Margotlog: Tobacco Road
When Erskine Caldwell wrote the novel Tobacco Road in 1934, the southern United States was still mired in the agricultural decline that began way before the Civil War and continued into the 1960s. My friend Jill Breckenridge describes its beginning in her poetic sequence Civil Blood (1986). Using the voice of a slave named Jacob, she writes: " ...ain't nothing/you can give a dying field when they're bound on working it to death." Two crops planted each year, "corn takes more than her share, then wheat or rye...never planted in sweet clover...then tobacco...those brown leaves drinking up the little life that's left."
By the time Jeter and Ada Lester have raised seventeen children, each year falling further behind, the Georgia land that gave the road its name has long been planted in cotton. It now yields only a half bale an acre. But Jeter can't afford to plant even that--the Captain who used to stake share croppers to cotton seed and guano for fertilizer has moved to Augusta. Though he'll let the share-cropper families remain in the shacks, he won't pour any more of his money into the used-up land.
Breckenridge describes how her ancestors left Virginia's exhausted land in the 1790s to settle in Kentucky. Jeter Lester's family has grubbed a kind of living from the same Georgia soil for probably 150 years, each year, the yield lessening until by the 1930s, the family is as worn down as the earth, barely able to do more than pretend to plant, their car completely wrecked; their house as gap-toothed as the old grandmother who hides from Jeter, Ada and their two remaining children, the old grandmother afraid they'll hit her if they see her.
I've encountered this dirt-poor poverty in James Agee's magesterial Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), but his prose is so elaborate and filagreed with compassion and intelligence that it's hard to see through it to the mental and emotional poverty of his subjects. Now so with Caldwell who writes with a spare, dry humor that lets Jeter and his kin flake into awareness before our eyes. Jeter keeps going because he suspends disbelief in himself, his situation, even what is quite morally fit. He encourages his 16-year-old son Dude to marry with the preacher lady Bessie partly because he, Jeter, has the hots for Bessie too, but also because her dead husband has left her $800 and she aims to buy an automobile.
There's nothing Jeter admires more than an automobile. When he gets a ride with Dude and Bessie, their trip to Augusta has all the makings of a carnival on half-shares. There's a huge meal of cheese and crackers--mind you, the Lesters have almost nothing to eat from one day to the next. Their cornmeal is run out, fat back too. With no income and no likelihood of one from a crop, Lester decides to cut scrub oak and try to sell a load for firewood in Augusta. This second of his trips in Bessie's new car ends in disappointment and disaster--the car overheats, the boy Dude has a second (or is it a third) accident, and no one wants to buy the scrub oak. But spending the night in a "hotel" in Augusta nets Bessie a sly stint as a prostitute. It's amazing how the good Lord does provide. "I don't know when I've had so much fun," admits Bessie.
Through all this, the reader wavers between disbelief--can the Lesters be this close to starvation and receive no aid from kin or community? What about those 15 older children who have moved to the towns and work in the cotton mills? After disbelief comes amusement and a growing acknowledgment that the Lesters hang on because they're great at fooling themselves and fooling around. It's backwoods humor, not 1830s-style, but 1930s' ribald, sly, teetering on the brink of destitution.
I won't tell you how it ends because I hope you'll borrow Mark Hammer's wonderfully droll reading of Tabacco Road from the library. Or read the book itself, though for my money, it won't be as much fun. Hammer is astonishingly believeable as Jeter, as Bessie, as Dude, even as the cleft-palate teen Ellie Mae, whose slide downhill toward a cute male kinfolk is one of the slyest sex scenes I've ever encountered. Politically correct, it ain't. But down-to-earth and believable, it surely is.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Margotlog: The Great Migration and the African-American Story
Margotlog: The Great Migration and the African-American Story
A wonderful class of graduate students and I have started discussing how history and story intersect. We began with Doctorow's Ragtime and the movie made from the novel. Next we read August Wilson's play, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," which the Guthrie Theater produced a year ago. Now my mind won't shut up: it keeps throwing up all kinds of other examples, amazing episodes and works in and about what is probably the richest, most controversial, continuing story in American history: slavery and its descendents.
It's rather common knowledge these days that the institution of slavery greatly troubled the founders of the American "experiment" and almost made a compromise impossible. Though the American Civil War was fought over sectional competition, when it came right down to it, freeing African-Americans from bondage was at its heart. President Abraham Lincoln called Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, "the woman who started a war." Since then, the story of African Americans enriches and challenges us as individuals and a nation. I can't begin to enumerate all the episodes of history and the works of imagination that derive from it. But let me at least make a start.
August Wilson's play is set in Chicago, which with New York became the two great meccas where African Americans headed in the waves of migration that took them out of the increasingly segregated and hostile south--just before and during World War I and World War II. As one student mentioned, Chicago is still one of the most segregated American cities. Yet, out of the Chicago experience many astonishing African-American writers have enriched our culture: let's start with Gwendolyn Brooks, the great poetic chronicler of the poor, the lively, their tenements, their language, their music. Along with Lorraine Hansberry who wrote the play "A Raisin in the Sun" and a moving memoir, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, and Richard Wright (Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy), these writers (based in Chicago for at least part of their lives) made the history and story of newly arrived Chicago migrants, their efforts to reach toward that sun of prosperity vivid and compelling. The fact that we have Barack Obama, an African-American president, and his talented and highly educated wife at the head of our country today says a huge amount about individual achievement and group solidarity via Chicago--how through the growth and exercise of political, intellectual and creative power, astonishing individuals can rise to the top. (In these contentious times, I like to remind myself of this!)
On the East Coast, the African-American writers, artists and intellectuals that derive from the Harlem Renaissance and continue today include the poet Langston Hughes, with Gwendolyn Brooks, the two greatest African-American poets of the first half of the 20th century. Then there are a group of fiction writers who extended our awareness of African-American lives well into the mid-20th century: Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), James Baldwin (Notes of a Native Son), and Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God). The Civil Rights movement brought another generation of African-American writers forward--Maya Angelou, Margaret Walker, ALice Walker, on and on, not to mention the political/religions works of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Finally there's Toni Morrison's immensely complex and enticing works, my favorite being Beloved. She won the Nobel Prize for literature, perhaps the highest honor the world can bestow.
I'm just touching the most obvious, not really moving far into the last thirty years except with Morrison. Suffice it to say, we are gifted with extraordinary African-American writers, whose courage, desperation, humor, artifice and realism astound and inform. Don't waste any time: get thee to a library or book store. Read, listen, or in the case of August Wilson, go to the next production of one of his Pittsburgh trilogies, performed by Saint Paul's leading theater, the Penumbra Theater, which is housed in Saint Paul's old Rondo neighborhood, which was lovingly described in Evelyn Fairbanks' memoir, Days of Rondo.
A wonderful class of graduate students and I have started discussing how history and story intersect. We began with Doctorow's Ragtime and the movie made from the novel. Next we read August Wilson's play, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," which the Guthrie Theater produced a year ago. Now my mind won't shut up: it keeps throwing up all kinds of other examples, amazing episodes and works in and about what is probably the richest, most controversial, continuing story in American history: slavery and its descendents.
It's rather common knowledge these days that the institution of slavery greatly troubled the founders of the American "experiment" and almost made a compromise impossible. Though the American Civil War was fought over sectional competition, when it came right down to it, freeing African-Americans from bondage was at its heart. President Abraham Lincoln called Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, "the woman who started a war." Since then, the story of African Americans enriches and challenges us as individuals and a nation. I can't begin to enumerate all the episodes of history and the works of imagination that derive from it. But let me at least make a start.
August Wilson's play is set in Chicago, which with New York became the two great meccas where African Americans headed in the waves of migration that took them out of the increasingly segregated and hostile south--just before and during World War I and World War II. As one student mentioned, Chicago is still one of the most segregated American cities. Yet, out of the Chicago experience many astonishing African-American writers have enriched our culture: let's start with Gwendolyn Brooks, the great poetic chronicler of the poor, the lively, their tenements, their language, their music. Along with Lorraine Hansberry who wrote the play "A Raisin in the Sun" and a moving memoir, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, and Richard Wright (Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy), these writers (based in Chicago for at least part of their lives) made the history and story of newly arrived Chicago migrants, their efforts to reach toward that sun of prosperity vivid and compelling. The fact that we have Barack Obama, an African-American president, and his talented and highly educated wife at the head of our country today says a huge amount about individual achievement and group solidarity via Chicago--how through the growth and exercise of political, intellectual and creative power, astonishing individuals can rise to the top. (In these contentious times, I like to remind myself of this!)
On the East Coast, the African-American writers, artists and intellectuals that derive from the Harlem Renaissance and continue today include the poet Langston Hughes, with Gwendolyn Brooks, the two greatest African-American poets of the first half of the 20th century. Then there are a group of fiction writers who extended our awareness of African-American lives well into the mid-20th century: Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), James Baldwin (Notes of a Native Son), and Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God). The Civil Rights movement brought another generation of African-American writers forward--Maya Angelou, Margaret Walker, ALice Walker, on and on, not to mention the political/religions works of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Finally there's Toni Morrison's immensely complex and enticing works, my favorite being Beloved. She won the Nobel Prize for literature, perhaps the highest honor the world can bestow.
I'm just touching the most obvious, not really moving far into the last thirty years except with Morrison. Suffice it to say, we are gifted with extraordinary African-American writers, whose courage, desperation, humor, artifice and realism astound and inform. Don't waste any time: get thee to a library or book store. Read, listen, or in the case of August Wilson, go to the next production of one of his Pittsburgh trilogies, performed by Saint Paul's leading theater, the Penumbra Theater, which is housed in Saint Paul's old Rondo neighborhood, which was lovingly described in Evelyn Fairbanks' memoir, Days of Rondo.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Margotlog: Dolphin Tail/Tale
Margotlog: Dolphin Tail/Tale
We just saw the movie in a nearly empty, late-afternoon theater. I imagine it if were about a moose who'd lost its foot, the audience would be fuller, here midcontinent, with moose, so say the experts, edging off our U.S. part of the globe. But this is an ocean tale which begins with stunning undersea photography of dolphins weaving through cathedrals of coral. For the photography alone, it's worth the price.
The interaction of dolphins and humans has been recorded for centuries--ancient images from the king's palace at Knossos, Crete, of humans astride dolphins' backs. I watched white-skinned, winter-weary Norde Americanos swimming with dolphins in turquoise water off the coast of Isla Mujeres years ago, but nobody tried mounting with halter and stirrups.
What a connection with an animal can do for a forlorn child needs no deep psychological probe. The kid by-passes adult rules and demands, hurts and disappointments, and enters the world on the paws, hooves, flippers of an animal kin. When I was five, six, seven, and my parents stood mid-kitchen on weekday mornings arguing, I often positioned myself at the tall, deep, Old Citadel window and watched my turtle claw around its small watery world. Even now I can make out the yellow stripes on its head, legs and webbed feet, the tiny claws that slid down the wet, inward curving sides. We were both trapped, but watching my turtle created a silent companionship in our various containers where neither of us could gain purchase.
What's so touching about this Dolphin Tale is that the adults neither overly invade the story, nor allow adult circumstances to trash the children's important roles in the animal's recovery. The boy hero discovers the dolphin beached and tangled in rope and rusty crab cage. The marine rescue crew includes a girl his age. We watch as the two observe the dolphin in hospital--a large tank where its damaged tail must finally be amputated. Then the dolphin shows a preference for the boy who first befriended her. Her clicks and "whooshes," and moans, her singing, in other words increases when he is around. It's the start of a series of events that brings her a helpful plastic surgeon whose main job is fitting damaged soldiers with legs, arms, hands.
But the story with all its necessary array of characters and plot twists--lonely parents, friendly grandfather, damaged soldier cousin, damaging hurricane, poorly funded marine rescue center--never departs far from the dolphin named Winter. Her success in accepting a substitute tail, the human skill and dedication to return her t0 the right way of swimming, make clear without preaching or politicking that what humans do to damage other creatures, they can also do to help and restore, themselves included. The boy becomes linked to the fully living world, and leaves his hand-held electronic devices and subtly built remote-controlled model helicopters go smash. I wonder if the grandson in my life, the one who's great at throwing and catching, but lately fallen in love with water and seashells might not also love Winter and her boy advocate. Might not absorb, as does the boy in the film, that there are so many ways to
We just saw the movie in a nearly empty, late-afternoon theater. I imagine it if were about a moose who'd lost its foot, the audience would be fuller, here midcontinent, with moose, so say the experts, edging off our U.S. part of the globe. But this is an ocean tale which begins with stunning undersea photography of dolphins weaving through cathedrals of coral. For the photography alone, it's worth the price.
The interaction of dolphins and humans has been recorded for centuries--ancient images from the king's palace at Knossos, Crete, of humans astride dolphins' backs. I watched white-skinned, winter-weary Norde Americanos swimming with dolphins in turquoise water off the coast of Isla Mujeres years ago, but nobody tried mounting with halter and stirrups.
What a connection with an animal can do for a forlorn child needs no deep psychological probe. The kid by-passes adult rules and demands, hurts and disappointments, and enters the world on the paws, hooves, flippers of an animal kin. When I was five, six, seven, and my parents stood mid-kitchen on weekday mornings arguing, I often positioned myself at the tall, deep, Old Citadel window and watched my turtle claw around its small watery world. Even now I can make out the yellow stripes on its head, legs and webbed feet, the tiny claws that slid down the wet, inward curving sides. We were both trapped, but watching my turtle created a silent companionship in our various containers where neither of us could gain purchase.
What's so touching about this Dolphin Tale is that the adults neither overly invade the story, nor allow adult circumstances to trash the children's important roles in the animal's recovery. The boy hero discovers the dolphin beached and tangled in rope and rusty crab cage. The marine rescue crew includes a girl his age. We watch as the two observe the dolphin in hospital--a large tank where its damaged tail must finally be amputated. Then the dolphin shows a preference for the boy who first befriended her. Her clicks and "whooshes," and moans, her singing, in other words increases when he is around. It's the start of a series of events that brings her a helpful plastic surgeon whose main job is fitting damaged soldiers with legs, arms, hands.
