The Year In Review: Adolescent Literature 226 Edition

On January 1, 2019, I resolved to start a commonplace book wherein I would write quotations from my reading. These quotations must meet the simple criterion of striking my fancy at the moment I am reading them. They need not be inspirational, profound, or examples of great writing.

Shortly, thereafter people who should know better asked me to teach an adolescent literature course. Were I a person who followed through on my resolutions, I would have filled two or three notebooks with quotations from the books I used in class or the supplemental materials I read to prepare to teach, but I frequently fail at following through on my New Year's resolutions.

Looking through the quotations I copied in the commonplace book, three stick out as valuable reminders for the last days of 2019.

First, Wendell Berry's essay "In Defense of Literacy" contains a line that needs no context or explanation. Berry reminds readers, "Short-term practicality is long-term idiocy." This fact is ignored constantly, most dangerously by our political and corporate leaders.

The other two quotations require a bit of context. The first comes from Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first book in his Chaos Walking trilogy. A central conceit of the series is that men and animals project their thoughts audibly for all to hear; women do not. The book was first published in 2008, so Ness must be given credit for presciently creating an extended metaphor to illustrate the effects of 24/7 news cycles and social media. The fact that he calls phenomenon "Noise" throughout the series earns him extra prescience points.

Early in The Knife of Never Letting Go, Todd Hewitt, the novel's protagonist and narrator, says, "Noise ain't truth. Noise is what men want to be true, and there's a difference 'twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if don't watch out." Listening to and reading about the impeachment debate makes it clear that "Noise ain't truth" and individual Americans are hearing what they want to be true based on the "Noise" that reaches them but there's a wide, dangerous divide between what people want to be true and the truth.

Finally, news that a United States government website listed the fictional nation of Wakanda as a free- trade partner brings to mind a statement made by Changamire, who in the first four issues of the "A Nation Under Our Feet" arc is a scholar guilty of little more than a few radical ideas about the proper role of government. When he speaks to Wakanda's Queen Mother, Changamire says, "Wakanda is science and wonder, all of it achieved by ensuring your subjects do not ask too many questions. Wakanda has all the intelligence any advanced society would want and none of the wisdom any free society needs."

In 2019, political leaders in South Dakota and the nation as a whole doubled down on their emphasis on short-term practicality, amplified their idiocy through the Noise of social media echo chambers, worked diligently to prevent citizens from asking hard questions, and, thereby, ensured that country will continue to lack wisdom free societies need.

A Minor Musing On Politics, Literature, And Unquiet Minds

As an English teacher I spent a lot of time thinking about the "usefulness" of literature especially novels and myths. Too many Americans seemingly equate use with  "being able to make a profit." Unless one is saying "'Myths and Novels' for $1000, Alex" literature may not have a financial use. 

Others may be more high minded and look to novels to somehow fill a faith void created as America's religious institutions fail to provide spiritual insight. The idea that novels can replace the god that Nietzsche claims we have all killed, however, seems specious.

While literature may not provide "the truth that shall set you free," it may provide a frame that allows readers to understand a confusing world. Elizabeth Bruenig illustrates that point with this Washington Post column that uses Conrad's Heart of Darkness to explain the damage being done to America's civic institutions.

Marlow’s is a civic kind of going mad, where the veil is lifted from politics and what lies beneath makes participation in ordinary political life with a quiet mind impossible. By the time he returns, what once seemed placid and unremarkable seems sinister and false — and it is. 

We’re about there, I think — perhaps not every single one of us, perhaps not just yet, but the conditions are right and the summer is long. The entire 2016 episode has been, in some sense, an introspective journey into America’s own innermost parts, with Donald Trump’s victory prompting a nervous self-inventory of what we value, whether our institutions work and to what degree we ought to trust one another. The full contents of that inward odyssey have yet to unfold. But on the question of institutional functioning, the news is unequivocally grim. Like Marlow, even after this particular chapter has ended, we are likely to find ourselves changed by what we’ve seen.

