I had a chance last fall to visit McDonald’s training center outside of Chicago–Hamburger University. The center rents meeting rooms and hosts conferences which is how I ventured on campus. We were notified that there was a “dress code” on campus that was business casual and that no jeans or tee shirts were to be worn. Since much of my industry is located in Utah and works outdoors this was not a popular choice, As the group’s resident preppy I was already equipped qwith a good supply of argyle sweaters and khaki pants
As someone who had spent most his life in Universities, I was mildly amused at McDonald’s view of the University where students followed dress codes, where everything was neat and orderly, and where everyone stuck to the proscribed curriculum. I don’t think such a university ever existed; it certainly hasn’t existed in America since the 1950’s. Now they treated us very well, provided meals without a hamburger in sight, and with the exception of a fiberglass stature of Ronald McDonald lounging on a bench on the second floor there was no hint of the company’s main business in the decor of the campus building.
The “campus” is equally impressive. A large number of acres in suburban Chicago have been carefully shaped by adding undulations. The landscaping is beautiful with trees, flowerbeds, and paths all artfully placed. two ponds, elevated to the status of “lakes,” on our map, grace the area. Ducks swim happily in Lake Ray and Lake Fred, ( named for the founders of McDonald’s). As we stared out the window of our meeting room we noticed a duck that seemed to have its head continually underwater. After some time, we realized this was an anchored decoy, one of several on the two lakes.
This decoy brought into focus the dis-ease I had felt on the campus. The entire project was one of control. People’s behavior shaped by rules and codes. Nature structured, prettied up, and put “to work” in the name of profit. I am perhaps exaggerating, but the entire place seemed to me to be a semiotic expression of American Corporate desire to control nature.
As one who tracks our alumni on facebook I am exposed and frequently entertained by the slang of college students. No change seems to strike me more viscerally than their casual use of the “N” word. My reluctance to spell it speaks to its taboo nature. As one who grew up in the South of the 1950’s and lived through the civil rights movement, the word carries considerable moral and historical weight for me which makes its current uses difficult. Are we seeing a reversion to older forms of discrimination or a genuine shift in racial attitude?
I have defended teaching Huckleberry Finn even as I had wished Twain had written “Slave Jim” instead of “Nigger Jim.” I have come to understand the multiple uses of this word within the African American community. Claude Brown’s wonderful essay from the 1970’s on the “soul word” is perhaps the finest balance of intelligent linguistics and felt personal experience about this topic. But I knew that as a white I was barred from this discourse.
Hip hop culture seems to have changed all this. Young white people–mostly men–refer to each other an “my niggah” as if the “ah” erased much of the word’s evil history. At first, I saw this phenomenon as simply disaffected, but relatively privileged, white youth claiming an outsider position. As one who spend the summer of 1968 in San Francisco, I can assure them that this is not a productive political move. Then across my facebook wall I watched a white student call his African American friend “my Niggah,” and saw the African American reply with friendship and no sense of insult. I was shocked. Had the world of my students so changed that this was possible?
Chuck Berry and Motown are credited with moving the civil rights agenda forward. On reflection, I see that America has accepted the cultural prominence of Black people long before it has included them in America’s material prosperity. This morning’s Washington Post reports that the unemployment crises as hit African American men 3 times harder than their white counterparts. The divisions remain, yet this new use of the “N” word seems to imply that generational solidarity may be more important than race . Also this usage marks an era of greater friendship and contact between the cultures.
So maybe this usage is a good thing or maybe I’m just too old to accept a world in which I cut on my computer and am greeted with “Good Morning my Twiggahs.”
In his best known and perhaps best piece of scholarship,The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates traces the development of a distinctly different African American rhetoric. He begins with Yoruba praise songs and traces this development through slavery, many writers and even Mohammad Ali. Indeed he talks about the “trope a dope.” African Americans developed a double voiced rhetoric full of both hyperbole and hidden meaning which was designed to mean one thing in the speaker’s community and another in the wider world. Presumably then Gates knows whites hear certain rhetoric differently than African Americans do.
We can imagine the good professor, tired from his Chinese journey, trying out a little trope a dope on the policemen who missing the irony, as Gates’s theory predicts he would, arrests the professor. Part of my enjoyment of this event has been the way in which knowledge has been rendered useless by “signifying.” For African Americans, including the president, the arrest was an absurd example of what happens too often to African Americans. Its value as a signifier exceeds its value as an individual event.
The white press pretended the event had no “signifying power,” and examined it as a single event. Of course, the president’s remarks were seen as symbolic and “inappropriate.” A similar fate befell Jeremiah Wright whose preaching, or at least the clips I saw on television, were full of signifying and in that sense no different from many other African American preachers. Consistently whites tend to hear only the single voice of a doubled voice and to miss the riffs and syncopation.
