Foster Dickson's Blog, page 36

Sharing #Goodstuff: Romare Bearden at the High, Atlanta

Dirty Boots: “Thank You, Peter Greene!”

It was really refreshing to read Peter Greene’s “We Need to Stop Talking about the Teacher Shortage” on Forbes.com earlier this month. Greene’s byline explains that he spent thirty-nine years as a high school English teacher, and now writes on education issues. It’s nice to know that someone with that much ground-level experience is out there countering the ideas from people with only an eagle-eye view.

Here, Greene takes exception with this notion that we have a teacher shortage in America. He begins by using the analogy that, if you tried to buy a car for $1.98 and didn’t succeed, you wouldn’t go tell your friends that there was a car shortage. Or if you tried to dine out in a restaurant for $1, you wouldn’t claim there was a food shortage when you left hungry. The stronger insight would be that you couldn’t get what you wanted for what you were offering. Same thing with education and teachers.  Greene writes:

Calling the situation a “teacher shortage” suggests something like a crop failure or a hijacker grabbing truckloads before they can get to market. It suggests that there simply aren’t enough people out there who could do the job.

There are, actually. But they’re finding other lines of work. And it’s not just money for salaries that keeps those folks away. Again, Green writes:

But over the past couple of decades teachers have also suffered a steady drumbeat of disrespect, the repeated refrain that US schools are failing and terrible, an accountability movement that is more about threats than support. The rise of reforms like Common Core and high stakes testing regimens have meant a loss of professional autonomy for teachers. The rise of alternative pathways and “any warm body will do” solutions send the message that teaching is such a simple job that any shmoe with minimal training can do it.

Back in 2016, I wrote a post called “Tiny Glimmers of Hope” about this very issue, and cited two important facts: first, that the state of Alabama cut education funding by 17.8% between 2008 and 2015, and second, that 40% fewer college students majored in education during that same period. In Alabama, where I live and teach, thousands of education jobs were eliminated in 2009, 2010, and 2011. My question, asked rhetorically, is: who would anyone choose a career field where jobs are disappearing?

In more recent years, though, the jobs are coming back. As the economy has grown, tax revenues have come up from the Recession-era abyss, enabling most school systems to approach to whatever normalcy is now. Meanwhile, the last ten years’ worth of teacher-bashing have taken their toll on the public consciousness. Cash-strapped administrators shamelessly told the media that the remaining teachers would have to “do more with less.” The growth of social media has allowed angry parents to post wildly and prolifically (and often half-truthfully) about all manner of indiscretions (supposedly) committed at their children’s schools. The number of school shootings has increased dramatically, and school names like Parkland joined names like Columbine. The leaders of the school reform movement based their improvement strategy on having the ability to fire teachers. Everybody gave Waiting for Superman and NBC’s Education Nation their rapt attention. And now, the filthy residue left behind by all that highly publicized ire and desperation— that’s what normalcy is now.

So, we can’t find enough people who want to work in that environment. Peter Greene isn’t surprised. Neither should we be. If there were fewer education majors in the early 2010s, there are fewer people becoming new teachers now. With retirements and other departures, education leaders are finding that many job postings going unanswered. I guess thye’ll just have to – how did they put it? – do more with less.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “To Regard Others as Worthy of Kindness”

In the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, after the often-repeated “Love is patient, love is kind” passages, we read another often-repeated portion:

11. When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.

12. At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.

We come into the world knowing nothing, not even who or what we are. We can’t even open our eyes, the new light is so bright, and our only recognizable instinct is to suck on anything put into our mouths.

Our parents are our first educators. During our earliest years, they teach us the basics, things we never remember not knowing, like how to aim a spoon at our mouths and actually get the food in there. Others around us, like neighbors and daycare workers, teach us to be social: to regard others as worthy of kindness, to value cooperation and order. As our consciousness of the world grows, our knowledge of ourselves is enhanced by the ability to compare unlike ways of living to our own. Though St. Paul’s letter is addressing our relationship to God, in the temporal world we also come to know others as we are known to them.

