Margotlog: Cultural Suffering
With my students, I'm reading a touching novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa (1981) Set in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada before, during and after World War II, Obasan portrays the suffering of Japanese "relocated" by the Canadian government. It's actually far more complex than that because two members of this extended Japanese family returned to Japan in the 1930s. They are the child Naomi's mother and grandmother. She never sees them again.
Shifting between several perspectives--Naomi's experience as a child of five through high school, and then leaping ahead to herself as an adult, a teacher in an Alberta school--the novel also infiltrates personal memory with documents which gradually shed light on her Aunt Emily's search for information about the "lost" relatives and justice for her extended family, separated and tossed about by the Canadian government.
In the United States, we usually find about about the Japanese internment camps during 7th grade history. The title that stays with me from my years working as a writer in the schools is Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Houston, 1979. Told from the perspective of a 7-year-old child, the story of dislocation and internment is harsh but not unrelieved--children adjust. In comparison Obasan is a much more probing account, with adult perceptions of loss, injustice and hardship interspersed with Naomi's childhood awareness. After the war ended, she and her family--brother and aunt and uncle--were uprooted again. This horror included not only the loss of the lively community the internees had created in a former ghost town, complete with the Japanese communal bath, but a resettlement to what was little more than a hut, amid the beet fields of Alberta. Unheated, cramped, the hut enforced a hatred that was doubled as all the family worked in the beet fields--heavy, hot labor--the only work offered to them. When they finally could afford to move to a small house in town, it's a relief the reader shares.
Through all this suffering runs the cultural manners of Japanese people themselves--their quiet, restrained acceptance, their sturdy continuation despite extreme loss and hardship. their lack of voiced complaint. I find all this remarkable and unforgettable. But I also spy amid the quietude, the defeat that quells and forces submission, the defeat that was visited upon the Jews in Germany, who went quiet to their own slaughter. I know that sounds like a harsh judgment but reading Obasan reminds me that when whole communities recognize the futility of revolt, many simply cave in. Not the Warsaw ghetto, however, nor countless individual resisters. Reading Elie Wiesel's Night proclaims just this resistance. It remains perhaps my most treasured document of an individual soul, helped quietly by others, to survive the most determined attempt at extermination.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Margotlog: Getting Out of Vietnam, Getting Out of Anything
Margotlog: Getting Out of Vietnam, Getting Out of Anything
Though I didn't realize her power when she was first publishing, Barbara Tuchman has since become one of my top three favorite American writers about history--Barbara Tuchman, Joseph Ellis and David McCullough. Ellis and McCullough are still alive, but Tuchman died in 1989.
What distinguishes them from other writers of history whom I've read is their astonishing ability to dramatize yet propell a narrative forward with periodic assessments that plunge right to the heart of significance. Take Tuchman's book review of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, which I'm reading now, long after its initial publication, collected in her book called Practicing History (1981).
Kissinger, as head of President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisors and as Gerald Ford's Secretary of State, contributed enormously to the lengthy U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. As Tuchman argues, his council should have urged U.S. withdrawal far sooner than it occurred in 1975. The U.S. should have withdrawn in the early 1970s when it was clear that the U.S. could not assure that Saigon, i.e. South Vietnam could sustain itself independently. Instead Kissinger and the presidents he served opted for continued U.S. troop and bombing incursions eventually pushing the war into Cambodia with an additional 40,000 Cambodian and 19,000 American lives lost. Tuchman astutely summarizes that the U.S. stayed because its government wanted to withdraw with honor. Instead, she argues, we should have made the case that we'd done all we could for the South Vietnamese and now they needed to stand or fall on their own strength. Which she goes on to remark, is exactly what happened when North Vietnam invaded the South and Saigon fell in 1975.
Getting out when winning is clearly impossible, chosing compromise and life-saving alteration, rather than a "fight to the finish"--that I'd like to see more of. For instance, how wonderful if the various legislatures, national and state, could put down their insistence on "winning" and agree that there must be a two-pronged approach to combating the budget deficit--raising taxes on the wealthy and altering "entitlement programs" like Medicare and Social Security. Just as the U.S. government fighting in Vietnam could not "imagine" withdrawal with anything short of "honor," meaning victory, so now we are brought to our knees by a refusal to take items from each side of the political divide and recognize that they both have an important place in addressing the inevitable: unless we make significant changes in both tax and entitlement structures, our economy will suffer short-term and long-term. Suffer so significantly that our political position may well become weakened, our vaunted ability to "rule the world" may well pass to others.
Ditto our blind, headlong path toward doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to bring a halt to fracking (which tears up forest and grassland, uses huge amounts of water, and then pumps this natural gas across sensitive acquifers--mine and your drinking water). No, no, no. We must admit we've exhausted this kind of energy. We must do two difficult but possible things--conserve far more than we do, and buy in big time to energy production that does not sprew CO2 into the environment.
How much longer, I muse, as I listen to Barbara Tuchman's clear and incisive indictment of Henry Kissinger and the governments he served--how much longer before we can make the sane but difficult choices?
Though I didn't realize her power when she was first publishing, Barbara Tuchman has since become one of my top three favorite American writers about history--Barbara Tuchman, Joseph Ellis and David McCullough. Ellis and McCullough are still alive, but Tuchman died in 1989.
What distinguishes them from other writers of history whom I've read is their astonishing ability to dramatize yet propell a narrative forward with periodic assessments that plunge right to the heart of significance. Take Tuchman's book review of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, which I'm reading now, long after its initial publication, collected in her book called Practicing History (1981).
Kissinger, as head of President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisors and as Gerald Ford's Secretary of State, contributed enormously to the lengthy U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. As Tuchman argues, his council should have urged U.S. withdrawal far sooner than it occurred in 1975. The U.S. should have withdrawn in the early 1970s when it was clear that the U.S. could not assure that Saigon, i.e. South Vietnam could sustain itself independently. Instead Kissinger and the presidents he served opted for continued U.S. troop and bombing incursions eventually pushing the war into Cambodia with an additional 40,000 Cambodian and 19,000 American lives lost. Tuchman astutely summarizes that the U.S. stayed because its government wanted to withdraw with honor. Instead, she argues, we should have made the case that we'd done all we could for the South Vietnamese and now they needed to stand or fall on their own strength. Which she goes on to remark, is exactly what happened when North Vietnam invaded the South and Saigon fell in 1975.
Getting out when winning is clearly impossible, chosing compromise and life-saving alteration, rather than a "fight to the finish"--that I'd like to see more of. For instance, how wonderful if the various legislatures, national and state, could put down their insistence on "winning" and agree that there must be a two-pronged approach to combating the budget deficit--raising taxes on the wealthy and altering "entitlement programs" like Medicare and Social Security. Just as the U.S. government fighting in Vietnam could not "imagine" withdrawal with anything short of "honor," meaning victory, so now we are brought to our knees by a refusal to take items from each side of the political divide and recognize that they both have an important place in addressing the inevitable: unless we make significant changes in both tax and entitlement structures, our economy will suffer short-term and long-term. Suffer so significantly that our political position may well become weakened, our vaunted ability to "rule the world" may well pass to others.
Ditto our blind, headlong path toward doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to bring a halt to fracking (which tears up forest and grassland, uses huge amounts of water, and then pumps this natural gas across sensitive acquifers--mine and your drinking water). No, no, no. We must admit we've exhausted this kind of energy. We must do two difficult but possible things--conserve far more than we do, and buy in big time to energy production that does not sprew CO2 into the environment.
How much longer, I muse, as I listen to Barbara Tuchman's clear and incisive indictment of Henry Kissinger and the governments he served--how much longer before we can make the sane but difficult choices?
Friday, November 25, 2011
Margotlog: A Polish and an African-American Grandmother
Margotlog: A Polish and an African-American Grandmother
We get so fixated on the nuclear family in the United States with its portability, privacy, and freedom to reinvent itself that we forget, except on Thanksgiving, how rich and supportive it can be to have several generations around the table. A few days ago, in this wonderful interregnum between frantic work-weeks called Thanksgiving break, I had lunch with two friends who had never met before, but who both grew up in Chicago. "She's my sister," cried the younger African-American friend. That lovely "soul sister" idea. Then when they were face to face, she asked, "Are you from the city?" As opposed, I found out, to the many suburban communities spreading in all directions except directly east, where of course lies great Lake Michigan. Yes, they both grew up in inner city Chicago. One with an immigrant Polish family, the other with African-American grandparents who came up from Mississippi.
I never knew my grandmothers, a lack I've often mourned. Word has it they were both good women, though not strong enough to withstand cancer in their early 60s. "Your grandmother could make us four boys stop fighting just be coming into the room," that's my father's voice in my memory. His mother Rose was a tiny Sicilian woman, probably no more than four feet, ten inches tall. When she was dying of ovarian cancer in Florida (where she and my grandfather moved to escape the Pittsburgh winters), my father's first cousin Eleanora, then newly trained as a nurse, took the train south to care for her. "When I looked in her jewelry box," Eleanora remembers, "I found a note from your grandfather, a love note telling Rose how much he adored her. He did that--left her little charms in her pockets or in her hymnal or behind the spices."
Let's call my two Chicago friends Adele and Roxy. Adele's Polish family lived not far from Lake Michigan in a duplex, the grandmother on the bottom, her daughter's family on top. After school, Adele immediately stopped at her grandmother's kitchen. "She wasn't a great cook," Adele confesses, "In fact, I can't remember what she gave me to eat, but it was quiet downstairs with Grandma. Upstairs, my mother would be sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee with her friends and criticizing their relatives. I didn't like that."
Roxy's African-American single mother had four children before she was much over twenty. Roxy spent the first and second grades in Southside Chicago schools--"all the schools were neighborhood schools," Roxy tells us. "We had an entirely African-American class." When she was in third grade, her mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The change was enormous. The four kids were the only black children in their grades. They quickly learned to speak "white English." Then every summer for five years, Roxy and her brother went back to Chicago and stayed with Gramma. "She was a witchy old lady," Roxy laughs, "saying things like, 'Don' you go leavin that purse on de floor."
"How come?" Roxy would challenge her. "Purse on floo, you be poor."
Hands on her hips, little Roxy sassed, "Then how come you be poor? Yo purse neber on de floo?" Roxy laughs at her sassy kid-self, then shakes her head at Gramma. "That lady brought all these notions from Mississippi. She was strict with us, but we'd laugh at her, not mean, just enjoying all being sassy together. Later she was proud of me. She kept saying, 'Law, chile, you be so smart. Don' you stop that studyin!'"
