lot of emails! They were in English, but she got a dictionary and translated them. She wrote back to him, partly in Spanish, and he had a dictionary too, to figure out what her emails meant. Fifteen months after she met Keith Burwick in the Houston airport, she came to Houston and, reader, she married him.

Vilma had to learn English, so she watched American soap operas and read as much as she could in English. She started attending ESL classes at HCC, which is where I met her. Now she's on her way to a four-year university, to study microbiology. And she became an American citizen. She's an American success story.

Multiculturalism and Feminism

2009-11-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

An interesting issue came up in the writing center the other day. I was tutoring a Chinese woman who was writing an essay about motherhood, fatherhood, and marriage. She wrote that women have a "bounden duty" to have children because they have the right body parts.

Usually I don't argue with students when they say things that I don't agree with, but I couldn't let this one go by. In part that was because I knew that her writing teacher would think this point of view odd; the teacher had assigned a lot of essays about gender issues and is presumably a feminist, although I don't know her and couldn't say that for sure. Even if this were not the case, I thought it was my "bounden duty" to inform the student that this statement, presented as if it were self-evident and not defended at all, would strike most Americans as old-fashioned, if not downright offensive. So I told her that in the US, we consider child-bearing a choice rather than a duty.

"A choice?" she said, after a long silence. What a novel concept.

I was somewhat puzzled by her puzzlement, because I have met other young Chinese women students who are very career-oriented and don't want to be only housewives. They don't seem to see child-bearing as a "duty," and I know that China has had a long-time policy of limiting births to one child per family. The Maoist socialist revolution was ostensibly feminist also.

I asked the student if most people in China thought that women had a duty to have children. She said that they did. Maybe she is from a different class or region than the women I had met before, who were graduate students at the University of Houston.

Anyway I posted a story about this on the email list for writing tutors at HCC, asking people what they do when a student writes something that is "politically incorrect" or possibly offensive to most Americans, especially when they don't seem to realize this is the case. Almost always these un-PC statements are about the inferiority of women, or their proper place in society being firmly under the thumb of men. Muslim and Hispanic male students, and some Asian men, are the usual offenders, but occasionally recent immigrants who are women express these un-feminist points of view, without defending them much, as if they are obviously true.

I was surprised that another tutor thought that it was inappropriate to some degree for me to argue with the Chinese student about her point of view. She said that some people think it is an honor to be pregnant, and that I was privileging the intellect over the body. I wrote back that I thought being pregnant and giving birth were indeed very empowering, but that the body is not necessarily "honored" by pregnancy: that in fact pregnancy changes the body in sometimes negative ways that can last the rest of a woman's life. (That's something that they don't tell young women.) I also reiterated the familiar feminist point that honoring the body means giving its owner control over it, rather than assuming that its reproductive ability belongs to a husband, or a collective. Women are not just baby-making machines, yo.

I also said that when one becomes a mother, one is by no means giving up on the intellect: being a good mother takes a lot of thought.

But there's another issue here: what are we to do with all these people moving to our shores who bring with them pre-Enlightenment--ie medieval--ways of thinking? Some European countries have had the policy of absolute tolerance of, say, Islamic fundamentalism, and the result is incidents like the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. Other countries like France have tried to assimilate Muslims by forbidding Muslim girls from wearing head scarves at school. In the US, we haven't really decided what our policy is. Muslim girls can wear head scarves or even full body coverings to school (I've seen women on the Rice campus who are covered head to toe in black, to the point that you can't even see their eyes), and in most universities and colleges, faculty bend over backward to accommodate "multicultural" points of view, in order to be "post-colonial." At the same time most academics would probably describe themselves as feminists, even while they argue that it's parochial for Westerners to tout Enlightenment values like freedom of thought and individualism!

I just can't go there. I am unashamed about valuing freedom of thought and individualism. And I don't think that those values are at war with community well-being. We don't have to choose between the individual and the community, especially when it comes to women's individualism: development policy makers in the Third World know now that educating and empowering women is the single most important thing that an NGO can work on, to improve the overall well-being of a whole community. (See Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's new book Half the Sky.)

Also, if the Chinese people are so averse to individualism, why do they want to get rid of the firewall that their government has erected around their internet access? How could Tiananmen Square have happened? Some Western intellectuals seem to think that all political attitudes are created by one's society, and that they are all equally valid; but if that's the case, how does change ever happen? How do people come to question what they've been taught? I think that people know when things aren't right, and that individual thinking exposes oppression. The freedom to talk about one's insights into oppression helps other individuals think more clearly about their situation, and that's how political change in the right direction of more freedom and equality happens.

So I will continue to encourage thinking and questioning of received opinion in the writing center. I don't care if I'm not post-colonial enough. I like the Enlightenment.

Why Not Play it Cool?

2009-11-03T14:51:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem by Wendell Berry that recently appeared in The New Yorker. It's written in couplets of iambic pentameter, and it's about global warming, I think.

Can you write a good poem about global warming? This poem doesn't shy away from being didactic. In fact, you could call it preachy. Usually that makes for a bad poem. And I am having a hard time saying that this is a good poem, even though I agree with all its sentiments. A couple of lines in it stick in my craw, for example:

"Burning the world to live in it is wrong."

Why is this bad? Well, any more, poems don't generally lecture to you and tell you what's wrong. I guess they used to, though, but that ended sometime in the early twentieth century.

So let's say this poem is a throw-back to ...Victorian poetry. Is it good Victorian poetry? I would say: pretty good. If we look at the line above again, there's more to it than first appears: the image is of burning a world in order to live in it. How can you burn something and live in it at the same time. You can't. You could burn some of it to live in the rest of it, but that's not what it says: it says we are burning the whole world in order to live in it. Our house is burning down around us. Point taken.

Some of the images are really good: "an antique dark-held luster." That's oil and coal presumably. It's old--"antique," implying old-fashioned, even out-moded, but valuable--and it's "dark-held," in some fastnesses deep in the earth. Maybe the earth tries to hold onto it, but we wrest it away from her. And it has luster; it shines like gold, like money, which it can be exchanged for a lot of.

But the question remains: is it ok to write a didactic poem? In the sixties there were a lot of poem-like songs that were sort of didactic. We called them "protest songs." Is this a protest poem?

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

(With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe)

by Wendell Berry

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

Another mule and wagon on the Dixie Limited's track

2009-11-03T13:34:00.000-08:00

Probably by now you've heard of Kathryn Stockett's widely acclaimed first novel, The Help. A friend loaned it to me, and I started reading it somewhat skeptically, as I usually don't like "best-seller" chick lit. But this book surprised me: it was well-written and thoughtful, and it has a riveting plot that keeps the reader reading deep into the night.

There are already over a thousand reviews of this book on Amazon, and I haven't read very many of them, so I may be repeating what other people have said, but here goes. The story is told in the first person voices of three characters: Skeeter, the young white woman who co-writes a book about the lives of black maids in Jackson, MS, in the mid-1960s; Aibileen, a maid in Jackson who writes several of the most important chapters in the book; and Minny, another maid whose explosive narrative of her own experiences being a maid drives the plot of the book. In the background are the terrible events of the early years of the Civil Rights movement: bombings, shootings, assassination, and general terror, mixed with wild hope.

I was raised in the South, and my mother had a maid. She was a constant quiet presence in my life from the time I was four, until I left for college. She left after my sister graduated from college and got married, so that means she worked for my family from about 1959 to 1999, about forty years. She was a very young woman, around eighteen years of age, when she first started coming a few days a week to our apartment at the VA hospital, and she was a little older than I am now when she finally left.

I remember wondering a lot what her life was like when she wasn't at our house. I never saw her house, or met anybody in her family. Sometimes I heard her husband's voice on the phone. During the 1960s, I remember knowing on some level that there was a lot of tension between black and white people (I was 14 in 1968), and I wished I could know what she thought, but as Kathryn Stockett says in the epilogue to her book, it just didn't seem possible to ask. Ms. Stockett wrote her book after spending years imagining how her beloved Demetrie would have answered that question.

This book may be as good an answer as white women ever get to the question: what do the black women that work for our families think about us? What are their lives like when they're not with us? Some of the answer, of course, is not flattering to white folks and is uncomfortable to read about. But Stockett also recognizes the closeness that sometimes develops between black and white women who spend hours together, looking after children together, and sharing the ups and downs of life over many decades; some of these relationships do last for forty years or more. The closeness and affection and genuine caring are there, but the characters in the novel talk about the "line" that can't be crossed, and how frustrating that line is.

I have to say that despite all the changes of the last forty years, that line has not gone away. I feel it when I am with the caregivers that take care of my parents so devotedly, twenty-four hours a day. I like to think that we are friends, and that there is genuine respect both ways. But my life has been privileged in ways that they can scarcely even imagine. Perhaps the greatest privilege was the opportunity to stay home with my own child, instead of having to leave him to care for other people's children.

The most heart-rending story in the book focuses on this very issue: the separation of a black mother and daughter, when the mother can't possibly care for her daughter and decides to put her in an orphanage. The main white character, Skeeter, only hears of her mother's maid's heartbreak at losing her daughter after Constantine, the maid, has died. But the other maids tell Skeeter that one of the hardest aspects of their lives is having to leave their own children to make a living caring for the children of (mostly idle) white women.

The picture of small-town middle-class Southern white women's lives is dead-on. I was a child in the 1960s, but even then I could see the deadening boredom yet privilege of the endless rounds of bridge, country club lunches, and Junior League meetings. Luckily, I escaped that, partly just by being born late enough that that life was no longer mandatory for middle-class white women by the time I grew up. But I enjoyed the skewering that Stockett delivers to the complacent grande dames of the country clubs.