Bruenig concludes that the change we undergo will be long lasting,

. . . It has gone this way before. It took several incidents, from Vietnam to Watergate to scattered episodes of civil unrest, to permanently damage American trust in government; but as distinct as each event was, they all fractured the same essential faith. We haven’t returned to consistent levels of pre-’70s levels of trust in 40 years, and I doubt this current civic unease will fade much sooner. 

This particular horror — Trump and his failures, whatever ridiculous thing he has said or done today, whatever international incident he causes on Twitter tomorrow, however authentic the next panic is — will pass. What will last is the frank revelation of a point that, while ugly and dark, is at least true: You really don’t have the choices you ought to in American democracy, because of decisions made without your consent by people of wealth and power behind closed doors. It’s possible to continue to participate in a democracy after that. But not with a quiet mind.

Many have rightfully referenced Orwell's fable Animal Farm as an analogy for the current political situation.  In Animal Farm, the men and pigs become indistinguishable. Likewise, as Bruenig points out, Heart of Darkness shows both the demagogue and the a dictator, can achieve similar ends: the destruction of faith in civil institutions.

I have long maintained that Trump and his enablers use Orwell's 1984 as a road map. Yesterday, Trump became a walking caricature of Orwell's Big Brother when he asserted, “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening, . . . Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” This post is far from the first to point out that Orwell's dystopian state rested on an "essential command": "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears."

I also wonder if America is approaching the tribalism illustrated in Lord of the Flies where one group rejected the evidence of their eyes and accepts that a pig's head on stick is somehow a talisman able to keep evil at bay. The boys were eventually rescued and novel leaves unanswered what happens when they return to "civilization." Like the questions that arise from the applying the Heart of Darkness to today's politics, this question should also cause disquiet because it implies there may be no true return from a descent into tribalism.

Because novels like Shakespeare's greatest works or ancient Greek tragedies offer questions without pat answers, we should encourage more reading and be more skeptical when a politician tells us "I alone can fix it." That we were not skeptical does not indicate that literature lacks value. Rather, it demonstrates that too few understand the value of the questions literature asks.

A Minor Musing About The Absence Of Art In Trump's White House

Over the weekend my long-suffering wife accompanied me to the inaugural St. Louis Pen Show. I  met some friendly, helpful vendors, ate some great barbecue, and was taken care of by a kind, soft-spoken waitress at the restaurant in the St. Louis Sheraton Westport Plaza Hotel. I spent too much money and saw a gorgeous scrimshaw pen made by Ryan Krusac. Thankfully, South Dakota's Attorney General Marty Jackley did not station South Dakota Highway Patrol officers at the border to pull us over to ensure we had paid the proper amount of sales tax.

In addition to spending money, I fell further behind on blogging. During a brief hiatus from shopping, I stumbled upon this editorial, "A Cultural Vacuum in Trump's White House." Cory has already made many of the points I wanted to comment on here and here.

Something about the Eggers' editorial and the Krusac pens reminded me of two other reads. The first is this Ross Douthat column in which Douthat opines that a certain "kind of cycle of incomprehension and aggression tends to destroy republics if it isn’t broken, if leaders can’t compromise ideological principles to maintain civic peace, if partisans can’t imagine how the world looks in communities vastly different from their own." He goes on to assert that the nation needs a president "who acts to reassure threatened-feeling out-groups in a way that Obama failed to do and Trump is incapable of even attempting."

The second work is Raymond Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder," an essay in which Chandler describes a world that is "not. . . very fragrant" before proclaiming that "[i]n everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption."

The fact that Trump is not capable of attempting to reassure those who feel threatened or that his partisans can't or won't imagine how the world looks to those living in a world that differs from their own may well be that they never seek the cultural redemption that art provides. 

A Minor Musing About The Last 3 Novels I Taught And Politics

In my excitement to discuss my new party affiliation, I forgot to mention that I have become a retiree. I may pick up a part-time job, but I am pretty sure I have corrected my last high school assignments.

As I was preparing notes about theme and characterization, it struck me how Wuthering Heights published in 1847, Things Fall Apart published in 1958, and All the Pretty Horses published in 1992 help explain the current zeitgeist. None of the musings made it into my lecture notes, but this is a blog not a classroom, so one can express musings that may not be classroom appropriate.