Adele picked up sewing from her Polish grandmother. This woman was so skilled that she made her daughter's entire graduating class of girls fancy "stepping out" gowns. She would take the bus downtown to the big department stores and shop for fabric. She knew the names of all sorts of linens, wools, silks, cottons, and later synthetics. Then arthritis stopped her, and she became simply a haven from Adele's sharp-tongued mother. Now Adele creates masterful needlework herself, knitting, needlepoint, crocheting, even that old-fashioned edging on pillow "slips" and sheets called "tatting."
I, who grew up so far from any grandparents that I saw them only in the presence of my parents, I wonder how my young-life might have been different if the older generation had taken part in it. I imagine they might have buffered me from my parents' excesses which became more and more pronounced as we lived longer in South Carolina--my father's ranting against civil rights, his finickiness about clothing and housekeeping and food, and my mother's rigid attempts to control his outbursts, her fearful whispering at me to behave, "because if you don't your father will never forgive me...."
There's a truism among immigration historians that the first generation arrives with grit, determination, and an unexpected sense of who they are and where they came from. It's the second generation that flounders. That fits my father, determined though he was to escape the Italian immigrant community and marry "a real American." Yet that "real American," my mother, constantly failed to create a milieu that comforted him, plus by moving to South Carolina, he had lifted himself out of the larger associations that defined his identity. It was sweet, though pathetic, how he sought out Italian ships docking in Charleston harbor, and occasionally brought home sailors from Genoa or Naples who could speak to his heart.
Lucky indeed are my friends whose childhoods were enriched by extended families. Their hearts beat close by, and still help to measure and regulate their own.
We get so fixated on the nuclear family in the United States with its portability, privacy, and freedom to reinvent itself that we forget, except on Thanksgiving, how rich and supportive it can be to have several generations around the table. A few days ago, in this wonderful interregnum between frantic work-weeks called Thanksgiving break, I had lunch with two friends who had never met before, but who both grew up in Chicago. "She's my sister," cried the younger African-American friend. That lovely "soul sister" idea. Then when they were face to face, she asked, "Are you from the city?" As opposed, I found out, to the many suburban communities spreading in all directions except directly east, where of course lies great Lake Michigan. Yes, they both grew up in inner city Chicago. One with an immigrant Polish family, the other with African-American grandparents who came up from Mississippi.
I never knew my grandmothers, a lack I've often mourned. Word has it they were both good women, though not strong enough to withstand cancer in their early 60s. "Your grandmother could make us four boys stop fighting just be coming into the room," that's my father's voice in my memory. His mother Rose was a tiny Sicilian woman, probably no more than four feet, ten inches tall. When she was dying of ovarian cancer in Florida (where she and my grandfather moved to escape the Pittsburgh winters), my father's first cousin Eleanora, then newly trained as a nurse, took the train south to care for her. "When I looked in her jewelry box," Eleanora remembers, "I found a note from your grandfather, a love note telling Rose how much he adored her. He did that--left her little charms in her pockets or in her hymnal or behind the spices."
Let's call my two Chicago friends Adele and Roxy. Adele's Polish family lived not far from Lake Michigan in a duplex, the grandmother on the bottom, her daughter's family on top. After school, Adele immediately stopped at her grandmother's kitchen. "She wasn't a great cook," Adele confesses, "In fact, I can't remember what she gave me to eat, but it was quiet downstairs with Grandma. Upstairs, my mother would be sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee with her friends and criticizing their relatives. I didn't like that."
Roxy's African-American single mother had four children before she was much over twenty. Roxy spent the first and second grades in Southside Chicago schools--"all the schools were neighborhood schools," Roxy tells us. "We had an entirely African-American class." When she was in third grade, her mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The change was enormous. The four kids were the only black children in their grades. They quickly learned to speak "white English." Then every summer for five years, Roxy and her brother went back to Chicago and stayed with Gramma. "She was a witchy old lady," Roxy laughs, "saying things like, 'Don' you go leavin that purse on de floor."
"How come?" Roxy would challenge her. "Purse on floo, you be poor."
Hands on her hips, little Roxy sassed, "Then how come you be poor? Yo purse neber on de floo?" Roxy laughs at her sassy kid-self, then shakes her head at Gramma. "That lady brought all these notions from Mississippi. She was strict with us, but we'd laugh at her, not mean, just enjoying all being sassy together. Later she was proud of me. She kept saying, 'Law, chile, you be so smart. Don' you stop that studyin!'"
Adele picked up sewing from her Polish grandmother. This woman was so skilled that she made her daughter's entire graduating class of girls fancy "stepping out" gowns. She would take the bus downtown to the big department stores and shop for fabric. She knew the names of all sorts of linens, wools, silks, cottons, and later synthetics. Then arthritis stopped her, and she became simply a haven from Adele's sharp-tongued mother. Now Adele creates masterful needlework herself, knitting, needlepoint, crocheting, even that old-fashioned edging on pillow "slips" and sheets called "tatting."
I, who grew up so far from any grandparents that I saw them only in the presence of my parents, I wonder how my young-life might have been different if the older generation had taken part in it. I imagine they might have buffered me from my parents' excesses which became more and more pronounced as we lived longer in South Carolina--my father's ranting against civil rights, his finickiness about clothing and housekeeping and food, and my mother's rigid attempts to control his outbursts, her fearful whispering at me to behave, "because if you don't your father will never forgive me...."
There's a truism among immigration historians that the first generation arrives with grit, determination, and an unexpected sense of who they are and where they came from. It's the second generation that flounders. That fits my father, determined though he was to escape the Italian immigrant community and marry "a real American." Yet that "real American," my mother, constantly failed to create a milieu that comforted him, plus by moving to South Carolina, he had lifted himself out of the larger associations that defined his identity. It was sweet, though pathetic, how he sought out Italian ships docking in Charleston harbor, and occasionally brought home sailors from Genoa or Naples who could speak to his heart.
Lucky indeed are my friends whose childhoods were enriched by extended families. Their hearts beat close by, and still help to measure and regulate their own.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Margotlog: My Father and the Bird
Margotlog: My Father and the Bird
And I don't mean Charlie Parker, the reknown jazzman. No, the bird in this case was the annual Thanksgiving Turkey.
My father grew up thinking very little of birds. He and his brothers (one of whom became a hunting guide in Nova Scotia) shot rabbits occasionally. Not in their Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Lebanon, heaven forbid! That was a relatively upscale and thoroughly civilized neighborhood. No guns. His father, the minister and lawyer for the Italian people, the tribal leader, never would have countenanced shot guns stacked beside the door. Maybe in the garage, but never in the sanctuary of the home.
But there are photos of my father and one of his younger brothers at their prep school, Gettysburg Academy, with rabbits strewn at their feet and shot guns upended as staffs of honor. Then when he visited my mother's North Dakota family for Thanksgiving, he shot rabbits and draped them over the front of a mean-looking sedan. Snow on the ground, lace-up boots on his feet, and a smirk on his face. Mighty Hunter!
In fact, he was finicky beyond belief. I can laugh now, but his precautions and admonitions about cleanliness and right behavior used to send my mother, sister and me into spasms of frustration. When it came time to bring home the turkey, the grocery store was the source and my mother the conveyor. She upended the bird in the sink, made sure all the pin feathers had been removed, cleaned out the cavity, put the gibblets to boil on the stove,and set the carcass in the roaster ready for the oven. "Maxine, are you sure you've thoroughly washed that bird?" my father would caution, as if it hadn't already passed through several stages of denaturing, as if it still carried barnyard dirt between its toes.
When we leafed through Ideals Magazine during summer visits to Papa Max in North Dakota, images of Thanksgiving always showed Father at the head of a snow-white table studded with family and relatives, while Mother lowered the bird in front of him. At our family Thanksgivings in Charleston, South Carolina, our Midwestern mother acted this role to perfection, her arms reaching around my father with the platter and the beautifully browned bird. At that point, however, he did not take up the carving tools and ask us to pass our plates. In fact, she stepped to one side of him and commenced to loosen the drumsticks, slice open the breast, and excavate stuffing to mound in a bowl. "Your father has no sense of anatomy," she would explain later with a touch of self-satisfied superiority. "He can never find the joints."
Then, after this ritual they'd silently worked out (unlike many other alterations of expected male/female roles which invoked loud protests on my father's part), she took her place at the foot of the table, and my father did indeed ask us to pass our plates. Often we were entertaining Citadel cadets or faculty members, stranded without family for the holiday. My father's joviality increased. He was truly thankful for bounty that could be shared, for evidence that many of the flock had gathered, and for what, as he would say, "the Lord has provided." Then we would bow our heads, and afterwards raise a glass in Thanksgiving.
I can see him now, light from the candles glinting on his glasses, his wide Italian mouth open in a grin, while we all follow his direction and lifted our tumblers of milk or water or wine, saluting with appreciation the flame around which we congregate. At the other end of the table, my mother is smiling her soft, girlish smile, reserved for moments like these, when all her work is done, when she can retreat into shy reserve, and enjoy the gregarious, slightly deranged bird she has married.
Whatever other configuration my own Thanksgivings take, this is the model against which they all are measured.
And I don't mean Charlie Parker, the reknown jazzman. No, the bird in this case was the annual Thanksgiving Turkey.
My father grew up thinking very little of birds. He and his brothers (one of whom became a hunting guide in Nova Scotia) shot rabbits occasionally. Not in their Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Lebanon, heaven forbid! That was a relatively upscale and thoroughly civilized neighborhood. No guns. His father, the minister and lawyer for the Italian people, the tribal leader, never would have countenanced shot guns stacked beside the door. Maybe in the garage, but never in the sanctuary of the home.
But there are photos of my father and one of his younger brothers at their prep school, Gettysburg Academy, with rabbits strewn at their feet and shot guns upended as staffs of honor. Then when he visited my mother's North Dakota family for Thanksgiving, he shot rabbits and draped them over the front of a mean-looking sedan. Snow on the ground, lace-up boots on his feet, and a smirk on his face. Mighty Hunter!
In fact, he was finicky beyond belief. I can laugh now, but his precautions and admonitions about cleanliness and right behavior used to send my mother, sister and me into spasms of frustration. When it came time to bring home the turkey, the grocery store was the source and my mother the conveyor. She upended the bird in the sink, made sure all the pin feathers had been removed, cleaned out the cavity, put the gibblets to boil on the stove,and set the carcass in the roaster ready for the oven. "Maxine, are you sure you've thoroughly washed that bird?" my father would caution, as if it hadn't already passed through several stages of denaturing, as if it still carried barnyard dirt between its toes.
