girl toys?

Talking about social construction of identity: here is a lego ad from 1981.  Notice what is not in this ad:

1) there is nothing pink or glittery
2) there are no direct or indirect allusions to princesses

Notice what is in this ad:

the assumption that girls are creative and can build things, including their own sense of worth and identity.

I'm told that pressure from retailers pushed Lego to market their product as a boy toy so that it could be clearly shelved with other boys' toys rather than in the aisle with girls' toys such as Barbies.  I've no authoritative verification for this, but it seems plausible.

 In 2011 one can buy pink lego.  Notice the domestic theme for these in this image.  Which aisle are these shelved in?

And WHY are toys shelved by gender designations?

Just a little snow

not our snow, but similar to our view

this morning.  This would not be news if we were not on track for one of the least snowed upon winters on record, a fact that depends upon record keeping and counting, or if we could not observe merely with our naked eyes that there has been next to no snow this season and none on the ground since mid-December.   Since we have not had much snow, and not any for some weeks, this tiny bit of snow is news, even good news.  It will provide a tiny bit of moisture. It already reassures those of us (me in particular) who rely upon the orderly rhythm of the seasons.  It gives hope to the skiers who long to glide along trails longer than 2.5 kms of artificially produced snow-like substance.  This is the real deal, flakes falling from the sky!

AmCon connection: 1) sorts of perception: contrast the counting, record-keeping to the direct, observational; 2) harder to find so must be supplied by the reader, maybe some allusion to winter on the plains, e.g. Cather or Holm.

remembering and not remembering: slavery

"When the Civil War ended, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions formed to process memories, no Nuremberg Trials to enable reflection, no Great Emancipator to free the future from the past — only ghosts and the ravenous politics of memory. The need for national reckoning was quickly subordinated to the political imperative of reunification, and on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, forgetting became more valuable than remembering. "

This from Peter Birkenhead on Slate.  He reflects on his visit to various landmark-esque sites in the American South--living  history museums, restaurants, bed & breakfasts--where the existence of slavery was not mentioned.  It is a long piece well worth reading for its insight into our deliberate national forgetting and inability to come to terms with our collective past.  It is also worth reading for its consideration of the more general matter of how we are all always connected to the past regardless of how well (accurately, wisely, or otherwise) we remember it.  He recalls his youthful nostalgia for decades prior to his own, including his trench coat and tattered copy of On the Road, as an entry to shining some light on the difference between nostalgia and authentic historical memory.

If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn’t absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don’t feel the connections to it in our bones. It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?

If it’s true that we’re all breathing Caesar’s breath — that because of the finite amount of perpetually moving molecules on Earth, one or two that he breathed are in each of our exhalations — then we don’t need to dress up in his clothes to connect ourselves to the past, we’re already wearing them. The past is with us always, but we need to live with it, open our eyes and poke around in it, take it all in: the good, the bad and the mythic, if we want to stay connected to the ever-changing present.

patriotic display of emotion

Lots on the news about the death of Korean leader Kim Jong-il and the people's response in ritualized mourning: public displays that include chest-beating and weeping.  Some American commentators question the sincerity and authenticity of the ritual mourning.

Do those Koreans really feel sad?  Are they just going through the motions or is their grief genuine?

I have some sympathy for those Koreans.  Perhaps this is because I've heard so many comments about Scandinavian-American, upper midwesterners seeming lack of emotion; these comments are based upon their/our non-demonstrative behavior.  Lacking display suggests lack of emotion and 'excessive' display seems to suggest faked emotion.

Why, I wonder, do we Americans question the sincerity of the Koreans' behavior?  What do we know about the relationship between sorrow and patriotism in a Confucian culture?  And what do we know about mourning or ritual?

It may well be that having conventions for expressing sorrow during the period of mourning serves both to allow expression of "real" sorrow and to evoke sorrow where it might otherwise be lacking.  It may well be that ritual is not the antithesis of real, genuine emotion, but rather its channel and its stimulus. 

Here are photos of the funeral processions for Vaclav Havel and John F. Kennedy.  Perhaps these displays were less subdued, but they are also instances of sorrow and patriotism mixed together in ritual.

The JFK image is precisely right for my recollection of the event for which my elementary school was canceled.  Like many other Americans, I watched the funeral on television.  I heard the symbolism of the riderless horse explained.  I saw that photo of little "John-John," in his serious coat, saluting his father.  I collected newspaper stories in a scrapbook.  Was my emotion real?  Did I catch it from the media and the adults around me?  Some of each seems the most genuine, true response.

Remaking ourselves with small electronic devises and hyperconnectivity

Sherry Turkle (MIT) has been studying and writing about technology for decades.  Her most recent book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. Today I heard her talking about I-phones and I-pads.  The interview sent me to my laptop and internet connection to look up more about her comments on these devises and the changes they are stimulating in our ways of being.  I was struck by the possibility that these are remaking our sense of ourselves in ways that we have not considered as we have focused on the early 20th century.  Turkle, in her most recent work, has begun to explore the losses as well as the possibilities of technology.  These include

1) the loss of solitude, a state of being which depends upon being alone, not connected, not available.

2) the possibility that those small devises in one's hand, manipulated by touch are experienced as an extension of self, a sort of "intimate machine. "

3) the possibility that we avoid real, emotional connection with people when we interact with them only through electronically mediated channels.

All this leaves me wondering about the senses and their role in human life.  And. . . as Christians celebrate the festival of the incarnation, I can not help but reflect that God-with-us was/is not virtual or simulated, but fully human, tangible, sensory, present. 

Then, we must ask ourselves: into what do we want to remake ourselves and our society?  This is not merely a question about political commitments; it is also a question about technology and machines.  The Model-T (and other automobiles made on moving assembly-lines) led to our assumptions about individual transportation, to construction of highways, to long commutes to work from suburbs, and to our dependance upon oil.  (Yes, led to conceals a much longer, more complex chain of causation.) Turkle is far from a Luddite.  She is not anti-technology.  Nonetheless, listening to her I was reminded that Amish provide a model of thoughtfulness about technology that might serve us well even if we are more willing to adopt new machines than they.

Gentle reflection for the season

So much busy activity and noise in this season can drown out its quiet, humble anticipation of joy.  "Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled": these are acts of faithfulness to the truth that this is the world God made, loves, and came to dwell in with us.  And the angels sing "Peace on earth, good will."