This issue ended not by court resolution, not by a journalistic transcript of every word spoken in the Gates house that evening, but in a flury of signifying. The White House garden was turned into that most American of summer places–the patio beer party. The vice president was there to equalize the racial balance and we had that most American of solutions the face to face sit down. All done as a silent movie.
The lack of any honest dialogue about the remaining racial tensions in this country have made us very sensitive to those events, utterances, and acts that signify those differences and tensions with discussing or resolving them. The signifying monkey will be with us along time.
One of the dangers of Dish TV is that one spends time watching movies that one would not normally see. Feeling particularly mindless this weekend I sat through Never Back Down. Now I am not the intended audience for this film which is a formula teen-age movie about extreme fighting (mixed martial arts). It has enough fighting and angst for you average teenage boy, scenes of the girl friend teaching the boy to be sensitive for the girls, and enough skin to appeal to both genders–a perfect date movie.
As is often the case, the interesting thing in the movie is the way it portrays the world its characters live in. Milieu becomes more important, or at least more interesting, than plot or character. What was intriguing to me was not the fighting or the girls interest in it. Mock combat as ground for male bonding or mate advertising has existed since the time of the ancient Greeks. Rather I was struck by the ubiquity of the video camera, the cell phone, and You Tube.
The movie opens with a fight on a football field in Iowa where our hero decks a larger opponent. In the next scene we learn that he, with his brother, and mom are moving to Orlando, because his younger brother has won a scholarship to a tennis academy. At the new school, someone has googled him, the You Tube video of the football fight makes the rounds and our hero is drawn into the fight club. The nerd who befriends him has a video camera virtually glued to his eye, Every fight is filmed and posted. At several times we see students walking down the hall of the high school glued to their cell phones, then we see them stare knowingly at the hero. Everyone accepts this loss of privacy and seem to think that being video and uploaded validates them as a person. The only complaint is a feeble protest at being filmed by two girls making out in a hot tub at a party. We don’t take their complaints seriously.
Now the movie is in no way about privacy. I suspect that only old fogeys like myself noticed this about the film. I admit to be sufficiently wedded to my blackberry to suspect that if I were a teen with the requisite electronics I could fall into this world easily. But at what cost. Must we have a constant audience? Must we be a constant audience? As plot the movie is old fashioned; as psychology it’s trite, but as a portrayal of a brave new world it’s unintentionally frightening.
Every once in a while the universe rubs your nose in something that has been previously below your radar. Yesterday my twitter stream sent me to an point counter point article on decriminalizing sexting, this morning a piece on illegitimacy in The Washington Post mentioned sexting, and tonight I watched an episode of Law and Order SVU which centered on sexting. In all of these the issue of prosecuting teens as child pornographers was mentioned. This struck me as absurd on the face of it and over kill in terms of penalaties. A fouteen year old girl should not be put on a sex offenders list, if she foolishly sends her boy friend a topless picture of herself.
In different ways these three experiences reminded me how ambivalent American culture is about sex in general and teen sex in particular. Our diet and maybe some environmental factors seem to have lowered the average age of puberty in girls. Our work place has made the age of marriage later and later. We cannot expect sexually mature persons to abstain for long. Yet we have no sense of the limits, education, or the help teens need to manage their sexuality.
Only a small knowledge of 14 year olds allows one to imagine how they might exchange nude pictures via their cell phones. An even smaller knowledge of life allows us to see the disaster created if those pictures go viral through the school via cell phones, Facebook, or other media. What then are the proper constraints we should put on teenagers, the media, etc. The original intent of the teens may be sexual, but in the sense that the pictures are nots not intended to arouse anyone else, they are not pornographic. After an angry break up, revenge may cause one of the two to publish the pictures. What is the crime? Is it a civil matter?
I haven’t a good answer to these questions. But they are ones parents, young adults, and society at large need to answer. People have been and will be hurt by sexting. If embarrassment were the only hurt, I might be willing to argue that the behavior is self-correcting. I help run a therapeutic boarding school and deal with troubled teen girls whose early involvement with sex has injured them psychically. Some of these are sex abuse in the obvious sense that an adult has taken advantage of a child. Others involve promiscuity, physical abuse, and other behavior among teenagers. Of course, I can discuss none of these cases on the web. But the intersection of teenage sexuality and social media is one that requires reasoned examination and an admission that real harm can occur when these two forces collide.