When we leafed through Ideals Magazine during summer visits to Papa Max in North Dakota, images of Thanksgiving always showed Father at the head of a snow-white table studded with family and relatives, while Mother lowered the bird in front of him. At our family Thanksgivings in Charleston, South Carolina, our Midwestern mother acted this role to perfection, her arms reaching around my father with the platter and the beautifully browned bird. At that point, however, he did not take up the carving tools and ask us to pass our plates. In fact, she stepped to one side of him and commenced to loosen the drumsticks, slice open the breast, and excavate stuffing to mound in a bowl. "Your father has no sense of anatomy," she would explain later with a touch of self-satisfied superiority. "He can never find the joints."
Then, after this ritual they'd silently worked out (unlike many other alterations of expected male/female roles which invoked loud protests on my father's part), she took her place at the foot of the table, and my father did indeed ask us to pass our plates. Often we were entertaining Citadel cadets or faculty members, stranded without family for the holiday. My father's joviality increased. He was truly thankful for bounty that could be shared, for evidence that many of the flock had gathered, and for what, as he would say, "the Lord has provided." Then we would bow our heads, and afterwards raise a glass in Thanksgiving.
I can see him now, light from the candles glinting on his glasses, his wide Italian mouth open in a grin, while we all follow his direction and lifted our tumblers of milk or water or wine, saluting with appreciation the flame around which we congregate. At the other end of the table, my mother is smiling her soft, girlish smile, reserved for moments like these, when all her work is done, when she can retreat into shy reserve, and enjoy the gregarious, slightly deranged bird she has married.
Whatever other configuration my own Thanksgivings take, this is the model against which they all are measured.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Margotlog: J. Edgar, Leonardo DiCaprio and Clint Eastwood
Margotlog: J. Edgar, Leonardo DiCaprio and Clint Eastwood
"The FBI in Peace and War"--was that the title of the radio drama? I never listened, but the music from a companion show, "Dragnet," even now plays its "bum-bum-bum-bum-bumbumbum" through my head. As historical movies go, or "bio-pics" if you prefer, Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" is a marvel. Watching Leonardo DiCaprio morph before your eyes from the smooth-faced young agent-on-the-make to the crinkly-haired, hunched, jowly J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI is, in my book, a marvel of acting. Include his accent, which reminds me of someone eating a mouthful of peanuts without the crunch--all stiff jaw and chew in the hopes of not choking.
Or is the film so powerful because of its lightning-fast shifts from J. Edgar's home with Judy Dench as Mama (who flirtatiously compliments her son on his new suit) to the Bureau of Investigation line-up of prospective agents--J. Edgar tweaks their ties and warns them against facial hair (presumably to render each sleuth as neutral and unrecognizeable as possible). We shift from glimpses of a pale heroic Lindberg to J. Edgar's hiring of a beautiful young man who stands on the other side of his desk with a dreamy expression in his dark-lashed blue eyes. Surely the relationship that develops between Hoover and this agent Clyde Tolson, his life-long friend, is homosexual. But was it consummated? The movie teases us with this--they reach for each other's hands in a cab, with Mama up front who will be dropped off first. As J. Edgar mentions taking up with actress Dorothy Lamour and asks, "Is it time for a Mrs. J. Edgar," Tolson attacks him in their side-by-side hotel rooms. After that brawl, a kiss must follow. Their bruised bloody lips say a lot--without anyone having to fess-up.
DiCaprio's acting is superb. Ditto Mama and Tolson and long-time secretary Helen who refuses to marry Hoover early in their young rise to power, but agrees instead to become his private secretary. She outlives him, and in the end, true to her promise, empties the files and starts shredding. Did shredders exist in the Nixon administration? My husband and I decide probably so for government offices, if not for private homes. It is this kernel of intense secrecy played against Hoover's many sleuthing innovations that we now take for granted--like fingerprinting or analysis of crime scenes like a science lab--that support his importance in the story of fighting crime. His importance and his weakness--he wanted the glory, and in the thread that recurs throughout the film, he dictates many lies to young agents writing his memoirs. Hoover claims more for himself than he deserved, for instance that he arrested the kidnapper of the Lindberg baby (whose pathetic little skeleton was found near the Lindberg mansion). A lie, but Hoover did push for the analysis of the wood used to build the ladder which the kidnapper climbed to steal the baby from a second -floor bedroom. Throughout the shifts back and forth in time and between public and private realms, we see Hoover become more aggressive in publishing and burnishing his own valor. Was it the rise of a monomania or the necessary P.R. to keep Congressional approval of funds? There is no easy answer.
I've admired Clint Eastwood in films (The Good, Bad and the Ugly), but I think this might be the first film he'd directed that completely mesmerized me. Cudos to the screenplay as well, written by Dustin Lance Black, but from my small experience with film-making, the magic is often in the editing. This I credit to Eastwood. Not a through-story like the wonderful "King's Speech" from last year (which we thought of here because of the astonishing casts in each), "J. Edgar" emphasizes the clip and dissolve possibilities of movie-editing--quick shifts in time, place, age of main character, etc. I found it riveting, and a good choice for portraying a man who hid a lot, whose public persona was not the most loveable, and yet in the films end by being largely sympathetic if humanly fallible.
Final comment: the music was composed by director Eastwood and one of his seven children, Kyle, performed in the movie combo.
"The FBI in Peace and War"--was that the title of the radio drama? I never listened, but the music from a companion show, "Dragnet," even now plays its "bum-bum-bum-bum-bumbumbum" through my head. As historical movies go, or "bio-pics" if you prefer, Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" is a marvel. Watching Leonardo DiCaprio morph before your eyes from the smooth-faced young agent-on-the-make to the crinkly-haired, hunched, jowly J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI is, in my book, a marvel of acting. Include his accent, which reminds me of someone eating a mouthful of peanuts without the crunch--all stiff jaw and chew in the hopes of not choking.
Or is the film so powerful because of its lightning-fast shifts from J. Edgar's home with Judy Dench as Mama (who flirtatiously compliments her son on his new suit) to the Bureau of Investigation line-up of prospective agents--J. Edgar tweaks their ties and warns them against facial hair (presumably to render each sleuth as neutral and unrecognizeable as possible). We shift from glimpses of a pale heroic Lindberg to J. Edgar's hiring of a beautiful young man who stands on the other side of his desk with a dreamy expression in his dark-lashed blue eyes. Surely the relationship that develops between Hoover and this agent Clyde Tolson, his life-long friend, is homosexual. But was it consummated? The movie teases us with this--they reach for each other's hands in a cab, with Mama up front who will be dropped off first. As J. Edgar mentions taking up with actress Dorothy Lamour and asks, "Is it time for a Mrs. J. Edgar," Tolson attacks him in their side-by-side hotel rooms. After that brawl, a kiss must follow. Their bruised bloody lips say a lot--without anyone having to fess-up.
DiCaprio's acting is superb. Ditto Mama and Tolson and long-time secretary Helen who refuses to marry Hoover early in their young rise to power, but agrees instead to become his private secretary. She outlives him, and in the end, true to her promise, empties the files and starts shredding. Did shredders exist in the Nixon administration? My husband and I decide probably so for government offices, if not for private homes. It is this kernel of intense secrecy played against Hoover's many sleuthing innovations that we now take for granted--like fingerprinting or analysis of crime scenes like a science lab--that support his importance in the story of fighting crime. His importance and his weakness--he wanted the glory, and in the thread that recurs throughout the film, he dictates many lies to young agents writing his memoirs. Hoover claims more for himself than he deserved, for instance that he arrested the kidnapper of the Lindberg baby (whose pathetic little skeleton was found near the Lindberg mansion). A lie, but Hoover did push for the analysis of the wood used to build the ladder which the kidnapper climbed to steal the baby from a second -floor bedroom. Throughout the shifts back and forth in time and between public and private realms, we see Hoover become more aggressive in publishing and burnishing his own valor. Was it the rise of a monomania or the necessary P.R. to keep Congressional approval of funds? There is no easy answer.
I've admired Clint Eastwood in films (The Good, Bad and the Ugly), but I think this might be the first film he'd directed that completely mesmerized me. Cudos to the screenplay as well, written by Dustin Lance Black, but from my small experience with film-making, the magic is often in the editing. This I credit to Eastwood. Not a through-story like the wonderful "King's Speech" from last year (which we thought of here because of the astonishing casts in each), "J. Edgar" emphasizes the clip and dissolve possibilities of movie-editing--quick shifts in time, place, age of main character, etc. I found it riveting, and a good choice for portraying a man who hid a lot, whose public persona was not the most loveable, and yet in the films end by being largely sympathetic if humanly fallible.
Final comment: the music was composed by director Eastwood and one of his seven children, Kyle, performed in the movie combo.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Margotlog: The Bridges of Venice
Margotlog: The Bridges of Venice
All the bridges in Venice are pedestrian--it's a city without cars. Yet, the map shows only a few--the Rialto and the huge bridge crossing the Grand Canal before the railroad station. But how do people get across? I asked myself, studying the map in the months before I arrived. Donna Leon's mystery novels suggest all kinds of sprinting, sauntering, skulking. Surely there must be bridges.
The approach to the city over water from the Marco Polo airport is the most romantic I've ever experienced--misty, flat and watery--with the Alilaguna "motoscaffo" (great Italian word suggesting the motor part and escape) twisting around striped poles to avoid the shallows. Cormorants and gulls bobbed or soared overhead. I could have been a teen again, speeding down the Inland Waterway between wild green barrier islands south of home, Charleston, South Carolina. The same excitement of entering a watery world at a speed to put wind in your face.
The same anticipation of discovery that could plunge deep and lift into the air. Then we slowed for Murano, the huge glass-factory island, a village in itself; passed the cemetery island girded with its retrained necklace of pink and white walls below a colony of tall green cypress, and found the city itself.
I was tired and excited and a bit unsteady on my feet. With my insistent map-gazing, I'd determined that my little hotel Boccassini lay close to this northern rim of the city, but which direction from the dock? Someone pointed and said in Italian, "over two bridges." Each bridge was like an arched hand over a narrow strip of water; each had thin "steps" which required me to lift my little suitcase on its rollers, trudge to the next and lift. Many of the wider and steeper bridges did the same, but by then, I'd ditched my suitcase and taken a nap.
