Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 340

October 11-12, 2014: AmericanStudying Appalachia: Online Resources

[I’ve already apologized to West Virginia in this space, but this week I’ve gone further: AmericanStudying Appalachia through five compelling cultural texts. It’s led up to this special weekend post highlighting a few wonderful resources for further Appalachian analyses.]Three online resources that can help you AmericanStudy Appalachia a lot further than I was able to in this handful of posts:1)      Appalachian History: A really wonderful scholarly, cultural, and personal blog on all things Appalachia, past and present.2)      AppLit: An NEH-supported project providing “resources for readers and teachers of Appalachian literature for children and young adults.”3)      Appalachian Studies: Web Resources: An example of the web at its best, this West Virginia University Library site compiles dozens of resources for every aspect of Appalachian Studies.I’d love to hear about AmericanStudies resources you’ve found or used, specific to Applachia or otherwise, in comments!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other resources you'd share?

October 10, 2014: AmericanStudying Appalachia: The Fire and the Furnace

[I’ve already apologized to West Virginia in this space, but this week I’ll go further: AmericanStudying Appalachia through five compelling sets of cultural texts; and leading up to a special weekend post highlighting a few wonderful resources for further Appalachian analyses.]On the surprising truths found in a couple of macho, mediocre action flicks.Obviously Hollywood action films have a great deal to tell us (often unintentionally, ironically, or otherwise implicitly, to be sure) about social issues like gender and race. But reading such cultural texts for what they reveal about social issues is different from arguing that the texts intend to make social or political points, and I’d never pretend that the Bruckheimers and Baysof the world generally set out with those kinds of goals. Yet at the same time, there are unquestionably examples of action films that do intend such social and political engagements—Matt Damon’s trilogy of Bourne films comes to mind immediately—and so it’d be important to approach any individual film with an open mind toward that possibility. Yes, even a Steven Seagal film.Online film critic Vern, one of our best contemporary reviewers, actually made the case, in his first book Seagalogy (2008), that Seagal’s films, especially the ones over which he had the most control, consistently reflect such social engagement. I haven’t seen enough of them to assess that theory, but it’s definitely true of both On Deadly Ground (1994, directed by Seagal) and the Appalachian-set Fire Down Below (1997). Seagal plays an EPA agent in both films, so much of the social and political commentary relates to environmental issues. But in Fire both those issues and numerous other plot threads are deeply tied to the history and community of its Appalachian setting: from villain Kris Kristofferson’s destruction of mountains and use of abandoned mines to dispose of toxic waste to the portrayal of a small Kentucky town striving to maintain its identity and heritage in the face of a changing world. It’s not a great movie by any means, but it’s got a lot to say about Appalachia.Despite boasting an incredibly impressive cast—Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Zoe Saldana, Woody Harrelson, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, and Sam freakin’ Shepard—last year’s Out of the Furnace (2013) is to my mind a much more uneven and so even less successful film than Seagal’s. But it does do something very interesting and important: connecting the changing realities of its specific setting, a northern Appalachian steel mill town (Braddock, Pennsylvania—that article provided filmmaker Scott Cooper with his movie’s title), to early 21st century national and international issues, including returning Iraq War veterans and the post-2008 recession. As I hope this entire series has illustrated, Appalachia—like every American setting and region—demands analyses of both its specific histories and stories and its ongoing and evolving relationship to the nation and world beyond its mountains, and Out of the Furnace, like all my week’s texts, can help us develop those analyses.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