 

December

by Gary Johnson

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here—and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
           Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
           And are there angels hovering overhead? Hark.

old Mohn Hall

some years after construction

maybe from soon after construction in early 1910s

As I'm reading AmCon 201 papers, "A Day in the Life of an Ole," I'm frequently taken inside various rooms of old Mohn Hall, the women's residence that stood on the site now occupied by the renovated and renamed Tomson Hall.  In order to stimulate my imagination I looked up some photos of the woman's residence that was torn down to make room for the then new science center (dedicated in 1968), now replaced by Regents Hall.

Here's a charming account (non-fictional) from the College Archives of move-in day in 1912:

In the annals of St. Olaf, February 12th is historic not only because of the annual recognition of Lincoln's birthday, but because on that day in 1912 some over a hundred women students living in homes on St. Olaf Avenue, Forest Avenue, and all streets between trekked up the Hill with suitcases and boxes, while Lewis Larson hauled their trunks to their new home.

Notice the size of those trees then in comparison to now.

Left Behind, Left Over, Left to do

Here's the AmCon connection:  102 discussion of the Second Great Awakening got us to invite Amy Frykholm to talk to us about her book Rapture Culture as we were thinking about American Democratic Vistas.  Always lurking in the back ground, as we consider dreams for America (in contrast to just my dream for myself in America), are utopian experiments from Plymouth Plantation to Pullman, Illinois to Woodstock Nation and the Great Society.  So. . . a couple of recent opportunities to notice the apocalyptic-inspired reflections on American life.

Friday evening my book group discussed Tom Perrotta's novel The Leftovers. [NYT review] When the book first came out I heard him interviewed and got a sense that while this story is set in post-rapture America it is only vaguely a response to the Left Behind series.  All the action of the book takes place after a rapture-like event.  Rapture-like because those who disappear are not only the Christian faithful of a certain sort, nor do all of those sort of Christians disappear.  This leads to a real question about whether what happened was the rapture so anticipated by that sort of Christian.  However, the book is less about that question and more an exploration of how the left-overs respond to the expected, unexplained loss.

Then on Saturday night I heard my colleague David Booth preview the songs for Promises, to be recorded next month.  Among them was "After the Rapture."  It responded to the rapture that did not happen in May 2011 by positing that the event had taken place and considering the work left to be done once the saints are gone.  (For the purpose of this song I will leave aside a response to this limited use of the term saint.)  One haunting, repeated line called on those remaining to "make this fallen world a paradise."  Among my several responses: wondering why we wouldn't just get to that work now.  Knowing David I suspect that was among the points he was making.  It's a hopeful American point, one with some antecedents in a different sort of Christianity.

by Jyoti Sahi

While I'm leery always about the illusion that either paradise, or an American utopia, or the rule of God can be achieved by human effort, I was moved by this song to think that even if the effort were wasted, it would be worth trying a little harder to do what is left to do toward a more just world.   And then, this morning's gospel lesson for the fourth Sunday in Advent: the magnificent, Mary's song about how God's rule turns the world up-side-down.

p.s.  If you are interested in the sort of leftovers in your 'frig, you might enjoy Stump the Cook.

America as process

Each of the two essays we read on the last day offered jazz as a key to understanding the central characteristics of American culture and/or character.  One, John A. Kouwenhoven's, "What's 'American' About America," was written in the 1950s.  The other, L. W. Levine's "Jazz and American Culture," in the late 1980s.  Both authors boldly attempt to articulate broadly true assertions without falling into essentialist fallacies. 

Why jazz?  In part, of course, because jazz has its origins within the United States.  In the most obvious, and easily demonstrated, sense it is an American genre of music though its roots extend to Africa and it has traveled around the globe.  However, these scholars' claim is more.  Before being invented in the USA, it is the sort of music that jazz is that expresses central features of American culture and character, both of the collective culture and of individual character.  Levine pays more attention to the music itself and to the historical debate about whether a 'low-brow,' popular form could be classified as culture at all.

Kouwenhoven takes another approach, beginning with a list of a dozen items that are more American than others including the grid iron street plan and the sky scrapper.  He considers how the two work together--horizontally and vertically--to create the New York skyline.  They reinforce their commonality: simple infinitely repeatable units.

Mary and I made our own list, topped by the drive-in restaurant.  (We did not think of the drive-in movie, but it could also be included.)  Our list also included garage sales, the interstate highway system, and plastic.  We noted the tension in these between stasis and impermanence, or maybe between the ephemeral and the enduring, that also suggests physical, social, and other sorts of motion.  Is that like jazz?  Is process valued here over product?  We'd need to consider each item on our list and the set of them together more carefully before I'd be willing to defend a claim about precisely what these items tell us about American culture and character.

Norwegian character

ice sculpture of Amundson

Today is the 100th anniversary of the day Roald Amundson and his team of Norwegian explorers arrived at the South Pole.  [HERE a link to the BBC coverage of a ceremony of commemoration.  That is where the photo is from.]  Of course, we in AmCon can not take notice of this event without also thinking of the "Father" in Ragtime and his adventure with an expedition to the North Pole.  I wonder if the Manitou Messenger covered the accomplishment?

The BBC also reports that the Norwegian Prime Minister noted that the explorers had the same virtues "that the young nation wanted to be recognized by: courage, determination and endurance."  Maybe Rolvaag would endorse this.  Maybe Boe would.  I can't say for sure, but I do know that they each admired the virtues they saw as characteristic of Norwegians and their culture.  These seem to be rather stoic virtues, perhaps well suited to polar expeditions and long, dark winters.

A Holiday Flash Mob at the U of MN

HERE

Often, maybe too often, conversations about this holiday season are consumed by complaint about consumerism or overwhelmed by honest acknowledgement of the stress.  Perhaps the latter is amplified on a college campus, especially one where the end of the term coincides with Christmas Festival.  So, this staged flash mob at the U of MN Carlson School of Management is a welcome, joyous interlude.  Since we've recently read Bill Holm, I mention also his tiny essay, "Chocolate Chip Cookies for Your Enemies."  Is it still available?  The little book offers a focused reminder of the quiet genius of the season.  Can I say that it calls us to fail at the hype and to embrace the core message of reconciliation that does not depend upon preserving and performing the habits of our ancestors or even our own favorite things, but only asks us to be open to the powerful force of live-giving love.  Yes, a gift economy rather than an economy built upon buying gifts.