But the story with all its necessary array of characters and plot twists--lonely parents, friendly grandfather, damaged soldier cousin, damaging hurricane, poorly funded marine rescue center--never departs far from the dolphin named Winter. Her success in accepting a substitute tail, the human skill and dedication to return her t0 the right way of swimming, make clear without preaching or politicking that what humans do to damage other creatures, they can also do to help and restore, themselves included. The boy becomes linked to the fully living world, and leaves his hand-held electronic devices and subtly built remote-controlled model helicopters go smash. I wonder if the grandson in my life, the one who's great at throwing and catching, but lately fallen in love with water and seashells might not also love Winter and her boy advocate. Might not absorb, as does the boy in the film, that there are so many ways to
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Margotlog: Three Cats
Margotlog: Three Cats
They couldn't be more different in character, though two are quasi-calico, the third and youngest, Julia, is black and white, a tuxedo cat. My kidding quasi son-in-law informs me she's a kitler or cat with Hitler moustache. Like humans,our cats display quirks probably inborn (we weren't there at their unveiling) but also have made adjustments to sometimes disappointing real world situations--i.e., Maggie being the middle cat when she'd really much rather be the solo.
The oldest, Mathilda or Tillie, we brought home squirming from cat rescue. She'd spent her childhood, so we were told, on the cellar ceiling, hunched on water pipes out of reach of the foster family kids. When she was small, she would leap from the top of our grand piano to the highest drapery rod and perch there, a furry gargoyle. Leaping is her forte, she was born with tall legs, long tail and a graceful balance. She will not be held, and even though she craves affectionate touch, even brushing with an emery board (her long fur comes off easily and the emery board doesn't snag), and she will not settle onto a lap. As I write this she is curled up behind me in the chair, where I reach back occasionally to stroke and scratch her chin and ears.
Maggie the Chunk used to eat way too much until we discovered the marvels of morning baby food--chicken or turkey variety. It seemed to give her a protein boost (or something special) that kept her from gorging on other kinds of food. Still she's created a ritual patting place, her head in the bowl of nibblets where only she eats--beside the bathtub upstairs. Otherwise, now that it's colder, she'll choose Fran's lap as he drapes himself with a comforter in his lounge chair. She purrs but not so loud as Tilly. And she and I have designated late evening, after-stretching time for play. Then the other two are usually gone, and Maggie and I have the bathroom to ourselves. She claws ferociously at the carpet, bats around a ball, and if I send it bouncing down the stairs, she'll sometimes rush after it and spend minutes semi-yowling on the first floor, her prize in her mouth. She, we think, was meant to be a great hunter.
Julia the adorable, named after John Lennon's song, is our teenage mom, so we were told. How this has affected her in her celibate adulthood I'm guessing is displayed in her gentle but effective killing of many ribbon bunches. These are bird stand-ins, caught as they dip toward her, then brought low in her jaws, held under her body and tromped to death by back paws. It's a behavior neither of the other, housebred cats display, wild-cat behavior developed in necessity, and now used in play.
What does the educator in me learn from these cat persons:
* that early childhood sets certain phobias and skills in place, which will show in adulthood no matter what the circumstances. I see hints of this in Fran's two grandsons, aged 5 and 2.5. The older was born with unusual large-motor skills, can track a ball and hit and catch it like a much older child, but his close-in interests have not much to do with identifying letters or words, though what's beginning to show are interests in numbering, counting, sorting small items from the natural world. He knows names of shells far beyond what a midcontinent kid would normally pick up in casual day-to-day life--product of games played outside with a washtub full of water and Florida shells, then some books identifying them.
* birth order and family circumstance affect us all, furred and skinned. What my sister remembers from our childhood is sometimes mysterious to me--younger, she stayed at home after I left for college; she stayed at home when I was out flouncing around; she saw the puppies born in the shed. I arrived only after they were curled up in little balls beside Tippy, their mother. I paid almost no attention. This was a traumatic event for her, whose effect I wouldn't begin to guess.
* talk, touch, routine, accommodation--all crucial in cat care, human care. All three cats have accommodated each other, though they haven't allowed themselves to curl up together. Fran insists if we weren't around much, they'd be far more cat-oriented. He's probably right. I see myself as a large cat, some of the time, and play with them on the floor, though I haven't yet been able to mimic a tail.
They couldn't be more different in character, though two are quasi-calico, the third and youngest, Julia, is black and white, a tuxedo cat. My kidding quasi son-in-law informs me she's a kitler or cat with Hitler moustache. Like humans,our cats display quirks probably inborn (we weren't there at their unveiling) but also have made adjustments to sometimes disappointing real world situations--i.e., Maggie being the middle cat when she'd really much rather be the solo.
The oldest, Mathilda or Tillie, we brought home squirming from cat rescue. She'd spent her childhood, so we were told, on the cellar ceiling, hunched on water pipes out of reach of the foster family kids. When she was small, she would leap from the top of our grand piano to the highest drapery rod and perch there, a furry gargoyle. Leaping is her forte, she was born with tall legs, long tail and a graceful balance. She will not be held, and even though she craves affectionate touch, even brushing with an emery board (her long fur comes off easily and the emery board doesn't snag), and she will not settle onto a lap. As I write this she is curled up behind me in the chair, where I reach back occasionally to stroke and scratch her chin and ears.
Maggie the Chunk used to eat way too much until we discovered the marvels of morning baby food--chicken or turkey variety. It seemed to give her a protein boost (or something special) that kept her from gorging on other kinds of food. Still she's created a ritual patting place, her head in the bowl of nibblets where only she eats--beside the bathtub upstairs. Otherwise, now that it's colder, she'll choose Fran's lap as he drapes himself with a comforter in his lounge chair. She purrs but not so loud as Tilly. And she and I have designated late evening, after-stretching time for play. Then the other two are usually gone, and Maggie and I have the bathroom to ourselves. She claws ferociously at the carpet, bats around a ball, and if I send it bouncing down the stairs, she'll sometimes rush after it and spend minutes semi-yowling on the first floor, her prize in her mouth. She, we think, was meant to be a great hunter.
Julia the adorable, named after John Lennon's song, is our teenage mom, so we were told. How this has affected her in her celibate adulthood I'm guessing is displayed in her gentle but effective killing of many ribbon bunches. These are bird stand-ins, caught as they dip toward her, then brought low in her jaws, held under her body and tromped to death by back paws. It's a behavior neither of the other, housebred cats display, wild-cat behavior developed in necessity, and now used in play.
What does the educator in me learn from these cat persons:
* that early childhood sets certain phobias and skills in place, which will show in adulthood no matter what the circumstances. I see hints of this in Fran's two grandsons, aged 5 and 2.5. The older was born with unusual large-motor skills, can track a ball and hit and catch it like a much older child, but his close-in interests have not much to do with identifying letters or words, though what's beginning to show are interests in numbering, counting, sorting small items from the natural world. He knows names of shells far beyond what a midcontinent kid would normally pick up in casual day-to-day life--product of games played outside with a washtub full of water and Florida shells, then some books identifying them.
* birth order and family circumstance affect us all, furred and skinned. What my sister remembers from our childhood is sometimes mysterious to me--younger, she stayed at home after I left for college; she stayed at home when I was out flouncing around; she saw the puppies born in the shed. I arrived only after they were curled up in little balls beside Tippy, their mother. I paid almost no attention. This was a traumatic event for her, whose effect I wouldn't begin to guess.
* talk, touch, routine, accommodation--all crucial in cat care, human care. All three cats have accommodated each other, though they haven't allowed themselves to curl up together. Fran insists if we weren't around much, they'd be far more cat-oriented. He's probably right. I see myself as a large cat, some of the time, and play with them on the floor, though I haven't yet been able to mimic a tail.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Margotlog: Pesto and Company
Margotlog: Pesto and Company
Cooking by instinct didn't happen overnight. In fact, in that first tiny kitchen, New York City circa 1965, I'm not even sure I could hardboil an egg. But I knew what, among my mother's rather bland fare, I could taste in memory: broiled steak treated with red wine vinegar, oregano, and salt and pepper, which my sister, mother and I coveted not so much for the meat itself but for its drippings--globs of juice in that ineffable mixture of vinegar and spices. Scooped from the pan with bits of bread after we'd left the table, it was the best part of the meal.
She also made a delicious spaghetti sauce with tuna fish and anchovies, also imported from my father's Sicilian mother and aunts: the tomato sauce probably canned but with the additions of a can of tuna and maybe half one of anchovies, this sauce brought the tang of the sea and field into "la boca," the mouth. Sprinkled with Parmesan--Ymmm!
Other than that, she opened cans--still marvelous in themselves to someone who'd watched her mother make everything from scratch. And everything else that my mother herself made from scratch (except for sweets), she overcooked. It was the German/Swedish in her. She couldn't help herself. I guess we're lucky my father was always on deck to demand a green salad. Those salads too I remember with relish from my mother's table. And I have to give my mother credit, also, for insisting that we ate our "roughage," which meant apples and carrots constantly between our teeth.
Only when I too began to cook away from home, did my own palate come entirely into play. Then the Italian choices I favored made themselves known. I loved cookbooks and usually followed them slavishly, but recently I've turned to taste itself and those smatterings of knowledge picked up from books and culinary mistakes.
For instance: recently I served friends a spaghetti dish I made up as I went along. It was delicious, we all agreed, and one wrote me a note asking for the recipe. Here it is, my first cooking by instinct offering to the world: "Pesto & Company"
Make pesto by blending basil leaves and some olive oil into a paste. Don't add anything else. Freeze or use immediately.
In a large frying pan, cook two medium onions in some olive oil and a bit of butter, for enhanced flavor. Add maybe three tablespoons of pesto or more depending on the amount of pasta and number of people you want to serve.
Then mix in slowly, over medium heat, 2 or 3 tablespoons of nonfat cottage cheese and the same amount of nonfat sour cream or yogurt--for the zing. Add maybe 4 tablespoons of capers, plus a little juice. Cut up and add a fresh zucchini, for texture. Add maybe 4 tablespoons of walnut pieces, for taste and texture. Mix. Then cook the pasta. I prefer whole wheat organic thin pasta because it cooks fast and tastes better than the bland white.
Once the pasta is "al dente," meaning when you bite into a strand, it offers a bit of resistance, drain it and dump into the sauce mixture. Completely coat pasta with sauce and transfer as much as you want into a serving dish. I never mix in Parmesan but put it on the table for guests to add themselves. This, in part, because I want to cut down on salt, but also I want to avoid adding too much to this almost overpoweringly zesty and zingy cheese.
That's it. What happens is that the pesto and white dairy products mix wonderfully into a rather googy sauce, then the other things add crunch and zing. Though I'm far from an expert, I find that the best Italian food (or any food) appeals not simply to taste but also very much to texture--i.e. chewiness. Unless my stomach is upset and I want nothing but the blandest food, I like to move bits of this and that around in my mouth, biting into this, then that and enjoying the little explosions of separate tastes which I then finish blending "al dente."
Cooking by instinct didn't happen overnight. In fact, in that first tiny kitchen, New York City circa 1965, I'm not even sure I could hardboil an egg. But I knew what, among my mother's rather bland fare, I could taste in memory: broiled steak treated with red wine vinegar, oregano, and salt and pepper, which my sister, mother and I coveted not so much for the meat itself but for its drippings--globs of juice in that ineffable mixture of vinegar and spices. Scooped from the pan with bits of bread after we'd left the table, it was the best part of the meal.
She also made a delicious spaghetti sauce with tuna fish and anchovies, also imported from my father's Sicilian mother and aunts: the tomato sauce probably canned but with the additions of a can of tuna and maybe half one of anchovies, this sauce brought the tang of the sea and field into "la boca," the mouth. Sprinkled with Parmesan--Ymmm!
Other than that, she opened cans--still marvelous in themselves to someone who'd watched her mother make everything from scratch. And everything else that my mother herself made from scratch (except for sweets), she overcooked. It was the German/Swedish in her. She couldn't help herself. I guess we're lucky my father was always on deck to demand a green salad. Those salads too I remember with relish from my mother's table. And I have to give my mother credit, also, for insisting that we ate our "roughage," which meant apples and carrots constantly between our teeth.
Only when I too began to cook away from home, did my own palate come entirely into play. Then the Italian choices I favored made themselves known. I loved cookbooks and usually followed them slavishly, but recently I've turned to taste itself and those smatterings of knowledge picked up from books and culinary mistakes.
For instance: recently I served friends a spaghetti dish I made up as I went along. It was delicious, we all agreed, and one wrote me a note asking for the recipe. Here it is, my first cooking by instinct offering to the world: "Pesto & Company"
Make pesto by blending basil leaves and some olive oil into a paste. Don't add anything else. Freeze or use immediately.
In a large frying pan, cook two medium onions in some olive oil and a bit of butter, for enhanced flavor. Add maybe three tablespoons of pesto or more depending on the amount of pasta and number of people you want to serve.
Then mix in slowly, over medium heat, 2 or 3 tablespoons of nonfat cottage cheese and the same amount of nonfat sour cream or yogurt--for the zing. Add maybe 4 tablespoons of capers, plus a little juice. Cut up and add a fresh zucchini, for texture. Add maybe 4 tablespoons of walnut pieces, for taste and texture. Mix. Then cook the pasta. I prefer whole wheat organic thin pasta because it cooks fast and tastes better than the bland white.
Once the pasta is "al dente," meaning when you bite into a strand, it offers a bit of resistance, drain it and dump into the sauce mixture. Completely coat pasta with sauce and transfer as much as you want into a serving dish. I never mix in Parmesan but put it on the table for guests to add themselves. This, in part, because I want to cut down on salt, but also I want to avoid adding too much to this almost overpoweringly zesty and zingy cheese.
That's it. What happens is that the pesto and white dairy products mix wonderfully into a rather googy sauce, then the other things add crunch and zing. Though I'm far from an expert, I find that the best Italian food (or any food) appeals not simply to taste but also very much to texture--i.e. chewiness. Unless my stomach is upset and I want nothing but the blandest food, I like to move bits of this and that around in my mouth, biting into this, then that and enjoying the little explosions of separate tastes which I then finish blending "al dente."
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Margotlog: American Riffraff
Margotlog: American Riffraff
It was my mother's term, the snooty, smalltown mayor's daughter from North Dakota--riffraff. Whom she meant, years ago when I began to hear her choice of words, I don't know--maybe some of my teenage friends. But now it pops up as the perfect word for Faulkner's Snopes family in The Hamlet (1940) and Thomas Hart Benton's swirling kaleidoscope of middle-America from before the Second World War.
