On sincerity and Christmas Festival

This is the weekend of the 101st St. Olaf College Christmas festival.  It is a big deal on our campus.  Four 'performances' of 90+ minutes of Christmas/Advent music by five choirs and the orchestra.  That involves several hundred students and several thousand in the audiences.  Some of those folks also come for a ritualized meal that draws upon immigrant memories: lutefisk, lefse, meatballs, potatoes, and the like.  Many of them show up in nordic sweaters: Dahl of Norway or Oleana or the variety designed especially for St. Olaf College with a lion motif.  Of course it goes without saying, but must be acknowledged, that this event both fosters school spirit and raises money. (Now by ticket sales and by encouraging donations beyond the ticket price.)

Along with the festival itself we have other annual customs.  The student newspaper will need to publish an opinion piece mocking the sweaters and declaring that lutefisk tastes awful.  This is not news.  While the sweaters are warm, they are also a sort of costume.  As costumes go, I prefer them to those wedges of fake-cheese people from Wisconsin wear or the face-paint sports fans don for big games or even to many Hallowen costumes.  (In fact I even own a sweater more like the red one here than the black one, but I never wear it during Christmas festival week.)

Moreover, very few people love the taste of lutefisk.  Only a few more still have any memory of eating it for any but ritual holiday occasions.  (I admit that I never eat it, nor did I as a child since my mother loathed the stuff and my father's Swedish Baptist family didn't have the tradition.)  However, anyone who sets foot on the campus is invited to join in the meal or to buy a sweater.  While these are markers of community membership, that membership is relatively open here. 

So, I wonder, why does this editorial appear year after year?  Why do the same jokes echo annually?  I suspect it might be because we are so unaccustomed to an invitation to participate in a sincere event, devoid of irony or exaggeration.  The festival/concert itself is such an invitation.  Yes, it is a performance, but fueled by hope and devotion rather than self-promotion or satire.  So rare is this that it requires the balance of jokes and critique provoked by the easy targets of flocks of people in wool, Norwegian sweaters and by that meal.  No doubt there is also a bit of the inevitable student poking at alumni involved as well.

I suspect that we need that editorial every year.  The festival does have the potential to inflate our self image, to be pompous, to give the impression of exclusivity.  The sweaters, like many costumes of membership, can be a little silly.  The food, like Thanksgiving turkey, it chosen for symbolic reasons at least as much as for nutritional or stylish ones.  And, at the same time, I'm grateful to be invited out of the fashionable irony of the age into 90 minutes of (almost) pure sincerity and offered the opportunity to dwell in the hope that is at the heart of advent waiting and Christmas' story. 

If you'd like to hear the concert: check here.

American Studies event

Tomorrow afternoon (Friday) there is an American Studies event with cakes to eat and books as door prizes.  No doubt many AmCon students will be there.  There will be lively, interesting conversation.  Alas, after dropping off my pumpkin spice bundt cake and some books, I will dash off to Tomson Hall to talk to "Lang & Lit" about Lars W. Boe.  In view of Boe's interest in fostering students' self-understanding as Americans and their participation in American life, somehow it seems wrong to be talking about him rather than participating in the American Studies event. 

What is the starting point?

Yesterday in my American Religion class we discussed Sylvester Johnson's article on nationalist, African American religious groups, e.g. Nation of Islam and others.  His assertions about the legitimacy of these groups as religions and their ethnogenesis offered a new angle on much of American religion.  In particular the repeated motif of some American's as the "new Israel," however, I have a hunch that there is much more to reconsider.

Perhaps I mentioned Marcus Garvey and Rastafarians in 1984.  Frankly I don't recall doing so.  But even if I did I'm certain that I was not able to consider that they, and similar movement, offered an instructive lens on the Pilgrims or Italian Roman Catholics.  Nonetheless, there is much to learn if we begin with the expectation that all religious groups in the USA are, in some sense, inventing an identity and a mythology to support it.  Some, like Joseph Smith, find buried resources, others make do with what they bring in their luggage, but everyone uses what they can put their hands on to cope with the [new] world in which they find themselves. 

The article also caused us to back up and ask about what various American groups have expected from their religion and to notice how this has shifted over time even within the broadly defined group that descends from those Pilgrims.

The large scale contours of American religion

In the midst of this first run at offering Religion 260, American Religion (non-seminar) I found my notes from the last time I offered something similar, spring 1984 at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. (That was just months after I'd passed my comprehensive doctoral exams.)  Immediately I noticed that in that earlier version of the course I was much more concerned, perhaps preoccupied, with insuring that my students absorbed many, many discreet pieces of information about American religious groups and their development. This time I'm much more interested in the patterns.  Or, one might say I'm more interested in plotting the contours of the landscape rather than focused on the individual data points.

Of course one can not plot the contours without the data points.  Perhaps this is a bit like the old discussion about trees and forests.  I'm now more interested in my students having a sense of the forest and being able to find their way among the trees.

Why?  I have a hunch that teaching religion 121, our introductory course in reading the Bible, and American Conservations has a great deal to do with my shift from pieces to patterns.   I'm relying less on students finding the material intrinsically interesting and am more concerned with how understanding what has been might help us understand what is.

And, I suspect that our current concern with religious pluralism raises questions about the past that push us toward the forest rather than the trees.   As we move through the 'text book' and more focused scholarship I find myself noticing connections and comparisons that had never occurred to me before and considering lines of questions that are novel to me.  For example, how do various groups and individuals expect to gain access to the sacred?  Can we trace developments and chart various options?  There is the classic Protestant expectation that this comes through reading the Bible, but also Deist reliance on reason not harnessed to scripture.  And how to compare the  state of revivalist ecstasy to the ritually indued trance of Mother Ann's work or the Ghost Dance?

Nothing better than new ideas! 

Sunshine Boys

Last night we saw The Sunshine Boys at the Guthrie, directed by St. Olaf's Gary Gisseleman.  It was spectacular!  The house was pretty full for a Wednesday night and the laughter was huge and frequent.

Neil Simon's portrayal of these two old vaudevillians in a story about their relationship makes excellent use of the vaudeville conventions.  Their story includes a steady stream of gentle misunderstanding mixed in with bits from their old routine so that the audience experiences a particular comic perspective on life.  In this well acted production, it was the perfect entertainment in the midst of a hot summer.

As the actors took their bows, there was also a tender moment as the two mature actors who play the entertainers interacted with the young actor who plays the nephew/agent.   Here we glimpsed a doubling in which the relationships portrayed seemed to mirror the relationships among the players.

Public Transportation provides freedom of movement

This morning each of the three people in my household had some reason to go to "The Cities."  Two had specific places to be and even some responsibilities in different parts of the metro and I just wanted "city air," even if it was going to be really hot air.  There was a book I wanted to buy and a 25% off coupon I wanted to use at the kitchen store, but I didn't have a schedule. 