Enjoy! the recording.  Let the music and the joy spread.

a salutary reminder

of an important piece of wisdom for much in life--parenting, teaching, being a friend--


this from Maria Scholz Boda's "Six Questions in Search of Some Answers," a lecture in the series, "Some Things We Learned in the Paracollege."

"...too much guidance can become counterproductive."

hedgerows: where the land is not cultivated 

and small animals and good ideas might flourish

How much is too much?  When is it too much?

Is this also true of other good things such as planning and assessment (not the sort MSB writes about here)?

How do we know when we've crossed the line? Is it when we, and those we learn with, cease to be productive?  Or is it when we begin to take productivity, rather than being and becoming, as our goal?

Boe, Jefferson, Daly, Luther: imperfection, failure

Lars W. Boe, St. Olaf College President 1918-42

Yesterday we looked at Lars W. Boe's 1934 commencement address delivered at Augsburg College.  There is so much to admire about the man, including his support of woman's suffrage and his efforts to raise the academic standards of the college.  But, in this talk and elsewhere we find that he was not too astute about the dangers of fascism in Italy and Germany in the early 1930s.  He seems to sympathize with the notion that in times of crisis rule by the law can be exchanged for rule by a person.  Just what he knew about what was going on in Germany and Italy, we don't know.  He had traveled there not long before and he had professional contacts through his involvement in international, cooperative Lutheran circles.   If he didn't notice or didn't understand what was happening or endorsed what we prefer that he had not, he was not alone and yet, with hindsight, we are inclined to judge his errors in judgment.  Once again, as in the case of Thomas Jefferson and slavery (as well as his attitudes about Native Americans), and feminist theologian Mary Daly and racism, and reformer Martin Luther and the Jews, we are confronted with the imperfection of those we admire, with their failure to see everything the way we d0.

This takes me back to Bill Holm, specifically to his plea that all of us look honestly as our own mistakes and take responsibility for them.  I wonder if one reason we are disturbed by the flaws and failures of those we admire is that those imperfections remind us of our own?  Can facing these collectively help us deal honestly and kindly both with the past and with ourselves?  This is not a plea for disregarding the failure, but for repair.  Holm wants the honest recognition of failures--both to live up to our ideals that are admirable and to false standards of success which are not--to be harnessed to responsibility.

While the dead can not change what they did or did not do, we can.  Thus we build upon the foundations laid by others as well as learning from them to avoid their mistakes.

Being named: what baby names might tell us

This from NPR's Scott Simon:

Parents seem to appreciate that naming your child is not voting for American Idol, but a lifetime choice. They choose names to last, which may be why biblical names, including Sarah, Hannah, Gabriel, Joshua and Elijah are among the most popular.
. . . .
A lot more 2011 baby names seem to have a stamp of ethnicity — but not necessarily their own ethnicity. I wonder how many American girls named Sophia are from Greek or Italian families, how many Isabellas are Spanish or Italian, or how many Aidens, Ryans and Conners are even a scintilla Irish.

Family names are still passed between generations, but a lot of Americans pointedly give names to their children that aren't tied to their past or taken from their family. They mix, invent and come up with names that ring with new hopes and dreams. That's why lists like this change and are worth reading. They remind us that Americans name their children for the people they hope they'll be.

When I heard this on Saturday morning I could not help but think of our current conversation about ethnicity and our earlier conversations about whether ethnic group membership is voluntary.  Simon's comments suggest that at least some aspects of it are indeed voluntary: names, for one.  And, with more constraints, language.

His remarks also highlight an important feature of all dynamics related to identity: to what extent is identity tied to the past and to what degree is it directed toward the future.  I assume that there is always some of each, even if the past orientation is only a desire to escape it.

Simon mentioned that top names from 1955.  For girls, it was Mary.  Now that name is down around 150.   In contrast to colonial New England, biblical names in general are pretty thin at the top of the list.  That is as interesting as the shifts in names regarded as ethnically identified.

So what kind of ethnic statement is this?

Re-posted from the St. Olaf Web.  Article by one of my students; photo by my son!

A new take on Norwegian sweaters

By Alexandra Wertz '12
December 1, 2011

Ian Rollwitz '12 sells Norwegian-sweater T-shirts in Buntrock Commons. The shirts have been a hit, with the first 300 nearly selling out in just two days. Photo by Thomas Dunning '15.

At most college campuses, thick-knit, multicolored Norwegian sweaters aren't exactly in style. But at St. Olaf, especially during the week of the annual Christmas Festival, they're all the rage.
There's just one problem: These stitched sensations typically cost hundreds of dollars, an amount rarely found in the wallet of college students.

So this year a group of entrepreneurial St. Olaf students came up with a way to make these hot commodities accessible to all Oles. They put the design of a Norwegian sweater on a T-shirt and started selling them for $10. The shirts were a hit, with the first 300 nearly selling out in just two days. The group is now taking orders for the T-shirts, and plans to sell them to Christmas Festival visitors as well.

The Norwegian-sweater T-shirt was the brainchild of Isaac Prichard '12. In order to help bring his idea to life, Prichard enlisted the help of Vance Ryan '12, Aaron Matuseski '12, Michael Erickson '13, and Lynne Dearborn '13. Those friends of his are in a marketing class that challenged them to come up with a product idea, market it, and ultimately sell it for the benefit of a nonprofit organization.

The group called in Jonathan Halquist '12 to design the shirts, and he successfully translated the knit pattern of a sweater to an inked T-shirt design. "It is both a great tribute to the Norwegian tradition of St. Olaf while also being a comfortable and casual alternative to the more traditional Norwegian sweater," Ryan says.

The group is donating the proceeds from their T-shirt sales to Kiva, a nonprofit microfinance organization that aims to alleviate poverty across the world through microloans. Ryan says the nonprofit's mission seems to align well with St. Olaf's focus on providing its students with a global perspective. "The ability to help people in some of the most remote parts of the world create opportunities for themselves and their families is very important us," Ryan says.

The group's goal is to raise $1,000 for Kiva, and so far they've raised $650. "By far the most fun part of the project has been seeing this idea come to life," Ryan says. "It has also been so rewarding to see the reaction of students. None of us thought this would be as successful as it has been, and we owe a huge thanks to all of the students who have supported us and Kiva."
For more information about the shirts or to place an order, email Vance Ryan at ryan@stolaf.edu.

Just in time for Christmas Fest . . .

