Margotlog: Lavender's Blue, Dilly, Dilly
For someone born nostalgic, language almost immediately acquired tactile, scenic compatriots. I'm sitting under my mother's ironing board, listening to her sing to the slap-hiss of the iron above my head: "Lavender's blue, dilly, dilly, Lavender's green." I'm probably two and a half; my sister may be about to be born or already in her crib. It's that magical entry point, when many experiences first lodge in memory, and nostalgia begins.
For years I thought the song was no more than melody and spoken sounds until some equally illustrative day when clouds parted and I realized that blue and green designated colors, and that king and queen followed in the next few lines. It took much longer for lavender to fix itself on anything other than a delicious combination of vocalizations. I still prefer saying it to seeing what it's supposed to represent. Language has its own, single-minded uses.
For instance, my father's crooked pointer and index fingers sweep across my cheek and grab a bit of flesh. "Eh, paisan," he chortles and shakes the fleshy cheek. As soon as he indicates that this act is called a pizzichille, or pinch kiss, the embodiment can no longer be separated from its name. No one else in the entire world has ever bestowed such a kiss on my cheek. It belongs to his thick, smooth fingers with their wide nails, and to that sudden yet humorous attack from above, for he is, after all, far taller than I am at age five.
Ashley Hall, where I went to school from first through sixth grades, still resides along Rutledge Avenue in Charleston, South Carolina, though the small houses where the early grades sat on small chairs or lay down for naps may not now be part of the campus. I never graduated to the upper school with its columned portico and stately mansion, though a few times, I did visit the shell house nearby, a small stucco embellishment covered with shells where "white elephant sales" were held. The whole business required such tongue twisting that I soon gave it up and returned to our lower-school houses with their creaky, twisting staircases.
First and second grade were, naturally, on the first floors where we could look out onto a sandy playing field and beyond to a grove of seesaws and swings. Mademoiselle, the French teacher, looks nothing like anybody I've ever met before, with her dark curls caught up in a topknot and small gold earrings stuck through her ears (was she wearing a black ribbon around her neck and puffed sleeves? I want to believe she was). She also seems closer to us children sitting on our nap rugs at her feet, perhaps because she bobs up and down as she has us repeat: "Je m'appelle," and then we sing "Sur le pont d'Avignon, l'on y danse, l'on y danse..." By reason probably of my already unmistakable oddity--my father is Italian (well, not really, but that's how I consider him at six and seven) --learning French seems no different from hearing him tease and chant in Italian on Saturday mornings.
In any case, "l'on y danse" penetrates and lodges in memory, only to be resurrected much later when I start learning Italian on my own and am presented with another very odd construction: the "en" which means "of it" or "of them," as in "I want two or them," as in "Io en desidero due." The "y" in French means simply "there," and the "l'on" means "someone." It's only now that I recognize how peculiar these tiny indications are to someone schooled in English. Learned so early, the French "y" and "l'on" never give me trouble; whereas, the Italian "en" often slips from its necessary place, making my foreign version of the language obvious. (In fact, I'm not sure even now that I've written it correctly.) When occasionally on Italian soil, someone who's just heard me speak Italian asks if perhaps I'm French, I smile with pleasure, for after all my first foreign language, learned so early as to be almost native, was French.
Now I want to be able to hear American English in my head. Not the "hearing" that is the personal, silent embodiment of a written text, but the actual reading outloud of something written in our hugely diverse American speech. And I pull from my hat Nelson Runger giving voice to the biography of John Adams by David McCullough. Though it's been several months since I listened to this audiobook, I like to think I can still call up Runger's light tenor voice, with its humorous dry lilt and careful though not emphatic enunciation. I hear no accent to it at all because, of course, it's the spoken English that surrounds me in the upper Midwest, the English that has become a standard for news casts and certain kinds of sit-coms.
But when I challenge myself to hear in my interior ear American speech brought to its essence on a page, it's Twain embodied in Huck Finn. They are on the river which moves Huck's rather melancholy ruminations along at a sprightly pace. And as Huck blends both observation and reflection, human with river drama, he concludes that, after all, he may just have to go to hell, if the only other choice is Tom's high-falluting frippery which would separate him forever from his beloved Jim. And in the process take away their freedom to move constantly down a river, through the land.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Margotlog: The Achievement Gap
Margotlog: The Achievement Gap
I've finally entered the older generation. Not the oldest, mind you: my cousin Eleanora at 93 is the oldest and dearest. But according to what I'm learning from my current crop of education students, I'm older. Sometimes wiser, sometimes, in comparison with them, simply possessing a longer memory. So with the Achievement Gap.
