Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 419

April 11, 2012: Poems I Love, Part Three

[I'm spending much of my blog-time this week working on a new writing project, about which more to come soon (when details become more finalized). So in honor of National Poetry Month, I'm going to highlight one amazing American poem per day this week, say one thing about why I love it, and then hope that you'll a) read and enjoy; and b) share your own nominations in comments!]

Stephen Crane's

"I saw a man pursuing the horizon" (1898)

At once both deeply cynical about the core of human existence (and the speaker/poet's ability to change it) and yet somehow humanistic and hopeful as well, an uneasy and important balance in all of Crane's works.

Next poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Favorite American poems, por favor!

4/11 Memory Day nominee: Jane Bolin, whose pioneering life of firsts culminated with her appointment as the first African American woman judge, and whose critical and impassioned perspectives on the core historical issues of the 20th century are just as inspiring as her professional trailblazing.

April 10, 2012: Poems I Love, Part Two

[I'm spending much of my blog-time this week working on a new writing project, about which more to come soon (when details become more finalized). So in honor of National Poetry Month, I'm going to highlight one amazing American poem per day this week, say one thing about why I love it, and then hope that you'll a) read and enjoy; and b) share your own nominations in comments!]

Sarah Piatt's

"The Palace Burner" (1872)

Parent-child relationships, class and revolution, gender and identity, self-reflection, history, the need for and limits of empathy … is there anything important this poem isn't about?

Next poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Favorite American poems, please!

4/10 Memory Day nominee: William Apess, about whose tragic but inspiring life, and angry and eloquent voice, see that link!

April 9, 2012: Poems I Love, Part One

[I'm spending much of my blog-time this week working on a new writing project, about which more to come soon (when details become more finalized). So in honor of National Poetry Month, I'm going to highlight one amazing American poem per day this week, say one thing about why I love it, and then hope that you'll a) read and enjoy; and b) share your own nominations in comments!]

Randall Jarrell's

"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" (1945)

The best poem about war I've ever read; also the single most gut-wrenchingly powerful poem I know.

Next poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What's a favorite of yours?

4/9 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Paul Robeson, whose diverse and singular talents and achievements were for a while

April 7-8, 2012: March 2012 Recap

[A slightly belated recap of the month that was in American Studying.]

March 1: 1912: My series on interesting Leap Years continues with a unique presidential election, international adventures, and the origins of Hollywood.

March 2: 1936: The Leap Year series concludes with a year defined by the Depression but featuring plenty of interesting pop culture and international American Studies events as well.

March 3-4: Celebrating Shirley Sherrod:  A Women's History Month series begins by celebrating a woman who should be remembered for exactly the opposite reasons the late Andrew Breitbart argued.

March 5: Celebrating Sophia Hayden: Celebrating a pioneering woman whose most public achievements were also the focus of the sexist critiques that drove her from the public sphere.

March 6: Celebrating Zitkala-Sa: Celebrating the Sioux orator and author who helped capture and yet thoroughly transcended some of her culture's and our nation's lowest points.

March 7: Celebrating Margaret Fuller: Celebrating one of America's most impressive and talented writers, philosophers, and voices.

March 8: Celebrating Sui Sin Far: Celebrating one of the most genuinely and inspiringly transnational American writers and identities.

March 9: One Short Video, Two Impressive Women: Celebrating Sojourner Truth and Alfre Woodard, a compelling two for one to end the Women's History series.

March 10-18: Spring Break Question: In which I left my readers with a spring break question about their American Studies interests and perspectives, one to which I'd still love to hear your answers!

March 19: Old Town State Historic Park: A series on sites of public memory in San Diego starts with the city's most historic and cross-cultural space.

March 20: Cabrillo National Monument: Three sides to one of San Diego's most rich and multi-layered historic sites.

March 21: Balboa Park: The inspiring origin points and evolution of this central San Diego space.

