Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 157

October 7, 2020: Recent Reads: Washington Black and The Water Dancer

[Last October I had a lot of fun sharing and AmericanStudying some of my recent reads, and it brought out great responses and nominations for a crowd-sourced weekend post. So this year I wanted to do the same, and would love to hear what you’ve been reading for another weekend list!]On realism, the fantastic, and two historical novels that blur the boundaries.In this post on Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990) and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), I wrote about how those two acclaimed and award-winning historical novels of slavery use anachronisms in parallel but ultimately quite different (and to my mind less and more successful, respectively) ways. But it’s perhaps more accurate to say that what both books and authors are seeking to do, with those anachronisms and in many other ways, is to blur the line between history and fiction, the lived histories and realities of slavery and the fictional and fantastic elements that storytelling can feature. In so doing, they’re part of a long legacy of such historical fictions (sometimes known as neo-slave narratives, a term coined by scholar Ashraf H.A. Rushdy), a list that would also include Octavia Butler’s time travel sci fi historical novel Kindred (1979), David Bradley’s blend of storytelling, folklore, and academic/scholarly history in The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Toni Morrison’s ghost story historical novel Beloved (1987), among many others. Earlier this year I read two of the newer entries in that well-established but still evolving genre: Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black (2018) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel, The Water Dancer (2019). The two novels interestingly parallel Johnson’s and Whitehead’s books respectively: like Middle Passage, Washington Black is a bildungsroman in which its recognizably realistic main character is born into slavery but experiences an extreme and at least somewhat anachronistic journey (taking him in Edugyan’s novel as far as the Arctic); and like Underground Railroad, The Water Dancer weds the histories of slavery to overtly supernatural elements linked to setting, in this case the protagonist Hiram Walker’s ability known as “conduction” (inherited from a mother of whom he has no memories despite an otherwise photographic memory), which allows him to transport people great distances by folding the earth and traveling across it. While my opinion isn’t the point of this post, I’ll note that I found Edugyan’s novel more effective and satisfying than both Johnson’s and Coates’, and would say that Whitehead’s remains my favorite of this group (but all four are well worth checking out).So what is the point of my post, then, beyond a Reading Rainbow-like insistence that you should “read the book(s)”? That is a main point for sure, but this pairing also leads me to think a bit more broadly about the question of representing slavery in fiction. (I’m indebted to a Twitter conversation with Laura Vranafor this paragraph’s brief thoughts.) Obviously historical fictions always blend those two elements in one way or another, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a late 20th or early 21st century historical novel of slavery that doesn’t do so in these more overt, extreme, and (in one way or another) fantastic ways. Even Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), a relatively straightforward multi-generational historical novel, features a striking climactic section that introduces Haley as a character and depicts his own recreation of his focal, familial histories. While this might be overstating the case, it seems to me that to write historical fiction about slavery (and perhaps about any similarly traumatic histories) both requires and amplifies the more fantastic side of storytelling, not to elide or forget the histories, but in an effort to capture and include (and ultimately, at least in some ways, transcend) them. Next recent reads tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Recent reads you’d share for the weekend post?

