Foster Dickson's Blog, page 43
May 19, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The most important one—”
[image error]Back in 2004, the movie Crash was hailed as an important film for giving mainstream America a glimpse into the tenuous relationship between police and people of color. It won three Oscars including Best Motion Picture and Original Screenplay. A moviegoer who went to see Crash in the theater might have thought, Finally! A movie that deals with racial injustice and the police! That is, if that person never saw Colors, which came out in 1988, three years before the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, or the 1975 movie Cornbread, Earl and Me about a black boy whose idol, a promising teenage basketball star in the neighborhood, is killed by police in a case of mistaken identity. That early 2000s moviegoer might also never have even heard of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song! from 1971, or the Sidney Poitier classic In the Heat of the Night from 1967.
May 17, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Pascagoula Abductions, 1973”
Forty-five years ago today, on October 11, 1973, two men named Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker reported to local sheriffs that they had been abducted by aliens while fishing on the Pascagoula River in southern Mississippi. Hickson and Parker claimed that a spaceship whizzed by, paralyzed them, and took them onto the ship to look them over.
May 16, 2019
#throwbackthursday: “I Just Make People Up” at Black Belt Treasures, 2009
Ten years ago today, on May 16, 2009, Clark Walker and I were doing a book signing at Black Belt Treasures in Camden, Alabama. I Just Make People Up Ramblings with Clark Walker, published by NewSouth Books, is a full-color coffee table book that offers a narrative biography of Clark and a representative sample of his paintings from a then-five decade career.
May 15, 2019
Disrupters & Interlopers: Clement Wood
Writer and activist Clement Wood was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1888. After graduating from the University of Alabama in 1909, and from Yale’s law school in 1911, he moved to Birmingham where he became active in politics. However, Wood was not a conventional Southern lawyer-politician of the early twentieth century. After working in city government in 1912 and 1913, he ran for mayor as a Socialist, but Wood was generally not a good fit for Birmingham. As one source put it, he was “removed for ‘lack of judicial temperament’ after he fell afoul of the local political establishment [and] moved to New York City.”
Clement Wood’s unorthodox writing career was rooted in his connections to the Socialist Party and to the Halderman-Julius publishing company, which produced the Little Blue Book series. Wood’s prolific and diverse output included salacious novels, works of literary criticism, writing instruction books, and edited anthologies, as well as a rhyming dictionary and a slang dictionary. About Wood, the This Goodly Land website explains:
He taught correspondence courses, sang spirituals in concerts and on the radio, and wrote approximately seventy Little Blue Book pamphlets, a series aimed at the American working class. Wood was a Socialist and lectured for the Ingersoll Forum of the American Society for the Advancement of Atheism. He was highly opinionated and seemed to seek out controversy.
[image error]Among his early works were Negro Songs: An Anthology and Poetry of the Southern States, both published in 1924, and Sexual Relations in Southern States, published in 1929. Among his more interesting titles were Clement Wood and his loves: how a good boy of methodism turned pagan and A Short History of the Jews. Though his most widely circulated work may be his rhyming dictionary, Wood’s greatest literary accomplishments were his 1917 poetry collection Glad of Earth and his 1920 novel Mountain, based on the “iron city” of Birmingham.
Wood died from a stroke in 1950 at his home in upstate New York. Though his eclectic works can easily be found online, Wood is less well-known today, through he was definitely representative a radical tradition that thrived in the early twentieth century.
The Disrupters & Interlopers series highlights lesser-known individuals from Southern history whose actions, though unpopular or difficult, contributed to changing the old status quo. To read previous posts, click any of the links below:
May 14, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
As I progress further into middle age, it has been hard to watch some of the things that I have known and enjoyed to fade away and disappear. When we’re together, friends my age and I inevitably talk at least a little about stores, businesses, events, and people that used to be around but aren’t anymore. And while it’s sad not be able to revisit them or even to take our own children to experience the same things, that’s part of it.