October 9, 2014: AmericanStudying Appalachia: The Black Mountain Poets

[I’ve already apologized to West Virginia in this space, but this week I’ll go further: AmericanStudying Appalachia through five compelling sets of cultural texts; and leading up to a special weekend post highlighting a few wonderful resources for further Appalachian analyses.]On how context can amplify and enrich our analysis of individual authors and works. I had a high school English teacher who really liked Robert Creeley, so we read a fair amount of his work as part of a poetry unit; I then read a good bit more Creeley as part of a college poetry course with the great Helen Vendler; and I returned to Creeley one more time as a supplemental author for a grad school paper I was writing on Robert Penn Warren’s poetry. I was of course a very different person and reader at each of those stages, but one thing remained the same: Creeley’s poetry did very little for me. I appreciated his potent, imagistic use of language, which reminded me a bit of William Carlos Williams; but for whatever reason, the depths that I have consistently found and appreciated in Williams’ poems eluded me when I read Creeley’s at each of those different moments.My perspective on Creeley and his poetry has significantly evolved, however, and it has done so in large part through a better understanding of his principal literary and cultural communities: the Black Mountain Poets, and Asheville, NC’s Black Mountain College where they were located. It generally helps to have a sense of what goals and concepts infuse a poet’s work, for example, and reading Charles Olson’s seminal essay “Projective Verse” (1950), widely considered a manifesto for the Black Mountain Poets, gave me a much clearer sense of the use to which Creeley and his colleagues hoped to put their striking images. Olson writes of “Objectism, … a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it.” A distinctly Appalachian analogy to be sure, and one borne out by the careful shaping of Creeley and his peers.Yet Black Mountain Collegewas more than just home to this group of avant-garde poets; over its 23 years of existence (1933-1956), the experimental educational institution featured instruction from (among many others!) Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Duncan, and Olson and Creeley, as well as guest lectures by William Carlos Williams and a certain physicist by the name of Albert Einstein. The College’s influence on modernist and postmodernist American culture, as well as on society more broadly, was profound and lasting, and the Black Mountain Poets represent only one part of those widespread effects. But they were a part of it, and it a part of them--and the more we can see Creeley and his fellow poets as operating within that experimental, artistic but also social and educational, southern Appalachian space, the more we (no, I’ll speak for myself, the more I) can appreciate their works.Last Appalachian text tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 8, 2014: AmericanStudying Appalachia: Murfree’s Mountains

[I’ve already apologized to West Virginia in this space, but this week I’ll go further: AmericanStudying Appalachia through five compelling sets of cultural texts; and leading up to a special weekend post highlighting a few wonderful resources for further Appalachian analyses.]On three compelling reasons to read one of Appalachia’s most talented writers.One of the most successful local color writers of the 1870s and 1880s, the era when such regional fiction dominated the American literary landscape, didn’t quite exist. By 1885 Charles Egbert Craddock had published numerous stories of Appalachian local color in the period’s magazines (as well as two impressive books, on which more momentarily); but in March 1885, as fellow AmericanStudier and blogger Rob Velella highlights in this great post, Craddock was revealed to William Dean Howells and others in the Boston literary scene (by one of the Atlantic Monthly’s editors, Thomas Bailey Alrdich, who had himself only learned of Craddock’s true identity the previous night) to be in fact a woman, Mary Noailles Murfree. Plenty of 19thcentury women writers wrote under male pseudonyms, but I don’t know of a revelatory moment quite as striking as Murfree’s.Even without that striking literary moment, however, Murfree’s Appalachian stories would be well worth reading. She was and remains best known for the short story collection In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), considered one of the masterworks of American regionalism. Like much local color writing, Murfree’s stories often straddle the fence between nuanced realism and stereotypical exaggeration, just as her own identity existed both inside (she grew up in Murfreesboro, a town named after her own great-grandfather) and outside (that ancestor was a Revolutionary war Colonel and serious blue blood, and Murfree’s family was wealthy enough to vacation at the Beersheba Springs resort every summer of her childhood) the Tennessee Appalachian community. But of course, we’re all both insiders and outsiders to our childhood communities, much like each community and region bears a complex relationship to the nation as a whole, and Murfree’s collection presents a funny, engaging, thought-provoking way to consider all those questions.Just as impressive, and far less well-known, is Murfree’s 1884 Civil War/Reconstruction novel Where the Battle Was Fought . In some ways the novel embodies a genre that by 1884 had become an American cliché: the romance of reunion, with former Union and Confederate families brought together by a conventional love story plot. But Murfree’s novel pushes beyond that stereotype, in ways that I would argue embody a far more under-narrated and distinctly Appalachian history: the experiences of a border state, the areas that bore dual and shifting allegiances throughout the Civil War. West Virginia, as I argued in that aforementioned apology post, came into existence as precisely such a state; but Kentucky and Tennessee occupied similar geographical and ideological territory, and Murfree uses her novel’s families and stories to depict those border histories with depth and power. Just another reason to spend some time in her Appalachian mountains.Next Appalachian text tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 7, 2014: AmericanStudying Appalachia: Miner Texts