Heathcliff, the brooding protagonist, of Emily Bronte's novel, exclaims, "'I shall not stand to be laughed at. I shall not bear it!' By the novel's conclusion, Heathcliff has caused the death of Hindley, his adopted brother; ruined the life of Edgar, his rival; and indirectly murdered his son by denying him necessary medical care. At the conclusion of his life, Heathcliff says,

My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don't care for striking: I can't take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.

Like Heathcliff the populists who fueled Trump's ascent seem motivated in part by the belief that "coastal elites" frequently disparaged them as denizens of "flyover country." In short, they don't want to be laughed at.

Further, they seem to view the other party as dangerous and a "threat." A 2016 poll found,

For the first time in surveys dating to 1992, majorities in both parties express not just unfavorable but very unfavorable views of the other party. Today, 58% of Republicans have a very unfavorable impression of the Democratic Party, up from 46% in 2014 and just 32% during the 2008 election year. Among Democrats, highly negative views of the GOP have followed a similar trajectory – from 37% in 2008 to 43% in 2014 and 55% currently. 

An overwhelming share of those who hold highly negative views of the opposing party say that its policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” 

Currently, 45% of Republicans view the Democratic Party’s policies as a threat, up from 37% in Pew Research Center’s 2014 study of political polarization. The share of Democrats regarding GOP policies as a threat has risen 10 percentage points (41% now, 31% then).

In the current climate, there seem to be enemies aplenty and proposed policies are seen as efficacious if they produce "liberal tears." Had the Bernie Bros been successful, efficacy would likely have been measured in "conservative angst." More importantly, it's unclear if or when the angriest of the populists will lose "the faculty of enjoying . . .destruction" or if they are "too idle to destroy for nothing." If they are not, the 1960s may seem like a time of peace and tranquility.

Like Heathcliff, Okonkwo, the protagonist of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, had obsessions: Okonkwo's "life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness." Okonkwo, therefore, "was ruled by one passion--to hate everything his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness . . ." In 1988, George H. W. Bush sought a "kinder and gentler nation." Given the current state of public discourse, we've lost a lot of ground in the past two decades.

Achebe took the novel's title from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming." The following lines from the poem need no explication.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

After having his innocence "drowned" in a series of violent picaresque adventures, John Grady Cole, the protagonist of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses,  returns home and engages in this brief exchange with his friend Rawlins. Cole begins the conversation,

I think I'm goin to move on.
This is still good country.
Yeah. I know it is. But it ain't my country. . . .
Where is your country? he said
I don't know, said John Grady. I don't know where it is. I don't know what happens to country.

Like John Grady Cole, I don't know what "happens to country." I do worry that we are nearing the time when our country be a place where "[t]he best lack all conviction, while the worst [a]re full of passionate intensity." If that event takes place, this won't be anyone's country.

Tweet And Quotation Of The Day: Reading As Soulcraft Edition

From John Merrow

"I'm not saying you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I'm saying it helps." Walter Mosley NYT Book Review 8/9/15

— John Merrow (@John_Merrow) August 10, 2015

Mosley's continuation is equally eloquent:

I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I’m saying it helps. Artists, musicians, naturally empathetic children and people born to the beat of a different drum often embark on more original lives than the Company Store wants for us. They’re naturally more resistant to the forces of big business and big government.

But readers don’t have to be all that special. They have the guidance of a thousand stories to help them make their way. They are never alone. They are equipped to challenge (or ignore) the expectations laid down by standardized testing, fifth-grade bullies and parents that gaze upon the present-day world with eyes that only see the past. They can envision alternatives to economic and political systems that have no heart, art or true ­humanity.

Most readers stop here. They gather their ever-widening circle of favorite writers and read and reread their beloved books. But some are compelled to become writers. The stories they were told or read kindle an obsession that cries out to be heard. Like minor gods, they rummage in the mud looking to make characters with whom to explore their dreams, and nightmares.

Paragraphs like these also likely explain why politicians like Governor Daugaard seek to ignore literature and focus on STEM.