We like to pretend we don't have classes in the United States, but they're there. At the bottom in coastal Carolina where I grew up, they were shiftless, slovenly, poor, and anemic riffraff. Anemic because they ate dirt, so the whisper went. Did I actually know any? Maybe a few, but largely they existed on the edges of my high school class, brought into our small town by school bus from the country. Rumor had it that one of the prettiest set herself up in a car after the basketball games and took young studs, one at a time. Whether she charged, I don't know.
I've just finished listening to a marvelous rendition of William Faulkner's The Hamlet, set in the hill and creek country around his fictional Jefferson, Mississippi. The hamlet is Frenchman's Bend, and the riffraff are the wildly expansive family called Snopes who threaten and eventually conquor the hegemony of the wealthy but far from aristocratic Varners. In between these fluid extremes are the folks in the middle, largely all men who sit on the veranda of the village store and provide a Greek chorus. Their lead, but far more active participant, is the traveling sewing- machine salesman V.K.Ratliff. Ratliff, who nominally lives in Jefferson with his sister, has a room in Mrs. Littlejohn's boarding house when he's on the road. He provides moral commentary in a laconic understatement, enhanced by shrewd, silent assessments.
Missouri artist Thomas Hart Benton was Faulkner's contemporary. But whereas Faulkner largely stayed put in Mississippi until the 1930s when he went on and off to Hollywood, Benton as young man studied in New York and Paris, and tried all the impressionist, expressionist, cubist styles of advancing European modernism. None of them stuck. Instead, with his flaming temper, he extricated himself from the New York art scene and returned to Kansas City, Missouri, where he went about imbuing his native state with some of his greatest murals. With shifting focus, huge close-ups of a man washing his hair, distant scenes of church-goers, travelers; huge muscled and elongated workers, small profiles of children, church steeples, hay stacks, locomotives, combines, smelters, he catalogues and celebrates the life of working-class and suited politicians like his father and grandfather--dances, school rooms, harvesting, on and on. His student Jackson Pollock represented the next, entirely disparate Abstract Expressionist artistic generation, but from Benton, Pollock learned to portray compelling motion as the major theme of huge works. The physicality of motion, says critic Lloyd Goodrich, describing what Benton did best: physicality, scale, and I'd add riffraff.
In The Hamlet, the last section called Peasants begins with the swirling stampeding hoedown of wild spotted horses, barb-wired together and dragged into Frenchmen's Bend by a Texan in a surrey. In the hamlet's first encounter with these horses, one of them splits the Texan's vest right down the back. Thomas Hart Benton could have done a wonderful mural of the horses and their depredations--one gallops down the hall in Mrs. Littlejohn's boarding house; another climbs into the wagon with the Tulls, turning it over on a bridge and rendering Mr. Tull unconscious, his face full of splinters. This unbridled energy exactly equals the artist's swirling, all-over, wildly exaggerated figures. Where Grant Wood portrayed the stillness, even rigidity of middle America, circa 1930, Faulkner and Benton gave us its outlandish creative action.
But Faulkner is the greater creator: There are sharp, quiet minds at work on the Hamlet's riffraff. In fact, the most pronounced of which lies with the quiet methodical Flem Snopes himself, undeviating (one of Faulkner's favorite words) in his dress--white shirt, small black string tie, squash cap, and filthy grey trousers--and equally undeviating in his calculations. He takes over running Varner's store because he never makes a mistake in totaling a bill. And by the end of the novel, he's calculated exactly what will bamboozle even Ratliff.
I know where to go to find the equal of Benton--Socialist Realism under Communism portrays the same gigantic figures, exaggerated in scale and physique, as they turn work into heroic parables. But to find the equal of Faulkner, we'd have to go back to the roots of American tall tales because he beds his fiction so deep in imagination and detail, slowly unfolding and sparkling in prediction of doom that we inhabit it fully, believing as if the spade or mule traces or baked sweet potato were part of our daily chewing. I know that his earlier works--The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying--are more admired, but for sheer plentitude and command of our belief, I recommend The Hamlet.
It was my mother's term, the snooty, smalltown mayor's daughter from North Dakota--riffraff. Whom she meant, years ago when I began to hear her choice of words, I don't know--maybe some of my teenage friends. But now it pops up as the perfect word for Faulkner's Snopes family in The Hamlet (1940) and Thomas Hart Benton's swirling kaleidoscope of middle-America from before the Second World War.
We like to pretend we don't have classes in the United States, but they're there. At the bottom in coastal Carolina where I grew up, they were shiftless, slovenly, poor, and anemic riffraff. Anemic because they ate dirt, so the whisper went. Did I actually know any? Maybe a few, but largely they existed on the edges of my high school class, brought into our small town by school bus from the country. Rumor had it that one of the prettiest set herself up in a car after the basketball games and took young studs, one at a time. Whether she charged, I don't know.
I've just finished listening to a marvelous rendition of William Faulkner's The Hamlet, set in the hill and creek country around his fictional Jefferson, Mississippi. The hamlet is Frenchman's Bend, and the riffraff are the wildly expansive family called Snopes who threaten and eventually conquor the hegemony of the wealthy but far from aristocratic Varners. In between these fluid extremes are the folks in the middle, largely all men who sit on the veranda of the village store and provide a Greek chorus. Their lead, but far more active participant, is the traveling sewing- machine salesman V.K.Ratliff. Ratliff, who nominally lives in Jefferson with his sister, has a room in Mrs. Littlejohn's boarding house when he's on the road. He provides moral commentary in a laconic understatement, enhanced by shrewd, silent assessments.
Missouri artist Thomas Hart Benton was Faulkner's contemporary. But whereas Faulkner largely stayed put in Mississippi until the 1930s when he went on and off to Hollywood, Benton as young man studied in New York and Paris, and tried all the impressionist, expressionist, cubist styles of advancing European modernism. None of them stuck. Instead, with his flaming temper, he extricated himself from the New York art scene and returned to Kansas City, Missouri, where he went about imbuing his native state with some of his greatest murals. With shifting focus, huge close-ups of a man washing his hair, distant scenes of church-goers, travelers; huge muscled and elongated workers, small profiles of children, church steeples, hay stacks, locomotives, combines, smelters, he catalogues and celebrates the life of working-class and suited politicians like his father and grandfather--dances, school rooms, harvesting, on and on. His student Jackson Pollock represented the next, entirely disparate Abstract Expressionist artistic generation, but from Benton, Pollock learned to portray compelling motion as the major theme of huge works. The physicality of motion, says critic Lloyd Goodrich, describing what Benton did best: physicality, scale, and I'd add riffraff.
In The Hamlet, the last section called Peasants begins with the swirling stampeding hoedown of wild spotted horses, barb-wired together and dragged into Frenchmen's Bend by a Texan in a surrey. In the hamlet's first encounter with these horses, one of them splits the Texan's vest right down the back. Thomas Hart Benton could have done a wonderful mural of the horses and their depredations--one gallops down the hall in Mrs. Littlejohn's boarding house; another climbs into the wagon with the Tulls, turning it over on a bridge and rendering Mr. Tull unconscious, his face full of splinters. This unbridled energy exactly equals the artist's swirling, all-over, wildly exaggerated figures. Where Grant Wood portrayed the stillness, even rigidity of middle America, circa 1930, Faulkner and Benton gave us its outlandish creative action.
But Faulkner is the greater creator: There are sharp, quiet minds at work on the Hamlet's riffraff. In fact, the most pronounced of which lies with the quiet methodical Flem Snopes himself, undeviating (one of Faulkner's favorite words) in his dress--white shirt, small black string tie, squash cap, and filthy grey trousers--and equally undeviating in his calculations. He takes over running Varner's store because he never makes a mistake in totaling a bill. And by the end of the novel, he's calculated exactly what will bamboozle even Ratliff.
I know where to go to find the equal of Benton--Socialist Realism under Communism portrays the same gigantic figures, exaggerated in scale and physique, as they turn work into heroic parables. But to find the equal of Faulkner, we'd have to go back to the roots of American tall tales because he beds his fiction so deep in imagination and detail, slowly unfolding and sparkling in prediction of doom that we inhabit it fully, believing as if the spade or mule traces or baked sweet potato were part of our daily chewing. I know that his earlier works--The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying--are more admired, but for sheer plentitude and command of our belief, I recommend The Hamlet.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Margotlog: The Weight of Feathers
Margotlog: The Weight of Feathers
Not at all heavy because they cover bodies of light bones that want to rise.
When my father died, it was the first death of the older generation. He had declined slowly, and I had seen him only intermittently. He in South Carolina with my mother, where my sister and I had left them when we went north. For years it had pleasant to come home to the warmth of cumquats on his little tree in Thanksgiving, or dark green magnolia leaves on the doorway wreath at Christmas. I rarely visited in the ghastly summer heat.
When he died, it was late July. The weight of grief was almost too much for me. I wrote about his funeral with the open casket where his wide Italian nostrils rose out of his face like tunnels and the rest of him was reduced to bone. That sufficed only for a time. Then I needed something that would carry me across miles and miles, here in Minnesota, and largely alone.
On my daily walks I began to collect feathers. First, I smoothed them with my fingers, brushing off the dust and repairing the tears. These tender repetitive actions soothed me. I identified what feathers I could--pigeon, crow, occasional red cardinal or striped woodpecker --and brought them home and arranged them like flowers in a tiny vase.
When they began to spill out of the vase, I used them as bookmarks, stuck them in flower pots, and finally--in meditative solitude and crazy tears--began to attach them, one a day, to a face mask I'd made out of papier mache with a covering of torn pieces of light brown construction paper. The orientation of the face soon became lost--every surface tufted with feathers. After the first few, I was inspired to write one of my father's sayings across little flags of white paper I used to glue and hold the feathers in place: "Per de la madonna! Oh, dio! Cindelaccia, Cindelina. Eh, paesan, come vai? Piano, piano (which means go slow in Italian)."
Like grief, there was no orientation to the mask. It mimicked my mental confusion, the sudden eruption of memory, the signal feathers of grief. Eventually I began to look outward. I put up a bird feeder in the back yard. I acquired a bird bath. Over the twenty years since his death, this activity has expanded to five feeders, two bird baths, five bird books, two pair of binoculars, and the sightings of chickadees, nuthatches, blue jays, pigeons, house sparrows, cardinals, goldfinches, purple finches, grackles, starlings, crows (occasionally), white-throated sparrows, a few thrush, thrashers, chipping sparrows, wrens (not seed eaters, but more common than before), robins who love the bird baths, a few passing, stunned migrants: a song sparrow during a snow storm mid-November; an oriole, a bluebird, not migrants but never settling nearby; a few flickers, many wood peckers, not seed eaters, but drawn to the trees I planted twenty-five years ago which are now grown tall.
Every winter lately, a bevy of hawks have captured pigeons and let us watch the grisly yet majestic dismembering. Now, everywhere I travel I am captivated by birds: osprey in Florida; white pelicans along the summer Mississippi, loons, grebe and mergansers on Lake Superior. Once in a summer drought, two tall blue heron in splash pools along the North Shore. Not to mention the myriad warblers in the woods who baffle me year after year. I still bring home feathers, but my grief has turned to unrelenting joy and attention. That's why it's almost impossible for me to believe that a farmer in western Minnesota could smash the eggs of white pelicans--this reported in yesterday's news. For me birds carry away grief and replace it with joy, reminders of all that touches us briefly, season after season, with their wings.
Not at all heavy because they cover bodies of light bones that want to rise.
When my father died, it was the first death of the older generation. He had declined slowly, and I had seen him only intermittently. He in South Carolina with my mother, where my sister and I had left them when we went north. For years it had pleasant to come home to the warmth of cumquats on his little tree in Thanksgiving, or dark green magnolia leaves on the doorway wreath at Christmas. I rarely visited in the ghastly summer heat.
When he died, it was late July. The weight of grief was almost too much for me. I wrote about his funeral with the open casket where his wide Italian nostrils rose out of his face like tunnels and the rest of him was reduced to bone. That sufficed only for a time. Then I needed something that would carry me across miles and miles, here in Minnesota, and largely alone.
On my daily walks I began to collect feathers. First, I smoothed them with my fingers, brushing off the dust and repairing the tears. These tender repetitive actions soothed me. I identified what feathers I could--pigeon, crow, occasional red cardinal or striped woodpecker --and brought them home and arranged them like flowers in a tiny vase.
When they began to spill out of the vase, I used them as bookmarks, stuck them in flower pots, and finally--in meditative solitude and crazy tears--began to attach them, one a day, to a face mask I'd made out of papier mache with a covering of torn pieces of light brown construction paper. The orientation of the face soon became lost--every surface tufted with feathers. After the first few, I was inspired to write one of my father's sayings across little flags of white paper I used to glue and hold the feathers in place: "Per de la madonna! Oh, dio! Cindelaccia, Cindelina. Eh, paesan, come vai? Piano, piano (which means go slow in Italian)."
Like grief, there was no orientation to the mask. It mimicked my mental confusion, the sudden eruption of memory, the signal feathers of grief. Eventually I began to look outward. I put up a bird feeder in the back yard. I acquired a bird bath. Over the twenty years since his death, this activity has expanded to five feeders, two bird baths, five bird books, two pair of binoculars, and the sightings of chickadees, nuthatches, blue jays, pigeons, house sparrows, cardinals, goldfinches, purple finches, grackles, starlings, crows (occasionally), white-throated sparrows, a few thrush, thrashers, chipping sparrows, wrens (not seed eaters, but more common than before), robins who love the bird baths, a few passing, stunned migrants: a song sparrow during a snow storm mid-November; an oriole, a bluebird, not migrants but never settling nearby; a few flickers, many wood peckers, not seed eaters, but drawn to the trees I planted twenty-five years ago which are now grown tall.