[I’ve already apologized to West Virginia in this space, but this week I’ll go further: AmericanStudying Appalachia through five compelling sets of cultural texts; and leading up to a special weekend post highlighting a few wonderful resources for further Appalachian analyses.]On three different types of cultural representations of mining communities.There’s not much point in trying to figure out which American experiences are the most difficult or destructive, so I’ll simply start this way: the life and world of our mining communitiesare fraught with hardships and dangers. In response to those harsh realities, some of the most prominent cultural portrayals of miners have focused on children who found a way out of those communities and into other (and, implicitly or explicitly, better) situations: country superstar Loretta Lynn (Sissy Spacek) in the film Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980); NASA engineer Homer Hickam Jr. (Jake Gyllenhaal) in the film October Sky (1999; based on Hickam’s 1998 memoir Rocket Boys). Both films portray the protagonists’ miner fathers (Levon Helm in Daughter, Chris Cooper in October) with sensitivity and nuance, but nonetheless make clear that their children have escaped to a better life.While some of the difficulties of the mining life as simply inherent to that job and world, others, it’s important to note, have been amplified by the mistreatment and exploitation practiced by many of the mining companies. Those histories came to a head in one of America’s most forgotten conflicts, the multiple West Virginia Mine Wars of the early 20th century. John Sayles’ historical film Matewan (1987), about which I wrote at length in this post, provides an impressive introduction to the mine wars, if one overtly and thoroughly sympathetic to the miners’ side and perspective. I share those sympathies, but of course whatever we think about their cause the mining company operators and their hired soldiers were all complex people in their own right, and so it’s worth complementing Sayles’ film with Diane Gillam Fisher’s poetry collection Kettle Bottom (2004), which constructs with wonderful nuance and humanity the first-person perspectives of multiple sides and stories from the mine wars.I wholeheartedly recommend all of the aforementioned cultural texts, but they are all focused on extreme, or at least unusual, aspects of the mining life and communities. There’s also something to be said for a representation of more everyday experiences and realities, that is, and providing such a representation is Steve Earle and the Del McCourty Band’s wonderful song “The Mountain.”Drawn from the 1999 album of the same name, Earle’s song creates the first-person perspective of a representative miner, one who has seen the century’s historical and social conflicts and changes, as well as the effects of the mining life on his own identity, but whose mountain home and community remain what they have always been. That community is as present in America as it’s ever been, and Earle’s song, coupled with all these texts, helps us consider that presence as well as our past.Next Appalachian text tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 6, 2014: AmericanStudying Appalachia: Wrong Turn and Deliverance

[I’ve already apologized to West Virginia in this space, but this week I’ll go further: AmericanStudying Appalachia through five compelling sets of cultural texts; and leading up to a special weekend post highlighting a few wonderful resources for further Appalachian analyses.]On images of the clash between American cultures, and how to rethink them.In that post apologizing to West Virginia, I highlighted jokes as a cultural medium through which stereotypes about a region like Appalachia can be developed, reified, and spread. There are other cultural forms that have contributed to that process as well, of course, and high on the list (as always in the 20th and 21st centuries) would be films. Take the Wrong Turn series, for example: while in many ways conventional slasher films, the Wrong Turns (or at least the first, which is the only one I’ve seen) define their beautiful 20-something victims-in-waiting as city kids, encountering a murderous family of Appalachian hillbillies who are definitely cannibals and probably inbred to boot. Even the film’s title suggests that by heading into this Appalachian space at all those city kids were making a fundamental (and fatal) cultural mistake.Making a similar mistake are the four city slickers—or rather, per the opening line of the trailer, “suburban guys like you or your neighbor”—on an Appalachian canoe trip into a hugely distinct cultural world in the film Deliverance (1972). It’s fair to say that the film’s two principal characters both have something meaningful to learn from their Appalachian ordeal—Burt Reynolds’ confident outsdoorman needs to learn his limits; Jon Voight’s quiet intellectualneeds to connect to his wild side--but at the same time the ordeal is destructive enough (killing one of the four and permanently traumatizing the others, as the nightmare with which the film concludes makes very clear) to qualify as a wrong turn for sure. And the film’s Appalachian antagonists, while not quite as grotesque or overtly cannibalistic as those in the slasher films, are otherwise pretty similar: likely inbred, definitely violent and murderous toward outsiders.On the other hand, there’s an undercurrent—literally and figuratively—in the film (one more consistently present in the 1970 James Dickey novel) that adds a distinct element to the relationship between city and country, “civilization” and Appalachia. As scholar Wyatt Phillips argued in my NeMLA panel on cultural rivers, the film’s Appalachian world is literally disappearing, its towns and homesteads gradually flooded by the effects of a newly built dam on the Coosawattee River. That’s been a real, ongoing historical process in Appalachia, as illustrated by the film’s use of an actual such location: Lake Jocasee, created by flooding after the Duke Power Company built a South Carolina dam. The film never quite overtly makes the point that, seen in this light, it is instead the Applachian characters whose lives and homes are threatened by the outside world; but by featuring these flooded settings, Deliverance does allow its viewers to consider that other side of this American cultural conflict.Next Appalachian text tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