What Would Happen If An Orthodox Christian, A Taoist, And An Ancient Pagan Walked Into A Bar

I teach a short unit on Dante in my world lit class, so I have been following big boy blogger Rod Dreher's American Conservative posts about Dante with interest. (He has far too many to link to) Because I also teach a unit on Taoism, his most recent post provoked some musings that I still haven't sorted through completely. This paragraph, which explained the events that prompted the post struck me as rather interesting:

This week, I stumbled across a book that gave me real insight into this problem. As you know, we moved to a new house recently. The moving process unearthed, so to speak, books of mine that have been out of sight and out of mind for a while. One of them is a book I bought five years ago, when I was reading about Taoism and its parallels to Orthodox Christianity. The contemporary Orthodox priest-monk Damascene wrote a book called Christ The Eternal Tao, in which he interprets the basic Taoist message in Christian terms. The basic idea is that outside of the Hebrew tradition, Taoism is the most complete understanding of what Christianity teaches, and, rightly understood, prepares one to accept the truth of the Gospel. The book by no means teaches syncretism, but rather identifies aspects of Taoist thought that correspond to the way Orthodox Christianity understands the spiritual path. Tao simply means “the Way”; in Chinese bibles, Jesus’s words, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” come out as, “I am the Tao, the Truth, and the Life.” For Taoists, yielding to the tao is the path to restoring harmony between body, soul, and the cosmological order, which isn’t necessarily deistic.

Something about that paragraph and the tone of Dreher's post reminded me of these passages from C.S. Lewis's "Myth Became Fact" which I have in an old paperback version of The Grand Miracle.

Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens--at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass form a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other…We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. ....

...Those who do not know that this great myth became Fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied. But Christians also need to be reminded - we may thank Corineus for reminding us - that what became Fact was a Myth, that it carries with it into the world of Fact all the properties of a myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about 'parallels' and 'Pagan Christs': they ought to be there - it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic - and is not the sky itself a myth - shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.

To answer the question posed by this post's title, I think they'd all have a beer and some good conversation. I'll leave it to others to prove Lewis and  Damascene wrong. I still have much musing to do.

Quotation Of The Day: JRR Tolkien As Prophet Edition

Rod Dreher posts this paragraph from a letter Tolkien wrote in 1930:

“[Family life must have been different] in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet…are artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”

Senator* Phil Jensen, Race, And "Revelation"

This morning's Rapid City Journal reports that Phil Jensen, a South Dakota state senator, believes "businesses should have the right to deny service based on a customer's race or religion." According to Jensen, this behavior that the "majority" will find "detestable" can be "fairly addressed by the free market." Jensen also supports drug testing welfare recipients but laughingly admits he hasn't thought about drug testing those who receive other government subsidies

If this situation follows the pattern established when others have made similar gaffes, revealing "a truth the politician did not intend to admit," Jensen and his allies will soon complain that the Liberal Media and RINOs are misconstruing his comments. That effort is beginning. By tomorrow afternoon or Tuesday, he will claim to be a victim of political correctness run amok.

I'm going to help Jensen play the victim card. He's a victim of an insular political system that allows him to get elected without serious opposition. As a politically conservative evangelical Christian, he's a victim of a cognitive-dissonance-filled philosophy that combines Ayn Rand and Christianity in a way that tortures logic to death. And, were I a betting man, I'd bet that he's a victim of an education that did not have him read Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation."

Ruby Turpin, the story's protagonist, spends most of her nights trying to rank African-Americans, poor whites, middle class folks, and the rich. While race is key element in her hierarchy, the most important criterion is understanding "that you had to have certain things before you could know certain things." After being physically assaulted my a young woman who tells Ruby, "'Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,'" Ruby has a vision while washing down some hogs.

Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black[s]. . . in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer.They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They, alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was.

Jensen's view that the market will correct bigotry and hate ignores Biblical injunction that the human heart is deceitful. It ignores James Madison's reminder that men are not angels. It is based on the view that those who have things must know things and have the "given wit" to use them right. Flannery O'Connor knew that attitude leads to self-satisfied virtues that have no basis. Jensen has yet to learn that lesson.

Update: Bob Ellis has the victim card piece up 12 hours ahead of schedule.
*Post was originally and erroneously headlined Representative. 

