Foster Dickson's Blog, page 64

Southern Movie #21: “Sophie and the Rising Sun”

Among the plethora of films that deal with some aspect of racial issues in the American South – from the classic “In the Heat of the Night” to the recent “Selma” – the 2016 film “Sophie and the Rising Sun” takes a different angle. Set in a small coastal South Carolina town called Salty Creek in the fall of 1941, the story begins when an Asian man is dumped, bloody and barely conscious, off an interstate bus traveling from New York to Miami. This one doesn’t follow the oft-traveled road of black-white Civil Rights struggles, but instead goes thick into the brambles and underbrush to explore the nuanced lives of pre-war Southern women in this deeply conservative culture.

“Sophie and the Rising Sun” begins elegantly with cello music in the background as we watch scenes of a young woman dressed in men’s clothes – overalls, long-sleeved shirt, and fedora – go about the work of pulling crab traps onto a small, white dinghy. Her mixture of self-reliance and grace remains the focus, as she does this hard work with delicate care. This is Sophie.

Briefly, we also meet the people who will play their roles in this tale: the nosy and self-righteous Ruth Jeffers who is feeding her horribly burned grown son in his upstairs bedroom, Grover Ohta who is abandoned and penniless in an unfriendly place, and Anne Morrison who is Sophie’s close friend and the town’s gardening expert. The tiny coastal town, we quickly understand, is abuzz over the strange but exotic arrival.

After he is found, the Asian man – who mumbles his name: Ohta – is first brought to convalesce in the potting shed behind an Anne Morrison’s house, despite her mild objections, and his needs are attended by a steady stream of meals from the local church ladies, including Ruth Jeffers, and by Anne’s black maid— who quickly quits.

After Ohta, who everyone presumes is Chinese, makes a quick recovery, the plot thickens when Sophie comes to Anne’s garden to paint while Ohta is helping to plant flowers. Soon, and perhaps equally important, a new African-American maid arrives: Salome, a woman who has previously lived in the town and who is returning after a long absence. With those complications, the multiple tendrils of the film’s story are all in place.

Though “Sophie and the Rising Sun” is structured around the forbidden love affair between Sophie and Grover, the story can’t be summarized so easily. From the beginning, the main narrative is interrupted by flashbacks of a little blonde girl running home, teary-eyed and disheveled. We understand her to be Sophie many years younger. Furthermore, the small town affected in significant ways by World War I – Ruth’s son was burned and Sophie’s beau was killed – is forced to react to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, which occurred on December 7, 1941.

The intolerance of the mid-century Deep South is on display here, but not in typical ways. When Grover Ohta is discovered by a young black boy, everyone is unsure how to handle his needs, and it is with mild apprehension that Anne agrees to let him stay at her house— in the shed. After Grover recovers, he is shown walking down the small-town sidewalk with a parade of children gawking at him like a carnival freak, and Anne is first surprised that he is an astute gardener and later that he can read. When Ruth Jeffers is dismayed that Anne and Sophie have not been at church on Sundays, she comes to Anne’s house to suggest that the maid take Grover to the black church, since he can’t come to theirs, because “he’s not white,” she hisses. The racism here is shown as a fumbling inability to handle the presence of a man who is neither black nor white.

Yet, the intensity of the plot is driven forward by Grover Ohta’s presence. After Grover has settled in and won Anne’s trust, she shares with him an unused box of paints, which leads to a series of first accidental then clandestine meetings between him and Sophie on a secluded waterway. Very discreetly, their feelings develop into a subtle romance, but their first kiss is interrupted by the realization that two men in a passing boat have seen them. The news then reaches Ruth, who brings her screechy and insistent nosiness to Sophie’s house, inquiring first why Sophie hasn’t been at church then whether she was kissing “that Chinaman.” This confrontation with racist intolerance reveals the nature of the flashbacks: it was Ruth who berated the distressed young Sophie and cruelly disrupted her childhood games with a black playmate.