March 22: The U.S.S. Midway:  The two very distinct and equally significant public purposes of San Diego's most unique museum and site.

March 23: The Safari Park: A few of the amazing creatures we met at this famous and powerful site, and what they can help us better understand, as the San Diego series concludes.

March 24-25: Race in Contemporary America: I start a series on this significant American Studies topic by asking for your ideas and suggestions—which I would still very much welcome and appreciate!

March 26: Race and Trayvon Martin: My two cents on one of our most contemporary and painful American events and questions.

March 27: Race and Danny Chen: On the tragic and inspiring sides to another recent and painful American story.

March 28: Race and The Hunger Games: What the racist responses to the recent film release can help us understand and analyze.

March 29: Racism in Contemporary America: A controversial episode from late last year helps me engage with the issues surrounding racism in the 21st century.

March 30: Race and Technology: A graphic shared by fellow American Studier Jen Rhee helps me analyze this very complex and important 2012 topic.

March 31-April 1: Race, President Obama, and Us: How American Studies can help us analyze this contested question with more sophistication and significance—and another request for your input, as the series and month ends!

More next week,

Ben

PS. Besides the specific questions asked by many of those posts, I'll ask this one too: topics you'd like to see me engage with in this space?

4/7 Memory Day nominee: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whose 20th century spanning life included activism in virtually every significant social movement, but whose environmental advocacy for Florida's Everglades, exemplified by the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947 ), led directly to the preservation of that amazing American space.

4/8 Memory Day nominee: Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Chicano writer, lawyer, and activist whose connections to Hunter Thompson and mysterious 1970s disappearance shouldn't overshadow his unique, ground-breaking, and compelling works of autoethnographic fiction.

April 6, 2012: American Satire

[This week, in honor of April Fool's Day, I'll be highlighting various American Studies connections to the holiday—not just to foolishness, but to pranks, jokes, and humor. This is the fifth and final post in the series.]

Highlighting (more briefly than ideal, but they speak for themselves) five great works of American satire.

1) Washington Irving's A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809)

2) Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger (1898)

3) Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

4) Tim Robbins' film Bob Roberts (1992)

5) Jon Stewart and The Daily Show's America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction (2004)

You'd be a fool not to check these out! Belated March recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. Any American satires you'd highlight?

4/6 Memory Day nominee: James Watson, the molecular biologist whose discovery (in collaboration with Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin) of the DNA molecule and its double helix structure earned him the Nobel Prize and changed the face of virtually every aspect of biology, genetics, and medicine (among other fields).

April 5, 2012: Nobody's Fool

[This week, in honor of April Fool's Day, I'll be highlighting various American Studies connections to the holiday—not just to foolishness, but to pranks, jokes, and humor. This is the fourth in the series. As always, suggestions and guest posts welcome—no fooling!]

Two important American Studies lessons from one of our quirkier, funnier, and more affecting late 20th century films.

Nobody's Fool (1994) , the Paul Newman starring vehicle based on the 1993 Richard Russo novel of the same name (which I will admit, in a very non-literature professor moment, to not having read), is a very funny movie. It's funny in its script, which includes plenty of laugh-out-loud funny insults, retorts, and quips; Newman's Sully gets the lion's share, but perhaps the single funniest line is given to a judge who critiques a trigger-happy local policemen by noting, "You know my feelings on arming morons: you arm one, you've got to arm them all, otherwise it wouldn't be good sport." And it's just as funny in its world, its creation of a cast of quirky and memorable characters (who, not coincidentally, are played by some of our most talented character actors, including Jessica Tandy in her final role). That those same characters are ultimately the source of a number of hugely moving moments is a testament to the film's (and probably book's) true greatness.