So I caught a ride up with my son and a ride back with my husband and in between . . . I used an all day  (6 hour) MTC pass!  No looking for a parking spot.  No watching out for drivers less responsible than me.  Just wait a few minutes for the light rail or the bus and let someone else drive.  In the time allotted to me I wandered in the Mill City farmers market where I purchased a pound of Spanish grilling onions for later and a yummy pastry with spinach, pear and blue cheese that I ate immediately; I bought the book; I had brunch at the Local, sitting on Nicollet Mall; I walked through Loring Greenway, Loring Park, and the Sculpture Garden; I cooled off in the Walker Museum shop; I had peach and vanilla ice cream at Sebastian Joe's; and I used the coupon to acquire a special pitcher for infusing water with fruit and herb flavors.

Yes, I was restricted by the routes and the schedules of the MTC, but all in all I managed to accomplish quite a lot and I experienced the service as freeing and relaxing.  

California Missions

In anticipation of a possible visit to several of the northern California missions I'm reading up.  On my shelf I had some old stuff, purchased years ago when I went to San Juan Capistrano; this was intended for the tourist trade and presented a rather rosy picture along with the some old photographs.  There is however more recent scholarship, such as Steven W. Hackel's Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis, that I'm finding informative and fascinating.

Converting California by James Sandos offers this useful characterization of earlier portrayals as either Christocentric Triumphalism or Christophobic Nihilism.  He attempts to steer a third course that gives credibility to both the Franciscans and the people they encountered.  This approach parallels recent developments in mission history more globally and will be useful to my teaching about missions and Christianity in the India those explorers were looking for.   Of particular interest for my courses on Christianity is his highlighting the differing meanings members of these two groups attributed to baptism and the distortions that arise from assumptions that baptism was a sign of total conversion. (I also learned quite a lot about venereal disease and the development of musical notation.)

I'm also interested in the function of the missions in the mythos of California.  Sandos points out that once California became part of the United States the history of the missions provided a past for the region, a past that was neither British nor Protestant but that nonetheless could be told as a romantic encounter between Europeans and Native People.  Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, Ramona, did this work.  So too efforts to restore the ruins of the missions in the early 20th century, sometimes from practically nothing, provided Californians and other Americans with cultural destinations akin to other historical sites.   Hence that Sunset Magazine book I bought at San Juan Capistrano and what I suppose that I would have learned about the missions if I'd been an elementary school student in California in the early 1960s. 

Are these also sacred sites either in some universal sense or for American public/civil religion?  Along with the effort to canonize Juniperro Serra, the founder of the first nine missions, that is a provocative issue but one I'm fascinated by as I ruminate on what would constitute a sacred site in the USA.  Certainly these are locations were Franciscans intended to do holy work and there are spaces there designated for religious ritual.  The question, however, is a larger one about how these places are regarded a century-and-a-half after their secularization.  Are they analogous to battlefields?  Certainly some sort of battle was done.  Are they places that enshrine our national values?  Which ones?  Are they places where we are still brought face-to-face with the transcendent or with the realities of our own humanity which is both noble and limited?  Even harder to answer but well worth contemplating if we are to have a way of thinking of our past (and our future) that is neither triumphalist nor nihilistic.  

getting cool

St. Paul, MN July 1935

A radio news story reports that in a major American city efforts to restrict the visible presence of homeless people (notice: not to address the fact of homelessness) include laws prohibiting sleeping in public, eating in public, and feeding people in public.  The public policy issues related to how we address homelessness deserve to be commented upon, but that is not the point of this post.  Rather, in the midst of an intense and prolonged heat wave this story recalls how people coped with heat in the pre-air conditioned era: they slept outside, sometimes in public places, they jumped in bodies of water, they wrapped themselves in damp sheets.  Generally hot weather drove people into places where they saw more of each other rather than into the refuge of their own houses.  Now the cost of getting cool is not only a higher utility bill and the environmental side-effects of increased energy usage, it is also reduced social contact.

I write this, of course, sitting in my newly air-conditioned office in a newly refurbished 130 year old building.  And I don't wish to sleep outside with the mosquitoes.  So I wonder how my predecessors reacted when the days and nights were hot.  Did they keep working as if the temperature were mild?  Did they stop often for a long drink of water?  Did they give up cooking and eat only raw vegetables?   Did they repair to the Canon River or Heath Creek for an afternoon of wading and splashing?  Were those the days when Boe sat in Rolvaag's back yard smoking cigars and planning for a Greater St. Olaf?

Observing the 4th of July

Sometimes in 101 we have assigned a personal essay about observing the 4th of July.  Most of the students wrote about family celebrations with a few references to parades and community fireworks.  There was a domestic, happy quality to these tales.  That is the sort of event on the surface of the poem, "Immigrant Picnic," by Gregory Djanikian, though the poem also hints at the personal loses involved in even the least traumatic relocation. 

The custom of public orations for the 4th seems to have fallen out of practice.  Only at Holden Village have I experienced a public reading of the Declaration of Independence such I have read about in descriptions of historical and fictional Independence Day observations in the 19th and early 20th century.  A powerful example, surely one of the great American speeches, is Frederick Douglass' "What to the American Negro is the Fourth of July?"  He lauds the nation's ideals, honors its founders, and points directly at its failure to enact its best commitments.  Here is James Earl Jones' reading the speech. VIDEO LINK

Even if slavery is outlawed, there is much in these words to inspire us decades later, to remind us that even as declaring independence was followed by a war to achieve it, so too proclaiming equality and freedom requires daily effort to make those ideals into reality.

where we live

If you are wondering how to describe where you live, here is help from The Brookings Institution, Census.gov, City-Data.com, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Endhomelessness.org, Federal Bureau of Investigation, StateoftheAir.org

Credit: Nelson Hsu, Natalie Jones, Melanie Taube, Tanya Ballard Brown / NPR

The opposite of all. . . .

Is having nothing the opposite of having it all?
Is having enough the opposite of having it all?
Is sharing the opposite of having it all?

What is all?

'Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: You can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands. . . .

"Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives."  

Nora Ephron @ 1996 Wellesley College Graduation

Is "having it all" the second-wave, feminist version of the American Dream?  The longing for "having it all" and the possibility or non-possibility has been bouncing around cyberspace a lot in recent weeks because of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic Cover Story “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”.  I've been reading some of the discussion.  Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable. It reminds me of the old goal of getting a bigger part of the pie.  One reason, an ethical one, this makes me uncomfortable might be that the difficulty having it all (or even a bigger piece) seems to be one of the first world problems that pale in comparison to the desire to have some food, a place to sleep, and a modicum of safety.  Another reason. a theological one, is that I think human beings are limited creatures and that living with certain kinds of limits may be a form of righteousness; this is not to deny that there are limits that are unjust and should be addressed, even shattered.  