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Anxiety of Too Many Choices”

At the end of last year, I felt like I had an overzealous announcer from a cheap TV commercial inside my head, shouting, Everything must go! I had reached a saturation point— a mental one.

[image error]Over the last few years, the crazy number of choices provided by the internet and digital media distribution had caused me to build up a seemingly interminable self-assigned “reading list.” Every time I’d see a book I’d like to read, I put it in my Amazon Wish List. If I’d see a movie I’d like to watch— in my Netflix queue!  When I browsed the cable guide, I took full advantage of the DVR’s ability to save every movie on Turner Classic that sounded interesting.

This compulsive hoarding of intended acculturation had also been urged forward by two well-meaning friends: one, my retired next-door neighbor who leaves his weekly Sunday New York Times on my porch when he’s done with it; and the other, a friend who makes a periodic donation of eight or ten weeks worth of New Yorkers, intended for my classroom. Among my ordinary duties as a husband, father, and teacher, I felt like I needed to read them all. (I couldn’t teach an article I hadn’t read, so even reading The New Yorker had become “working.”) Those print publications were stacking up, too.

It may seem pretty harmless, what I just described, but as a person who is driven by a sense of responsibility and by intellectual curiosity, my anxieties had been growing. At any given time, no matter how much I read or watched, I still had thirty or more movies saved on Netflix, a dozen more waiting in the DVR’s Recorded list, five or six dozen books wish-listed on Amazon, a foot-tall stack of Sunday Times, Times Magazines, and New Yorkers reminding me that I was behind . . . The Times’ weekly Book Review and Arts & Leisure sections, where I found a lot of this fodder, were going to be the death of me!

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#throwbackthursday: The Flor-A-Bama, 2013

By the time we get to this point in the school year, in mid- to late September, the newness has worn off, the slow slog to end of the first grading period is being felt by all, it’s still 100 degrees outside, and I want to make this face. Here I am, before I went back to wearing a beard, having a drink on the beach outside the Flor-A-Bama back in 2013.

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Dirty Boots: “The Wisdom of ‘WarGames'”

At the end of the 1983 movie WarGames, after the WOPR computer (called Joshua) had completed its frightening game of Global Thermonuclear War, its conclusion was: The only way to win is not to play. In that age of deep-seated fears about Russia and nuclear war, this thematic statement pointed toward what we all knew in real life, too. If a nuclear war did break out, we would all lose.

In a way, Joshua’s truism is correct, and in the Deep South, we have a euphemism for no-win quarrels: a pissing contest. The fight that will gain nothing and change nothing, but is only about causing damage in the interest of bravado and perceived superiority. From middle-school bullying to political grandstanding, these conflicts lack value and substance, but sadly so many of us get sucked in by them, picking sides (because we feel like we must) and digging the trenches we’ll use for self-defense. Then the nitpicking starts, then the antagonisms, then we look up and things have gotten out of hand . . . but the needle doesn’t move one way or the other. These are pretty prevalent on most social media platforms.

[image error]However, Joshua’s little truism is also wrong, in a way. In some situations, we must play. We’ve got clear and present problems in this country, and in this world, and our attention, time, and effort will be required to solve them. While more than half of American adults check social media every day, more than half of us also don’t exercise the most fundamental right in a democracy once every two years. I often hear from people that they don’t vote because they don’t know anything about the candidates. That can be remedied . . . with attention, time, and effort. For an American adult with internet access, it would take a few minutes to establish which districts he or she lives in – city council, county commission, board of education, state legislature, and congressional – followed by a few hours every other year to get a better understanding of who and what are being decided upon. Someone who was really ambitious might even spend some extra time exploring third-party candidates.

