Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 35

1963 Civil Rights March

I was on the 1963 Civil Rights March. I went with my mother and my friend Gail and her mother. We took a union-rented bus from Newark, NJ. It's one of the most important memories of my life -- and biggest march I have been on, though there have been bigger marches since then.

The most important part of the memory for me was not the march itself, which was so big that I had no sense of its bigness. I just remember a lot of people strolling under trees. I also don't remember the famous "I have a dream" speech, because I skipped it. I had been on a fair number of peace marches in Washington, and I always skipped the speeches and went off to an art museum. So I convinced my mother to go to the National Gallery, and we were looking at art while Dr. King gave his speech.

What I remember most clearly was the ride down. We were in a line of buses with union banners on their sides, rolling south out of the New York metro area. As we got out of the Central Atlantic states into the Border states, into the south, we began to see black people standing by the side of the highway -- entire families, just standing and watching the buses go by. There were a lot of them.

And when our bus drove into Washington, we saw black families standing on the porches of their houses, watching the buses go by. The way I remember it, they were not waving or cheering, they were simply watching, and their watching was intense.

The sense I got was -- this march was hugely important. People hoped for real change, and they were not entirely certain they would get it. Still, they hoped.

Well, that is my memory. It was important enough to me, that I put it into a story I wrote, "Big Brown Mama and Brer Rabbit," which is in a collection that got published this year, Big Mama Stories. In my story Brer Rabbit gets turned into a black man and becomes an auto worker in Detroit and later, after he has moved to the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul and is a middle-aged handyman, he goes on the march.

(The Big Mamas are magical beings, who come in all colors, including blue, green, orange and purple. They are tall tale characters like Paul Bunyan, only bigger and stronger, with a lot more skills and powers. If you want to know more about the story, you will have to get the book.)

I am not entirely enjoying the celebrations of the 50th anniversary, because they are putting the march into history, locking it into the past, and they are making it about Dr. King. He made the famous speech. But Bayard Rustin organized the march, and A. Philip Randolph called in every debt he was owed by the union movement for the march, and union locals all over the country rented buses and filled them. I had forgotten, but there were also special trains that carried marchers to Washington.

Most of all, the march was the people who organized it and went on it, and the people who stood on their porches and by the highway and watched. They knew this was important, and they hoped it would change America.

It didn't. It isn't part of the history because the job isn't done. The march was for jobs as well as civil rights, and too much of the country is unemployed, far more than in 1963, in fact. The jobs that exist -- especially for black people -- mostly suck. Who wants to work in the fast food industry for minimum wage?

Instead of having an end to racism, we're having a resurgence, including laws that are designed to disenfranchise people of color.

The Washington I remember from the march was black and full of ordinary working people. I was in Washington a couple of years ago. Georgetown was amazing: so rich and clean and white. It looked like a European capital. Washington is now the richest metro area in the country, and its black citizens are getting pushed out of the city, replaced by affluent white people.

In 1963, Detroit was the richest metro area in the country. Its money came from production. Washington is made rich by the federal government and the money that floods in to influence the government.

The country will be free when everyone can vote, and Washington listens to the voters, when the wall of money that isolates the city now is gone. It will be free when everyone has a decent job and a decent place to live, when healthcare and a good education is available to everyone, when racism and sexism are always confronted, when the government deals with real problems, such as global warming...

So, there is plenty of work left to do. The march was a milestone, but there is a long way to go. La lucha continua, as they say in the countries south of us.

P.S. The march was amazing and wonderful and inspirational. Being there was one of the best things that has happened in my life. (I added this, because I didn't want to end on a down note, and because big changes happen over time, step by step. You don't get where you want to go without taking each step.)

More weather

The trouble with being trapped like rat in an air conditioned apartment is, I feel like a trapped rat. Soon I will begin to gnaw off my tail... This is the summer version of cabin fever and much worse. If it were winter and snow, preferably a blizzard, I'd be pulling on my mukluks and my melton wool parka and going out to frolic in the drifts...

But I have to run errands tomorrow. So -- even though this heat wave is supposed to continue -- I will be out and about.

Pride and Prejudice

We watched the 2005 Hollywood version of Pride and Prejudice last night as part of our ongoing Jane Austen obsession. It's visually very impressive, and I like the Bennett estate as a working farm. Good pigs. Good cattle. Good hens. Excellent geese. But it skims over the surface of the novel. I did like Donald Sutherland, and I liked a Mrs. Bennett who didn't shriek all the time. No question in my mind, however, that the BBC TV series is much better. I suppose we will have to see the famous Lawrence Olivier version now.

