Foster Dickson's Blog, page 49
March 7, 2019
#throwbackthursday: Motley Crüe in Normandale, ca. 1983
In the early 1980s, my parents were among a small group who started a neighborhood watch program called the Normandale Association They worked to get our neighbors organized, to keep a look out for suspicious characters , etc. Once the program was in place, my dad went and put the metal neighborhood-watch sign near the edge of the neighborhood, and almost immediately, someone came along with red spray paint and wrote “Motley Crüe” across the back of it. My dad was furious! Thirty years later, when I drove through my old neighborhood, that sign was still there— and so was Motley Crüe.
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March 6, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Things.”
I’m in my office, scanning a three-rack stack of old cassette tapes. As my finger runs down the middle column of the lower rack, there are Keith Richard’s Main Offender, T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, The Best of the Band . . . Like everything in those racks, each tape has its own story. I can remember liking “Wicked As It Seems” after I saw the video on MTV, a black-and-white montage that featured a near-elderly Keith Richards emerging from the darkness to mumble his lyrics. I can remember discovering T. Rex after seeing that iconic image of Marc Bolan, face covered and top hat on, the look that Slash was copying. I can remember buying The Band’s album as a primer to that group I’d heard about, the one that backed up Bob Dylan in the ’60s.
March 5, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
[image error]When I was a boy, my dad used to cut grass for our neighbors to make extra cash. He charged $7 to cut the front and back yards, edge the curb, run the weedeater, sweep the driveway, and trim up any stray growth among the hedges. When my older brother and I helped him, doing mostly the smaller tasks, he kept $5 for household expenses and gave us each $1. That sounds like a pittance, but in the early 1980s, a buck could buy a candy bar and a Coke, so I didn’t fuss. If I got out there and helped him with two or three yards, I was all good for the week.
Most of the neighbors who used him as their yard man were elderly and had known him since he was a teenager. My dad inherited his parents’ house after they passed away, so my brother and I grew up in the same house he did and among people who had known him (and his family) most of his life. That meant we were raised on that cusp between an older Southern sense of place, surrounded by generations of people who knew us, and a New South world of suburban ranch houses, dirt bikes, and MTV.
We came up at a time when a dollar still meant something, but so did having the high score on Galaga or Dig Dug at the neighborhood arcade. Neither of those would last long. As earlier generations had, I made my annual Christmas wish list from the Sears catalog, and I rode my bicycle when I wanted to get somewhere. Like our rural forebears, us kids left the sight of adults to have our fun, treading independently to our backwoods and vacant-lot “forts” and other hovels, where older boys smoked cigarettes and made their own rules. (Picture the opening scenes of The Outsiders when Dallas takes the deck of cards from the little boys in the weedy lot.) Having to stay inside, where we could be governed, was one of our punishments.
Yet, we differed starkly from those farming forebears— in that we had air-conditioning, television, and snack-packed goodies for our lunches. To find only oranges and apples in our Christmas stockings would have been a grave injustice, not a present. To own nothing more than two pair of overalls – one for Sunday, one for every other day – was unfathomable. To eat regular meals made from homegrown items and cooked over a wood fire . . . People did that? Yes, they did. My maternal grandparents, who were born in 1907 and 1911, respectively, were among them.
But what did that mean to me? I was a kid whose milk came from a plastic jug, whose blue jeans came from a mall department store, and whose entertainment was piped onto a screen through a thick cable that allowed us to witness the gyrations of David Lee Roth and Cyndi Lauper. While I do remember the once-heralded Billy Graham Crusade taking over prime-time, I also remember not being happy about it since it interrupted the other shows. Bryl-creem was still a thing, but not all that popular among the younger crowd.
What makes sad, and what makes me miss those vestiges of the older bygone ways, is the closeness that we seem to have lost. The few societal connections left standing by cellphones having unlisted numbers were mowed down by the advent of privacy fences and the TV series To Catch a Predator. Now, we’ve been reduced to Facebook stalking and front-door security cameras to remind ourselves that the human race is still up and running. We’ve become people who roll up our car windows because we’re frightened of carjackers and fresh air. As for me, I miss knowing folks in the grocery store by name and seeing kids on bikes flying up and down the street on a Saturday, just as much as I miss my grandmother’s cornbread, walks home from school with my friends, and having everything I needed paid for with a dollar that I earned working alongside my dad.
“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.
March 4, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “How Cool It Was— Back Then”
There’s been a lot of heavy stuff to write about lately in the Deep South . . . race in politics, controversial legislation, and the death of a talented writer. Here it is, the heart of the winter, nearly a full month into the dead season with more than two months still to go until spring, and I’m looking for something good to talk about.
