Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 363
January 14, 2014
January 14, 2014: Spring 2014 Previews: Novel Perspectives
[As my spring semester gets underway, a series on courses and other events to which I’m looking forward. Share your spring previews for a forward-thinking crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
On the narrators and characters we love, those we don’t, and the value of both.This spring I get to teach for the second time a really interesting upper-level lit seminar: the American Novel, 1950 to the Present (sequel to a pre-1950 novel course I’ve taught a few times as well). I had a lot of fun with it the first time, but I have to admit that one particular aspect was a serious disappointment: I was greatly looking forward to my first time teaching Sylvia Plath’s The Bell-Jar (1963), especially to a class of junior and senior English majors (given the age, literary interests and voice, and sarcastic temperament of Plath’s narrator); but the majority of them (at least those who voiced their opinions) didn’t like Plath’s novel. Or, more exactly, they didn’t like that narrator/protagonist Esther—and if you don’t like the first-person narrator of a novel that’s as focused on that narrator’s perspective, experiences, and identity as Plath’s is, you’re in for a long unhappy read.Never one to let an opportunity for discussion and analysis pass us by, I made that unhappiness part of our class conversations—especially because many students had similarly negative takes on another narrator-protagonist, Calliope in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002); and yet they seemed as a group to like two other, potentially controversial narrators: “Tim O’Brien” in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) and Yunior in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008). There are lots of ways to analyze those different responses, including inescapable elements of gender and sexuality—Esther and Calliope foreground those themes in ways that (it seems to me) made my students uncomfortable. But it’s also the case that O’Brien and Yunior are novelist-narrators, overtly writing books that are focused in large part on characters other than themselves—and perhaps in that case we’re more willing to accept and appreciate their flaws and challenges than we are when the narrators are telling their own stories.In any case, the discussions and analyses will continue this semester—not only because all four of those novels remain on the syllabus, but because I’ve added another with a narrator and main character who’s even more unlikeable than any of them: Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho(1991). Not only have I never taught Ellis’ novel before, but I’ve never read it all the way through; so this will be a learning experience for the professor as well as the students (and I’ll be sure to keep you posted!). But even if we all hate Bateman and/or the novel, I think there’ll be significant value in the experience—because the things that don’t work for us have just as much as to teach us, both about themselves and about our own perspectives and preferences, as the ones that we love. I’m excited to see how this next group of students respond and what we all can learn together in the process.Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What’s on your spring calendar?
On the narrators and characters we love, those we don’t, and the value of both.This spring I get to teach for the second time a really interesting upper-level lit seminar: the American Novel, 1950 to the Present (sequel to a pre-1950 novel course I’ve taught a few times as well). I had a lot of fun with it the first time, but I have to admit that one particular aspect was a serious disappointment: I was greatly looking forward to my first time teaching Sylvia Plath’s The Bell-Jar (1963), especially to a class of junior and senior English majors (given the age, literary interests and voice, and sarcastic temperament of Plath’s narrator); but the majority of them (at least those who voiced their opinions) didn’t like Plath’s novel. Or, more exactly, they didn’t like that narrator/protagonist Esther—and if you don’t like the first-person narrator of a novel that’s as focused on that narrator’s perspective, experiences, and identity as Plath’s is, you’re in for a long unhappy read.Never one to let an opportunity for discussion and analysis pass us by, I made that unhappiness part of our class conversations—especially because many students had similarly negative takes on another narrator-protagonist, Calliope in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002); and yet they seemed as a group to like two other, potentially controversial narrators: “Tim O’Brien” in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) and Yunior in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008). There are lots of ways to analyze those different responses, including inescapable elements of gender and sexuality—Esther and Calliope foreground those themes in ways that (it seems to me) made my students uncomfortable. But it’s also the case that O’Brien and Yunior are novelist-narrators, overtly writing books that are focused in large part on characters other than themselves—and perhaps in that case we’re more willing to accept and appreciate their flaws and challenges than we are when the narrators are telling their own stories.In any case, the discussions and analyses will continue this semester—not only because all four of those novels remain on the syllabus, but because I’ve added another with a narrator and main character who’s even more unlikeable than any of them: Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho(1991). Not only have I never taught Ellis’ novel before, but I’ve never read it all the way through; so this will be a learning experience for the professor as well as the students (and I’ll be sure to keep you posted!). But even if we all hate Bateman and/or the novel, I think there’ll be significant value in the experience—because the things that don’t work for us have just as much as to teach us, both about themselves and about our own perspectives and preferences, as the ones that we love. I’m excited to see how this next group of students respond and what we all can learn together in the process.Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What’s on your spring calendar?
January 13, 2014
January 13, 2014: Spring 2014 Previews: A Fantastic Intro
[As my spring semester gets underway, a series on courses and other events to which I’m looking forward. Share your spring previews for a forward-thinking crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
On the fun course that teaches two vital life skills.In 2007, at the request of a determined group of Fitchburg State undergrads, I created a new course: Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy. Because that first group of students was so self-selected, I went kind of nuts, assigning twelve novelsand two graphic novels; they were up to it, but we didn’t have much of a chance to get in depth with any particular author, text, or focal point. So when I taught the course again in 2010, I heavily revised the syllabus, with a handfulof longer works now balanced by short stories from a couple“Best of” anthologies. It was a great class, and I’m excited to teach it again this spring—for lots of reasons, but most especially because the class allows us to think and talk explicitly about two skills that I believe will come in very handy throughout the students’ lives.For one thing, the class asks students to bridge a gap that tends to exist pretty strong in their minds, as well as in what they’ve been taught and shown in most of their edcuational and academic communities: between on the one hand the things that we enjoy, that are fun and entertaining; and on the other the things that we analyze, that are serious and educational. There are lots of problems with that perceived gap, including the fact that it can lead students to associate education and analysis with a total lack of fun and enjoyment. But it also, and perhaps even more problematically, can make it very difficult from them to analyze the things they love—and it seems to me that that kind of analysis is excellent practice for analyzing ourselves, for subjecting our own identity and choices to the same rigorous attention and thought that we would dedicate to a college text or topic. Since I see such self-analysis as a vital component of a successful life, I’m very happy to think that this course might help produce a skill that can contribute to it.On the other hand, if self-analysis and even –criticism is an important and worthwhile goal, it can’t or at least shouldn’t come at the expense of self-confidence. And that’s particularly true for undergrads, who (at least at Fitchburg State) tend more to doubt that they have anything to say than to say things without enough self-reflection. So another benefit of a class that focuses on texts that (in many cases) feel more fun and entertaining is that it can help give students the skills for how to argue for the value of those works, and thus of the things that interest and move them overall—to make the case, that is, for what they care about, rather than treating them as guilty pleasures or the like. Given my own initial reluctance to create an Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy course—and thank goodness for that determined group of students, or I might never have done so—it’s fair to say that the skill of arguing for the value of such interests remains a lifelong pursuit; and in this course, together, we can all keep working on and toward it. Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What’s on your spring calendar?