Without trivializing, I mention that death is one of the limits we all face.  Human life does not last forever.  This week Nora Ephron confronted that limit and as people, especially women, have responded to her death many of them have referred to the commencement speech she gave in 1996 at her alma mater.  The quotations above are from that talk.  Read the whole thing!  Like Ursula K. Le Guin's "Left-Handed Commencement Address" delivered at Mills College in 1983, this speech goes beyond the trite to the heart of important life issues.  (LaGuin goes further to question the notion that success is to be pursued.)

I find two points in Ephron's assertion that women in the class of 1996 might be able to have it all useful and true, despite my fundamental skepticism about that claim.  First, she admits that this will be messy and complicated then advises embracing the mess and the complications.  She does not expect this to be easy or assume that making it easy is someone else's job.  Second, at the end of her remarks, she urges her listeners to make making a difference for other women part of what is included in their "all."  Thus, she appears to be in sympathy with those Americans who assert that the American Dream is bigger than having everything for one's self and that it includes contributing to the public good.

And that reminds me of another remarkable American woman from an earlier phase of woman's rights, Frances Willard.  As the president of the WCTU her motto emphasized action more than possession:  Do Everything!  (Wish I could find the photograph of her at her roll top desk, piled high with all the paper involved in doing everything.)  Notice that Ephron mixes doing and having and a careful reading of Slaughter might also distinguish between the two.  

It is who I am...Catholic and gay

Christine Quinn, NYC council woman and likely mayoral candidate on Weekend Edition.

Insightful reflections on the value of government officials working together instead of as opponents, but to me more interesting for Quinn's comments about the nature of faith.  Asked if she considers leaving the Catholic church since it does not approve of her sexual identity, she replies with something like this: You can't leave your faith, it is who you are.  Moreover she states simply that when she wakes up in the morning she is Catholic and gay.  Her tone suggests that this is the fact, not a problem, and that others who might regard it as a problem should just get over their problem.  Perhaps there is a bit of lurking essentialism in her comments and yet there is also something very appealing about her recognition that faith is something deep and shaping, not merely a choice one makes as if buying a car or ordering dinner.

Generational happiness

My Am Con students wrestled mightily with the reality of Americans' seemingly unending dis-satisfaction.  We noticed it in Quicksand and in Ragtime both set more or less in the early 20th century.  (Enich coined a fine term for it; if he reads this, perhaps he'll add it in the comments.) By the end of the fourth semester they were also working on coming to terms with gap between national ideals and aspirations and the realities of national life.  Angels in America gave some of them a handle on this problem.  Hannah's admonition that one must have an "idea" about America combined with Belize's declaration that he did not have to love America gave them a way to recognize that the gap is not always reducible to collective (or even individual) hypocrisy.  There is also something of a "work in progress" quality to the nation, its culture, and its people.

Perhaps these realizations come at a particular developmental stage, to each generation in its own time and in its own way.  Poet Carl Dennis hints at something like that in his poem, "Our Generation," which I take to be about the generation labeled the "boomers."  Here he manages to shine a gentle light both on the pursuit of individual happiness and on the few who notice the gap between the county in theory and the country in fact.  He does it gently and with quiet hope.

Our Generation

Whatever they'll say about our delinquencies,

They'll have to agree we managed to bridge the gap

Between those who arrived before us

And those who followed. We learned enough

At the schools available to fill the entry-level positions

At the extant sawmills our elders managed,

At banks, drug stores, freight yards, and hospitals,

Then worked our way up to positions of trust.

There we were, down on the shop floor

Or up in the manager's office, or outside the office

On scaffolds, washing the windows.

Did we work with joy? With no less joy

Than people felt in the generations before us.

And on weekends and weekday evenings

We did our best to pursue the happiness

Our founders encouraged us to pursue,

And with equal gusto. Whatever they say about us

They can't deny that we filled the concert halls,

Movie houses, malls, and late-night restaurants.

We took our bows on stage or waited on tables

Or manned the refreshment booths to earn a little extra

For the things we wanted, the very things

Pursued by the generations before us

And likely to be pursued by generations to come:

Children and lawns and cars and beach towels.

And now and then we stood back to admire

The colorful spectacle, the endless variety,

As others before us admired it, and then returned

To fill our picnic baskets, drive to the park,

And use the baseball diamonds just as their contrivers

Intended they should be used. And if we too

Crowded into the squares to cheer the officials

Who proclaimed our country as fine in fact

As it is in theory, as faithful a friend to the planet

As any country we cared to name,

A few of us confined to a side street,

Carried signs declaring a truth less fanciful.

A few unheeded, to be sure, but no more unheeded

Than a similar few in generations before us

Who hoped that the truth in generations to come,

Though just as homely, would find more followers.

Carl Dennis
The Kenyon Review
New Series, Volume XXVII Number 2
Spring 2005

Religion in the USA

I'm working on my syllabus for Religion 260: American Religion.  To that end I've been reading, along with other things, the Columbia Guide to Religion in American History.  I concur with one reviewer's judgment that while one generally does not expect a reference work to be summer reading, several of the chapters in this volume are compelling and fascinating enough to qualify.  The chapter by Andrew M. Manis on "Civil Religion and National Identity" is among those. I learned lots and will learn more from the book and from works included in each chapter's bibliography.

Coming to the book immediately after three days in a workshop on teaching writing, I admired the writing in several of the chapters and will use examples to illustrate a clear, informative, engaging introduction and generally admirable writing.  For example, Mark Noll begins his chapter on theology this way.

"Americans have changed the world much more by action than by thought.  In the religious realm, it is the same."

Ten things that will make you happy

So it is self-help-y.  So what.  That is a venerable American genre.  We recognize it in Ben Franklin and it endures til today.  And if the pursuit of happiness is a right claimed in the Declaration of Independence, then what better goal for a self-help guide/poster than moving toward happiness.  Moreover, these are ten things that SCIENCE tell us will make us happy.

Notice especially #10 which points us toward the notion that happiness is built upon public virtue rather than achieved by self-indulgence.

#10: Give It Away, Give It Away Now! Make altruism and giving part of your life, and be purposeful about it. Researcher Stephen Post says helping a neighbor, volunteering, or donating goods and services results in a “helper’s high,” and you get more health benefits than you would from exercise or quitting smoking. Listening to a friend, passing on your skills, celebrating others’ successes, and forgiveness also contribute to happiness, he says. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn found that those who spend money on others reported much greater happiness than those who spend it on themselves.

HERE for a more easily read version.

American Dream: Radio Reflections

HERE the first in an NPR series on the American Dream.