So, what better way to take my mind off the mean ol’ present by waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ past. I’m about a half a year late writing about this one, but not too long ago I read that last May marked the 35th anniversary of the release of the classically zany film depiction of the Deep South in the late ’70s, Smokey and the Bandit, starring Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed and Jackie Gleason. If you’ve never seen this movie, shame on you! And frankly, the only thing I respect less than a Southerner who has never seen this movie is a Southerner who has only seen the censored TBS version that used to air on lazy Saturday afternoons, the version where Sheriff Buford T. Justice keeps using the overdubbed, heavily censored epithet “scum bum” (in the place of “sumbitch”).
March 1, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”
And next came Absalom, Absalom! After I got through reading The Sound and the Fury, for about a week I was reading parts of Petrarch’s medieval poetry work La Canzionere as a literary pallet-cleanser when I decided to go ahead with the other William Faulkner novel on my New Year’s Resolution list. Would I have the mental energy to devour another of The Dixie Limited’s novels, this one reputed to be even more difficult and mind-boggling than The Sound and the Fury, while I am teaching next school year? Probably not. Let’s get it done now. So on a Wednesday in mid-June, I put my kids in my little white Echo and we braved the heat between home and the Juliette Hampton Morgan branch of the public library. After finding them another round of summer reading books in the kids’ area, I herded my two little ones across the hall to the adult fiction section, found F FAU, took Absalom, Absalom! off the shelf— and with a sigh went up front to the checkout counter, thinking, Why do I do these things to myself? Couldn’t I just find some enjoyable books and relax this summer . . . ? While a lot of people I know are chattering in veiled terms about those Fifty Shades of Gray housewife porn novels or expressing an intention to read that Henrietta Lacks book, my reading self would remain in self-imposed exile in Yoknapatawpha County, probably to return to the world somewhere around the 4th of July.
February 28, 2019
#throwbackthursday: The Ten-Years-Ago Snow
It isn’t supposed to do this Alabama . . . but ten years ago this week, it did. This was what my street looked like on the morning of March 1, 2009. While this might be called a “light dusting” in some northern states, this little episode shut down schools and businesses for a bit. People in the Deep South don’t know how to drive (or how to act) in this powdery foolishness.
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February 27, 2019
Calling All Readers: Book Talks on #ClosedRanks
[image error]Since the release of Closed Ranks last November, members of the Whitehurst family and I have made regular public appearances to discuss the book and to encourage people to read it and learn more about the Whitehurst Case. Closed Ranks has received media attention on WLWI 1440 AM with Kevin Elkins and WVAS’s HBCU Review with Dr. Robert White, as well as TV news segments on WSFA-12, a substantial article in the Montgomery Advertiser, and a glowing review from the Alabama Writers Forum. And we’ve had book talks and signings with Montgomery Rotary, the Montgomery City of Refuge men’s group, the Read Herring Bookstore, the Juliette Hampton Morgan Public Library, One Montgomery, Pebble Hill in Auburn, the Homewood Public Library, the Alabama Department of Archives & History, the New Life Church of God in Christ, and the Perfecting Holiness Nondenomenational Church in Greenville. The next two public events are in April: at Auburn University at Montgomery’s OLLI brown bag lunch and at the Alabama Book Festival.
If you would like to schedule a book talk or signing, which could be a public or private event, send a message using the Contact Form on the About page. Also, if any reading groups or book clubs have chosen Closed Ranks as their selection, I will be glad to come to the meeting when you discuss the book.
February 26, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
It was unavoidable that we in Alabama would have to answer, in some way, when the world caught wind of Goodloe Sutton’s recent editorial proclaiming that the Ku Klux Klan should descend on Washington DC. And it was inevitable in this era of social media that the world would indeed catch wind of it.
I first read about “Klan needs to ride again” in an article about it in the Montgomery Advertiser, my local paper. Sutton’s pro-Klan editorial isn’t very long, and its logic is not terribly difficult to defeat. On the most basic level, the word “ideology” is misspelled (as “idealogy”) in a sentence calling some people “ignorant,” “uneducated” and “simple-minded,” and the piece vaguely demeans people who supposedly “do not understand the constitution.” And while I’m not a regular reader of the Democrat-Reporter, I have read in recent days that similar sentiments do appear in that newspaper from time to time.