Here are somethings I discovered about canals and bridges. For good walking, choose a long sidewalk beside a canal. My favorite was Fondamenta dei Mendicanti, which I found by crossing another bridge along the rim of the lagoon and turning into the heart of the city. For the Venetians, "Fondamenta" means a wide paved "front" or foundation to the water. It's not the same as a "Riva," which is a much wider paved space, such as the Riva degli Schiavoni, along the Grand Canal leading toward San Marco. When I left my little hotel in its warren of crazy-making narrow streets, and found myself again on the Fondamenta Nova along the lagoon, then turned onto Fondamenta dei Mendicanti (that last word refers to beggars) I soon felt as if I might not get lost for quite a while.
This was true in part because I soon walked into what in other Italian cities would be called a piazza, but which in Venice is a campo or field. This one, Campo Santi Giavanni e Paolo (Saints John and Paul) shared its name with a wonderful building, once a church, now a huge hospital. When Napoleon deconsecrated enormous numbers of churches in the early 1800s, many immediately took on other uses. In the campo before this truly unusual building, with two half-moon atop its facade, I discovered amazing bas reliefs arranged beside the door. The image at the start of this blog is the second image. It's of men in turbans--Venice was after all linked closely with what we'd call the near east. It's no doubt an image from the Bible, though I'd be the last to guess, well ok I'll guess Joseph and his brothers.
In any case, passing the ospedale, pausing each time I passed to and fro toward the innards of Venice and more twists and turns and dead ends against walls and bridges that ended in private doors, each time passing, I would pay homage to the former church, its elegant facade opening into the campo and the astonishing images. In my next entry on Venice, I'll give you the other image, a lion forward of a long colonnade into the background. Another mystery of this amazing city.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Margotlog: Prison Diaries
Margotlog: Prison Diaries
When I met my husband, he had been out of prison nearly 20 years--the federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, where he was sent as a pacifist during the early days of the Vietnam War. Soon after he was freed in 1968, after serving 17 months, he wrote a series of prison sketches for a college class. Writing about being in prison wasn't unique to Fran. Last night I heard him and two other peacenik ex-cons read their poetry and prose about prison. The occasion was Carol Connolly's third-Tuesday reading series at Saint Paul's University Club. "I think about prison every day," said poet Jim Moore. Dramatist Frank Kroncke would agree. I don't know about Fran.
Their musings, dramatizations, rants could not have been more different. Fran transformed prison into brief, dramatic sketches of other inmates, mostly African-American bank robbers and murderers. Fran had spent time in Mississippi helping with voter registration; he'd attended the March on Washington when Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I have a dream speech." For Fran, prison became (in part) a school of "blackness." With Richard B. he was "able to really discuss blackness," Fran wrote. "I thought...being in prison, in a recognized uniform, unable to escape, degraded, deprived of even the simplest respect, subjugated to another breed of man--the hacks in their uniforms--[was] not unlike being black in a ghetto, and I supposed that my emotional responses--hostility, fear, anger, resentment, inadequacy--paralleled those of men in that more permanent situation." When Fran mentioned this idea to Richard, a successful "poet, pianist, playwright" before drugs turned him into a "junkie, prisoner, lunatic," Richard seemed to agree. Yet the more Fran thought about it, the more he realized that there was a deeper, underlying aspect: his "utter inability to describe to anyone outside, the full horrors of prison, the true depths of despair and anguish, I knew that...this was the truest, perhaps the only, parallel to being black." Richard agreed: "That's it, Man."
Jump forward to Liberia's horrendous disintegration under waves of child-soldiers led by outraged tribal people who had been dispossessed for centuries. Between 1980 and the restoration of a semblance of calm under various international peace-keeping forces, Liberia was one of the bloodiest and craziest war zones in the world. Children as young as 5 were snatched from their tribal parents and given alcohol and guns. Some insurgent groups targeted women, raping, wounding and removing them miles from their families. Often these insurgents trotted around in women's high heels and frilly wedding dresses, carrying huge purses.
Helene Cooper's memoir The House on Sugar Beach describes this period from the distance of her own rise as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. Her father had died in Liberia, her mother had finally given up and come to the U.S. permanently, joining Helene and her younger sister. The descendant of early American ex-slaves who founded the ruling "Congo" class in Liberia was now working in an American nursing home, emptying bedpans, saving money for her daughter's college education.
After joining American forces entering Iraq, journalist Helene Cooper decided she had to return to Liberia, and search for her adopted sister Eunice. Can any of us in the U.S. (except Southerners after the Civil War, except black ghetto dwellers after race riots in the North, except perhaps black ghetto dwellers at any time) truly grasp what frantic, deadly chaos is really like? No more than Fran could cross over the racial divide, even wearing the prison uniform. But Helene Cooper's memoir comes close to bringing the reader inside Liberia, decimated by over twenty years of conflict. Interestingly it was Liberian women and their political clout, their refusal to be victims anymore, who fostered resolution of the tribal conflict and the eventual election in 2006 of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Liberia's first woman president.
American women certainly played a role in the American peace movement, but here in the U.S. young men, willing to trade months of their youth to protest the Vietnam war, received the most attention. Did their actions make any difference? Was going to prison worth the loss of hope, activity, belief in a future? In the book I wrote about Fran and the peace movement in general, "Stop This War: Americans Protest the Conflict in Vietnam," he concludes in the negative. Now I imagine that the choice was made in a flush of youthful passion, a commitment to peace so intense that the young rebel could not imagine any other act. Though I could not take up a gun except in self-defense, though I understand deep down the impossibility of becoming a uniformed agent of death, I also see that for Fran, prison deadened what had been his youth. Though he certainly lived a productive life thereafter, as a librarian, father, friend, he might have served himself better as a conscientious objector doing alternative service in a hospital. There he would not have been branded, incarcerated (that word that calls up incineration), forced into subjugation. He might have been able to feel the changes in himself as he helped heal those in his care.
When I met my husband, he had been out of prison nearly 20 years--the federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, where he was sent as a pacifist during the early days of the Vietnam War. Soon after he was freed in 1968, after serving 17 months, he wrote a series of prison sketches for a college class. Writing about being in prison wasn't unique to Fran. Last night I heard him and two other peacenik ex-cons read their poetry and prose about prison. The occasion was Carol Connolly's third-Tuesday reading series at Saint Paul's University Club. "I think about prison every day," said poet Jim Moore. Dramatist Frank Kroncke would agree. I don't know about Fran.
Their musings, dramatizations, rants could not have been more different. Fran transformed prison into brief, dramatic sketches of other inmates, mostly African-American bank robbers and murderers. Fran had spent time in Mississippi helping with voter registration; he'd attended the March on Washington when Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I have a dream speech." For Fran, prison became (in part) a school of "blackness." With Richard B. he was "able to really discuss blackness," Fran wrote. "I thought...being in prison, in a recognized uniform, unable to escape, degraded, deprived of even the simplest respect, subjugated to another breed of man--the hacks in their uniforms--[was] not unlike being black in a ghetto, and I supposed that my emotional responses--hostility, fear, anger, resentment, inadequacy--paralleled those of men in that more permanent situation." When Fran mentioned this idea to Richard, a successful "poet, pianist, playwright" before drugs turned him into a "junkie, prisoner, lunatic," Richard seemed to agree. Yet the more Fran thought about it, the more he realized that there was a deeper, underlying aspect: his "utter inability to describe to anyone outside, the full horrors of prison, the true depths of despair and anguish, I knew that...this was the truest, perhaps the only, parallel to being black." Richard agreed: "That's it, Man."
Jump forward to Liberia's horrendous disintegration under waves of child-soldiers led by outraged tribal people who had been dispossessed for centuries. Between 1980 and the restoration of a semblance of calm under various international peace-keeping forces, Liberia was one of the bloodiest and craziest war zones in the world. Children as young as 5 were snatched from their tribal parents and given alcohol and guns. Some insurgent groups targeted women, raping, wounding and removing them miles from their families. Often these insurgents trotted around in women's high heels and frilly wedding dresses, carrying huge purses.
Helene Cooper's memoir The House on Sugar Beach describes this period from the distance of her own rise as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. Her father had died in Liberia, her mother had finally given up and come to the U.S. permanently, joining Helene and her younger sister. The descendant of early American ex-slaves who founded the ruling "Congo" class in Liberia was now working in an American nursing home, emptying bedpans, saving money for her daughter's college education.
After joining American forces entering Iraq, journalist Helene Cooper decided she had to return to Liberia, and search for her adopted sister Eunice. Can any of us in the U.S. (except Southerners after the Civil War, except black ghetto dwellers after race riots in the North, except perhaps black ghetto dwellers at any time) truly grasp what frantic, deadly chaos is really like? No more than Fran could cross over the racial divide, even wearing the prison uniform. But Helene Cooper's memoir comes close to bringing the reader inside Liberia, decimated by over twenty years of conflict. Interestingly it was Liberian women and their political clout, their refusal to be victims anymore, who fostered resolution of the tribal conflict and the eventual election in 2006 of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Liberia's first woman president.
American women certainly played a role in the American peace movement, but here in the U.S. young men, willing to trade months of their youth to protest the Vietnam war, received the most attention. Did their actions make any difference? Was going to prison worth the loss of hope, activity, belief in a future? In the book I wrote about Fran and the peace movement in general, "Stop This War: Americans Protest the Conflict in Vietnam," he concludes in the negative. Now I imagine that the choice was made in a flush of youthful passion, a commitment to peace so intense that the young rebel could not imagine any other act. Though I could not take up a gun except in self-defense, though I understand deep down the impossibility of becoming a uniformed agent of death, I also see that for Fran, prison deadened what had been his youth. Though he certainly lived a productive life thereafter, as a librarian, father, friend, he might have served himself better as a conscientious objector doing alternative service in a hospital. There he would not have been branded, incarcerated (that word that calls up incineration), forced into subjugation. He might have been able to feel the changes in himself as he helped heal those in his care.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Margotlog: Those Pesky Sexy Details
Margotlog: Those Pesky Sexy Details
I, who had only a single pregnancy and never wanted another, am far from one to talk. But there was a girl in my college class who went to New York for an abortion. In the details I heard, it had all the hallmarks of a classic case: a climb up a dark stairway, entry into what looked like an apartment, a meeting with a doctor (was he weary, leering, efficient?), the passing of hundreds of dollars, the procedure which inevitably left her bleeding and cramping--almost unable to walk. And her halting return down the stairs and onto the street.