On the fun course that teaches two vital life skills.In 2007, at the request of a determined group of Fitchburg State undergrads, I created a new course: Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy. Because that first group of students was so self-selected, I went kind of nuts, assigning twelve novelsand two graphic novels; they were up to it, but we didn’t have much of a chance to get in depth with any particular author, text, or focal point. So when I taught the course again in 2010, I heavily revised the syllabus, with a handfulof longer works now balanced by short stories from a couple“Best of” anthologies. It was a great class, and I’m excited to teach it again this spring—for lots of reasons, but most especially because the class allows us to think and talk explicitly about two skills that I believe will come in very handy throughout the students’ lives.For one thing, the class asks students to bridge a gap that tends to exist pretty strong in their minds, as well as in what they’ve been taught and shown in most of their edcuational and academic communities: between on the one hand the things that we enjoy, that are fun and entertaining; and on the other the things that we analyze, that are serious and educational. There are lots of problems with that perceived gap, including the fact that it can lead students to associate education and analysis with a total lack of fun and enjoyment. But it also, and perhaps even more problematically, can make it very difficult from them to analyze the things they love—and it seems to me that that kind of analysis is excellent practice for analyzing ourselves, for subjecting our own identity and choices to the same rigorous attention and thought that we would dedicate to a college text or topic. Since I see such self-analysis as a vital component of a successful life, I’m very happy to think that this course might help produce a skill that can contribute to it.On the other hand, if self-analysis and even –criticism is an important and worthwhile goal, it can’t or at least shouldn’t come at the expense of self-confidence. And that’s particularly true for undergrads, who (at least at Fitchburg State) tend more to doubt that they have anything to say than to say things without enough self-reflection. So another benefit of a class that focuses on texts that (in many cases) feel more fun and entertaining is that it can help give students the skills for how to argue for the value of those works, and thus of the things that interest and move them overall—to make the case, that is, for what they care about, rather than treating them as guilty pleasures or the like. Given my own initial reluctance to create an Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy course—and thank goodness for that determined group of students, or I might never have done so—it’s fair to say that the skill of arguing for the value of such interests remains a lifelong pursuit; and in this course, together, we can all keep working on and toward it. Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What’s on your spring calendar?
January 11, 2014
January 11-12, 2014: Ben Mangrum’s Guest Post: The Post-Recession Comedy
[Ben Mangrum is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He’s the editor of
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics
, where a version of this post was original published on January 10, 2014.]
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that since the 2008 economic crisis, television comedies have often been as interested in the economic ups and downs of its characters as their romantic vicissitudes. One of the most vivid examples of this shift is 2 Broke Girls (2011) now in its third season, which, for all its predictable humor, signals an attempt by networks to dramatize a search for happiness in the midst of diminished economic opportunity. Max Black (Other post-Recession comedies abound. Netflix’s updated version of Arrested Development (2013) converts the post-9/11 Bluth family and their “treason” with Saddam Hussein (so brilliantly executed in seasons 1-3, 2003-2006) into a narrative of economic collapse. In the post-Recession Arrested Development, the oldest son of the Bluth family, Michael (My favorite post-Recession comedy, New Girl , follows Jessica Day (Those who have been around the TV block might protest that the post-Recession comedy, with its dramatization of frustrated adult life under limited finances, doesn’t really seem all that new. In an earlier generation of comedies, such as Friends (1994-2004), characters live together and struggle to survive in pricey Manhattan. Rachel Green (In contrast, for all its wit, even New Girl can’t seem to imagine its characters outside an arrested economic space. The loft is the horizon of their world, and the viewers are invited to see how they find happiness under such meager circumstances. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, the post-Recession comedy seems to suggest. In fact, what’s so troubling is not that the post-Recession comedy accurately depicts the growing income inequality in America, especially after the 2008 crisis. Rather, what’s unsettling is that, in its imagination of a happy but financially unequal world, this generation of comedy may show us ourhorizons. Satisfaction is available, it seems to say, but you’ll have to find it despite dwindling wages and sparse resources.
[Next series starts Monday! In the meantime, check out Ethos for more great posts, including a recent one on Grapes of Wrath at 75 from friend of the blog Heidi Kim!
PS. What do you think?]
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that since the 2008 economic crisis, television comedies have often been as interested in the economic ups and downs of its characters as their romantic vicissitudes. One of the most vivid examples of this shift is 2 Broke Girls (2011) now in its third season, which, for all its predictable humor, signals an attempt by networks to dramatize a search for happiness in the midst of diminished economic opportunity. Max Black (Other post-Recession comedies abound. Netflix’s updated version of Arrested Development (2013) converts the post-9/11 Bluth family and their “treason” with Saddam Hussein (so brilliantly executed in seasons 1-3, 2003-2006) into a narrative of economic collapse. In the post-Recession Arrested Development, the oldest son of the Bluth family, Michael (My favorite post-Recession comedy, New Girl , follows Jessica Day (Those who have been around the TV block might protest that the post-Recession comedy, with its dramatization of frustrated adult life under limited finances, doesn’t really seem all that new. In an earlier generation of comedies, such as Friends (1994-2004), characters live together and struggle to survive in pricey Manhattan. Rachel Green (In contrast, for all its wit, even New Girl can’t seem to imagine its characters outside an arrested economic space. The loft is the horizon of their world, and the viewers are invited to see how they find happiness under such meager circumstances. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, the post-Recession comedy seems to suggest. In fact, what’s so troubling is not that the post-Recession comedy accurately depicts the growing income inequality in America, especially after the 2008 crisis. Rather, what’s unsettling is that, in its imagination of a happy but financially unequal world, this generation of comedy may show us ourhorizons. Satisfaction is available, it seems to say, but you’ll have to find it despite dwindling wages and sparse resources.