The American Dream is an implicit contract that says if you play by the rules, you'll move ahead. It's a faith that is almost unique to this country, says Michael Dimock of the Pew Research Center.
"When Germans or French are asked the same questions about whether it's within all of our power to get ahead, or whether our success is really determined by forces outside our control, most German and French respondents say, 'No, success is really beyond our control,' " Dimock says.

This bit identifies something we may have underplayed in our class' focus on perpetual dis-satisfaction: the expectation and confidence that satisfaction (success or happiness) is obtainable, more precisely that these are within our personal control.

Current discussion, including the linked story, suggests that this confidence is on the decline.  That observation raises related questions: what is the basis of the confidence and its loss?  How possible has it been for the average American or for most Americans to get ahead in past decades?  And how much of that was in individual's control?

Now I also wonder about the effect of declining confidence on our willingness to be generous to others?  Is it the case that when individuals feel that the deck is stacked against us that we become less willing to give others help?  If so is that because we figure that there is only so much good luck available and we want to keep ours for ourselves?  I recall reading about this notion of limited luck in an anthropological article about fishing cultures, more specifically about pre-modern, peasant Norwegian fisherfolk.

semester's end

The 2010-12 cohort of American Conversations has come to its conclusion.   Students have gone on to their summer's activities.  Some are anticipating study abroad next year.  Others will be back on campus.  The formal program's completion does not signal an end to conversation or reflection upon perennial issues.

I may continue to make posts here on related topics, but only now and then rather than on a regular basis.

on first drafts

This from Patricia Hampl's essay "Memory and Imagination," in which she writes specifically about memoir so the point might need a bit of  adjustment for other genres.  Nonetheless, I offer it at a time in the semester when many students might benefit from the encouragement she gives.

"For me, writing a first draft is a little like meeting someone for the first time.  I come away with a wary acquaintanceship, but the real friendship (if any) and genuine intimacy--that's all down the road

"A careful first draft is a failed first draft.  That may be why there are so many inaccuracies in the piano lesson memoir...

"The real trouble: the piece hasn't yet found its subject; it isn't yet about what it want to be about.  Note: what IT wants, not what I want.  The difference has to do with the relation a memoir -- any writer, in fact -- has to unconscious or half-known intentions and impulses in composition."

The advise, the encouragement?  Well, it is to get something on the paper so that you can think about it and learn from it.  The first draft may not even be worth cleaning up; it may require a new start; but it will have done its work of helping you to find out what there is to be said.

NPR TED talks on Happiness: choice and action

THREE TALKS about happiness:

Barry Schwartz: Does Having Options Make Us Happier?   
Only some of the time, but raising expectations can also contribute to dissatisfaction and having too many options may be paralyzing.   But, my students assert that this is NOT true for them.  At least most of them did and one agreed that when the analysis is applied to buying jeans (the example Schwartz gave from his own experience), she experiences something like paralysis and would prefer not to undertake the task.  Another confessed to something similar when selecting a movie on Netflix.  Others suggested that Schwartz may be accurate for people of his generation, but not for theirs.  They have always had so many choices, so they are not paralyzed or rendered dissatisfied.  In the midst of the exchange, I wondered if the parallel between jeans, or shampoo, or coffees and big ideals is valid.  That is to suggest that dissatisfaction with consumer goods may be debilitating, but dissatisfaction with with the nation's current reality relative to is highest ideals can (indeed should) motivate action.  

Kathyrn Schulz: Why Should We Embrace Regret?  Schulz uses the example of the tattoo she got when she was 29 to explore the value of regret which is not precisely the opposite of happiness.  Rather she suggests that regret can be a reminder that we can do better.  Her remarks are of interest in conversation with our discussion in class about ways to understand Americans' failure to bring our best ideals to reality.  The assertion that honest recognition of that failure can be the basis of renewed effort resonates with her suggestions about the value of regret for individuals.

 

Malcolm Gladwell: What Does Spaghetti Sauce Have To Do With Happiness?   The shift from expectation of universals to recognition of varying preferences for such things as the viscosity of tomato sauce and the taste of mustard and the roast of coffee.  Has this given us more pleasure?  Can insights drawn from research on food preferences be used to promote conflict resolution?

 

Taking a moment for beaming with pride

about the two retrospective panels we've had so far.  Each of the twelve students have returned to a previous reading and offered an interpretation that takes account of our four semesters of work together.  With only five minutes to speak they have had to be concise in expressing their insights; and they have been.  Also impressive: the coherence among them!  Evidently they have been in the same conversation over these months.  They have taken note of a cyclical movement between emphasis on individualism and revival of concern for community.  They have noticed that even linear developments often have periods of regression.  They have commented upon parallels between the experience of distinct groups.  They have observed the interaction of large scale social and political movements with the personal lives of individuals.  They have pointed to the important distinction between seeking commonality and being forced to conform.  Important, rich insights and knowledge that hints at the value of this program.

memory becomes reality

From Patricia Hempl, the author of the beautiful memoir A Romantic Education, this quotation from an essay, "Memory and Imagination."

"What is remembered is what becomes reality.  If we 'forget' Auschwitz, if we 'forget' My Lai, what then do we remember?  And what is the purpose of our remembering?  If we think of memory naively, as a simple story, logged like a documentary in the archive of the mind, we miss its beauty but also its function.  The beauty of memory rests in its talent for rendering detail, for paying homage to the senses, its capacity to love the particles of life, the richness and idiosyncrasy of  our experience.  The function of memory, on the other hand, is intensely personal and surprisingly political. 

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relation with the past."

Although Hampl is writing about memoir, much of what she writes might also inform the writing of history that is not reduced to counting, statistics in the past tense, or efforts at accurate reproduction of what was.  What we remember as members of groups and what we forget contributes much to what we can become.  Taking mythology as a strong, potentially positive force, it is necessary; but false memories that forget or deny what was painful or a failure allow us to carry those diseases and broken bones in our bodies without healing.  Even if we present ourselves as successful and whole, the wounds fester.

Now I'm thinking again of the final speech Prior makes at the end of Angels in America.  Certainly when the play was written his reference to "this disease" was to AIDS, but now we might extend the reference metaphorically to the failure to remember and confront the ways in which the nation and its people fail to meet our aspirations.  It kills some, but Prior prophecies that some will recover to carry out the Great Work.  So . . . . perhaps  . . . . the possiblity of utopia depends on a healthy recollection of the past.

more on plastic dinerware and hospitality

After AmCon students came to dinner Monday, as I was cleaning up the blue plastic plates and plastic forks of various colors for re-use, I thought again about tableware.  This time I thought less about how what these implements convey about one's class and economic standing and more about what they might say about one's communities.  My thoughts were hardly profound or original, but I was grateful to have enough dinnerware so that everyone could eat, enough to make hosting a smallish crowd easy.  And I noticed that having enough of these in plastic rather than good china and silver also suggests something of the sort of hospitality I am prepared to offer and that my guests are willing to accept: casual and convivial rather than formal.  In this situation the implements are pared down almost entirely to their function with little symbolic meaning remaining.  They are tools for eating and building social communities not markers of my economic resources or social status.