Every winter lately, a bevy of hawks have captured pigeons and let us watch the grisly yet majestic dismembering. Now, everywhere I travel I am captivated by birds: osprey in Florida; white pelicans along the summer Mississippi, loons, grebe and mergansers on Lake Superior. Once in a summer drought, two tall blue heron in splash pools along the North Shore. Not to mention the myriad warblers in the woods who baffle me year after year. I still bring home feathers, but my grief has turned to unrelenting joy and attention. That's why it's almost impossible for me to believe that a farmer in western Minnesota could smash the eggs of white pelicans--this reported in yesterday's news. For me birds carry away grief and replace it with joy, reminders of all that touches us briefly, season after season, with their wings.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Margotlog: Eating Peanut Butter Right Out of the Jar
Margotlog: Eating Peanut Better Right Out of the Jar
Poet Jim Moore endeared himself to me years ago with a little poem in which he mused/amused himself with a tiny series of life notations, circa seven years old, ending with the remark that his mother had no idea that he was eating peanut butter right out of the jar. In the midst of serious poet angst, serious word play, serious world crisis, Jim Moore brought us into an immediate, slightly shame-faced little moment. The kind rarely displayed on stage or screen. I used the poem a multitude of times to inspire kids to write about how they too got away with a little something which was forbidden. On a few occasions, I tried to emulate Jim's approach. No dice. What Jim captured had an ineffable stamp all his own.
A few days ago, I stood above a shifting, rippling stream of language, perception, empathy that is Jim's new book, Invisible Strings (Graywolf, 2011). It bubbles up to amuse and delight:
How far away
it is possible to go from Saint Paul
in a single night of raucous dreams:
I wake up before dawn,
joyful, moon sliding in
through the slats
of our broken bamboo curtain. (section 2 "Trying to Leave Saint Paul") (NOTE: the line spacings may not be retained in the published version of the blog. So, think of the first line that looks like a title as part of the stanza's message, and after that every second line is indented to meet the indentation of the title.)
The surface amuses and delights, but then we are sucked into deep holes around hidden rocks:
Her friends come now
every day since the death of her brother
to walk the floor along with her
as she sweeps up
in the little cafe
where we came to know her
before the grief of her true life began. (section 3 "Of All Places")
This is a very flexible medium. It is in glinting motion because the lines spread themselves over the white space with an ease that is surely studied but never feels so. It is poetry easy on the eye and heart, yet it does not shrink from grief, catastrophe, even tiny moments of self-hate, which we accept because the poet is so often full of love, love for his life, for those who share it with him, for the catastrophes that befall so many. He is both the observer on the bank of the river, and in and of the river itself, aware and submerged, staying afloat, though sometimes just barely.
His work in this book reminds me of the 8th century Chinese poet Tu Fu (712-770), also water-borne since his rather tenuous life in service to emperors gave way to wandering, famine, revolution, and floating in a house boat on the Yangtze river. One of his translators writes of Tu Fu, "his famous compassion includes himself, viewed quite objectively and almost as an afterthought" (Hawkes, 1967). Neither to diminish nor elevate, I'd like to call Jim Moore's new book our own midwestern Tu Fu and invite you to enjoy these poems over and over, because like watching a river, each time adds sparkle and depth.
Poet Jim Moore endeared himself to me years ago with a little poem in which he mused/amused himself with a tiny series of life notations, circa seven years old, ending with the remark that his mother had no idea that he was eating peanut butter right out of the jar. In the midst of serious poet angst, serious word play, serious world crisis, Jim Moore brought us into an immediate, slightly shame-faced little moment. The kind rarely displayed on stage or screen. I used the poem a multitude of times to inspire kids to write about how they too got away with a little something which was forbidden. On a few occasions, I tried to emulate Jim's approach. No dice. What Jim captured had an ineffable stamp all his own.
A few days ago, I stood above a shifting, rippling stream of language, perception, empathy that is Jim's new book, Invisible Strings (Graywolf, 2011). It bubbles up to amuse and delight:
How far away
it is possible to go from Saint Paul
in a single night of raucous dreams:
I wake up before dawn,
joyful, moon sliding in
through the slats
of our broken bamboo curtain. (section 2 "Trying to Leave Saint Paul") (NOTE: the line spacings may not be retained in the published version of the blog. So, think of the first line that looks like a title as part of the stanza's message, and after that every second line is indented to meet the indentation of the title.)
The surface amuses and delights, but then we are sucked into deep holes around hidden rocks:
Her friends come now
every day since the death of her brother
to walk the floor along with her
as she sweeps up
in the little cafe
where we came to know her
before the grief of her true life began. (section 3 "Of All Places")
This is a very flexible medium. It is in glinting motion because the lines spread themselves over the white space with an ease that is surely studied but never feels so. It is poetry easy on the eye and heart, yet it does not shrink from grief, catastrophe, even tiny moments of self-hate, which we accept because the poet is so often full of love, love for his life, for those who share it with him, for the catastrophes that befall so many. He is both the observer on the bank of the river, and in and of the river itself, aware and submerged, staying afloat, though sometimes just barely.
His work in this book reminds me of the 8th century Chinese poet Tu Fu (712-770), also water-borne since his rather tenuous life in service to emperors gave way to wandering, famine, revolution, and floating in a house boat on the Yangtze river. One of his translators writes of Tu Fu, "his famous compassion includes himself, viewed quite objectively and almost as an afterthought" (Hawkes, 1967). Neither to diminish nor elevate, I'd like to call Jim Moore's new book our own midwestern Tu Fu and invite you to enjoy these poems over and over, because like watching a river, each time adds sparkle and depth.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Margotlog: Going.,Going, Going, Gone Global,
Margotlog: Going, Going, Going Gone Global
In the mid-1990s, when the U.S. signed another trade agreement (I now realize it was NAFTA, a regional agreement among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada) I was driving into Wisconsin. The MPR newscast announced this new freedom granted to U.S. corporations to take their manufacturing operations outside the U.S. with impunity. I immediately had a sick feeling. How exactly this would effect American life or my mounting sense of global justice, I could only dimly perceive at the time. But the simple clear question that occurred to me was this: if Americans aren't making the goods they will eventually buy, then how will they have the money to continue buying them?
World stability depends in part on a rising standard of living worldwide. Though world trade agreements can help to produce that, they can't protect against a host of ills that don't come within the ken of such agreements. Like the underlying political system of a country, its educational standards, its wage and working structures, etc. Just because tariffs between the U.S. and Mexico are lowered, doesn't mean that the young Mexican women sewing shirts or jeans for the U.S. market are protected against low wages or long hours, poorly ventilated buildings, or ruinous invasions of privacy by their employers--for instance, forced use of contraceptives. In fact, as I saw documentaries through a local nonprofit dedicated to global human rights, it became clear that U.S. corporations were at the root of keeping wages and working conditions poor for these workers outside the U.S.
During the next ten years, from the 90s into the early 2000s, the effects of globalized business came to my attention in other, immediate ways: calling Delta Airlines, I found myself talking to someone from India who was hard to understand and didn't have the knowledge of U.S. geography or time differences to make much sense of my ticketing problems. Buying new clothes on sale, I discovered that I was purchasing a garment made in Bangladesh. Caught between appreciating the relative cheapness of the garment and worrying about what the lives of these workers were like, I carried my purchase home, put it on my body and forgot about it.
Meantime, my global environmental ethic was aroused: I was buying and eating pears from Chile, and fish and wine from Australia. Surely the emissions from transporting these products such long distances must be factored into their overall, global cost. We were experiencing global warming, weren't we? Were my consuming habits here in Minnesota contributing to cutting down the rainforests? Was my coffee, hidden in its Maxwell House comfy American label, contributing to an environmental disaster somewhere else in the world? All these concerns crossed my palate with the food. Then there was the energy question, lately come to a head with Canadian gas being extracted from a horrendously damaging method called fracking.
Now our own U.S. workers are in trouble. The U.S. gained not a single job in August, so the news reports. Unions which have traditionally protected workers from sweatshop conditions and low pay are under fire by a form of Republicanism one can only call exploitative. Our education system, after being wrenched about by No Child..., is now being forced by the same brand of Republicanism to take larger and larger numbers of students into a single class. Two days ago, a special education teacher I'm mentoring talked about having three times the number of students that used to be mandated for a single teacher's load. "We can't teach much," she commented. "These are autistic kids who are very delicately balanced. They freak out with too much noise, etc."
How to connect the big global picture to what is happening here at home? Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, has voiced some deep concerns about the globalization of American business and consumption. Yesterday a StarTribune interview indicated that Reich is "concerned about what we can afford to pay for what we as a nation need to do." Such as educate all our children for the highly demanding, technologically savvy work that is coming along. We can't afford as a nation to create a widening underclass with poor nutrition, poor education, poor life prospects. Why? Because simply put, if our workers can't compete with those overseas, American corporations will take those jobs overseas. Thus, it seems clear to me that we must do some or all of the following things:
* resist mightily continuing cuts to education. The public education system simply can't sustain any more without damaging the viability of our people and their work skills
* support unions because they protect American jobs and their decent pay.
* rethink the corporate advantages of various trade agreements, and where necessary, tailor tariffs and reciprocal regional agreements to benefit health and human viability within our borders. American corporations donate enormous amounts to largely Republican politicians who throw a scrim over the realities of how corporations have drained the life-blood from American livelihoods. Note: the Ponzi schemes for bundling mortgages and then taking out insurance assuming the mortgages would fail have bereft many Americans not only of homes but of the funds they sank into those they've lost. Likewise this enormously risky financial maneuvering has rippled across all kinds of economic transactions, creating first the recession of 2008, and now this stagnant, no-growth economy.
* insist on higher taxes for the upper 5 % of Americans. They are the ones benefiting from corporate practices; not the middle or lower classes. They should contribute more of their earnings, as Warren Buffet, Mr. Money-Pants himself attested recently. As Robert Reich has said, the voices of big corporations are drowning out the voice of ordinary citizens. It is time we began to look around us and see just how deeply the loss has reached.
In the mid-1990s, when the U.S. signed another trade agreement (I now realize it was NAFTA, a regional agreement among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada) I was driving into Wisconsin. The MPR newscast announced this new freedom granted to U.S. corporations to take their manufacturing operations outside the U.S. with impunity. I immediately had a sick feeling. How exactly this would effect American life or my mounting sense of global justice, I could only dimly perceive at the time. But the simple clear question that occurred to me was this: if Americans aren't making the goods they will eventually buy, then how will they have the money to continue buying them?
World stability depends in part on a rising standard of living worldwide. Though world trade agreements can help to produce that, they can't protect against a host of ills that don't come within the ken of such agreements. Like the underlying political system of a country, its educational standards, its wage and working structures, etc. Just because tariffs between the U.S. and Mexico are lowered, doesn't mean that the young Mexican women sewing shirts or jeans for the U.S. market are protected against low wages or long hours, poorly ventilated buildings, or ruinous invasions of privacy by their employers--for instance, forced use of contraceptives. In fact, as I saw documentaries through a local nonprofit dedicated to global human rights, it became clear that U.S. corporations were at the root of keeping wages and working conditions poor for these workers outside the U.S.
During the next ten years, from the 90s into the early 2000s, the effects of globalized business came to my attention in other, immediate ways: calling Delta Airlines, I found myself talking to someone from India who was hard to understand and didn't have the knowledge of U.S. geography or time differences to make much sense of my ticketing problems. Buying new clothes on sale, I discovered that I was purchasing a garment made in Bangladesh. Caught between appreciating the relative cheapness of the garment and worrying about what the lives of these workers were like, I carried my purchase home, put it on my body and forgot about it.
Meantime, my global environmental ethic was aroused: I was buying and eating pears from Chile, and fish and wine from Australia. Surely the emissions from transporting these products such long distances must be factored into their overall, global cost. We were experiencing global warming, weren't we? Were my consuming habits here in Minnesota contributing to cutting down the rainforests? Was my coffee, hidden in its Maxwell House comfy American label, contributing to an environmental disaster somewhere else in the world? All these concerns crossed my palate with the food. Then there was the energy question, lately come to a head with Canadian gas being extracted from a horrendously damaging method called fracking.
Now our own U.S. workers are in trouble. The U.S. gained not a single job in August, so the news reports. Unions which have traditionally protected workers from sweatshop conditions and low pay are under fire by a form of Republicanism one can only call exploitative. Our education system, after being wrenched about by No Child..., is now being forced by the same brand of Republicanism to take larger and larger numbers of students into a single class. Two days ago, a special education teacher I'm mentoring talked about having three times the number of students that used to be mandated for a single teacher's load. "We can't teach much," she commented. "These are autistic kids who are very delicately balanced. They freak out with too much noise, etc."
How to connect the big global picture to what is happening here at home? Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, has voiced some deep concerns about the globalization of American business and consumption. Yesterday a StarTribune interview indicated that Reich is "concerned about what we can afford to pay for what we as a nation need to do." Such as educate all our children for the highly demanding, technologically savvy work that is coming along. We can't afford as a nation to create a widening underclass with poor nutrition, poor education, poor life prospects. Why? Because simply put, if our workers can't compete with those overseas, American corporations will take those jobs overseas. Thus, it seems clear to me that we must do some or all of the following things:
* resist mightily continuing cuts to education. The public education system simply can't sustain any more without damaging the viability of our people and their work skills
* support unions because they protect American jobs and their decent pay.
* rethink the corporate advantages of various trade agreements, and where necessary, tailor tariffs and reciprocal regional agreements to benefit health and human viability within our borders. American corporations donate enormous amounts to largely Republican politicians who throw a scrim over the realities of how corporations have drained the life-blood from American livelihoods. Note: the Ponzi schemes for bundling mortgages and then taking out insurance assuming the mortgages would fail have bereft many Americans not only of homes but of the funds they sank into those they've lost. Likewise this enormously risky financial maneuvering has rippled across all kinds of economic transactions, creating first the recession of 2008, and now this stagnant, no-growth economy.
* insist on higher taxes for the upper 5 % of Americans. They are the ones benefiting from corporate practices; not the middle or lower classes. They should contribute more of their earnings, as Warren Buffet, Mr. Money-Pants himself attested recently. As Robert Reich has said, the voices of big corporations are drowning out the voice of ordinary citizens. It is time we began to look around us and see just how deeply the loss has reached.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Margotlog: Not So Fast
Margotlog: Not So Fast
I'm borrowing a title from Phebe Hanson and Joan Pride's travel memoir because it applies to all kinds of motions--teeth, bows, feet. Item: in the last two weeks, I've been visited by two performances of Bach that were too fast. "Listen to this last movement," advised Steve Staruck on MPR. I did. A bunch of crickets hyped to the max. Then last weekend at the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, their excitement got out of hand. Joana Carneiro, the young Portuguese conductor, led the orchestra in Bach's "Double VIolin Concerto in D. Minor." I couldn't distinguish Allegro and Vivace--both first and third movements grinding notes into a flurry of cornmeal that rose like a flock of gnats over the stage. Don't get me wrong: Joana Carneiro herself as a conductor works like a mad peasant from Kathe Kollwitz's Peasants Revolt series, or Goya's "Disasters of War." The vigor of her black-clad back, swooping and bending, cajoling and inciting was, in itself, an art form.