[Next series starts Monday! In the meantime, check out Ethos for more great posts, including a recent one on Grapes of Wrath at 75 from friend of the blog Heidi Kim!
PS. What do you think?]
January 10, 2014
January 10, 2014: San Fran Sites: Remembering Chinatown
[As I was reminded during my book talk visit, the Bay Area is home to numerous, significant American sites. In this week’s series, I’ll highlight a handful of such evocative places. Add your thoughts, or your own sites, in the comments!]
On the past, the present, and a way to bridge the two.San Francisco’s Chinatown is often referred to as the oldest Chinatown in North America; it is that, but its history is also more multi-part and more multi-national than that designation implies. The neighborhood includes, for example, the Clay Street spot where English sailor William Richardson set up his tent in 1835, considered the first site of Anglo settlement in California. Even further back, the neighborhood’s Portsmouth Square was the site of the area’s first Spanish township, known as Yerba Buena until it was renamed San Francisco in 1847—and was also where Captain John Montgomery raised the area’s first American flag a year before that renaming. If we combine that century of multi-national history with the subsequent century and a half of Chinese American life, the neighborhood becomes one of the most culturally and historically rich in all of the US. That rich and evolving history of Chinese American life continues into the 21st century, as my visit to and talk at the Him Mark Lai (Chinatown) branch of the San Francisco Public Library helped me understand. The neighborhood has also become one of the city’s—as well as the state’s, and perhaps even the nation’s—premier tourist attractions, however, and it’s fair to ask whether that tourist industry has any interest in (or even any ability to engage with) the neighborhood’s complex present identity and community, much less the multiple stages and sides to its history. Much like the French Quarter in New Orleans or the North End in Boston (among other such heavily touristed historical and cultural neighborhoods), that is, there are ways in which San Francisco’s Chinatown has become a cultural performance, a simulacrum(to get all theoretical for a moment) of realities that of course also continue to exist alongside the images.So how to bring those 21st century visitors into conversation with the neighborhood’s, community’s, and city’s histories? One very easy and productive way would be to have them visit the Chinese Historical Society of America, about which I blogged in the post linked at “my book talk visit” above. The CHSA is a wonderful combination of museum, cultural site, and community center, connected to both the histories and the present identities of Chinatown, the Chinese American community, and the immigrant experience more broadly. A visitor to the CHSA—and I speak from personal experience here—comes away with both a far richer understanding of the contemporary neighborhood into which they’re emerging and a much better sense of all that has come before in this space, as well as all the other places and histories to which it connects. Like San Fran itself, that is, the CHSA has much to teach us about who we’ve been and who we are.Special guest post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?
On the past, the present, and a way to bridge the two.San Francisco’s Chinatown is often referred to as the oldest Chinatown in North America; it is that, but its history is also more multi-part and more multi-national than that designation implies. The neighborhood includes, for example, the Clay Street spot where English sailor William Richardson set up his tent in 1835, considered the first site of Anglo settlement in California. Even further back, the neighborhood’s Portsmouth Square was the site of the area’s first Spanish township, known as Yerba Buena until it was renamed San Francisco in 1847—and was also where Captain John Montgomery raised the area’s first American flag a year before that renaming. If we combine that century of multi-national history with the subsequent century and a half of Chinese American life, the neighborhood becomes one of the most culturally and historically rich in all of the US. That rich and evolving history of Chinese American life continues into the 21st century, as my visit to and talk at the Him Mark Lai (Chinatown) branch of the San Francisco Public Library helped me understand. The neighborhood has also become one of the city’s—as well as the state’s, and perhaps even the nation’s—premier tourist attractions, however, and it’s fair to ask whether that tourist industry has any interest in (or even any ability to engage with) the neighborhood’s complex present identity and community, much less the multiple stages and sides to its history. Much like the French Quarter in New Orleans or the North End in Boston (among other such heavily touristed historical and cultural neighborhoods), that is, there are ways in which San Francisco’s Chinatown has become a cultural performance, a simulacrum(to get all theoretical for a moment) of realities that of course also continue to exist alongside the images.So how to bring those 21st century visitors into conversation with the neighborhood’s, community’s, and city’s histories? One very easy and productive way would be to have them visit the Chinese Historical Society of America, about which I blogged in the post linked at “my book talk visit” above. The CHSA is a wonderful combination of museum, cultural site, and community center, connected to both the histories and the present identities of Chinatown, the Chinese American community, and the immigrant experience more broadly. A visitor to the CHSA—and I speak from personal experience here—comes away with both a far richer understanding of the contemporary neighborhood into which they’re emerging and a much better sense of all that has come before in this space, as well as all the other places and histories to which it connects. Like San Fran itself, that is, the CHSA has much to teach us about who we’ve been and who we are.Special guest post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?
January 9, 2014
January 9, 2014: San Fran Sites: Muir Woods
[As I was reminded during my book talk visit, the Bay Area is home to numerous, significant American sites. In this week’s series, I’ll highlight a handful of such evocative places. Add your thoughts, or your own sites, in the comments!]