One amazing thing is the way in which Stockett manages to make something new grow out of the well-plowed ground of race relations in the South. Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor are all hard acts to follow. But the stories of Faulkner's families, black and white, inter-related by blood and history, start before the Civil War and end around the 1940s. Faulkner didn't write about the 1960s. Welty and O'Connor touched on the intimacy and distance of these black and white cousins trenchantly in the 1960s, but it was not the centerpiece of their oevres, as it was with Faulkner. Since the 1950s and 1960s, many black writers have illuminated the lives of black people in slavery and afterwards, writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Recently, in the last forty years or so, it seems that it's been rare for a writer entered into the imaginative and emotional life of both white and black people as thoroughly as Faulkner did, with an understanding that doesn't oversimplify the complexity of either race's experience. Stockett has come close to Faulkner's high standard in that department. It's a brave attempt. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."

She can't match his style, obviously, and there are no modernist breakthroughs here as there were in The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. Stockett benefits from her reading of Faulkner: she lets the characters speak for themselves, as Faulkner did in those two books. It's not exactly stream-of-consciousness, and that's a good thing: The Help is a much more accessible book than The Sound and the Fury, if a less rich one textually. It's not the kind of book that scholars will be poring over for decades to come, but it's a damn good read. Whereas many if not most readers are put off by the difficulty of Faulkner's voices, with their highly cryptic allusiveness to dreams and other voices--the "tale told by an idiot" in particular--readers are quickly drawn in by the warm and very real voices of Stockett's likeable characters. Nobody likes Jason Compson.

At first Stockett's impersonation of the way black women talk sort of irritated me: it seemed a bit fake and annoying. But eventually the authenticity of the voices won me over. Some people really did talk like that; some still do. Skeeter's voice is also believable, quirky, and funny. Getting a character's voice right-- her speech patterns and accent--without "dumbing down" her voice is tricky, and Stockett nails it. She has obviously read her Huckleberry Finn, and her Alice Walker. It's hard to get these characters' voices out of your head when you put the book down, and that's a good test of a voice's authenticity.

In the epilogue, Stockett goes into memoir mode and tells why she wrote the book: in part it was in tribute to the black woman who raised her. I kind of wondered why she didn't just write a memoir; why did she feel as if she needed to write a novel, when her own story and Demetrie's story was so compelling? I think it might be because she wanted it to be about more than just herself and Demetrie. She was able to populate her book with not just middle-class white women, but a memorable "white trash" woman too; not just with saintly black women but with at least one mean and bitter one. This terrain of black and white women was treacherous: she could have lapsed into caricature and stereotype and sentimentality, and at times she comes pretty close. But in the end, the black women are not all saints and the white women are not all snotty, frigid, and lazy.

She says there is one line in The Help that sums up the meaning of the book:

"Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I thought."

Houston: There's no there there.

2009-09-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

Today I tutored a young woman who was supposed to be writing a "descriptive paragraph." One choice was to write about one's own neighborhood and describe it. Her paragraph described driving along a street on a cool, windy day, and seeing the bare trees and the big, beautiful houses.

The problem is, in Houston we don't have bare trees, really. And the number of cool, crisp days you can count on one hand. Some of the pecans and oaks lose their leaves for a few weeks in mid-winter, but the dominant species--the live oak--is never bare: it starts to put out tiny new yellowish leaves in February, and at that time, some of the older, brown leaves fall. But it's never completely bare.

Right now, although it is "fall," you would never know from looking at Houston or its trees: they are all green and leafed out. The oaks and pecans don't start losing leaves until December. And although it's the end of September, it was 96 degrees on Tuesday.

There are some big, beautiful houses in Houston, but those are not the houses that our students live in.

So I asked her if this descriptive paragraph was really about her neighborhood, and she said that it wasn't; that she had made it up. I thought so: usually when you read vague, insipid student writing, the student didn't obey the injunction to "write what you know."

I asked her, "So, where do you live?"

She answered, "What do you mean?"

I didn't know how to respond to this. After a few seconds I said, "Ok, so where did you wake up this morning?"

She said, "Oh, ok, I live over by the airport."

So then we had something to work with. I asked her about her commute home, what exit she got off at, what was at the exit, what did she see on Monroe Avenue on her way to her street, what she saw after she turned onto her street, whether she could hear the airplanes, and what her own yard and house looked like. The trouble was, all she could say was, "Houses. Trees." She didn't know what color the houses were or what kind of trees were in her own yard, or what kind of flowers grew in the little garden in the front yard.

This is just pitiful. This is worse than the unexamined life: this is the unseen life, the life that is thought by its subject to be so unworthy as to be not worth looking at, at all.

Or maybe it's just that the average Houstonian doesn't look at her city, for fear of what she might see. If you really do look at Houston, it's somewhat horrifying in its ugliness. Maybe it's a form of psychological self-protection to imagine fall in a New England college town, rather than have to face the fact that your dirty, hot, humid city has no seasons, and that what you see when you drive home is an adult bookstore.

It reminded me of what Gertrude Stein said when she visited her old hometown of Oakland, after having lived in Paris for years. She said, "There's no there there." The home she grew up in was gone, her synagogue was gone, her neighbors were gone. Everything that had once made it a place was gone.

That kind of alienation is endemic in Houston, where the built environment is so transitory, where perfectly good houses are torn down every day to make townhouses at a frenetic pace, and where place is rarely created at all, even temporarily. Everybody is here from somewhere else, some other "there," most often a village in the Third World. Or in my case, a village in Tennessee.

How can a writer even describe such a city? Houston has a gritty, concrete (literally) reality that should be easy to describe, but somehow many people can't. They can't tell you what they see on their commute, maybe because it doesn't mesh with their ideas of what they SHOULD see on their commute. They should see a street out of a movie or TV show.

Most movies seem to be set in a world where people live on leafy, prosperous streets that literally have white picket fences. A movie I saw recently, "Father of the Bride," is an example. The family is not presented as being especially affluent, but the house is big, covered with blooming roses, and sited on a street with other "big, beautiful houses." It seems to be in New England somewhere; the people wear sweaters, and leaves fall in a picturesque way. It snows.

Nothing like that happens in Houston. Leaves fall IN SPRING! Roses bloom IN WINTER! It never snows! Our lives and neighborhoods don't look like movie lives or TV lives. So, if we don't have fiction to guide us in writing about our lives, we sort of have to start from scratch, with what really is happening on the ground, even though it's not supposed to be happening.

Maybe that's actually a good thing. Somebody could probably make a list of great writing that comes from just such circumstances: the alienated subject in the nondescript city, where there is no there there. If you can think of writing like that--whether novel or memoir--let me know. One example might be a great story about Houston that I read in The New Yorker years ago by Antonya Nelson, "Eminent Domain." It described the placeless place and the ensuing anomie perfectly.

How bad is a comma splice really?

2009-09-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

Today I tutored a guy in the writing center who had written a narrative about his childhood in the notorious East End of Houston. He was in a gang by the time he was ten, and he took a 9mm pistol to school in order to ward off the mean guys in a rival gang. They started harassing him on the way to school, and he took the gun out of his backpack and shot at them. They ran away and never bothered him again.

That's the great thing about guns, I suppose. Bad boys used to follow me home, too, and throw rocks at me. I suppose if I'd shot at them, they might have stopped.

(Amazingly, this kid never got apprehended for shooting at other kids. Rather, he got caught selling pot and spent several years in juvenile detention. When he got out, he was a new man. He got his GED in juvie, and now he's in community college. His friends, however, are still in gangs and dealing drugs.)

In light of these serious offenses, it seemed silly to carp about his comma splices. But that was what I was supposed to explain, so I did. I felt very silly though. "Shame on you for connecting two sentences with only a comma! You could have hurt somebody! To Huntsville with you!"

Single mothers telling their story

2009-09-09T13:03:00.000-07:00

Two young women came in to the writing center today back to back. Each had the assignment of writing a personal narrative. Both narratives began with the drama of reading a pregnancy test and finding out that it's positive.

One of these young women looked almost too young to be the mother of a one-year-old. The other had three children. One was married to the father of her child, and she had a lot of family support to go back to college. The other one was not married to the father, and he didn't help her at all with the expenses of daycare and formula and diapers. This woman had, despite her family responsibilities, managed to get a certificate in dental assisting, and was working for a dentist for a good wage, but she still could not pay her day care expenses and have any money left over.

Both had written well-structured, dramatic narratives with good telling details. Both appeared to be smart and hard-working. Both loved their children so much that they would do almost anything to make their children's lives better. Both seemed to have some support from their own families.

But both were being screwed by the low wages we have in America and by the lack of affordable, quality day care. And one of them was being seriously undone by the father's unwillingness to take responsibility for the lives he had created.

It's hard not to feel outraged when stories such as these come in the writing center, and they come in regularly. Some people might be tempted to say something like, "Well, come on, they knew that sex creates babies." And the young women themselves did not let themselves off easy: both stated in their writing that they understood their own complicity in their hard lives. But young people are wired to want to have sex. There's nothing we can do about that. Why not prepare them a little better? Why not tell these young Catholics that the Pope is wrong about birth control being a sin? Why not point out that the Church is not going to help them raise their babies or pay for their day care?

One of the women said that most of the teenaged mothers that she knows just stay home with their babies and don't work or go to school. So apparently it is somewhat normal for Hispanic teenagers to get pregnant. I heard a young Hispanic mother on NPR, in fact, say that it was pretty normal. An article this summer in the Dallas Morning News said that a CDC study "found that Hispanic teens aged 15-19 are much more likely to become pregnant (132.8 births per 1,000 females) compared to their black (128 per 1,000) and white (45.2 per 1,000) peers." The teen birth rate is rising again after years of improvement.

It may be normal in some communities to be a teenage mother, but as these young mothers know better than anyone, it is very, very hard. The fierce determination of these young women to do the best thing for their children--to get educated to work at a higher level--is inspiring. But imagine what that drive and determination could have accomplished if they had had some help earlier with birth control; if they had not been brainwashed by the Catholic Church; if the fathers of their babies weren't so feckless; if wages for high school graduates were higher; and if our society believed it was in the common interest of everyone for young mothers to have more support and help with daycare.

the vorpal blade went snicker-snack

2009-09-08T10:51:00.000-07:00

Stanley Fish has been writing a series of articles in the New York Times about the teaching of writing. The third one appeared yesterday, and it's worth reading.