October 6, 2020: Recent Reads: The Yellow House

[Last October I had a lot of fun sharing and AmericanStudying some of my recent reads, and it brought out great responses and nominations for a crowd-sourced weekend post. So this year I wanted to do the same, and would love to hear what you’ve been reading for another weekend list!]On three books I’d put in conversation with Sarah Broom’s stunning multi-generational family memoir.1)      Salvage the Bones (2011): I wrote about Jesmyn Ward’s wonderful second novel in this post on representations of Katrina, and would still argue that Salvage is the best literary engagement with that hurricane that I’ve encountered. But The Yellow House is definitely in that conversation, with The Water (as Broom usually calls Katrina) serving first as a consistent, foreshadowed undercurrent beneath her family histories and then exploding into a central role in the family’s lives and world in the book’s second half. Given that the floodwaters destroyed the family’s titular New Orleans home, it’s fair to say that Broom’s book is ultimately as much about memory as Ward’s—in this case, not just memories of the storm, but also and especially of the generations and decades (captured in that titular house), the stories and secrets, that lie buried yet exposed on every page of her book. 2)      Heavy (2018): Speaking of multi-generational family stories and secrets, I don’t know of any recent memoir that engages with such themes more potently than Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. Heavy features a somewhat more standard memoir narration and structure than Yellow House, using the first-person voice, perspective, and story of its author as a window into broader stories and histories like those of his mother, his Mississippi home, and race in America. But while the relationship of Sarah Broom (as author and as narrator) to her book and its subjects is significantly more ambiguous and fraught than that, I would nonetheless argue that the two memoirs similarly turn the genre, as well as their focal identities and families and American identity itself, inside-out, laying bare the ways that memory and story both construct and deconstruct every individual, every family, every home and community. 3)      The Grandissimes (1881): I know, one of these things is not like the others. But you know me well enough to know that I believe there’s great value in putting older cultural works in conversation with 21st century ones, and George Washington Cable’s sweeping, multi-generational historical novel—one that focuses on a particular New Orleans house to open up its themes of family, community, race, and history—is to my mind the closest literary parallel to Broom’s memoir that I’ve read. Since Cable’s book goes back to the first years of the 19thcentury and Broom’s takes us up through 2019, that means between these two works we’ve got more than 200 years of fraught, contested, secretive, vital American history and story—and with Ward and Laymon in the mix as well, we’re a long way toward a reading list that would rival any collection of American books.  Next recent reads tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Recent reads you’d share for the weekend post?

October 5, 2020: Recent Reads: How Much of These Hills is Gold

[Last October I had a lot of fun sharing and AmericanStudying some of my recent reads, and it brought out great responses and nominations for a crowd-sourced weekend post. So this year I wanted to do the same, and would love to hear what you’ve been reading for another weekend list!]On necessary darkness, literary legacies, and the optimism of recovery and resistance.As part of that series last year, I highlighted a novel—Tommy Orange’s stunning There There (2018)—which thoroughly and importantly challenged my critical optimism. I don’t know that I’ll ever read another American novel that does so more potently, but the best novel I’ve read so far this year is at the very least a close contender. C. Pam Zhang’s rightly acclaimed debut novel How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020) is a masterpiece of revisionist historical fiction in the best sense of every word in that phrase, opening up the experiences of Chinese Americans (and all Americans) in the mid-19thcentury American West with a combination of lyricism and raw realism that felt genuinely unique (no easy feat in a novel published in 2020). As this excellent NPR review notes, Zhang’s novel is profoundly pessimistic, with every moment and event adding one more layer to what the reviewer calls “a perpetual state of longing and disappointment.” That darkness feels just as earned, and just as necessary, as does Orange’s, but there’s no getting around the fact that it makes Zhang’s book a painful read (if, again, a consistently lyrical and beautiful one).As with any great novel, however, there are many more layers to How Much than its tones, and I wanted to highlight two in particular here. That NPR reviewer also notes the book’s clear echoes of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), as Zhang’s novel likewise features children (in this case the siblings Lucy and Sam, 12 and 11 respectively) on a quest to bury a deceased parent (their father, known by the Mandarin “Ba”) whose voice and body alike often dominate the novel as fully as did Addie Bundren’s in Faulkner’s book. Of course Faulkner looms large for any subsequent American novelist, but I would argue that Zhang’s location of her novel in the legacy of Dying is more specific and more pointed than that. As my college friend and wonderful fellow AmericanStudier Heidi Kim argues in a chapter of her book Invisible Subjects (2016), “The Foreign Faulkner: The Mississippi Chinese in Faulkner’s South,” that “Faulkner makes use of the Chinese at pivotal moments to discuss the intrusion and socioeconomic containment of a foreign presence.” (A few decades earlier, Charles Chesnutt does the same with a singular Chinese American figure in a pivotal early chapter in The Marrow of Tradition [1901]). But I think Heidi would agree with me that Faulkner isn’t much interested in the Chinese American community on its own terms, and so Zhang’s novel can be seen as both an extension of and yet a challenge to this element of his literary legacy.Much of the darkness of Zhang’s book is intertwined with that idea of Chinese Americans as “a foreign presence”: the novel’s epigraph is “This land is not your land,” and even though in the first chapter Lucy recalls her father telling her “You remember you belong to this place as much as anybody,” it feels that the exclusionary narrative and its destructive effects often dominate Lucy and Sam’s experiences. I hope it’s clear that I’m not trying in any way to minimize that bracingly dark and painful side to Zhang’s novel, which again offers an important counterpoint for critical optimists like myself. But you know me well enough to know that I have to end on a more optimistic note, and it’s this: the writing and existence of Zhang’s novel, to me, represents a potent form of both recovery and resistance. That is, by telling the story of Chinese Americans in this mid-19thcentury America, Zhang at the same time implicitly but crucially pushes back on any narrative that seeks to exclude that community from American histories, stories, identities. A book doesn’t need a happy ending (and Zhang’s book certainly doesn’t offer one) to help us move toward a more perfect union, and to my mind this book is a vital example of how historical fiction can do just that. Next recent read tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Recent reads you’d share for the weekend post?