On why both solitude and community are appropriate modes through which to experience a natural wonder.If you drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and a few miles north of San Francisco you come to one of America’s most striking natural spaces, the Muir Woods National Monument. The drive itself is pretty scenic and impressive, and there’s a nearby beach (Muir Beach, natch) that’s one of the West Coast’s most preserved and pristine, among other attractions. But if you’re going to Muir Woods, you’re likely going for the trees, those majestic redwoods and sequoias, and I’m here to tell you that they don’t disappoint. The single most famous giant redwood, the one with the hole you can drive your car through, is at a privately owned site much further north; but the trees in Cathedral Grove and throughout the rest of Muir Woods are just as imposing and majestic, a reminder of how much in the natural world dwarfs (in the best and most necessary sense) our human comprehension.There’s a strong argument to be made that the best way to experience Muir Woods would be in solitude and silence. After all, John Muiris rivaled in American history and culture only by Henry David Thoreau and Rachel Carson as an advocate for such solitary experiences of the natural world; “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” Muir wrote in his journals, and like those compatriots he fervently believed that such wildernesses demand our singular attention if they are to guide us where they would. As a hugely prominent advocate for the national park system, Muir certainly believed that all his fellow Americans should have the chance for such experiences, so I’m not suggesting that he was in any way an elitist—but rather that he recognized, as so many of the great naturalists have and do, the power of what Ralph Waldo Emerson calledin his essay “Nature” (his first published work and one of the ur-texts of American naturalism to be sure) “an original relation to the universe.” “If a man would be alone,” Emerson begins the first chapter of that essay, “let him look at the stars”—but I think he’d have been on board with “the redwoods” as the predicate of that sentence instead.But there’s an equally strong argument to be made for a communal experience of Muir Woods—an argument that’s founded on one of the most unique and inspiring moments in recent world history. In the spring of 1945, representatives from 50 nations met in San Francisco to produce the United Nations Charter, the founding document of that new organization; on May 19th, the group traveled to Muir Woods for a ceremony honoring Franklin Roosevelt, who had been instrumental in convening the UN conference before he passed away in April of that year. They placed a commemorative plaque in Cathedral Grove, paying tribute not only to FDR and to his vision for the UN, but to how much a site like Muir Woods can remind us of all that we humans share, including the vital collective mission of preserving the natural world around us. While us 21st century visitors might not travel to Muir Woods with quite such an impressive purpose, nor surrounded by quite such an inspiring community, we all can similarly share the woods with those who inspire and encourage us in pursuit of our most ideal goals and futures. I think Muir would approve of that too.Final site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On why both solitude and community are appropriate modes through which to experience a natural wonder.If you drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and a few miles north of San Francisco you come to one of America’s most striking natural spaces, the Muir Woods National Monument. The drive itself is pretty scenic and impressive, and there’s a nearby beach (Muir Beach, natch) that’s one of the West Coast’s most preserved and pristine, among other attractions. But if you’re going to Muir Woods, you’re likely going for the trees, those majestic redwoods and sequoias, and I’m here to tell you that they don’t disappoint. The single most famous giant redwood, the one with the hole you can drive your car through, is at a privately owned site much further north; but the trees in Cathedral Grove and throughout the rest of Muir Woods are just as imposing and majestic, a reminder of how much in the natural world dwarfs (in the best and most necessary sense) our human comprehension.There’s a strong argument to be made that the best way to experience Muir Woods would be in solitude and silence. After all, John Muiris rivaled in American history and culture only by Henry David Thoreau and Rachel Carson as an advocate for such solitary experiences of the natural world; “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” Muir wrote in his journals, and like those compatriots he fervently believed that such wildernesses demand our singular attention if they are to guide us where they would. As a hugely prominent advocate for the national park system, Muir certainly believed that all his fellow Americans should have the chance for such experiences, so I’m not suggesting that he was in any way an elitist—but rather that he recognized, as so many of the great naturalists have and do, the power of what Ralph Waldo Emerson calledin his essay “Nature” (his first published work and one of the ur-texts of American naturalism to be sure) “an original relation to the universe.” “If a man would be alone,” Emerson begins the first chapter of that essay, “let him look at the stars”—but I think he’d have been on board with “the redwoods” as the predicate of that sentence instead.But there’s an equally strong argument to be made for a communal experience of Muir Woods—an argument that’s founded on one of the most unique and inspiring moments in recent world history. In the spring of 1945, representatives from 50 nations met in San Francisco to produce the United Nations Charter, the founding document of that new organization; on May 19th, the group traveled to Muir Woods for a ceremony honoring Franklin Roosevelt, who had been instrumental in convening the UN conference before he passed away in April of that year. They placed a commemorative plaque in Cathedral Grove, paying tribute not only to FDR and to his vision for the UN, but to how much a site like Muir Woods can remind us of all that we humans share, including the vital collective mission of preserving the natural world around us. While us 21st century visitors might not travel to Muir Woods with quite such an impressive purpose, nor surrounded by quite such an inspiring community, we all can similarly share the woods with those who inspire and encourage us in pursuit of our most ideal goals and futures. I think Muir would approve of that too.Final site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
January 8, 2014
January 8, 2014: San Fran Sites: Alcatraz
[As I was reminded during my book talk visit, the Bay Area is home to numerous, significant American sites. In this week’s series, I’ll highlight a handful of such evocative places. Add your thoughts, or your own sites, in the comments!]