He makes several good points. First, we should stop moaning about how poorly prepared college students are, and how their high schools failed them (which they did), and get on with the job of getting them up to speed. Second, yes, it's true that a lot of reading makes people into good writers, but good luck persuading eighteen year olds to do a lot of reading. And, while theoretically everybody is entitled to write in their own dialect, it's not the best way to get ahead in the world: you have to learn standard English, as a second language if necessary.

Fish's main point is that college students today need a lot of help understanding something very basic: what a sentence is. We may think that we writing teachers should be teaching researching skills, or complex argument skills, or organization skills in writing. But a great many students have a lot of trouble with the basic unit of writing: the sentence. (Ok, the word is a more basic unit, but most students know what a word is.) I have found it to be true that the most common errors in student writing revolve around the problem of not knowing what a complete sentence is: this misunderstanding underlies the sentence fragment, the run-on sentence, the comma splice, etc.

How does Fish remedy this misunderstanding? He has some great ideas. He writes a sentence like "Jane likes cake" on the white board, and challenges students to elaborate this simple sentence into a Proustian one of a hundred words, explaining how they did it and why it's still one sentence. He gives them the famous Lewis Carroll nonsense poem "Jabberwocky" and has them replace the nonsense words with "real" words, explaining how they know, for example, what you could write instead of "Oh frabjous day!" (Unfortunately anything you might write instead would be worse.)

I was amazed by his final assignment: he divides his class into groups and tells them to invent a language! With a lexicon, and a grammar. Wow. Budding Tolkiens must love this class. Then they have to present this language to the rest of the class and explain how to translate its messages into English. Presumably they use the Roman alphabet? Or not?

Sometimes he writes a boring sentence on the white board--"The first year of college is full of many challenges"-- and then the students add to this sentence in a kind of linguistic Exquisite Corpse game, but where you can see what everybody else did.

Fish provides some useful links to other teachers' books and methods. I recognized one: They Say/I Say, which is about the scholarly debate that we're trying to get students to join. Only problem is, there are some things about this debate that are kind of stupid, such as the requirement that we start our papers with propositions like, "Everybody that has ever written about Faulkner and environmentalism up to this point has been wrong. I'm the one with the goods."

I'm sure Fish's methods work great with students who have a basic command of English. But in many community colleges, we are teaching students who are not only unsure about what a sentence is; they are unsure about what a lot of English words mean. I wonder if ESL students could do that Jabberwocky exercise. To them, everything sounds like, "the vorpal blade went snicker snack!"

Harold Bloom on spectacle vs. text

2009-09-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

Wow, no sooner did I diss the overabundance of spectacle and the dearth of good text in country music, than I read this editorial in the New York Times by Harold Bloom, who writes,

"More than ever in this time of economic troubles and societal change, entering upon an undergraduate education should be a voyage away from visual overstimulation into deep, sustained reading of what is most worth absorbing and understanding: the books that survive all ideological fashions."

I'm not totally against ideological fashions, but I know what he means. He lists Some Great Books: "Homer, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Milton." What I am against is visual overstimulation, via those glowing rectangles that seem to be everywhere. Real pictures, not so much. Over-indulge all you want in black and white silver gelatin photographs in particular.

The death of the country music author, circa 1971

2009-09-08T07:09:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched a DVD of the Johnny Cash show, which ran on ABC from 1969 to 1971. By that time, I was not watching much TV; I stopped in the summer of 1968, because the police riot at the Chicago convention scared me so much. But I think I might have watched a few episodes of the Johnny Cash show. It was a big deal for Nashville; it was filmed at the Ryman Auditorium, the Mother Church of country music, and the home of the Grand Ole Opry. Johnny Cash envisioned the show as a way of bringing together musicians from many genres: country music, jazz and blues, folk, and rock. Last night I saw Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Louis Armstrong, Linda Ronstadt, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Tammy Wynette, James Taylor, Neil Young, and Credence Clearwater Revival.

It was amazing to see some of these powerful singers and songwriters when they were very young, at the beginning of their careers. But the most striking thing about the Johnny Cash Show was the fact that it looked completely different from the way TV music shows look now. When singers perform on television now, they dance, gyrate, throw their hands in the air, grab their crotches, etc. But in the late sixties and early seventies, they stood ramrod straight and barely moved as they sang. Some of the folk rockers made expressive faces--James Taylor closed his eyes to sing--but the country music people looked like deer caught in the headlights. Tammy did not move at all the whole time she sang "Stand By Your Man." When she was talking to Cash, she looked down at the ground, afraid to look into the camera. George Jones looked more like a possum than ever, about to play dead. Marty Robbins sort of tried to move around a bit, but he had trouble. Only the Man in Black seemed truly comfortable in front of the TV cameras.

I have seen these people perform since, and they are passionate, powerful performers in person. Why were they so damped down? It was as if somebody had turned down the volume on everything: the voice, the body, the passion. Suddenly it occurred to me that country music people were not used to being on television! They were comfortable on the stage of the Ryman when it was full of Shriners and middle-aged people on vacation in Music City, and on the stages of county fairs and small-town auditoriums around the country; but the lights and cameras of television, even on that familiar stage, made them very nervous.

These performances were interspersed with recent interviews with Kris Kristofferson and Hank Williams, Jr, about the show and its effects on country music especially. Somebody, I think Kristofferson, said that there wasn't much music on TV in the late sixties, and there was almost no country music at all on television. It was a huge thing for country music, to be broadcast on a network TV station into the homes of people all over the country. It was so huge that it scared the shit out of them, and their fear showed.

Still, the performances were great, although wooden by today's standards. What made them great? The songs. The song lyrics were really, really great back then. Think of "Sunday Morning Coming Down":

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An' I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An' stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I'd smoked my brain the night before,
On cigarettes and songs I'd been pickin'.
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,
Cussin' at a can that he was kicking.
Then I crossed the empty street,
'n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken.
And it took me back to somethin',
That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin',
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin' comin' down.

In the park I saw a daddy,
With a laughin' little girl who he was swingin'.
And I stopped beside a Sunday school,
And listened to the song they were singin'.
Then I headed back for home,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'.
And it echoed through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin',
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin' comin' down."

The imagery in this song is so vivid. The persona wakes up dirty and drunk, and probably under the influence of some other substances than just beer. His kitchen has no food; he has to have a beer for breakfast. There's nobody taking care of this man, cooking him eggs and bacon, or cleaning his clothes; he's alone, and he doesn't take care of himself. He lives in a gritty walk-up downtown somewhere. All around him are signs of normal family life: children playing, somebody frying chicken, people singing in a church. These are things that he has lost "somehow," but like anybody hung over, he can't remember exactly how he lost the normal comforts of family life. The listener is left to imagine the events that caused this kind of wreckage and loneliness, and it's not too hard to imagine them. But the persona's understanding of his loss seems like a small ray of hope, that he might yet pull himself out of this lonely, dissipated life.

Johnny Cash sang this song on the show, and apparently the fact that he actually sang, "Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned," was an amazing TV moment, because the network execs wanted him to change the lyrics to something less gritty.

Kris Kristofferson himself sang, "Lovin' Her Was Easier Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again," another poem set to music:

I have seen the morning burning golden on the mountains in the skies.
Achin' with the feelin' of the freedom of an eagle when she flies.
Turnin' on the world the way she smiled upon my soul as I lay dying.
Healin' as the colours in the sunshine and the shadows of her eyes.

Wakin' in the mornin' to the feelin' of her fingers on my skin.
Wipin' out the traces of the people and the places that I've been.
Teachin' me that yesterday was something that I never thought of trying.
Talkin' of tomorrow and the money, love and time we had to spend.

Lovin' her was easier than anything I'll ever do again.

Comin' close together with a feelin' that I've never known before, in my time.
She ain't ashamed to be a woman, or afraid to be a friend.
I don't know the answer to the easy way she opened every door in my mind.
But dreamin' was as easy as believin' it was never gonna end.

And lovin' her was easier than anything I'll ever do again.

Again, this is better than average love song writing. In the first stanza there's some ambiguity about whether it's the speaker or the sun that's aching, turning, and healing; so the sun's movement becomes a metaphor for changes in the speaker, under the influence of this warming, golden woman, who herself, if she is the sun, is also aching, turning, and healing.

The next stanza repeats the series of verbs ending in "-ing" or rather "-in'": waking, wiping, teaching, talking. You also have some alliteration going on in the repeated w's and t's. And this wonderful phrase, "Teaching me that yesterday was something that I never thought of trying." What could that mean? Many things: that the past wasn't as bad as he thought; that things could have been different if he'd done things differently; that memory itself is possible and good. And that these yesterdays, rather than being just a blight on memory, are the seeds for better "tomorrows," of money, love, and time. Kristofferson seems to be making an oblique allusion to another famous love poem, "To His Coy Mistress," which also wonders about how much love and time there is to spend; but whereas the poet Marvell was urging his mistress that there was not much time left for love, in this poem it's the lady that's telling the poet how it is, and her view is that there is plenty of time in the future for love (and money). Rather than scarcity, she preaches abundance, like the sun that gives off limitless energy to everything that can soak it up.

Of course at the end of the song there's a sense of tragic loss, of this abundance and ease. Country music used to be tragic. It used to be about loss, mainly. This is hard to remember when you listen to the radio now. At some point in the seventies, the decision was made by people on Music Row to make country music more appealing to more upscale, younger, and more urban listeners, and country music lost its roots in Great Depression hardship, poverty, and loss. The Johnny Cash Show was canceled for the same reason by ABC in 1971 during the "rural purge," when they canceled everything that had a tree in it, as somebody quipped: Mayberry, the Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, and the Johnny Cash Show. Again, they were trying to appeal to younger, more urban, more hip audiences.