October 3-4, 2020: September 2020 Recap

 

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

August 31: Fall Semester Previews: A Policy of Care: A preview series for a Fall semester unlike any other starts with a new syllabus statement to reflect that new world.

September 1: Fall Semester Previews: Open-Access Texts: The series continues with an impressive open-access resource, and a broader question for us all moving forward.

September 2: Fall Semester Previews: Ungrading: My tentative embrace of a radical pedagogy, and a question that remains, as the series rolls on.

Special Post: The Rock Springs Massacre and Working-Class White Supremacist Violence: I wanted to share here this piece that didn’t end up getting published for my Saturday Evening Post column.

September 3: Fall Semester Previews: Zoom: One thing I’ve learned about teaching in a new format, and what I still haven’t figured out (although I’m getting there as the semester unfolds!).

September 4: Fall Semester Previews: What Doesn’t Change: The series concludes with some continuity and clarity at a chaotic and uncertain time.

September 5-6: Crowd-sourced Fall 2020: Thoughts, plans, concerns, and solidarity from many of my friends and colleagues—add yours in comments!

September 7: History through Games: War Games: One of my more fun series ever kicks off with three board games through which I learned about war histories and stories.

September 8: History through Games: The Oregon Trail: The series continues with three takeaways from the pioneering video game.

September 9: History through Games: Careers: A piece I wrote for the Fitchburg Historical Society newsletter on learning history through the 1970s update of the classic board game.

September 10: History through Games: Video Game Action and Inaction: How two action-packed and one decidedly less active game portray the past, as the series plays on.

September 11: History through Games: History Adventures: The series concludes with a new, interactive digital book series that extends the Choose Your Own Adventure genre to new media.

September 12-13: History through Games: Reacting to the Past: A special weekend post on a few voices from whom I’ve learned about the pedagogical games.

September 14: Nazis in America: Madison Square Garden: Ahead of Project Paperclip’s 75th anniversary, a NaziStudying series starts with the February 1939 NYC rally.

September 15: Nazis in America: Ford, Lindbergh, and Coughlin: The series continues with three famous figures who reflect the depth and breadth of US Nazism.

September 16: Nazis in America: The Plot against America: Three telling and compelling layers to Philip Roth’s alternate historical fiction, as the series marches on.

September 17: Nazis in America: Wernher von Braun: Three striking and smart lines from Tom Lehrer’s satirical song.

September 18: Nazis in America: Neo-Nazis and Charlottesville: The series concludes with how to respond to a resurgent, but not at all new, neo-Nazi movement.