Anyone like me who grew up in the south during the 1950s and 60s, has no trouble believing in an education gap between whites and blacks. It was blatantly physical--fresh new schools in growing white suburbs; old, sometimes fire-trap buildings for black students. Updated textbooks for white students; outmoded, hand-me-down books for blacks. One of the most important goals of the civil rights movement was equality in public services: erase the "blacks at the back of the bus," and separate railroad cars; allow all races to sit at the lunch counter and order cherry Cokes. But along with these changes, equality in education and voter rights were probably the most controversial and crucial goals. If black share-cropper families were terrorized into withdrawing their children from school to work in the fields, leaving the students far fewer months in school than their white counterparts--that was a serious lack.
We like to pretend that racial prejudice does not exist north of the Mason-Dixon line, but any honest educator, who witnesses what happens to students in poverty; any high school teacher in an urban integrated high school, especially one within a poor black neighborhood, will encounter the phenomena of African-American students being lured into gangs or teen pregnancy, not to mention, as my education students depict, lower standards for black students, and the silent shuttling of them into remedial, lower-performing classrooms. There are many hurdles, some within families, some within neighborhoods, some within the schools themselves, which stall black students at lower achievement than white counterparts.
This achievement gap has been around for decades, if not centuries. To put it bluntly: it's the result of prejudice as the result of slavery. This prejudice is so pervasive, so nuanced that it's often hard to know where to start in describing it: one area that strikes me repeatedly is the difficulty black students and white teachers have in relating to each other. Their styles of address do not jibe. Whereas many black adults tell youngsters and teens to shape up and behave--there can be a "jivving" element, an outspoken repartee; white adults, especially female teachers t employ serious and not very personal address, especially with students of a race different from their own. In part because any white educator has a deep-seated fear of offending black students.
This is a serious difference: unless black students are held to high standards of academic performance, they're not likely to achieve them. And "being held" includes hearing it from one of their own. For centuries a desire and will and drive to achieve were, for a black person, tickets to oblivion. To stand out and draw the attention of a master or overseer meant the lash, meant being sent "down river" into the deep south where huge gangs of slaves worked in the most gruesome conditions on large plantations. I'm not surprised when my black students who are now teachers posit the idea that black students perform best when taught by black teachers. Black teachers themselves present the possibility of achieving power and status, and can require dedication and hard work from their students without raising the fear, so ancient and deep-seated, of a backlash.
As the Saint Paul school district discusses returning to a neighborhood-school configuration, to alleviate a budget crunch in part by reducing the need for busing, I wonder if this may also take advantage of another element of black culture which integration via busing did not: the "it takes a village" character of raising black children. The importance of extended family and neighbors depends a great deal on shared needs and a pattern of co-parenting, stepping in to guide a child no matter what one's literal connection to that child might be. When my students read Frederick Douglass' opening chapter in his autobiography, from the mid 1800s, they discover how frequently in slavery mothers were sold away from their children with the express purpose of weakening bonds of blood, and rendering both mother and father (who was, as in Douglass' case, often the white master) absent to a child's education.
As schools with all kinds of students struggle to meet the test score demands of No Child Left Behind, it's crucial that we all, no matter what our race or history, look candidly and truthfully at what really works in motivating and sustaining all youth, then go about procuring it.
I've finally entered the older generation. Not the oldest, mind you: my cousin Eleanora at 93 is the oldest and dearest. But according to what I'm learning from my current crop of education students, I'm older. Sometimes wiser, sometimes, in comparison with them, simply possessing a longer memory. So with the Achievement Gap.
Anyone like me who grew up in the south during the 1950s and 60s, has no trouble believing in an education gap between whites and blacks. It was blatantly physical--fresh new schools in growing white suburbs; old, sometimes fire-trap buildings for black students. Updated textbooks for white students; outmoded, hand-me-down books for blacks. One of the most important goals of the civil rights movement was equality in public services: erase the "blacks at the back of the bus," and separate railroad cars; allow all races to sit at the lunch counter and order cherry Cokes. But along with these changes, equality in education and voter rights were probably the most controversial and crucial goals. If black share-cropper families were terrorized into withdrawing their children from school to work in the fields, leaving the students far fewer months in school than their white counterparts--that was a serious lack.
We like to pretend that racial prejudice does not exist north of the Mason-Dixon line, but any honest educator, who witnesses what happens to students in poverty; any high school teacher in an urban integrated high school, especially one within a poor black neighborhood, will encounter the phenomena of African-American students being lured into gangs or teen pregnancy, not to mention, as my education students depict, lower standards for black students, and the silent shuttling of them into remedial, lower-performing classrooms. There are many hurdles, some within families, some within neighborhoods, some within the schools themselves, which stall black students at lower achievement than white counterparts.