Fast is over-rated unless you're trying to outrun a tornado or flood. There's almost always another train. Rushing down the highway these days almost always ends in a stalemate stuck in a traffic jam. This summer, taking the train, not the plane from Chicago to Saint Paul we went slow enough through the water meadows of Wisconsin for me to spy two cranes rising on their huge gray wings like enormous cloaks giving way to the breeze. I want to teach the small people in my life to paw through a tub of shells over and over, counting and describing, as light flickers over us and the water eddies back and forth. Last evening walking down a familiar alley, I noticed a V of geese headed straight west overhead. Then they got lost in the huge flickering head of a cottonwood. A bird-eating tree? When I finally spied them again, they had veered sharply southeast, heading no doubt toward Lake Pepin and ultimately down the Mississippi flyway. They knew that tree, something told me. Something about the way it flickered pointed them south, on a diagonal away from the setting sun. If I'd been running, I would have missed them.
Then there's the savor of munching slow. A while back, a doctor told me, drink a glass of water before eating dinner. Then take small bites, with time in between. Chew thoroughly, savor the flavor and texture. Notice what you're eating. Sit and rest between courses. Sit and read The New Yorker after cleaning your plate. When I first attempted this revolution, I had to rein the consuming horse under control. My husband who can finish a huge plate of food in five to ten minutes, became agitated. Finally I had to tell him: "I'm not going to rush. I'm going to sit here. You go on. I'll see you later." Now I have the table to myself for half an hour or more after he's decamped.
Remember, our progenitors, thousands of years ago, walked. Or ran, or rode on horseback, muleback, camelback. Speed consuming miles and baked potatoes and a flurry of notes does not a life make. It makes a blur, a buzz, a stomach ache.
I'm borrowing a title from Phebe Hanson and Joan Pride's travel memoir because it applies to all kinds of motions--teeth, bows, feet. Item: in the last two weeks, I've been visited by two performances of Bach that were too fast. "Listen to this last movement," advised Steve Staruck on MPR. I did. A bunch of crickets hyped to the max. Then last weekend at the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, their excitement got out of hand. Joana Carneiro, the young Portuguese conductor, led the orchestra in Bach's "Double VIolin Concerto in D. Minor." I couldn't distinguish Allegro and Vivace--both first and third movements grinding notes into a flurry of cornmeal that rose like a flock of gnats over the stage. Don't get me wrong: Joana Carneiro herself as a conductor works like a mad peasant from Kathe Kollwitz's Peasants Revolt series, or Goya's "Disasters of War." The vigor of her black-clad back, swooping and bending, cajoling and inciting was, in itself, an art form.
Fast is over-rated unless you're trying to outrun a tornado or flood. There's almost always another train. Rushing down the highway these days almost always ends in a stalemate stuck in a traffic jam. This summer, taking the train, not the plane from Chicago to Saint Paul we went slow enough through the water meadows of Wisconsin for me to spy two cranes rising on their huge gray wings like enormous cloaks giving way to the breeze. I want to teach the small people in my life to paw through a tub of shells over and over, counting and describing, as light flickers over us and the water eddies back and forth. Last evening walking down a familiar alley, I noticed a V of geese headed straight west overhead. Then they got lost in the huge flickering head of a cottonwood. A bird-eating tree? When I finally spied them again, they had veered sharply southeast, heading no doubt toward Lake Pepin and ultimately down the Mississippi flyway. They knew that tree, something told me. Something about the way it flickered pointed them south, on a diagonal away from the setting sun. If I'd been running, I would have missed them.
Then there's the savor of munching slow. A while back, a doctor told me, drink a glass of water before eating dinner. Then take small bites, with time in between. Chew thoroughly, savor the flavor and texture. Notice what you're eating. Sit and rest between courses. Sit and read The New Yorker after cleaning your plate. When I first attempted this revolution, I had to rein the consuming horse under control. My husband who can finish a huge plate of food in five to ten minutes, became agitated. Finally I had to tell him: "I'm not going to rush. I'm going to sit here. You go on. I'll see you later." Now I have the table to myself for half an hour or more after he's decamped.
Remember, our progenitors, thousands of years ago, walked. Or ran, or rode on horseback, muleback, camelback. Speed consuming miles and baked potatoes and a flurry of notes does not a life make. It makes a blur, a buzz, a stomach ache.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Margotlog: From HIstory to Story
Margotlog: From History to Story
When I published The Story in History in 1992, the idea of using historical material to inspire creative writing was far from new--there was, after all, Tolstoy's War and Peace, 1869, not to mention the Shakespeare plays about all those English kings, Henry IV Part One with Falstaff and Prince Hal being my favorite. But aside from rather fluffy historical romances of the type I loved to read as a Southern teenager, about belles in the antebellum South, and dashing soldiers in gray, the notion of reinterpreting history through the lens of poetry and fiction needed some updating, some diffusion into modern creative possibilities.
Today that enrichment has extended beyond my own modest dreams to the point that some of the greatest poets and prose writers of the last twenty years astound us with their concoctions. Now looking at the recipes from the historical end intrigues me as much as discerning how fiction can enrich our portrayal of the past. Let's take David McCullough's 1776. What can this masterful historian teach us about weaving brilliant narrative from solid documentary evidence? What are some differences between contemporary fictional treatments of history and what history itself creates?
1776 brought the rebels surprising victories early and late, but in the middle, the American forces under General Washington suffered horrendous defeats in and around New York. It was one of the times that try men's souls, not to mention the women at home, receiving their letters.
The pen, for the historian, is far mightier than the sword: pity the poor historian in a hundred years, trying to piece together what common soldiers in Afganistan and Iraq, or their commanders, have to say about battles there. All told in emails, I suspect. Will they have survived?
McCullough's narrative is enriched time and again by vivid quotations from Washington's general orders to his officers, by his letters to Congress, to Mount Vernon. McCullough quotes letters from the youngest soldier, a fifer aged 15, and from his superiors, for instance Henry Knox all of 26, former bookseller in Boston, turned ordinance commander. The English are no less literary. It's these voices from the front, and occasional responses, especially from Abigail Adams, at home that bring McCullough's narrative to life.
Their authenticity is unquestionable. They are not fiction. The portrait McCullough paints of the public Washington--his facade of indomitable courage, his refusal to give up, his cool presence on a powerful horse leading the weary and shoeless men through icy countryside to attack Princeton at the turn of the year--all this is echoed by the men who observed him. But his letters show us his private griefs and doubts, his exhaustion and fears, and his continual return to thoughts of Mount Vernon as an antidote to this war he was learning to fight. These two perspectives prove one of McCullough's conclusions: the war, which would drag on another six years, ending only in 1783, was won through the perseverance, intelligence, and courage of George Washington. We are right to call him the father of our country.
How would a fictional account differ? A contemporary fiction of this important year? I suspect it would not focus on Washington at all, but take an unexpected point of view. Maybe the 15 year old fifer; maybe one of the Hessian soldiers captured at Trenton in a battle that lasted 20 minutes and roused American spirits after long months of defeat and mistakes in and around New York. That "Crossing of the Delaware" made so famous in the painting by German Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1851, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York) might inspire a cross-dressing rower as a subject for a novel. As there were in the Civil War, so probably also in the Revolution: women took up arms after disguising themselves as men.
Another element that distinguishes McCullough's narrative is its sweeping portrayal of landscape. We get bird's eye and more earthbound views, positioning us on either side of the Delaware; rather insistent chronology of Congress's removal to Baltimore, for fear of a British attack; of British General Howe's decision to pull the largest portion of his army away from the Delaware, leaving only a small force of 1000 Hessian troops at Trenton. Washington couldn't figure out for the longest time whether Howe had left the area or not. But we, the historical readers, know more than he did. We have hindsight to sweep forward and back through time, and up and down the coastal geography. This differs from what a fiction writer would probably choose to do: to embed our knowledge narrowly in the more limited perspective of participants. We would tramp with the Americans, shoeless and freezing in the tempest-tossed Delaware, uncertain of whom we would meet at Trenton. Though tension certainly exists in McCullough's narrative, it's not as fierce as a fictional account might create.
And McCullough does not dwell on the grisly or nefarious possibilities. Though he describes how the Hessian commander stuffed a warning of an American approach into his coat pocket and continued playing cards that Christmas evening, he does not do more than mention the possibility that the Hessian leader was thoroughly drunk. He died in the battle, McCullough tells us. That is enough to put such speculation to rest. I suspect that a fiction writer would not be so gallant. Go where the drama is, ferret out the possible underlying cause that the Hessians and their well-tried commander failed so miserably. Though McCullough includes the experiences of commoner and foot soldiers, he does so almost always to portray what is tinted with a bright hue, the red of freshly spilled blood, or the trembling voice of a storekeeper in British-occupied New York, who pulls a captured American soldier into the back room to relate that General Washington has taken 800 Hessians prisoner. Historians write for posterity; novelists turn over the dead and pillage their pockets and guts.
There are many more differences, of course. For now, this Sunday morning, when our contemporary course as a nation struggles on, this heroism and perseverance seem one of the best parts of our historical legacy.
When I published The Story in History in 1992, the idea of using historical material to inspire creative writing was far from new--there was, after all, Tolstoy's War and Peace, 1869, not to mention the Shakespeare plays about all those English kings, Henry IV Part One with Falstaff and Prince Hal being my favorite. But aside from rather fluffy historical romances of the type I loved to read as a Southern teenager, about belles in the antebellum South, and dashing soldiers in gray, the notion of reinterpreting history through the lens of poetry and fiction needed some updating, some diffusion into modern creative possibilities.
Today that enrichment has extended beyond my own modest dreams to the point that some of the greatest poets and prose writers of the last twenty years astound us with their concoctions. Now looking at the recipes from the historical end intrigues me as much as discerning how fiction can enrich our portrayal of the past. Let's take David McCullough's 1776. What can this masterful historian teach us about weaving brilliant narrative from solid documentary evidence? What are some differences between contemporary fictional treatments of history and what history itself creates?
1776 brought the rebels surprising victories early and late, but in the middle, the American forces under General Washington suffered horrendous defeats in and around New York. It was one of the times that try men's souls, not to mention the women at home, receiving their letters.
The pen, for the historian, is far mightier than the sword: pity the poor historian in a hundred years, trying to piece together what common soldiers in Afganistan and Iraq, or their commanders, have to say about battles there. All told in emails, I suspect. Will they have survived?
McCullough's narrative is enriched time and again by vivid quotations from Washington's general orders to his officers, by his letters to Congress, to Mount Vernon. McCullough quotes letters from the youngest soldier, a fifer aged 15, and from his superiors, for instance Henry Knox all of 26, former bookseller in Boston, turned ordinance commander. The English are no less literary. It's these voices from the front, and occasional responses, especially from Abigail Adams, at home that bring McCullough's narrative to life.
Their authenticity is unquestionable. They are not fiction. The portrait McCullough paints of the public Washington--his facade of indomitable courage, his refusal to give up, his cool presence on a powerful horse leading the weary and shoeless men through icy countryside to attack Princeton at the turn of the year--all this is echoed by the men who observed him. But his letters show us his private griefs and doubts, his exhaustion and fears, and his continual return to thoughts of Mount Vernon as an antidote to this war he was learning to fight. These two perspectives prove one of McCullough's conclusions: the war, which would drag on another six years, ending only in 1783, was won through the perseverance, intelligence, and courage of George Washington. We are right to call him the father of our country.
How would a fictional account differ? A contemporary fiction of this important year? I suspect it would not focus on Washington at all, but take an unexpected point of view. Maybe the 15 year old fifer; maybe one of the Hessian soldiers captured at Trenton in a battle that lasted 20 minutes and roused American spirits after long months of defeat and mistakes in and around New York. That "Crossing of the Delaware" made so famous in the painting by German Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1851, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York) might inspire a cross-dressing rower as a subject for a novel. As there were in the Civil War, so probably also in the Revolution: women took up arms after disguising themselves as men.
Another element that distinguishes McCullough's narrative is its sweeping portrayal of landscape. We get bird's eye and more earthbound views, positioning us on either side of the Delaware; rather insistent chronology of Congress's removal to Baltimore, for fear of a British attack; of British General Howe's decision to pull the largest portion of his army away from the Delaware, leaving only a small force of 1000 Hessian troops at Trenton. Washington couldn't figure out for the longest time whether Howe had left the area or not. But we, the historical readers, know more than he did. We have hindsight to sweep forward and back through time, and up and down the coastal geography. This differs from what a fiction writer would probably choose to do: to embed our knowledge narrowly in the more limited perspective of participants. We would tramp with the Americans, shoeless and freezing in the tempest-tossed Delaware, uncertain of whom we would meet at Trenton. Though tension certainly exists in McCullough's narrative, it's not as fierce as a fictional account might create.
And McCullough does not dwell on the grisly or nefarious possibilities. Though he describes how the Hessian commander stuffed a warning of an American approach into his coat pocket and continued playing cards that Christmas evening, he does not do more than mention the possibility that the Hessian leader was thoroughly drunk. He died in the battle, McCullough tells us. That is enough to put such speculation to rest. I suspect that a fiction writer would not be so gallant. Go where the drama is, ferret out the possible underlying cause that the Hessians and their well-tried commander failed so miserably. Though McCullough includes the experiences of commoner and foot soldiers, he does so almost always to portray what is tinted with a bright hue, the red of freshly spilled blood, or the trembling voice of a storekeeper in British-occupied New York, who pulls a captured American soldier into the back room to relate that General Washington has taken 800 Hessians prisoner. Historians write for posterity; novelists turn over the dead and pillage their pockets and guts.