Plains Pops: Items That Warm The Heart On a Cold Night Edition

Representative Hickey's lucid explanation of why South Dakota's death penalty needs to be repealed. A pdf is here.

Adam Smith, the economist conservatives love, thought poetry important.

The role of language is an essential component of Smith’s moral philosophy because it is the fundamental connection between the individual and the community. In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Smith expounded on the virtue of both poetry and prose, which “provide the capacity for exchange and agreement” in different contexts of human relations. It is in the sections of Adam Smith’s Pluralism on the importance of language that Shaftesbury’s influence on Smith shines through the strongest, particularly with Shaftesbury’s stress on language as a vehicle for unifying “the good and the beautiful.”

On a less serious note, the Minnesota Twins will open Spring Training in about six weeks. Pitchers and catchers report on February 16. Although I'm a bit skeptical, some experts like the Twins off season moves. Hope springs eternal.

Finally, Andrew Sullivan posts this video of Peanuts going Punk.

Quotation Of The Day: We Have A Moral Obligation To Vote Against Every Politician Who Doesn't Read Fiction Edition

From Neil Gaiman:

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

Please, read the whole lecture.

Pop Culture And Great Literature Meet: Ozymandias - As Read By Bryan Cranston: Breaking Bad

HT: @k8am

Why Didn't This Stuff Happen Before Finals?

First, A Northwestern University student is refusing to perform a song based on works of Walt Whitman because Whitman was a racist. The choral work does not contain evidence of Whitman's racism.

Whitman was a racist; he was also gay. Oh by the way, he was the best American poet of the 19th Century, and he cared for wounded soldiers during the Civil War.

It would have interesting to ask the young'uns if we should not read "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," "O My Captain!, My Captain!," or "I Hear America Singing" because Whitman was racist or gay or both. It would also have been fun to extend the conversation to ask them if people should not buy Ford products because Henry Ford was an anti-Semite.

This Francis Beckworth sentiment matches mine on this issue:

You do yourself no good by not seeing the greatness even in people who have held disreputable ideas. To look at Walt Whitman and just see a racist is precisely what makes racism wrong: you don’t see the entire person–in all his complexities, virtues, and foibles–you just see the race. By doing this, you artificially flatten the person, and thus you literally lie to yourself, for you intentionally deny the truth that a great man can have within him both grandeur and vice. If you want to be better than Whitman, rid yourself of the habits of mind that in him resulted in the beliefs that you now find offensive. The ability to separate the wheat from the chaff is a sign of intellectual maturity. Thus, discarding the wheat because you can’t bear the chaff does not punish Mr. Whitman; it punishes you.

This post was published before finals, but I missed it until today. It also ties to my belief that literature is essential. From this Jag Bhalla Scientific American post:

It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival. . . .

Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that leaves out much of what and how we feel is false. Nature shaped us to be ultra-social, and hence to be sharply attentive to character and plot. We are adapted to physiologically interact with stories. They are a key way in which our ruly culture configures our nature.

Has Bob Ellis Become A Relativist? Or Bad Things Happen If You Trust Brainy Quote But Didn't Listen To Your English Teacher

Stopping by Bob's RSS feed blog yesterday, I noticed a post leading off with this quotation:

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”—James A. Baldwin

Grad school was a long time ago, but I didn't remember Baldwin as the ideal Ellis conservative. I also remember this quotation as being part of his identity as a person of color in the United States. The entire quotation bears me out:

I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

I had forgotten about the bolded sentence, however. Does Bob really believe that situations, "the demands of life," can justify pulverizing one's "finest principles" like, oh I don't know, maybe the Republican Party platform? That certainly would be a news flash to get the South Dakota blogosphere in a whirl.

Let's be clear, I'm not attributing Baldwin's world view and atheism to Ellis, but this incorrect application of a quotation serves as an example. Writers should know who expressed the sentiments they quote and the entire context of the quotation before they use it to prove a point that the original writer never intended.

A Minor Musing On The Politicization And Practicality Of Literature

One of the frequent commentators at the Madville Times is a person who has adopted the pseudonym grudznick. Grudznick assumes the persona of a grumpy old man, but for all I know the commenter may be a pre-teen girl with a crush on Justin Bieber. Grudznick frequently posts comments asserting that things and people must be be useful. A recent example involves the arts: "we all know the arts are a dead end."