Unlike many of the other films I've discussed in this space— Lone Star and City of Hope , Gangs of New York , Jungle Fever and Mississippi Masala, and more—Nobody's Fool is not explicitly engaged with significant American Studies issues. But that doesn't mean that there aren't American Studies lessons to be learned from its subtle and wise perspectives on identity and community. For one thing, Sully's most central culminating perspective (spoiler alert, here and in the next paragraph!) is a powerful and important vision of our interconnectedness to the many communities of which we're a meaningful part: "I just found out I'm somebody's grandfather. And somebody's father. And maybe I'm somebody's friend in the bargain," Sully notes, rejecting a tempting but escapist future in favor of staying where he is; while he has ostensibly known about all these relationships for years, what he has realized through the film's events is both how significant these roles are for his own identity and life, and how much his presence or absence in relation to them will in turn influence the people and communities around him.

If Sully has learned that specific, significant lesson by the film's end, he has also, more simply yet perhaps even more crucially, done something else: recognized the possibility for change. Sully's not a young man by the time we meet him, and it's fair to say that he's very set in his ways; one of his first lines of the film, in response to his landlady (Tandy) offering him tea, is "No. Not now, not ever," and the exchange becomes a mantra of sorts for the film, shorthand for Sully's routines (with every person in his life) and the fixity of his perspective and voice. So it's particularly salient that the film ends with an extended and different version of this exchange: "No. How many times do I have to tell you?" Newman replies, and Tandy answers, "Other people change their minds occasionally. I keep thinking you might." "You do? Huh," are Newman's final words in the film, and he delivers them with surprise and, it seems to me, a recognition, paired with the earlier epiphany about interconnections, that perhaps Tandy is right, and he has future shifts ahead of him that he can't yet imagine. If the American future is going to be all that it might be, that's going to depend on most—perhaps all—of us being open to change, most especially in our own identities and perspectives; Sully's only begun that trajectory, but exemplifies its possibility, at any point in our lives and arcs, for sure.

Last in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any foolish but wise films you'd highlight?

4/5 Memory Day nominee: Booker T. Washington, the former slave turned political and social leader who is perhaps best known today for his moderate approach to racial equality (particularly when compared to a contemporary like Du Bois), but whose hugely significant legacies in the fields of education, government and policy, and life writing (among others) should never be forgotten.

April 4, 2012: Melville's Confidence Man

[This week, in honor of April Fool's Day, I'll be highlighting various American Studies connections to the holiday—not just to foolishness, but to pranks, jokes, and humor. This is the third in the series. As always, suggestions and guest posts welcome—no fooling!]

On one of American literature's most unique and interesting, and, yes, foolish, works.

I don't think too many 21st century Americans read or even know about the mid-19th century movement known as Southwestern Humor, and that's too bad. Besides representing some genuinely American folktales and mythologies—I vaguely remember reading stories about Mike Fink in childhood anthologies featuring Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Pecos Bill and the like, but I wonder if any of those characters remain on our cultural radar in any meaningful way—the Southwestern humor stories are just plain funny, both in their outlandish events and in their ability to capture story-tellers' voices and effects. T.B. Thorpe's "The Big Bear of Arkansas" (1854) is not only a clear predecessor to Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1867); it's also nearly as great an act of literary and local color story-telling and humor. You could do a lot worse, in this April Fool's week, than spending some time reading Thorpe and his peers.

At first glance, Herman Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857) seems likewise inspired by, or at least parallel to, Thorpe's story: both works are set on Mississippi River steamboats, and both feature multiple acts of story-telling, comprising communal conversations that are constituted out of such competing stories. Melville even ups the humor ante on two interconnected levels: he published his novel on April 1, and set it on the same day, which had for at least a few years been known as April Fool's Day. Yet as anyone who has read Melville knows, the author's sense of humor tended more to the dark and cynical than to the light and folktale-like; he expressed this perspective on humor very clearly in an 1851 letter to his friend Samuel Savage, writing that "It is—or seems to be—a wise sort of thing, to realize that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed round pretty liberally and impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it." And in The Confidence Man, the joke that gets passed round is both dark and, like much of Melville's work, extremely prescient of ongoing American and philosophical concerns.