On why it’s okay to 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’ve seen—because of its unique origin point, as the site of an annual (and now seemingly permanent) gathering of sea lions; because of the collection of stores and games and entertainments that has sprung up around that focal point, making the pier feel a bit like a combination of Coney Island and the Mall of America; and because it’s also the launching point for tours and explorations of Alcatraz, the island, national park, and former federal prison in San Francisco Bay. As a result of that latter connection to The Rock (the penitentiery, not the action film starring Connery and Cage), Pier 39 also houses the Alcatraz Gift Shop, a store where you can buy, among countless other things, baby clothes designed to look like inmates’ apparel (right down to the numbered nametags).When I first encountered the gift shop, I found it in pretty poor taste, a crass commercialization of a site where over a thousand Americans were imprisoned, many for life and all in the most bleak maximum security conditions. I’d still say that’s part of the story, although the gift shop’s earnings do support the national park and thus (as I understand it) the very deserving National Park Service as a whole. But I would also say that the gift shop, like the national park, like the tours and explorations of the island, and perhaps even like the action film, although that would be a stretch at best, has the potential to connect tourists and visitors to the history of the prison—and that such a connection, like any burgeoning historical interest, could lead as well to further investigation and engagement with issues in the present, with the broader histories and stories of America’s prisons and prisoners. I’ve long since come to the conclusion that almost any method of engaging Americans with our histories, as long as it doesn’t blatantly misrepresent or falsify that past, is worthwhile, and certainly the Alcatraz tourism industry has the potential to produce such engagement.On the other hand, there’s another Alcatraz history, one located after the prison’s 1963 closure and before its 1973 opening as a national park, that isn’t part of the gift shop at all, nor, I would argue, much present in the island’s tourist narratives more broadly. That’s the 1969 takeover of the islandby a group of Native Americans affiliated with the American Indian Movement; this particular community called themselves “Indians of All Tribes” and hoped to turn the island into a cultural center. During the nearly two years of occupation, this activist effort certainly succeeded in raising awareness and changing national conversations, although (as was the case with each AIM endeavor) it also produced unintended acts of destruction and violence. The history of the occupation is thus a complex one, connected to longer-term and even more complex 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 could include not only Native American communities and stories but those of the many other cultures that have called and continued to call the Bay Area home? Not sure I can imagine a more inspiring future for a former prison.Next site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On why it’s okay to 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’ve seen—because of its unique origin point, as the site of an annual (and now seemingly permanent) gathering of sea lions; because of the collection of stores and games and entertainments that has sprung up around that focal point, making the pier feel a bit like a combination of Coney Island and the Mall of America; and because it’s also the launching point for tours and explorations of Alcatraz, the island, national park, and former federal prison in San Francisco Bay. As a result of that latter connection to The Rock (the penitentiery, not the action film starring Connery and Cage), Pier 39 also houses the Alcatraz Gift Shop, a store where you can buy, among countless other things, baby clothes designed to look like inmates’ apparel (right down to the numbered nametags).When I first encountered the gift shop, I found it in pretty poor taste, a crass commercialization of a site where over a thousand Americans were imprisoned, many for life and all in the most bleak maximum security conditions. I’d still say that’s part of the story, although the gift shop’s earnings do support the national park and thus (as I understand it) the very deserving National Park Service as a whole. But I would also say that the gift shop, like the national park, like the tours and explorations of the island, and perhaps even like the action film, although that would be a stretch at best, has the potential to connect tourists and visitors to the history of the prison—and that such a connection, like any burgeoning historical interest, could lead as well to further investigation and engagement with issues in the present, with the broader histories and stories of America’s prisons and prisoners. I’ve long since come to the conclusion that almost any method of engaging Americans with our histories, as long as it doesn’t blatantly misrepresent or falsify that past, is worthwhile, and certainly the Alcatraz tourism industry has the potential to produce such engagement.On the other hand, there’s another Alcatraz history, one located after the prison’s 1963 closure and before its 1973 opening as a national park, that isn’t part of the gift shop at all, nor, I would argue, much present in the island’s tourist narratives more broadly. That’s the 1969 takeover of the islandby a group of Native Americans affiliated with the American Indian Movement; this particular community called themselves “Indians of All Tribes” and hoped to turn the island into a cultural center. During the nearly two years of occupation, this activist effort certainly succeeded in raising awareness and changing national conversations, although (as was the case with each AIM endeavor) it also produced unintended acts of destruction and violence. The history of the occupation is thus a complex one, connected to longer-term and even more complex 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 could include not only Native American communities and stories but those of the many other cultures that have called and continued to call the Bay Area home? Not sure I can imagine a more inspiring future for a former prison.Next site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
January 7, 2014
January 7, 2014: San Fran Sites: Palace of Fine Arts
[As I was reminded during my book talk visit, the Bay Area is home to numerous, significant American sites. In this week’s series, I’ll highlight a handful of such evocative places. Add your thoughts, or your own sites, in the comments!]
On the deeply strange site that’s unnerving and inspiring in equal measure.As part of a series on San Diego spaces last spring, I wrote a post about Balboa Park, and specifically the many striking buildings and monuments created within it for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. Perhaps because they’re part of the separate space of the park (rather than overtly connected to the city beyond its borders), and perhaps because there are many of them in close proximity to one another, those buildings and monuments didn’t seem (at least to this visitor) particularly odd or out of place. But the same can’t be said for another monument constructed for the same exposition, San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts; the Palace’s huge buildings literally and figuratively stand out amidst the homes, businesses, and docks of the city’s Marina District, making the site a unique and beautiful but very odd non sequitor.Ever since my one visit to Rome, back in the summer of 2002, I’ve noted that my favorite thing about the city, and Italy overall (the only European country I’ve visited to date), was the lack of separation between its historic buildings and sites and its contemporary neighborhoods and life, the way in which you could turn a random corner and see the Coliseum. Yet although I’ve concurrently lamented the way in which American cities seem instead to separate the past from the present, I have to admit that the Palace of Fine Arts, entirely unseparated as it is, felt more unnerving than impressive—and I think the reason (which I felt even before I learned about it) is its artificiality, its overtly purposeful construction as an impressive cultural performance. That is, a site like the Coliseum was simply a historical and cultural edifice that has been allowed to remain part of the evolving city around it; I’m sure that its architects intended it to make a statement, but it nonetheless was at one point part of the city and its daily life. The Palace was from its first moments of existence anything but, and, to my mind, it shows.But having said all of that, it’s also important to say this: as with any urban space, and perhaps especially one so overtly un-intended for a practical purpose, the Palace has evolved and grown as part of the surrounding community. Some of that evolution is likely in line with the site’s initial goals: I was far from the only tourist wandering the Palace’s grounds on the day I visited. But some evolutions have taken the space in other directions: from the many different birds who have made the Palace’s lagoon their home, and made the site into a natural as well as man-made one as a result; to the local residents who were reading, jogging, picnicking on the grounds, making the Palace into an urban park along the lines of the many produced by the City Beautiful movement. While the Palace’s monuments and sculptures are inspiring in their own way, I found these perhaps unintended (and certainly more organic) evolutions much more inspiring still: as a reflection of how the history of a site, like the history of a city and of a nation, grows out of all those who encounter and engage with and inhabit it, into something new and far more beautiful than any isolated moment could ever be.Next site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On the deeply strange site that’s unnerving and inspiring in equal measure.As part of a series on San Diego spaces last spring, I wrote a post about Balboa Park, and specifically the many striking buildings and monuments created within it for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. Perhaps because they’re part of the separate space of the park (rather than