This achievement gap has been around for decades, if not centuries. To put it bluntly: it's the result of prejudice as the result of slavery. This prejudice is so pervasive, so nuanced that it's often hard to know where to start in describing it: one area that strikes me repeatedly is the difficulty black students and white teachers have in relating to each other. Their styles of address do not jibe. Whereas many black adults tell youngsters and teens to shape up and behave--there can be a "jivving" element, an outspoken repartee; white adults, especially female teachers t employ serious and not very personal address, especially with students of a race different from their own. In part because any white educator has a deep-seated fear of offending black students.
This is a serious difference: unless black students are held to high standards of academic performance, they're not likely to achieve them. And "being held" includes hearing it from one of their own. For centuries a desire and will and drive to achieve were, for a black person, tickets to oblivion. To stand out and draw the attention of a master or overseer meant the lash, meant being sent "down river" into the deep south where huge gangs of slaves worked in the most gruesome conditions on large plantations. I'm not surprised when my black students who are now teachers posit the idea that black students perform best when taught by black teachers. Black teachers themselves present the possibility of achieving power and status, and can require dedication and hard work from their students without raising the fear, so ancient and deep-seated, of a backlash.
As the Saint Paul school district discusses returning to a neighborhood-school configuration, to alleviate a budget crunch in part by reducing the need for busing, I wonder if this may also take advantage of another element of black culture which integration via busing did not: the "it takes a village" character of raising black children. The importance of extended family and neighbors depends a great deal on shared needs and a pattern of co-parenting, stepping in to guide a child no matter what one's literal connection to that child might be. When my students read Frederick Douglass' opening chapter in his autobiography, from the mid 1800s, they discover how frequently in slavery mothers were sold away from their children with the express purpose of weakening bonds of blood, and rendering both mother and father (who was, as in Douglass' case, often the white master) absent to a child's education.
As schools with all kinds of students struggle to meet the test score demands of No Child Left Behind, it's crucial that we all, no matter what our race or history, look candidly and truthfully at what really works in motivating and sustaining all youth, then go about procuring it.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Margotlog: The King's Speech
Margotlog: The King's Speech
At our book club recently, we discussed Nicholas Baker's novel The Anthologist (2009). Though I had read perhaps only a third, I was one of two among ten with a decidedly negative reaction to the main character, a poet who's failing spectacularly to complete an introduction
to an anthology of poetry. He's just been abandoned by his live-in girlfriend; he wallows in humorous self-disgust, fear, distractions--can't even play badminton with neighbors without berating himself for his awkwardness. Along the way, he delivers little set-pieces about poets and poetry, including sex tidbits--Louise Bogan and Theodore Roethke and their delicious sex weekend--musings on rhyme (which he loves) and its demise. All the while being unable to keep himself, his clothes, his surroundings decently clean. He set my teeth on edge.
Hoping I hadn't been a horrible curmudgeon, though trusting to my friends' stalwart ability to hold to their own assessments, I came home, wondering about my extreme reaction. During these searches in my private history cabinets, I happened on thoughts of the movie "The King's Speech," which I'd just seen a second time with my daughter. Why had I wept at King George VI's debilitating stutter when I'd sneered at this anthologist's mental lock jaw? Partly it was the dramatic presentation, I decided: we see "Bertie" interacting with his daughters, the future Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. He's adorable in that role: turning himself in his tux into a penguin and lisping a journey across oceans and land, flightless, until he wraps them in his flippers and magically turns into? An albatross. We see him with his wife, the future Queen Mum who eventually outlives him by (I'm guessing) at least 50 years. She takes the initiative to find him another speech "therapist" in the person of an Australian failed actor, Lionel Logue, and though Bertie resists at first--Logue insists on equality between them, has no glamorous pretensions, and soon challenges the stutterer's protective armor--their eventual friendship and working partnership (the king flailing his arms, rolling like a log around the room, repeating true tongue-twisters, reading to music, mouthing swear words in the midst of pauses) shows their joint triumph over the king's damaged self.