The Johnny Cash Show stood at the cusp of a new era in music entertainment. In the future, music would be more spectacle and less meaning, as Baudrillard would say. Less text, more dancing, color, and lights. It would be about the simulation of reality, not the actual gritty reality of the Great Depression that people of Johnny Cash's age could remember. No more songs like Merle Haggard's about working class resentment and anger: "I'm tired of this dirty old sidewalk...You can keep your retirement and your so-called social security...Think I'll walk off my steady job today." Instead, the country music of the radio morphed into the country music of CMT, a world of fast-cut, surrealistic editing, elaborate costumes and sets, lip synching, and "stars" who look more like models than like hard-scrabble survivors of rural working class life.

As "wooden" as George Jones was on the TV set, he still looked like a possum, which is something that you could never say about Tim McGraw.

Are Flannery O'Connor's stories good?

2009-08-06T10:36:00.001-07:00

I read a review early in the summer of a new biography about Flannery O'Connor, a writer I first encountered in a literature class in college almost 35 years ago. She is a Southern woman writer, and a rural person, and therefore I am interested in her, because I am a Southern rural woman, although not much of a writer. I was excited when I found the new biography in our local library (although it was filed wrong, under "F.") I also wanted to acquaint myself again with Flannery O'Connor, because I admired so much the short story, "Idols," that Tim Gautreaux published in The New Yorker. The story was based on a couple of O'Connor's characters, Julian in "Everything That Rises," and Parker in "Parker's Back."

I got about half way through the biography, called Flannery, and got rather bored. O'Connor had in fact predicted that a biography of her would be boring; she wrote, “As for biographies, there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” Well, she was sort of right. It was interesting reading about her early education at a local women's college, and her subsequent trip to various writer's workshops and colonies, and her friendships with other intellectuals, but once she got sick with lupus, she had to go home to her farm and live with her mother, and her life pretty much was spent between the house and the chicken yard.

So, I decided that instead of reading the entire biography, I would read her collection of short stories, also in our library. It's a rather thick tome with a lot of stories in it, dated from the forties through the mid-sixties. But again, I couldn't quite finish it. I wondered why.

It's not that the stories aren't beautifully written, in terms of the prose style and the dialogue. O'Connor is a wonderful describer of people. Sometimes she makes you laugh out loud in recognition; for example, a woman character "was about the size of a cedar fence post." The characters themselves have wonderfully real Southern voices and are themselves great observers of other people. A young man describes a middle-aged woman thus: "She had theseyer brown glasses and her hair was so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull." One can imagine O'Connor silently making these observations about the people around her, chuckling to herself, and writing them down in her notebook as quickly as possible. She is a meaner Jane Austen.

Sometimes the descriptions of the landscape take your breath away:

"A cloud, the exact color of the boy's hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun....The turnip continued to descend. After a few minutes there was a guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic raindrops, like tin-can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet's car."

Who else would describe a cloud as a big turnip? Or thunder as "guffawing"? Or rain as tin-can tops? This is the world of the rural South, where fantastic natural beauty coexists with all our junk, like turnips, tin cans, old cars, and a guffawing God behind the clouds.

And this brings me to the real problem I have with these stories: that guffawing God figure, who is there at the end of every story to kill somebody or burn them up or drown them or shoot them. It may seem as if another character performs the execution, but it's really God acting behind the scenes. O'Connor was a devout Catholic. Apparently she didn't believe in showing this directly in her stories. But her God is like the Wizard of Oz, behind a curtain, pulling the levers.

This is the a formula to the stories: there is a complacent, somewhat stupid middle-class rural white person, usually a woman. Sometimes this woman lives with one or two children, but there is never a husband or father around; he is always dead or gone. Usually the child is defective in some way: one daughter has a wooden leg; another is retarded; or the child may simply be precocious, or an intellectual (a handicap in its own way in the rural South). Into this rural, land-owning but barely scraping by (usually racist) woman's life comes some kind of a Misfit. In one story he is actually called the Misfit. The Misfit may be a crazy tenant farmer, an immigrant (the Displaced Person), a babysitter, or a con artist. This person, the reader quickly realizes, is going to destroy the main character, or at least seriously disrupt her orderly little scene. And the reader is always right. Often there is a violent death at the end of the story. There is basically no denouement or "falling action"; after the death or disaster, the story ends.

During the action leading to the climactic violent event, the Misfit character challenges the main character's complacency. The Misfit will often be more ignorant, more backwoods, than the middle-class main character. He is a kind of noble savage, full of cryptic remarks such as, "Jesus thrown everything off balance." He, or his wife, is often what we would call now a Pentecostal Protestant Christian, given to a very emotional, personal kind of spirituality, in stark contrast to the main character's more staid, denominational church-going. O'Connor writes of one of these nominally Christian women, "She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true." In the fifties and early sixties, these rural Pentecostal evangelicals were truly marginal folks, not the mainstream suburbanites that they are now. They handled snakes and spoke in tongues and got baptized in muddy rivers.

The main character feels superior, more worldly and educated, than this invader who will upset her world. But in the end, it seems, O'Connor sides with the ignorant and the violent, who cause a rupture, even a death, in the complacent Christian's life. It is the emotional, primitive Pentecostalism that carries the day with her, it seems.

This is where O'Connor loses me. How is violence redemptive? If the grandmother ends up shot and dead at the end of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," what good is the "learning" that the murderer/misfit imposes on her? The Misfit says, famously, "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." I suppose that means that her soul was lost in the minutiae of her petty, safe bourgeois life. Well, sometimes that does happen.

I guess you can only believe in the redemptive power of violence if you believe in an after-life, where you get to think about the circumstances of your violent death and why it happened to you. But even if you grant O'Connor that, it seems excessive to kill off a child at the end of "A View of the Woods." The murder is particularly brutal: the child's grandfather bangs her head against a rock. It's hard to see how the child "learns" anything from this. Or the grandfather for that matter.

After about ten or fifteen stories like this, the reader begins to dread the ending so much that she stops reading. It seems as if O'Connor is deliberately horrifying and terrifying the reader, almost as if she is writing a B-grade horror movie rather than a literary short story. The violence often seems like a cheap trick, to make the story more dramatic. Violence sells!

But in real life, it doesn't take a murder or a house fire to make a person change or learn something about herself, fortunately. But it may be harder to write a story where the main character changes as a result of, say, a peaceful, chance encounter with a stranger. I admit that when I try to write a story, I try to think of something "dramatic" for the climax. Maybe I should read more John Cheever or John Updike, to find out how Yankees structure their stories. As I recall in those stories, usually nobody gets gored by a bull. Maybe somebody gets drunk or has a brief affair. A woman might say something cutting to a man. That's about as bad as it gets.

Five Houses Down, by Christian Wiman

2009-07-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

This poem from a New Yorker of about a month ago made a huge impression on me. I think it's because it describes my neighbor's house almost perfectly. I looked up Christian Wiman. He's the editor of Poetry, a journal of (guess what) poetry, and he was born in West Texas. I guess that explains why his neighbor's yard looked so much like my neighbor's yard: Texas is where people from Tennessee go when they can longer get along with their neighbors. Poetry magazine has a very good website, where you can read more entertaining poems. The poems there are not the inscrutable poems they made you read in high school and college. They make sense, but not in a prose way. If all English teachers would use Poetry or even The New Yorker (which sometimes publishes inscrutable poems) to teach literature rather than anthologies and textbooks, I think students would like reading and writing better.

Five Houses Down
by Christian Wiman June 29, 2009

I loved his ten demented chickens
and the hell-eyed dog, the mailbox
shaped like a huge green gun.
I loved the eyesore opulence
of his five partial cars, the wonder-cluttered porch
with its oilspill plumage, tools
cauled in oil, the dark
clockwork of disassembled engines
christened Sweet Baby and benedicted Old Bitch;
and down the steps into the yard the explosion
of mismatched parts and black scraps
amid which, like a bad sapper cloaked
in luck, he would look up stunned,
patting the gut that slopped out of his undershirt
and saying, Son,
you lookin’ to make some scratch?
All afternoon we’d pile the flatbed high
with stacks of Exxon floormats
mysteriously stencilled with his name,
rain-rotted sheetrock or miles
of misfitted pipes, coil after coil
of rusted fencewire that stained for days
every crease of me, rollicking it all
to the dump where, while he called
every ragman and ravened junkdog by name,
he catpicked the avalanche of trash
and fished some always fixable thing
up from the depths. Something
about his endless aimless work
was not work, my father said.
Somehow his barklike earthquake curses
were not curses, for he could goddam
a slipped wrench and shitfuck a stuck latch,
but one bad word from me
made his whole being
twang like a nail mis-struck. Aint no call for that,
son, no call at all. Slipknot, whatknot, knot
from which no man escapes—
prestoed back to plain old rope;
whipsnake, blacksnake, deep in the wormdirt
worms like the clutch of mud:
I wanted to live forever
five houses down
in the womanless rooms a woman
sometimes seemed to move through, leaving him
twisting a hand-stitched dishtowel
or idly wiping the volcanic dust.
It seemed like heaven to me:
beans and weenies from paper plates,
black-fingered tinkerings on the back stoop
as the sun set, on an upturned fruitcrate
a little jamjar of rye like ancient light,
from which, once, I took a single, secret sip,
my eyes tearing and my throat on fire.

Tim Gautreaux and Flannery O'Connor

2009-07-09T11:48:00.000-07:00

The June 22 issue of The New Yorker had a story in it by Tim Gautreaux, a Louisiana writer. The story was called "Idols," and it was about a man named Julian who had inherited a big house in Mississippi. I thought this sounded vaguely familiar, especially the character's name. The fact that the story ends in a conflagration made me think of Flannery O'Connor, who loved to end her stories with a big fire, and also of Faulkner, who burns down houses and barns in his stories too. I imagined that Tim Gautreaux, a Southerner, took as his mentors both O'Connor and Faulkner, as many Southern writers do.