The film’s narrative shifts when Anne’s radio announces that the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor, shortly after Anne and Sophie have gone into town and watched a newsreel showing dire atrocities committed by the Japanese military. Anne is first shocked by the act of war, then is more shocked to find out that Grover is not Chinese, but Japanese. From this point, the plot of “Sophie and the Rising Sun” centers on the Grover’s problematic presence. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor news, Anne returns home to find her garden destroyed and “DIRTY JAP” scrawled in red paint on the shed where Grover lives, then he is attacked by two newly minted GIs. Once again badly beaten up, Grover is hidden inside Anne’s house – a major no-no in 1940s South Carolina – and she tells Ruth and even Sophie that he is gone, put on a bus. However, Anne’s lie is easily spotted since she says that Grover has gone home to Canada. Sophie and Ruth both know that he is from California.

Our racist villain Ruth Jeffers will have none of it. She wants to know where he is. Anne then hides Grover in a cabin in the woods, but has to reveal his whereabouts when she herself falls out from the stress of hiding him. Now bedridden, Anne has to rely on Sophie and Salome to take care of (and save) Grover. It is here that we find out another meaning behind those flashbacks: Salome was the black little girl who Sophie was playing with when Ruth Jeffers blessed them both out for crossing racial lines. Salome will gladly aid in thwarting the mean old woman.

Though we have hope for Grover Ohta, we sense at this point that he will not fare well. Certainly, he could be put on an interstate bus back to California, but he would have to cross the entire South – from coastal Carolina to western Texas – before he would be anything near to safe. The likelihood that he would make it would be almost nil. And we are especially worried for him when a disheveled Ruth adds it all up and finds out where he is.

But it is too late for Ruth’s meddling. Grover and Sophie are loaded into a car full of supplies to make a midnight run. The final straw for the conniving old woman is a physical confrontation with Salome, who throws her to the ground and tells her once and for all to leave the couple alone. “They’re gone,” Salome says. While we are glad for Salome’s victory at that moment, we also know what it will mean for her when she and Ruth get back to town.

The last we see of Grover Ohta and Sophie Willis, they are among the California mountains in what we understand to be in a Japanese internment camp. He is planting a garden bed in front of a small cabin, and a smiling Sophie is sketching on their front steps.

In addition to being a fine film with a well-crafted story and some beautiful cinematography, “Sophie and the Rising Sun” handles the delicate hypocrisy of the 1940s Deep South fairly well. There are no easy answers in this film, though the villains are clearly marked— and to be sure, the churchiest of the church ladies is the worst one of all. And of course, the local lawman, the one who placed Grover at Anne’s house in the first place, comes in a close second for his hateful, nasty actions.

As a document about the Deep South in the years before integration, “Sophie and the Rising Sun” does two things that make it stand out: it provides a nuanced take on white women and their black domestic help, while also interjecting a new kind of racial conundrum. However, what the film fails to do – and what most films about racism in the South fail to do – is show what happens next. We see Salome throw Ruth to the ground in triumph, but we don’t see the consequences for Salome, since we have to know that Ruth is not going to accept defeat in that way. We also see the happy couple at the end, but we don’t see their subsequent trials as an interracial couple in mid-century America. While it’s nice to see love triumph over hate at a key moment, I’m sorry to say it but . . . it’s just not that simple.

Filed under: Film/Movies, Social Justice, South Carolina, The Deep South Tagged: Race, race issues, Sophie and the Rising Sun, south carolina, Southern movie of the month, World War II

the #newschool: #voting all-in.

Even though I don’t work in politics, I do think about how voter turnout could be improved. My thinking is that, in the midst of the 2016 election controversies and the current voter-integrity commission, we should be asking ourselves different questions about how to fix these problems, because as the old adage says, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

First, I wonder what might change if election laws stated that results could not be certified unless a certain level of turnout was achieved? It is a common practice for corporate, local, or nonprofit boards not be able to vote on substantive issues unless they have a quorum, which is a minimum number of members present. So, what if we had to have a minimum turnout – in effect, a quorum – for an election to be valid? Having a quorum before making major decisions just makes sense.