September 19-20: Nazis in America: Project Paperclip and Hunters: For the project’s 75th anniversary, a more historical and a more fictional side to how the Amazon show portrays those histories.

September 21: Legends of the Fall: Young Adult Lit: An AutumnStudying series kicks off with two iconic YA novels that fractured my innocence alongside that of their characters.

September 22: Legends of the Fall: American Pastoral: The series continues with a quiet scene that embodies the loss of innocence far more than the novel’s over-the-top moments.

September 23: Legends of the Fall: The Body and Stand by Me: A novella that’s explicitly about the loss of innocence and a film adaptation that’s decidedly less so, as the series peeps on.

September 24: Legends of the Fall: Presumed Innocent: The multiple levels of revelations about innocence and guilt built into the best mystery fiction.

September 25: Legends of the Fall: “American Pie”: The series concludes with the straightforward and subtler sides to a beloved ballad about the loss of innocence.

September 26-27: Crowd-sourced AutumnStudying: Another full and fun crowd-sourced post—add your AutumnStudying nominations in comments!

September 28: Sports Scandals: The Black Sox: On the 100th anniversary of a key turning point, three ways to contextualize the Black Sox kick off a series on sports scandals.

September 29: Sports Scandals: Rosie Ruiz: The series continues with three layers to the infamous marathon scandal beyond the headlines.

September 30: Sports Scandals: Lance Armstrong: Two broader implications of a scandal that’s easy to pin on an individual bad actor, as the series cheats on.

October 1: Sports Scandals: The Patriots: Two ways the record-breaking NFL dynasty’s scandals foreshadowed the age of Trump.

October 2: Sports Scandals: The Astros: The series concludes with one thing that’s definitely different about the first sports scandal of the 2020s, and the fundamental question of what’s next.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

October 2, 2020: Sports Scandals: The Astros

[On September 28th, 1920, four key members of the Chicago White Sox admitted to throwing the 1919 World Series, a pivotal turning point in the unfolding Black Sox scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Black Sox and four other sports scandals, past and present!]On one thing that’s definitely different about the first sports scandal of the 2020s, and the fundamental question of what’s next.In many ways, the epic Houston Astros video-sign stealing-cheating scandal that engulfed Major League Baseball and the sports world in those long-ago days of late 2019 and early 2020 feels quite parallel to the first major Patriots scandal (Spygate) I discussed yesterday. A successful sports franchise was revealed to be using video technology to spy on its opponents, both fans and team officials tried to dismiss the actions as something “everybody does” (and baseball insiders noted that that was partly true but that this particular team had gone far beyond the norm), and substantive, ground-breaking punishments (which were still seen by many as insufficient) were levied against the team and its head coach/manager. Despite the anti-Patriots bias I acknowledged yesterday, I’d be the first to admit that the Astros scandal was orders of magnitude worse than Spygate—not least because there’s definitive evidence it was part of, and almost certainly that it significantly affected, the playoffs and at least one World Series—but I’m just saying, the broad strokes of the scandal itself seem familiar within the last couple decades in sports. 2007 and 2019/2020 aren’t that far apart (even though this year it feels like even 2019 was eons ago), but there’s been at least one hugely prominent societal change over that time: the rise and dominance of social media. Of course such media were around in 2007, but they were far from ubiquitous, and I certainly don’t believe that many professional athletes had social media presences and platforms. Whereas in 2020 virtually every professional athlete does, and in response to the Astros revelations many baseball players used their social media platforms to make far more direct and striking statements about the scandal and its aftermaths than we ever would have seen through official quotes to reporters or press releases or the like. And I would argue that this ability for the public to get far more raw and honest responses from players on social media carried over into things like media interviews, as illustrated by the comments from the man considered baseball’s best player, Mike Trout; it seems unlikely to me that in the pre-social media days the player considered the face of Major League Baseball would have said things as direct as “They cheated” and (even more surprisingly, as a direct critique of the powers that be) “I don’t agree with the punishment.” Cheating in some form will always be around, but social media illustrates how societal changes will affect how such scandals play out.If 2020 reveals anything, of course, it’s that we all too often can’t imagine or even predict the form such societal changes will take. But while the pandemic and its drastic effects on the 2020 baseball season has overshadowed the aftermath of the Astros scandal, I would argue that there’s a fundamentally similar issue at play: a sense that baseball has gone astray, has lost both the trust and the interest of a significant portion of its potential audience. Major League Baseball isn’t responsible for what has happened to this season, that is, but as with any of us, what it can control is its choices and actions in the aftermath, and the widespread consensus is that so far those choices and actions have further illustrated a sport in serious decline. But as is the case with America, the future is anything but set in stone, so the fundamental question is whether and how baseball (like all of us) can learn from this moment and move forward more successfully. “There’s always next year!” is a pretty important thing to keep in mind, but one for which we have to actively work, now more than ever. September Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports scandals you’d highlight?