Later I found out that the connection between Gautreaux's story and O'Connor was more direct: the Julian character in "Idols" is in fact the Julian in "Everything That Rises Must Converge." The latter story was first published in 1961. Julian has just finished junior college, so he's about 20 years old. In "Idols," which appears to be set in the present, Julian is in his sixties, an aging typewriter repairman. This fact is poignant, because in "Everything That Rises," he is selling typewriters as a temporary job until he "gets on his feet," as his mother says. Apparently, he never got beyond that.

In "Everything That Rises," Julian is both attracted to his aristocratic heritage, in the form of the old house he saw once, and repelled by his mother's constant invoking of her aristocratic forebears. He and his mother have fallen on hard times, and they live in a run-down neighborhood in a city, perhaps Memphis. Furthermore, black people are "rising," and the buses are recently integrated. Julian's mother both resents and patronizes black people, and she gets her comeuppance in a big way at the end of the story.

In "Idols," black people are absent. Class antagonisms have taken the place of racial conflict. Julian is now patronizing a poor white man, whom he hopes to help by employing the man, Obie, to fix up the old mansion which he has finally inherited. But it turns out that Obie is the one in control, as he is far more skillful and competent than Julian. Obie has his own goal: to rid himself of the tattoos that cover his entire body, including one of a Byzantine image of Christ on his back. The alert reader will recognize this Obie as O.E. Parker, from O'Connor's story "Parker's Back." Obie's wife calls the tattoos "idols," and won't take him back until he has them removed by a doctor, a painful process. By the end of the story, Obie's "idols" are gone, although they were once the things that gave meaning to his life.

Guess what. By the end of the story, Julian's "idol" is gone too, at least most of it. The big house is flooded, and the outbuildings are burned. Julian is bankrupt and can't restore his house, its plaster fallen in the flooding, its electricity ancient, its heating system nonexistent.

At first this story seems like a little moral parable: don't attach too much importance to yourself and your possessions, because they are mere idols that separate you from the real God, or other people, or something. But it's not that simple: one of Obie's "idols" IS God, or an image of God, on his back. His wife hated it because, like the late Byzantine Christians (the iconoclasts), she thought that images of God were idolatrous: "He don't look....He's a spirit. No man shall see his face." Parker's getting rid of this image is a little piece of iconoclasm, analogous to the work of zealots in the early medieval period who insisted on erasing images of Christ from Byzantine churches and who smashed wooden icons.

Maybe the point is that Julian's house was a similar image of his "importance," as he puts it, just as it was for his mother. Julian despised his mother's snobbery, her constant allusions to her family's lost aristocratic past. She kept saying, "I know who I am." Who she is, she thinks, is a Godhigh, a descendant of a prosperous landowner and slave-owner. Despite Julian's rejection of this identity in his youth, he has thoroughly embraced it by his late sixties, as Gautreaux imagines him. He thinks he knows who he is--the owner of a beautifully restored antebellum mansion, and by extension an aristocrat himself--just as Obie thinks that he knows what God looks like. But the mansion, and the name Godhigh, are no more representations of what Julian really is than the image of God on Parker's back is a representation of the real God. Parker doesn't know what God looks like, and Julian doesn't really know who he is.

I wonder if Gautreaux embraces O'Connor's relentlessly Christian view of the world. Somehow I doubt it. He is good at Southern voices, as she was; he seems to like a semi-apocalyptic ending to his stories, as she did. But "Idols" is less of a parable than O'Connor's stories, which nevertheless always manage to just barely avoid being so much parables that they cease to be art. Still, she came a little too close for comfort sometimes.

Tea Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

2009-06-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

Run, don't walk, to the newsstand and buy the June 8 & 15 copy of The New Yorker, the summer fiction issue. The "debut fiction" is a very impressive debut indeed by a very young person, born in 1985, Tea Obreht. She was born in Yugoslavia.

"The Tiger's Wife" is a kind of oral history/folk tale that recalls the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, in that it is set in a rural village in Eastern Europe. The narrator "heard" the story from various sources, mostly her grandfather, but there are events in the story that the grandfather didn't know, says the narrator. It's never exactly clear where the story is happening. And it's not clear what parts of it are "true." In that respect, it also reminds the reader of magical realism, as in the stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where nothing is really certain, and some pretty incredible things happen.

On the other hand, the setting of the story in time is very specific: April of 1941, when German bombs were falling on "the city." A tiger, who is not exactly in a zoo but behind some kind of bars, escapes because of the bombing and wanders through the city (Belgrade?) and out into the country, to the village where the narrator's grandfather lives with his grandmother. He is a boy of nine when the events in the story happen.

Evidently this story is part of a longer novel, to be published in 2010. I tried to pre-order it through Amazon, but it is not available as yet.

The illustration for the New Yorker story is also pretty great: it's by an Italian graphic artist named Lorenzo Mattotti. It looks like it was done with colored pencil or pastels.

Heart of Dryness, by James Workman

2009-06-01T06:47:00.001-07:00

This is a long and very detailed account of how a band of Kalahari Bushmen defied their government--the government of Botswana--and won the right to continue living in their desert home. The author, an American, spent seven years in Botswana, and he made many visits into the Kalahari to visit with and interview this extended family, headed by an elderly woman. She is a central figure in the narrative.

I thought that this book would tell more specifically about how the Bushmen survive in such a dry climate. But really, it's mostly about the legal wranglings in the courts of Botswana about whether the Bushmen should be allowed to continue living in the Kalahari. The government felt that their presence interfered with tourism, for some reason, and also with diamond mining, although it's never clear why the Kalahari was not big enough for all three--wildlife for tourists, diamond mines, and Bushmen--to coexist together.

Eventually it came down to a struggle over the right to water, because the government, which had been providing water for Bushmen inside the game preserve, cut that water off. The Bushmen began trucking water in, but that too was prohibited. There was an international outcry over the apparent attempt at genocide directed at the Bushmen. In the end the Bushmen were successful at getting the right to truck water in, and many of them returned to the preserve.

The small band of die-hards continued to live in the Kalahari throughout the water cut-off, finding water as they always had traditionally, by foraging for moist food and game. I thought it was interesting that in the desert, food is water, and water is food.

Workman extends the "lessons" of this Botswana story to the rest of the world and to the future, but there his argument seems a bit weak. First, it's not clear what the lesson is: don't leave your land, no matter what? Find ways to survive without piped-in water? Second, even if the lessons were clear, it's not obvious that this particular situation will be very much like future water shortages in other parts of the world. We had a bad drought in the Southeastern US two summers ago, but the tap water continued flowing. We didn't even have any rationing. In desert cities of the West, sometimes water is rationed, but I doubt that any municipalities in the US will just cut off water to people living in a desert. I could be wrong.

One useful lesson I gleaned from the book was: separate urine and feces when handling human waste. The Bushmen do that: they use the urine for tanning hides, and feces are buried in sand, where they dry up. That makes sense and could be applied in the States when water gets really short and the ten gallon flush comes to be seen as the luxury it really is.

J. G. Ballard story

2009-05-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

I read an amazing story in The New Yorker the other day: "The Autobiography of J.G.B." by J.G. Ballard. It's a very short story, only one page. In it, the narrator wakes up to find himself alone in an otherwise intact modern world. One would think he might panic or be upset, but in fact he's rather happy, and at the end, "B was ready to begin his true work."

The protagonist, like Ballard himself, lives in a suburb of London. He finds plenty of food in the shops. He takes a motor boat to France; it is also empty of humans. His only companions are birds. It reminds one a bit of The World Without Us, a recent book by Alan Weisman, which is nonfiction, and imagines how the Earth would change if humans suddenly disappeared. Except in this case, there is one remaining witness to the newly empty world.

So, what is this "true work" that the lone surviving human can now begin? The work of writing perhaps? It is a solitary kind of work.

I think the pleasure of this story comes from the fact that it acknowledges, somewhat covertly, the fact that sometimes we fantasize about an absence of other people, about being entirely alone, not subject to the demands of anyone. Artists especially sometimes have this guilty fantasy. "L'enfer, c'est les autres," as Sartre put it. Imagine how much time you'd have to work on what you really want to do! But of course this idea raises the question: for whom are you doing it? Can you write without readers?

Persuasion, by Jane Austen

2009-05-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

I started reading this novel years ago, when I was reading all of Jane Austen, and I didn't finish it. It was too tense and agonizing. The suspense was almost painful: here is this young woman in her late twenties, still in love with a man she rejected because of family pressure eight years ago, and he comes back into her life. At first he seems cold and distant, but then she begins to think that maybe he still loves her too. But in this society, the woman can't speak first. She can't simply say to him, "I still love you, and I'm sorry I didn't accept your proposal eight years ago. I was given bad advice by my family." No, she has to wait for him to put aside his pride and ask if maybe she's changed her mind about him. She's on pins and needles the whole time, and there are terrible humiliations, and she's treated very badly by her family, but in the end it all works out.

Still, it's so painful to think that women once lived like this: utterly dependent on marriage for survival; dreading being an old maid; prevented from doing any kind of real work at all; prisoners of a rigid class system; and silenced by rigid gender role conventions.

Review of Becoming Jane Austen

2009-05-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

This is an accessible biography of Jane Austen for the general reader. The author also includes a lot of genealogical information, maybe more than one needs, about Jane's parents, grandparents, cousins, etc. In addition there's the story of Jane's own romance with Tom Lefroy, which is the centerpiece of the movie Becoming Jane. The movie has some incidents in it that are not in this book; for example, in the movie, Jane elopes with Tom and then changes her mind and goes home. Apparently that didn't really happen. In reality, she waited for him for three years while he was in law school and he didn't come back to marry her.

Jane had two more marriage proposals, one of which she briefly accepted before changing her mind. Apparently at some point she decided she did not really want to be married at all, and she devoted herself seriously to the craft of being a writer. This was, however, some time after she had already published Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, both of which were written when she was quite young.

