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.

Why read The Help

Some useful conversation in class today on this topic.  I hope that it will stay with us as we discuss the book itself.  While we did not take up this question, perhaps we will later.  Do the several book covers urge one or another of these reasons upon us as we browse the bookstore tables?

1. Some people might read it for their personal entertainment which is, of course, a reason why many people read fiction.  Since it is a book that relies on characters and plot, this seems to be a likely reason why many people who put the book on best seller lists read it.  No one seems to be  making the case that this great, enduring literature.
2. Another related reason, perhaps a sub-set of the first, is that people might read it because it treats a time that they remember.  This is related to one student's observation of current popular interest (nostalgia?) for the 1960s.  Of course, lots of people lived through the 1960s and they had various experiences of those years.  Not all of them will recognize themselves in this book; or, if they do, they might not care for the portrayal of themselves in the book.  Such persons might buy the book, read some of it, but not finish it.
3. Even if they did not live through those years, other readers might read the book hoping to gain knowledge about and understanding of the USA in the early 1960s, more specifically 1963-64.  Here we want more specificity.  What about those years?  General period stuff: news items, stuff for sale, fashion, cars, etc.?  The emerging civil rights and women's liberation movements?  Regional (southern) and class culture, especially among women?  Race relations?  One young white woman's coming to consciousness?  This reason seems to be at the heart of the controversy.  Put it this way: to what degree, if at all, does this book provide an accurate portrayal of its subject?  And behind this question addressed to this book in particular is the more general question about the potential of fiction to provide historical knowledge or to increase our understanding of people who are not us or times that are not ours.
4. Given that the book is both popular and has generated a controversy, we might read it for the window it gives on the current state of race, class, and gender relations in the USA.  To do this requires that we read the book along with other readers (as well as with some who resist reading the book.)

Happy Face = mask?

The April 2012 National Geographic includes a feature about masks of Africa and the African diaspora.  Follow the link to the article and the photos that accompany it.  Reading the article I was reminded of our conversations in earlier semesters about masquerade and performance of identity.  But since I read the article this semester, in the midst of our consideration of happiness, I began to wonder about the phrase, "put on a happy face."

It is a song lyric and you can find recordings of several singers performing it on you-tube. 

The Wall Street Journal has reported that following the advise contributes to job productivity.  The article side-bar gives suggestions for how get a happy face on your own face, not a mask.

In keeping with the photo of a person with a bucket painted with a happy face over her head (that is no longer) here, another take on the advise might wonder if putting on a happy face is an invitation to ignore what is going on around the smiler.  Thus putting on a happy face might be the equivalent of burying one's head in the sand rather than choosing to take a positive attitude and have one's facial muscles lead the way.

Unearned Intimacies: On the Ethics of Telling Other People's Stories

Viking Theater

Thursday, April 12

7:30 p.m.

Jason DeRose, 

Western Bureau Chief, National Public Radio

Unearned Intimacies: 

On the Ethics of Telling Other People's Stories

will be streamed live at www.stolf.edu
look for the posters on the St. Olaf Campus because that image is too big to include here

Shared obsession with sentences

"They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates." 

This from excellent novelist Jhumpa Lahiri.  The paragraph is from her contribution to a new NYTimes series on the craft of writing.  HERE

To Happiness, Carl Dennis

I made no attempt to resist this poem on our topic by one of my favorite poets.  He personifies happiness and thus suggests that happiness is a friend.  The narrative of a friend's arrival after a long absence brings a vicarious sense of happiness to me.  Perhaps even stronger, it wakens memory of similar visits and desire for their repetition.

To Happiness

by Carl Dennis

If you're not approaching, I hope at least
You're off to comfort someone who needs you more,
Not lost wandering aimlessly
Or drawn to the shelter of well-lit rooms
Where people assume you've arrived already.

If you're coming this way, send me the details—
The name of the ship, the port it leaves from—
So I can be down on the dock to help you
Unload your valises, your trunks and boxes
And stow them in the big van I'll have rented.

I'd like this to be no weekend stay
Where a single change of clothes is sufficient.
Bring clothes for all seasons, enough to fill a closet;
And instead of a single book for the bedside table
Bring boxes of all your favorites.