overtly connected to the city beyond its borders), and perhaps because there are many of them in close proximity to one another, those buildings and monuments didn’t seem (at least to this visitor) particularly odd or out of place. But the same can’t be said for another monument constructed for the same exposition, San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts; the Palace’s huge buildings literally and figuratively stand out amidst the homes, businesses, and docks of the city’s Marina District, making the site a unique and beautiful but very odd non sequitor.Ever since my one visit to Rome, back in the summer of 2002, I’ve noted that my favorite thing about the city, and Italy overall (the only European country I’ve visited to date), was the lack of separation between its historic buildings and sites and its contemporary neighborhoods and life, the way in which you could turn a random corner and see the Coliseum. Yet although I’ve concurrently lamented the way in which American cities seem instead to separate the past from the present, I have to admit that the Palace of Fine Arts, entirely unseparated as it is, felt more unnerving than impressive—and I think the reason (which I felt even before I learned about it) is its artificiality, its overtly purposeful construction as an impressive cultural performance. That is, a site like the Coliseum was simply a historical and cultural edifice that has been allowed to remain part of the evolving city around it; I’m sure that its architects intended it to make a statement, but it nonetheless was at one point part of the city and its daily life. The Palace was from its first moments of existence anything but, and, to my mind, it shows.But having said all of that, it’s also important to say this: as with any urban space, and perhaps especially one so overtly un-intended for a practical purpose, the Palace has evolved and grown as part of the surrounding community. Some of that evolution is likely in line with the site’s initial goals: I was far from the only tourist wandering the Palace’s grounds on the day I visited. But some evolutions have taken the space in other directions: from the many different birds who have made the Palace’s lagoon their home, and made the site into a natural as well as man-made one as a result; to the local residents who were reading, jogging, picnicking on the grounds, making the Palace into an urban park along the lines of the many produced by the City Beautiful movement. While the Palace’s monuments and sculptures are inspiring in their own way, I found these perhaps unintended (and certainly more organic) evolutions much more inspiring still: as a reflection of how the history of a site, like the history of a city and of a nation, grows out of all those who encounter and engage with and inhabit it, into something new and far more beautiful than any isolated moment could ever be.Next site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
January 6, 2014
January 6, 2014: San Fran Sites: Angel Island
[As I was reminded during my book talk visit, the Bay Area is home to numerous, significant American sites. In this week’s series, I’ll highlight a handful of such evocative places. Add your thoughts, or your own sites, in the comments!]
On the site that reminds us that you’ve got to go there to know there.I’ve written a lot, in the last few years, about San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island: from this very early blog post to this follow up, and at length in the third chapter of my recent book. It’s fair to say, in fact, that there are few American historic or cultural sites about which I’ve thought more than Angel Island, and more exactly the Immigration Station there that became both a prison and a poetic archive for so many Chinese and Asian American arrivals. In this 21st-century moment, with websites like the two to which I linked in that last sentence, it’s absolutely possible to connect deeply and meaningfully with a historic and cultural site from afar, and so I don’t believe that my prior writings on Angel Island were significantly limited because I hadn’t yet had the chance to visit the site in person. But now that I have had the opportunity to do so, I’ll admit that there are many elements to the site that it’d be very difficult to appreciate without such a visit.For one thing, there’s the island’s crucial contradiction: its closeness to San Francisco, yet at the same time its powerful sense of separation and isolation. San Francisco’s harbor is clearly visible from the island, and would have been even more so in the early 20th century, with much less suburban development in between. Riding on the ferry to the island on a pleasant early November morning, I could imagine how that visibility felt to arriving Chinese immigrants, the promised mainland only a short final boat ride across the bay. Yet the island itself feels far from the city, most especially because it is large and natural/wild enough (and again, would have likely been even more so a century ago) that it feels very much like a space and world of its own. It’s difficult to overstate how painful and destructive this contradiction would likely have felt to those arrivals detained at Angel Island, many for months and even years: to be so close and yet so far away from their destination, to see (probably daily, and certainly frequently) the place which was being withheld from them. It’s no wonder they wrote such lyrical and evocative poems!Being on the island, surrounded by its natural and still wild (or at least un-developed) landscapes and beauty, also led me to another and perhaps even more complex question: how much the island, and specifically the rocky, forested inlet on which the immigration station was built, might have reminded many of the Chinese arrivals of the landscape and world which they had left behind. I haven’t been to China, so this is a particularly speculative idea; and it would seem to conflict with the opening of one of the Angel Island poems, which reads “The sea-scape resembles lichen twisting and turning for a thousand li./There is no shore to land and it is difficult to walk.” But on the other hand, it would be possible to read that poem’s frustration as caused by the similarity to what had been left behind, the sense that the speaker has traveled so far only to find him or herself seemingly no closer to a new world—a reading that would relate to the poem’s next line, “With a gentle breeze I arrived at the city thinking all would be so.” And no matter what, a visit to Angel Island helps us to think with more depth about such poems, and the Chinese American experience overall.Next site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On the site that reminds us that you’ve got to go there to know there.I’ve written a lot, in the last few years, about San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island: from this very early blog post to this follow up, and at length in the third chapter of my recent book. It’s fair to say, in fact, that there are few American historic or cultural sites about which I’ve thought more than Angel Island, and more exactly the Immigration Station there that became both a prison and a poetic archive for so many Chinese and Asian American arrivals. In this 21st-century moment, with websites like the two to which I linked in that last sentence, it’s absolutely possible to connect deeply and meaningfully with a historic and cultural site from afar, and so I don’t believe that my prior writings on Angel Island were significantly limited because I hadn’t yet had the chance to visit the site in person. But now that I have had the opportunity to do so, I’ll admit that there are many elements to the site that it’d be very difficult to appreciate without such a visit.For one thing, there’s the island’s crucial contradiction: its closeness to San Francisco, yet at the same time its powerful sense of separation and isolation. San Francisco’s harbor is clearly visible from the island, and would have been even more so in the early 20th century, with much less suburban development in between. Riding on the ferry to the island on a pleasant early November morning, I could imagine how that visibility felt to arriving Chinese immigrants, the promised mainland only a short final boat ride across the bay. Yet the island itself feels far from the city, most especially because it is large and natural/wild enough (and again, would have likely been even more so a century ago) that it feels very much like a space and world of its own. It’s difficult to overstate how painful and destructive this contradiction would likely have felt to those arrivals detained at Angel Island, many for months and even years: to be so close and yet so far away from their destination, to see (probably daily, and certainly frequently) the place which was being withheld from them. It’s no wonder they wrote such lyrical and evocative poems!Being on the island, surrounded by its natural and still wild (or at least un-developed) landscapes and beauty, also led me to another and perhaps even more complex question: how much the island, and specifically the rocky, forested inlet on which the immigration station was built, might have reminded many of the Chinese arrivals of the landscape and world which they had left behind. I haven’t been to China, so this is a particularly speculative idea; and it would seem to conflict with the opening of one of the Angel Island poems, which reads “The sea-scape resembles lichen twisting and turning for a thousand li./There is no shore to land and it is difficult to walk.” But on the other hand, it would be possible to read that poem’s frustration as caused by the similarity to what had been left behind, the sense that the speaker has traveled so far only to find him or herself seemingly no closer to a new world—a reading that would relate to the poem’s next line, “With a gentle breeze I arrived at the city thinking all would be so.” And no matter what, a visit to Angel Island helps us to think with more depth about such poems, and the Chinese American experience overall.Next site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
January 6, 2013: San Fran Sites: Angel Island
[As I was reminded during my book talk visit, the Bay Area is home to numerous, significant American sites. In this week’s series, I’ll highlight a handful of such evocative places. Add your thoughts, or your own sites, in the comments!]