After finding out from this book that Jane wrote Mansfield Park and Persuasion later in life, as an "older" and more experienced woman, I was inspired to read them again. They are a bit darker than her earlier works. That used to put me off, but now I understand that they are this way because of her greater understanding of the often tragic situation of women in her time. She was apparently particularly upset at the way her brothers repeatedly impregnated their poor wives, so that the women gave birth every 18 months or so, and then finally died of exhaustion. One gets the impression that she was rather glad she never married.

Another interesting thing I learned from this book was that Jane Austen hated cities and could only work well on her writing in the country. I know the feeling. Learning this about her made me feel better about the fact that I think I work better at my projects in the quiet and isolation of the country. I had always thought that was something weird about me.

Review of The Other Side of Paradise

2009-05-12T09:18:00.001-07:00

I belong to the Amazon Vine program. They send you a free book in exchange for you writing a review of the book. This is the review I wrote of the above book.

I picked this book because of the wonderful cover photograph. But the writing itself did not disappoint. I was somewhat skeptical at first, because it's a memoir written in the first person present, and I am a little tired of that. Frank McCourt used the first person present to great effect in Angela's Ashes, but not everybody is Frank McCourt. It takes a good writer to pull off this tense and person, and Staceyann Chin, although a young writer, is a very good writer.

Like Frank McCourt, she had a terrible childhood. Again, this has become something of a commonplace, sadly, in memoirs. But a terrible childhood does not a great memoir make. Sure, an impoverished, brutal childhood arouses our bourgeois voyeurism, but it takes more than shock value to make a great book. It takes great writing.

Ms.Chin's writing is not show-offy and her style is not elaborate or self-consciously arty. It's just exact: you can see and hear her characters and places. The patois of Jamaica gets into your mind and you want to hear these characters talk some more in their beautiful, expressive dialect.

The story can get a little wearing in its relentless grimness. Basically, all the adults in young Stacyanne's life fail to take proper adult responsibility for her and her brother: her mother abandons them, her father won't acknowledge that he is her father, her aunt beats her, and her male cousins try to rape her. Only her grandmother is a steadfast, reliable adult in her life, but when she is too old to work and must go to live with one of her sons, Stacyanne and her brother are pretty much on their own.

Stacyanne realized early on that her ticket out of the back side of Paradise was academic achievement, and she studied hard and with a vengeance. She was admitted to a prestigious girls' high school and then to a university. But eventually, because of her sexual orientation, she had to leave Jamaica. She went to New York, where she lives, writes, and performs today.

So the story has a happy ending and could be an inspiration to any young person struggling with an unhappy home life and unloving adults, especially if that young person is gay.

Go Down, Moses and Games of Property

2009-05-04T06:37:00.001-07:00

My Peruvian friend Vilma got her American citizenship last week. I wanted to give her a book to celebrate, a very American book. What would be the most American book in the world? I thought of Go Down, Moses, my favorite book by Faulkner. It has everybody in it: Native Americans, African Americans and Hillbilly Americans.

I started re-reading it, and I realized that it’s also really, really confusing. (I ended up giving Vilma Huckleberry Finn instead.) It opens with Faulkner’s weird stream of consciousness style and a lot of omitted punctuation; then suddenly a fox is running through a kitchen with two old men and a bunch of dogs chasing it, and somebody named Tomey’s Turl has “broke out again.”

Oh yes, Tomey’s Turl: the son and grandson of old Carothers McCaslin, the patriarch of the McCaslin family. I thought I sort of remembered. Didn’t his grandmother drown herself when she discovered that the father of her own child, Tomey, had impregnated Tomey? I re-read all of Go Down, Moses, and indeed that is revealed near the end.

Go Down, Moses is a much more complicated book than I realized when I read it for the first time about eight years ago. I had to re-read the first story, “Was,” three times before I figured out what was going on in the card game. It seems that Tomey’s Turl, despite being a slave, has managed to engineer all the events in the book, so that he can marry Tennie, his sweetheart who lives on a neighboring plantation. He seems powerless, and he hardly speaks at all, but he controls and out-wits his owners and half-brothers, Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy. To do this, he makes an alliance with a white woman, Sophonsiba, who also has matrimony in mind: she wants Uncle Buck to marry her. And eventually he does, in part because of the events that occur because of Tomey’s Turl’s “escape.”

The farcical “hunt” for Tomey’s Turl, and his pursuit of Tennie, and Sophonsiba’s pursuit of Buck, are all mirrored at the end of the book in the more solemnly told story of the pursuit of the bear, Old Ben, which ends in death for the bear and the fierce dog, Lion. In fact the theme of caging, escape, and pursuit recur throughout the several stories that make up Go Down, Moses. It suddenly occurred to me that other critics might have noticed this. I went to the library at the University of Houston, and found about ten books just about Go Down, Moses. The one that spoke most immediately to my interest in Tomey’s Turl and the pursuit theme is Games of Property, by Thadious Davis.

Games of Property is a dense, thoroughly researched exposition of antebellum property law, especially as it applied to the ownership of slaves. It turns out that property case law even began with a case about who owned a fox! Davis says that Faulkner was probably aware of this case, as he had lawyer friends. At any rate, she then shows how people found ways to find some freedom within the restrictive, cage-like laws of the slavery system, and that this realm of freedom was often a game: a card game, a hunt, even a dice game. The hunt for Tomey’s Turl was a game that he and Buck and Buddy had played many times before, and it was a kind of ritual. Buck even gave Tomey’s Turl a head start so that the chase would be more fun. At the end of the story, it seems that Tomey’s Turl may be manipulating the cards in a poker game so that Tennie will go home with him and Uncle Buck.

This complicated game playing goes on between the white and black people and between men and women throughout the novel. Relatively powerless people, black and female, use whatever power they can find to manipulate the white males who seem to hold all the power. Sometimes, as in “Was,” these games are successful. Davis says that games are arenas that are slightly outside the normal social order of law, but never entirely outside it. Law itself is a way of regulating the "game" of capitalism and property that is the constant backdrop to all human relations. But within that constricted, legally bound social space, even women and enslaved people find some freedom to enact their wills on the world.

There is a lot more to Go Down, Moses than the game/property theme: there are the themes about environmental destruction and the responsibility that a person has for the misdeeds of his ancestors. But both of these are related to the idea of property and games: land as property, the hunt on the land as a game, and the attempt to outwit personal karma as a kind of cosmic game.

Once I wrapped up a book for a child’s birthday, and when I presented it to him, and he opened it, he said, “Thanks, but I already have a book.” I laughed and said, “It’s ok to have more than one book.” But sometimes I think that Go Down, Moses is the only book I really need. I could read it over and over again and keep finding new things in it.

.

Review of Vanessa and Virginia

2009-04-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

Photograph of Julia Duckworth Stephens, mother of Virginia and Vanessa

I got this book from the Amazon vine program, which sends free books to people to review. Sometimes the books are really great, but more often they are bad, or only so-so. This fell into the so-so category.

The author's idea was to write a memoir from the point of view of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister. She was a painter, and they were very close as children and later as fellow artists. Vanessa married, and then had several affairs with men, producing a number of children. Virginia married but never had children. She was much more successful as a writer than Vanessa was as a painter.

This idea--of imagining Vanessa's voice-- was good because we know a lot about what Virginia thought, as she wrote so much, but we know less about Vanessa's inner life, which the author imagines, based on several biographies of the sisters. The problem is, the voice that she gives Vanessa is not very credible. She sounds entirely too contemporary. Vanessa, for example, would not use the word "parenting" for example, as nobody did before about 1980.

The plot revolves a great deal around Vanessa's torments about her lover Duncan Grant, who was bisexual, and who ended up dumping her for a man. In this book the author imagines that Vanessa attempted suicide over this. I don't know if there is any historical evidence for this. WE know of course that Virginia successfully killed herself.

But the interesting aspects of the plot and the author's ability to evoke the setting of a late 19th century upper-class English childhood do not make up for the lack of a convincing narrator's voice. I realized, reading this, how important this often over-looked quality of first-person fiction is: one thinks of successful first-person narrators, like Huckleberry Finn or David Copperfield. Maybe those voices succeeded because the writer knew the character's place and time so well, as it was his own. In a way, Susan Sellers is writing historical fiction, and making a Bloomsbury character talk convincingly is almost as hard as making a medieval person talk convincingly! That time was long ago and far away, it turns out.

The other problem is that Sellers assumes that the reader knows a lot about Bloomsbury, almost as much as she does. She does not explain who Lytton, Carrington, Vita, and Ottoline are. I think she wrote this novel for Bloomsbury fans who will recognize the characters as old friends from their readings of other books about Bloomsbury. I am not particularly a Bloomsbury fan. I love Virginia Woolf's novels, but the whole cast of decadent, somewhat pretentious, privileged upper-class intellectuals does not appeal to me very much.

REading this reminded me of the day that I visited Sissinghurst Castle in 1994. WE took a cab from town to the garden, which was the creation of Vita Sackville-West and her husband. Vita was one of Virginia's lovers. There had recently been a PBS television series about Vita's affair with another woman, Violet. When the cab driver picked us up, he asked us if we were going there because of "the scandal." We asked, "What scandal?" Apparently a lot of Americans were drawn to the garden because of the titillation factor. We were in fact wanting to look at the flowers. I thought it was funny that a hundred years later, this affair was still "a scandal."

Academic literacy

2009-04-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

Jim Burke has a cool blog for English teachers. Here is a recent post about what California college professors say about what students need to be able to do in college.

http://jimburke.typepad.com/

Academic Literacy: What Do You Need to Succeed?

What are the skills necessary to not just survive but thrive in academic classes in general and at the college level in particular? This is the question the California State University and University of California systems asked some years ago in a report titled Academic Literacy.

Here is one of the most important passages in a section that discusses the concept of "habits of mind":
What constitutes academic literacy?

The dispositions and habits of mind that enable students to enter the ongoing conversations appropriate to college thinking, reading, writing, and speaking are inter-related and multi-tiered. Students should be aware of the various logical, emotional, and personal appeals used in argument; additionally, they need skills enabling them to define, summarize, detail, explain, evaluate, compare/contrast, and analyze. Students should also have a fundamental understanding of audience, tone, language usage, and rhetorical strategies to navigate appropriately in various disciplines.