He also has truly ugly antagonists: first among them his brother, King Edward II who, when Bertie urges him to give up his affair with the twice-divorced Wallace Simpson, mocks Bertie's impediment to the point of rendering him speechless. But it's the combination of events and Bertie's essential strength of mind and character that bring the shine to Colin Firth's stunning performance. Forced into the role of king when Edward abdicates for the woman he loves, Bertie must find his voice. Hitler looms--making stirring speeches, as Bertie witnesses on film. There will be war again. This combination makes Bertie's and Logue's triumph over the stutter not only a personal, but a national imperative. Hard to beat motivation like that. But it is Bertie's softness, his descent into tears a few nights after taking the throne, when he realizes he cannot make any sense of the papers in an official box. His trouble and his tears are motivated by a challenge larger than most mortals could bear; and he has not been allowed (by his mocking family) to grow the confidence to meet it. Only as an adult, with the help of his gentle, witty wife and the sensitive, assured guidance of Lionel Logue, a commoner if there ever was one, does Bertie gain the majesty and command to become George IV.
I'm also reminded of a long review in The New Yorker (March 7, 2011) of a late 19th-century German writer none of us has ever heard of: Theodor Fontane. In his review Daniel Mendelsohn comments that Fontane's novelistic strategy was likely formed by his years as a drama critic--almost all scenes presented as conversations, i.e. very dramatic. Just like Jane Austen, I thought. Nicholas Baker uses hardly any conversation at all, probably because his character not only lives alone, has little concourse with the outside world and is a thorough narcissist. (Forgive me, Book Club Pals.) That isolation does change, so I learned from those who read the whole book: the anthologist goes to Switzerland where all kinds of things break loose. But I won't return to the book to find out. The self-involved "voice" persisting for over 100 pages simply doesn't hold my esteem or attention for that long.
At our book club recently, we discussed Nicholas Baker's novel The Anthologist (2009). Though I had read perhaps only a third, I was one of two among ten with a decidedly negative reaction to the main character, a poet who's failing spectacularly to complete an introduction
to an anthology of poetry. He's just been abandoned by his live-in girlfriend; he wallows in humorous self-disgust, fear, distractions--can't even play badminton with neighbors without berating himself for his awkwardness. Along the way, he delivers little set-pieces about poets and poetry, including sex tidbits--Louise Bogan and Theodore Roethke and their delicious sex weekend--musings on rhyme (which he loves) and its demise. All the while being unable to keep himself, his clothes, his surroundings decently clean. He set my teeth on edge.
Hoping I hadn't been a horrible curmudgeon, though trusting to my friends' stalwart ability to hold to their own assessments, I came home, wondering about my extreme reaction. During these searches in my private history cabinets, I happened on thoughts of the movie "The King's Speech," which I'd just seen a second time with my daughter. Why had I wept at King George VI's debilitating stutter when I'd sneered at this anthologist's mental lock jaw? Partly it was the dramatic presentation, I decided: we see "Bertie" interacting with his daughters, the future Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. He's adorable in that role: turning himself in his tux into a penguin and lisping a journey across oceans and land, flightless, until he wraps them in his flippers and magically turns into? An albatross. We see him with his wife, the future Queen Mum who eventually outlives him by (I'm guessing) at least 50 years. She takes the initiative to find him another speech "therapist" in the person of an Australian failed actor, Lionel Logue, and though Bertie resists at first--Logue insists on equality between them, has no glamorous pretensions, and soon challenges the stutterer's protective armor--their eventual friendship and working partnership (the king flailing his arms, rolling like a log around the room, repeating true tongue-twisters, reading to music, mouthing swear words in the midst of pauses) shows their joint triumph over the king's damaged self.
He also has truly ugly antagonists: first among them his brother, King Edward II who, when Bertie urges him to give up his affair with the twice-divorced Wallace Simpson, mocks Bertie's impediment to the point of rendering him speechless. But it's the combination of events and Bertie's essential strength of mind and character that bring the shine to Colin Firth's stunning performance. Forced into the role of king when Edward abdicates for the woman he loves, Bertie must find his voice. Hitler looms--making stirring speeches, as Bertie witnesses on film. There will be war again. This combination makes Bertie's and Logue's triumph over the stutter not only a personal, but a national imperative. Hard to beat motivation like that. But it is Bertie's softness, his descent into tears a few nights after taking the throne, when he realizes he cannot make any sense of the papers in an official box. His trouble and his tears are motivated by a challenge larger than most mortals could bear; and he has not been allowed (by his mocking family) to grow the confidence to meet it. Only as an adult, with the help of his gentle, witty wife and the sensitive, assured guidance of Lionel Logue, a commoner if there ever was one, does Bertie gain the majesty and command to become George IV.
