Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 34

October 26-27, 2024: A PrisonStudying Reading List

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’veAmericanStudied prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to thisweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

Five recentbooks all PrisonStudiers should read (of the many that could populate such alist, so please share more below, including older ones of course!):

1)     Michelle Alexander, TheNew Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010): Iwrote at length about Alexander’s book inthis post, and then got to teach it in my Fall2016 Analyzing 21st-Century America course, so here I’ll just addthat few if any 21st-century books have been more prescient about akey issue facing our society. Every other one in this list followed Alexander’s,in every sense.

2)     Shaka Senghor, WritingMy Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (2013): Thereare a number of recent memoirs by incarcerated or formerly incarceratedindividuals, and every one of them is as worth our time and attention as allsuch individuals are. But Senghor’s is particularly powerful on many levels,including its central emphasis on one of the most brutal aspects of modernprisons, solitary confinement.

3)     Bryan Stevenson, JustMercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014): I wrote at lengthabout Stevenson and his vital book when heand it won the Stowe Prize in 2017, and have made extensive classroom andscholarly use of the resources created by Stevenson’s EqualJustice Initiative so I’m a certified super-fan. In many ways Just Mercyrepresents a focused response to a particularly outdated aspect of our prisonand justice systems, the death penalty. But it’s also a wider look into theroles that racism, economic inequality, and other forms of discrimination playin every aspect those systems.

4)     Shane Bauer, AmericanPrison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment(2018): Bauer went undercover as a prison guard, not a prisoner, and so I don’twant to suggest that his investigative journalist project was quite as bold noras brave as NellieBly’s self-imprisonment in a mental asylum. But it’s still a unique andimportant act that produced a striking book as a result, and one that offers adistinctive perspective on prisons with which all of us should engage.

5)     Christine Montross, Waitingfor an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration (2020): The mental,psychological, and emotional effects of prisons are one of those topics that Iimagine we all have some sense of, yet at the same time most of us have no realsense of, if that duality makes sense. We can’t truly talk about this issue norabout incarcerated Americans without a fuller such collective awareness, andMontross’s book is thus a vital resource to add to this reading list.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other PrisonStudying readings you’d highlight?

October 25, 2024: Prison Stories: The Inside Literary Prize

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

Threequotes that together help sum up why one of our newestliterary prizes is also one of the most important ever.

1)     “Freedombegins with a book”: That’s ReginaldDwayne Betts, Founder and CEO of the awesome Freedom Reads project, one of the Prize’sprincipal collaborating organizations. It goes without saying that books arefar from the only form of freedom or rights that incarcerated individuals andcommunities should possess, and I know Betts and the project would of courseagree. But I hope it also goes without saying for readers of this blog that Idon’t think it’s possible to overstate the impact and influence of books andall that they offer; and if that’s true for all of us (as I believe it is), itis infinitely more true still for folks for whom books can represent a bridgeto the world that might otherwise not be present in any form. Getting books inthe hands of incarcerated folks is a vital enterprise, and then listening to, respecting,and fully recognizing their reading of and response to those books—as this newprize, judged entirely by incarcerated people, does—is a wonderful next step.

2)     “Thisliterary prize that honors how engaging with great books can both buildcommunity and facilitate a deeper understanding of our shared human experience”:That’s Lori Feathers,co-owner of the very cool InterabangBooks in Dallas and one of the principal voices behind the prize’s initialcreation. It’s a bit of a paradox but also undeniably the case that two of themost crucial ways we can support incarcerated people are both to help strengthentheir inside communities and to help connect them to all of our outsidecommunities. Neither of those is easy to accomplish, and doing both at the sametime seems particularly challenging—but I agree with Feathers that this prize andits processes very much do both, creating impressive communal ties between incarceratedpeople and yet fully connecting them to our society as a whole at the sametime.

3)     “Tothe people inside, please know when I say ‘we’ and when I refer to ‘my people,’I mean you too”: That’s Professor Imani Perry,the phenomenal author and scholar whose excellent book Southto America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation(2022) was the winner of the inaugural 2024 Inside Literary Prize. (It’s also,to my shame, the only one ofthe four National Book Award-nominated finalists I’ve read, but I hope toseek the others out soon!) Perry’s book is more than deserving of this prize onits own terms, but I think that quote really sums up both the prize’simportance and why she was a perfect first choice for what will hopefully becomean annual addition to our literary landscape—and an inspiring addition to our justicesystem.

Readinglist post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?