[image error]As the long-time editor-publisher of the Democrat-Reporter newspaper in the small town of Linden in western Alabama, Goodloe Sutton has been a fixture in the Black Belt for longer than most Alabamians have been alive. In the mid-1960s, he took over the newspaper from his father Robert E. Sutton, Jr., who ran it from 1917 until 1965. (His father was also mayor of Linden and a member of the House of Representatives.) I’m not going to make any effort to defend the ideas that Sutton expressed recently – I disagree with him completely – but would like to say that neither he nor his work should be reduced to one outrageous editorial. In addition to this insta-famous rant, he was nominated for an environmental award in 1981 for using his newspaper to educate forest landowners in the area, and in the summer of 1998, Sutton exposed the sheriff of Marengo County for pocketing public funds. By contrast, al.com’s JD Crowe had this to say about Sutton:
He may have always been a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot, but his editorials have gotten steadily more brazen in the last few years. You get the feeling if he didn’t have the newspaper, he’d be walking around town in his underwear yelling at strangers, women and children.
Sutton’s February 14, 2019 editorial rightly drew ire, chagrin, and swift condemnation, which included a denouncement from Sen. Doug Jones and professional excommunication from the Alabama Press Association. The nation quickly hyper-focused on this short editorial, got offended, and shouted intense calls for his resignation, an onslaught that few people could withstand. The outcry succeeded, of course, and Goodloe Sutton handed over leadership of the Democrat-Reporter to someone else on February 21, a week into his dubious bout with global infamy.
Unlike many of the pundits, real and self-appointed, who now hold Sutton up as their target of the moment, I’ve actually been to Linden and know a few people from there. I’m no expert, but my experience with Alabama’s Black Belt extends further than a tweet I saw last week. And what I know is this: when the nation is through spewing venom at this small-town newspaper man, the situation in Linden will not have changed much. Back in 2011, the Tuscaloosa News called “Linden, a town divided by race,” and the evidence to support that assertion included this:
At Linden High, the only public high school in the city, there are 196 students and not one of them is white. Two miles south of Main Street is the private school, Marengo Academy. Of the 205 students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade there, none are black.
As a person interested in real societal progress, these swirling tirades against individuals concern me. There are a bigger issues to consider than the humming masses on social media seem capable of, before they move on to the next victim. I’d rather take a moment to consider and discuss why Sutton wrote these things, what circumstances caused him to have these ideas, what effect he has on his community, what effect the global exposure of his position can achieve, and how we can assist communities like Linden that are geographically isolated, racially divided, and economically struggling. Rather than moving on after Sutton’s fall, I hope we will use this opportunity to address attitudes and actions like his, which are both divisive and unproductive, and which affect real people. Because, if we choose instead to attack one person after another, venting our spleens in visceral terms on the individual offenders, picking them off then fizzling out . . . these questionably righteous ideological tornadoes that fling absolutism and zero-tolerance in every direction won’t be much more than, as William Shakespeare put it, “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
“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.
February 25, 2019
A Long Process: Reading, Writing, and How to “Fix” Education
Last month, Forbes.com ran yet another article in that now-tedious sub-genre of “how to fix education” pieces, and not surprisingly, its title declared, “To Fix College, We Need to Fix the Mistakes We’re Making in K-12.” There are only two subjects that pop up in modern media that really get my goat: criticisms of Generation X and criticisms of K-12 teachers— in part because I’m both. However, I do enter into these education-related articles with something of an open mind . . . and with a genuine but cautious optimism that maybe something fair or productive will be proposed or shared.
This time my optimism was rewarded and some of my admittedly self-righteous notions affirmed. Writer Natalie Wexler shared this in the early portions of the article:
Increasingly, undergraduates are turning away from majors like English and philosophy: In 1967, 17% chose to major in the humanities, but by 2013 the proportion was only 8%. Colleges are replacing those majors with other more popular ones that are presumed to lead more directly to employment, like data analytics. That’s partly the result of economic pressure.
Of course, I was miffed to read that decisions about education and university-level programs are being based on what’s “popular,” rather than what’s best. (Maybe we should create degree programs in Cardi B and Fortnite, I hear that they’re popular these days.)
Then, this somewhat disturbing bombshell came a few paragraphs down:
One survey of American undergraduates at typical four-year colleges revealed that half hadn’t taken a single course in the prior semester that required them to write 20 pages or more; 35% said they studied five hours per week or less; and one third hadn’t taken a course that required even 40 pages of reading per week. Not surprisingly, these students didn’t seem to be learning much: after two years, 45% showed no significant improvement in their ability to think critically, reason, or write well. It’s not clear why professors are assigning so little work, but one possibility is that they realize many students aren’t equipped to do more.
When I read that, I thought, what colleges and major fields did they survey, so I know never to send my children there? One-in-three of these undergrads claim to be reading less than forty pages per week. (These must be the ones so ensconced in their smartphones that they walk into lightpoles.)
Yet, Wexler did proffer a solution to these conundrums that revived my hope:
Still, all is not lost for today’s high school and college students. If they’re motivated and if teachers understand what is needed to help them learn—including breaking down complex problems into manageable steps and providing explicit instruction in how to write [italics mine] about the content of their courses—it’s not too late to build knowledge and the analytical skills that can only develop in tandem with it.