On the site that reminds us that you’ve got to go there to know there.I’ve written a lot, in the last few years, about San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island: from this very early blog post to this follow up, and at length in the third chapter of my recent book. It’s fair to say, in fact, that there are few American historic or cultural sites about which I’ve thought more than Angel Island, and more exactly the Immigration Station there that became both a prison and a poetic archive for so many Chinese and Asian American arrivals. In this 21st-century moment, with websites like the two to which I linked in that last sentence, it’s absolutely possible to connect deeply and meaningfully with a historic and cultural site from afar, and so I don’t believe that my prior writings on Angel Island were significantly limited because I hadn’t yet had the chance to visit the site in person. But now that I have had the opportunity to do so, I’ll admit that there are many elements to the site that it’d be very difficult to appreciate without such a visit.For one thing, there’s the island’s crucial contradiction: its closeness to San Francisco, yet at the same time its powerful sense of separation and isolation. San Francisco’s harbor is clearly visible from the island, and would have been even more so in the early 20th century, with much less suburban development in between. Riding on the ferry to the island on a pleasant early November morning, I could imagine how that visibility felt to arriving Chinese immigrants, the promised mainland only a short final boat ride across the bay. Yet the island itself feels far from the city, most especially because it is large and natural/wild enough (and again, would have likely been even more so a century ago) that it feels very much like a space and world of its own. It’s difficult to overstate how painful and destructive this contradiction would likely have felt to those arrivals detained at Angel Island, many for months and even years: to be so close and yet so far away from their destination, to see (probably daily, and certainly frequently) the place which was being withheld from them. It’s no wonder they wrote such lyrical and evocative poems!Being on the island, surrounded by its natural and still wild (or at least un-developed) landscapes and beauty, also led me to another and perhaps even more complex question: how much the island, and specifically the rocky, forested inlet on which the immigration station was built, might have reminded many of the Chinese arrivals of the landscape and world which they had left behind. I haven’t been to China, so this is a particularly speculative idea; and it would seem to conflict with the opening of one of the Angel Island poems, which reads “The sea-scape resembles lichen twisting and turning for a thousand li./There is no shore to land and it is difficult to walk.” But on the other hand, it would be possible to read that poem’s frustration as caused by the similarity to what had been left behind, the sense that the speaker has traveled so far only to find him or herself seemingly no closer to a new world—a reading that would relate to the poem’s next line, “With a gentle breeze I arrived at the city thinking all would be so.” And no matter what, a visit to Angel Island helps us to think with more depth about such poems, and the Chinese American experience overall.Next site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On the site that reminds us that you’ve got to go there to know there.I’ve written a lot, in the last few years, about San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island: from this very early blog post to this follow up, and at length in the third chapter of my recent book. It’s fair to say, in fact, that there are few American historic or cultural sites about which I’ve thought more than Angel Island, and more exactly the Immigration Station there that became both a prison and a poetic archive for so many Chinese and Asian American arrivals. In this 21st-century moment, with websites like the two to which I linked in that last sentence, it’s absolutely possible to connect deeply and meaningfully with a historic and cultural site from afar, and so I don’t believe that my prior writings on Angel Island were significantly limited because I hadn’t yet had the chance to visit the site in person. But now that I have had the opportunity to do so, I’ll admit that there are many elements to the site that it’d be very difficult to appreciate without such a visit.For one thing, there’s the island’s crucial contradiction: its closeness to San Francisco, yet at the same time its powerful sense of separation and isolation. San Francisco’s harbor is clearly visible from the island, and would have been even more so in the early 20th century, with much less suburban development in between. Riding on the ferry to the island on a pleasant early November morning, I could imagine how that visibility felt to arriving Chinese immigrants, the promised mainland only a short final boat ride across the bay. Yet the island itself feels far from the city, most especially because it is large and natural/wild enough (and again, would have likely been even more so a century ago) that it feels very much like a space and world of its own. It’s difficult to overstate how painful and destructive this contradiction would likely have felt to those arrivals detained at Angel Island, many for months and even years: to be so close and yet so far away from their destination, to see (probably daily, and certainly frequently) the place which was being withheld from them. It’s no wonder they wrote such lyrical and evocative poems!Being on the island, surrounded by its natural and still wild (or at least un-developed) landscapes and beauty, also led me to another and perhaps even more complex question: how much the island, and specifically the rocky, forested inlet on which the immigration station was built, might have reminded many of the Chinese arrivals of the landscape and world which they had left behind. I haven’t been to China, so this is a particularly speculative idea; and it would seem to conflict with the opening of one of the Angel Island poems, which reads “The sea-scape resembles lichen twisting and turning for a thousand li./There is no shore to land and it is difficult to walk.” But on the other hand, it would be possible to read that poem’s frustration as caused by the similarity to what had been left behind, the sense that the speaker has traveled so far only to find him or herself seemingly no closer to a new world—a reading that would relate to the poem’s next line, “With a gentle breeze I arrived at the city thinking all would be so.” And no matter what, a visit to Angel Island helps us to think with more depth about such poems, and the Chinese American experience overall.Next site tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
January 4, 2014
January 4-5, 2014: Ani DiFranco and Slavery
[A special post in response to a complex and crucial recent American non-event.]