I’ve also wondered why voting, which is a responsibility of citizenship, hasn’t been tied to other privileges of citizenship. Why hasn’t registering to vote been a requirement, like we’ve had boys registering for the Selective Service? Why hasn’t failing to vote been like failing to appear for a court date or for jury duty? Why can the federal government withhold tax refunds from people who default on student loans, but there is no penalty for not voting? And finally, since voter fraud and crossover voting  are criminal acts – effectively de-incentivizing those acts – couldn’t we incentivize voting by offering something like a tax deduction or credit to people who do vote?

I also wonder what might change if, instead of looking for lawmakers to solve the problems, we put some sharp people from the fields of logistics, marketing, and psychology to the task of improving voter turnout. Realistically, if Amazon can get any purchased item to our homes in two days, getting more eligible voters to cast ballots at polling places near their homes should be an attainable goal.

From a logistics standpoint: if the weatherman can have a mobile meteorology lab and the police can have mobile surveillance vehicles and public libraries can have bookmobiles, couldn’t we create mobile polling places that serve isolated rural communities and urban areas with inadequate public transportation? Or what if poll workers went to the front doors of people who didn’t vote, verified their picture ID, handed them a ballot, waited while they filled it out, and carried it back to be counted? The practice may sound far-fetched, but I’ve seen canvassers from the Census Department go to the homes of people who didn’t return the questionnaire.

Another viable logistics solution might be to keep polls open longer. What if polls were open for multiple days, or for twenty-four hours instead of twelve? That could better accommodate shift workers, truck drivers, and others who don’t work the traditional eight-to-five. Retails stores stay open longer at Christmastime when sales potential is greater, so it can’t be too difficult for polls to stay open longer on voting days.

I can already hear the fiscally conservative argument that doing such things would cost too much money. All of those extra poll workers and canvassers would need background checks, then have to be trained, organized, paid, and provided transportation. But if you ask me, any amount of money that we spend on improving our election system is money well-spent—because it empowers the people and gives greater validity to the results.

I don’t know whether any of those ideas are good ones, but I do know that we have a major problem when so many Americans aren’t voting. Sure, we could have long discussions about the oft-told tales of undesirable candidates and the do-nothings in Washington, but the real question would still remain: what are we going to do about it? There’s one thing we can do about it that would be more effective than harassing our representatives on Twitter: vote for people we do want, who can solve the nation’s problems.

Filed under: Civil Rights, Critical Thinking, Social Justice, Voting Tagged: patriotism, vote, voter turnout, voting rights

Alabamiana: JW Dickson, 1854 –1921

[image error]I first came across the name JW Dickson when I was reading Hassan Jeffries’ Bloody Lowndes about six or seven years ago. Jeffries’ history of voting-rights efforts by disillusioned SNCC workers in 1966 and 1967 begins with some background on the place. Lowndes County is in the Black Belt region of west Alabama, situated between Montgomery and Dallas counties, and the route of the 1965 march went right through there on Highway 80. Known as one of the more brutally segregationist places in this region of archetypal Southern plantations, “Bloody Lowndes” earned its nickname. In this situation, in 1903, Sheriff JW Dickson had bought the labor of  a black man named Dillard Freeman who could not pay his court fines, then refused to let him visit his sick brother. But Freeman went anyway.

Frustrated and desperate, Freeman sneaked away from the farm, but the sheriff tracked him to his mother’s house and beat him mercilessly in her presence. After the beating, he tied the young man’s hands behind his back, fastened a rope around his neck, and handed the loose end to a henchman sitting astride a mule. Dickson then forced him to run more than six miles back to his plantation and whipped him whenever his pace slowed. Upon their return, Dickson beat Freeman again, this time with a piece of gin belt attached to a wooden handle. When the sheriff tired, he handed the whip to another of his men who finished administering the punishment. (18-19)

Freeman was so badly beaten and scarred that “other field hands had to grease his back so he could bend to work,” and from then on, he was chained to stop him from trying to escape again. (This same story appears in the seventh chapter of .)