Patrick found an essay on the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie. The author makes a good defense of it, but agrees that it is more a movie experience than a Jane Austen experience. I thought a lot of it was lovely -- and gritty and Hogarthian. The essayist says it works visually to a considerable extent. You are given information through images, rather than dialogue. We bought it at a large discount at Target, so will be able to watch it again.

Austen, I suspect from her writing, was not especially visual. It's her dialogue and her narrative voice that I notice and remember.

I woke this morning thinking it was not a good movie. Emma Thompson wanted her name off the script, and this was a wise decision. The script is not good, except when it uses Austen's lines. I think it's a serious mismatch. A director who thinks visually and an author who thinks in words not images. The script writer should have been a bridge. But it's not a good script...

Weather Report

You know those summer mornings when it's bright and cool, but you can feel the noon heat coming behind the coolness? This is not one. At 8:30 it was hot and humid and sticky and awful. The air was not breathing quality air, but the kind of air you used to get in Detroit in the summer, when the city was full of car plants making production. Industrial quality air. An hour later, it was slightly worse.

Patrick says we are getting California wildfire smoke. So that's the particulate matter and the grayish haze. In Detroit, it was the plants making cars and good jobs and money for most everyone. Now it's the west burning down.

Economists and Taxes

This is a comment I posted on the wonderful Naked Capitalism blog in response to an article by an economist on taxes. He was actually making a good point: that economists use language about taxes that builds in an anti-tax prejudice. But he didn't do it in clear English, and he presented his ideas in the abstract way that economists do, without reference to reality. So I wrote:

I had three responses to this article.(1) Why can’t economists learn to write in the English language? (2) Why postulate what people are like? There are polls, and there is sociology. You can actually find out about people’s wants and needs. (3) Why not take a look at history? World War Two and the 1950s show how much damage was done to the economy by high taxes combined with high government expenditures.

(Note: there is a bit of sarcasm here. The American economy roared during WWII and did better in the 1950s than it has done since. Taxes were high, and the government spent a fortune on the war effort and then on post-war housing and education and the interstate highway system and... Economists talk about the dead weight of taxes pulling down the economy. Top income tax rates were over 90% in the 40s and 50s. They didn't seem to weigh on America one bit.)

I don’t think (as this guy does) that we want to maximize after tax income. I think we want to maximize a decent life in an environment that doesn’t collapse around us. I’d take a very low after tax income in return for national health, an improved national pension plan, free education, good social services, and national programs to build affordable, low energy housing and a sustainable world.

For what it is worth, when Republicans were the dominent party in Minnesota and refusing to raise taxes, the people of Minnesota passed two constitutional amendments by popular vote. Both raised sales taxes, one to fund transportation in the state, the other to fund clean water, the environment and the arts. People will take less after tax income in return for social goods.

Read more at Naked Capitalism.

Minnesota Orchestra

I have been trying to figure out what the administration and board of the Minnesota Orchestra think they are are doing. The lockout of orchestra musicians has been going on for the better part of a year. For what it is worth, the Orchestra Association is being advised by the law firm that advised American Sugar in its lockout of workers up in Moorhead and advised the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in its lockout of musicians. The SPCO musicians finally settled. Their base pay has been cut 19% and the number of musicians in the orchestra has been reduced.

I knew the SPCO had financial problems, but the Minnesota Orchestra is doing a huge expansion of Orchestra Hall, partly funded by a state grant. To get the state grant, they had to show that their financials were solid.

Per the musicians' website, the administration wants pay cuts of 30-50%. Also per the website, the Minnesota Orchestra pay was in line with other major orchestras, and other major orchestras -- such as Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco and Pittsburgh -- have new contracts with flat pay or slight increases in pay.

This is by Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker:

In his latest piece, (Graydon) Royce alludes to a column I wrote in 2010, in which I said, "For the duration of the evening of March 1st, the Minnesota Orchestra sounded, to my ears, like the greatest orchestra in the world." … I stand by the statement, at least as far as the musicians themselves are concerned. As for the board and the management, I am tempted to apply a superlative of a quite different kind. I'll simply say this: do the board and management actually wish to destroy the Minnesota Orchestra? So far, their actions seem to be moving steadily toward that end.

It is quite amazing for a nonprofit with one mission, maintenance of a classical orchestra, to destroy that orchestra and its mission. I think it's flat out insane. Remember that Alex Ross thinks it may be the greatest classical orchestra in the world. That's a heck of a thing to destroy. Not something a sane person would do. Remember that the orchestra administration was able to convince the state of Minnesota that the orchestra was in good financial shape, so the problem does not seem to be money. If the problem is money, in spite of their representations to the state, then they need to open their financial records to the union and the public and plead for help.

In an attempt to make the actions of the board and administration appear rational, I came up with two theories. Remember these are only theories.