We are all pioneers, or maybe not

In the opening scene of Angels in a America, the funeral of Louis' grandmother, the rabbi speaks about the immigrant journey and asserts that the descendents can not make the same journey.  " You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist." 

One commentator remarks that all the major characters in the play are pioneers of some sort, perhaps contradicting the rabbi.  Certainly the Mormon characters bring to mind their own ancestors who made the 19th century journey from New York state to Utah across the western plains.  Even if Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis is out of fashion and the frontier was not the most important experience in shaping American character, the mythology of journey--both immigrant and pioneer in the west--remains powerful.  

This poem allows us to think about the value of a slow journey at ground level from the perspective of those who more often travel rapidly in the air.   (Remember Harper's final speech delivered through the window of an airplane.)  Nye encourages us to consider what we miss as we travel fast and high, but she does not avoid noticing that the old journey also had its cost.

 

Full Day

by Naomi Shihab Nye

The pilot on the plane says:
In one minute and fifty seconds
we're going as far
as the covered wagon went
in a full day.
We look down
on clouds,
mountains of froth and foam.
We eat a neat
and subdivided lunch.
How was it for the people in
the covered wagon?
They bumped and jostled.
Their wheels broke.
Their biscuits were tough.
They got hot and cold and old.
Their shirts tore on the branches
they passed.
But they saw the pebbles
and the long grass
and the sweet shine of evening
settling on the fields.
They knew the ruts and the rocks.
They threw their furniture out
to make the wagons lighter.
They carried their treasures
in a crooked box.

"Full Day" by Naomi Shihab Nye, from Come With Me. © Greenwillow, 2000.

Technology that promotes social captial

"covered dish" for bringing a meal

My students know that I tend to be skeptical about the degree to which electronic technology actually promotes human good.  I recognize the potential, but I also see the down side.  So it seems honest for me to acknowledge that CaringBridge and FoodTidings.com appear to be uses of technology that do promote social capital.  Both depend upon prior relationships and foster them in service of sharing news about a person well-loved and of providing meals and other help.  Perhaps by making that person's network of friends visible, these programs even stimulate new relationships and expand community.  Seems like an interesting topic for further research.

History of America in 15 Cars

The book is Engines of Change, by Paul Ingrassia who is interviewed here on NPR.  Which cars?  The interview touches on the 1953 Corvette, the VW Bug, the 1964 Mustang, and the Prisus.

As many of my students know, I keep a metal model of a yellow Mustang convertible in my office.  Not because I ever owned a real one, but because I have a pretty clear memory of seeing one in a garage, probably near Cambridge, MA, when my family spent the day there getting our dark blue falcon station wagon repaired after sliding into a bridge.  I must have been about nine years old.  I was not (am not) much interested in cars, but that one impressed me.  I did not know, what I know now from this interview, that the Mustang was relatively inexpensive and therefore encouraged the trend toward the "two car family."And that new information leads to the observation that, of course, suburbs with out public transportation also encouraged ownership of two cars because one took the father to work and another was necessary for grocery shopping, taking kids to activities, and other "errands."

It is not quite true to say that I'm not much interested in cars.  While I don't read car magazines and I'm not able to identify models and years beyond the most iconic ones, I am interested in the symbolic value of cars and in what they tell us about American culture.  So, I'm eager to see this book.  It seems like it might be a good fit for AmCon 202 next time around.

The brain is NOT a computer

This from David Brooks:

"The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have learned into an argument or a paper." 

The editorial is about on-line learning, but the description above is more generally applicable to the learning process.  At this point in the semester, near the end, we are moving toward synthesis, trying to move from merely acquiring information and playing with it (scrambling in Brooks' terms) to making our own meaningful patterns. 

Angelic Declaration of Independence?

Two nights, three hours each, watching the HBO version of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika.  This is my second viewing and this time I also read the script for the stage version as well as some scholarly articles.

I watched with students who were born about the time the play was first staged.  For them, there is no pre-AIDs experience, just as there is no pre-9/11 America, as one of them pointed out to me a year ago.  Watching with them intensified my awareness of the passage of time, not so much in relation to the play's concerns about time, history, change, and stasis, but more in relation to how one's location and perspective affects one's identification of what the play is about.  Of course it is a play 'about' AIDS; of course it is a play that portrays a moment in American history; but from this chronological distance, the under laying themes seem to come to the surface and the events of the late 1980s become the vehicle for exploring enduring concerns.

All of that was to prepare to comment on Prior's final speech.  Last night that speech seemed to echo the Declaration of Independence.

"This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away.  We won't die secret deaths anymore.  The world only spins forward.  We will be citizens.  The time has come. . . . The Great Work Begins."


From this distance the disease can not be reduced to AIDS, although that is the actual referent, and many more people are included in the "we" than the gay men afflicted by AIDS in the 1980s.   Post 9/11, for example, the disease might be construed as xenophobia, fear and hatred, an infection that spreads and threatens our ideals and our life together.  Thus the declaration, "We will be citizens," rings a note rather like the Declaration of Independence, a commitment to taking responsibility for the work of becoming what we prize.

nostalgia . . . the pain of old wounds

Because Mad Men (the television show) is about the late 1950s/1960s as is The Conquest of Cool and because we're paying some attention to various genres of re-presenting the past, I included the show in our syllabus.  That decision also obligated me to watch some episodes, read about the show, and think about it beyond mere plot summary.  Today in class we watched a few clips and included my former teaching partner, Chris Galdieri,  in the conversation via skype from his new post at St. Anselm College.   The technology was a little clunky, but fun for the novelty.

Chris pushed us to think about a notion Don Draper introduces in his pitch to Eastman-Kodak, namely that nostalgia is related to the pain of old wounds.  I have checked the etymology; that is not precisely correct, but it will do for our purposes.  Since the show has evoked and builds on a sort of nostalgia for the 1960s we can ask what "old wounds" it is exploring.  And what sort of portrayal does it provide?  Is this a representation intended to probe those wounds or to heal them?  Whose wounds, the old wounds the characters feel or the wounds they inflict upon their descendants, literal and generational?