I know the arts neither bake bread nor build houses. And yet, as a literature teacher, I'm unwilling to dismiss the arts as useless much less as a "dead end." Greater minds than mine have attempted to defend literature and have punted. Alan Jacobs took up the issue recently; he concludes the task is impossible:

It is not possible to come up with an adequate “defense of literature,” because “literature” doesn’t exist: too many wildly different kinds of plays and stories and poems and songs fall under that useless rubric. Defenses of specific works, or specific authors, or even specific ways of reading specific works or authors, might be possible and useful; but nothing broader than that.

And maybe we should remember also these words from George Orwell: “There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible.”

Perhaps Jacobs is correct, but grudznick and those who agree the arts are pointless seem to indicate that no poem, story, painting, or sculpture ought to survive. It's as if they feel threatened by the arts. Perhaps those of us who teach literature are to blame; we often force the young'uns to look for symbols and synecdoche to the point that students lose the excitement inherent in the story or the beauty of the poem.

There may be another reason that grudznick and his art-is-useless cronies my dislike literature in particular. Olivia Senior points out that literature is political because "the creators of literature, are political animals; it is part of accepting our responsibility of being human, of being citizens of the world."

Literature is above all, storytelling. And, as Chinua Achebe has said, storytelling is a threat. Storytellers, poets, writers, have always found ways of confronting tyranny, especially in spaces where such actions are dangerous and deadly. Throughout the ages, writers have developed and employed myriad literary devices and explored the fullest limits of language through satire, magical realism, fantasy, fable and so on. Writers over the ages have found ways of talking about issues – like politics – without seeming to talk about them. The function is not to present the world as it is, but to present it in a new light through the narrative power of art. Literature does not ask "What is it about?" It asks "How do we tell it to make it real?"

The idea that subtext, symbol, and satire allow literature to exist as "threat" may be why conservatives dislike it, especially in the age of red meat  talk radio and Fox News. E.D. Kain points out that contemporary conservatives prefer the overt:

And it’s not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced. It’s just that today’s conservatives have lost any sense of proportion or subtext. Everything is so overt and over-stated. I think that The Lord of the Rings is a basically conservative text. It’s just not explicitly conservative and doesn’t say anything nasty about Obama.

Today’s conservative pop culture is reactionary, which is fitting I suppose. There was a mockumentary conservatives made a couple years ago that attempted to not very cleverly spoof Michael Moore. But an attempt to beat Moore at his own game is probably going to fail, if only because it’s little more than preaching to the choir (and this isn’t even to say that Moore isn’t deserving of his own criticism – the left is actually very good at leveling its own critique at Moore.) It’s the same in politics: conservatives aren’t so much interested with their own ideas about governance as they are about responding to and obstructing the ideas of their opponents.

And perhaps that’s the crux of the issue. Conservative art mimics conservative politics rather than the other way around. And so it can never really be art.

The idea of use or that art, especially literature must be as overt as a sermon seems to be an effort to dilute its ability to speak truth to power. Like Senior, I don't want literature to be overtly political, students ought to see the world as political and react to it.

So, since I have to answer the question: "Should literature be political?" I will say, yes, but not in an explicit way. The purpose of literature is not to represent but to re-present, to hold up that mirror in a light that enables us to see reality both reflected and refracted. And that applies to politics or any subject that we choose, or in the best case scenario, in the subject that chooses us. As writers we live lives that are not navel-gazing but conscious, fully engaged with the world.

My favourite quotation is Gauguin's statement: "Art is either plagiarism or revolution." So let me end by taking issue with the title of this debate, especially with the prescriptive should. Should the subject matter of literature be prescribed by anyone? I say no. So let's end by revolting against those who would apply the word "should" to art. Even in a question. 

Quotation Of The Day: Literature Set In Rural America Edition

From this Craig Fehrman article:

There’s a long tradition of shotguns and spare-prose fiction depicting America’s working class, and right now the Midwest is having a literary moment. Dennis Lehane, who anchors his crime novels in Boston, once told an interviewer that “in Greek tragedy they fall from great heights. In noir they fall from the curb.” In books by a small but growing number of authors—besides Bill, Donald Ray Pollock (Ohio), Bonnie Jo Campbell (Michigan), Alan Heathcock (Illinois)—there are no curbs. The roads are gravel and dirt, but the people still find a way to fall.