I'll be eager to clear half my shelves to make room,
Eager to read any titles you recommend.
If we've many in common, feel free to suggest
They prove my disposition isn't to blame
For your long absence, just some problems of attitude,

A few bad habits you'll help me set to one side.
We can start at dinner, which you're welcome
To cook for us while I sweep and straighten
And set the table. Then light the candles
You've brought from afar for the occasion.

Light them and fill the room I supposed I knew
With a glow that shows me I was mistaken.
Then help me decide if I'm still the person I was
Or someone else, someone who always believed in you
And imagined no good reasons for your delay.

"To Happiness" by Carl Dennis, from Unknown Friends. © Penguin, 2007. Reprinted with permission. 

Plastics

LINK  The advise Dustin Hoffman got in the Graduate: "Just one word.  Plastics."  

Again and again, I wonder if we could not have all of 202 with that as our starting place.  There is so much plastic everywhere these days that just making an inventory of our plastic stuff might consume the entire semester.

Among the topics I'd want to consider is the way the word's meaning has changed.  Once plastic was a quality of substances.  It indicated that those substances could be deformed, especially when heated.  This allows those substances to be extruded into molds and made into toys, water bottles, vases, spoons, shoes, keyboards, telephones, credit cards, recycling bins, trash bags, and many, many, many more items that we now describe as plastic because they are made out of substances that have been formed.  Now the word plastic has come to mean the substance itself.  If it refers to the substance's qualities, plastic is more often given the meaning cheap, fake, or disposable.  Indeed plastic has become a metaphor for those qualities as well as for something that lasts longer than it is used or that has no taste.

American restaurants

These are Mario's.

Also on this trip we ate: sandwiches from a deli in Decorah, pasta at Mario's in Dubuque, and fried food at a tavern-ish place in Lansing.  The Italian restaurant was recommend by the B&B owner as a place where the "locals" eat.  He informed us that Mario is really from Italy and returns there regularly.  He also advised us to sit in the booths behind the bar rather than in the restaurant.

The Windmill

The decor got us thinking about what constitutes an American restaurant, even if (or perhaps because) this one is owned by an immigrant and is known for its Italian food.  Of course there is no one definitive answer.  Even asking the question is as much a fool's errand as asking what is genuinely American food.

Nonetheless, without excluding other possibilities, the knotty pine paneling, the red upholstered booths, the television screen tuned to a basketball game, the trophies won by teams sponsored by Mario's, the photos on the wall, the potted plants in the window sill, the plastic-encased menus, and the iceberg lettuce in the ante-pasta plate reminded us of other similar places we've eaten near Northfield (The Ranchero), in eastern Montana (something with a number in its name on the main street in Miles City), close to Fergus Falls, Minnesota (The Peak), and in Wenatchee, Washington (The Windmill).  Perhaps "supper club" is the big category, though there are some that are more like cafes and open for breakfast and lunch rather than an evening meal.  Certainly there are other restaurants that are American and some of those serve other sorts of food, but I have never encountered or eaten in a restaurant like these any other country.  I suspect that if I ever did, the place would be identified as American.

Dream Houses Up and down the Mississippi

My husband's sabbatical project is devising new lab exercises involving the Mississippi River for his geology and geography students.  Since St. Olaf is now on spring break I was able to join him as he traveled one segment, by car, the western shore of the river from Dubuque, Iowa to Red Wing, Minnesota.  We took in the Mississippi museum in Dubuque and stopped at Effigy Mounds near MacGregor, Iowa.

Not the Richards House

Along the way we saw lots of houses: huge, stately, old Victorians on the bluffs and row houses close to the railroad and some tiny houseboats tied up to the levees and some house elevated on stilts made of cement blocks right along the shore.  Even if it is true, as Jim Cullen tells us, that one powerful version of the American dream is the dream of home ownership, this trip made vivid to me the reality that the dream comes in many versions.

While the house one can have is dependent upon one's resources, I was struck by the thought that which the house one wants is also a function of the dream one has for a good or happy life.  Sitting in a glider on the back porch of our B&B on a warm Saturday was lovely, but I don't dream of owning a large, always in need of renovation, architectural landmark made into a B&B.  Nor do I dream of having been the original owner of such a place.  Neither life is one that would make me happy.

anticipating our look at advertising

LINK  Advise from one of the real Mad Men.  NPR review of a book.