One of the authors I read, J. M. Tyree, pointed out that the creator of the show, like the Coen brothers who wrote A Serious Man set in the approximately the same pre-1968 era, did not live through these years as an adult, if at all.   Thus, if the show is indeed returning to old wounds, they have been experienced indirectly.  Perhaps, to oversimplify, the children raised according to the precepts of Dr. Spock are exploring the genesis of their own experiences.  (Maybe the times are a bit off.)  Alan Anderson, an Australian argues that "we" like the show because it portrays a time freer of government regulation in which people may have behaved badly, but they were also held accountable for their behavior.  I"m not convinced that the last is true.  It seems to me that the show is filled with people being able to hide their deliberate disregard for social norms, though perhaps this is merely an indication of the prevalence of  some sort of double standard for public and private behavior.  If so, we'd need to pay close attention to how and where that line is drawn.

A blogger who offers detailed and fascinating analysis of the costuming notes that his mother, or the mother of a friend, like the character Peggy Olson was a recently graduated secretary from Brooklyn working in a Manhattan office in precisely these years.  She is uninterested in the show and does not find it to provide an accurate portrayal of her experience.  No doubt not everyone participated in this "life style" even if the clothes, furniture, cuisine, and other decorative details are on target.

Tyree offers this: "An American paradox is that the much-vaunted Emersonian characteristic of self-reliance dovetails rather nicely with the goals of big business to create a nation of isolated, vulnerable, and greedy selves who can be persuaded that buying products is a form self-expression. . . . then Don Draper and Peggy Olson are emblematic figures in the rise of a funny kind of freedom."  Certainly these two characters have wounds and acquire them even as they exercise their freedom.  That in itself might be a lesson worth pondering: the exercise of freedom is likely to produce injury as well as pleasure.  And a challenge we Americans have not yet met is to tend to the injury, to one's self as well as to others, not only to celebrated the pleasures.

deep maps

"How a world is imagined and lived in begins with 'maps' far more profoundly ingrained that those of the cartographer.  It includes a deep sense of home and of the familiar places likened to it.  It also includes a sense of the distant and unfamiliar.  Mapping the known world has always included, at its periphery, the unknown world, terra incognita, which the imagination may conceive as shadowy and frightful or as golden and glorious."  Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography

Paul Bunyan & Babe the Big Blue Ox: Bemidji, MN

I'm finding this book fascinating for what it is teaching me about India, for what it is showing me about the relationships between human beings, our collective identities, and landscape, and for what it is causing me to wonder about these dynamics in North America where our shared mythology is so young.  Indian identification of sacred places (fords, crossing points), of dwellings of the divine, and routes of pilgrimage are many centuries old.  The mythology and the landscape are intricately tied by repeated rituals and long memory.

It may be that individual Americans and perhaps their closest family and friends have a few decades or even a century of layering, but as a people our mythological mapping is more thin than deep.  Nonetheless, I'm curious about what there is and how it is developing.  How might family vacations to national and state parks be understood within this framework?  Do historic landmarks play a part?  What of those odd, local markers and annual town festivals, like the Defeat of Jesse James Day here in my town?  What would be learned from paying serious attention to these roadside attractions?

the illusion of conversation in sips of connection

"WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved." 

Thanks to Beth for sending along the LINK to this piece in the New York Times by Sherry Turkle, wise student and observer of human interactions with and use of technology. Turkle notes that real conversations, that are the stuff of real relationships, take time and encourage reflection.  These can be enhanced by instant modes of communication, which she designates as "sips," but she asserts those texts, tweets, and FB messages do not substitute for relationship and can be used to avoid genuine solitude.  If the technology has limited effectiveness for individual relationships, one wonders if the limits are even more limited for building community?

Notice that limited effectiveness does not imply no effectiveness, only that some types of interaction require time and physical presence.  In this regard a resident college offers its students a precious opportunity to live, study, eat, and converse in real-time, face-to-face over an extended period of time.  That this most often takes place when students are in their late teens and early twenties probably magnifies the benefit.  Perhaps it might even foster a desire to seek out other communities once they graduate from college life.

Back to tableware: this time, ads over time

1847

1929

We know that tableware has both a functional value and a symbolic value.  This dual quality makes it a prime example for considering how advertisers present this product to potential buyers.  Here we see four examples that span more than a century.  Although this is not a carefully selected sample, it does seem to suggest that into the early 20th century silver tableware was presented as a luxury item that confirmed one's high social status.  The ad from the 1950s is consistent with the common view that that was a era in which household domesticity was a widely held ideal.   (No mention in the ad, of course, of the communal, utopian experiment where Onedia tableware originated.)  The Dansk ad has the minimalist style of the 1960s and shows us the product itself so that we can make our decision about the unconventional shapes and lack of ornamentation.  The text of the Dansk ad does appeal to expert aesthetic (rather than scientific) opinion by its mention of museums and awards.  Perhaps this echos the 1847 ad's assertion that there is art in the silverware.  All this fits with what we've been reading, but a larger sample would be needed for a conclusive interpretation.

1953

1961

reading about writing

Merely reading fine writing does have the potential to train one's ability to write.  At least it helps form one's judgement about what constitutes fine writing.  

NPR comes through with recommendations of three books that go another step: they are ABOUT writing, more specifically about writing for ordinary readers.

LINK

Stephen King is quoted: "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."

"joys of the soul"

"When I think about what really makes me happy, what I really crave, I come up with a very different list: concentrated, purposeful work, especially creative work; being with people I love; feeling like I’m part of something larger. Meaning, connectedness, doing strenuously what you do well: not sights, not thrills, and not even pleasures, as welcome as they are. Not passivity, not letting the world come in and tickle you, but creativity, curiosity, altruism, engagement, craft. Raising children, or teaching students, or hanging out with friends. Playing music, not listening to it. Making things, or making them happen. Thinking hard and feeling deeply."  This by William Deresiewiez blogging in The American Scholar LINK

In three paragraphs (the second quoted above) Deresiewicz considers what makes life worth living.  His comments are prompted in part by reading another author (Steven Weinberg, in the New York Review of Books) reflecting upon "the consolations of life in the absence of belief in the hereafter."  Deresiewicz argues in favor of the "joys of the soul" rather than of the "pleasures of the body" as a richer set of consolations.  His rejection of a consumerist notion of the self would makes him a valuable contributor to conversation with our current reading about advertizing in the 1960s.

And the exchange of comments that follow his brief posting make lively reading that points us toward large issues such as the power of status, the value of social connections, and the difference religious belief makes.  I recommend those as well.

carnivalesque consumerism

"But for all of its studies and surveys, its rules and its white lab coats, the advertising of the 1950s was ill-attuned to the carnivalesque spirit that undergirds American consumerism.  Order and stability also meant stagnation and stasis, the direct opposite of the 'new and daring' that have long animated American affluence."  Thomas Frank, p. 49

In what sense is consumerism carnivalesque? 