On two historical contexts for a very 21st century controversy.In mid-December, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco announced that she would be running (along with some songwriter friends and colleagues) a writers’ retreat and workshop in June 2014 at Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation and Resort. Because Nottoway is a former antebellum slave plantation turned tourist resort and “educational” site (not so much about slavery itself, it seems, as about life for antebellum Southern whites), DiFranco’s choice of setting led to a significant and growing backlash, particularly on social media and in other online communities. [I should note that the site seems to have been chosen by an event planning company, although since the retreat is DiFranco’s the ultimate responsibility nonetheless resides with her.] As a result, in late December DiFranco cancelled the retreat, writing an extended apology-but-also-defense-that’s-a-non-apologythat is likely to become a classic in that ubiquitous contemporary genre. While I’m happy to critique DiFranco’s specific choices and tone deafness, however, there are also broader American historical and cultural contexts to which we can and should connect this controversy.For one thing, I would connect Nottoway to “The Southern Restaurant,” one of the most popular culinary attractions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As I highlighted in the Introduction to my first book, the overtly representative Southern Restaurant (also known in some promotional materials by the even more defining name “The South”) promised “to recreate the feel of an antebellum plantation, down to the ‘band of old-time plantation ‘darkies’’ which performed at all times.” While such details reveal the inescapable presence of racist narratives in these nostalgic images of the South, the restaurant overall signaled an interconnected but even broader late 19th century national trend—toward the kinds of curiosity for and attraction to the luxuries and excesses of the plantation world that would reach their apotheosis a few decades later in the immense popularity of both the literary and cinematic portrayals of Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara. This embrace of the plantation South often required, to my mind, not overt racism so much as a willful elision of race and slavery from the picture at all—an elision that, to be clear, is at least as destructive as overt racism, and that might well be echoed in DiFranco’s tone deaf choice and then defense of Nottoway as the setting of her writers’ retreat.DiFranco did acknowledge those histories of race and slavery in her pseudo-apology, but did so in a frustratingly condescending way, suggesting that she has a better sense of such histories and how to engage with them than do her critics (many of them African American). An interesting historical and cultural context for that attitude would be William Faulkner’s 1956 telegram to W.E.B. Du Bois: Du Bois had challenged Faulkner, an opponent of the era’s post-Brown federal integration policies, to a debate in the aftermath of the Emmett Till lynching and the acquittal of his accused killers; Faulkner responded by telegram, writing, “I do not believe there is a debatable point between us. We both agree in advance that the position you will take is right morally, legally, and ethically. … If it is not evident to you that the position I take in asking for moderation and patience is right practically then we will both waste our breath in debate.” Like DiFranco, Faulkner was an immensely talented artist, and one profoundly sympathetic to the complexities and even horrors of American history and identity; but like DiFranco’s apology, Faulkner’s telegram to Du Bois suggests an unwillingness to step back and learn from those whose perspectives on and understandings of our histories would have had a great deal to add to his own. But DiFranco’s story isn’t over, and I hope her pseudo-apology won’t be the last word on this complex and important subject. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?
On two historical contexts for a very 21st century controversy.In mid-December, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco announced that she would be running (along with some songwriter friends and colleagues) a writers’ retreat and workshop in June 2014 at Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation and Resort. Because Nottoway is a former antebellum slave plantation turned tourist resort and “educational” site (not so much about slavery itself, it seems, as about life for antebellum Southern whites), DiFranco’s choice of setting led to a significant and growing backlash, particularly on social media and in other online communities. [I should note that the site seems to have been chosen by an event planning company, although since the retreat is DiFranco’s the ultimate responsibility nonetheless resides with her.] As a result, in late December DiFranco cancelled the retreat, writing an extended apology-but-also-defense-that’s-a-non-apologythat is likely to become a classic in that ubiquitous contemporary genre. While I’m happy to critique DiFranco’s specific choices and tone deafness, however, there are also broader American historical and cultural contexts to which we can and should connect this controversy.For one thing, I would connect Nottoway to “The Southern Restaurant,” one of the most popular culinary attractions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. As I highlighted in the Introduction to my first book, the overtly representative Southern Restaurant (also known in some promotional materials by the even more defining name “The South”) promised “to recreate the feel of an antebellum plantation, down to the ‘band of old-time plantation ‘darkies’’ which performed at all times.” While such details reveal the inescapable presence of racist narratives in these nostalgic images of the South, the restaurant overall signaled an interconnected but even broader late 19th century national trend—toward the kinds of curiosity for and attraction to the luxuries and excesses of the plantation world that would reach their apotheosis a few decades later in the immense popularity of both the literary and cinematic portrayals of Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara. This embrace of the plantation South often required, to my mind, not overt racism so much as a willful elision of race and slavery from the picture at all—an elision that, to be clear, is at least as destructive as overt racism, and that might well be echoed in DiFranco’s tone deaf choice and then defense of Nottoway as the setting of her writers’ retreat.DiFranco did acknowledge those histories of race and slavery in her pseudo-apology, but did so in a frustratingly condescending way, suggesting that she has a better sense of such histories and how to engage with them than do her critics (many of them African American). An interesting historical and cultural context for that attitude would be William Faulkner’s 1956 telegram to W.E.B. Du Bois: Du Bois had challenged Faulkner, an opponent of the era’s post-Brown federal integration policies, to a debate in the aftermath of the Emmett Till lynching and the acquittal of his accused killers; Faulkner responded by telegram, writing, “I do not believe there is a debatable point between us. We both agree in advance that the position you will take is right morally, legally, and ethically. … If it is not evident to you that the position I take in asking for moderation and patience is right practically then we will both waste our breath in debate.” Like DiFranco, Faulkner was an immensely talented artist, and one profoundly sympathetic to the complexities and even horrors of American history and identity; but like DiFranco’s apology, Faulkner’s telegram to Du Bois suggests an unwillingness to step back and learn from those whose perspectives on and understandings of our histories would have had a great deal to add to his own. But DiFranco’s story isn’t over, and I hope her pseudo-apology won’t be the last word on this complex and important subject. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?
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