Foster Dickson's Blog, page 50
February 22, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Chasing Ghosts: Southern Pride”
The question may have occurred to someone who has been reading my Chasing Ghosts posts: why would a blog that is mainly about progressive ideas and the culture of the Deep South include a series of descriptive pieces about the writer’s family history?
[image error]Chasing Ghosts is not only about finding the bald facts of strands of parents and children that eventually resulted in me. No, for me, being a part of the Deep South is not socio-political; it’s personal. The Dickson family – my branch of it – migrated from the Carolinas to Georgia and finally into Alabama during a period from the mid-1700s through the mid-1800s. We have lived in Alabama for more than 150 years. I have seen census records from the 1850s that show my great-great-great grandfather David Madison Dickson (1811-1877) owning a homestead less than twenty miles from where I live now, having come over from Troup County, Georgia in the 1850s. There is also a family myth, which I read in a book in the Alabama Dept. of Archives & History, that Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is based on Dicksons, who were the plantation owners that she knew where she grew up. Back further than them, my great-great-great-great-great grandfather David “Long Pat” Dickson (1750 – 1830) was a hell-on-horseback patriot in Georgia during the Revolutionary War and later a member of Georgia’s state senate during the early years. In terms of the Deep South’s culture, these and others among my forebears were among the men and women who forged the regional identity, across South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
February 21, 2019
#throwbackthursday: First Monster Truck Show, 2014
It was five years this month that I took my then-five-year-old son to his first monster truck show in Montgomery’s Garrett Coliseum. I had been looking forward to taking him, since my dad regularly took my brother and me to tractor pulls and car crushes in this same venue when we were kids in the 1970s and ’80s. My son had also been a lover of all things motorized since he could move around on this own, and had begged to go to this event . . . He lasted about twenty minutes in the noise.
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February 20, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Before Their Eyes Adjust to the Light”
Working with teenagers, I regularly get to hear expressions of ideas that I too once held: adults want to ruin all fun because they are dead inside; learning is pointless when the subject matter has no direct connection to one’s life; and life will always be like it is right now. These sad and unenviable presumptions, which have come to define the teenager á la Holden Caulfield, arise from a simple lack of life experience and from their disappointing interactions with adult authority figures. (Recall the darkly transparent lyrics to Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen.”) Looking up at the world from their distinctly un-powerful position, life must really seem that way.
February 19, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
[image error]I’ve lived in Alabama for forty-five years and taught here for sixteen, and I’ve never met a kid who liked a spelling test. (I’m sure there are some, I just don’t know them.) However, though we rail against spelling tests and grammar worksheets when we’re young, the alternative is far, far worse— especially for the South. None of us today can imagine a world where widespread illiteracy is the standard. We can’t fathom living, working, and socializing in a society where few people could read and write, where almost all the messages of daily life were transmitted orally.
Not long ago, I finished my surface-level coverage of the history of the English language with my twelfth-grade English students, beginning with the departure of the Romans from the British Isles in the 400s AD and ending with Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755. Each year, we talk about the Old English of “Beowulf” and Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the introduction of Old French by William the Conqueror, then Chaucer’s use of Middle English vernacular in The Canterbury Tales, Wycliffe‘s and Tyndale‘s efforts to have an English Bible, the effects of the printing press on literacy, followed by the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588, Shakespeare’s innovative usage and style, the King James Version of the Bible, and finally, the dictionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries . . . all of which have shaped this strange language that we use today. I want for my students to understand why we English speakers are swimming in irregularities, why English sounds different wherever it’s spoken around the world, and why we have to take those darn spelling tests.
Because we live in a global society, we need standardized spelling and grammar, and the South is no exception. According to Melvyn Bragg’s book The Adventure of English, which accompanied the BBC series of the same name, prior to King Henry V’s chancery beginning to standardize our wacky language’s spelling in the 1400s, there were thirty-four different spellings of the word receive and twenty-two for the word people. Americans, and Southerners in particular, need standardized spelling. Consider this everyday Southern conversation between two working-class men:
Person 1: Jeetyut?
Person 2: Nawjoo?
Person 1: Naw yont-too?
Person: Yeh-lezgo.
If you’re not from the South, you may have no idea what those two men are saying. So here it is, in standard English, which if spoken would hardly sound like what would come out of those two men’s’ mouths:
Person 1: Did you eat yet?
Person 2: No, did you?
Person 1: No, do you want to?
Person: Yes, let’s go.
To move instead to a style of Southern speech that’s more blue-blooded, a dialect/accent that has little use for the consonant R, consider this:
Person 1: Dijoo see that bawee ovuh thayuh?
Person 2: I deeklayuh . . . he’s not spostah be ovuh thayuh!