• Maybe when we buy things to construct a masquerade?  That is to suggest that buying things to invent or to reinforce our identities is a masquerade.  Is that only possible when what we buy falls into the "non-use" function of the goods?  Or at least when we have means adequate to allow us to make those sorts of choices among available options?
• There is also the phenomenon of Black Friday sales which do seem to foster a sort of wild abandon consistent with carnival in medieval Florence or contemporary Rio.
• Is there another way?  Is he suggesting that American consumerism is inherently destabilizing of  social order?  If so, how?  Perhaps because "new money" can buy a person into a new social class.  Still I'm not entirely convinced because I observe that often consumer purchases are intended to consolidate as much as to disrupt one's social position.

unhappy, post-1960s world?

 

"For many, the world with which 'the sixties' left us is a distinctly unhappy one."

 Thomas Frank on the opening page of The Conquest of Cool

This seems to suggest that we are living in an unhappy world and that the reasons for our unhappiness are to found in the 1960s.  Two assumptions, or assertions, I'm not ready to take as true on the face of it.  Both will be subjects of our conversations for several class periods.

Inside Conversation

M. Cassatt, "The Conversation"

At yesterday's Admitted Student Day, in the session on the four Conversations programs, a prospective student said: "The student I stayed with last night told me that AmCon is the B-team to The Great Conversation."

My reply, "The Great Conversation does tend to promote a sort of arrogance.  In AmCon we are more interested in democracy."  Then a few more remarks about varying topics and approaches and how those are valued.  Finally, which ever program a person is in, it will take your whole brain and lots of time. Karen als spoke up to emphasize that if a student has been admitted to St. Olaf, odds are that that student could do the work in any one of these four programs.

Later I wished that I had thought to offer an analogy to music organzations.   Is being in the band more or less serious than being in orchestra or a choir?  And isn't it the case that what each choir sings is a significant factor in each one's reputation, since all three of the upper-class choirs are excellent in quality?

Noticing happiness in poems

It is national poetry month so yesterday a group of faculty read poetry to each other: some poems written by the reader and some not.  These were not poems about happiness.  Indeed some had topics quite the opposite: sorrow, guilt, or mourning.  Nonetheless, the act of gathering to read and then reading did generate a sort of joy in the shared appreciation for the beauty of the words.

"My apologies to happiness for taking you as my due."

This line from "Under One Star" by Wislawa Szymborska was perhaps the only direct reference to happiness and it is in passing.  I'm noticing this.  Happiness often appears in poems in passing.  It is noticed rather than examined.  This morning I read another poem (Another Insane Devotion by Gerald Stern) in which happiness appear as a single word sentence drawing upon the three details that precede it.

"[...]I think I gave the cat

half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think

I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice.

It was this I bought, the red coleus,

the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade.

Happiness. I watched him with pleasure.

I bought memory. I could have lost it."

Without dismissing the value of careful analysis and reflection, I'm inclined to agree with these poets and their example of noticing happiness.

(not) writing about happiness

"In truth, books about joy are hard to find because happiness is nearly impossible to write about. Narrative thrives on conflict." 

Lauen Goff on NPR's You Must Read This Book about Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim LINK

There is poetry about happiness, however.  For example, this collection titled Happiness by Deborah Keenan.  I wonder if this is because poetry can focus our attention on a moment and happiness is experienced in moments?

HAPPY Good Friday???????

Everywhere I went yesterday, even church, I was offered this blessing.

Is it a profound theological point?  There is that notion that the fall of humanity into sin is the cause of greater good.  Maybe that makes Good Friday a day to be be happy. 

And we do call it GOOD Friday, so perhaps happy is an appropriate response to the day's event.  Theologians do speak of the happy exchange in which Jesus assumes human sin and humans receive his righteousness.

And it was a gorgeous day, warmish and clear.  I did have lunch with my dear friend.  I WAS happy.

Even the bulletin at the Good Friday service instructed me that the appropriate attitude is not mournful since Christians know that Jesus death on the cross is not the end of the story, but a new beginning transforming death into life.

Nonetheless, I've never been greeted "Happy funeral," so I stand by my uncomfortable reaction and continue to search for a more appropriate greeting.

practicing freedom

We should care that as the public sphere becomes increasingly chaotic and threatening, what we think of as freedom consists of insularity and retreat.  Marketers welcome this development, but a consumerist mentality allows us to turn spiritual practices, which traditionally have been aimed at making us more responsive to the legitimate needs of the world, into self-indulgence. 

Kathleen Norris

Poet and essayist Kathleen Norris raises the startling possibility that 21st century Americans are less attentive to the "legitimate needs of the world" then were the desert hermits of 4th century Egypt.  Most often our immediate response to those ancient men and women is to disdain their withdrawal from the real world and to dismiss their spirituality as selfish.  Norris, who has dwelt with them, has a different response, a more admiring one that allows her to learn from their sayings and their example of wrestling with demons and their desire to see the world honestly.

But, that is a longer and subtle discussion.  In these two sentences Norris turns her attention to her own world and ours.  She notices that self-help is more likely to promise fulfilling "what I want" than to counsel self-examination.  There are exceptions, there are always exceptions.  If her critique is extreme, it is still true.  Freedom can, often does, devolve into self-indulgence marked by insistence upon being given many options and uninhibited power to chose between them.

The easiest example are consumer decisions.  Many, many types of phones and several service providers to decide among, but no option to not have a phone, to be fully engaged with the person in the room with me rather than always eager for the next distraction.  This example is not simple.   To regard the ubiquity of cell phones as self-indulgent and isolating requires some thought beyond the emotional appeal of the ads suggesting that virtual presence is as good as real presence.  It requires assessing the long effects of the tool on life and relationships, not only the convenience.

If the easiest examples need careful unfolding, the more complex examples, decisions about private relationships and public life, are more insidious still.  A long look would bring us back to our earlier discussions of happiness as an individual concern and happiness as a result of cultivating public virtue.  This may go beyond Ben Franklin's famous system for keeping track of his own moral progress, which was not so different from individuals counting calories or logging miles run.  The practices of freedom are not limited to voting and external actions.  They also involve facing difficult realities about our selves and seeing the world honestly so that we can attend to its legitimate needs, not only indulge our own own desires.

How to get change

This from Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” (1982) 

This essay, then, has no conclusions: it is another beginning for me. Not just a way of saying, in 1982 Right Wing America, I , too, will wear the yellow star. It’s a moving into accountability, enlarging the range of accountability. I know that in the rest of my life, the next half century or so, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged. The middle-class white girl taught to trade obedience for privilege. The Jewish lesbian raised to be a heterosexual gentile. The woman who first heard oppression named and analyzed in the Black Civil Rights struggle. The woman with three sons, the feminist who hates male violence. The woman limping with a cane, the woman who has stopped bleeding are also accountable. The poet who knows that beautiful language can lie, that the oppressor’s language sometimes sounds beautiful. The woman trying, as part of her resistance, to clean up her act.