October 1, 2020: Sports Scandals: The Patriots

[On September 28th, 1920, four key members of the Chicago White Sox admitted to throwing the 1919 World Series, a pivotal turning point in the unfolding Black Sox scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Black Sox and four other sports scandals, past and present!]On two ways the record-breaking NFL dynasty’s scandals foreshadowed the age of Trump.Full disclosure: I really hate the Patriots. But in truth, my personal perspective on the team has evolved greatly over the last two decades, an arc that I would argue has a great deal to do with the team’s scandals. Due to a combination of my ex-wife’s fandom, my 2003 move to the Boston area, and the team’s historic underdog status, I cheered the Pats on in their 2001 and 2003 Super Bowl triumphs. Having previously lived in Philly and as a big fan of Donovan McNabb, in 2004 I rooted for the Eagles, but with no animosity toward the Pats. But the combination of 2007’s Spygate scandal (and more exactly the collective response from Pats fans to those cheating revelations, on which more below) and my growing distaste for the mythos around Tom Brady led me to increasing hostility toward the team in the course of that undefeated season, and over the 13 years since they’ve become the only sports team in my life to date that I genuinely, passionately despise (and that was beforetheir multi-layered connectionsto Donald Trump!). So yes, it’s fair to say that it’s hard for me to write a post about them that remains entirely analytical and objective. I’m still gonna analyze them, though, and if and where I fall short I have no doubt that the many Pats fans in my life will let me hear about it. More exactly, I believe two layers to the responses to the Pats’ scandals foreshadowed dominant narratives surrounding the rise, presidency, and era of Trump. For one thing, I’ve seen time and again arguments that Belichick and company aren’t cheaters, they’re just a coach and team who are willing to “do whatever it takes to gain a competitive advantage” (and thus to win). Of course sports figures and teams have cheated since the dawn of time (to use a favorite student phrase), but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such brazen dismissals from sports fanbases or commentators of the ethics or morality of cheating in favor of a “win at all costs” mentality. And I would say something very similar of Donald Trump and the 2010s GOP—dirty tricks have always been part of the political landscape, but I’ve never seen a political party more dedicated to nor more blatant in stating the idea that the goal is “winning,” that everyone else in politics and society are “adversaries” to be defeated at all costs, that cheating (such as blatant voting rights repressions) is not only acceptable but necessary in order to achieve those goals. In my extensive experiences with both New England sports radio and Patriots fans (especially the younger ones, including my sons’ peers and my FSU students), I’ve also encountered a second, even more disturbing and Trump-like mindset: the idea that the league is out to get them. In this perspective, the cheating scandals not only were not a big deal, but also and more importantly were conspiracies concocted by those aforementioned evil adversaries, turning the Pats into the true victims of these stories. This mindset can permeate everywhere, making it nearly impossible to recognize even basic facts: I remember after the Pats Super Bowl LIII win over the Rams, a game in which the Rams were charged with six more penalties than the Pats (for 45 more yards), hearing a Pats fan student lament that “the refs were against us and tried to make us lose.” Given that Donald Trump is rivaled only by Andrew Johnson in his ability to see enemies everywhere, to depict himself as the victim of “fake news” and many other conspiracies, and to gin up similar sentiments from his cult-like fans, it seems only fitting that the scandal-ridden Patriots, more than any other sports franchise, have become so closely connected to Trump and his presidency. Last ScandalStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports scandals you’d highlight?