There are many more differences, of course. For now, this Sunday morning, when our contemporary course as a nation struggles on, this heroism and perseverance seem one of the best parts of our historical legacy.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Margotlog: Turgenev and Tension Among the Generations
Margotlog: Turgenev and Tension Among the Generations
When I first read Fathers and Sons by the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, I hadn't been prepared first by Isaiah Berlin's essay on the Russian intelligentsia. This time around I read Berlin's essay which serves as an introduction to the Penguin edition. I learned that the outsider, young scientist Bazarov, who comes to visit with his pal Arkady, represents the nihilists (Arkady uses this term to describe his blunt, brusque friend), who wanted to sweep all the stuck-in-the-mud or snooty Russian bureaucrats and aristocrats away, but had rather nothing to put in their place.
Frankly, no matter how true this was to the period when Turgenev was writing--the book was published in 1862--what strikes me on this second reading is how contemporary Turgenev's portrayal of generational conflict feels to the present. Arkady has completed his education in Petersburg and returns to his father Nikolai's estate which has been much reduced by division of the land with the peasants. A gentle peace-maker, Arkady and his not so elderly father are moved to tears and awkwardness by this reunion. Nikolai has taken a very young mistress after his wife's death, and early in the novel, he tries to explain Fenichka's presence and that of her baby boy. This creates a forward-and-back dance of tension between father and son. Arkady displays manly adult acceptance, and his father the reticence and embarrassment of having to acknowledge a sexual life after his wife's death.
Bazarov could not be more unlike his friend Arkady--brusque, often silent, not at all given to emotional responses (he is, after all, an outsider), Basarov goes out of his way to insult the fourth man of the group, Pavel Petrovich, who is Arkady's uncle. Pavel could not be more unlike his brother Nikolai. Where Nikolai is very much the country squire, easy-going, affectionate, not overly fancy or persnickety about linen or food, etc., his brother Pavel continues to wear beautifully tailored clothes; is always scented with perfume, eats hardly anything, and generally comports himself as the disappointed and idle dandy that he was in younger days. It's a mark of Turgenev's skill that we accept this scheme of opposing pairs in two generations as the most natural occurrence in the world.
Isaiah Berlin comments that Turgenev was not a politically minded writer, unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, his younger contemporaries. In fact, Turgenev spent many years of his adulthood in France where his long-time mistress, the singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot, lived with her husband and children, pursuing a career. Thinking about his acceptance into this household (where his own daughter by a seamstress was brought up), I glimpse what perhaps was the real-life experience on which Turgenev bases the odd sexual relationship between the father Nikolai and his much younger mistress, and the feints and gradual revelations of this liason which make up the first half of the novel.
Then there's Basarov and Pavel, so opposed in behavior and allegiances that they must come to blows. And so they do, in an awkward but murderous duel which leaves Pavel dead. After this, Basarov must leave, which he does, returning to his own parents, not far away, his father a one-time army doctor, and his mother one of the unforgettable characters in Russian literature, humble, entirely given over to cooking to please her son, and devout in the entreme. Among his own people, Basarov's nihilism becomes less extreme; his care for the peasants a touching corrective to his brusqueness with the fancy aristocracy, and his agonizing death from typhus (which his doctor father cannot cure), another of the novel's dramatic and highly touching scenes.
Thinking of these young men and their relations to their parents, I'm reminded not so much of myself, as of my husband Fran and his missionary parents. Fran was one of the young radicals of the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam war and eventually allowing himself to be sent to prison as a pacifist--he refused the various "outs" that might have worked, such as exiting to Canada or declaring himself a conscientious objector. I use his story to frame Vietnam protest in my book Stop This War: Americans Protest the Vietnam Conflict (available from Amazon). Fran's father had also been a pacifist sent to prison after refusing to register for the World War II draft. What has often touched me about Fran's prison experience is the fact that his father did not visit him. His mother came, the parent with whom Fran had the greater conflict. I interpret this as the father not wanting to acknowledge that his son had upstaged him. The mother, who had lived with her in-laws during her husband's incarceration, felt, I imagine, the hollowness that must be part of such a radical choice. This hollowness echoes in Basarov and his death, which seems such a waste. As does Fran's imprisonment, a chunk of 17 months out of his life, from which he had to recover. And yet, in our modern instance, there's also the alternative to consider: 17 months in Vietnam would no doubt have left a far deeper and more lasting wound. As Turgenev so gently shows, the young are put or put themselves on the front line of a culture's decadence.
When I first read Fathers and Sons by the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, I hadn't been prepared first by Isaiah Berlin's essay on the Russian intelligentsia. This time around I read Berlin's essay which serves as an introduction to the Penguin edition. I learned that the outsider, young scientist Bazarov, who comes to visit with his pal Arkady, represents the nihilists (Arkady uses this term to describe his blunt, brusque friend), who wanted to sweep all the stuck-in-the-mud or snooty Russian bureaucrats and aristocrats away, but had rather nothing to put in their place.
Frankly, no matter how true this was to the period when Turgenev was writing--the book was published in 1862--what strikes me on this second reading is how contemporary Turgenev's portrayal of generational conflict feels to the present. Arkady has completed his education in Petersburg and returns to his father Nikolai's estate which has been much reduced by division of the land with the peasants. A gentle peace-maker, Arkady and his not so elderly father are moved to tears and awkwardness by this reunion. Nikolai has taken a very young mistress after his wife's death, and early in the novel, he tries to explain Fenichka's presence and that of her baby boy. This creates a forward-and-back dance of tension between father and son. Arkady displays manly adult acceptance, and his father the reticence and embarrassment of having to acknowledge a sexual life after his wife's death.
Bazarov could not be more unlike his friend Arkady--brusque, often silent, not at all given to emotional responses (he is, after all, an outsider), Basarov goes out of his way to insult the fourth man of the group, Pavel Petrovich, who is Arkady's uncle. Pavel could not be more unlike his brother Nikolai. Where Nikolai is very much the country squire, easy-going, affectionate, not overly fancy or persnickety about linen or food, etc., his brother Pavel continues to wear beautifully tailored clothes; is always scented with perfume, eats hardly anything, and generally comports himself as the disappointed and idle dandy that he was in younger days. It's a mark of Turgenev's skill that we accept this scheme of opposing pairs in two generations as the most natural occurrence in the world.
Isaiah Berlin comments that Turgenev was not a politically minded writer, unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, his younger contemporaries. In fact, Turgenev spent many years of his adulthood in France where his long-time mistress, the singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot, lived with her husband and children, pursuing a career. Thinking about his acceptance into this household (where his own daughter by a seamstress was brought up), I glimpse what perhaps was the real-life experience on which Turgenev bases the odd sexual relationship between the father Nikolai and his much younger mistress, and the feints and gradual revelations of this liason which make up the first half of the novel.
Then there's Basarov and Pavel, so opposed in behavior and allegiances that they must come to blows. And so they do, in an awkward but murderous duel which leaves Pavel dead. After this, Basarov must leave, which he does, returning to his own parents, not far away, his father a one-time army doctor, and his mother one of the unforgettable characters in Russian literature, humble, entirely given over to cooking to please her son, and devout in the entreme. Among his own people, Basarov's nihilism becomes less extreme; his care for the peasants a touching corrective to his brusqueness with the fancy aristocracy, and his agonizing death from typhus (which his doctor father cannot cure), another of the novel's dramatic and highly touching scenes.
Thinking of these young men and their relations to their parents, I'm reminded not so much of myself, as of my husband Fran and his missionary parents. Fran was one of the young radicals of the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam war and eventually allowing himself to be sent to prison as a pacifist--he refused the various "outs" that might have worked, such as exiting to Canada or declaring himself a conscientious objector. I use his story to frame Vietnam protest in my book Stop This War: Americans Protest the Vietnam Conflict (available from Amazon). Fran's father had also been a pacifist sent to prison after refusing to register for the World War II draft. What has often touched me about Fran's prison experience is the fact that his father did not visit him. His mother came, the parent with whom Fran had the greater conflict. I interpret this as the father not wanting to acknowledge that his son had upstaged him. The mother, who had lived with her in-laws during her husband's incarceration, felt, I imagine, the hollowness that must be part of such a radical choice. This hollowness echoes in Basarov and his death, which seems such a waste. As does Fran's imprisonment, a chunk of 17 months out of his life, from which he had to recover. And yet, in our modern instance, there's also the alternative to consider: 17 months in Vietnam would no doubt have left a far deeper and more lasting wound. As Turgenev so gently shows, the young are put or put themselves on the front line of a culture's decadence.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Margotlog: Let's Give a Hand for Trees
Margotlog: Let's Give a Hand to Trees
Before I was forty, I didn't take trees seriously. They were there, older and taller than I was. But I noticed them and asked their names. Tall stately magnolias in my parents' first South Carolina lot, Mount Pleasant, north of Charleston. These majestic beings must have been 150 years old, my mother, the German tree-hugger, insisted. Nothing north of the Mason Dixon line measured up until I met the elephant trunk beeches at Winterthur, the DuPont estate outside Wilmington, Delaware. Their smooth grey trunks flared into huge flanges that clutched the earth, while their enormous heads fluttered far above in the blue. Then I moved to Minnesota and met city boulevard elms, who rivaled the beech, and further north, vast white pine, atavars of an earlier period before white people came to hack and hew. Stepping from a canoe on the Namekagon or upper St. Croix, my husband and I looked up in awe from the trunks that we couldn't encompass with both our arms stretched around them.
Then two things began to happen. The elms along Minneapolis boulevards began to die, and my first husband and I treated those in front of our house. Second, we divorced, I moved to Saint Paul, eventually remarried and bought a house that was built in 1912. It had been covered with aluminum siding, and its postage-stamp yard thatched with sod. Nothing but a rather puny boulevard ash grew higher than grass. I was suddenly appalled. Where were the leafy consorts shading and beautifying the house? Where were the green-haired friends I'd taken for granted before?
Trees talk, you know. They talked their way onto my yard: first in the front a Honey Locust with feathery golden leaves, and its companion, a Russian olive that bloomed tiny sweet flowers each spring. In the back, against the fence, courtesy of the Arbor Foundation, sprouts of white pine, and blue spruce. I planted so many spruce I had to dig one up when it was still under a foot tall and donate to the next door neighbor. Next on a trip to visit my husband's parents who lived in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, I acquired three silver maples shoots from my new mother-in-law. These people, missionaries to China, then to poor communities in Virginia, North Dakota, and Iowa, had no heirlooms to give us, but Lu, my husband's mother, knew what was lasting, and had potted these seedlings for us to take home. If I'd known better, I could have dug similar ones from someone's yard in Saint Paul, but it seemed fitting that we'd drive these little spouts, no higher than my mid-calf, north to plant all over the back yard, again, so many trees I had to repot one and donate it across the street.
That was the mid-1980s. Every tree but one maple we had to cut down--it was too close to the house--has survived. I listened to them, and when they said "Water," I did, with the hose turned on low nestled a foot from their trunks. When they said nourish, I did, with fertilizer stakes, pounded into the wet spring soil. I added a lovely spring-flowering crabapple, whose white blossoms float over the backyard like frozen kisses. I'd still be adding trees if I could, but there's simply no more space. Several years ago, the emerald Ash beetle was sighted in Minnesota, and we had our boulevard ash treated. SInce it may not survive the beetle onslaught, I planted among the astilbe and goldenrod further along the boulevard, a tiny tamarack from the bogs of Northern MInnesota. It likes its feet wet, and we have a kind of rain garden there.
This year in Saint Paul, we had more than enough rain through July. Then the natural watering stopped. There have been sprinkles since, but nothing substantial for going on six weeks. It's too long for growing things, especially fledgling trees. Along Selby Avenue coming up the hill from Lexington Parkway, I notice droopy new elms, just planted in the boulevards, a variety that's resistant to Dutch Elm disease. They may not die of Elm beetles, but they will of thirst unless someone wakes up and waters them good. What does a good watering mean? A couple of hours of low-hose seepage around the roots, every week, all the way through the autumn until the ground freezes. Big trees have put down wide-flung root systems that capture water low in the ground. But these new sprouts have yet to do that. They are dying of thirst. I hope somebody will listen. P.S. I also water my big trees because I love them and want them to flourish. Home to me means people I love, a roof that's secure, cats to purr up close, and trees outside to filter out noise, dust, sun and heat. A house is not a home without its companion trees.
Before I was forty, I didn't take trees seriously. They were there, older and taller than I was. But I noticed them and asked their names. Tall stately magnolias in my parents' first South Carolina lot, Mount Pleasant, north of Charleston. These majestic beings must have been 150 years old, my mother, the German tree-hugger, insisted. Nothing north of the Mason Dixon line measured up until I met the elephant trunk beeches at Winterthur, the DuPont estate outside Wilmington, Delaware. Their smooth grey trunks flared into huge flanges that clutched the earth, while their enormous heads fluttered far above in the blue. Then I moved to Minnesota and met city boulevard elms, who rivaled the beech, and further north, vast white pine, atavars of an earlier period before white people came to hack and hew. Stepping from a canoe on the Namekagon or upper St. Croix, my husband and I looked up in awe from the trunks that we couldn't encompass with both our arms stretched around them.
Then two things began to happen. The elms along Minneapolis boulevards began to die, and my first husband and I treated those in front of our house. Second, we divorced, I moved to Saint Paul, eventually remarried and bought a house that was built in 1912. It had been covered with aluminum siding, and its postage-stamp yard thatched with sod. Nothing but a rather puny boulevard ash grew higher than grass. I was suddenly appalled. Where were the leafy consorts shading and beautifying the house? Where were the green-haired friends I'd taken for granted before?
Trees talk, you know. They talked their way onto my yard: first in the front a Honey Locust with feathery golden leaves, and its companion, a Russian olive that bloomed tiny sweet flowers each spring. In the back, against the fence, courtesy of the Arbor Foundation, sprouts of white pine, and blue spruce. I planted so many spruce I had to dig one up when it was still under a foot tall and donate to the next door neighbor. Next on a trip to visit my husband's parents who lived in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, I acquired three silver maples shoots from my new mother-in-law. These people, missionaries to China, then to poor communities in Virginia, North Dakota, and Iowa, had no heirlooms to give us, but Lu, my husband's mother, knew what was lasting, and had potted these seedlings for us to take home. If I'd known better, I could have dug similar ones from someone's yard in Saint Paul, but it seemed fitting that we'd drive these little spouts, no higher than my mid-calf, north to plant all over the back yard, again, so many trees I had to repot one and donate it across the street.