What to do with books when not reading them

 
LINK to dozens and dozens of photos of bookshelves.  What to write about them?  Nothing.  I'll let the images draw us in.

LINK to Library Journal article about the Little Lending Library Project.  What a great idea that calls to mind Benjamin Franklin as well as Andrew Carnegie.  If cities and schools can decide to read a single book together, why not also offer lots of different books that many read.

Freedom {preposition} religion

This from Bill Moyers on the recent episode regarding contraception, insurance, and Roman Catholic teaching and practice is a fine analysis that hangs on which preposition is inserted between the words freedom and religion.  The liveliness of American religion is stimulated in large degree by the tense circumstances generated by inserting both of and from.  The first amendment promise of freedom of religion (free exercise) is linked with the promise of freedom from (non-establishment).  While the initial scope of this was limited, over the decades we've expanded from the specific legal guarantees to more general cultural expectations that require frequent negotiation.  The freedom to exercise (to believe and practice) one's own religion, does depend on freedom from coercion that forces one to subscribe to the beliefs and practices of another religion.  While this may seem, to many citizens, obvious in the realm of governmental authority, the rub comes in other arenas, most specifically in "faith-based" institutions such as Roman Catholic hospitals.  What Moyers points out about Obama's recent efforts is that the president is offering a plan that preserves the rights of the individual while not forcing the institution to compromise its policies.  Would that all similar conflicts about for/from could be so neatly addressed.

(Asian) Indian Pursuit of American-style Happiness

LINK
Akash Kapur, who has lived since a child in both the USA (Minnesota to be more precise) and India writes from Ponicherry India about "India's remarkable process of Americanization.  His opinion piece in the New York Times begins with the news that both Starbucks and Amazon are launching themselves in India.  These beginnings, he suggests, may signal the completion of the process.  Beyond this straightforward observation, he offers examples in support of his conclusion that, "The American promise of renewal and reinvention is deeply seductive--but, as I have learned since coming back home, it is also profoundly menacing."

No doubt, a similar conclusion could be reached based upon examples from the United States as well.  It is not only in India that promising inventiveness and optimism lead both to happiness and sorrow.

report along the way

After meeting with most of the 202 audio assignment groups: I can say that I'm delighted with the directions that they are taking this project.  I anticipate that we will learn about topics that include the Civilian Conservation Core, education and cultural heritage, the value of archeological artifacts, the economics of tourism, and biological diversity.  Just what issues and research problems will emerged from these topics remains to be seen.  We may hear about individuals' experiences in parks, about the natural landscape, about public policy relative to natural resources, about how popular opinion regards the relative value of people and wilderness.  At least two groups are aiming for national broadcasts.  One group is experiencing the realities of social capital over a long duration.  All groups are showing maturity and discipline developed over their nearly two years of college work.

accidental happiness

Reading student essays about happiness reminded me of a line of poetry that I often quote.  It is from Jane Hirshfield and goes something like this:

"Enlightenment, the masters tell us, is an accident, but some habits make us accident prone."  

Perhaps the wisdom can be transferred to the pursuit of happiness.  Finally happiness is not something that we catch, but some habits make us more likely to be caught by it.  If so, we find that neither luck nor effort by itself is the sole cause of happiness.

So, while I'm in a proverbial mode, I also offer this insight about snowflakes.  They are made neither by cold nor water alone, but require the interaction of both.  Moreover, while they are different from each other, they have enough in common that we are able to recognize that a snowflake is a snowflake not a grain of sand or a rain drop.

Landscape or People?

Meg Ojala helped us with reading photographs of the Japanese internment camps, especially with understanding what Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams each brought to their work.  Three key differences:

1) Why each one was there: Lange was commissioned, Adams was there on his own.
2)  Technical skill and style: Lange was the less technically adept; she used a hand-held large (or maybe medium) format camera; she got close to the subjects.  Adams was more of a careful technician; he used a tripod; he allowed the subjects to prepare themselves rather than attempting something akin to "candid" shots.
3) Their larger body of work:  Lange had already made many photos of people as part of her earlier documentary work.  Adams made his reputation as a landscape photographer in the linage (sort of) of great western landscape painters.