[image error]Having lived my whole life in my hometown, I’ve had a front-row seat for the march of time that has altered one local landscape. Kids no longer ride their bikes to the video arcades where we huddled around Pac-Man and Galaga, since this generation is hunched over an iPad or laptop at home. There are now payday loan places housed in old fast-food buildings where we used to grab a bite, and neighborhoods where my friends once lived are littered with for-sale signs and sprinkled with boarded-up windows. Sites that used to be cow fields have become either strip malls with Starbuck’s and hibachi restaurants or expansive, corporate-owned car lots. Driving around town, I find myself starting sentences with, “When I was a kid, that was a . . .”
It is discomfiting that things change, but it would be far spookier if they didn’t. In John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he describes a wedding scene where the bride and her expectant groom are held forever in that moment of beauty and youth, yet are forever unable to progress beyond the ceremony into their marriage. In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the newly deceased Emily is warned not to go back and re-experience her life, since she’ll see it knowing what the living don’t know: what comes next, what happens after. In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s protagonist shows us what would happen if the calendar did stand still. Time has to keep moving, or, as the Anne Sexton poem put it, our lives would be “more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped.”
The Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Thanh has been quoted as saying, ““It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” Even though letting go isn’t always easy to do, moving on has a good side, too. Though I do miss some of the now-gone features of yesteryear, the same impermanence has also removed some of the undesirables. I haven’t missed the Great Recession of 2009 at all, nor do I want to relive the late ’90s panic about Y2K. I also don’t miss a downtown Montgomery that was boarded up, empty, and covered with brown-and-gray Biblical murals, and there is a whole range of state and local politicians whose now-obscurity I don’t lament. What we talk about less often than the sadly nostalgic is the bright side of impermanence: the bad shit goes away, too.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
May 13, 2019
The Seven Stages of Grief (for Springtime Paper-Grading)
As a creative writing and senior English teacher, spring comes as both a blessing and a boon. On the one hand, I love the warm weather and bright blooms of April outside; on the other, I am often inside grading papers. While I’ll acknowledge that I did this to myself with my choice of career – accountants have tax season, teachers have paper-grading season – I’ll also share that, with the approach of year’s end and the glorious lead-in to summer vacation, comes the inevitable period when all of us teachers of writing must once again grapple with the seven stages of grief . . .
The first stage, Shock, comes when we must face the fact that we will actually have to read, mark, and grade the elaborate writing assignments that we dreamed up for our students to complete. These long-term projects include documented essays that may have incorporated annotated bibliographies, note cards, outlines, peer reviews, and drafts throughout the year, culminating in final drafts of ten pages or more, which we hope (desperately) will be well-written and thoroughly researched with sources appropriately cited— just like we taught.
After that, Denial is our first best bet in facing this shock. This comes when we look at that big stack of papers from dozens of students, and refuse to begin. There’s time, of course. “Certainly no one expects these back quickly,” we tell ourselves. There are other tasks to be completed right now: emails to be answered, forms to be filled out.
Anger sets in shortly thereafter when we take a breath, sigh deeply, and take on the first few papers. Here, our worst fears are revealed to be true: writing errors, awkward sentences, bizarre word choices, rambling, incorrect citations, even outright plagiarism. This third stage is marked by an unseemly realization that the whole stack, with a few exceptions, will contain the problems that we see in those first few.
Bargaining is a move forward but not much. In response to the overwhelming self-doubt about whether we can face the whole stack, there’s the plan to grade a few papers each day, which may even include a chart or countdown. And in the backs of our minds, there are also faint ideas about “losing” the papers. We could set them on top of the car, and forget, and drive off . . . “I guess I’ll just have to give everyone a hundred,” we could sheepishly propose. (The sad thing is: no one would complain.)
Depression comes about a third of the way through the stack. This feeling of hopeless bitterness comes from marking errors that a fourth-grader shouldn’t make, like not capitalizing the first letter of a name or place, but also from discovering prevalent instances of plagiarism in some papers. “Am I wasting my time,” we ask ourselves as we slog through the intellectual mud. “Did anybody learn anything . . . ?”