(1)The administration and board decided to save money while the new Orchestra Hall lobby was under construction by locking out the musicians. Why pay musicians when the Hall was barely -- if at all -- useable? Why worry about finding other venues? Simply lock the musicians out. In addition, I imagine, they hoped to break the union and thus be able to pay much less, when construction was done and they rehired the orchestra. If they lost the current musicians, it wouldn't matter because they could hire recent music school graduates. Anyone can play classical music. They haven't managed to break the union, and they don't know what to do next. They are stuck with a bad plan.

(2)They decided to eliminate the Minnesota Orchestra, because it's too expensive, and replace it with a pops orchestra, which will -- they hope -- cost less and bring in more subscribers. Or have no orchestra and rent the Hall out for special events -- rock concerts or weddings.

Patrick says it would be a lot easier to just have recorded music. But they'd better remember to pay ASCAP and BMI.

Communication

I don't usually remember dreams. However I did remember part of a dream from last night. It was a Star Trek TV show dream or maybe a Galaxy Quest dream. I didn't recognize any of the characters, but the uniforms looked familiar.

A human star ship had gone into a new region of space and met aliens, who looked like humans, at least superficially. The aliens were afraid of being conquered or assimilated, which led to conflict. I have forgotten the middle of the dream, the part with action. But I remember the resolution.

The aliens communicated with each other via the direct exchange of cellular material, rather like bacteria. Because of this, it was possible that there was only one alien with many bodies. In any case, humanity could not assimilate the aliens, nor could they assimilate humanity, because real communication was not happening.

The aliens were talking with the human star farers, but this speech was superficial, not their real -- chemical -- form of communication.

The humans told the aliens that they were leaving this region of space and would not be back for a long time, so the aliens were doubly safe.

That was the dream. What was it about? A failure to communicate, which is probably important to a writer.

Work

I get more work done than I realize. I woke up thinking about the story I'm revising and realized, while still half awake, what I needed to do next. Then I made coffee and toast with marmalade and settled down at the computer to check my mail and then answer a series of questions for an online interview about "Kormak the Lucky," the story that F&SF just published. (Small bit of promotion here.) That was interesting. I think I have figured out what the story is about. By the time I finished that, it was time to go exercise. I thought some more about the story I'm revising at the Y.

Exercise

I have mixed feelings about exercise. I feel better when I do it, and I like the people I meet at the Y. But in the end my idea of real fun is cruising the Internet or reading a book.

But I love going to the Y in the morning. Today was sunny when I headed over, the sky bright blue and the air cool. As I crossed the street to the park, the Asian Invasion lunch truck zipped past me, heading for a parking place. There were people walking dogs, and a guy playing the beat-up, rainbow-colored, upright piano that sits under the band shell. A building in the neighborhood offers apartments to people who have been homeless. This guy looked as if he might live there, as did the two men who made up his audience. He played darn well.

Silence, Please

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a lovely post at The Atlantic on the Amtrak quiet car and the kind of people who make noise in a car reserved for quietness. I enjoyed the post and the long series of comments, which through many kinds of rude public behavior. One of the commenters said that he or she believed many people -- possibly most people -- could not handle silence.

This instantly hit home with me. I have thought for years that people are afraid of being alone with their thoughts. Either their thoughts are painful or they have no thoughts, though Zen teachers tell us there is always some kind of crap floating through our minds.

I like silence. I plot stories while walking the track at the Y, and I appreciate the silence in the weight room. Once in a while a staff member plays music, but usually there is no sound except a bit of conversation. When there is music, I find its beat puts me off my own rhythm as I work out.

At home, I either have silence or classical music, played not too loudly. I especially like 17th and 18th century chamber music. This was music designed to be played while the nobility digested their dinners. It does not demand the same kind of attention as Beethoven, for example.

But having said I like silence, I remember the noises that don't bother me. I have lived in cities my entire life, so the background noises of cities -- cars, machinery, sirens -- don't usually bother me. I am able to shut them out. I hear them as silence, I think, though the true quietness of the country is more relaxing.

I like going out to write. A coffee house with a good collection of CDs is a wonderful place. Most of the time, people around me are fairly quiet. Many people sit alone with a computer or notebook. The staff is willing to sell me a cup of coffee plus refills and then leave me alone for hours.

This kind of noise -- a good CD, people talking quietly -- does not bother me. In fact, it seems to help me write.

Rude noise bothers me. Music played too loudly. Drunks yelling in the street. The TVs that run endlessly in public places. Why? Most of the time no one is watching. One makes a choice to go into a coffee house and listen to music, while writing. One does not make a choice to listen to drunks yelling. And if one is waiting in an airport, one is making a decision to fly, which is not the same as a decision to listen to Fox News.

I like to be alone with my thoughts. More silence, please.