It would be very foolish of me to spoil the details of Melville's novel, which is, at least by Melville's standards, brief and very read-able, and well worth your time. So I'll just say that what his titular confidence man does, both by joining the steamboat's community and through his particular voice and identity, is to draw out the complexities of such crucial and complex themes as trust and deception, interpersonal relationships and our own needs and goals, and the role of stories and performance in constructing and negotiating identities. The novel's other characters represent a wide cross-section of American and human existence, and are not reducible simply to what the confidence man reveals about them; yet they can no more escape those revelations than they can determine with certainty who this mysterious figure is—or, for that matter, who any of their compatriots are at their core, what they know and what they can believe about their community and its stories. If that sounds pretty funny to you, in the truest sense of why we laugh and whom we're laughing at, then you and Melville's Man will get along just fine.

Next in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any funny stories or works you'd recommend?

4/4 Memory Day nominee: Dorothea Dix, for more on whose amazing and inspiring life and work see the post at that link!

April 3, 2012: Seward's Folly

[This week, in honor of April Fool's Day, I'll be highlighting various American Studies connections to the holiday—not just to foolishness, but to pranks, jokes, and humor. This is the second in the series. As always, suggestions and guest posts welcome—no fooling!]

A few examples of why it's not at all foolish to consider the specifics of how, when, and why America's territory expanded.

Let me get this out of the way at the start: despite having had the singular dishonor of vaulting Sarah Palin, and her erroneous and destructive visions of American identity and history, onto the national stage, Alaska is a very welcome part of our 21st century American community. Everything I wrote about Sitka in this post on complex and instructive American places is equally true of the state overall; it opens up landscapes, histories, and communities without which we'd be a less rich and diverse nation. Yet we can't fully appreciate much of what Alaska brings and means if we don't better understand the contexts of its addition to our nation: the complex history of Russian imperialism in the region; the pre-Civil War arguments over international expansion that led to the first consideration of buying Alaska, under the Buchanan Administration; and the very divided Reconstruction-era moment and Johnson Administration during which Seward finally gained approval for that purchase in 1867 (and received the funds in 1868), and which produced the very vocal and famous critiques of the acquisition.

At least as complex, and far more explicitly dark and tragic, is the history surrounding the American "acquisition" of Hawai'i a few decades later. My January 25th Memory Day nominee, Charles Reed Bishop, illustrates some of the powerful and inspiring sides to American connections to Hawai'i in the mid-19th century; yet at the same time, Bishop's struggles to hold onto his late wife's ancestral lands (on which they had started their school) in the face of pressures from subsequent settlers and big business to acquire that land exemplify the kinds of forces that led directly to America's annexation of Hawai'i. There are few historical figures whose stories reflect more poorly on the US's actions than Queen Liliuokalani (although she has plenty of competition, of course), and we can't possibly understand the place's history or meaning outside of a much fuller inclusion of her in our national histories and narratives. Such an inclusion wouldn't make it impossible to appreciate the state's natural beauties, nor its most famous contribution to 21st century America—but it would force us to recognize at which price those beauties, and the resources they include, were bought, and what that reveals about late 19th century American imperialisms.

If Hawai'i's history is one of the nation's most dramatic and tragic, the evolving story of Maine would seem to be one of the quietest and most diplomatic. Although the area had been part of the United States (and specifically of Massachusetts) since the Revolution, and had gained its own statehood in 1820, it had throughout those years served as a flashpoint for continuing conflicts between the US and England. Those conflicts turned into the so-called "Aroostook War" of 1839, a bloodless struggle over the state's borders and resources that was resolved through diplomacy three years later with the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Besides revealing how tense relations between the US and its former mother country remained throughout the first half of the 19th century, that Treaty also illustrates some of the many other issues to which that relationship connected—besides settling the Maine/New Brunswick border, the treaty also stipulated the creation of a joint American and British naval force for the sole purpose of patrolling the African coast and "suppressing the Slave Trade," enforcing laws that had been on the books in both nations for decades but which clearly remained an issue. Engaging with the history of Maine, then, allows us to better understand multiple complex and crucial, Early Republic international influences and relationships.