Testing occurs when we face another fact: grades have to be turned in to finalize the term. This paper is one of the major grades for the fourth grading-period, and it has to be in there. This is the point when we wish that paper-grading could be like an ’80s movie montage: some invigorating song plays and when it’s over, we’re done!
Acceptance finally arrives with a few days left and a few papers to go. By this time, we’ve read some good papers, and a few really good ones, and we’ve gotten over the insult of having a student whose writing lacks even basic grammar to copy-and-paste a whole section from an article in The Atlantic. “No, I haven’t wasted my time,” we’ve surmised by this point. “Some of them seemed to get it.” All that remains is to hand them back and be done.
No path is without its brambles. Along with the perks of a career in teaching English and writing, which include reading great literature and plenty of time off, come the inevitable bouts of struggling against carelessness, procrastination, and avoidance. I can’t say that I blame the students though: when I was young, I’d’ve rather been doing other things, too. But despite the best intentions of the teachers who create these long-term writing assignments to ennoble and enlighten college-bound his-schoolers, this cyclical conundrum repeats itself . . . annually . . . and without fail.
May 12, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Southern Movie 7: ‘The Waterboy'”
In honor of Mother’s Day, a Southern Movie about a boy who loves his momma . . .
[image error]Chock-full of catch phrases that have become oddball euphemisms in modern American culture, The Waterboy takes us to the fringes of Deep Southern culture via the football program at a tiny Louisiana college. Adam Sandler plays Bobby Boucher, a possibly-retarded man in his thirties who lives in the swamps with his mother, played by Kathy Bates. Boucher, who is obsessed with “high-quality H20,” works as the waterboy for the South Central Louisiana University Mud Dogs, coached by long-time loser “Mister Coach Klein,” played by Henry Winkler of Happy Days fame. Klein has fallen on hard times, brought on by the trickery of his arch-rival coach, the sinister and cruel Red Beaulieu, played by country music star Jerry Reed.
Everybody loves an underdog story, and Bobby Boucher’s ascendance (from being a no-confidence mama’s boy to a college football star who gets the girl) is egged on by the now-infamous, Cajun-drawled “You can do it!” shouted enthusiastically by Rob Snider’s unnamed character. The Waterboy is Rudy gone horribly wrong.
May 10, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “When I become president . . .”
I will run as a moderately liberal conservative who is a strong supporter of the First Amendment and a representative for the best values of the South: individual rights tempered by a love of God and family. My campaign theme song will be Merle Haggard’s “Rainbow Stew.”
May 9, 2019
When a Tug of War Yields a Log-Jam
Sometimes, on the news, we see polling that gives an indication of how many Americans think the country is on the right track or on the wrong track . . . According to one polling group, Rasmussen Reports, that wrong-track number has been over 50% for more than two years, since March 2017. Right now, the website RealClearPolitics has the bad number at 56.4%, while the well-known pollster Gallup has 65% of respondents saying that they’re “dissatisfied” with what’s happening in the country.
And about this, I agree with the majority of Americans. I, too, believe that our country is on the wrong track. I, too, am dissatisfied. But not for the reasons that one might assume. I’m not stewing about the Mueller Report or the possibility of an impeachment, nor am I disgruntled over who got blocked from Facebook and Instagram. The tug-of-war has really become uninteresting to me, because the Alex Joneses of the world come and go. I know what my values are – neither political party fully represents them – and those values are more important to me than personalities or caucuses or news cycles or trolls or clicks or followers.
I believe that our country is on the wrong track not because of who is in office or what party they’re from, but because American voters seem to support the entrenchment that contributes to a political log-jam. Our political system was designed for compromise, and the way it works best, each side has to concede some things to get some things. We can’t move forward on climate change when one side says that we have to combat it, and the other side says that it doesn’t exist. We can’t craft workable immigration policy when we can’t agree about whether we’re talking about human beings who fear for their lives or monsters who’ve come to ruin our country. Meanwhile, both sides have claimed to be working in the interest of the common man, as wages stagnated and income inequality got worse. Yet, too few nationally prominent voices are trying to remind us that division won’t solve this, while media darlings like AOC get attention for proclaiming that moderates are “meh.”