She survived. It was the right decision--she was a college student with a fine mind and even in the 1960s, opportunities ahead of her. She wasn't ready for motherhood, nor was the boy who impregnated her ready for fatherhood. But it was not easy. She had the abortion alone, sneaking away from our college in Baltimore, afraid as she climbed those dark steps. The referral had come from a college friend, a native of New York. My friend took the train back to Baltimore, in pain and fear.
One of the most compelling essays in an anthology I often use with college students is an excerpt from Margaret Sanger's 1938 autobiography: lifting a line from Mathew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," the excerpt is titled "The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Human Misery." It is set in 1912 among the immigrant tenements of New York's lower East Side. As a public health nurse, Sanger was often called to treat impoverished immigrant women who'd had abortions. She recounts one case, "a small, slight Russian Jewess, about twenty-eight...of the special cast of feature to which suffering lends a madonna-like expression." Up three flights of stairs, with no running water or toilet facilities, the apartment was crammed with children and boarders. After three weeks of nursing, the tiny woman recovered, looked into Mrs. Sanger's face and said,"Another baby will finish me, I suppose."
She begs for the secret: how to prevent pregnancy. The doctor in attendance looks at her and shakes his finger: "Any more capers, young woman, and they'll be no need to send for me....Tell [your husband] to sleep on the roof." This response touches the root of the problem: it is the woman's fault, and she is amusing herself, plus husbands are difficult to "put off."
These days, we know better, don't we? Yet, unwanted pregnancy is surely at its root a woman's problem--hers the body that carries the child; hers the health which suffers from uncontrolled pregnancies or abortions. But the family as a whole and society at large can be weighted to the ground by huge numbers of children whose nurturing a family can't provide. Margaret Sanger devoted the rest of her career to championing the need for birth control. Through her efforts, laws legalizing the dissemination (notice the word) of birth control information were passed around the country. She herself opened in 1916 the nation's the first family-planning clinic, in Brooklyn.
I have few friends left from my highschool class in South Carolina. The only one I've recently renewed came to my father's funeral, which touched me quite a bit. We met a few times and enjoyed laughing over our high school selves. Then there began to appear email messages from her: she had a huge list to whom she sent political tracts. I deleted the first, but I read the second: it claimed that the Kinsey reports were responsible for rampant sexuality among young people. It deplored sex outside of marriage and castigated family planning clinics. I drew a long breath: the Kinsey reports, Sexuality in the Human Male (1948) and Sexuality in the Human Female (1953) shocked the nation, especially the second book, based on interviews with 6000 women. Their sexual behavior surprised many readers who supposed that women were prim, proper, and devoid of sexual urges.
We're beyond that now, right? How else to view TV and magazine ads that display so much of women's flesh? Far from Victorian prudery. And those are not mannikins, either. Yet, yet, there was my high school friend denouncing teenage sexuality, championing sex only within marriage. I didn't want to find out she would say about birth control or abortions.
We are truly a culture in love with paradox. Not the only one, worldwide, surely, but with our own loveable, deplorable brand of excess and shoot-from-the-hip passions. (Hmm, interesting metaphor, given the subject.) I have decided that fascination with repression is the flip side of fascination with expression. That behind every die-hard anti-abortionist lies a woman who has somehow suffered vis-a-vis her own sexuality, childbirth, family life. No one who's ever experienced an abortion suggests that it is easy: not an easy choice, an easy procedure to undergo, or an easy aftermath to live with. Prevention is far, far preferable. I practiced prevention with an assiduity I have reserved for almost nothing else. According to statistics I read recently, Planned Parenthood's work is a little less than 95% devoted to helping poor women find workable alternatives to abortion. Their clients include college students or teens who are afraid to see their family doctor.
After two pregnancy scares, one when I was a senior in high school and one as a freshman in college, I asked my somewhat older roommate for a referral to a doctor in Baltimore. I went by myself, taking the bus into downtown Baltimore from my suburban campus. The doctor looked at me sternly: "Do your parents know you are doing this?" When I remember now how I quaked under his stern, unfamiliar gaze, I am appalled at his invasion of my privacy. But this was the early 1960s! I took the only choice open to me: I lied: "Oh yes," I assured him. "I'm engaged to be married." I wasn't. In fact, I would break up with my young man within a month. He was six years older than I and not willing to "wait" for me. "Oh yes," I repeated. "We're getting married in a month."
I never looked back. That diaphragm became one of my best friends.
I, who had only a single pregnancy and never wanted another, am far from one to talk. But there was a girl in my college class who went to New York for an abortion. In the details I heard, it had all the hallmarks of a classic case: a climb up a dark stairway, entry into what looked like an apartment, a meeting with a doctor (was he weary, leering, efficient?), the passing of hundreds of dollars, the procedure which inevitably left her bleeding and cramping--almost unable to walk. And her halting return down the stairs and onto the street.
She survived. It was the right decision--she was a college student with a fine mind and even in the 1960s, opportunities ahead of her. She wasn't ready for motherhood, nor was the boy who impregnated her ready for fatherhood. But it was not easy. She had the abortion alone, sneaking away from our college in Baltimore, afraid as she climbed those dark steps. The referral had come from a college friend, a native of New York. My friend took the train back to Baltimore, in pain and fear.
One of the most compelling essays in an anthology I often use with college students is an excerpt from Margaret Sanger's 1938 autobiography: lifting a line from Mathew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," the excerpt is titled "The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Human Misery." It is set in 1912 among the immigrant tenements of New York's lower East Side. As a public health nurse, Sanger was often called to treat impoverished immigrant women who'd had abortions. She recounts one case, "a small, slight Russian Jewess, about twenty-eight...of the special cast of feature to which suffering lends a madonna-like expression." Up three flights of stairs, with no running water or toilet facilities, the apartment was crammed with children and boarders. After three weeks of nursing, the tiny woman recovered, looked into Mrs. Sanger's face and said,"Another baby will finish me, I suppose."
She begs for the secret: how to prevent pregnancy. The doctor in attendance looks at her and shakes his finger: "Any more capers, young woman, and they'll be no need to send for me....Tell [your husband] to sleep on the roof." This response touches the root of the problem: it is the woman's fault, and she is amusing herself, plus husbands are difficult to "put off."
These days, we know better, don't we? Yet, unwanted pregnancy is surely at its root a woman's problem--hers the body that carries the child; hers the health which suffers from uncontrolled pregnancies or abortions. But the family as a whole and society at large can be weighted to the ground by huge numbers of children whose nurturing a family can't provide. Margaret Sanger devoted the rest of her career to championing the need for birth control. Through her efforts, laws legalizing the dissemination (notice the word) of birth control information were passed around the country. She herself opened in 1916 the nation's the first family-planning clinic, in Brooklyn.
I have few friends left from my highschool class in South Carolina. The only one I've recently renewed came to my father's funeral, which touched me quite a bit. We met a few times and enjoyed laughing over our high school selves. Then there began to appear email messages from her: she had a huge list to whom she sent political tracts. I deleted the first, but I read the second: it claimed that the Kinsey reports were responsible for rampant sexuality among young people. It deplored sex outside of marriage and castigated family planning clinics. I drew a long breath: the Kinsey reports, Sexuality in the Human Male (1948) and Sexuality in the Human Female (1953) shocked the nation, especially the second book, based on interviews with 6000 women. Their sexual behavior surprised many readers who supposed that women were prim, proper, and devoid of sexual urges.
We're beyond that now, right? How else to view TV and magazine ads that display so much of women's flesh? Far from Victorian prudery. And those are not mannikins, either. Yet, yet, there was my high school friend denouncing teenage sexuality, championing sex only within marriage. I didn't want to find out she would say about birth control or abortions.
We are truly a culture in love with paradox. Not the only one, worldwide, surely, but with our own loveable, deplorable brand of excess and shoot-from-the-hip passions. (Hmm, interesting metaphor, given the subject.) I have decided that fascination with repression is the flip side of fascination with expression. That behind every die-hard anti-abortionist lies a woman who has somehow suffered vis-a-vis her own sexuality, childbirth, family life. No one who's ever experienced an abortion suggests that it is easy: not an easy choice, an easy procedure to undergo, or an easy aftermath to live with. Prevention is far, far preferable. I practiced prevention with an assiduity I have reserved for almost nothing else. According to statistics I read recently, Planned Parenthood's work is a little less than 95% devoted to helping poor women find workable alternatives to abortion. Their clients include college students or teens who are afraid to see their family doctor.
After two pregnancy scares, one when I was a senior in high school and one as a freshman in college, I asked my somewhat older roommate for a referral to a doctor in Baltimore. I went by myself, taking the bus into downtown Baltimore from my suburban campus. The doctor looked at me sternly: "Do your parents know you are doing this?" When I remember now how I quaked under his stern, unfamiliar gaze, I am appalled at his invasion of my privacy. But this was the early 1960s! I took the only choice open to me: I lied: "Oh yes," I assured him. "I'm engaged to be married." I wasn't. In fact, I would break up with my young man within a month. He was six years older than I and not willing to "wait" for me. "Oh yes," I repeated. "We're getting married in a month."
I never looked back. That diaphragm became one of my best friends.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Margotlog: Into the Woods
Margotlog: Into the Woods
While northern Minnesota is straining for a flash of white, ready to send a shot into the woods, I'm driving east and south into rolling farm country around Afton where glimpses of the St. Croix River shine through the trees. The woods in this longest of falls have lost most of their color and a haze hangs over the trees. It's as if we dream deep into something ancient and immoveable, some living being that settles into rest.
At eleven this morning, we will congregate, my lovely daughter and I, with long-time friends of the family to sing Frank into the ground. He was the father of my daughter's first lasting love, a tall supple man with a '50s crew cut and a slow smile. I saw him only twice. Were it not for her continuing affection for his son and her diffidence in appearing among this family whom she has not seen for a long time, I would not be accompanying her. But I am happy to leave my city routine behind, to drive into another landscape, and step out of the car beside a small cemetery adorned with enormous spruce and slender cedars twined together over graves.
It is a modern church, but it has simplicity and the warmth of wood beams. Since we know so few and feel a bit awkward, we slide into a pew to the side and somewhat back. A woman is playing hymns at a piano, familiar in their overall effect, the best part of Protestantism I often think, these songs with their hint of folk melodies and quirky inner verses. Suddenly tears prick my eyes, and my daughter puts her arm around me. I am weeping with an inexpressible sadness that lies most days far below the surface, sadness that swoops far south to my parents' last years in South Carolina, where fifteen years apart, they also went into the ground.