September 30, 2020: Sports Scandals: Lance Armstrong

[On September 28th, 1920, four key members of the Chicago White Sox admitted to throwing the 1919 World Series, a pivotal turning point in the unfolding Black Sox scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Black Sox and four other sports scandals, past and present!]On two broader implications of a scandal that’s easy to pin on an individual bad actor.First things first: there’s no way to analyze the Lance Armstrong doping scandal without focusing on multiple layers to the acclaimed cyclist’s personal mistakes and failings. Not just his years of breaking the rules to enhance his performances with drugs, and not even just his years of lying about that and calling accurate accusations against him a “witch hunt” or worse, and not even just his making hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsements throughout that time (making him at his peak one of the world’s richest athletes, and a great deal of which he has kept to this day), but also and perhaps especially the fact that he still seems to think he did nothing wrong. At its heart, the Armstrong story is about a talented athlete who also seems to be a pretty lousy person, character flaws revealed not so much through his cheating but rather through all of his actions and statements and perspectives that were brought out and amplified by that scandal.But I hope that one of the things this blog has most consistently modeled over the years is that it’s always worthwhile to examine multiple sides to and factors in any story and history, and in the case of Lance Armstrong I think the scandals helps us analyze a couple broader elements to 21st century society and culture. One of them is our willingness to overlook system issues in sports in order to celebrate iconic athletes and athletic achievements. The blind eye that fans turned for years to the rampant presence of performance-enhancing drugs in the world of cycling feels quite similar to the willful ignorance with which baseball and its fans treated steroid use for the entirety of the 1990s, and for much the same reason—the home run feats of McGwire and Sosa and Bonds and company, like Armstrong’s multiple Tour de France triumphs (after beating cancer, on which more in a moment) offered sports thrills that we didn’t want to diminish by looking too closely at the men behind the curtain. To at least some degree, the same is true of our collective unwillingness to think for many years (even to this day) about head injuries and football—if sports provide escapist excitement, it becomes quite difficult to consider seriously the problems inherent in those worlds. Sports often provide even more than escapism, though—they highlight figures who are seen as role models and treated as heroes. For many years Lance Armstrong, who returned from an extended bout with stage three testicular cancer to win all those Tour de Frances in a row and whose autobiography (published in the midst of that run of victories) was titled It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (2000), both presented himself and was portrayed by the media and world at large as a role model and a hero. I’m not saying that I necessarily agree with Charles Barkley that athletes should never be role models—we all (and especially our kids) can learn things from and be inspired by any number of figures, after all. And I’m not even saying that Armstrong doesn’t still offer such potential inspirations, especially to those dealing with a serious diagnosis; that part of his story and life remains present even with all the subsequent revelations and missteps. But as history reveals time and time again, if we simplistically idolize any figure, we are doing an injustice, both to the fraught complexities of human identity and to what we genuinely can learn and take away from those stories. Lance Armstrong is clearly not someone to idolize—but he is, at his worst as well as at his best, someone whose story we can all learn from. Next ScandalStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports scandals you’d highlight?