That was the mid-1980s. Every tree but one maple we had to cut down--it was too close to the house--has survived. I listened to them, and when they said "Water," I did, with the hose turned on low nestled a foot from their trunks. When they said nourish, I did, with fertilizer stakes, pounded into the wet spring soil. I added a lovely spring-flowering crabapple, whose white blossoms float over the backyard like frozen kisses. I'd still be adding trees if I could, but there's simply no more space. Several years ago, the emerald Ash beetle was sighted in Minnesota, and we had our boulevard ash treated. SInce it may not survive the beetle onslaught, I planted among the astilbe and goldenrod further along the boulevard, a tiny tamarack from the bogs of Northern MInnesota. It likes its feet wet, and we have a kind of rain garden there.
This year in Saint Paul, we had more than enough rain through July. Then the natural watering stopped. There have been sprinkles since, but nothing substantial for going on six weeks. It's too long for growing things, especially fledgling trees. Along Selby Avenue coming up the hill from Lexington Parkway, I notice droopy new elms, just planted in the boulevards, a variety that's resistant to Dutch Elm disease. They may not die of Elm beetles, but they will of thirst unless someone wakes up and waters them good. What does a good watering mean? A couple of hours of low-hose seepage around the roots, every week, all the way through the autumn until the ground freezes. Big trees have put down wide-flung root systems that capture water low in the ground. But these new sprouts have yet to do that. They are dying of thirst. I hope somebody will listen. P.S. I also water my big trees because I love them and want them to flourish. Home to me means people I love, a roof that's secure, cats to purr up close, and trees outside to filter out noise, dust, sun and heat. A house is not a home without its companion trees.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Margotlog: Round Pegs in Square Holes
Margotlog: Round Pegs in Square Holes
They don't work, or so we should have discovered first hand in kindergarten. It's a very primary lesson BUT not much help in politics. I could have started this mumbling with a more dramatic flair: my husband commented the other day, "Republican presidents seem to get more done." But didn't want to prejudice readers of the other stripe right off the bat, because I too tend to vote for the Democrats. Yet, in polarized times like these, when even what I'd call smart Democrats and smart Republicans are getting sucked further into antagonism, I wake up in the wee hours trying to turn those round and square, triangular and hexagonal pegs for further inspection.
Let's examine the "debt ceiling" for all its worth. In simple terms, raising the debt ceiling meant that the federal government had congressional authorization to borrow enough to keep paying its debts. Since we're in a recession, with more drain on the federal coffers than they can long sustain, such a move looked at first glance like the wrong peg for the hole. Yet it was not. We'd just witnessed abroad what happens when governments fail to pay their debts. Internal and external chaos ensues. The debt ceiling had to be raised, but with compensating adjustments to some of the other huge expenditures like social security which are becoming financially insecure.
Why did the Republicans and some Democrats in Congress resist raising the debt ceiling? Because they had become so blinded by "round peg in round hole" thinking that they couldn't step toward a more complicated version of what fits where. Now comes the fun part: I'm going to tell you my night thoughts about this radicalization.
First, the Republicans who hate federal government interference so profoundly that they're ready to shuck the whole mess and disband the union. I suspect them of white-washing more personal prejudices. It is profoundly not politically correct these days to protest African-Americans or other people of color in politics. We have elected an African-American president (though my husband the extreme liberal corrects me: "He's half white and half Kenyan." Forget that, I say, in the eyes of most Americans President Obama looks African-American.) White privilege is alive and well in the United States, especially the further one gets from the city center. Statistics suggest that the largest growing population in the U.S. is Hispanic. Someday we may become a dual-language country.
Then there are the two enormously sensitive personal issues that tap into religious feelings: abortion and same-sex marriage. Along some highways leading from the Twin Cities into the Minnesota hinterlands, billboards announce that babies in the womb are alive, fully human. They feel pain. We will be practicing homicide if we practice abortion. I don't question the weight of belief and emotion that helped erect these messages. And that weight bears down in favor of hometown round pegs which desperately want to fit into round holes. It refuses to consider what another child born to a family already strapped economically could mean homelessness or worse. Or what an unwanted pregnancy could do to a high school student whose family is rigidly Christian and will ostracize her or worse. It refuses to look at individual cases and consider how they deviate from a norm.
Now let's take a look in the other direction. Most Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of rationality. We are not hobbled by round peg-square hole problems. Wrong, I say. Here are some recent personal and more public examples: my own congressional rep, Democrat Betty McCollum has recently taken three extreme positions on what I consider crucial issues:
* the new bridge over the St. Croix from Stillwater into Wisconsin. She resists any bridge at all.
* raising the debt ceiling. She voted against doing so.
* presenting to Congress and passing new trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Columbia. She opposes these trade agreements.
A few days ago we drove to Stillwater. The downtown was clogged with cars. Have you noticed, despite the growing evidence of global warming, Americans are driving larger and larger vehicles. Or is it only Minnesotans? The once sleepy small town of Stillwater, with its narrow main street running parallel to the river, had a traffic jam to rival the log jams that used to clog the river. A new bridge over the river is crucial to the health of this town. New approaches will divert traffic from the downtown, hopefully returning it to manageable proportions. Yes, the river is part of the Scenic Rivers designation, protected from development, but a variance has been allowed to build a new bridge. Betty McCollum is taking a rigid position on this--she's being a steward of the river, but not looking at the traffic problems within the town itself.
Raising the debt ceiling was, in my opinion, one of the most difficult but crucial votes in the Congress for years. When at the last instant there was a compromise, McCollum along with Al Franken voted against it. What's with these extreme Dems? I hear my husband's voice: "Republican presidents get more done." He would add that the Democrats usually go along with a Republican president; whereas with Dem presidents, Republicans don't follow that pattern. I'd counter, "Look at this! Clearly in a issue of national importance, two of our own Minnesota Dems opted out." This is resistance at the other extreme.
Ditto on these proposed trade agreements that will erase protective tariffs against American goods in three trading partners. Here my very liberal husband has a knee-jerk reaction, hates the World Trade Agreement passed during the Clinton administration so much--which allowed American corporations to export jobs overseas yet still claim all the advantages of being listed as American corporations, that he thinks this is the same thing. "No, " I insist. "This is a different kind of trade agreement. It will open countries to American goods. It will make American goods less expensive in these countries. Canada and the European Union have already signed agreements with these three countries. Get with it!" Am I not surprised that Betty McCollum has also come out against the agreements?
In such antagonistic times, it's harder to assess any issue on its own merit. Time to hold these various shapes in our hands and think deeper night thoughts.
They don't work, or so we should have discovered first hand in kindergarten. It's a very primary lesson BUT not much help in politics. I could have started this mumbling with a more dramatic flair: my husband commented the other day, "Republican presidents seem to get more done." But didn't want to prejudice readers of the other stripe right off the bat, because I too tend to vote for the Democrats. Yet, in polarized times like these, when even what I'd call smart Democrats and smart Republicans are getting sucked further into antagonism, I wake up in the wee hours trying to turn those round and square, triangular and hexagonal pegs for further inspection.
Let's examine the "debt ceiling" for all its worth. In simple terms, raising the debt ceiling meant that the federal government had congressional authorization to borrow enough to keep paying its debts. Since we're in a recession, with more drain on the federal coffers than they can long sustain, such a move looked at first glance like the wrong peg for the hole. Yet it was not. We'd just witnessed abroad what happens when governments fail to pay their debts. Internal and external chaos ensues. The debt ceiling had to be raised, but with compensating adjustments to some of the other huge expenditures like social security which are becoming financially insecure.
Why did the Republicans and some Democrats in Congress resist raising the debt ceiling? Because they had become so blinded by "round peg in round hole" thinking that they couldn't step toward a more complicated version of what fits where. Now comes the fun part: I'm going to tell you my night thoughts about this radicalization.
First, the Republicans who hate federal government interference so profoundly that they're ready to shuck the whole mess and disband the union. I suspect them of white-washing more personal prejudices. It is profoundly not politically correct these days to protest African-Americans or other people of color in politics. We have elected an African-American president (though my husband the extreme liberal corrects me: "He's half white and half Kenyan." Forget that, I say, in the eyes of most Americans President Obama looks African-American.) White privilege is alive and well in the United States, especially the further one gets from the city center. Statistics suggest that the largest growing population in the U.S. is Hispanic. Someday we may become a dual-language country.
Then there are the two enormously sensitive personal issues that tap into religious feelings: abortion and same-sex marriage. Along some highways leading from the Twin Cities into the Minnesota hinterlands, billboards announce that babies in the womb are alive, fully human. They feel pain. We will be practicing homicide if we practice abortion. I don't question the weight of belief and emotion that helped erect these messages. And that weight bears down in favor of hometown round pegs which desperately want to fit into round holes. It refuses to consider what another child born to a family already strapped economically could mean homelessness or worse. Or what an unwanted pregnancy could do to a high school student whose family is rigidly Christian and will ostracize her or worse. It refuses to look at individual cases and consider how they deviate from a norm.
Now let's take a look in the other direction. Most Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of rationality. We are not hobbled by round peg-square hole problems. Wrong, I say. Here are some recent personal and more public examples: my own congressional rep, Democrat Betty McCollum has recently taken three extreme positions on what I consider crucial issues:
* the new bridge over the St. Croix from Stillwater into Wisconsin. She resists any bridge at all.
* raising the debt ceiling. She voted against doing so.
* presenting to Congress and passing new trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Columbia. She opposes these trade agreements.
A few days ago we drove to Stillwater. The downtown was clogged with cars. Have you noticed, despite the growing evidence of global warming, Americans are driving larger and larger vehicles. Or is it only Minnesotans? The once sleepy small town of Stillwater, with its narrow main street running parallel to the river, had a traffic jam to rival the log jams that used to clog the river. A new bridge over the river is crucial to the health of this town. New approaches will divert traffic from the downtown, hopefully returning it to manageable proportions. Yes, the river is part of the Scenic Rivers designation, protected from development, but a variance has been allowed to build a new bridge. Betty McCollum is taking a rigid position on this--she's being a steward of the river, but not looking at the traffic problems within the town itself.
Raising the debt ceiling was, in my opinion, one of the most difficult but crucial votes in the Congress for years. When at the last instant there was a compromise, McCollum along with Al Franken voted against it. What's with these extreme Dems? I hear my husband's voice: "Republican presidents get more done." He would add that the Democrats usually go along with a Republican president; whereas with Dem presidents, Republicans don't follow that pattern. I'd counter, "Look at this! Clearly in a issue of national importance, two of our own Minnesota Dems opted out." This is resistance at the other extreme.
Ditto on these proposed trade agreements that will erase protective tariffs against American goods in three trading partners. Here my very liberal husband has a knee-jerk reaction, hates the World Trade Agreement passed during the Clinton administration so much--which allowed American corporations to export jobs overseas yet still claim all the advantages of being listed as American corporations, that he thinks this is the same thing. "No, " I insist. "This is a different kind of trade agreement. It will open countries to American goods. It will make American goods less expensive in these countries. Canada and the European Union have already signed agreements with these three countries. Get with it!" Am I not surprised that Betty McCollum has also come out against the agreements?
In such antagonistic times, it's harder to assess any issue on its own merit. Time to hold these various shapes in our hands and think deeper night thoughts.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Margotlog: I Looked the Part
Margotlog: I Looked the Part
Heavy hair that framed the sides of my face like spaniel ears, large dark eyes which by third grade would peer through blue-rimmed glasses, and a rather heavy gait since I wore orthopedic shoes. How could I not be a good student?
Recently I was struck by the qualities that promote studentdom, not only because school is starting, and I'm now a teacher, but also because two vivid instances of students who beat the odds have appeared before me, one immediate and one from my past.
First the distant one: When I was a college student at Goucher College outside Baltimore, Florence Howe was one of the few women professors, a rather discouraging fact, given that Goucher was then a women's college. Not only was she female, but young and striking looking with a full head of dark hair marked in front by a white streak. Recently I've been reading her memoir, A Life in Motion, published by the Feminist Press which she founded.
Child of working-class New York Jews, FLorence Howe's intelligence and scholarly application made itself known by high school, but her mother persistently denigrated or ignored her accomplishments. Her mother worked and when she came home, wanted to listen to radio programs, not help Florence do homework. Possibly her mother didn't have the skills, after a certain point, to offer much help. Nor to conceive of college. Her father, who drove a cab, took a different attitude, praising and encouraging her, but he couldn't provide much help either. It was her teachers at Hunter College High School, then at Hunter College itself (which was free) who led her in various directions that culminated in graduate school and her position at Goucher in the early 1960s. What her mother did say, however, was a kind of backhanded directive: Become a teacher so you'll have your own money and your husband can't make you grovel. This didn't describe her own father's behavior exactly, but fit the family's poverty: her mother's job helped put food on the table.
Now the modern instance: This is a young high-school English teacher in a Twin Cities suburban high school whom I know because she's finishing her master's degree in education, and I'm her advisor. Let's call her Natalie. Natalie is African-American. Beginning in Chicago and concluding in the Twin Cities, Natalie's elementary and high school education had three parts: kindergarten through third grade, fourth through seventh in Chicago, then eighth through graduation from high school in the Twin Cities.
As Natalie and I talk about her capstone paper's focus--on the achievement gap between students of color and white students (which is very high in Minnesota)--I encourage her to tell her own story because it so clearly emphasizes two crucial elements in students' success: a settled school history, i.e. staying in one school for as long as possible, and the importance of teachers and parents.
Natalie's first four years of school in Chicago, her single mom moved the family from one neighborhood to another. Natalie's schooling was disrupted by what we call today transience. It's like uprooting a little plant and never letting it put down strong roots. That changed when her mother settled into an all-black neighborhood with a neighborhood school. As Natalie describes that school, I'm struck by several elements that contributed to help her take hold: all her teachers were black. They provided strong role models for African-American accomplishment, and they knew the culture and racial dimensions of their students' lives. "Our teachers would call in our parents if we acted up," says Natalie. "They ate with us in the lunchroom, stayed with us on the playground, saw us out the door. We walked to school with the same students through all our elementary grades because Chicago's philosophy required elementary schools to serve surrounding neighborhoods. There was no busing."