I didn't see my mother buried, but both my daughter and I remember my father's funeral, when my mother was still feisty and resistant to any effort on our part to contribute what she had not vetted. It almost makes me smile, how she went at my daughter's and sister's desire to sing at the funeral, her fury mixed with whatever anguish and struggle she'd suffered but would never express.
Who knows what family torment has gone into the making of this slowly unfolding celebration of Frank's life.
Two things stand out: the first is the exquisite eulogy offered by the son who is now my daughter's dear friend. It's years since I have spent time with this son, who is now at least forty-five. Like his father, his demeanor has always been extremely quiet. Thus I have had no reason to expect the story-telling eloquence, the quiet humor and clear, abiding affection of his tribute. As he speaks, I sense that since I saw him last--was it ten years ago?--he has matured enormously. During his father's slow decline, he acted as his mother's right-hand, negotiating the shift to various care centers, and now with restrained grace giving him to us before he is truly gone. I sense that as he honors his father, he is also ushering himself into greater freedom and the possibility of accomplishment beyond what has been possible before. This was certainly true of me, I tell my daughter later. I flowered after my father's death, as if freed to present myself to the world as I wished, not hampered by his many fears and prohibitions.
The other thing I notice and dislike deeply in the ensuing service are the Bible readings. Though there is nothing inherently offensive about them, they are rendered in a modern translation. The beloved King James version has been put aside. "Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," becomes something like "though I walk through a dark valley." And "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies," becomes something like "you feed me even in difficult times." No, no, no, my heart and mind object. No! You are tampering not only with memories that go far back into childhood, but you have robbed of memorable music some of the most beautifully rendered passages of the Bible.
As my daughter and I drive away after the service, she comments about the liturgical elements in the funeral, "They have such iconic power, yet at the same time they felt null and void." I agree, then I add that the glorious language of the King James Version resonates across time and space, linking us in the English-speaking world to virtually the earliest Protestant English versions of the Bible. No modern translation can do this. Its language is too contemporary; it might just as well have been lifted from the pages of the newspaper. Frank, whose steadfastness will endure among those who knew him, deserved better. As do we who came to celebrate his life.
While northern Minnesota is straining for a flash of white, ready to send a shot into the woods, I'm driving east and south into rolling farm country around Afton where glimpses of the St. Croix River shine through the trees. The woods in this longest of falls have lost most of their color and a haze hangs over the trees. It's as if we dream deep into something ancient and immoveable, some living being that settles into rest.
At eleven this morning, we will congregate, my lovely daughter and I, with long-time friends of the family to sing Frank into the ground. He was the father of my daughter's first lasting love, a tall supple man with a '50s crew cut and a slow smile. I saw him only twice. Were it not for her continuing affection for his son and her diffidence in appearing among this family whom she has not seen for a long time, I would not be accompanying her. But I am happy to leave my city routine behind, to drive into another landscape, and step out of the car beside a small cemetery adorned with enormous spruce and slender cedars twined together over graves.
It is a modern church, but it has simplicity and the warmth of wood beams. Since we know so few and feel a bit awkward, we slide into a pew to the side and somewhat back. A woman is playing hymns at a piano, familiar in their overall effect, the best part of Protestantism I often think, these songs with their hint of folk melodies and quirky inner verses. Suddenly tears prick my eyes, and my daughter puts her arm around me. I am weeping with an inexpressible sadness that lies most days far below the surface, sadness that swoops far south to my parents' last years in South Carolina, where fifteen years apart, they also went into the ground.
I didn't see my mother buried, but both my daughter and I remember my father's funeral, when my mother was still feisty and resistant to any effort on our part to contribute what she had not vetted. It almost makes me smile, how she went at my daughter's and sister's desire to sing at the funeral, her fury mixed with whatever anguish and struggle she'd suffered but would never express.
Who knows what family torment has gone into the making of this slowly unfolding celebration of Frank's life.
Two things stand out: the first is the exquisite eulogy offered by the son who is now my daughter's dear friend. It's years since I have spent time with this son, who is now at least forty-five. Like his father, his demeanor has always been extremely quiet. Thus I have had no reason to expect the story-telling eloquence, the quiet humor and clear, abiding affection of his tribute. As he speaks, I sense that since I saw him last--was it ten years ago?--he has matured enormously. During his father's slow decline, he acted as his mother's right-hand, negotiating the shift to various care centers, and now with restrained grace giving him to us before he is truly gone. I sense that as he honors his father, he is also ushering himself into greater freedom and the possibility of accomplishment beyond what has been possible before. This was certainly true of me, I tell my daughter later. I flowered after my father's death, as if freed to present myself to the world as I wished, not hampered by his many fears and prohibitions.
The other thing I notice and dislike deeply in the ensuing service are the Bible readings. Though there is nothing inherently offensive about them, they are rendered in a modern translation. The beloved King James version has been put aside. "Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," becomes something like "though I walk through a dark valley." And "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies," becomes something like "you feed me even in difficult times." No, no, no, my heart and mind object. No! You are tampering not only with memories that go far back into childhood, but you have robbed of memorable music some of the most beautifully rendered passages of the Bible.
As my daughter and I drive away after the service, she comments about the liturgical elements in the funeral, "They have such iconic power, yet at the same time they felt null and void." I agree, then I add that the glorious language of the King James Version resonates across time and space, linking us in the English-speaking world to virtually the earliest Protestant English versions of the Bible. No modern translation can do this. Its language is too contemporary; it might just as well have been lifted from the pages of the newspaper. Frank, whose steadfastness will endure among those who knew him, deserved better. As do we who came to celebrate his life.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Margotlog: What Use Is Oral History?
Margotlog: What Use Is Oral History?
Oral History came of age for the general reader in the United States with Studs Terkel's various volumes--Working, Hard Times (about the Great Depression) and The Good War (World War II). Published between 1974 and 1985, these works of oral history bought to the page and national sales the voices of common people, whether they be down-and-out (to borrow a phrase from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933) or wealthy unknowns. Now I'm trying to convince a newer generation of the value in oral history.
We've been reading two Native American works--Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, the book I wrote with Ojibway artist George Morrison (probably the premier Minnesota Native artist, whose work was accorded one of two solo exhibits when the National Museum of the American Indian opened in 2004) and N. Scott Momaday's The Names. Though they rely heavily on oral history and on memory, these are rather different books. In part because Momaday's Kiowa, Oklahoma ancestry was made real and vivid to him in his childhood by family storytelling; whereas, George Morrison's history was slowly eroding, being replaced by the English language and life of Grand Marais, the small Lake Superior town near his childhood home.
Momaday's lyrical work of memory and coming of age is suffused with family stories which entered his consciousness at so early an age that they became mingled with his own growing perceptions. Several students in my class object to his willingness to report these many-times remembered events, though he certainly indicates the uncertainties that inhere in them. My students consider them "tainted." I, on the other hand, find these account of frayed remembrances both believable and compelling, like an ancient shield painted with figures which are in some places are worn away. But I have spent years considering how some groups find their way into written and print accounts, while others do not. It is largely a function of power--museums, publishing houses, even the use of a particular favored language, like English, all have to do with power and the control of various destinies.
Let me tack another published work onto these musings: The House on Sugar Beach, Helene Cooper's lively and vivid account of growing up wealthy on the outskirts of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, not a place many residents of the United States think much about. Cooper, a journalist, draws us back into her childhood in this huge house on the beach. Here, her wealthy parents, one descended from the first free African-Americans who settled in Liberia, have made a leisurely life for themselves. In the process, she relates quite a bit about the 1820 arrival of a shipload of African-Americans from the United States, their decimation by disease, the few remaining leaders' war against the native inhabitants, and eventual establishment of Monrovia and subjugation of the locals. Over the years I've heard about the American Colonization Society's attempt to solve the U.S. "slavery question" by repatriating freed slaves to Liberia. But until Cooper's book, I had no idea the process was so filled with drama and strife. Some of the history Cooper relates is no doubt written down, but what she tells, as passed down from her ancient ancestor through other family, has a gritty, believable quality that I suspect most history books avoid.
Not to mention that in her rendition of her own work, she slides delightfully from the native Liberian patois (a lively version of English) into standard English and back again. How much would be lost without the spoken word! How empty and hollow would be our lives without memory and family stories! I think I'll wait until my unconvinced students spend another decade on the planet before I query them again. As I look back over my own and now my daughter's life, it seems to me that not until we cross into our late 30s and early 40s do we begin to realize how valuable are these memories and family histories. Then we begin gathering them for ourselves.
Oral History came of age for the general reader in the United States with Studs Terkel's various volumes--Working, Hard Times (about the Great Depression) and The Good War (World War II). Published between 1974 and 1985, these works of oral history bought to the page and national sales the voices of common people, whether they be down-and-out (to borrow a phrase from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933) or wealthy unknowns. Now I'm trying to convince a newer generation of the value in oral history.
We've been reading two Native American works--Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, the book I wrote with Ojibway artist George Morrison (probably the premier Minnesota Native artist, whose work was accorded one of two solo exhibits when the National Museum of the American Indian opened in 2004) and N. Scott Momaday's The Names. Though they rely heavily on oral history and on memory, these are rather different books. In part because Momaday's Kiowa, Oklahoma ancestry was made real and vivid to him in his childhood by family storytelling; whereas, George Morrison's history was slowly eroding, being replaced by the English language and life of Grand Marais, the small Lake Superior town near his childhood home.
Momaday's lyrical work of memory and coming of age is suffused with family stories which entered his consciousness at so early an age that they became mingled with his own growing perceptions. Several students in my class object to his willingness to report these many-times remembered events, though he certainly indicates the uncertainties that inhere in them. My students consider them "tainted." I, on the other hand, find these account of frayed remembrances both believable and compelling, like an ancient shield painted with figures which are in some places are worn away. But I have spent years considering how some groups find their way into written and print accounts, while others do not. It is largely a function of power--museums, publishing houses, even the use of a particular favored language, like English, all have to do with power and the control of various destinies.
Let me tack another published work onto these musings: The House on Sugar Beach, Helene Cooper's lively and vivid account of growing up wealthy on the outskirts of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, not a place many residents of the United States think much about. Cooper, a journalist, draws us back into her childhood in this huge house on the beach. Here, her wealthy parents, one descended from the first free African-Americans who settled in Liberia, have made a leisurely life for themselves. In the process, she relates quite a bit about the 1820 arrival of a shipload of African-Americans from the United States, their decimation by disease, the few remaining leaders' war against the native inhabitants, and eventual establishment of Monrovia and subjugation of the locals. Over the years I've heard about the American Colonization Society's attempt to solve the U.S. "slavery question" by repatriating freed slaves to Liberia. But until Cooper's book, I had no idea the process was so filled with drama and strife. Some of the history Cooper relates is no doubt written down, but what she tells, as passed down from her ancient ancestor through other family, has a gritty, believable quality that I suspect most history books avoid.