Now, in standard English spelling:
Person 1: Did you see that boy over there?
Person 2: I declare . . . He is not supposed to be over there!
And those two examples from the Deep South don’t even begin to cover Appalachian English, which is a-whole-nother branch of South-talk.
Can you imagine an customer service rep in Phoenix, Arizona or Burlington, Vermont getting an email from a customer in Nwawlinz or Jawjuh, who spelled words the way they sound down here? The message would read like the cow’s scribbled signs in Chick-Fil-A ads! (If you’re not from the South, you may also not know what Chick-Fil-A is.)
Though we English teachers can be regarded as the enemies of the people – those pedants who insist on rules that no one follows and who make people read books that no one understands – we actually perform a great public service: consolidating and perpetuating a common linguistic and literary heritage that took centuries to forge. Will there be defiant disregard for those standards? Yes. Will we ever enforce utter conformity? Never. (Do we expect to? Not hardly.) But God bless all of you if we ever stopped doing what we do.
“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 18, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Teach.”
On the evening that my students and I met the traveling students from Phillips Exeter Academy for the first time, their teacher Olutoyin Augustus-Ikwuakor had a sheet full of activities planned for our two-hour preliminary session. Mrs. Augustus-Ikwuakor and I had corresponded in the spring about their trip from New Hampshire to Alabama, where they would spend four days in late November learning about social justice and Civil Rights issues, and she wanted her students to meet and collaborate with some local students. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, we were gathered in their hotel’s conference room to eat dinner together, to get to know each other, and to do some educational groundwork. As we looked over her list of activities, I asked if I could have a few minutes to talk with them about Southern history, and she replied, a little surprised, “Oh, you want to teach?”
February 16, 2019
Book Talk: Perfecting Holiness Church in Greenville, February 24
On Sunday afternoon, February 24, Stacy Whitehurst, son of Bernard Whitehurst, Jr. and an elder at New Life Church, and I will be talking about the Whitehurst Case and Closed Ranks at the Perfecting Holiness Nondenomenational Church in Greenville, Alabama. The event, which is part of the church’s Black History program, will be at 2:30 PM.
February 15, 2019
Collecting Stories in Newtown, February 23
Next Saturday, February 23, my Creative Writing students and students from our school’s Photography magnet will be at the Newtown Community Center in north Montgomery to collect stories and images from the Newtown community. The event will be from 9:00 AM ’til 12:00 noon. The project is funded by an honorable mention grant from the Alabama Bicentennial committee.
The historically black Newtown community, situated near Cypress Nature Park, was partially documented in the mid-1960s by Southern Courier photographer Jim Peppler, whose collection is now held at the Alabama Department of Archives & History. However, since the 1960s, the community has struggled with a lack of development opportunities that have enhanced and expanded other parts of the city. One December 2018 news article explained that residents’ water had been running brown for years.
Unfortunately, the history of Newtown has also not been well-documented, and through this student project, we hope not only to make progress toward that goal, but also to connect dozens of Montgomery students to an often-neglected aspect of our local history. In addition to preparations that have already been made, our students will visit the Archives next week to survey Peppler’s photos and learn more about Newtown prior to the Saturday oral history event.
If you or anyone you know would like to contribute to their stories and images to the collection, please come to the community center on Saturday morning, February 23. Stories told by residents will be recorded digitally in order to be archived and shared through scholarly online databases, and photographs and other physical items will be either scanned or photographed and returned. No items or photos will be kept, and no images or stories will be sold. This project is a not-for-profit education and preservation effort to ensure that the Newtown community is accurately portrayed through stories and images from residents who have lived there.
For more information, see the flyer below:
February 14, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Panic On!”
[image error]I first saw Widespread Panic live back in the early 1990s at an outdoor venue in southern Montgomery County called Sandy Creek, which was basically an open field down a one-lane dirt road, and at the time I had no idea who they were. I had seen this bright orange poster on a phone pole for a band that was playing out there and decided to go. Shows at Sandy Creek always made for a good time. Bringing your own cooler was easy enough, and the crowds contained an unpredictably eclectic mix of rednecks, stoners, college students, bikers, undercover cops and other sundry characters. But Sandy Creek is closed now, and I don’t remember much about that show at all . . .
February 13, 2019
(Unpublished) #Poem: “I should’ve been George Willard”
Three of my favorite literary works are Thornton Wilder’s 1936 play Our Town, Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 short story collection Winesburg, Ohio, and Edgar Lee Master’s 1916 poetry collection Spoon River Anthology, and this poem alludes to characters in all three. Though the commentary made in it is personal, the allusions serve as a comparisons to real life.
I should’ve been George Willard
I should’ve been George Willard, rambling naively
around town, soaking up the double-tongued
tales of some local Parcival,
or showing kindness to the pathetic,
frightened Wing Biddlebaum.