October 4-5, 2014: Crowd-sourced Collections

[There are few practices more AmericanStudies, but also more complex, than that of collecting historical, cultural, and artistic treasures and memorabilia. This week I’ve highlighted and analyzed five such collections and the collectors who assembled them. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and collection highlights of fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments!]First, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the amazing conversations that take place on H-Net’s H-Material-Culturediscussion threads!Another museum worth highlighting just followed me on Twitter this week: the Bronx’s B.C.A.D. Art Gallery!Following up Tuesday’s post on P.T. Barnum, Nancy Caronia writes, “I guess when he is called a showman and an exploiter of people like Joice Heth, we can sometimes forget that he was a businessman first. When he bought Scudder's Museum, he did it as a business venture designed to keep his collections of people and objects all in one place and to maximize his profits. He operated in much the same way as other entrepreneurs and industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century. I don't know that anyone has examined the way in which the railroads or the factories were similar to the way people like Barnum exploited those not able to fend for themselves. It would be interesting, yes?”Following up Wednesday’s post on George Catlin, Maggi Smith-Dalton notes that she recently used one of Catlin’s portraits as part of a presentation: “Dickens met one of [Catlin’s] subjects on the 1842 trip and I had the Catlin painting in the Keynote presentation.”Tom B., founder of the wonderful Building a Library site, highlights Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum (located in Farmington Hills, Michigan), which he calls “great for browsing weirdness.”Next series starts Monday,Ben
PS. Further thoughts on these topics? Any other collections you’d highlight?

October 3, 2014: American Collectors: Phil Collins!

[There are few practices more AmericanStudies, but also more complex, than that of collecting historical, cultural, and artistic treasures and memorabilia. This week I’ll highlight and analyze five such collections and the collectors who assembled them. Please share collections and museums of interest to you for a collected weekend post!]On a couple takeaways from a very strange recent story.I’ve long waited for an opportunity to blog about Phil Collins, and finally with this series the chance has presented itself. Actually, that’s a bald-faced lie, and backwards to boot—I had never given Phil Collins the slightest bit of blog-thought (although “Land of Confusion”might be worth a post down the road, now that I’m doing such thinking) until my colleague and friend Irene Martyniuk sent me this late June BBC story about Collins donating his ginormous collection of memorabilia related to the 1836 Battle of the Alamo to a San Antonio museum. It was that story which inspired this week’s series on collectors and collecting, and so it’s only fitting that I end by thinking about a couple angles to that weird—or at least seriously random—bit of AmericanStudies news.For one thing, note Collins’—or at least the story’s—conflation of cultural and historical versions of the battle. Collins says that he has “had a love affair with this place [the Alamo] since I was about five years old,” the age when he saw “the 1950s TV series Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier ” (King was a 1955 live-action film edited together from episodes of the TV show, but I think we can allow a 5 year-old some latitude in memory). It’s probably likely that most of us are first drawn to history through cultural rather than historical texts, but there’s still some significant slippage in Collins’ statement—neither the TV show nor the film, nor for example the John Wayne film of five years later, would have connected Collins to “this place” itself, but rather to versions of it just as constructed as the one he gradually assembled in his Swiss basement. And certainly none of those versions were likely to have included the Mexican histories and stories that comprised a significant part of the battle as well.For another thing, and one relevant to this entire series of posts, there’s the distinction but also the overlap between private and public collecting. The two would seem quite different, both in purpose (Collins assembled his collection to make himself happy, while a museum does so to share its artifacts with and inform the public) and relatedly in audience (Collins’ collection was limited to whomever he invited to his Swiss basement, while a museum’s is ideally open to whoever can travel to, afford, and otherwise access it). But on the other hand, every collection I’ve highlighted this week came into existence because of the efforts, the choices, and even the personal interests and quirks of individuals, and I think it’s fair to say that there are few if any museums about which we couldn’t say the same. Phil Collins doesn’t seem to be in the same discussion as Isabella Stewart Gardner or George Catlin (P.T. Barnum, maybe—I kid, Phil fans, I kid!), but maybe a century from now we’ll see his donation and collection in the same light. Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other collections you'd highlight?