MPR sent a reporter to St. Olaf to scope out the larger context.  Here are his blog posts: LINK  This is also just in time for our consideration of St. Olaf in 201.  The reporter hits most of our current talking points: the community of trust, the food, the dorm life, the music, the Norwegian stuff in the bookstore, the chapel.  Not much about the education, I notice.  And we'd want to think about how the parts go together.  What institutional practices contribute to the community of trust?  Not every residential school has that.  Does singing together build that sort of capital and does that leak out to the non-singers through shared living space?  Isn't that account just a tiny bit too simple?  Certainly we are decades past a time when one could argue that the trust was the side-effect of thick lines of family relationships, but there might be some residual effect, but that assumes that people who are related to each other naturally trust each other.

So my point?  Just this, the description may be accurate as far as it goes, but the posts lack much in the way of analysis.  (To be fair, they also don't promise any analysis.)  That is what we need to do ourselves.  And as we do it we might pay attention to the social effects of so many students in musical ensembles and the spill over effect, especially since we're had other occasions this semester to think about resonances between a particular sort of music and some aspect of American life.

Another poet comments on something like failure

Bill Holm's variations on a theme is titled "Music of Failure," but those variations are not all precisely failure.  He points to death which some might identify as the ultimate failure.  Perhaps loss is a more general category that includes death.  Whether every loss is a sort of failure I"m not certain though I have a hunch that from the most mundane inability to locate my car-keys to the specter of death that lurks in the news of a contemporary's cancer diagnosis there is a confrontation with human limitations.

In this poem, one of my favorites by this fine poet, Mary Oliver writes that on the "other side of the black river of loss" is salvation.  And she counsels the necessity of honest acknowledgement of  mortality, of loving what can not last, and of being able to relinquish what is finished.  Not easy advise to follow, but wise, oh so wise.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Ethnic identities: sentimental, symbolic, substantive

We're back to ethnicity just as the Advent season summons many (Christian) Americans to combine their religious devotions with some performance of the culture of their pre-USA origins.  This will be breaking out all over the St. Olaf campus soon with a sort of camping up of Norwegian-ness by those claiming 100% Viking descent and those whose claim is admittedly fictive.  Yesterday (Rolf) Henry appeared in my office showing off his new tee-shirt . . . printed as if it were a Norwegian sweater and in the bookstore the latest variation of the official St. Olaf Norwegian sweater is on sale.

Tomorrow in class we tackle Michael Aune's essay, "Both Sides of the Hyphen," and his question about how St. Olaf's Norwegian-American founding might matter today.

Contemporary Norwegian Design

Pick one?
A)  Not at all.

B)  It is a sentimental, nostalgia for the great-great-grandparents.  Let's eat some goodies full of butter and almonds and tell some Ole and Lena jokes.  Perhaps this assumes some sort of familial relationship.

C)  It is symbolic of the old traditions.  No reason not to eat those cookies, wear those sweaters, even take a cruise in the fjords.  Why not celebrate the egalitarian values, remember the obstacles overcome, and greet the King and Queen when they are in town.  Maybe this is open to anyone who admires the heritage.

D)  It is substantive, not something dusted off for special occasions, but a living stream that contributes to our collective life together.  This option, as Aune points out, suggests that ethnic identity is dynamic rather than static, something that requires cultivation more than preservation.  This was the default situation for the immigrant generation who often had a "divided heart," but it is harder to sustain in subsequent generations or to share with others.  Does it require an inherited legacy, or is it possible for individuals to adopt this sort of ethnic identification? living 3422044656342204465

Seeing, sympathy, self (beyond one's own)

Walker Evans, but not Alabama

Bill Holm, in "The Music of Failure," writes about Jame Agee and Walker Evans portrayals of Alabama tenant farmers in the 1930s.    Agee uses "hundreds of pages of thundering prose" while Evans made "simple, direct photographs."  Holm asserts that both men showed that "at the bottom of everything is skin: under that, blood and bone."  That this is true of all human beings.  The difference is only that some are more able to mask this truth with "money earned, suit brand, car model, school degree, powerful army, big bombs, bootstrap rhetoric."

Later in the essay Holm offers his plea for authentic humanity (not his terminology).  Let me link it back to Agee and Evans.  Holm writes that a strong self, the ego, "requires first the power to sympathetically imagine something outside itself."  Wlaker's words and Evans' images help this happen by showing the "lives of other human beings."  Holm continues, the second necessity is "the capacity to love something outside the self."

Again and again this semester we have confronted this reality:  people are different from each other.  We are divided from each other by membership in various sorts of groups, "classes" if you will determined by biology, family, economic resources, social categories, place of residence, and the like.  Some have power and opportunities that others do not.  Again and again we have confronted the dilemma: how are we to bridge those differences?  And asked, is there commonality as well as difference?

Holm's answer: yes there is fundamental commonality and it is grounded in the human potential to see "death in things."  Yes, there are bridges built from recognizing that commonality that moves us beyond our individual-self and beyond our collective-self.  Yes, music, and photographs, and literature do this.

All well and good.  Two questions lurk:
1) We still wonder about some photos as intrusive and exploitative.
2)  I wonder about the photos we take of our selves and post for all to see.  Notice how seldom those reveal that we are "skin: under that blood and bone."
Evidently there is music, literature, and photography that obscures rather than showing the truth.

a different sort of company town

Thanks to an Ole connection at NPR: a story about Holden Village.   (With links to slide show and you-tube)

Of interest to us, why?

First because the facilities (buildings, road, etc.) were constructed as a company town by Howe Sound Mining so there is a bit of a tie in with our consideration of Pullman, IL.   This little town was isolated in a way that Pullman was not.   Many miles up-lake from Chelan, Washington, it is located in Railroad Creek Valley, but there is no train.  About 11 miles down the road, on the lake shore, there was another little settlement not owned by the company and a much shorter walk toward the wilderness a 'sub-division' of houses built by married workers.  The single miners all lived in dormitories provided by the company and the management families lived in houses also provided by the company.  There was a bowling alley, a gym, a pool-hall, a short-order restaurant, a school, a hospital.  At miners' reunions, the folks who were kids there report mostly pleasant memories.  The company seems to have had a more modest social agenda than Mr. Pullman.  It closed the town when the price of copper fell.

Second because the retreat community that occupies the site, while not a company town, does shape its members' values and practices thereby accomplishing the sort of goals Pullman had, though not precisely the same values and practices that he promoted.  Indeed, he might have found the Holden sort of community unnerving.  It is hardly a utopia, but its scale allows attention to the infrastructure of water, electricity, sewer, and human relations that we seldom have time for or access to in our ordinary lives. 