Tying it all together – the passages that I’ve block-quoted here – it is no surprise that the number of English and philosophy majors has declined if we have young people who don’t read much in school, who aren’t assigned intensive amounts of reading, and who aren’t challenged to read difficult works and to write to prove that they understood those works. A person can’t be an English or philosophy major if that person can’t read in a sustained and critical way. A student can’t gain the same intellectual ground from watching YouTube videos, commenting on message boards, and creating Google Slides presentations that he or she could from reading and writing. And, as an assessment method, nothing can replace writing.
The problem here is simple, if you ask me: from the beginning of recorded history in Western culture, adults have transferred knowledge and skills to the young in two main ways, through personal instruction and hands-on learning, and through reading and writing— and computer programs, apps, and other learn-quick schemes have never succeeded in surpassing those historically tried-and-true methods. I know that students complain about long, heavy reading assignments, and that they sometimes avoid them completely by not reading, but that’s no excuse for teachers and professors not to give them!
In 1991 and ’92, I wrote my required senior thesis in twelfth grade proving that the character of Satan in John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem “Paradise Lost” fit the model of an Aristotelian tragic hero. I chose that topic, and the thesis was an independent project where the teacher offered guidance. For that year-long assignment, I had to read the whole epic poem on my own, in a world without internet-based summaries and explanation. I had to read and understand elevated language that didn’t resemble my everyday Alabama speech patterns. I had to choose passages and gather thematic statements that supported my assertion. And I had to organize them into a coherent discussion that made my point. Moreover, for the senior thesis, our teacher gave herself the right to “fail” the paper and hand it back for a revisions, and to keep “failing” it until it was acceptable. I “failed” twice, and had to go back home – in the spring of my senior year, all angsty and excited and ready to graduate – and sit down at my typewriter to rewrite that twenty-plus page paper (because we didn’t have word-processing software to make edits and re-print it). When she accepted it that third time, I felt like I had gotten out of jail. What is most important: twenty-seven years later, I still remember what I learned from that assignment.
While I may agree with Wexler on the one hand, I have a few comments of my own, on the other. First, even if one-third of undergrads aren’t reading at least forty pages per week, two-thirds are. That means that most professors are assigning substantial reading loads. Personally, I’d be curious to know the ages (and generations) of professors who are assigning less reading, and I’d bet that it’s the younger professors who aren’t giving enough. Second, it is not the job of K-12 teachers to send students into college knowing fully how to read, reason, and write flawlessly and without the need for further instruction. This fact should be apparent since the seminal college course in American post-secondary education has always been Freshman Composition. In fact, most of the academics who I know admit that they didn’t really know how to write until they got to graduate school. Teaching a young person to read, think, and write is a long process: elementary teachers have a role, middle school teachers build on that foundation, high school teachers build further on it— and college professors have their working role in the process, too. Let’s not forget that, while we’re talking about how to “fix” the problems in education.
February 24, 2019
Oral Histories in Newtown
Oral histories are, if you ask me, the most underrated genre of written work. These documents, which are typically comprised of storytelling by everyday people explaining their work-a-day lives, are valuable, though often underestimated. The genre’s most famous adherent might be Chicago radio man Studs Terkel, whose Working and Hope Dies Last are among my favorite books, but the quotation that always comes to my mind is in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town, where Thornton Wilder has the Stage Manager to say, in pontificating about small-town life:
Y’know Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney, same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.
Recording the stories of people who may be passed over by “history” is among the most important tasks we in the cultural fields can do.
[image error]It was in that spirit that a fellow teacher, a handful of colleagues, and I proceeded last fall to plan and complete a project that would have our students to collect oral histories in the Newtown community in north Montgomery. After working closely with resident Martha Johnson, who coordinates the annual Newtown Reunion, the event was held yesterday. We talked to and photographed about a dozen Newtown residents during a three-hour morning session at the community center there. Those recordings, scans, and photographs will now be collected and archived for researchers and the public to access.
Our hope is that these archives, like the Jim Peppler Southern Courier Photograph Collection at the Alabama Department of Archives & History, will help the Newtown community to be more fully understood. This community has an extremely rich history that is underpinned by hard-working people who’ve stuck together through difficult times.
Thankfully, we had an honorable-mention grant from the Alabama Bicentennial that served to pay the rental fee for the location yesterday and to purchase supplies needed to conduct the work. Because the project was educational in nature and involved students’ effort and time, there are no plans for any summative publication to follow today’s event. As news becomes available about the completion of the time-consuming archival work and their subsequent public release, I’ll be sure to share that, too.