 I'm struck by the way she links identity with accountability.  To claim one's identity, she seems to say, is not to withdraw into ever smaller circles, but rather to increase one's responsibility for one's self and one's engagement with the world.  This is a strategy for stimulating and pursuing change.

"Like" it on Facebook

The suggestion appears in so many places.  "Like us on Facebook."  Every posting (almost) offers the possibility to like what one has just read.  I find myself liking this, a bit to my surprise.  Why the positive response?

1)  Grammatical reason:  like is after all a verb.  I like that the word like is being used in a way close to what I take to be its central meaning, one that indicates approval, perhaps even affection.

2) Attitudinal reason: like indicates a positive response.  I like that I'm being offered the opportunity to express approval, perhaps even affection, without the corresponding negative options.  Of course I could type those in, but the default for response is "like."  Maybe this is a bit like the adage, "If you don't have something good to say, don't say anything."  Nonetheless, I like that I'm being encouraged to express my approval, delight, appreciation, or other positive responses.

NB: I do not, by this approval of liking, mean to suggest that there are no situations in which disapproval or protest is necessary; only that casual negative response is not healthy for individuals or conducive to community life.

What kind of change?

The tag line, "Change begins with a whisper," prompted us to ask what sort of change, if any, takes place in the course of The Help.  Reading documents from the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Rights/Women's Liberation movement extends the question.  What sorts of changes were called for?  What changes were actually accomplished? 

More bluntly, how is the United States different now than it was before, say, Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-1950s or before Title IX?  Thinking about this question, I'm reminded of our earlier observations about the interaction of social constraints and permissions with individual action.  Some constraints have been lifted by legal changes, thus opening up possibilities.  The likelihood of a person walking through the open doors is effected by factors beyond legality: access to quality education, family expectations, health, and many more.  And so much depends upon the measures we use to make comparisons and the scale of our sample.  Have women achieved the goal of equal pay for equal work?  Has this woman, employed in this company, achieved equal pay for each work? 

While the temptation to ask, "Are Americans happier now?" lurks, I think that the question is too vague.  Has the "problem that has no name" disappeared?  That might be a question we could tackle with some survey data and a look at a range of publications.  My hunch is that we'd find that it has not been eradicated, but that there is less of it.  What kind of changes are involved?  Some are in educational policy and practice, some are economic, some are personal.  What has not gone away: the persistent tension between self-interest and commitment to groups including the people to whom one is most intimately related.  

What kind of help?

Reading documents from and a bit of an introduction to the New Left, specifically about Freedom Summer, raised questions for me about the helping relationships between white and black Americans.  One objection to the novel, The Help, has been that it suggests that the maids (aka the hired domestic help) needed the help of the young, white woman to gain their agency and ability to tell their stories.  Should we distinguish between their ability to know and articulate their experience and their access to the means to publicize those stories?  Would that be parallel to the strategic help young, white volunteers gave to voter registration campaigns by bringing the work to media attention? 

The Dream of a Common Language

Yesterday in class I made a plea:  If there is no possibility that imagination can bring us into communication with each other, if we cannot ever get inside each others' minds and hearts, then there is no hope for human community and we will all be captive within our boundaries.  I said something like that.  I was speaking specifically about the dual question for fiction writers (and implicitly for their readers): is it allowable for an author to write in the voice of characters whose identity and experience is vastly different than the author's?  And, is it possible to do that adequately, with authority and truth?

I did not invoke Adrienne Rich's evocative phrase, used as the title of a collection of her poems, "The Dream of a Common Language."  I wish that I had because the phrase is rich in hope (even as Rich was well aware of the obstacles) and also because she died this week.  Here is a fine tribute in the New York Times.

Poetry Magazine link to poems, essays, bio, etc.

Access to 1963 and 64 in Jackson MI

A Critical Reveiw of the novel The Help

This is a very comprehensive response that uses critical in both the neutral and the negative sense.  Among its interesting features are links to newspapers from Jackson MI in the time period of the novel.

Lines in The Help

"She just don't see em.  The lines.  Not between her and me, not between her and Hilly."  This Minny says to Abilene about Celia.  p. 367 in my edition. 

After spending much of Monday in a workshop with several Norwegian scholars and thinking about the comparisons between Norwegian and American culture, this observation took on added weight.  While Americans are eager to affirm the openness of our society and to defend the possibility of individuals advancing their positions toward social equality, this comment by a fictional character shines a bright light on the possibility that opportunity is more a matter of positional change and less of  structural change.

Now I must make reference to my religion department course on Christianity in India.  In that course we must repeatedly confront the "vexing" topic of caste.  And we find that again and again reform movements that initially call into question the very premise of caste distinction (that is calling for structural change) end up settling for  advancing the position of their group within the system (that is accepting positional change.)  Lines continue to be drawn, but 'my group' has made progress within them. 

One of the participants in the recent workshop observed that in much of European socialism the goal is to make all people equal while in the USA the goal is to give everyone an equal opportunity to make something of themselves.  This American view seems to assume that those racial and class lines are natural.  I'm interested in thinking about how the characters in this book think about those lines.

This comment by Minny suggests that Celia is unaware of the lines.  She wants to be friends both with Hilly who is her social superior and with Minny who is her servant and black.  She does not understand that class and race mitigate against such relationships.  In contrast Skeeter who is Hilly's social equal arranges for all those toilets to be left on Hilly's lawn and collaborates with Minny and other maids.  Does she do this on purpose?  Is she aware that she is calling the whole structure into question?  The novel is not definitive.

There is no doubt that Hilly no longer regards Skeeter as her equal or as her friend.  How Minny and the other maids regard Skeeter is more difficult to say.  There is still a line between them.  They may not have become friends.  But perhaps they have come to see each other more fully.  But maybe not.  I am left wondering if Abilene, Minny, and all those people from the church who sign the book for Skeeter still regard her in the the categories available to employees and employers in the Jim Crow south. Is that why they urge her to move to New York as they might have given advise to a small, white child?

Water brings . . .

When friends came back from a sabbatical trip to Tanzania, they pledged that once a week they would wash themselves with a bucket of water rather than taking a shower; the practice was intended to remind them of how precious water was in the village where they stayed and thus also to remind them of the people with whom they lived and worked.

Surely it is the case that here in the upper-midwest we seldom notice how precious and necessary water is because we are never far from a lake or a river and our faucets bring hot and cold running water almost without fail.  Once in a great while something in the well-pump system at our house fails.  Usually this happens when I am the shower and covered with soap.  It is not a happy situation; rather one that gets my day off to a bad start.

In contrast, this morning filling my teakettle from a shiny, new, kitchen faucet started the day well.  Using it put a smile on my face.  The pleasure of the tool reminded me to be grateful for the simple, but necessary resource--water, for the privilege of easy access to that water, and for my husband who installed the faucet that gave me access so easily.