Third because this article describes how the on-going efforts to clean up the mining residue from the first community is effecting the current community.

thankful for consumer pressures

Here is a peculiar gratitude: Thanksgiving, unlike many other holidays, has not been moved to Monday.  It stays on Thursday and makes a four day holiday with most of the days after the big event, so those three days are not available for preparations.  I suspect that this timing is preserved by the pressures of consumers who want to buy stuff on Friday and merchants who hope to go into the black that day.  I have never hit those sales and it is easy for me to disdain the impulse to shop at mid-night, but I'm grateful for the sales as I enjoy a day ordinary tasks (housecleaning, bread baking, even school work) without dashing back to work.

Not a cheerful Thanksgiving poem

THIS poem by Sherman Alexie will not conjure up hallmark images of a happy, first Thanksgiving eaten by friendly neighbors dressed in Puritan somberness and equally stereotyped native costumes.  Or, if it does, the conjuring will be by way of remembering that those images are less than the true story of that first year and the years that followed.

Alexie gives us an eschatological vision of a banquet marked by forgiveness and joy, but it is not a story Jesus told nor is the location a city on a hill.  Nonetheless, the culminating meal does celebrate restoration and plenty for which many Christians would give thanks.  Merely changing our menu from turkey to salmon would not achieve the vision, but the perhaps holding the image of the meal in our imagination as we eat our turkey will allow us to season our thanksgiving with repentance and resolve.

 

The Powwow at the End of the World

By Sherman Alexie
 

I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall   

after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam   

and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive   

and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam   

downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you   

that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find   

their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific   

and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive   

and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon   

waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall   

after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia   

and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors   

of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall   

after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River   

as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives   

in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.   

I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after   

that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws   

a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire   

which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told   

by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall   

after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon   

who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us   

how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;   

the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many   

of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing   

with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.

Sherman Alexie, “The Powwow at the End of the World” from The Summer of Black Widows. Copyright © 1996 by Sherman Alexie. Used by permission of Hanging Loose Press.


Source: The Summer of Black Widows (Story Line Press, 1996)

report on my absence: social capital, embodied ideas, precision of expression

While Mary lead the class I was off to San Francisco to attend the annual, national meetings of the American Academy of Religion along with thousands (yes thousands) of other scholars of religion.  Even in a great city like San Francisco, where the sessions are spread over blocks rather than all in one convention center and one does go outside, the event has odd effects on one's sense of reality.  Sitting in a sub-divided ballroom listening to papers for hours on end is punctuated with odd glimpses of people one has not spoken to or thought of for years among the vast book displays as well as by shared meals with dear friends seldom seen.  There is a bit of the junior high/middle school dynamic in each encounter: quickly one must discern the appropriate status scale and calibrate one's response appropriately.

When a former classmate hailed me to put in a good word for a job applicant I thought of the ways in which social capital is not only generated by such organizations and "old school" ties, but also about how it is spent.  Perhaps I thought of that because I'd been to a session about Robert Putnam's new book, the very well received American Grace, co-authored by David Campbell.  It was not so much about social capital, but our old friend Alexis de Tocqueville did come up in the discussion several times.  Here I'm not going to rehearse the argument of the book, which is fascinating and largely regarded as solid; neither am I going to summarize the interesting, appreciative, yet challenging responses by a political theorist, a sociologist, and a theologian.  Rather two points:

1) I was reminded how much more engaging it is to merely listen in on conversations between real people in person than to read even a finely written article.  In part this is simply the energy produced by incarnate human beings in a room; and even more it is the interactive, responsiveness which demonstrates that knowledge and understanding are socially produced.  Frankly, it was remarkable to watch Robert Putnam listen to comments on his work and then stand up to respond with some passion and autobiographical references. 

2) I was wishing that those real live people would not resort to short-hand phrases.  "Nones" as short-hand for persons who declare no formal affiliation with a religious group.  At least that is where the term originated.  It did not mean that those persons had no religious ideas or spiritual practices or moral standards.  But, when we use the word "nones" without the original context, the meaning expands and becomes less useful.  Similarly when we speak of tolerance without an object, a fine characteristic is made vague.  It seemed to me, a listener in the audience, that more precise use of language would have given the conversation greater clarity.

Vaudeville photo stills

 

Look at those remarkable performers!  It was a fantastic show. 

magic (with audience participation). . .slap stick comedy. . . ethnic humor. . . tap dancing . . . musical production . . . an animal act . . . and serious music.

What inequality?

flock of wealth in Montana

LINK  to David Brooks' slightly tongue-in-cheek comment on the sorts of inequalities currently regarded as acceptable in American society and those that are not.  His description strikes me as largely correct.  So too his conclusion:

"Dear visitor, we are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other. Have a nice stay."

 What I'd have liked to have read is his analysis of why one sort of inequality is acceptable and another is not and his interpretation of what this tells us about ourselves. 

As I've been thinking about this piece, Enich has been thinking about our discussion on Friday.  What he wrote could be in conversation with Brooks, so I re-post his recent comment.

Enich's Amcon Thoughts: Social Class, Value Systems and Space: I was thinking a lot since Friday about value systems and what input they have on mobility in various societies. We mentioned how in an agri...

who can know?

storm cloud near Red Cloud

From the introduction to My Antonia, an exchange between Jim Burden and the unidentified author of the introduction: "We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it." 

And there is the dilemma, succinctly stated.  Is it possible for anyone to know about anything that we have not experienced directly for ourselves?  And if it is not possible, then how will we develop bonds of relationship and compassion for each other?

Surely there is a role for imagination that bridges what I have not experienced in a way that fosters empathy, not only for those 'less fortunate' than me, but for anyone who is not me.  And isn't that one of the functions of art and scholarship, to build such a bridge that we can cross?  Reading Cather's work we are offered an opportunity to learn something about growing up in a little prairie town, not every thing, but something worth knowing.  We need not take her novel as the only source; in fact, we ought to come to it with both sympathy and eyes wide open.  But, if we don't read it and engage our imagination and our evaluative capacities, we will know less.

Private Property and citizenship: Emancipation, Homestead, and Dawes

Friday's con-versation about ideals of American life at the turn into the twentieth century yielded some insights for me beyond my delight in the vigor of the conversation.  These derive from the chronological coincidence of the Homestead Act and the Emancipation Proclamation as well as from the later (1887) Dawes Act.