I'm also reminded of a long review in The New Yorker (March 7, 2011) of a late 19th-century German writer none of us has ever heard of: Theodor Fontane. In his review Daniel Mendelsohn comments that Fontane's novelistic strategy was likely formed by his years as a drama critic--almost all scenes presented as conversations, i.e. very dramatic. Just like Jane Austen, I thought. Nicholas Baker uses hardly any conversation at all, probably because his character not only lives alone, has little concourse with the outside world and is a thorough narcissist. (Forgive me, Book Club Pals.) That isolation does change, so I learned from those who read the whole book: the anthologist goes to Switzerland where all kinds of things break loose. But I won't return to the book to find out. The self-involved "voice" persisting for over 100 pages simply doesn't hold my esteem or attention for that long.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Margotlog: Cold, So Cold
Margotlog: Cold, So Cold
My photographer friend Linda Gammell recently told me about a winter week she spent in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. Her work usually focuses on prairie plants--rose hips, gamma grasses, staghead ferns. What was she doing in all that cold? "I wanted to challenge myself," she said. "To get to that edge of fear when walking into the woods takes me to an awareness that a few steps further and I might not find my way back." Not to mention that at 30 below zero, she might soon freeze to death. Not to mention that below a certain temperature, the shutter on her camera didn't work.
The camp where she and a painter friend stayed is run by a band of youths who aren't afraid of cold. Several groups were there this winter week: a band of hardy outdoor painters who've perfected the gear--hand and feet warmers, for starters--to allow for pleine aire artistry at 30 below. Then a group of blind outdoor lovers. At the sauna, their trust came alive. First the heat and sweat, then with socks on their feet, a short walk down a dock to a hole cut in the ice. Lowering oneself by holding onto a pole fastened over the water, the heat-besotted enter the freezing water. But it's not possible to exit without a helping hand--ice forms too quickly on one's own fingers which slip off the pole. "I was amazed," Linda said, "at the trust of the blind. They made their way down the dock and into the water, confident that someone would be there to help retrieve them through the ice." It sounds like a birth experience.
Cold has never been my friend, especially below certain degrees. My first winter in Minnesota, after edging north from South Carolina, first to Baltimore for college where it snowed a few times, then to New York City where I bought some knee-high boots, then to Kansas City where a January tornado blew out windows in our newish apartment complex and finally to the Twin Cities, I arrived with what I expected was winter hardiness. Excited to sample winter sports, my husband and I went to the sled-dog races at Lake Como. Standing for an hour in my Big Apple boots, my toes became so numb I couldn't feel them. Once home I unsheathed my feet: there they were, ten white shriveled fish, rather limp. With slow heating in warm water, I brought them back to agonizing life--they stung and itched, swelled red and troubled, and only subsided after days of tender massage and more soaking. Ditto some of my fingers over the first fifteen years of Minnesota winters. Finally I gave up any notion of fashion and now muffle my head, neck, body, hands in as much goose down as possible, plus I wear two pairs of men's socks inside heavy men's hiking boots. Traction and interior space to trap layers of air and let the "piggies" wiggle. It's been many years since my feet haven't made it comfortably through a winter.
But the artistry of cold? I think of German-American poet Lisel Mueller whose poem "Not Only the Eskimos" gives us so many versions: "the Big Snow when Chicago becomes/like paradise and strangers spoke to each other" or her poem "Letter to California," with its evocation of "bony trees, which hold/the dancer's first position" until an intimation occurs: "cardinal with its lyric call/its body blazing like a saint's/unexpected gaudy heart." She has it best, I think, as I gaze out to my bird feeders, later winter afternoons, watching the cardinals flicker back and forth, not quite eroded by darkness.
My photographer friend Linda Gammell recently told me about a winter week she spent in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. Her work usually focuses on prairie plants--rose hips, gamma grasses, staghead ferns. What was she doing in all that cold? "I wanted to challenge myself," she said. "To get to that edge of fear when walking into the woods takes me to an awareness that a few steps further and I might not find my way back." Not to mention that at 30 below zero, she might soon freeze to death. Not to mention that below a certain temperature, the shutter on her camera didn't work.
The camp where she and a painter friend stayed is run by a band of youths who aren't afraid of cold. Several groups were there this winter week: a band of hardy outdoor painters who've perfected the gear--hand and feet warmers, for starters--to allow for pleine aire artistry at 30 below. Then a group of blind outdoor lovers. At the sauna, their trust came alive. First the heat and sweat, then with socks on their feet, a short walk down a dock to a hole cut in the ice. Lowering oneself by holding onto a pole fastened over the water, the heat-besotted enter the freezing water. But it's not possible to exit without a helping hand--ice forms too quickly on one's own fingers which slip off the pole. "I was amazed," Linda said, "at the trust of the blind. They made their way down the dock and into the water, confident that someone would be there to help retrieve them through the ice." It sounds like a birth experience.