Next in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? And any other foolish (in the best sense) topics I should consider, or you'd like to write about?

4/3 Memory Day nominee: Washington Irving, one of America's first professional writers, a hugely talented satirist, travel writer, and biographer, and, in his creation of distinctly American folk tales, one of the most enduring contributors to our national mythology.

April 2, 2012: Fools Rush In?

[This week, in honor of April Fool's Day, I'll be highlighting various American Studies connections to the holiday—not just to foolishness, but to pranks, jokes, and humor. This repeat of an oldie-but-still-goodie is the first in the series. As always, suggestions and guest posts welcome—no fooling!]

I find myself lately, in thinking about my goals for a wide variety of my pursuits—from this blog to my future book projects, from certain aspects of my classroom work to other public commitments like those with NEASA—somewhat torn between a couple of distinct emphases, both answers to King Theoden's question to Aragorn during the hopeless portion of the battle of Helm's Deep: "What can men do against such reckless hate?" Which is to say, in a moment [I wrote this in April 2011, although precious little has changed and certainly not for the better] when 62% of Republicans in a recent poll preferred a presidential candidate who does not discount the Birther garbage, when a significant number of our national conversations and narratives seem to have entirely unhinged from any discernible or even debatable reality, what is the role of a public scholar?At times I find myself agreeing with the constant refrain of one of my favorite bloggers, Digby, who believes that far too often writers and thinkers on the left attempt to take such a high road that they cede the most traveled paths to those voices on the right who are willing to shout their arguments as loudly and as passionately (and often, yes, as falsely) as possible. In a recent post she linked to an 1820 essay by William Hazlitt, entitled "On the Spirit of Partisanship,"  which illustrates just how much the two sides have long (and perhaps always) been unfairly matched in this sense: "Their object is to destroy you," Hazlitt writes to his fellow liberals about their conservative opponents, "your object is to spare them." Yet as tempting, and at times certainly as necessary, as it can be to fight fire with fire, at the end of the day I still believe that the most central goal of any liberal writer—and doubly so of any public scholar—should be to push back against oversimplifying narratives, to argue for more complex and dense and genuine understandings of American culture and history and identity and even politics. It's a long arc for sure, but if enough such voices make themselves part of the conversation, it can still bend to justice.

It's important to add, though, that providing such a measured and complex perspective is not mutually exclusive to fighting for an era's most significant causes, a fact that is exemplified by today's nominee for the American Hall of Inspiration, Albion W. Tourgée. Tourgée managed to be, for many decades, both one of America's most thoughtful public scholars and commentators and a passionate advocate for the issue (racial equality) about which he felt most strongly: a Civil War veteran who was struggling with his wounds in the climate of his native Ohio, he moved with his wife to North Carolina and became a Radical Republican supporter of Reconstruction and freedmen's rights there; he wrote a pair of profoundly complex and self-reflective and at times ironic and cynical novels about that experience, A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880) , and continued to publish works of fiction for the rest of his career; but even after moving back north in 1881 he published a syndicated newspaper column ("A Bystander's Notes") in which he argued passionately for racial equality on a variety of fronts (and against racial violence and discrimination on at least as many). His opposition in that space to Louisiana's segregated railways led to his selection to argue Homer Plessy's 1896 case before the Supreme Court; in those arguments Tourgée advanced his belief that justice should be "color-blind," a phrase which Justice John Harlan borrowed for his passionate dissenting opinion from the Court's pro-segregation ("separate but equal") decision.Tourgée was always, I believe, able to view himself and his writing with the kind of distance that keeps one from becoming a caricature, a windbag so fond of one's own voice and arguments that no one not already convinced will even listen. Yet he most certainly did not fear to tread into some of his era's most divisive and difficult questions, and in fact advanced the same kind of measured and reasoned and profoundly impressive ideas there that his Reconstruction novels force an audience to confront. Inspiring, and not at all foolish, for sure. Next post in the series tomorrow,

BenPS. What do you think? And any foolishness-related nominations for future posts in the series?