1. Freeing slaves and offering free land: two expansions of citizenship.
2. Free land was offered to freed slaves who have not been counted as citizen previously, to immigrants asserting their intention to become citizens, and to native-born citizens willing to move west and do the work, but not to citizens who served in the Confederacy's military forces.
3. Also note that this was offered to adult men and unmarried adult women, the former who could vote and the later could not.
4. Also excluded the Chinese who were not allowed into the nation and thus could neither get 160 acres or become citizens.
5. The Dawes Act offered Native Americans (not immigrants precisely, but still aliens of a sort) a traded: take up the notion of private ownership of property and gain citizenship.  

So we have the familiar notion that land ownership is the foundation of the independence necessary for exercising the responsibilities of citizenship to vote.  However these were mixed with notions of loyalty to the nation (which the Confederates had violated), and with notions about gender roles that allowed un-married women to own land and pay taxes, but not to vote, and with notions about racial identity that anticipated that African-Americans and Native Americans could become loyal, responsible citizens, but Chinese could not. 

I'm still thinking about the interaction of these several assumptions even as I have just read a rather intriguing essay about Dakota and Norwegian female land ownership near Devil's Lake, North Dakota. The author points out the oddity that recent immigrants, many of whom barely spoke English, were expected to somehow contribute to the government's project of bring the Sioux into American culture. (Karen V. Hanson, "Land Taking at Spirit Lake: The Competing and Converging Logics of Norwegian and Dakota Women, 1900-1930."  Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities.)

a long way from camping it up

Coming to school early this morning I encountered the expected grey squirrels dashing across the lawn.  What I had not expected, but was delighted to see, was a pair of cardinals...on the ground.

The female cardinal is my favorite visitor to our winter bird feeder so I was especially delighted to spy one today. (The one in the photo is not the one that I saw.)

Contemplating her in the context of the semester's conversations I was struck by the subtlety of her coloring.  It seemed, to me on the morning of the first frost or few snow flakes, that she was attired in the very opposite of a camped up, dramatic costume.  I read her grey with accents of red as confident and stylish.

Vaudville 2011 @ St. Olaf by AmCon Students!

I'm astonished by all the hidden talents that were revealed!

• Isaac's Italian accent
• Athena's kick
• Katie's animal instincts
• that tap-dancing
• that production number
• that clarinet music
• that old, flying carpet magic
• all that murder and camping
• more, and more, and more

Perhaps there will be photos.  Certainly there was laughter and appreciation for one another.

Constraints: bodily and social

I'm still thinking about Solnit on technology and bodily existence as burdensome, but now I'm also thinking about it with some additional bits and pieces.  In particular, I'm thinking about the interaction of bodies and social constraints.

One is to also consider what sort of social constraints might be regarded as some how analogous.  Yesterday we returned to models for negotiating ethnic variety and national identity in the USA and recalled the limits of an assimilationist model based on "Anglo conformity" or even the melting pot.  These are effected by visible, bodily markers of difference which can inhibit the possibility of an individual "melting" or conforming.  Of course movements like Black Nationalism rejected the goal of finding a way to join and the alternate models of an ethnic federation or cultural pluralism do not necessarily regard those visible, bodily markers as barriers.  Nonetheless, in the past a person's membership in a racial or ethnic group could in fact result in constraints upon individual's opportunities.

Similarly, in our previous discussion of Gay New York we considered the phenomenon of "policing" which imposed constraints on public behaviors, learned that the degree social of openness varied from one ethnic, racial, or class group to another, and noted that certain employments allowed more or less public acknowledgement of gay men's sexuality.   While individual men made decisions about how to live, most did so with those community standards in place even as the standards changed over time in response to various factors such as the wavering legal status of prohibition.

A third, somewhat different, line of thought was sparked by stories about space exploration: the special fuel needed to travel really, really far and a test run in which the potential travelers were confined for many months to simulate the boredom of a multi-year space journey.  These are efforts to get way beyond the boundaries of our earthly life!  And as I listened I wondered if our considerable human innovation and creativity might not be better directed to improving the basic life conditions of human beings whose earthly life is sustained on less than a dollar a day in India or the increasing number of Americans living below the poverty life.  Certainly those are conditions that constrain their options and their contributions to common life.

What is Ragtime about?

with thanks to students for their discussion in class and their papers, for my colleague Gary Gisselman who is directing the musical at Park Square in St. Paul:

1. American society on the cusp of the 20th century.
2. the ways in which historical figures interact with "generic" ones and thus shed light on the open questions of their day.
3. Winslow Homer's painting?  It is at the beginning and the end of the novel so I've gotta think it matters, but how?  The sea and the sky as open in contrast to the city?  Younger brother standing there at the water's edge like a fish coming out of the brine: is that something about evolution?
4. Father's diminishment next to Mother's coming into her own and Coalhouse's demise next to Tateh's rise seem to provide some focus for the social forces at work.  And these lead to.....Little Rascals?  A new vision of America?
5. No doubt Houdini could be the key: an escape artist who can't escape.  
6. So....maybe....like so much of American art in various genres, this is an exploration of freedom and not freedom, of the forces and structures that bind people and the ways in which they try to or actually do get free.

Burdensome bodies?

". . . .technology regards the very terms of our bodily existence as burdensome."  Rebecca Solnit in River of Shadows.

I do like this observation, but oddly I had not thought about it in terms of mind (or spirit)-body dualism until Mary asked me about the religious context for the view.  Perhaps that is because those Christians who advocate such a dualism would put the tension in moral terms and I take Solnit to be pointing toward another sort of issue.  Nonetheless, Mary's question was a fair one that I'll keep thinking about for some time.  I suppose that those Christians who hold to a spirit-body dualism do regard bodily existence as burdensome and a barrier to living a pure, spiritual life.  And they may even devise 'technologies' to escape their bodies: ways of fostering mystical experience, for example.   However, as I said in class, there is a wider, more mainstream tradition within Christianity that values bodily existence as part of divine creation and in recognition that in Jesus God took on human flesh.  Indeed Jesus himself displayed the burden of bodily existence and its related awareness of mortality in that he ate, and rested, and wept.