This past week I attended the Ballet West’s recreation of three dances premiered at the Ballet Russe; the earliest of the pieces was first performed in 1909; the latest in 1929. Before the performance the managing director came out and gave a little speech about the importance of the Ballet Russe. In closing he asked the audience to image that it was 1909 and all we knew of the Ballet was Swan Lake. Of course, we failed.
For those not versed in performance history, the Ballet Russe was a Russian troop performing in Paris under the direction of Sergei Diaghelev who was a genius at finding and combining talent. Georges Rouault, Picasso, and many other of Paris’s artistic elite designed and painted sets for him, he commissioned many of the standards of modern ballet especially the works of his fellow countrymen–Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The premier of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913 started a riot. Oh to have an audience that cared so much.
Now the performances I saw were very well done. I refer any interested readers to Alastair’s Macaulay’s review in The New York Times (April 7, 2009). But we as audience could not bring new eyes and ears to the theatre. What were musical, dance,and artistic innovations are to us old and to a certain extent classics. We can never see tham as radically as their first proponents did.
This does not mean we cannot be moved by the performance–I was. Nor does it mean that we should not perform the pieces. But we must adm’it that performance cannot escape interpretation and any performancec thaat seeks to recreate the 1909 experience is an interpretation of both the ballet and 1909.
The first recording of ballet music I owned and listened to with care was Stravinsky, not Swan Lake. The Ballet Russe is not the avant-garade but the benchmark in my experience. Educated in the Avant Garde we constantly seek the new, the exciting, the revolutionary. But what now have we to rebell against?
Commercial activity and art have always overlapped in the West, but we have no dominate tradition and therefore no place to attack. Revivals like these point this out. It seems to me that mass media has replaced art as society’s thinking point and we are poorer because of it.
A graduate school friend once excused her reading of romance novels as “mind candy.” The phrase has stuck with me to describe that reading we do solely for pleasure with no intention of improvement or learning. For many people this is the sole reason they read; others prefer television.
My confection of choice is the historical mystery novel–a genre practiced by both the Americans and the Brits. I tend to prefer the Brits and the Irish over the Americans. Of course, I prefer Scotch or Irish whiskey to bourbon as well. These tend to come in several varieties–classical Roman, medieval both English and French, and 19th century. There is Bruce Alexander’s wonderful series about John Fielding, Henry Fielding brother, but the 18th century does not attract the mystery writers like the other eras do.
I read all three and although I admire the work of Stephen Saylor, Lindey Davis, and Anne Perry, my preference has always been for the medieval. My aunt, the same one who first gave scotch, started me on this vice by introducing me to Ellis Peters and the Brother Cadfael mysteries. I quickly devoured the series and began to look for similar writers.
Like all historical writing these mysteries reflect the concerns of the time they are written. Many of the readers and many of the writers of these mysteries are women. So it is not surprising that in eras in which womens’ roles were restricted, male detectives acquire strong and intelligent partners. In the 19th century novels many of the women are suffragettes or have become nurses and midwives so they can move more freely in society.
Peter Tremayne Sister Fidelma series seems to fit this bill. However, Tremayne is the writing name of Celtic historian Peter Bransford Ellis. While Sister Fidelma seems to have more freedom that any woman in the 7th century, he is portraying Irish history and Celtic Christianity very accurately. His clear, but mostly unspoken premise is that the West would be place had Celtic Catholicism triumphed over the Roman branch. It would certainly be a different one.
My other favorite bonbons are Bernard Knight’s Crowner John novels. These novels center on John de Wolfe the first man who held the title of coroner in Devon. The author has worked as a forensic scientist most of his life. Clearly he is tracing the history of position he, in fact, has held.
People who like history less than I do may find my taste in mind candy a little too heavy. But I read these for fun and for escape. I read only a little science fiction, but both take us from our world to another where the expression of passions we know are expressed in ways we may not have imagined.
I wondered about my love for Medieval mysteries. Fending off my eight year old nephew’s laser sword attack, I remembered that my friends and I took sticks and trash can lids and fought battles of great chivalry–we all read and loved King Arthur, Robin Hood and whatever else we could find.
What’s your Mind Candy? We all have some and an occasional piece is a real pleasure.
I’m born the same year as Mick Jagger and for years thought I shared a birthday with him. I don’t. In my last post I talked about finding and reading an old journal. In it was the following poem written in 1993 when we both turned fifty. Now that we’re both sixty-five I’ve decided to put it on the web.
Me and Mick at Fifty
I don’t want to be singing satisfaction when I’m forty–Mick Jagger
We’re ten years beyond it
And still we sing
I can’t get no…
Not yet filled
We search and sing
I can’t get no…
Your body slim still
Your lips pout and sing
I can’t get no…
My mirror shows more girth
Scars and wrinkles. Why is it
I can’t get no…
We’ve ingested, pursued succeeded
And still we sing
I can’t get no
We should have known
Satisfaction is received
Not gotten
Must we still sing
I can’t no…
PS. One vision of Hell is being immobile in the nursing home with “Satisfaction” blaring out the PA system.