Not to mention that in her rendition of her own work, she slides delightfully from the native Liberian patois (a lively version of English) into standard English and back again. How much would be lost without the spoken word! How empty and hollow would be our lives without memory and family stories! I think I'll wait until my unconvinced students spend another decade on the planet before I query them again. As I look back over my own and now my daughter's life, it seems to me that not until we cross into our late 30s and early 40s do we begin to realize how valuable are these memories and family histories. Then we begin gathering them for ourselves.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Margotlog: Say After Me: Global, Local, Global, Local
Margotlog: Say After Me: Global, Local, Global, Local
We've just turned our clocks back. I never can remember which we acquire with each spring/fall maneuver--more or less light, morning or evening. But waking in the dark as I usually do, winter or summer, I send filaments of light far and wee, to borrow a phrase from one of America's most wonder-filled poets, e.e.cummings.
As I lie in the dark of morning, polar bears enter frigid Artic waters with fewer and fewer ice floes to rest on; displaced Somali herdsmen wander south, their herds having died of thirst and lack of food. Bangkok and the east coast of the U.S. are pummeled with various forms of wet--typhoons, hurricane, snowfall. Texas experiences drought and high temperatures greater than ever recorded.
This sends me looping back to the "little Ice Age" which has been identified by all kinds of measures to have occurred off and on from 1315 to the end of the 19th century. Rivers in England and the Netherlands, not to mention New York Harbor and the Baltic Sea froze during this period. Crops failed from cold and wet, with great famines being recorded in 1315-17. Colonies in Greenland starved and were abandoned. Ice persisted on Lake Superior until June. And the great violin maker Stradivari created his world-reknown violins out of wood made denser by the shorter growing seasons. Finally, two crashes in world population occurred first in Europe during the Black Death and then in the Americas following European contact and the scourges of measles, smallpox, and other infectious diseases against which Native Americans had no immunity. With the drop in agriculture, more trees grew back. As we should know by now, reforestation soaks up warming gases, cooling the atmosphere.
According to weather scientists, we should be in the middle of a 4000 year cooling period, but instead because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases--created by human burning of fossil fuels--we are experiencing global warming. A few days ago, this up-tic in greenhouse gas was measured as much higher than predicted. We may have passed that point of no quick return identified by climate expert James Hansen. According to Hansen (see his book Storms of My Grandchildren) the largest culprit in the greenhouse production which the US can control is coal. His "Declaration of Stewardship" urges a moratorium on coal burning because much of the world's oil and gas comes from other countries whose politics cannot be controlled. Whereas, the US has large deposits of coal still to be retrieved and burned. He opposes a cap and trade format and urges a carbon tax on oil, gas, coal with 100% dividend (meaning, I think, that the tax would be 100% returned to the users).
As I ready my trees and perennials for this very dry onset of our harshest Minnesota season--the BIG W!--I rake and carry all the leaves from my silver maples (one of the most hardy native trees) and my boulevard ash (unfortunately targeted by the ash borer, though I've had my tree treated twice). I mound these leaves around the base of trees including evergreens, shrubs, perennials. And of course I have watered them all very well before doing so. We live in an urban heat island. The state is planning to position devices through the Twin Cities to test just how much warmer, and yes drier, we are. I personally find drought much more problematic than wet. Seems to me I read that we have not had a full complement of 20-22 inches of rain for around 5 years. Yes we have a large river that runs through us. We have many lakes. And our huge snowfall last year and wet spring may well have replenished our underground acquifers. But I still count on my trees to cool my house, to "eat" greenhouse gas, and spread that life-giving oxygen around the neighborhood.
Remember, my dear friends and neighbors, far and wee, trees are our best hope against global warming, especially in this neanderthal political period when our politicos are butting heads and refusing to take what seem the most obvious steps toward protecting our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which increasingly means taking major steps to control our contribution (huge!) to global warming.
We've just turned our clocks back. I never can remember which we acquire with each spring/fall maneuver--more or less light, morning or evening. But waking in the dark as I usually do, winter or summer, I send filaments of light far and wee, to borrow a phrase from one of America's most wonder-filled poets, e.e.cummings.
As I lie in the dark of morning, polar bears enter frigid Artic waters with fewer and fewer ice floes to rest on; displaced Somali herdsmen wander south, their herds having died of thirst and lack of food. Bangkok and the east coast of the U.S. are pummeled with various forms of wet--typhoons, hurricane, snowfall. Texas experiences drought and high temperatures greater than ever recorded.
This sends me looping back to the "little Ice Age" which has been identified by all kinds of measures to have occurred off and on from 1315 to the end of the 19th century. Rivers in England and the Netherlands, not to mention New York Harbor and the Baltic Sea froze during this period. Crops failed from cold and wet, with great famines being recorded in 1315-17. Colonies in Greenland starved and were abandoned. Ice persisted on Lake Superior until June. And the great violin maker Stradivari created his world-reknown violins out of wood made denser by the shorter growing seasons. Finally, two crashes in world population occurred first in Europe during the Black Death and then in the Americas following European contact and the scourges of measles, smallpox, and other infectious diseases against which Native Americans had no immunity. With the drop in agriculture, more trees grew back. As we should know by now, reforestation soaks up warming gases, cooling the atmosphere.
According to weather scientists, we should be in the middle of a 4000 year cooling period, but instead because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases--created by human burning of fossil fuels--we are experiencing global warming. A few days ago, this up-tic in greenhouse gas was measured as much higher than predicted. We may have passed that point of no quick return identified by climate expert James Hansen. According to Hansen (see his book Storms of My Grandchildren) the largest culprit in the greenhouse production which the US can control is coal. His "Declaration of Stewardship" urges a moratorium on coal burning because much of the world's oil and gas comes from other countries whose politics cannot be controlled. Whereas, the US has large deposits of coal still to be retrieved and burned. He opposes a cap and trade format and urges a carbon tax on oil, gas, coal with 100% dividend (meaning, I think, that the tax would be 100% returned to the users).
As I ready my trees and perennials for this very dry onset of our harshest Minnesota season--the BIG W!--I rake and carry all the leaves from my silver maples (one of the most hardy native trees) and my boulevard ash (unfortunately targeted by the ash borer, though I've had my tree treated twice). I mound these leaves around the base of trees including evergreens, shrubs, perennials. And of course I have watered them all very well before doing so. We live in an urban heat island. The state is planning to position devices through the Twin Cities to test just how much warmer, and yes drier, we are. I personally find drought much more problematic than wet. Seems to me I read that we have not had a full complement of 20-22 inches of rain for around 5 years. Yes we have a large river that runs through us. We have many lakes. And our huge snowfall last year and wet spring may well have replenished our underground acquifers. But I still count on my trees to cool my house, to "eat" greenhouse gas, and spread that life-giving oxygen around the neighborhood.
Remember, my dear friends and neighbors, far and wee, trees are our best hope against global warming, especially in this neanderthal political period when our politicos are butting heads and refusing to take what seem the most obvious steps toward protecting our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which increasingly means taking major steps to control our contribution (huge!) to global warming.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Margotlog: The Voicing of Literature: the Water*Stone Readiing
Margotlog: The Voicing of Literature--the Water*Stone Reading
Last night I attended a "reading" of works from the recent issue of Water*Stone, published by Hamline University's MFA Program in Writing. Since I'm an occasional teacher in the overarching program called Graduate Liberal Studies, I have a stake in the journal's success.
I've been attending literary readings for decades--yes, I admit it--it's been this long. For perhaps the last four years, I've also been listening to books on disc every night while I stretch, soak my eyes, take vitamins, etc. It's a great way to clear away the nags and spars of the day and encourage a rich flow of sleep. This experience has netted me two favorite readers: Nelson Runger and Flo Gibson.
Both these readers have what we'd call gravelly voices, voices with glints and many sharp edges. They do not run mellifluously (whew! lots of l's) along, those honey-toned voices that eventually put you to sleep, as mead did the Greeks, mead being liquor made of honey. I'll also add as two of my favorite literary voices, David McCullough, the author of wonderfully alert and energetic history books, and Toni Morrison, especially reading her book of all books, the novel Beloved. Unlike these two, most authors I've found do not make the best oral presenters of their work.
Recently I listened to Flo Gibson read Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Within the rather narrow range of the novel, set in Sir Bertram's home and grounds, with one late incursion into poverty amid the seaside Portsmouth family of the novel's main character Fanny Price, there are characters with widely divergent intelligences and experience. Sir Bertram has just returned from Antigua. Lady Bertram, the languid, voices her way through life with repetitive and quiet requests. Her sister, Mrs. Norris, could not be more sharp-tongued, opinionated, insistent on pre-eminence (though, of course, she doesn't deserve it--she's the splinter stuck in the novel's side, constantly annoying and ultimately infected!) Fanny herself is quiet, submissive, yet her inner life is full of alarms, passions, and growing moral intelligence. Then there is Edmund, her slightly older cousin, Sir and Lady Bertram's second son, who becomes Fanny's champion in the family, her confidante, and at the very very end, her husband. Across this well-regulated family flashes the Crawfords, Mary and Henry--two delightful though spoiled orphans brought up by the unregenerate rake Admiral Crawford. These two bring London life and morals into the Northamptonshire community.
Flo Gibson renders the intricacies of Jane Austen's small world to humorous perfection with her gravelly range--soft and subdued for Fanny and the same though flatter for Lady Bertram. Sharp-edged and noisy for Mrs. Norris, deeper and commanding for Sir Bertram, reflective and encouraging or worried for Edmund, then for Mary and Henry Craqford, a harder, brighter tone with slightly faster delivery. She also captures to perfection Fanny's Portsmouth mother who whines and droops under the weight of her alcoholic husband's inadequacies--also rendered with bluff believability. Though far from the range of Dickens' Oliver Twist, which Flo Gibson also delivers with astonishing and varied accents, her version of Mansfield Park gives substance and the play of motion, light and shadow, along with the ever-increasing moral complication of the story. It's a remarkable achievement.