This morning, on Studio 360, I heard a set of STORIES that recalled all of this to me: its topic was genetic engineering and other enhancements of human bodies.  These technologies before birth and after accidents or disease aim to remove the limits of human bodies in ways that are like electric lights and the telephone and so forth.  And here I realize that my reluctance to embrace some of these technologies is theological because they seem to me to be denying the goodness of bodies that are limited.  I'm unwilling to allow that needing to sleep and eat, for example, are so burdensome that we should overcome them rather than tending to them.

technology free breathing space

This from the chaplain's office at Yale University:

The newest space opened by the Chaplain’s Office aims —as its name suggests —to give students juggling hectic schedules a chance to “breathe.”

Breathing Space, an initiative that began on Sept. 4, opens a reading room, bathroom and meditation room in the basement of Welch Hall’s entryway C to students from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday. The goal of the center is to provide undergraduates and graduate students alike with a technology-free zone that offsets the “hustle and bustle of their days,” University Chaplain Sharon Kugler said in a Wednesday email. Though student organizers said publicizing the new spot has been difficult, they said they hope Breathing Space will become a popular hangout once more students learn of its existence.

At Breathing Space, students can read religious texts, talk with friends, grab free snacks, meditate in a room with floor cushions and an indoor waterfall, and take part in various arts and crafts activities. Though the centeroffers weekly religious text studies, Kugler said Breathing Space is not designed to target any specific religious or spiritual traditions but rather offer a spot for students to unwind.The center is staffed by 10 student workers every week, Breathing Space’s coordinator Ivy Onyeador ’11.

In an effort to separate students from constant emails and other daily stresses, Breathing Space does not allow technological devices such as cell phones, laptops and iPods. Kate Stratton DIV ’12, who runs a weekly arts and crafts session called “Time for the Soul” at Breathing Space, said the absence of these personal electronics creates a “no-pressure zone” that gives students a way to “recharge.”

“Breathing Space is a no-gain zone —people don’t come to accomplish something,” Stratton said. “But there’s something meaningful about stepping out of your rat-race schedule to stop and just ‘be.’”

Notice the contrast with Moody who adopted the current innovations in marketing and to some extent technology in service of his religious message.

Ford and Jobs changed America

Such lively conversation today.  Such interesting ideas.  Such a joy and privilege to be with these students!

Prompted by the obituaries and accolades given to Steve Jobs earlier this fall, we began with two parallel, nearly identical, sentences:

Henry Ford changed America.

Steve Jobs changed America.

Following Stanley Fish's encouragement, we built on the three "words" to help us think about what was changed (e.g. American values, American experiences of work, American's perception of physical distance and time, etc.) and by what means (e.g. by the moving assembly line, by access to affordable automobiles, by 24 hour access to instant, international communication).  We noted similarities of biography and in the men's self-portrayal and in some of their flaws.  There was lots more that we did not get to, including the simple connection between the automobile and superhighways being alluded to by the connection between computers and other devices and the digital superhighway. 

In the heat of the conversation I did not read aloud this sentence from Johnson about Ford. Seems like the sentence would apply equally as well to Jobs as to Ford.

"He illustrated the power, which all historians learn to recognize, of a good but simple idea pursued singlemindedly by a man of implacable will." p. 606

Freedom to not work . . . .or to work

Lawrence, MA 1912

The comment I wanted to make in response to Andrew that flew out of my brain:

Andrew's remark that workers were freed to work for Pullman and live in his town or not to do so points to the dispute about the nature of freedom that was lively in this period.  While manufacturers asserted the freedom to enter into contracts, labor advocates saw the dangers of being "wage slaves."  Eric Foner's chapter on this period, in his book The Story of American Freedom, is excellent and well worth getting your hands on, especially if you are an economics major or interested in business.

For now, one short quotation:

Most profoundly, labor raised the question whether meaningful freedom would exist in a situation of extreme economic inequality.  On July 4, 1886, the Federated Trades of the Pacific Coast rewrote Jefferson's Declaration adding to the list among mankind's inalienable rights "Life and means of living, Liberty and the conditions essential to liberty."  Freedom required certain kinds of social arrangements, not simply liberty of contract. p. 126

NPR Story on Houdini edited by our own Jason DeRosee

In 202 the big final project will return to an earlier 101 project in form but take it to completion: a radio/pod cast.  The topics will begin with National Parks.  There will be help, including a workshop with St. Olaf Alum Jason DeRose of NPR.  So ...............  this piece he edited on Houdini's descendent makes a sort of connection between what we have been doing (Ragtime, the novel in which HH is a character, Vaudeville, etc.) and what we will do.

THE LINK

Entertainment culture, political culture, and religion

THIS comment by Anthea Butler on Herman Cain's performance at the National Press Club on October 31 suggests something of the way that the rise of entertainment culture we have been considering via Gilbert's study of Chicago has made its way into both religion and politics.  We'll consider the former (the intertwining of religion and entertainment) when we get to the chapter on Moody.  More specifically Butler draws upon the stereotypes of African-Americans in early 20th century popular entertainments such as minstrel shows, vaudeville, and movies, to comment on Cain's defense against charges of sexual harassment.  I'll paste in a paragraph, but urge you to read the whole piece in order to appreciate Butler's nuanced assessment.

Cain, a member of Antioch Baptist church North in Atlanta, Ga, has mentioned his Christian faith on the campaign trail, and has recorded a gospel album. Cain’s singing of “He looked beyond my faults” was, in my opinion, a combination of minstrel show, an Amos and Andy riff without Amos, and a sly admission. By going into entertainment mode with the crowd, Cain tried to both deftly testify to his faith with his Teavangelical base, while at the same time throwing the throngs of reporters off from the trail of the sexual harassment suit. All while confessing that while “others saw his faults, He (Jesus) saw my need.” One wonders what Cain’s faults really are.

All Saints Day

A day to remember and give thanks for the saints who have gone before us, for all who have contributed to the communities in which we live and the people we are.

Hungry Heroines and Tragic Mulattos

After our rather critical discussions of Helga Crane in class, Zoey identified her with a literary type: the tragic mulatto.  Now I'm reading a collection of essays about Norwegian-American women (Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities and Identities, eds. Bergland and Lahlum) that includes one on another literary type: the hungry heroine.  Ingrid Urberg explains that the type is found first in European folklore and then represented in immigrant fiction, more specifically works by and about Norwegian-American women.  Then she explores the translation of this fairy-tale type in several novels considering how these female protagonists move from their "lack" through a "quest" and achieve a "reward" in a new home.