4/2 Memory Day nominee: Marvin Gaye, the Motown pioneer, producer, and legend who remains one of the few American popular artists able to create, with equal ease and complete success, socially conscious, lastingly catchy, and irresistibly sexy music.

March 31-April 1, 2012: Race, President Obama, and Us

[The sixth post in my series on race in contemporary America. The final post in the series for now, and one that asks for, nay demands, your input as well! I'd also love to return to this series down the road, so please still feel free to share other ideas or guest posts on these topics.]

American Studies and the elephant in the room when it comes to race in contemporary America.

The early 2008 Reverend Wright controversy and Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech in response, as well as the responses on the right that Obama had "thrown his grandmother under the bus" in part of that speech. The competing visions of the election itself: as a triumph of a "post-racial America," as the culmination of the Civil Rights movement, or as an election stolen by ACORN. The literally untold numbers of racist images, jokes, slurs, and narratives created by Obama's opponents. The books, whether attacking Obama's identity (such as one on his "Kenyan anti-colonial worldview"), highlighting its symbolic power, or simply analyzing its racial and ethnic contexts. It's no stretch to say that race has been the single most consistently defining aspect of Obama's national presence over the last four years, and no long-shot to say that it will be just as defining in the upcoming election as well.

Yet aside from the more complex, scholarly engagements provided by books like the last two linked in that sentence above—and possibly by other books by up-and-coming young American Studiers—it's also fair to say that we haven't, in our collective conversations about the issue, analyzed race and Obama so much as deployed narratives in that general direction. Perhaps that's a given—certainly much (all?) of our politics these days consists of deploying narratives rather than analyzing—but us American Studiers can and should work to push those conversations in more analytical and meaningful directions. Take, for example, the 2010 moment when Obama self-identified on the census as "black/African Am": it might be impossible for our current racial narratives to deal with that moment with any real complexity; whereas an American Studies perspective could connect that complex choice to the long histories of mixed race Americans' self-images and identities, to literary and cultural representations of those identities, to questions of passing and racial definitions and community in America, to David Hollinger's emphases on "voluntary affiliations" as a new defining 21st century category of identity, to the evolution of the census itself (which had in 2000 for the first time included a separate category for "mixed race," one checked by 6.8 million Americans; yet which had cut that category for the 2010 census), and more.

That's one example; it will come as a significant shock to you all, I'm sure, that I could go into another half-dozen or –million more. But as I have tried to do in the past, and will of course keep trying to do, I'd rather turn the American Studying over to you guys instead. So tell me: to what American histories, questions, issues, images, ideas, debates, figures, or stories would you turn to develop American Studies analyses of President Obama? Obviously that can and should go well beyond race, and wherever your American Studies perspectives take you and us will be very welcome; although I'd certainly be interested to hear your connections through this specific lens of race as well. In any case, I'd much, much rather end this week's series by adding some more voices and perspectives into the mix than by continuing to simply feature my own. So have at it! If you don't want to log in to post a comment, email 'em to me (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu)! Or Tweet 'em (@AmericanStudier)!

More next week,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

3/31 Memory Day nominee: César Chávez, the Mexican American activist and labor leader whose efforts on behalf of farm workers and migrant laborers changed the face of American politics, society, and community in the 20th century and beyond.

4/1 Memory Day nominee: Scott Joplin, the son of a slave and sharecropper who helped create a new genre of distinctly American music and profoundly influenced both his own era and the next century of national and world culture.