Like that game of Global Thermonuclear War at the end of WarGames, these days elections break out and we lose, because the machine is playing itself while we watch. Then we end up like that roomful of awestruck on-lookers who can do no more than stare anxiously and hope that everything turns out OK. In the movie, the bureaucrats were so busy with their pissing match that the only hopes for a positive outcome were a down-and-out computer scientist who had faked his own death and a slick teenage hacker who reorganized the world from his messy bedroom. While we all felt relief when Joshua didn’t blow up the world, when these anti-heroes saved us all by defying The Man, in the real world the wisdom of WarGames lies in an altogether different realization, one that has great relevance in our current era: the people who are supposed to be taking care of business need to quit bickering and do the work they’re charged with doing.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Ten Films about the South”

[image error]In case you can’t already tell from reading other posts in this blog, I’m marginally fascinated by depictions and conceptions of the region where I live. I say marginally because I’m not obsessed by it, but I am more than a little bit interested. And since films are the major mass media of the 20th century, meaning that many of these depictions occurred on the silver screen, movies form the conceptions that lots of people hold. If you can’t tell what I mean by that, I’ll ask this: how many people outside the South take their ideas about the South from Gone with the Wind or Forrest Gump and how many take their ideas from actual historical or journalistic research?

Of course, these depictions produce, in part, the stereotypes that we’re known for . . . Birth of a Nation was the first ever blockbuster movie hit, in 1918, and that film created a lot of people’s conceptions of what the South was— and is. I took the time a few years ago to watch this movie, and I found it absurd, looking at it nearly a hundred years later. To think that so many people actually bought into the holistic idea that was presented there!

So here are some of my commentaries on ten films that feature the Deep South in their plot lines. I’ve already spent a previous post writing about Smokey and the Bandit so I won’t include that one in this list . . . but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it.

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Help a blogger out!

[image error]Each year, a bill comes to renew the web domain and hosting services for Welcome to Eclectic. While I like keeping the blog free for any reader anywhere to click on a post and read, the costs associated with keeping Welcome to Eclectic online are real. Though thousands of people visit Welcome to Eclectic each year, only a few click on the page that offers information on how to support it financially, and even fewer actually make a donation. So, I’m asking my readers to help a blogger out— make a donation, even a small one. If you’ve enjoyed what you read here, be a part of keeping it going.

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Southern Movie 41: “Ellie” (1984)

If 1980s comedies are a genre all their own, then 1984’s Ellie fits right in. This movie is about as deep as a mud puddle. It is silly and zany and inappropriate and chock-full of ridiculous stereotypes. People fall over each other and scramble around haylofts. It has no-name actors. It even has the obligatory 1980s gratuitous-nudity scenes.

Ellie begins with a quick background narrative told in a folksy, comedic tone, as still photos pass over the pattern of red bandana. We learn that there is a pretty widow (played by an older Shelley Winters) with three twenty-something sons and a seedy, mustached brother, and that she has married an old farmer who has a pretty daughter named Ellie. The photos and storytelling let us into the scenario quickly: the sons are salacious, and the brother is a jailbird, but that Ellie is sweet and pure.

The scene then shifts to a rickety Southern farmhouse where a pretty young blonde woman comes out carrying a lamb. A country theme song plays as she walks around the homeplace. After dropping the lamb in the barn, she goes to feed the pigs where a handsome young man in a leather jacket – one of her stepbrothers – plays a shiny resonator on the fence then falls into the pigshit because he’s trying to look down her dress. Next, she is in a garden plot while another stepbrother, this one a big dummy in overalls and a red baseball cap, takes pictures of her when she leans over. Of course, he falls face-down in the dirt, too. Finally, Ellie is in the yard with the chickens as the stepmother and the sleazy brother look on, and he gets kicked off the porch when he leans forward to look too hard.

In the next scene, we see the elderly farmer and his chubby wife in the bedroom, which is decked out with gaudy curtains and bedding. He is trying to get some nookie, but she tells him that he’ll get nothing until he writes and signs a will that leaves her everything. We find out during her pleading that they met when the wife, whose name is Cora, came to their house selling magazines door-to-door. Of course, in the interest of getting some affection, he does what she asks.