October 24, 2024: Prison Stories: Johnny Cash

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On the messagethe Man in Black still has for us—if we can ever start to hear it.

In thisvery early post on my colleague and friend IanWilliams’ work with prison inmates (which I reposted yesterday as part ofthis series), I made the case that the incarcerated might well represent themost forgotten or elided American community (and that they’re in that bleakconversation in any case). I wish I could say that anything has changed in thenearly four years since I made that case [NB. This post originally appeared in September2014, but once again I believe it fully holds up more than a decade later], butI don’t believe it has; perhaps Orangeis the New Black will help produce a sea-change in our awareness of andattitudes toward those millions of incarcerated Americans, and perhaps the proposedfederal changes in drug-related sentencing will begin to make a dent inthose shocking numbers, but as of right now it seems to me that the prison industrialcomplex is only growing in size and strength.

More than fiftyyears ago, one of the most iconic 20th century American artists andvoices began a career’s worth of efforts to force us to think about the worldand life of our prisons. I had some critical things to say about Johnny Cash inthis post, so it’s more than fair that I pay respect here to one of hismost impressive and interesting attributes: his consistent attention to thatsetting and its experiences and communities, from the 1955 song “Folsom Prison Blues”through his many prison performances, culminating (but by no means concluding)in the groundbreaking live albums At Folsom Prison (1968) and At San Quentin(1969). My friend and fellow AmericanStudierJonathan Silverman identifies Cash’s trip to Folsom as one of the NineChoices through which Cash most reflected and influenced Americanculture, and I would go further: it was one of the most unique and significantmoments in any American artistic career.

Or it shouldbeen that significant, at least. Forty-five years later, with our collectiveawareness, understanding, and attitudes toward prisoners seemingly morenegative than ever (although studies like this 2002 onegive some reason for hope in that regard), I don’t know that Cash’s clearrecognition of the shared humanity between himself and those prisoners—and,implicitly but clearly, between those prisoners and every other audience towhom Cash performed—has reached his fellow Americans in any consistent way. Thatmight seem like a given, recognizing prisoners’ humanity—but when I read andhear frequentcritiques of prisoner access to exercise and health facilities, to media,to decent food, to liveable conditions, to any of the things that seem todefine American life as we generally argue for it, I’m not at all sure thatsuch recognition is widespread. Perhaps we must first, to quote another prisonsong (sung by a man who did his owntime for drug-related offenses), Steve Earle’s “The Truth”(2002), “Admit that what scares you is the me in you.”

Lastprison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?

October 23, 2024: Prison Stories: Ian Williams and Teaching in Prisons

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

[N.B. Thispost on my inspiring then-colleague and still-friend Ian Williams’ experiences teaching inprisons originally aired way back in my blog’s first month, inNovember 2010. But it’s all still damn true, other than the sad fact thatwe haven’t been colleagues for far too long.]

If you wanted to feel verydepressed, you could spend some time trying to decide which at-risk Americanpopulation is more elided in our national narratives and perspectives about ourcurrent identity and community: certainly Native Americans, on whom I’vealready focused a good deal in this space and will continue to do so, have agood case (although probably it was better before casinos forced us to admitthat they still exist); the homeless and those living at the very bottom of theeconomic ladder are definitely in the conversation too. But I think a verystrong argument could be made that the population we most consistently forgetto include in our sense of ourselves, until and unless there’s some sort ofscandal that makes us think about them but solely in negative terms (seeHorton, Willie), is the more than 2.3 million Americans—or more than 1 in 100,and that statistic is from 2008 so it’s likely higher today—who are in prison. (Makingus, it’s important to add, the worldwide leader in both the overall number ofcitizens and the percentage of the population behind bars.) It’s ironic but, Ibelieve, entirely accurate to note that much more press and attention was paidto (for example) Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan’s couple of weeks in jail thanis paid to the millions of their fellow Americans who are spending significantportions of their lives in that world.

There are all sorts of issuesassociated with that world and this community, as well as an equally strikingnumber of complicating factors and influences that have helped create andsustain it, and it would be irresponsible of me to pretend to know nearlyenough about any of them to focus on them in a piece here (I’m quite sure thatmany readers will know a good deal more and should, as always, chime in). Andin any case, my focus today, in the first of three Thanksgiving-inspired posts,is instead on an incredibly impressive kind of academic and American (in thebest sense) work being done in this community by a colleague of mine, IanWilliams. Ian is, in his own ways, a model of the type of interdisciplinaryscholar and teacher and person that I consistently aspire to be: he teaches andproduces scholarship about American literature and identity and culture, as doI, but he’s also a published and on-the-rise poet and author of fiction, hastaught dance and performance, and has entirely revamped our department’sliterary magazine and website, to cite only a few of his broad and meaningfulpursuits and accomplishments. But the most impressive of his efforts, to mymind, is also perhaps the least overtly visible: he has over the last coupleyears begun to go into local prisons and develop reading and writingconversations and courses with inmates, dialogues that have continued wellbeyond his individual visits and that have, without question, addedimmeasurably to the world and possibilities of those imprisoned Americans.