October 2, 2014: American Collectors: The Smithsonian

[There are few practices more AmericanStudies, but also more complex, than that of collecting historical, cultural, and artistic treasures and memorabilia. This week I’ll highlight and analyze five such collections and the collectors who assembled them. Please share collections and museums of interest to you for a collected weekend post!]On three evocative moments in the history of America’s national collection.The Smithsonian Institution, the self-proclaimed “world’s largest musem and research complex,” was created by both the generosity and the caprice of an Englishman. When scientist James Smithson died in 1829 he left most of his estate to his nephew Henry James Hungerford; but in Smithson’s will, if Hungerford died childless (which he did only six years later) that estate would pass to the U.S. “to found … an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” I suppose many museums begin with the actions and choices of an individual, but I think in this case it would do Americans good to recognize that one of our national treasures woud likely not exist if there had been a little Hungerford or two running around. We’ve been transnationally influenced and dependent throughout our history, and we owe the rest of the world—including those Brits—much more than we like to admit.Smithson’s bequest didn’t exactly specify how the institution was to increase and diffuse knowledge, but in the years leading up to and after the Smithsonian’s 1846 establishment collecting became the principal mechanism through which it was developed. One particularly productive source of those early collections was the Navy’s United States Exploring Expedition, which circumnavigated the globe under commanding officers Thomas ap Catesby Jones and Charles Wilkes (among others) between 1838 and 1842. The expedition collected numerous animal and plant specimens, ethnographic artifacts, and other resources, most of which made their way back to Washington and became part of the Smithsonian’s founding collections. In an era when the U.S. was beginning to venture into imperialistic international endeavors, the expedition, and through it the Smithsonian, offered a far different way to think about our engagement with the world.Obviously and unfortunately that didn’t stop our imperialistic endeavors, but the Smithsonian has likewise continued to amass and expand its collections and museumsover the century and a half since those origin points. There have been plenty of evocative moments along the way, but I would highlight a very recent one: June 21, 2013, when, in honor of Go Skateboarding Day, the National Museum of American History mounted an extensive exhibition on and demonstration of the sport, featuring Tony Hawk’s first skateboard and numerous other submissions, items, and professional skateboarders. I’m sure there were criticisms that such an exhibition was beneath the Smithsonian’s standards or the like—but the truth is that the collection has been both haphazard and wonderfully all-encompassing from the start; and as anyone who’s had the chance to visit any of the institution’s (free!) museums can attest, the results have been American in the very best sense.Last collector tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Collections you'd highlight?

October 1, 2014: American Collectors: George Catlin

[There are few practices more AmericanStudies, but also more complex, than that of collecting historical, cultural, and artistic treasures and memorabilia. This week I’ll highlight and analyze five such collections and the collectors who assembled them. Please share collections and museums of interest to you for a collected weekend post!]On what the artist and collector got right, what he got wrong, and what we owe him in any case.19thcentury white reformers and activists for Native American rights often called themselves “Friends of the Indian,” and while the phrase comes across as naïve and perhaps even paternalistic, I think it also has a genuine and significant meaning. This was an era, after all, when even many sympathetic perspectives on Native Americans portrayed them as a disappearing community; but to my mind friends exist in the present and future, and so the phrase represented at least partly a pushback against that common narrative. One of the most prominent such friends was George Catlin, the painter and author who produced hundreds of paintings and multiple booksand volumes of engravings depicting Native American life and communities; Gatlin subsequently collected both his own works and numerous artifacts into a traveling Indian Gallery that he took (accompanied by his own lectures about Native Americans) around the country and across the Atlantic.While Catlin didn’t work for social or political reforms like many of the century’s activists, that doesn’t mean that his art and collecting didn’t have their own effect and value. But it’s the artifacts that he included—and that apparently often drew the most attention and response—in his collections and Indian Gallery that represent a significant problem. It’s often impossible to be sure, but it seems clear that many such Native American artifacts were stolen or otherwise taken illegitimately from the individuals and tribes in question, a practice that unfortunately continues to this day. The fact that Catlin assembled his Gallery in order to “rescue from oblivion” the tribes and cultures does not excuse such actions (for which, to be clear, I don’t have definite evidence in Catlin’s case, just strong suspicions and educated guesses), but rather makes them that much more ironic and frustrating, particularly given the basic but crucial fact that the cultures were not vanishing.They weren’t vanishing, but they also often were not documented. Given that most—although not all by any means—19th Native American cultures continued to practice oral forms of storytelling, historiography, and collective memory, it’s fair to say that it would be far more difficult for contemporary Americans to learn and understand about these cultures as they then existed without the kinds of documentation produced by Catlin and his peers (like Lewis Henry Morgan). We can and should look critically at all such figures and their engagements with and relationships to (and even, perhaps, exploitations of) 19th century Native cultures, but we also must acknowledge the resources and opportunities that their works provide us, resources without which our own ability to study and engage with those cultures in the 21stcentury would be significantly diminished.Next collector tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Collections you'd highlight?