All this led me to ponder a question:  which subject matter is best suited to portrayals of America?

The national parks, we've learned, were established at least in part as a statement of patriotic pride.  While the USA might not have a long, magnificent cultural history like Europe, the parks demonstrated that it did encompass monumental landscapes.  On the other hand, can the landscape without the people tell us much about the culture that is definitive of the nation?

And that of course sends me back to my interim course in Greece and Turkey where we talked about taking photographs and what we include and exclude.  More often than not the tourist post-cards are photos of buildings (or ruins of them).  Some are of spectacular landscape, though often as background for the human construction.  Seldom are people included.

Now I'm back to those photos Lange took.  (The one here is hers.  More via the link in the first paragraph.)  Some observers suggest that she portrays degradation in contrast to Adams who shows the people's dignity.   When I look at her photos, I see human vulnerability and am moved.  But, I wonder if that sort of intimacy is more than what is generally desired when we are looking for images to convey something large about a nation.  Perhaps we default to landscape or buildings because those are less personal.

More to ponder.

research as a pleasure

The students in 202 are now in the midst of two weeks set aside for research on their big projects.  Each group has a national park and the notion of happiness as their starting point.  I'm meeting with them along the way.  As we talk I reiterate, "This time is offered to you as a gift, an opportunity to read and dig and follow up on odd footnotes." 

Nope that is not me.

I'm trying to convey something of the joy and pleasure I get when I do those things.  I'm remembering happy hours spent sitting on the floor of library stacks reading bits and pieces of books that were only marginally relevant to the project at hand.   I'm on the verge of quoting from Luther: "And I will say nothing more of the pure pleasure a man gets from reading books."   

With all those books so close the possibilities of knowledge and imagination are palpable.  Work spills into vacation!  Research becomes pleasure.  I'm seldom much happier than that.

Unhappiness as a research problem

From Booth, Colomb, and Williams, The Craft of Research.  "A practical problem is caused by some condition in the world (from spam to losing money in Omaha to terrorism) that makes us unhappy because it costs us time, respect, security, pain, even our lives.  We solve a practical problem by doing something (or by encouraging others to do something) that eliminates the cause of the problem or at least ameliorates its costs."  (4.1.2)

First, I admit that I was a bit surprised to find happiness, or rather unhappiness, offered as the signal that one has found a problem that might be addressed by some sort of research.  More often potential researchers are advised to find topics that interest them.  Of course these authors, in this chapter, are moving potential researchers from topics to questions to problems, so it may well be that "what interests" you is fine for identifying a topic, but inadequate for questions and problems.

Second, this use of the term unhappiness suggests that the state of unhappiness is a reaction to something being wrong or a symptom that something is wrong that needs to be addressed.  The solution, the condition that restores happiness, might be more time, respect, security, elimination of pain, etc.  If so, then perhaps it follows that the pursuit of happiness might be better understood as an effort to get things in their proper, even righteous order.   The humming of a well lubricated engine is a sound of happiness despite the fact that the engine is inanimate and thus unable to experience emotion.  An advantage of this angle is that it seems to eliminate the possibility of happiness being achieved in isolation.

Leap Year 2012

Not exactly a polar bear plunge.  Frolicking lion cubs, maybe? 

Another shot of the same event: HERE. (Photos by Thomas Bjorn L. Dunning)  Do they look happy?  It is experience more than possessions, even an experience in nature.  Surely this is a day they will remember.

Yellowstone history today

A reminder that images helped to make the case.

"Yellowstone was named a national park on this date in 1872. Written descriptions of Yellowstone began to appear in the East Coast media over the next few decades, but most of them were dismissed as tall tales. Mountain man Jim Bridger insisted over and over that he had seen petrified trees and waterfalls shooting upward into the sky. Trapper Joe Meek, describing the Norris Geyser basin, recounted stories of steaming rivers, boiling mud, and fire and brimstone. Because of the Native American wars and the Civil War, the United States Geological Survey did not come in to investigate Yellowstone until 1871. The crew submitted a 500-page report to Congress, and on March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Act of Dedication to preserve more than 2 million acres of wilderness as the world's first national park."

This from the Writer's Almanac for March 1, 2012