The next day, the oddball blended family is outdoors at a picnic. The old farmer sits in a wheelchair beside his wife, who chows down on a plate of food, while her useless brother drinks beer in an inner tube on the ground. The farmer is fussing at his wife about how her sons and her brother Art look at Ellie, and about how Art never does any work, and it is then that we find out that Art has a heart condition. The sons we saw during the opening credits amble up; one rides up on a dirt bike. When Ellie comes over, her father tries to talk to her about how she has grown up and how her body is drawing the attention of young men, but she swears that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. After she leaves, though, the farmer’s time has come. His wife secretly lets loose the brake on his wheelchair and gives him a push down the hill and into the pond. However, he doesn’t drown right away, and the sons argue over who has to finish him off: “Aw Mom, I had to kill the last one,” one says. Cora gives up and does it herself.

At his funeral, where the widow Cora is dressed in black and flanked by her sons, a simpleton preacher rambles out a wobbly sermon to a few people in attendance. The sheriff is there, too, and he compliments the widow on her good looks, but when Ellie declares that her father’s death was no accident, a melee ensues! It is quick though and ends with Cora and her sons tripping over the coffin and falling into the grave as Ellie looks over the side and smiles at them.

That night, in a particularly bizarre scene, Cora is lying on the bed eating sweets and surrounded by her sons. One of them paints her toes, while the other two lounge . . . almost like lovers beside and on top of her. But the action is going on outside. Ellie is in the barn, and Art makes a go at her, informing her that her father is no longer there to protect her. He offers her some chewing gum while she points a pitchfork at him. He makes his move but she throws him off and then dumps water on him. Back in the bedroom, Art comes walking into the scene where the mother and her three sons are in the bed, and we find out that Art is not Cora’s brother at all. One of the sons calls him Uncle Art and he replies to “cut the crap.” Cora then shoos the young men and shimmies onto Art, who she has thrown onto the bed. Art, however, is having none of it, pleading about his heart, and we figure out then that Art’s condition is not just a way to get out of work— it’s also a way to keep the overweight, older woman off of him.

Meanwhile, outside by campfire, Ellie gives a tearful monologue about her situation. Given the style of the film, it’s not terribly convincing, but given the context of the girl’s situation, it moves the plot forward. She is alone and outnumbered by a group of shysters, and she must take action to save herself.

[image error]In the daylight, Ellie’s first target is the photographer-stepbrother in the overalls. He is big and goofy, wearing his red baseball cap backwards, probably the easiest to pick-off of the three. A good ol’ 1980s montage follows as we listen to some country music and watch the smiling pair have their impromptu photo shoot in the woods. When we come out of the montage, the goofy boy wants to take some naked photos. She resists playfully but also backs him onto a rock ledge and coaxes a confession out of him about who killed her father. Ellie pleads seductively, claiming that her father abused her and that she’s glad he’s gone. The boy falls for it and lets out of a few of the facts, but as she removes her dress, he backs over the rock ledge to his death.

After his funeral, which is in the same spot as the old farmer’s, Cora is at the sheriff’s office. She proclaims angrily that she wants him to pursue Ellie as a murderer, but the sheriff alludes slyly to the mysterious death of Cora’s husband not too far in the past. Instead of doing his duty, he does what any no-count, half-brained Southern sheriff would do in that situation: he attempts to have sex with the widow who is accusing her stepdaughter of murdering her son. But Cora is having none of it.