Our study informs our conclusions about the complex nature of academic literacy. Competencies in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and in the use of technology that are described in later segments presuppose the intellectual dispositions valued by the community college, CSU, and UC faculty who teach first-year students and participated in our study. They tell us, and our experience confirms, that the following intellectual habits of mind are important for students’ success. The percentages noted indicate the portion of faculty who identified the following as “important to very important” or “somewhat to very essential” in their classes and within their academic discipline. College and university students should be able to engage in the following broad intellectual practices:

* exhibit curiosity (80%)
* experiment with new ideas (79%)
* see other points of view (77%)
* challenge their own beliefs (77%)
* engage in intellectual discussions (74%)
* ask provocative questions (73%)
* generate hypotheses (72%)
* exhibit respect for other viewpoints (71%)
* read with awareness of self and others (68%)

Faculty members also indicated, by the percentages below, that the following classroom behaviors facilitate students’ learning. They noted that students should be able to do the following:

* ask questions for clarification (85%)
* be attentive in class (84%)
* come to class prepared (82%)
* complete assignments on time (79%)
* contribute to class discussions (67%)

Successful college and university students also know how to take advantage of what college has to offer, especially when they do not understand an assignment, are confused about teachers’ expectations, or need particular guidance. Self-advocacy is, therefore, a valuable practice that emerges from the recognition that education is a partnership.

College and university faculty also expect students to:

* respect facts and information in situations where feelings and intuitions often prevail;
* be aware that rhetorics of argumentation and interrogation are calibrated to disciplines, purposes, and audiences;
* embrace the value of research to explore new ideas through reading and writing;
* develop a capacity to work hard and to expect high standards; and show initiative and develop ownership of their education.

The Book Whisperer

2009-03-31T07:21:00.000-07:00

Here is the review I wrote for Amazon about this great book, The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller. I received it as part of the Amazon vine program. This program sends out free books to willing reviewers (of which I am one). They send you a list via email of the books that are available for review, and you can choose two. Last month The Book Whisperer was one of my choices.

"This book by a Texas sixth grade teacher confirms what I've long believed, as a teacher myself: that books are way under-rated. I tutor students from first grade to college, and I consistently find that students don't read enough real books for pleasure, usually. The ones who do become the good students, and they usually read outside of class, on their own time. Many students' lives are so crowded with busy work--a.k.a. homework--that they don't have time to sink into a great book and read for long periods of time.

"It's amazing how teachers whose job it is to teach reading don't actually use real books to teach reading: they use interminable worksheets, exercises, vocabulary drills, reading primers, anything but a real book. Recently I was tutoring a first grader who is slightly behind in his reading skills. His mother is very worried. All I did was show him a book that emerging readers love: Bears on Wheels. Pretty soon he could read that book. Then he read Hop on Pop. He was so excited! I had told him that the books were library books. After our tutoring session, he ran up to me in the parking lot and said, 'Shannon! How much do those library books cost?' Imagine my pleasure in telling him that they were completely free.

"I was surprised, though, that he had not been to a public library yet. It seems that many parents don't avail themselves of this wonderful free resource. But teaching a child to read is not rocket science: all it takes is a pile of picture books, a lap, and some time. Yes, phonics is important; but it's a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end is reading pleasure.

"Ms. Miller requires her sixth graders to read forty books during the school year. And they do! One secret to her success is simply having a lot of books in her classroom: two thousand to be precise. These are her own books, and she can loan them as she likes to students. She has an index card system for tracking who has the books, but she doesn't worry about it too much. Also, she doesn't make them do book reports, vocabulary quizzes about the books, etc. They keep a notebook on their responses to the books they are reading, and they voluntarily do "book commercials" where they tell the class about a book that they loved.

"She does not have the class read a book together, with everybody reading the same novel, as most English teachers do. But she does read aloud to her students, so there are certain books that they all are following and can discuss together.

"In this way, she establishes in her students a habit of reading, which she hopes will last a lifetime. The results are impressive: students who have repeatedly done poorly on standardized tests start to do well on these tests for the first time. It turns out that endless test-taking drills are not nearly as effective in raising test scores as simply letting students read for pleasure.

"I wish more teachers would throw away their worksheets and book report assignments, and just let students read, and read, and read."

Writing on Demand

2009-03-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

I used to know that school was deadening, artificial, and prison-like. Why do I keep forgetting that?

Lately, the whole phenomenon of the "writing assignment" seems especially depressing and artificial to me. Students are required to write about things that they know nothing and care nothing about; sometimes they are required to write the opposite of what they really think.

An example of that was the writing assignment I was helping a student with today. She had to write an article against abortion, even though she is an abortion supporter. She was also told that she could use no religious arguments or even refer to religion in her essay. But the more she researched the evidence against abortion, the more she found that there was no credible scientific argument against abortion. Basically, all the arguments against it are religious. But she couldn't cite those. So she had to pretend in her essay that weak arguments, unsupported by science, had more validity than they really do: that abortion causes women to become depressed or infertile or have breast cancer, etc.

This is similar to the difficulty I experienced on Tuesday, when a student had to write an essay explaining why she thought the government should intervene in the sinking economy. The student didn't understand the global financial crisis well at all. So her essay consisted of a list of everything that's wrong--unemployment, foreclosures, banks going under-- with no real explanation of how government intervention would help relieve those problems. Her argument was basically, "Things are all messed up, so we have to do something!" But people who think the government should do nothing say the same thing: "Things are all messed up, so keep the government out of it! Let the market fix itself!"

Paul Goodman wrote a book called Growing Up Absurd. He became a home school advocate, in the hopes of reducing the absurdity in the lives of children and young people. I think he was right: school is a major source of absurdity in students' lives, in large part because of writing assignments that mean nothing to the student.

Donalyn Miller, who wrote The Book Whisperer, developed a reading program for her sixth graders that enables them to choose the books that they will read. The class does not all read the same novel together; each student reads forty books a year, and that is the main requirement. Why couldn't we make similar requirements about writing? Students could be required to write a certain number of words per semester, but that writing could be about anything, and in any form: in the form of a formal essay, or blogs, or poetry, or raps, or letters to people.

It would be a lot more fun to help students with writing that they really care about, rather than having to read and fix up these make-work essays that nobody cares about.

The Goldilocks Zone

2009-03-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

Climate scientists talk about planets where life can exist as planets that exist in the Goldilocks zone: not too hot and not too cold.

I think there might be a zone like that for school assignments: not too hard and not too soft, like the Three Bears' beds.

The other day I ran into an assignment that I thought was too hard. The assignment was to analyze the global financial crisis and determine whether or not the federal government should intervene, and why or why not.

This seems to me to be the $64 trillion dollar question, possibly the hardest question in the world right now. The student that I was tutoring said that yes, the government should intervene. But then she went on to simply describe how bad the crisis was. She didn't say what the government should do, or why it should do that.

But could you explain that? I couldn't. I trust Paul Krugman's judgment that the government should intervene, probably by nationalizing the banks. But I can't explain why Krugman thinks that. And it would take me weeks to get up to speed enough to explain it.

I know that there are lots of questions about what the government should do: how big the bail outs and stimulus should be; how much debt the government can accrue as a percentage of GDP before our own bonds become bad investments; which toxic assets the government should buy, and for how much; how the government should deal with mortgage defaults; whether any of this is fair to the average citizen; what to do about the money that has already simply disappeared into the pockets of CEOs at banks and car companies; and on and on ad nauseum. I don't understand credit default swaps or zombie banks, but I believe that the Dow could go much, much lower, and that unemployment will go a lot higher before this is over. That is to say, I know that this is a very complex issue that I don't really understand at all. I really, really hope that some people in the Obama administration understand it, and that the Congress acts on these understandings.

Back to the pedagogical issue. Some people say that difficult assignments are good for students. But I think there's such a thing as an assignment that is too difficult. The ideal assignment is challenging, but the student should be able to do a good job on it with some guidance from the teacher. It should be a little harder than the last assignment, but not a lot harder. Assignments that are too difficult can be harmful in that (1) they can frustrate the student and in the long run make her cynical about school, if the student understands that she doesn't really understand the assignment and that she just has to fake her way through it; (2) they can teach students that school is mystifying and at times meaningless, because often you don't understand what you are supposed to be doing. This is demoralizing.

Grading presents a problem because if an assignment is too difficult, the teacher either has to give the student a bad grade despite the fact that she struggled hard to do the assignment, or the teacher gives the student a good grade for a bad paper, which misinforms the student about what a good job on that assignment would look like.

I think sometimes that teachers who teach little kids think more about these things than college teachers do. I am teaching a first grader to read. I know that giving him a "hard" book, like Frog and Toad Are Friends, would be a mistake right now. I can read that aloud to him while he watches. But when I want him to read to me, I give him Go Dog Go, or Hop on Pop. He reads those over and over again until he is perfectly confident with them. Then we might go on to The Cat in the Hat. His reading is carefully paced to challenge yet encourage him and give him a sense of mastery.

That's harder to do at the college level, where texts are not so easy to sequence. Still, I think college professors should think carefully about the sequence of assignments and try not to give freshmen and sophomores assignments that they will only be ready for when they get to graduate school.

Do graduate students in economics know the answer to the global financial crisis? Could they write an essay supporting government intervention in the economy? Could Geitner do it? Can Obama? Is there anybody out there who really knows what to do? Or can even explain what the options are, and why some are better than others? I trust that there might be, but I bet you can count the number of people who really understand this on one hand.

Good book recommendation site

2009-03-07T15:47:00.000-08:00

Here's a cool site about reading and books. You can create an account as on Facebook or Twitter, where you can archive lists of all the books you've read, are reading now, and intend to read!