I can’t claim to speak for Ian’sexperiences, and he has written a bit recently about them on his own blog [BEN:Now sadly defunct, but trust me, it was great]. And I’m quite sure that hewould dispute my sense that this gig is a thankless one; whether it garners anyvisibility or attention is not, that is, at all connected to whether it’sappreciated or makes a difference, and the thanks, similarly, come not fromoutside perspectives but from those impacted directly by the work. I agree withall of those thoughts (that I’ve imagined into Ian’s perspective!), but wouldalso argue that the absence of visibility is itself a further sign of how muchwe don’t include this world and community nearly enough in our nationalnarratives and consciousness. Every few years (at least) sees a new movie aboutan inspiring teacher doing important work with public school students in theinner city; I can’t agree strongly enough that such individuals are sources ofinspiration, and I don’t think we could make enough movies celebrating teachersin any case (duh, I suppose). But the communities whom Ian is inspiring areeven more desperately in need of that influence—and while their inhabitantscan’t necessarily (or at least often can’t) get to the happy endings andbrighter futures that are often featured in the captions at the end of thosemovies, that doesn’t mean that we should celebrate any less fully the teachersand Americans who are doing what they can to connect with and impact theirworlds and lives.

I’ll stop there,since I can already imagine Ian’s demurrals from much of what I’ve written. Atthe end of the day, again, he isn’t doing this work so it’ll get written up,here or in much more prominent publications or spaces. But that doesn’t mean itshouldn’t be—nor that American Studies shouldn’t include and study the world ofour imprisoned fellow Americans much more fully than it often does. Nextprison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?

October 22, 2024: Prison Stories: Alcatraz

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On why it’s okayto turn a prison into a tourist attraction—and what we could do instead.

San Francisco’s Pier 39 is one of the more interesting tourist areas I’veseen—because of its unique origin point, as the site of an annual (and nowseemingly permanent) gathering of sea lions; because of the collection of stores and games and entertainments that hassprung up around that focal point, making the pier feel a bit like acombination of Coney Island and the Mall of America; and because it’s also thelaunching point for tours and explorations of Alcatraz, the island, National Park, and former federal prison in San Francisco Bay. Asa result of that latter connection to The Rock (the penitentiary, not theaction film starring Connery and Cage at their most, well, Connery and Cage),Pier 39 also houses the Alcatraz Gift Shop, a store where you can buy, among countless other things, baby clothesdesigned to look like inmates’ apparel (right down to the numbered nametags).

When I firstencountered the gift shop, I found it in pretty poor taste, a crasscommercialization of a site where over a thousand Americans were imprisoned, many for life and all in the most bleak maximum security conditions. I’dstill say that’s part of the story, although the gift shop’s earnings dosupport the National Park and thus (as I understand it) the very deservingNational Park Service as a whole. But I would also say that the gift shop, likethe National Park, like the tours and explorations of the island, and perhapseven like the action film, although that would be a stretch at best, has thepotential to connect tourists and visitors to the history of the prison—andthat such a connection, like any burgeoning historical interest, could lead aswell to further investigation and engagement with issues in the present, withthe broader histories and stories of America’s prisons and prisoners. I’ve longsince come to the conclusion that almost any method of engaging Americans withour histories, as long as it doesn’t blatantly misrepresent or falsify thatpast, is worthwhile, and certainly the Alcatraz tourism industry has thepotential to produce such engagement.

On the otherhand, there’s another Alcatraz history, one located after the prison’s 1963closure and before its 1973 opening as a National Park, that isn’t part of thegift shop at all, nor, I would argue, much present in the island’s touristnarratives more broadly. That’s the 1969 takeover of the island by a group ofNative Americans affiliated with the American Indian Movement; this particular community called themselves “Indians of All Tribes” andhoped to turn the island into a cultural center. During the nearly two years of occupation, thisactivist effort certainly succeeded in raising awareness and changing national conversations, although (as was the case with each AIM endeavor) italso produced unintended acts of destruction and violence. The history of theoccupation is thus a complex one, connected to longer-term and even morecomplex histories and obviously unable to be turned into a gift shop product;but why couldn’t Alcatraz become the site of a cultural center, one that couldinclude not only Native American communities and stories but those of the manyother cultures that have called and continued to call the Bay Area home? Notsure I can imagine a more inspiring future for a former prison.