I should’ve been diving headlong
into the heart of our quicksand nuances,
senseless aims, fragile joy, deep suffering—
these formidable truths about how wildly
we misunderstand each other
and how inadvertently
we savage the people around us.
I should’ve been George Willard. I was never
Benjamin Pantier and certainly not George Gibbs.
though I’ve felt at times
like the Stage Manager, plying the roles
that each scene called for,
and other times,
like Trainor the Druggist,
applying my own specialized knowledge
to make sense of what didn’t turn out well.
As the pulleys and cogs and other machinations
redirect this foray into an array
of loosely related charades and foibles,
in my town, we all fall down
less where should than where we do.
Yet, like a will-o-wisp that does not beckon follow,
I instead wander among the disparate
parts, having no like to match my like,
weaving my way and watching with wonder,
ending up instead as Simon Stimson. I was never
George Willard, who at first tied the strange
creatures together but then left anyway.
“He’s seen a peck of trouble,”
they say in low tones on quiet streets.
“I don’t know how that’ll end.” None
of us do, or can, because music
has a language all its own.
About ten years ago, I all but quit submitting poems to literary magazines and began sharing a few here. To read previous (Unpublished) #Poem posts, each with its own mini-introduction, click on the title below:
(Unpublished) #Poem: a haiku series
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Don’t Nobody Even Like You”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Yes, I Know”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “They Come, Growling”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Lost Things”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Taking Root”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Sabbatical”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Southern Soil”
(Unpublished) #Poem: [Untitled]
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Reading Kenko”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Curb Market, Saturday Morning”
February 12, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
Though my work as a writer and author in Alabama and the writing and publishing being done in New York City are two different species, they are still the same animal. When Closed Ranks was published last fall, people would ask me where they could get a copy. When I would respond, “Amazon . . . bookstores . . . anywhere you buy books,” some seemed genuinely surprised that a person they knew had a book on Amazon. They seemed equally surprised when I would add that Closed Ranks is my sixth book, not my first.
[image error]There are two things that seem difficult for people to understand about those of us who are (somewhat condescendingly) called “local writers.” First, we are real writers who write real books. Our work takes just as much time and effort and skill as those by far-off wonders in New York City and Paris. Beyond that, the fact that we write about the subjects that encompass our daily lives shouldn’t diminish the respect we earn for doing it.
Second, when people ask, “How’s your book doing?” the sad truth is usually: I don’t know. In this muddied and lengthy process, a writer contracts his work to a publisher, who makes physical books from the manuscript, which are then shipped to a distributor, who then send them to booksellers, both online and brick-and-mortar, who then put them in the hands of readers. There isn’t a middle man in this industry— there are middle men, and lots of them! It may seem strange to readers that writers don’t know how our books are doing, but it’s the norm that we usually don’t.
What also works against the Deep Southern “local writer” is something that I wrote about in a previous column: people in the Deep South read less than the national average, and those national rates aren’t all that great anyway. As a writer of nonfiction books about Southern culture, which have a limited audience, I am vying for attention from an audience that less-often engages with products like I make. If a person applies common sense to the facts that we know, you get this: fewer people are reading + online sellers make more books available = a lot of books sell fewer copies. The rise of internet bookselling has been great for readers, but not necessarily for writers and publishers.
Although literacy is commonplace in our culture, writing and publishing have remained mystical endeavors. In a recent The New York Times article titled “How Hollywood Gets the Publishing Industry Wrong,” writer Sloane Crosley explained how “everyone thinks they can do what we do, even though no one has a clue what we do.” Later in the article, discussing sales and promotions, she remarked that “we try to sneak books into your house and under your pillow. We crumble them over your food when you’re not looking. In return? Bupkis.”
I know that, when people ask how my book is doing, they’re asking because they care. I wish I could get out my phone, check an app, and share an exact number of copies-sold, but I can’t. I know how many people show up to book talks and how many I sell afterward, but not much more than that. Perhaps sadly, I’d add to Sloane Crosley’s assertion that I’m not sure that any of us in the book business know exactly what we do, or why some books sell well and others don’t.
Speaking for myself, I just want people to buy my books and visit my blog because they believe that my writing is worth reading, because they want to know more about the subjects, and in the case of my books, because they know that they’re spending their money on a worthwhile product. Physical copies of my books cost me money, so I can’t give them away free, and I have a support page on this blog, because I believe the work merits it. I hope that you-reading-this believe that, too. Perhaps more important than the question to me – “How’s your book doing?” – is my question to you: How’d I do? Which you can only answer if you’ve gotten one and read it.
“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.
![[image error]](https://fosterdickson.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/img_3058.jpg){kind=link}