Perhaps the most useful aspect of the site for teachers or parents is the fact that it has extensive lists of books that are popular with young adults and children. These are lists of books that young people are actually reading, not lists of books that adults think they should be reading. Of course the Harry Potter books are at the top of those lists, but also very popular are the Twilight series about vampires. I have to admit that I know very little about these books except what I have gleaned from the posters I've seen in Walmart featuring the main characters, a rather ordinary looking girl and a sexy vampire guy.

Another interesting aspect of this site is that they are currently running a contest for the best "status update novel." This is a novel written using Twitter, or other status update online software, where you keep adding information about yourself or a fictional character as a 24 hour cycle goes by. You can only add 140 characters per post, which is an interesting formal constraint. As a child, I used to imagine myself as the heroine of the ultimate novel, which would tell every single thing that I did all day long, every day, for my entire life! It would be told in the third person, by an imagined narrator who spent her entire "life" documenting my life. Sometimes when I was playing after school I would narrate this novel in my head: "Now she's playing with her dog. She's singing songs to her dog in the yard."

Little did I know in 1964 that eventually technology would make this very thing possible. But lately I haven't been singing to dogs. Maybe I should, again.

1952; 1962; 1972

2009-03-03T10:32:00.000-08:00

Here are two passages that I read recently that seem to have something to do with each other. Both are written by women in love. The first is by Carolyn Cassady, who was married in 1952 to Neal Cassady, but having an affair with his best friend Jack Kerouac, who lived with them in a bohemian menage a trois. Neal knew about the affair but didn't seem to mind. Both Neal and Jack became "accustomed to the idea" of sharing one woman.

"When both men became accustomed to the idea, they dropped their defenses and joined me downstairs in the kitchen. While I performed my chores, they'd read each other excerpts from their works-in-progress or bring out Spengler, Proust, Celine or Shakespeare to read aloud, interrupted by energetic discussions and analyses. Frequently they would digress and discuss a musician, or a riff or an interesting arrangement emanating from the radio. I was happy listening to them and filling their cups. Yet, I never felt left out any more. They'd address remarks to me and include me with smiles and pats, or request my view."

So, in 1952, Carolyn Cassady was "happy" just listening to men's talk while she did her chores, grateful for the occasional "smiles and pats," as if she were a dog. A dog who does dishes. I guess, with the children and two men to take care of, she didn't have time to read or write herself. O tempora! O mores!

The other passage is also about a girl watching a man at a table. It was written by Amy Bloom, who, as a girl in 1962, had the great good fortune of having lunch with Marcella Mastroianni, then at the peak of his acting career. He had already made La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2.

"1962. I have been swimming for hours, wearing my new navy blue one-piece with the red vinyl anchor on one shoulder. I swim to the side of the pool and fall in love with Marcello Mastroianni. He's the guest of my parents' dear friends, who are in the movie business. Clouds blow past. Shafts of light fall upon il Signor Mastroianni, who is not quite 40 years old and so darkly handsome and loose-limbed and charmingly weary, but not too weary to splash me while he has a drink poolside. I suddenly understand why people like to kiss, why sitting in the company of another person is as thrilling as the Steeplechase at Coney Island, how watching a man pop a cracked green olive into his mouth and then lick his fingers could cause a person to be both breathless and uncomfortable. Il Signor Mastroianni brought out a plate of antipasti and we ate lunch under the patio umbrella, and in addition to discovering desire, I discovered roasted red peppers, soppressata, and marinated eggplant."

Flash forward another ten years, to 1972. It is my freshman year in college, and I am having breakfast in the cavernous, noisy freshman/sophomore dining hall. Across from me is a young man who is not eating his grits. They are getting cold. So I help myself to some of his grits, reaching across the table with my spoon.
"What are you doing? You're eating my breakfast!" He looks really indignant.
Oops. I made a mistake, I guess. Yankees may eat grits, but they don't eat off each other's plates like that.

However, in twenty years, one can see a lot of progress: women go from silently waiting on men at tables, grateful for the occasional pat, to ogling film stars poolside, to finally taking men's food away from them and eating it themselves! What next?

The Endangered Humanities

2009-02-26T10:27:00.000-08:00

An article in the New York Times discusses the sad state of the humanities in higher education these days. The number of students majoring in literature, history, the arts, and philosophy has been dropping since the mid-sixties, apparently because students and their parents perceive the study of the humanities as a luxury, and not a practical choice for a career-minded student. This seems odd, considering the fact that most of the lawyers I know, for example, majored in English. Defenders of the humanities point out the importance of critical thinking and a grounding in ethics for people in all lines of work. Maybe that's what's been missing lately on Wall Street.

Reading and vocabulary; skimming

2009-02-26T09:27:00.000-08:00

Sometimes students have a hard time reading a text because it contains so many unfamiliar words. Frequently teachers tell students to look up the words they don't know. But if there are a lot, it slows the reader down so much that the process of looking up all the words can discourage a student from reading at all.

Other teachers encourage students to keep reading when they run into a difficult word. Sometimes the meaning will emerge from the context. But if the student is an ESL student, for whom English is not the first language, this may not work. What is a good compromise between looking up every three or four words and reading very slowly on the one hand, and reading without any comprehension on the other?

Maybe a compromise would be to encourage the reader to read the text as well as she can without using a dictionary, underlining the words that she doesn't know. Then once she has a general sense of what the text is about, she could go back and start looking up some of the words. It may be clearer which words are the most important to understand, and which are not so important.

The truth is that fluent readers skip words and even whole passages when they read. I have found that the people who read the most give themselves permission to skim and skip. Other people have never gotten over their childhood training that one must read every single word of every text that one reads, and they feel guilty if they don't. But you are in charge of your own reading: read what you want to out of any given text! Even assigned texts can often be skimmed profitably. I think it's better, if you have limited time, to skim an entire text rather than just read a quarter of it or less.

Sometimes students come in the writing center having written an essay about a text that they never finished reading! I try to teach them to skim: to read the first paragraph in its entirety, the first sentence of every following paragraph, and the last paragraph in its entirety. Some students have never heard that this is "ok."

The past unreal conditional

2009-02-26T07:57:00.000-08:00

Yesterday at HCC I learned about a tense that I hadn't heard of before: the past unreal conditional. A website called English Page explained more about it. It says:

"The Past Unreal Conditional is used to talk about imaginary situations in the past. You can describe what you would have done differently or how something could have happened differently if circumstances had been different."

Some examples are:

If I had owned a car, I would have driven to work. But I didn't own one, so I took the bus.
She would have traveled around the world if she had had more money. But she didn't have much money, so she never traveled.
I would have read more as a child if I hadn't watched so much TV. Unfortunately, I did watch a lot of TV, so I never read for entertainment.

That's pretty straightforward. But what intrigued me about the past unreal conditional is that the phrase itself is almost like a little poem, very potent with meaning. The past IS unreal, in the sense that what really happened is almost always invisible to us, and what we think happened is what becomes our past: our story about the past. And many times our story about the past is not real; it's more imaginary than real.

The "conditional" part for me refers to the way our stories about the past condition the present. We see the present, as it were, through the lens of our stories about the past. But also, the technical grammatical meaning of "conditional" here also applies: we constantly think about how things might have been different. If only I had done things differently in the past, I could have avoided all this trouble in the present, etc. But that's unreal too: we did it the way we did it, and that's the reality of it.

I also thought about how the phrase "the past, unreal, conditional" reminded me of Faulkner's famous saying, "The past isn't dead. It's not even past." I think Barack Obama referred to that phrase in his famous speech about race. People think that Faulkner said it, but he actually made one of his characters say it. Gavin Stevens says it in Requiem for a Nun, talking to Temple Drake about her own terrible past, which she is now trying to put behind her. (The prequel to Requiem for a Nun is Sanctuary, one of the most bleak novels Faulkner wrote.)

I thought that if Faulkner were living today, and if he were teaching English at HCC, Faulkner might say, "The past isn't even past. It's actually the past, unreal, conditional." But Faulkner thought of the past as being almost the most real thing, the thing that governed all his characters' lives. However, at the same time, the characters' past always exists in the form of stories. Absalom, Absalom! begins with Quentin Compson sitting in a darkened living room with Rosa Coldfield, hearing her long, confusing story of her sister's marriage to Thomas Sutpen. She is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and her bitterness and hatred of Sutpen are evident from the beginning. So how "real" is this story of the past?

All our stories may be unreal and conditional, but we can't do without our stories. Our minds work by creating stories about the past. We can't stop doing that, but we can meet our stories with understanding, rather than necessarily believing all of our painful thoughts about them.

List of books for Seventh Graders

2009-02-26T07:43:00.000-08:00

I work for a tutoring business called Learning Squared. Today the director, Sylvia Bryant, asked me to make a list of books that would be appropriate for seventh graders. The seventh grader in question is a girl, but this list includes books that boys might like too. If you can think of any more that your seventh grader(s) particularly liked, please let me know.

Here is my list, compiled in part from my own memory but also from a great book called The Well-Trained Mind, by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. The ones with an asterisk are ones that I've read and that I approve. ;-)

J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter series
*C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
*T H. White, The Sword in the Stone
*Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
*Christina Rossetti poems, especially "Goblin Market"
*Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensiblity
*Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
*Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped
Treasure Island
*Alcott, Little Women
*any Sherlock Holmes stories
*Kipling, the Jungle Book
H. G. Wells, the Time Machine or The War of the Worlds
*London, The Call of teh Wild
Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
*Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
*Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling
*Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories
*Toni Morrison, Beloved, or any other novel by her
Isaac Asimov
Pearl Buck
Willa Cather
*Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
*Jules Verne, TWenty thousand Leagues Under the Sea
*Dickens, A Christmas Carol
*Brink, Caddie Woodlawn
*Field, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years
*Forbes, Johnny Tremain
Speare, Calico Captive
*Hurston, Their Eyes were Watching God
*Gipson, Old Yeller

The Two Rs

2009-02-26T07:39:00.000-08:00

I teach reading and writing at the primary, secondary, and college level. This blog has been set up to discuss ways of teaching reading and writing better, and also to talk about the reading and writing that teachers do for their own pleasure.