Nextprison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?

October 21, 2024: Prison Stories: Dorothea Dix

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’llAmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to aweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

On the groundbreakingand inspiring activist who changed both prisons and mental health treatment,and from whom we still have a lot to learn.

InMarch 1841, a thirty-nine-year-old teacher and social worker named DorotheaDix visited East Cambridge Jail in Massachusetts. She was there to teach aSunday School class for female prisoners, but what immediately and entirelydrew her attention were the conditions in which all of the inmates—but mostegregiously, to her sensitive perspective, the mentally ill and disabled, whowere held there not because they had necessarily committed a crime but becausethe facility doubled as an asylum, as almost all American prisons in the eradid—were held. Among other things, the facility was entirely unheated and hadbeen kept that way throughout the New England winter; when Dix inquired aboutthis policy, she was told that “the insane do not feel heat or cold” (a frustratingly ubiquitousbelief at the time).

That falsehood represents justthe tip of a very sizeable iceberg of misinformation that constituted the vast,vast majority of public and even medical thinking about the mentally ill in thefirst half of the 19th century. But Dix was not one to acceptconventional or traditional wisdom, no matter how widespread or entrenched itmight be. She took it upon herself to visitvirtually all of the state’s jails and almshouses (the latter a morecharitable but often no more suitable space in which the mentally ill werehoused), talked at length with all those who worked in them as well as (whenshe could) some of those who were housed there, and wrote up incrediblydetailed and thorough notes on the eerily similar conditions she observedthroughout her travels; she turned those notesinto a document for theMassachusetts legislature, and won as a result a significant state outlayof funds to expandthe Worcester State Hospital and make it into a much more appropriate homefor the state’s mentally ill wards.

That successful journey was onlythe beginning of an epic quest that would encompass much of Dix’s remaining forty-odd years oflife; she would eventually travel across every state east of theMississippi and even numerous European nations, visiting facilities constantlyand working tirelessly to improve conditions in those facilities, to advocatefor the opening of better facilities, and, perhaps most significantly, tochange fundamentally the way society viewed these individuals and communities. Dix once wrote,as evidence for why she knew that many can be “raised from these baseconditions,” of a young woman who “was for years ‘a raging maniac’ chained in acage and whipped to control her acts and words. She was helped by a husband andwife who agreed to take care of her in their home and slowly she recovered hersenses.” This woman represents only one individual among the untold millionswho were positively influenced by Dix’s work and perspective, but of courseeven one individual’s live so radically changed for the better is a significantachievement; to contemplate how many people around the world were given theopportunity to go from unheated cages and brutal beatings to sensitive care andtreatment by Dix’s efforts is to truly understand how much one inspiringAmerican can do and transform in a life’s work.

Yet as much goodas Dix’s efforts accomplished, it would do her memory no honor to pretend thatwe have adequately shifted our perception or, most importantly, our social andcommunal treatment of the mentally ill; a late 20th century textlike OneFlew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest highlights (in fictional but not at allinaccurate form) just how far from desirable our mental institutions oftenremain. The definition of insanity, the phrase goes, lies in doing the samething over and over again and expecting different results. Dorothea Dix’sredefinitions are still, it seems, very much needed. Next prison story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’dhighlight?

October 19-20, 2024: An AmericanStudier Tribute to the Phone

[75 years ago this week,operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone callsmuch easier. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied some classic phone calls inAmerican culture, leading up to this special tribute to what phones mean in myown 21st century life!]

As a sonwho has lived more than 550 miles away from his parents for more than half ofhis life, and as a Dad who has been apart from his sons about half the time forthe last twelve years or so, I’ve long relied on the telephone to help me stayconnected to the people I love most. But in the last few months, I’vesignificantly amplified that need: getting married to the love of my life whohappens to live thousands of miles away at the moment; and moving my older soninto college in a city more than a thousand miles away. Quite simply, if itweren’t for FaceTime and video calls, for voicenotes and texted memes, for allthe ways big and small that I can reach out to these favorite people and theycan reach out to me and we can stay connected despite the thousands of miles inbetween, I would be infinitely unhappier and less whole and less me. I’m wellaware of the challenges and problems that SmartPhones present, but there’sliterally nothing in our 21st century world for which I’m more grateful.