September 29, 2020: Sports Scandals: Rosie Ruiz

[On September 28th, 1920, four key members of the Chicago White Sox admitted to throwing the 1919 World Series, a pivotal turning point in the unfolding Black Sox scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Black Sox and four other sports scandals, past and present!]On three layers to the infamous Boston Marathon scandal beyond the headlines. 1)      New York and Boston: I’ve been reading recently about the Mandela Effect, the way in which large groups of people can remember something differently than how it actually took place. I don’t know if this quite qualifies, but it seems to me that Rosie Ruiz is consistently remembered for having cheated her way to the 1980 Boston Marathon women’s title by taking the subway instead of running the full course. Yet that’s in fact a combination of two different sides to Ruiz’s story: she was discovered to have cheated to the Boston title(by jumping out of the crowd on Commonwealth Avenue near the finish line) and stripped of that crown; and subsequently, stories came out about her being spotted on the subway during the 1979 New York City marathon, which had provided her qualifying time for Boston and which was then also stripped from her record. Obviously these are parallel and interconnected stories, but the combination of them into one event reveals at the very least the need to reexamine our collective memories of any figure and history. 2)      Subsequent crimes: As far as I can tell, Ruiz largely disappeared from the public record after those 1980 revelations, with two specific, also parallel exceptions: her April 1982 arrest in New York (on the same day as the Boston Marathon) for embezzling from a real estate company; and her November 1983 arrest as part of a South Florida drug bust. These arrests would seem to indicate that both Ruiz’s propensity for cheating and her troubled life went far beyond the 1979 and 1980 sports scandals, but it’s also possible to see them another way: that after those scandals (before which the 26-year-old Ruiz had never been arrested) her life went off the rails, spiraling into additional criminal behavior. Obviously that’s a chicken-and-egg type question, and the answer wouldn’t change the facts of these different unethical and illegal actions in any case. But it’s always worth thinking about narratives of contingency and inevitability when it comes to the arc of any individual life, just as with all of history. 3)      A Cuban American childhood: Ruiz was born in Havana, and immigrated to (or rather fled to, given the realities of movement under Castro’s regime) the United States with her family in 1962, when she was 8. She was apparently then separated from her mother and lived with extended family in South Florida. I don’t want to overstate the relevance of these complex childhood details, as of course the vast majority of either Cuban Americans or immigrant children separated from their parents do not go on to a life of cheating and criminality. Yet if we simply examine Ruiz’s own life, it’s fair to say that these early experiences would have been influential, and perhaps more specifically that they left her with feelings of instability or uncertainty about such foundational elements as home and family. All part of understanding the story of Rosie Ruiz beyond the headlines, anyway. Next ScandalStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports scandals you’d highlight?

September 28, 2020: Sports Scandals: The Black Sox

[On September 28th, 1920, four key members of the Chicago White Sox admitted to throwing the 1919 World Series, a pivotal turning point in the unfolding Black Sox scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Black Sox and four other sports scandals, past and present!]On three different ways to interpret what remains one of sport’s most stunning scandals.When a group of players on the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to “fix” (or rather, from the players’ perspective, throw) the 1919 World Series, a story that unfolded over the following two years and culminated in the 1921 “Black Sox trial,” the scandal seemed to exemplify ideas of lost innocence and purity (which were already in the air in that post-World War I, “lost generation” moment). Nothing summed up those ideas better than the mythic but enduring image of a young boy confronting “Shoeless” Joe Jackson outside the courthouse with the words, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” And in Eight Men Out (1963), his seminal book on the scandal, Eliot Asinofhelped reiterate and enshrine those images of the scandal’s corrupting effects and meanings on America’s national pastime and perspective.There was another side to Asinof’s portrayal of the scandal, however—one that didn’t necessarily take hold of the popular consciousness in his era, but on which John Sayles’ 1988 film adaptation of the book focuses at length. This interpretation focuses less on the effects of the scandal and more on one of its key causes: the striking yet representative greed and selfishness of Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner, in an era when professional athletes had (compared to their employers, at least) no power or say in their careers and fates. Sayles, for whom labor history is one of the defining American issues and stories, pulls no punches in his portrayal of Comiskey specifically and the era’s labor dynamics more broadly—he likes to say that he tries to push beyond black and white in his films and engage with the grey areas in between, and I believe he has done so to great success on many occasions, but to my mind his Eight Men Out is at its heart a clear and ringing indictment not of corrupt baseball players, but of a corrupt capitalist system that uses and then scapegoats them.There’s another way to characterize that system, though: to focus on how much, to quote Denzel Washington’s character in Glory, “We all covered up in it, too. Ain’t nobody clean.” To see, that is, the Black Sox as emblematic of unifying American goals and desires, however much we might like to locate them outside of us instead. It’s to that end, I would argue, that F. Scott Fitzgerald makes Jay Gatsby’s closest New York associate the mysterious Meyer Wolfshiem, a fictional version of Arnold Rothstein, “the man who fixed the World’s Series” (as Gatsby puts it). One could of course argue that Gatsby’s association with Wolfshiem reveals his shadier and more shameful side, the kinds of gangster connections that Tom Buchanan scornfully critiques. But to my mind, Gatsby ultimately embodies nothing less than the American Dream—there’s a reason Fitzgerald nearly changed his title to Under the Red, White, and Blue —and so too, in its own dark and twisted way, does making a fortune by fixing the nation’s most significant sporting event and spectacle.Next ScandalStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports scandals you’d highlight?