In part her purpose is to counteract the common impression that Beret, in Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, is the prototypical Norwegian immigrant woman: reluctant, depressive, and yet strong.  In some aspects a tragic type.  As I read Urberg's essay I was reminded that no single fictional character can adequately portray the wide range of human experience and response to common situations.  I wondered once again about what might be learned by considering  Quicksand both as a novel of the Harlem Renaissance and as an immigrant novel.  I'm not at all sure that this would change our response to Helga, but the larger field of comparison might yield useful insights about the intertwining of race, ethnicity, and gender in the early 20th century.

Norton on the Fair

 











 "The great Fair was indeed a superb and appropriate symbol of our great nation, in its noble general design and in the inequalities of its execution; in its unexampled display of industrial energy and practical capacity; in the absence of the higher works of creative imagination; in its incongruities, its mingling of noble realities and ignoble pretenses, in its refinements check-by-jowl with vulgarities, in its order and its confusion--in its heterogeneousness and its unity."

This comment by Harvard President Charles Eliot Norton, an official of the Columbian Exposition, gives evidence that at least some of those involved in its planning and execution were well aware of the ideological issues being played out there.  While scholars and other observers today often suggest that the White City represented an effort by an emerging elite to impose their largely middle class values and the Midway provided an alternative popular culture, perhaps the Fair also could be seen as an effort to find a way for multiple cultures to exist alongside, even over-lapping, one another.

Optimism, pessimism, dissatisfaction, hope

As we come back to these attitudes, again and again, this from theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether seems appropriate:

"If we are 'optimistic,' it suggests that change is inevitable and will happen in the 'natural' course of things, and so we need not make much effort ourselves. Someone else will take care of it. If we are 'pessimistic,' change is impossible, and therefore it is useless to try. In either case we have the luxury, as critical but comfortable elites in the United States, to question the present system without being responsible for it. What we need is neither optimism nor pessimism, in these terms, but committed love." - Rosemary Radford Ruether

Making visible

THIS from the October 23, 2011 Mpls Strib, an op-ed about poverty and children.  I could not get access to the article she mentions in which there are photos of kids in designer clothes.  She attempts to counter those images of children whose middle-class parents spent significant money on their soon-to-be-outgrown "luxe" outfits with statistics about the increasing number of Twin Cities kids whose parents' income is so low that they qualify for free lunch (35%) and others numbers about the dire situation of children living in poverty whom the rest of us are unlikely to notice.  She suggests that we are unlike to notice them because our daily lives do not intersect: we live and move in different parts of the city.  And, we don't notice them because the media we do see shows us those other kids in fancy, expensive clothing.

We talked about this in class from a couple of angles:
1) How does the situation she describes compare to that documented by Jacob Riis' photos and Hull House reports?

2) How effective is her op-ed in comparison to Riis' photos and Hull House reports?

A very important response to the first required us to move beyond the easy generalization that "the poor you have with you always."  We needed to consider both the degree of economic stratification in the USA at a given time and the actual conditions in which children in those various "classes" lived.  A parallel can be drawn to statistics about literacy.  In that case we must ask both what constitutes literacy and how many people achieve it.  What counted a century and a half ago would not count as literacy today. And today we'd probably need to add consideration of access to information technology to assessment of the ability to read.

Our response to the second seemed, at first, to assume that visibility is necessary if the general public is to respond to the situation of the poor.  We noted that a person or group of people can be invisible because there is no portrayal of their situation or because that portrayal is lost in the blizzard of information.  A variation on the second is that the viewer becomes numb to the images.  The Hull House strategy included both providing decision makers with many reports with many facts and taking up residence in those "congested areas."  At its best this strategy encouraged the residents to consider real people who were neither reduced to aggregated statistics nor to two-dimensional images.  Thus their neighbors were both visible and known in 3-dimensions.

Out in Chicago: History Museum Exhibit

Link to exhibit

After our reading of Gay New York this exhibit from the Chicago History Museum is of interest now that we're concentrating on that midwestern City.  The linked page includes photos of some items in the exhibit, both historical and contemporary.  These recall themes we have encountered before.  There is a photo from Bronzeville, Chicago's African-American neighborhood on the near southside, recalling the intersection of New York's "gay world" and Harlem.  The page also notes events including a walking tour of the Andersonville neighborhood, home to Ann Sather's Scandinavian restaurant and Women and Children First, a venerable feminist bookstore.  The first is a legacy of the neighborhood's history as a Scandinavian immigrant community; likely the second signals the influx of lesbian residents in the 1980s.

photographic past poem

In the Olden Days

by Richard Newman

The world held no color but sepia.
Our bedside tables creaked beneath the weight
of daily hardships, buffered only by doilies.
We did without, did things by hand. We got more
snow. Our Mickey Mouse was far from cute.
We specialized in quaint and quirky phrases
like "23 Skidoo." Our songs rang dark
with forced joy and naiveté: "Aint We Got Fun?"
Staring from family photographs, we look
older than we are. Even as children, our faces
are shadowed with doubt and parental disappointment,
as if to say to those looking years from now:
We persist. We persevere. We do this for you.
"In the Olden Days" by Richard Newman, from Borrowed Towns. © Word Press, 2005. 

After looking at those Jacob Riis photos on Friday, I was struck by this poem's suggestion that the people in photos speak from their time to contemporary viewers.  And I wished that our exercise had been slightly different.  Instead of writing captions for the photos we might have written speeches for the people in them: 1) what would this child holding the baby have said to Riis's viewers and 2) what does she say to us.

more on tableware

Once more about the tools for eating and what they reveal about values and customs. This time we consider the flatware of the the early 20th century.


If 'everyone' can own a fork or two, then how will the elite demonstrate their refinement?  Multiply the kinds of forks and knives and spoons.  That increases the cost of owning a full set.  It requires a larger table to set a larger, more elaborate meal to eat from it with the utensils, and introduces special knowledge about which utensil to use to each each dish.  Thus, even if I have enough money to buy all those pieces and a cook to plan and prepare the meal, I still could betray my non-elite origins by eating my fish with a dessert fork.

on the joys and aches of global perspective

THIS lovely reflection from Monte Smith (Paracollege, 2000) about coming "home" from Hong Kong and how she feels about being here while also not being there.  She reminds me that our happy encouragement of global perspective is only part of the story.  Opening one's heart up to the world includes being open to its sorrows and to the smaller sadness of always being divided between where one is and the place and people who are elsewhere.