Next seriesstarts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

October 18, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: The 2024 Election

[75 years ago this week,operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone callsmuch easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls inAmerican culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own21st century life!]

On howphone calls can symbolize the striking contrast in our 2024 electoral choice.

I haven’twritten much in this space about the2024 campaign, which is fine by me and I imagine fine by you all as well(plenty of that elsewhere, and really everywhere else, if you want it!). I dohave an election-week series on the 1924 campaign coming up in a couple weeks,and will end that series with a weekend post reflecting on the 2024 results,whatever they will be (keeping everything crossed, natch). I know it’s nosecret to any reader of this blog (or anyone who knows me, or anyone who existsin October 2024) what I fervently hope will happen on Tuesday November 5th,and not just for all the obvious and crucial political and contemporary reasons(although duh)—I also still believe, and in fact believe even more fully than Idid when I wrote that 2020 Considering History column now that I’ve learned alot more about her, that KamalaHarris’s heritage and identity make her just as foundationally American as,if not even slightly more tellingly and importantly American than, Barack Obama(whom I’vecalled “the first American President”).

So yeah,the stakes in this election are high, in AmericanStudies terms as in literallyevery other way. And I’d say that phone calls offer a clear and compelling wayto represent one of the most fundamental contrasts at the heart of ourelectoral choice. On the one hand we have the two justifiably infamous phonecalls through which then-President Donald Trump sought to undermine the 2020election (before and after it took place) as well as American democracy andideals, the rule of law, and our relationships with foreign allies among otherthings: his July2019 call to Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky; and his January 2021 call toGeorgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. There are no shortage of momentsto which we can point to make the case that Trump was the worst president inAmerican history (with all due respect toAndrew Johnson), but I don’t think it gets much clearer than thecombination of those two phone calls. Or, to put it another and even moretelling way: Trump embodied and continues to embody the worst of Americanhistory, our most divisive and destructive impulses, the frustrating butinescapable fact that our boastedcivilization is but a thin veener; and these phone calls are exhibits 1 and1A in that case.

On the otherhand we have a famous phone call that came to symbolize the actual results ofthe 2020 election: “Wedid it, Joe!” The contrast in not just content but also and I’d argueespecially tone between that November 2020 call and Trump’s pair is striking,and connects to the ways that this year’s Democratic National Convention inAugust leaned into tonesof hope and joy (in direct and potent contrast to the fearfuland resentful Republican National Convention in July). But it was also justa very meaningful and moving moment for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, animportant stage in the arc of a definingly American family story, individual life,and political career that are all both literally and figuratively on the ballotthis November. I guess I’m not telling y’all how to vote (although if you’replanning to vote Trump, I really am not sure what you get out of this blog)—butwho on earth would vote for the guy who made those 2019 and 2021 phone callswhen they could vote for the lady who made this 2020 one?!

Tributepost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 17, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: “Madam and the Phone Bill”

[75 years ago this week,operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone callsmuch easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls inAmerican culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own21st century life!]

On a funnyand fun poetic voice and character, and the layers of meaning she reveals.

Across hisnearly 50 yearswriting and publishing poetry (among other genres), American treasure LangstonHughes went through a number of different stages and series. One of themore unique were the MadamAlberta K. Johnson poems—originally created by Hughes in “Madam andthe Number Runner” (later revised to “Number Writer”),published in the Autumn 1943 issue of ContemporaryPoetry, Johnson would go to serve as the speaker/persona for nearly 20 moreof his poems (all titled in that same “Madam and the” style) over the next fewyears. Johnson was a confident, no-nonsense Harlem matriarch, a womannavigating with humor, resilience, and serious attitude both contemporary anduniversal challenges of economics and survival, gender and relationships, raceand community, and many more. As with almost all of Hughes’ works, the Madampoems are deceptively straightforward, highly readable and engaging but withsignificant layers and depth (of literary elements and cultural/historicalcontexts alike) that reward our close readings.