Cold has never been my friend, especially below certain degrees. My first winter in Minnesota, after edging north from South Carolina, first to Baltimore for college where it snowed a few times, then to New York City where I bought some knee-high boots, then to Kansas City where a January tornado blew out windows in our newish apartment complex and finally to the Twin Cities, I arrived with what I expected was winter hardiness. Excited to sample winter sports, my husband and I went to the sled-dog races at Lake Como. Standing for an hour in my Big Apple boots, my toes became so numb I couldn't feel them. Once home I unsheathed my feet: there they were, ten white shriveled fish, rather limp. With slow heating in warm water, I brought them back to agonizing life--they stung and itched, swelled red and troubled, and only subsided after days of tender massage and more soaking. Ditto some of my fingers over the first fifteen years of Minnesota winters. Finally I gave up any notion of fashion and now muffle my head, neck, body, hands in as much goose down as possible, plus I wear two pairs of men's socks inside heavy men's hiking boots. Traction and interior space to trap layers of air and let the "piggies" wiggle. It's been many years since my feet haven't made it comfortably through a winter.
But the artistry of cold? I think of German-American poet Lisel Mueller whose poem "Not Only the Eskimos" gives us so many versions: "the Big Snow when Chicago becomes/like paradise and strangers spoke to each other" or her poem "Letter to California," with its evocation of "bony trees, which hold/the dancer's first position" until an intimation occurs: "cardinal with its lyric call/its body blazing like a saint's/unexpected gaudy heart." She has it best, I think, as I gaze out to my bird feeders, later winter afternoons, watching the cardinals flicker back and forth, not quite eroded by darkness.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Margotlog: Reading Elizabeth Bowen at Sanibel
Margotlog: Reading Elizabeth Bowen at Sanibel
What makes a perfect motel get-away? On our family jaunts when I was a kid in South Carolina, the family car deposited us on the edge of turquoise pools and my sister and I raced into the motel to change into our suits. I paid no attention to the rooms we rented.
Sanibel Island, linked to the southwest Florida coast by a breath-taking causeway and high-looped bridge, seems a throw-back to the 50s, except this time the motel room gets all the attention. Large and shaded by a long gallery which runs along the strip of motel rooms, our generous room at Anchor Inn peaked at the entrance and sloped down to narrow windows overlooking a lagoon. At around 7 each morning, a tall jet of spray lifted out of the lagoon to play begin its music. Sabel palms (the island's most common) and Australian pines towered over shorter bushes. As I sat up in bed, reading The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (published in 1938 and set largely in London), the gentle light and sounds of falling water washed away all memory of Minnesota snow.
Bowen's novel, dense and glinting with subterfuge, takes us deep into the confusions of an orphan, who like Bowen herself, orphaned at 12, must take up residence with distant relatives. Portia, at 16, comes to live with her half-brother and his wife Anna in what I imagine to be a three or four-story, narrow, well-furnished but steely house which faces a park with swans. Portia and Anna form the two sides of the inevitable triangle, with the stern housekeeper Matchett forming the third. Though fascination with various men--the flagrantly narcissistic and conniving Eddie and stalwart, kind-hearted Mr. Brutt--occupies both Anna and Portia (in fact, they take turns flirting and attempting to become intimate with both), it is their disinclination for each other, and Matchett's mothering of Portia that drive the emotions and ruptures of the plot.
It's the writing that carries me deep into admiration. Almost anyone, I tell myself, can set characters at each other; it's a mistress of subtlety and surprise who can throw cloudy motivation onto draperies, telephones, or an orphan's sensuous delight in a newly washed, fluffy rug. There are plenty of rougher characters: Portia's classmates at a private school; the distant relatives with whom she spends a month's holiday while Anna and the half-brother vacation on Capri. These "blokes" on the edge of adolescence but already employed--they have to make their way; no family money supports them--voice snappish, silly notions and enlarge Portia's experience of sex and its vagaries; they also have the virtue of being absolutely open about their thoughts and feelings.
Sanibel has kept itself small--no enormous high-rises hotels or condos; everything low or no more than four stories. It's also put 60% of the land into nature preserves, with the J. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge being one of its best known. Our guide, a Barry from Brooklyn, couldn't have been more informative or passionate about mangroves and mud-flats, willets (tallish, plump wading birds) or the many osprey ("fish hawks") we watched from our open-air tram. In south Florida, mangroves with their stilt-like roots and glossy leaves hold the swamps and islands from being eroded and washed away by hurricanes. A hurricane, Barry told us, can break the branches, tear the leaves off, but it can't uproot a mangrove. When a wealthy property-owner on the mainland destroyed mangroves on his land, he was fined $50,000 and required to replant them.