Later, Ellie is seen hanging out of the hayloft of the barn while another of her stepbrothers is practicing his riflery nearby. She asks him to come up there to help her with a rat, but he replies that he’s been told by his mother to stay away from her. Of course, he can’t resist ultimately, and he climbs up there and finds her in her stripped down to her bra and panties. As this goes on, Cora returns in her convertible, but in the dark barn, her son has stripped too – having dropped his rifle to do so – then another bizarre tidbit follows. For some reason, they begin playing a kinky game of toreador with Ellie’s skirt, which has the young man in his tighty-whiteys putting bull horns on his head with his fingers. But that was part of the ruse. Ellie maneuvers him around with the game, and Cora gets to see from ground level her near-naked son catapults himself out of the hayloft and to his death. At the funeral, the skinny old sheriff attempts once again to gain Cora’s affection, but fails . . . Over by the cars, Cora proclaims that she has a “craving for a certain young lady’s blood,” but Art just stands by, chewing his gum.

Now, only one stepbrother remains – the guitar player – and Ellie has a plan for him, too. We see her down by the pond, sawing off the depth marker by the small pier. Now that Ellie has disposed of one stepbrother in the woods and another in the hayloft, the only stereotypical place left for the last one is the honky-tonk. Ellie dolls herself up in her ramshackle bedroom and goes the red-tinted barroom where she knows he will be. (While this is going on, we see Cora and Art stumbling through the woods with a box and discussing how Ellie is to be disposed of.) As she did with the other stepbrothers, she cozies up to this one, too, and before long, they are riding his motorcycle to the pond where we’ve just seen Ellie. The two make out a bit and shed a few clothing items, then – right after we see Cora and Art dump what he know to be snake under Ellie’s bedsheets – Ellie says, “Dive for me” to her stepbrother.

The problem is: he doesn’t fall for it. They tussle, and she runs, her clothes first half-stripped then completely. He gets on his motorcycle and chases her back to her little bedroom. Meanwhile, Art and Cora are in the honky-tonk, finding out that the two young people were there and left together. And of course, as the young man tries to force himself on Ellie in her bed, the snake gets him. And we have funeral number three.

That night, as Cora soaks in the bath and sips whiskey, Art suggests that they sell the farm and leave, but Cora wants revenge. Art reminds her that the sheriff warned them that, if there were any more “accidents,” he’d have to investigate. Which wouldn’t seem like much a threat coming from a skinny, ineffective lawman like this, but a plot twist comes next.

We see the sheriff striding across a town street and into a store. After warning the effeminate little storekeeper that it’d better be good to wake him from his nap, the storekeeper shows him photos that photographer-stepson took of Cora drowning her husband! The sheriff still isn’t convinced, and the little man purses his lips out of chagrin. The sheriff leaves, and Ellie meets him on the sidewalk. The sheriff starts to show her to the pictures, but then doesn’t, and Art pulls up in the car, with a big grin on her face. Ellie says, “What do you want?”

The pair drive back out to the farm, where Cora is waiting on the porch. They have brought Ellie back to the house to look through some of her father’s things before the place is sold. She is sent to the attic, and after she goes in the house, Art and Cora discuss their plan to kill her. Art is hesitant, but Cora reminds him of his past crimes (which she could call the law about) and of his need for heart medicine (which the money will pay for). Art agrees. Up in the attic, he attempts to overtake Ellie to stab her with a switchblade knife, but Ellie asks to say her prayers before she dies.

As Ellie is half-praying, half-influencing Art, a Mercedes Benz pulls up the dirt driveway and a citified woman gets out, blathering about how the house is exactly what she wants! As Art tries to decide whether to go through with the murder, the woman and her husband in a three-piece suit come up to the house, wanting to look it over for purchase. Cora tries to keep them out of the house, knowing that Art may be committing murder upstairs, but the pushy woman just keeps on. Upstairs, Ellie is stripping down, supposedly giving in to Art’s suggestion that he deflower her before she dies, but the city couple is worming their way up there. What follows is an another very strange scene, where Art and Ellie are wrapped up in some kind of kinky naked wrestling match, while the city woman gets turned on by their primal noises. But, as we knew would happen, the ultimate result is Art’s death . . . by heart attack. He declares, “What a way to go!” as he falls naked down the stairs at Cora’s feet.