The onethat I’ve close read the most often, as I teach it in my American Literature IIcourse alongside a couple other Hughes poems, is “Madam and the Phone Bill” (1944).Like most of the Madam poems, this one is presented as part of a dialogue, butwith the reader only getting Johnson’s half of the conversation. In this casethat conversation is with a representative of the “Central” phone company whohas contacted Johnson to make her pay for a long-distance call from herwandering (in both senses) significant other Roscoe. The first stanzaimmediately establishes every aspect of that situation along with Johnson’sunique and witty voice and perspective: “You say I O.K.ed/LONG DISTANCE?/O.K.edit when?/My goodness, Central/That was then!”Effortlessly using poetic elements like rhythm and rhyme, as well astypographical ones like capitalization, italics, and punctuation, Hugheslocates us within his speaker’s voice, in the middle of this phone conversation(or rather argument) in progress, and with an immediate sense of the problemfacing our put-upon heroine. The voice and humor only deepen from there, as inthe poem’s middle stanza (the 5th of 10): “If I ever catchhim,/Lawd, have pity!/Calling me up/From Kansas City.”

But likeall the Madam poems, and as I said all of Hughes’ poems and works period,there’s a lot more to “Phone Bill” than just that fun and funny feel. Certainlythe poem offers a glimpse into Johnson’s fraught negotiation of genderdynamics, such as the contradictions between her desire to maintain her statusas an independent woman and her worries about what “them other girls” mightoffer Roscoe (perhaps especially while he’s hundreds of miles away in KC).Written in the shadow of the recently ended Great Depression (a frequent Hughes topic), thepoem likewise reflects the fraught dynamics of an individual’s conversationswith the corporations who could with a single bill (or instead with anunderstanding waiving of that bill) profoundly change their economicsituations. And I would say that it’s particularly relevant that the bill inquestion is a phone bill—the period’s increasingly ubiquitous telephones, andmore exactly evolving technological possibilities like long-distance calling,symbolized at once greater social and communal connections and yet another wayin which individuals were beholden, to grasping corporations and distant butstill needy significant others alike. Like it or not, Alberta, those are debtswe’re all “gonna pay!”

Lastfamous phone call tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?

October 16, 2024: Famous Phone Calls: Phone Songs

[75 years ago this week,operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone callsmuch easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls inAmerican culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own21st century life!]

On fivepop songs that call upon this technology.

1)     “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” (1972):One of the more interesting lost elements of telephone technology is the role ofthe switchboard operator, that unseen middle person on whom callersrelied for decades to make their connections. While I believe that role had significantlylessened by the 1970s (I certainly never had to speak to anoperator to make a phone call), both of my first two songs use it in acompelling symbolic way, with Jim Croce’s 1972 ballad featuring a speaker whospills his emotions over a breakup to an apparently quite sympathetic operator.

2)     “Switchboard Susan” (1979):Nick Lowe’s speaker addresses the switchboard operator even more directly andspills some emotions as well, but in a quite different tone than that ofCroce’s ballad. In an attempt to pick up this “greater little operator” withwhose “ringing tone” he “fell in love” immediately, that speaker resorts to aseries of increasingly desperate telephonic double entendres, including(apropros of the week’s inspiration) “When I’m near you girl I get anextension/And I don’t mean Alexander Graham Bell’s invention.” What more isthere to say about that?

3)     “867-5309/Jenny” (1981):As operators faded away, wannabe callers could dial their desired numbersdirectly—but this former teenage dialer can confirm that it’s not always easyto go through with the call. That’s one telephonic lesson of one-hit wonderTommy Tutone’s 1980s smash: with the line “I tried to call you before but Ilose my nerve” he succinctly sums up that painful experience of ending a callmid-dial. But Tutone’s song also illustrates another side to the topic I talkedabout with Scream yesterday—the waythe phone can connect us to strangers. In horror films that’s a threateningproposition, but as “number[s] on the wall” like Jenny’s suggest, it can be anenticing one as well. 

4)     “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Boothwith Money in My Hand” (1996): Sometimes the phone lets us down,though. I’m sure there are other pop songs which also use the distinctive (ifperhaps now outdated) sounds of telephone calls falling to connect, but I don’tknow of any off-hand. And in any case, this Primitive Radio Gods track with oneof the longest titles in pop music history is a true original, in sound andsound effects as well as in lyrics.

5)     “Telephone” (2009):Music videos were of course already a thing in 1996 (and even in 1981), butover the subsequent decades they’ve become more and more fully a genre untothemselves, as illustrated by that hyperlinked short film for Lady Gaga andBeyoncé’s “Telephone.” To be honest, that video is far more interesting than(and quite fully distinct from) the song. But I did want to note that even inour cell phone/smartphone age, the trope of a phone call (answered orunanswered) to represent the highs and lows of a romantic relationship remainsvery much in force in pop music.

Nextfamous phone call tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?