This makes for more than just good noir. Sometimes the rural Midwest, and rural America more generally, can seem to drown in don’t-bother-locking-the-doors nostalgia. The frustrations of groups like the Tea Party suggest that, in many ways, this near mythology remains as powerful inside the region as out. Against this ideal, consider Bill’s new novel, Donnybrook, whose title refers to a three-day bare-knuckle fighting tournament held every August on former farmland. Fans come to watch, gamble, inhale, imbibe—“like a Dead concert with fists,” a mostly toothless meth head calls it. It’s not so easy to be nostalgic about that.

Being Human: Why Great Literature Still Matters

I rant quit a bit about the STEM uber alles mindset that seems to dominate contemporary American thought. That thought seems to dominate certain circles of education reform. Cindy Haven quotes a David Foster Wallace book review to show that great literature is necessary to remind one what it means to be human:

“The thing about Dostoevsky’s characters is that they live.  And by this I don’t mean just that they’re successfully realized and believable and ’round.’ The best of them live inside us, forever, once we’ve met them. …

[Dostoevsky'] concern was always what it is to be a human being – i.e., how a person, in the particular social and philosophical circumstances of 19th-century Russia, could be a real human being, a person whose life was informed by love and values and principles, instead of being just a very shrewd species of self-preserving animal. …

So, for me anyway, what makes Dostoevsky invaluable is that he possessed a passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we, here, today, cannot or do not allow ourselves."

Wallace's review also points to a reason that condemnation of "dead white males" is overblown. The young'uns need to read a few of the old books* every year:

Part of the answer to questions about our own art’s thematic poverty obviously involves our own era’s postindustrial condition and postmodern culture.  The Modernists, among other accomplishments, elevated aesthetics to the level of metaphysics, and ‘Great Novels’ since Joyce tend to be judged largely on their formal ingenuity; we presume as a matter of course that serious literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.  Add to this the requirement of textual self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism, and it’s fair to say that Dostoevsky et al. were free from certain cultural expectations that constrain our own novelists’ freedom to be ‘serious.’

But it’s just as fair to observe that Dostoevsky operated under some serious cultural constraints of his own: a repressive government, state censorship, and above all the popularity of post-Enlightenment European thought, much of which went directly against beliefs he held dear and wanted to write about.  The thing is that Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius – he was, finally, brave.  … who is to blame for the philosophical passionlessness of our own Dostoevskys? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t – could not – laugh if a piece of passionately serious ideological contemporary fiction was also ingenious and radiantly transcendent fiction

I may be reading too much into this advertisement, but it strikes me that it points to a strong undercurrent in American culture that asks Americans to seek answers in tech rather than in their own humanity.



HT: This Andrew Sullivan post

*I will stipulate that they should read some more recent works as well. Many on this list would work in a high school classroom

A Minor Musing About Getting Older

I sat in the car this afternoon and, protected from the wind, watched geese circle before forming a V against a gray sky. I saw both graceful flight and hard work fighting against the wind. It has been a long time since I have taken a few minutes just to sit and watch birds fly, and I have spent part of the evening wondering why.

Patrick Kurp quotes John Updike who seems to indicate that this afternoon's experience is part of getting older:

“Aging calls us outdoors, after the adult indoors of work and love-life and keeping stylish, into the lovely simplicities that we thought we had outgrown as children. We come again to love the plain world, its stone and wood, its air and water….The act of seeing itself is glorious, and of hearing, and feeling and tasting.”

I Love It When Literature Makes The News

Both NPR and Politico report that poet Richard Blanco will read a poem during President Obama's second inauguration.  From Politico:

The Presidential Inauguration Committee on Wednesday named the Inaugural poet, who will appear at President Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony on Inauguration Day. Richard Blanco will be the country’s youngest Inaugural poet and also the first Hispanic and first member of the LGBT community to serve in the position, according to a statement from the committee:

The cynic in me sees this choice a stroke of pure genius. It's a nod to the Latino community in general, and it's a sign that Democrats are willing to reach out the Cuban-American community in particular. The latter group has tended to be solidly Republican.