By now, Cora is ready to just do it herself. She begins to chase Ellie with a shotgun, blasting away. Yet, success will evade her . . . sort of. Eventually, the sheriff drives up and puts a stop to it. And resolves the situation in his own way: he takes Cora away in handcuffs then marries her, with Ellie as the maid of honor. With the trio standing outside the little church, the country music plays, and the credits roll.

Filmed on location in Maypearl, Texas, which is south of Dallas/Fort Worth, Ellie shares quite a few similarities with other low-budget Southern comedies from the 1970s and ’80s. Stirring together a blend of shameless lawbreaking, sexual chicanery, and outright stupidity, we get these “Southern-fried” films that seems to be either knock-offs of or half-rate attempts at what The Dukes of Hazzard or Smokey and the Bandit did reasonably well. One commenter on IMDb tried to peg this movie as a recasting of the Electra-Clytemnestra story from Greek tragedy, but I wouldn’t give it that much credit, even if the storylines are similar. What Ellie is is simple enough: a silly sex comedy, set in the South, that bases its characters and story on the lowest Erskine Caldwell-style stereotypes. 

To read Southern Movie posts, see the full list.

Dirty Boots: “The Shift Away from Eliot (and Toward Tartuffe)”

In his landmark 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” – published one hundred years ago this year – poet TS Eliot ended with this as one of his key points:

To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad.

He was discussing poetry in the essay, but his point could be taken more broadly. What matters more than the artist – his or her life, biography, or credentials – is the quality of the work. Is the work, as Eliot put it, “an expression of significant emotion”? That was the criteria that the great Modernist proffered as what should be the prime force in evaluation and assessment. Then, in the last sentence, Eliot closed by stating that poets (or more broadly, creative artists) must live “in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

[image error]Having received my formative literary (and artistic) education, both institutional and practical, in the late twentieth century, Eliot’s idea was the gold standard. The work must stand on its own. An artist is not good because of who he or she is, but because of what he or she produces. And, as they say on Project Runway: “One day, you’re in; the next, you’re out.” Put out a weak album or a bad movie or a clunker of a novel, you might be done.

Yet, our current involvement with fast-paced news and social media seems to be changing that. Today, we have people who are “famous for being famous”— minimally talented socialites and hucksters who have managed to turn into image into brand using the democratic modes offered by YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. It is Eliot’s paradigm turned on its head: To divert interest from the art to the artist. Their fans – now called “followers” in a peculiarly cultish bit of linguistic evolution – aren’t looking at them because they’ve produced anything of value or because they seem able to do that at all, but simply because they’ve offered themselves to be looked at.

In my estimation, someone who isn’t doing anything worth watching . . . shouldn’t be watched. As an example, I’d point out much of the content on YouTube: bluster, yelling and woo-ing at unimpressive acts, wide-eyed efforts to draw attention to mundane things, all of which only prove that an Average Joe with a GoPro, a selfie stick, and a grasp of the formula can participate in what was once show business, and what should not be mistaken for the arts.

TS Eliot suggested a century ago that a poet (or artist) should live in the “present moment of the past,” meaning that creative people should understand both the zeitgeist and the history and traditions that led to it. However, convinced that these are unprecedented times we live in, many current performers and “influencers” instead express an open indifference to tradition, even to recent history. Again, Eliot’s idea has been turned upside down by people who want to live only in “merely the present.”

Perhaps this is a regular old, run-of-the-mill historical shift, like the ’60s generation had long hair and flower power that made their Depression-survivor parents say, How could could you believe such things? But man, I hope not. I can’t imagine the results if we do shift to a no-substance, anti-tradition ideal that values spectacle over message, if we do move intellectually away from Eliot’s stance that artistic merit yields credibility, if we do abandon seeing ourselves as part of a historical continuity. We will be in deep, deep trouble culturally if the idle chatter of the inane Tartuffe is elevated while no one has read Tartuffe to know what that even means.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.