Imagine mangroves as the Matchetts of south Florida: they "come with the furniture" and take far sturdier and determined care of up-coming generations (read, Portia) than any besotted sophisticate. I won't reveal the plot or ending of The Death of the Heart, except to say, despite the title, I don't believe the heart dies at all; in this novel, like Sanibel, those who work at preservation take control at the end.
What makes a perfect motel get-away? On our family jaunts when I was a kid in South Carolina, the family car deposited us on the edge of turquoise pools and my sister and I raced into the motel to change into our suits. I paid no attention to the rooms we rented.
Sanibel Island, linked to the southwest Florida coast by a breath-taking causeway and high-looped bridge, seems a throw-back to the 50s, except this time the motel room gets all the attention. Large and shaded by a long gallery which runs along the strip of motel rooms, our generous room at Anchor Inn peaked at the entrance and sloped down to narrow windows overlooking a lagoon. At around 7 each morning, a tall jet of spray lifted out of the lagoon to play begin its music. Sabel palms (the island's most common) and Australian pines towered over shorter bushes. As I sat up in bed, reading The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (published in 1938 and set largely in London), the gentle light and sounds of falling water washed away all memory of Minnesota snow.
Bowen's novel, dense and glinting with subterfuge, takes us deep into the confusions of an orphan, who like Bowen herself, orphaned at 12, must take up residence with distant relatives. Portia, at 16, comes to live with her half-brother and his wife Anna in what I imagine to be a three or four-story, narrow, well-furnished but steely house which faces a park with swans. Portia and Anna form the two sides of the inevitable triangle, with the stern housekeeper Matchett forming the third. Though fascination with various men--the flagrantly narcissistic and conniving Eddie and stalwart, kind-hearted Mr. Brutt--occupies both Anna and Portia (in fact, they take turns flirting and attempting to become intimate with both), it is their disinclination for each other, and Matchett's mothering of Portia that drive the emotions and ruptures of the plot.
It's the writing that carries me deep into admiration. Almost anyone, I tell myself, can set characters at each other; it's a mistress of subtlety and surprise who can throw cloudy motivation onto draperies, telephones, or an orphan's sensuous delight in a newly washed, fluffy rug. There are plenty of rougher characters: Portia's classmates at a private school; the distant relatives with whom she spends a month's holiday while Anna and the half-brother vacation on Capri. These "blokes" on the edge of adolescence but already employed--they have to make their way; no family money supports them--voice snappish, silly notions and enlarge Portia's experience of sex and its vagaries; they also have the virtue of being absolutely open about their thoughts and feelings.
Sanibel has kept itself small--no enormous high-rises hotels or condos; everything low or no more than four stories. It's also put 60% of the land into nature preserves, with the J. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge being one of its best known. Our guide, a Barry from Brooklyn, couldn't have been more informative or passionate about mangroves and mud-flats, willets (tallish, plump wading birds) or the many osprey ("fish hawks") we watched from our open-air tram. In south Florida, mangroves with their stilt-like roots and glossy leaves hold the swamps and islands from being eroded and washed away by hurricanes. A hurricane, Barry told us, can break the branches, tear the leaves off, but it can't uproot a mangrove. When a wealthy property-owner on the mainland destroyed mangroves on his land, he was fined $50,000 and required to replant them.
Imagine mangroves as the Matchetts of south Florida: they "come with the furniture" and take far sturdier and determined care of up-coming generations (read, Portia) than any besotted sophisticate. I won't reveal the plot or ending of The Death of the Heart, except to say, despite the title, I don't believe the heart dies at all; in this novel, like Sanibel, those who work at preservation take control at the end.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Margotlog: A Cautionary Tale
Margotlog: A Cautionary Tale
In memoir writing, where the pen reaches deep into the past and draws up strands of honey and excrement, a life's array, with its tassels and flotsam dances around the well. Finally to have achieved expression, life beyond the tortured or torpid self, coherence, even. When I first encountered memoir writing, it was through the pen of Patricia Hampl, Saint Paul's witty and poetic chronicler of immigrant and Catholic tribes. Her first book, A Romantic Education, still remains one of my favorites. She was my teacher in more ways then one.