This seems crucial to both of us as we unpack what this meant for Natalie's education. Stability, first of all. A constant strong guiding presence in and outside the classroom. Knowledge of students' lives first hand--no student came from far away. Their home lives, their discipline, etc., all could be easily determined by the school. Finally a cohort of friends to accompany a kid throughout the day.
I've often wondered about the value of busing. Yes, it was put in place across the nation to combat segregation. Though Natalie's school and neighborhood were essentially segregated, the quality of education was high. And the students were taught by people of their own race. Nor were they taken away from a familiar neighborhood every day to attend a school with kids far different from themselves. Undoubtedly in some schools busing has created greater opportunities for underserved students, but it's no surprise to me that Saint Paul has decided against busing (for all students or only elementary?). Eliminating busing in Saint Paul is a money-saving measure, but it also gives kids a chance to know the world under their feet, all around them, at the slow pace of walking, taking it in, day after day. That kind of environmental consciousness--this is my world and this is myself in it--can help form a sense of self among others, distinct and united. I venture to say it's the foundation for ethical thinking.
When Natalie's mother brought her family to the Twin Cities hoping for a better life, they settled first in Minneapolis and Natalie began at a junior-senior high combo. When they moved the next year, and the next, and the next, from suburb to suburb, Natalie convinced her mother to let her take the city bus into the city and conclude high school where she had started it. "Teachers knew me; they guided and encouraged me," Natalie says. "I did homework on the city bus. My mother trusted me. If I'd lived by the mandate that you go to the closest high school,I would have changed high schools three times."
That kind of up-rooting is extremely damaging at any age, but especially when the focus should be on developing mental, social, and emotional capacity. No wonder transience is highly correlated with school failure. Transience is also correlated with low-income. As Natalie explains, "We always rented for a year at a time. If Mom wanted to find a better apartment or a better job, it wasn't hard for us to pick up and move, but I insisted on staying at the same school."
It's no surprise to me that Natalie has become a high school English teacher, eager to teach the classics, but also, I say to myself, a highly important role model and guide to the students whose background mirrors her own. She was helped to make important choices for education. Those choices will be different from student to student. But there are certain constants--stability, continuity and teachers who can light the spark. I'm honing my sparks.
Heavy hair that framed the sides of my face like spaniel ears, large dark eyes which by third grade would peer through blue-rimmed glasses, and a rather heavy gait since I wore orthopedic shoes. How could I not be a good student?
Recently I was struck by the qualities that promote studentdom, not only because school is starting, and I'm now a teacher, but also because two vivid instances of students who beat the odds have appeared before me, one immediate and one from my past.
First the distant one: When I was a college student at Goucher College outside Baltimore, Florence Howe was one of the few women professors, a rather discouraging fact, given that Goucher was then a women's college. Not only was she female, but young and striking looking with a full head of dark hair marked in front by a white streak. Recently I've been reading her memoir, A Life in Motion, published by the Feminist Press which she founded.
Child of working-class New York Jews, FLorence Howe's intelligence and scholarly application made itself known by high school, but her mother persistently denigrated or ignored her accomplishments. Her mother worked and when she came home, wanted to listen to radio programs, not help Florence do homework. Possibly her mother didn't have the skills, after a certain point, to offer much help. Nor to conceive of college. Her father, who drove a cab, took a different attitude, praising and encouraging her, but he couldn't provide much help either. It was her teachers at Hunter College High School, then at Hunter College itself (which was free) who led her in various directions that culminated in graduate school and her position at Goucher in the early 1960s. What her mother did say, however, was a kind of backhanded directive: Become a teacher so you'll have your own money and your husband can't make you grovel. This didn't describe her own father's behavior exactly, but fit the family's poverty: her mother's job helped put food on the table.
Now the modern instance: This is a young high-school English teacher in a Twin Cities suburban high school whom I know because she's finishing her master's degree in education, and I'm her advisor. Let's call her Natalie. Natalie is African-American. Beginning in Chicago and concluding in the Twin Cities, Natalie's elementary and high school education had three parts: kindergarten through third grade, fourth through seventh in Chicago, then eighth through graduation from high school in the Twin Cities.
As Natalie and I talk about her capstone paper's focus--on the achievement gap between students of color and white students (which is very high in Minnesota)--I encourage her to tell her own story because it so clearly emphasizes two crucial elements in students' success: a settled school history, i.e. staying in one school for as long as possible, and the importance of teachers and parents.
Natalie's first four years of school in Chicago, her single mom moved the family from one neighborhood to another. Natalie's schooling was disrupted by what we call today transience. It's like uprooting a little plant and never letting it put down strong roots. That changed when her mother settled into an all-black neighborhood with a neighborhood school. As Natalie describes that school, I'm struck by several elements that contributed to help her take hold: all her teachers were black. They provided strong role models for African-American accomplishment, and they knew the culture and racial dimensions of their students' lives. "Our teachers would call in our parents if we acted up," says Natalie. "They ate with us in the lunchroom, stayed with us on the playground, saw us out the door. We walked to school with the same students through all our elementary grades because Chicago's philosophy required elementary schools to serve surrounding neighborhoods. There was no busing."
This seems crucial to both of us as we unpack what this meant for Natalie's education. Stability, first of all. A constant strong guiding presence in and outside the classroom. Knowledge of students' lives first hand--no student came from far away. Their home lives, their discipline, etc., all could be easily determined by the school. Finally a cohort of friends to accompany a kid throughout the day.
I've often wondered about the value of busing. Yes, it was put in place across the nation to combat segregation. Though Natalie's school and neighborhood were essentially segregated, the quality of education was high. And the students were taught by people of their own race. Nor were they taken away from a familiar neighborhood every day to attend a school with kids far different from themselves. Undoubtedly in some schools busing has created greater opportunities for underserved students, but it's no surprise to me that Saint Paul has decided against busing (for all students or only elementary?). Eliminating busing in Saint Paul is a money-saving measure, but it also gives kids a chance to know the world under their feet, all around them, at the slow pace of walking, taking it in, day after day. That kind of environmental consciousness--this is my world and this is myself in it--can help form a sense of self among others, distinct and united. I venture to say it's the foundation for ethical thinking.
When Natalie's mother brought her family to the Twin Cities hoping for a better life, they settled first in Minneapolis and Natalie began at a junior-senior high combo. When they moved the next year, and the next, and the next, from suburb to suburb, Natalie convinced her mother to let her take the city bus into the city and conclude high school where she had started it. "Teachers knew me; they guided and encouraged me," Natalie says. "I did homework on the city bus. My mother trusted me. If I'd lived by the mandate that you go to the closest high school,I would have changed high schools three times."
That kind of up-rooting is extremely damaging at any age, but especially when the focus should be on developing mental, social, and emotional capacity. No wonder transience is highly correlated with school failure. Transience is also correlated with low-income. As Natalie explains, "We always rented for a year at a time. If Mom wanted to find a better apartment or a better job, it wasn't hard for us to pick up and move, but I insisted on staying at the same school."
It's no surprise to me that Natalie has become a high school English teacher, eager to teach the classics, but also, I say to myself, a highly important role model and guide to the students whose background mirrors her own. She was helped to make important choices for education. Those choices will be different from student to student. But there are certain constants--stability, continuity and teachers who can light the spark. I'm honing my sparks.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Margotlog: Who Were These Other Men?
Margotlog: Who Were These Other Men?
I hadn't a clue in high school and college--gay life wasn't recognized in polite Charleston, South Carolina society during the 1950s and 60s. Yes, rock n rollers with duck tails and pompadours rumbled against the crew cuts, but they all had girls hanging on their arms. James Dean's slouch, a cigarette dangling from his pouty lip, was about as "rouee" as it got, though my parents entertained a couple of men who ran an antique shop "South of Broad," until one of them ran off to New Orleans and got married. No one ever dreamed his partner might be a man, and as far as I knew, it wasn't.
Slowly, knowledge that there were other ways to enjoy another's body seeped into my rather staid consciousness. But race and women's lib took precedence. In my race to escape my parents' household, then to form a more perfect union, I allowed only the icons of racial liberation to shine outside my marriage vows. Even then, it took me years to catch up with truly informed and practicing believers in racial equality. Feminism, on the other hand, caught me by the scruff of the neck: why was it that white, married. female colleagues were the ones to fear? Now when I parse those ugly shoves and dismissals, I note that we attack those who are closest and more likely to edge us out of the tiny chance we have to move to the top.
Then came AIDS. Occasionally when I teach a class on science and western culture, I invite my ex-husband to visit. As a young physician, he performed an alternative to fighting in Vietnam by joining the U.S. Public Health Service. Information about an odd infection seeped into the United States from Germany in the early 1980s, if I'm remembering right. It seemed to have been brought from Africa by male, airline stewards. They were very very ill, wasting away, and eventually died. The disease was traced to prostitution, and beyond that to the practice among some African tribes of eating what we now call "bush meat."
I know now that the Stonewall Riots of the late 1960s introduced mainstream Americans to gay life and its repression with a bang, but I wasn't paying attention. But by the 1980s, I was capable of registering a major new and frightening disease--AIDS. The fact that it attacked gay men, far more frequently than any other group, brought the culture into sharp relief. Two literary works and a movie helped me understand: Paul Monette's 1992 memoir Becoming a Man: A Half Life, and Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty, 1996, and the movie "Philadelphia."
But I knew before that of the wildness of gay life, the "bath house" sexual switcheroos and art that shook American standards to their foundation. AIDS caught the kaleidoscope of gay life up short, and for those of us outside, reminded us that human beings were suffering and dying at unnaturally young ages and in excrutiating agony.
So much has changed in the last twenty-five years. AIDS is now brought under control for sufferers in the U.S. through a combination of drugs that reduces it to a chronic condition. AIDS in AFrica, however, rages among all ages and kinds of people, infecting female prostitutes at truck stops in Uganda, children in the womb, parents, grandparents, you name it. The AIDS epidemic changed the way gay men in the U.S. lived their lives--many like Monette and Doty nursed partners dying of AIDS. MOnette himself died of it. The scourge dampened free and open sexual practices and sent several generations of gay men into monogamy. Then into marriage, where they could accomplish it.
Now I know who these other men are. I've read their memoirs and poetry, agonized with a few friends who have lost lovers to AIDS, and helped others celebrate unions as strong as any heterosexual ones. The revolution in American knowledge and attitudes about gay life during the last thirty years is astonishing. Yet, in Minnesota and other states, we now have a vote pending on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Five steps forward, four steps back. Nothing as monumental as this cultural "coming out" can happen easily. Most of the suffering has fallen on the men who've died of AIDS and their healthy counterparts who still cannot live their sexuality without scorn. I have benefited enormously from this change because I now can be open and affirming with gay friends. They have taught me that there are many ways to be a man in American life, and some have nothing to do with football or driving huge cars as fast as possible.
I hadn't a clue in high school and college--gay life wasn't recognized in polite Charleston, South Carolina society during the 1950s and 60s. Yes, rock n rollers with duck tails and pompadours rumbled against the crew cuts, but they all had girls hanging on their arms. James Dean's slouch, a cigarette dangling from his pouty lip, was about as "rouee" as it got, though my parents entertained a couple of men who ran an antique shop "South of Broad," until one of them ran off to New Orleans and got married. No one ever dreamed his partner might be a man, and as far as I knew, it wasn't.
Slowly, knowledge that there were other ways to enjoy another's body seeped into my rather staid consciousness. But race and women's lib took precedence. In my race to escape my parents' household, then to form a more perfect union, I allowed only the icons of racial liberation to shine outside my marriage vows. Even then, it took me years to catch up with truly informed and practicing believers in racial equality. Feminism, on the other hand, caught me by the scruff of the neck: why was it that white, married. female colleagues were the ones to fear? Now when I parse those ugly shoves and dismissals, I note that we attack those who are closest and more likely to edge us out of the tiny chance we have to move to the top.
Then came AIDS. Occasionally when I teach a class on science and western culture, I invite my ex-husband to visit. As a young physician, he performed an alternative to fighting in Vietnam by joining the U.S. Public Health Service. Information about an odd infection seeped into the United States from Germany in the early 1980s, if I'm remembering right. It seemed to have been brought from Africa by male, airline stewards. They were very very ill, wasting away, and eventually died. The disease was traced to prostitution, and beyond that to the practice among some African tribes of eating what we now call "bush meat."
I know now that the Stonewall Riots of the late 1960s introduced mainstream Americans to gay life and its repression with a bang, but I wasn't paying attention. But by the 1980s, I was capable of registering a major new and frightening disease--AIDS. The fact that it attacked gay men, far more frequently than any other group, brought the culture into sharp relief. Two literary works and a movie helped me understand: Paul Monette's 1992 memoir Becoming a Man: A Half Life, and Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty, 1996, and the movie "Philadelphia."
But I knew before that of the wildness of gay life, the "bath house" sexual switcheroos and art that shook American standards to their foundation. AIDS caught the kaleidoscope of gay life up short, and for those of us outside, reminded us that human beings were suffering and dying at unnaturally young ages and in excrutiating agony.
So much has changed in the last twenty-five years. AIDS is now brought under control for sufferers in the U.S. through a combination of drugs that reduces it to a chronic condition. AIDS in AFrica, however, rages among all ages and kinds of people, infecting female prostitutes at truck stops in Uganda, children in the womb, parents, grandparents, you name it. The AIDS epidemic changed the way gay men in the U.S. lived their lives--many like Monette and Doty nursed partners dying of AIDS. MOnette himself died of it. The scourge dampened free and open sexual practices and sent several generations of gay men into monogamy. Then into marriage, where they could accomplish it.
Now I know who these other men are. I've read their memoirs and poetry, agonized with a few friends who have lost lovers to AIDS, and helped others celebrate unions as strong as any heterosexual ones. The revolution in American knowledge and attitudes about gay life during the last thirty years is astonishing. Yet, in Minnesota and other states, we now have a vote pending on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Five steps forward, four steps back. Nothing as monumental as this cultural "coming out" can happen easily. Most of the suffering has fallen on the men who've died of AIDS and their healthy counterparts who still cannot live their sexuality without scorn. I have benefited enormously from this change because I now can be open and affirming with gay friends. They have taught me that there are many ways to be a man in American life, and some have nothing to do with football or driving huge cars as fast as possible.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)