We moved furniture around last week and I had to empty a bookcase. In it, I discovered several old journals. Now, I must admit to being a very irregular journal keeper. I’ll start with a burst of enthusiasm. Make near daily entries for a month or so. Then slowly taper off, stop, and when some pressure or enthusiasm enters my life, I’ll start again. I keep the journals though. My earliest is 1966-67 when I was in the Peace Corps and is a folio sized composition book sold in school stores. Later I went to ruled and un-ruled sketch books.
I sat and read a journal that covered the years 1991 to 1996, the period between my divorce becoming final and my remarriage. In it were my usual scraps–descriptions of events, an odd and not very good poem or two, a trying to reason out what I felt about this or that, some goals and wishes, and a comment or two on what I was reading. A stranger reading my journal might note some reoccurring themes–a struggle with weight, a good deal of earthly ambition, an attempt to understand my life experience in terms of the politics and culture of my day, and an ongoing search for both spiritual and sexual connection.
My pleasures, of course, lay in remembering these events and looking at my goals achieved or not some fifteen years later. Laughing at how God had arranged that my goals be achieved in ways I couldn’t imagine. Remembering fondly an afternoon in August, 1992 on a mountaintop outside Vancouver when unsought and unexpected an experience close to the mystical occurred to me. My journal says I felt whole after feeling asunder for very long, I write about the beauty of the view, and about driving through Vancouver rush hour with “an almost Zen-like calm.” An experience I intectually believed possible was now emotionally real.
My father died a month after my remarriage and three weeks after his seventy-ninth birthday. Entries exist on both sides of this event. Nowhere do I write about my feelings toward him or the week I spent with my mother and siblings watching him die and then burying him. My first journals contain several unsent angry letters to him and many pages in several of them try to understand my relationship with him. Just before my remarriage and his death we made some peace–more than a truce, but not a full reconciliation. But the gap, this lack of writing, the glaring lacunae struck forceably on this rereading. Why hadn’t I written. Did (do) I consider it a closed chapter?
Socrates says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The unremembered life is not really lived.
Poet and essayist Bill Holm died on February 25th of complications of pneumonia. I have known Bill since we had first jobs together at Hampton University. We took to each other immediately as we shared a love of arguing and good whiskey and believed the latter improved our ability to do the former. Bill was two months my senior and I must confess his death has made conscious of my own mortality. Were he here, he’d laugh and quote Jonathan Swift at me, “Those who thought my Age a Screen…”
One cannot write about Bill’s work without writing about Bill the person. His avatar was Walt Whitman and Bill’s works are songs of himself and like Whitman’s, they are songs of ourselves. By remaining intensely personal and local he opened up the wider world to his readers. The characteristic titles are The Music of Failure and The Heart can be Filled Anywhere on Earth. How better to write about America’s obsession with success than by examining failure.
Bill wanted to be a poet and much of his poetry is very good, but I suspect that it is as an essayist we will remember him. His prose is rhythmic, lyrical, and surprising, as if not writing poetry brought out his best poetic talents.
He was an extremely funny writer and performer.The Box Elder Bug Variations are poems about a local beetle presented as musical variations a la Bach which speculate on what the world would be like if “Box Elder bugs were as big as Norwegians.” His ode to mushroom soup remains one of my favorites. “Whole synods of Lutherans debate whether water, milk, or cream should perform the dilution.”
Carol Bly told him that one of his essays was “unremittingly moral.” The phrase describes Bill himself. He sided with the poor, the rural, the unimportant. He railed at the rich, the greedy, the stupid, all Repubicans and most Democrats. He grew up in the Luthern church, satirized its culture his whole life, but never lost Biblical rhythm or a Christian sense of social justice.
I haven’t written about the importance of music in Bill’s life. One of the pleasures of visiting him was to awaken to sound of his daily practice–first Bach and then whatever he was fascinated by at the moment. I remember both Joplin and Liszt as temporary passions. But no composer long ousted Bach. His 2006 Christmas letter suggests that if everyone in the world started their day with 20 minutes of Bach, we’d have a better world. He may be right.
I won’t be there next Saturday when he is put into the windswept prairie that he loved; I won’t know what he has chosen for his epitaph–I’d guess Whitman or something in Icelandic I can’t read. Perhaps his own title “The Dead get by with Everything.” But I started with Swift and Bill could share his epitaph.
“Go Traveler and imitate, if you can his strenuous defense of human liberty.”
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