September 26-27, 2020: Crowd-sourced AutumnStudying

 [As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Leading up to this crowd-sourced AutumnStudying post that’s sure to be as popular as pumpkin spice (if such a thing is possible)—add your thoughts in comments!]

Rob LeBlanc follows up Monday’s post, writing, “There is one Cormier novel that explicitly reflects on American feelings about warfare and masculinity, Heroes (1998). It is a worthwhile read and contains the wariness of a post-Vietnam War writing vantage point in the context of WWII.”

Other autumnal highlights:

AnneMarie Donahue shares “Dead Poets’ Society, Sabrina's Thrilling Adventures, Halloween Tree, Something Wicked This Way Comes, ‘Autumn Leaves,’ ‘Autumn in New York,’ Hocus Pocus, Nightmare before Xmas, Sleepy Hollow, too much to mention!”

Jeff Renye highlights H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” and his poem “The Ancient Track,” Karl Edward Wagner's "Sticks,” Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing, and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” He adds, “I reread it over the Summer (or sometime since March), but definitely “The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas,” LeGuin. The imagery of the place is that of the height of summer, which of course some who gain a terrible knowledge decide to depart.”

Jessica Blouin goes with Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”!

Samantha Bridgman shares Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” H.D.’s “Eurydice,” and Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking.”

Padmini Sukumaran writes, “Persuasion by Jane Austen is especially noted for its theme of Autumn. I also very much appreciate the children's book, The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes—a book about ostracism vs. fitting-in at school, which has a Chapter entitled, "A Bright Blue Day" about a Day in October, which features a turning-point in the Book.”

Anne Holub writes, “Anything involving new recipes for big meals and desserts. Cookbooks by Ina Garten, ones all about only pies, or new restaurant cookbooks all seem to come out in the fall.”

Andrew DaSilva nominates “Anything taking place in New England: It by Stephen King, Harvard Squareby André Aciman, Still Alice by Lisa Genova, A Prayer for Owen Meanyby John Irving, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The Outer Beachby Robert Finch and Of Plimoth Plantation by William Bradford to name a few.”

Troy Brownfield shares Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Derek Tang gets right to the point: “football.”

On Twitter, Anne Trubek nominates “Hawthorne,” and “all the Transcendentalists, really.”

Carol Loranger tweets “a pitch for some of our lesser-read poets,” including Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Luke Havergal,” Adelaide Crapsey’s “November Night,” and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Merry Autumn.”

BilaGlanitweets “how about some Yeats? As in, ‘The Second Coming’?”

I’ve got to end with Amy Johnson’s two suggestions: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” And “Also Poe. I remember reading ‘The Raven’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ in middle school and thinking they were the epitome of creepy at the time.” If that combo ain’t AmericanStudying, I don’t know what is!

And Olivia Lucier agrees, “anything Edgar Allan Poe!”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other autumn images, stories, contexts you’d share?