My contribution to the genre includes what I like to call an "oral history memoir," Minnesota Ojibway artist George Morrison's chronicle--Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998). After countless interviews, fashioning chapters of Morrison's life from Chippewa City just northeast along Lake Superior from Grand Marais, to art school in Minneapolis, immersion in the heady days of abstract expressionism among the "big boys" of New York, as he called them, and then "turning the feather" back toward his native roots in Minnesota, we told the story of his eventful life in art, his words which I fashioned into sometimes laconic, sometimes brightly poetic chapters. When Morrison was given one of two solo exhibits at the opening of the Smithsonian's new (and beautiful) Native American museum in Washington, I liked to believe that I'd helped him achieve that eminence.
But his story remained his, not mine. Along with some essays--one published in The House on Via Gombito--I've also written, joyously, laboriously and with more iterations than I can count--a memoir of traveling with my daughter the summer after her freshman year in college. Titled Falling for Botticelli, this memoir began as a joint project: our two voices sparring, twining, into a portrait of two generations coming unstuck and repositioning themselves in a new configuration. Every few weeks, I stand in front of the candles in the Saint Paul cathedral and watch a flame flicker with its cousins. "Let it come to light," I pray. Publishing these days is a tricky business, what with the economy and competition from what I've recently started calling "screen" media. I will keep lighting the candles and hoping to entice the story between covers.
Recently, several students have sent me vivid, troubling life stories. These are stories of exhaustion, physical, emotional, spiritual. Of depletion, when the narrator's youth becomes sucked out of her through constant motion, neglect, and gradual addiction to substances and damaging relationships. Praising the exquisite depiction of the writing, I also mourn the loss of what in education and psychology is called resilience, lost because the person was hounded by her own demons but also bereft of parental stability. That sometimes these stories emerge from the well of despond into coherence, not just of the pen but of the life, gives me hope. Writing a memoir sometimes celebrates that achievement, but writing a memoir can also catch the self in its free fall toward breakage. Now, writing this in the dark of a March morning, I lift up a candle to those young and older selves who struggle to climb out of the well. And hope that not only a rope of words, but many helping hands reach down to lift them up.
In memoir writing, where the pen reaches deep into the past and draws up strands of honey and excrement, a life's array, with its tassels and flotsam dances around the well. Finally to have achieved expression, life beyond the tortured or torpid self, coherence, even. When I first encountered memoir writing, it was through the pen of Patricia Hampl, Saint Paul's witty and poetic chronicler of immigrant and Catholic tribes. Her first book, A Romantic Education, still remains one of my favorites. She was my teacher in more ways then one.
My contribution to the genre includes what I like to call an "oral history memoir," Minnesota Ojibway artist George Morrison's chronicle--Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998). After countless interviews, fashioning chapters of Morrison's life from Chippewa City just northeast along Lake Superior from Grand Marais, to art school in Minneapolis, immersion in the heady days of abstract expressionism among the "big boys" of New York, as he called them, and then "turning the feather" back toward his native roots in Minnesota, we told the story of his eventful life in art, his words which I fashioned into sometimes laconic, sometimes brightly poetic chapters. When Morrison was given one of two solo exhibits at the opening of the Smithsonian's new (and beautiful) Native American museum in Washington, I liked to believe that I'd helped him achieve that eminence.
But his story remained his, not mine. Along with some essays--one published in The House on Via Gombito--I've also written, joyously, laboriously and with more iterations than I can count--a memoir of traveling with my daughter the summer after her freshman year in college. Titled Falling for Botticelli, this memoir began as a joint project: our two voices sparring, twining, into a portrait of two generations coming unstuck and repositioning themselves in a new configuration. Every few weeks, I stand in front of the candles in the Saint Paul cathedral and watch a flame flicker with its cousins. "Let it come to light," I pray. Publishing these days is a tricky business, what with the economy and competition from what I've recently started calling "screen" media. I will keep lighting the candles and hoping to entice the story between covers.
Recently, several students have sent me vivid, troubling life stories. These are stories of exhaustion, physical, emotional, spiritual. Of depletion, when the narrator's youth becomes sucked out of her through constant motion, neglect, and gradual addiction to substances and damaging relationships. Praising the exquisite depiction of the writing, I also mourn the loss of what in education and psychology is called resilience, lost because the person was hounded by her own demons but also bereft of parental stability. That sometimes these stories emerge from the well of despond into coherence, not just of the pen but of the life, gives me hope. Writing a memoir sometimes celebrates that achievement, but writing a memoir can also catch the self in its free fall toward breakage. Now, writing this in the dark of a March morning, I lift up a candle to those young and older selves who struggle to climb out of the well. And hope that not only a rope of words, but many helping hands reach down to lift them up.
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