Now back to the Water*Stone reading. There were some excellent voices. I'll single out my friend Morgan Grace Willow for her presentation of her essay "Signs of the Time," about a Minneapolis gang murder of a hapless young dear black man. With her long experience of signing for the deaf, Morgan has also created a clear vocal delivery which is easy to hear and helps the story develop its own momentum. We are sorry to have her stop. Many many of the poetry readers did not do justice to their work: their voices either too low or too fast or too wispy. Robert Bly, MInnesota's first poet laureate, used to ask "Want to hear that again?" after just finishing reading a poem. Some of us used to groan because his first delivery was rich and maybe a bit too cadenced, but perfectly intelligible. I could have heard many of the Water*Stone poems a second, even a third time.
One of the prose readers, June Melby, had a bad throat and made the excellent decision to ask one of the editors to read for her. Her piece, "Take a Break for a Delicious Sno-Cone," sent many of us in the audience into amused chuckles and murmurs. It was my husband's favorite piece. Why? Because he could hear every word distinctly.
Last night I attended a "reading" of works from the recent issue of Water*Stone, published by Hamline University's MFA Program in Writing. Since I'm an occasional teacher in the overarching program called Graduate Liberal Studies, I have a stake in the journal's success.
I've been attending literary readings for decades--yes, I admit it--it's been this long. For perhaps the last four years, I've also been listening to books on disc every night while I stretch, soak my eyes, take vitamins, etc. It's a great way to clear away the nags and spars of the day and encourage a rich flow of sleep. This experience has netted me two favorite readers: Nelson Runger and Flo Gibson.
Both these readers have what we'd call gravelly voices, voices with glints and many sharp edges. They do not run mellifluously (whew! lots of l's) along, those honey-toned voices that eventually put you to sleep, as mead did the Greeks, mead being liquor made of honey. I'll also add as two of my favorite literary voices, David McCullough, the author of wonderfully alert and energetic history books, and Toni Morrison, especially reading her book of all books, the novel Beloved. Unlike these two, most authors I've found do not make the best oral presenters of their work.
Recently I listened to Flo Gibson read Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Within the rather narrow range of the novel, set in Sir Bertram's home and grounds, with one late incursion into poverty amid the seaside Portsmouth family of the novel's main character Fanny Price, there are characters with widely divergent intelligences and experience. Sir Bertram has just returned from Antigua. Lady Bertram, the languid, voices her way through life with repetitive and quiet requests. Her sister, Mrs. Norris, could not be more sharp-tongued, opinionated, insistent on pre-eminence (though, of course, she doesn't deserve it--she's the splinter stuck in the novel's side, constantly annoying and ultimately infected!) Fanny herself is quiet, submissive, yet her inner life is full of alarms, passions, and growing moral intelligence. Then there is Edmund, her slightly older cousin, Sir and Lady Bertram's second son, who becomes Fanny's champion in the family, her confidante, and at the very very end, her husband. Across this well-regulated family flashes the Crawfords, Mary and Henry--two delightful though spoiled orphans brought up by the unregenerate rake Admiral Crawford. These two bring London life and morals into the Northamptonshire community.
Flo Gibson renders the intricacies of Jane Austen's small world to humorous perfection with her gravelly range--soft and subdued for Fanny and the same though flatter for Lady Bertram. Sharp-edged and noisy for Mrs. Norris, deeper and commanding for Sir Bertram, reflective and encouraging or worried for Edmund, then for Mary and Henry Craqford, a harder, brighter tone with slightly faster delivery. She also captures to perfection Fanny's Portsmouth mother who whines and droops under the weight of her alcoholic husband's inadequacies--also rendered with bluff believability. Though far from the range of Dickens' Oliver Twist, which Flo Gibson also delivers with astonishing and varied accents, her version of Mansfield Park gives substance and the play of motion, light and shadow, along with the ever-increasing moral complication of the story. It's a remarkable achievement.
Now back to the Water*Stone reading. There were some excellent voices. I'll single out my friend Morgan Grace Willow for her presentation of her essay "Signs of the Time," about a Minneapolis gang murder of a hapless young dear black man. With her long experience of signing for the deaf, Morgan has also created a clear vocal delivery which is easy to hear and helps the story develop its own momentum. We are sorry to have her stop. Many many of the poetry readers did not do justice to their work: their voices either too low or too fast or too wispy. Robert Bly, MInnesota's first poet laureate, used to ask "Want to hear that again?" after just finishing reading a poem. Some of us used to groan because his first delivery was rich and maybe a bit too cadenced, but perfectly intelligible. I could have heard many of the Water*Stone poems a second, even a third time.
One of the prose readers, June Melby, had a bad throat and made the excellent decision to ask one of the editors to read for her. Her piece, "Take a Break for a Delicious Sno-Cone," sent many of us in the audience into amused chuckles and murmurs. It was my husband's favorite piece. Why? Because he could hear every word distinctly.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Margotlog: Generation Gaps
Margotlog: Generation Gaps
I like to think the gaps between generations are not defined (in the U.S.) by technological changes, but so they are. My adorable, 94-year-old Cousin Eleanor teases her 40-something gynecologist that she not only remembers radio and newsreels but pre-radio. He looks at her like a freak of nature, a totally alive fossil. For my sister and me growing up in the 1950s, radio brought us the Everly Brothers singing "Wake Up, Little Susie" and Elvis crooning "Treat me like a fool, but love me..." and whatever preceded that. My father sat at a card table in the living room, scratching his receding hairline, correcting papers, and listening to the World Series on the radio. Yes, by that time, we had moved across the Cooper River Bridge from Charleston, to the tiny town of Mt. Pleasant, and we had a TV. But we watched it only on Sunday nights when my mother set up TV tables in the living room and we were entertained by the Ed Sullivan show where Elvis would shock the nation with his gyrating hips.
All that seems very long ago. Yet something of the same phenomenon exists today. Recently a student wrote in some concern about the waning of oral history. He opined that with the advent of handheld electronic devices, the young and younger generations would lose the ability to listen. Even the ability to manipulate a magazine. He heard about a pre-walking baby who'd been given a handheld device and quickly learned to "flip" the pages by touching the tiny screen, yet when given a magazine, and finding that touching the cover brought no response, the baby began to scream. Hmmm, will our hands quickly evolve (like the constant up-ticking of greenhouse gases) into stumps?
Unlikely. An interest in family and community history, which can best be told by those who either lived it or heard it from earlier generations, usually does not appear until age thirty-five or forty. We have to live a certain amount of time ourselves, and develop the perspective to realize that we have vivid memories of childhood, before we become alert to the stories of our elders. N. Scott Momaday's wonderfully evocative memory dream of his Kiowa people, The Names (1976), reaches deep into the collective knowledge of Kiowa arrival: the coming-out people who emerged through a hollow log until a pregnant woman became stuck and thus stopped further generation. In early morning dark, when my mind swings far and wide, I imagine that this genesis is as mythic and meaningful as the story of African ancestors who spread through eons of time to every inhabitable place on the globe, changing their skins and tongues as they go. What is deep and narrow for the Kiowa is wide and slow for believers in evolution.
Momaday's account of his tribal and family arrival in Oklahoma--from Montana on his Kiowa father's side and Kentucky on his mother's Anglo-Saxon and Cherokee side; their eventual removal to the Jemez pueblo in New Mexico--brings up another American author of the middle west and southwest, Willa Cather. Her novel about the first bishop of Santa Fe, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927, made Time Magazine's list of the 100 best books in the English language.
As Momaday writes, "It is a principle of their lives that the pueblo people move ever towards the center." And "Water is a holy thing in the pueblos. You come to understand there how the heart yearns for it." And "The Roman Catholic churches...seem to be appropriated by the culture and to express it in its own terms." Cather shows this last most emphatically in the story of two French priests who attempt to oust their Spanish predecessors and in the process realize it is the native people themselves whose resist like the land.
I like to think the gaps between generations are not defined (in the U.S.) by technological changes, but so they are. My adorable, 94-year-old Cousin Eleanor teases her 40-something gynecologist that she not only remembers radio and newsreels but pre-radio. He looks at her like a freak of nature, a totally alive fossil. For my sister and me growing up in the 1950s, radio brought us the Everly Brothers singing "Wake Up, Little Susie" and Elvis crooning "Treat me like a fool, but love me..." and whatever preceded that. My father sat at a card table in the living room, scratching his receding hairline, correcting papers, and listening to the World Series on the radio. Yes, by that time, we had moved across the Cooper River Bridge from Charleston, to the tiny town of Mt. Pleasant, and we had a TV. But we watched it only on Sunday nights when my mother set up TV tables in the living room and we were entertained by the Ed Sullivan show where Elvis would shock the nation with his gyrating hips.
All that seems very long ago. Yet something of the same phenomenon exists today. Recently a student wrote in some concern about the waning of oral history. He opined that with the advent of handheld electronic devices, the young and younger generations would lose the ability to listen. Even the ability to manipulate a magazine. He heard about a pre-walking baby who'd been given a handheld device and quickly learned to "flip" the pages by touching the tiny screen, yet when given a magazine, and finding that touching the cover brought no response, the baby began to scream. Hmmm, will our hands quickly evolve (like the constant up-ticking of greenhouse gases) into stumps?
Unlikely. An interest in family and community history, which can best be told by those who either lived it or heard it from earlier generations, usually does not appear until age thirty-five or forty. We have to live a certain amount of time ourselves, and develop the perspective to realize that we have vivid memories of childhood, before we become alert to the stories of our elders. N. Scott Momaday's wonderfully evocative memory dream of his Kiowa people, The Names (1976), reaches deep into the collective knowledge of Kiowa arrival: the coming-out people who emerged through a hollow log until a pregnant woman became stuck and thus stopped further generation. In early morning dark, when my mind swings far and wide, I imagine that this genesis is as mythic and meaningful as the story of African ancestors who spread through eons of time to every inhabitable place on the globe, changing their skins and tongues as they go. What is deep and narrow for the Kiowa is wide and slow for believers in evolution.
Momaday's account of his tribal and family arrival in Oklahoma--from Montana on his Kiowa father's side and Kentucky on his mother's Anglo-Saxon and Cherokee side; their eventual removal to the Jemez pueblo in New Mexico--brings up another American author of the middle west and southwest, Willa Cather. Her novel about the first bishop of Santa Fe, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927, made Time Magazine's list of the 100 best books in the English language.
As Momaday writes, "It is a principle of their lives that the pueblo people move ever towards the center." And "Water is a holy thing in the pueblos. You come to understand there how the heart yearns for it." And "The Roman Catholic churches...seem to be appropriated by the culture and to express it in its own terms." Cather shows this last most emphatically in the story of two French priests who attempt to oust their Spanish predecessors and in the process realize it is the native people themselves whose resist like the land.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)