On the other hand, the fact that Blanco is gay will certainly drive Obama's most ardent and vitriolic opponents into a dither. I can't wait to read Brad Ford's and Steve Sibson's take on this choice. It's always fun to see people foaming at the mouth. (As a side note, I think that some of Obama's critics on issues like drones and the usurpation of civil liberties need to get more coverage. I wonder if that coverage would occur if they did froth at the mouth more often.)

The only possible downside for President Obama is the fact that including a poet may anger Secretary of Education Arne Duncan along with the testing and Common Core folk who think literature is a waste of time. In order to make them happy, Obama would have had to ask Bill Gates to do a public reading of the new Windows tech manual..

Cynicism aside, here's "Burning in the Rain" one of Blanco's poems that was published in the New Republic in 2011:

Someday compassion would demand
I set myself free of my desire to recreate
my father, indulge in my mother’s losses,
strangle lovers with words, forcing them
to confess for me and take the blame.
Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet
by sheet on the patio and gathered them
into a pyre. I wanted to let them go
in a blaze, tiny white dwarfs imploding
beside the azaleas and ficus bushes,
let them crackle, burst like winged seeds,
let them smolder into gossamer embers—
a thousand gray butterflies in the wind.
Today was that day, but it rained, kept
raining. Instead of fire, water—drops
knocking on doors, wetting windows
into mirrors reflecting me in the oaks.
The garden walls and stones swelling
into ghostlier shades of themselves,
the wind chimes giggling in the storm,
a coffee cup left overflowing with rain.
Instead of burning, my pages turned
into water lilies floating over puddles,
then tiny white cliffs as the sun set,
finally drying all night under the moon
into papier-mâché souvenirs. Today
the rain would not let their lives burn.

Quotations Of The Day: Literary Allusion And Assault On Civil Liberties Edition

First Judge Colleen McMahon uses the two literary classics to describe her ruling that the Constitution doesn't allow the President to assassinate American citizens but that the Administration does not have to release internal memoranda that justify ordering assassinations:

“I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret,” she wrote.

“The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me,” Judge McMahon wrote, adding that she was operating in a legal environment that amounted to “a veritable Catch-22.”

Conor Friedersdorf begins his analysis of McMahon's ruling with two more literary references:

Permitted to run CNN for a day, I'd amuse myself by arranging for a Crossfire-style debate between English professors who disagree intensely about how best to characterize President Obama's national security policies. "They're Orwellian," one would insist. "They're actually better described as Kafkaesque," the other would counter. They'd go back and forth, citing his transgressions against basic norms of justice and comparing them to plot points from dystopian novels. Poor Wolf Blitzer. He'd be horrified by a segment that afforded so little deference to a sitting president.

Plains Pops: A Give Me Something To Belive In Trio

I always feel good when I can use a Poison song as part of post headline.

First, this trailer for The Life of Pi reminds one to believe the unbelievable:

Second, this post from GeekDad  begins with the following paragraph on the search for saviors:

Not to sound like a woe-is-me fatalist, but if the world has ever been in need of saving, it’s now. We’re continuously looking for heroes to step in and fix everything. Some turn to politics and the upcoming election – okay, we won’t be going there – while others are drawn to their religious community – and we’ll be skirting by that issue, while we’re at it. In entertainment, one certainly doesn’t have to look too far to see what has everyone abuzz. The Avengers brought in just shy of infinity million dollars while in theaters; and Christopher Nolan’s final Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises saw about half of that. Both of these blockbusters were derived, of course, from the rich and overflowing heroics of the Big Two comic book companies. While Marvel and DC Comics are certainly both rife with saviors, they are far from being the sole source material. In Kristopher White’s indie graphic novel The Thirty-Six, we see that our comic heroes don’t have to wear tights, or special armor with Tron-esque piping, for that matter, to be super and save the day.

Most importantly, this series of meditations on The Odyssey from political blogger Rod Dreher powerful illustrate why Homer's poem still resonates.