On a brighter note than that one-syllable snub, in an April column titled “Politics Isn’t A Sport,” the Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson made this viable argument:
At one level, a politics based on team loyalty ceases to serve political purposes. It may be entertaining — to those who find democratic decline a hoot — but it makes the building of working coalitions to confront specific problems more difficult. Anyone who wishes to cooperate with elements on the other side on, say, education reform, or health-care reform, or entitlement reform is viewed as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. If the main standard in politics is the victory or loss of the tribe, then the task of passing laws to make conditions better becomes secondary and suspect.
I know that America is fascinated these days with disruption and newness, with installing people with no political experience into elected office, but some of the newbies are carrying a stolid platform and an iron will into a place where process, relationships, and compromise all matter.
However, there’s a root to this problem in our culture that’s less often acknowledged. Today, the unceasing flow-of-imagery has inflated the value of success. Though it is good to set a goal, work for it, and achieve it, this other version of success is only about getting what we want by surmounting obstacles, navigating loopholes, emerging triumphant, and not simply defeating opponents but standing alone among a field full of fallen competitors. This is success as defined by Nike and Gatorade commercials, by test scores and US News & World Reports rankings, by Best in Class and Best in Show awards— and who wouldn’t want to to be best? But when that version of success makes its way into politics, there can only be winners whose will is enacted and losers whose will is subjugated. It is faith in that version of success that leads to gerrymandering, stonewalling, and “alternative facts.”
In a recent column, another of those few voices, David Brooks, outlines and describes his own take on this quasi-ethical phenomenon in “Five Lies Our Culture Tells Us.” They are:
Career success is fulfilling.
I can make myself happy.
Life is an individual journey.
You have to find your own truth.
Rich and successful people are worth more than poorer and less successful people.
He’s right that these notions are prevalent in our culture. Numbers one and two, when translated into politics, mean: the world will be perfect when my side “succeeds” and our opinions become laws. Numbers three and four imply point to the notion that, if it satisfies my perspective, then it must be good and right. Finally, number five is a gross distortion of that Lockean principle: if private property is good, then a lot of private property must be great!
All five of Brook’s “lies” center on the individual over the collective, on personal goals over societal good, on a kind of success that garners as much as possible to one’s self, which leads to extreme partisanship when applied to politics. Within this kind of thinking, any victory for the other side can’t be tolerated, and any flaws in one’s own side must be denied, subverted, and framed as lies and fabrications; ergo, my side is based on my truth, which makes me happy, and therefore we should be successful and fulfilled, and they should not.
This is no way to envision a democracy, especially one that unites so many diverse people, and that’s why I’m in the majority who believe that we’re on the wrong path. Our current divisive politics does not allow for the depth and breadth of who we are. Though Americans can be opinionated, argumentative, and hostile, we can also be giving, caring, virtuous, understanding, charitable, selfless, and kind— and that’s what I’d like to see reflected in our politics.
Moreover, we’ve got some pretty significant challenges to face these days. During a recent Meet the Press panel discussion, columnist Peggy Noonan remarked that, when the prime players get done bickering over their personal squabbles, they’ve got a country to run. After all, that’s the purpose of gaining elected office: to participate in crafting policy solutions to societal quandaries, not to achieve personal success by getting on the right team and defeating people whose ideas contradict one’s own. That’s why they call government jobs and elected offices “public service,” an ideal that, if emphasized, would put us back on the right track.
May 8, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Southern Movie 15: ‘Lemora'”
The 1970s were an awesome era for bizarre, low-budget horror movies, and the strange Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural from 1973 is a part of that tradition. This one has it all: bad acting, a storyline that makes little sense, cheap sound effects, methodically slow walking, too many camera close-ups. Supposedly set in 1930s Georgia, the only things Southern about Lemora are the forced accents and the evangelist-preacher male lead. TCM Underground’s webpage on Lemora describes the film this way:
Set in the Depression-era South, it opens like a rural gangster movie and detours into a drama of religious hypocrisy before becoming a sinister Alice in Wonderland.
That’s pretty generous.