Because Lowndes County and Montgomery County are adjacent, I’ve been interested for a long time in the possible connections between the Lowndes County Dicksons and the Montgomery County Dicksons, though I’ve never been able to draw a line between them. My branch of the Dickson family left Troup County in western Georgia and settled in Montgomery County in the 1850s, then faltered and split after the Civil War, with successive generations leaving the area then returning in the 1950s. It seems, from JW Dickson’s father John being listed in pre-Civil War census records in Coweta County, that the Lowndes County Dicksons would be related to my branch, but I haven’t been able to find any people we have in common.

Unlike the Dicksons in my line, the Lowndes County Dicksons moved to the Alabama Black Belt, set up homestead farms, and stayed put. There in Lowndes County, they prospered economically and politically. The 1860 census for Hayneville shows the large family of John and Sarah (Williamson) Dickson in scant detail, with JW there at age 5. Shortly after the Civil War, the 1870 census shows young JW Dickson, aged 15, along with his parents and siblings Joseph, aged 17; Eliza, aged 13; John, aged 7; Edwin, aged 5; and Lewis, aged 2, in the rural farming community of Letohatchee. In the latter document, his parents are both listed as having been born in Georgia, though JW and his brothers and sisters were born in Alabama— more evidence that they came over from Georgia about the same time that my forebears did. It is also worth noting that every other person on that census page, on the page before it, and on the page after it are all either black or mulatto, and almost all of the adults are described as farm laborers or domestics. The elder John Dickson must have been operating his farm on a large scale to employ so many people.

JW Dickson appears to have taken up the family business, farming in Letohatchee, and by the end of the 1800s, was becoming active in politics. In 1887, when he was about 32, his testimonial appears in a Montgomery Advertiser ad for a brand of oats. In January 1888, he married a woman named ME Ivey. (The 1880 census for Letohatchee shows a 20-year-old woman named Mary E. Ivey. Presumably that’s her.) In 1894, he was shown among a list of Democratic party delegates, chosen by resolution. Later, in 1895, he had an ad in the Advertiser offering to stud his English setter, and the Citizen-Examiner newspaper in the county seat of Hayneville showed that a lawsuit brought against him by a man named WA Broughton was being continued. All mundane matters of business as usual.

The 1900 census then fleshes out JW Dickson a little more. He was 45 years old and living with his wife, whose name is illegible in the record. (Though this is only a guess: as it is written, her name looks like “Emme”, which could be a misspelling based on a misunderstanding of her initials: ME.) Living with them were also a boarder named Mollie Satterwhite, who was the grown daughter of nearby planter SA Satterwhite, as well as two black house servants. Again, every person surrounding his little family on the page is black. Sadly, across the column next to his wife’s name, we see that she bore one child who did not live. (Interestingly, a December 1900 social announcement in the Greenville’s The Living Truth newspaper has him and Miss Satterwhite attending a Dickson family wedding together— with no mention of Mrs. Dickson in the list of attendees.)

[image error]In 1900, JW Dickson was elected sheriff of Lowndes County. At that time, having one’s name on the “County Democratic Ticket” was tantamount to winning. A year later, in October 1901, the public notice in the Hayneville newspaper about the vote to ratify Alabama’s now-infamous state constitution bore Dickson’s name. In subsequent years, various other public notices on everyday legal matters also bear his name, showing him acting as executor of an estate or proclaiming the sale of seized property.

Though his name is misspelled on the Department of Labor’s webpage on the subject, JW Dickson comes up as well in the story of WEB Dubois’ Black Studies work in Lowndes County from 1897 – 1907. According to this information, Dickson and his family were the among the prime impediments to Dubois’ efforts:

The problem the Bureau of Labor faced can be surmised from the experience of the Department of Justice. A U.S. attorney described a case involving J. W. Dixon, sheriff of Lowndes County, the same county Du Bois was studying. When the Grand Jury investigated an incredibly brutal case of forced labor, “five Dixon brothers rode up on their horses at 12 o’clock Saturday night” to warn one of the grand jurors “what to expect.” “These Dixons,” the U.S. attorney observed, “are men of the highest political and financial influence. They are large planters and control a great deal of labor….They are said to have killed several men. It is believed that witnesses are practically compelled to perjure their souls because they fear their lives.” The Dixons were not indicted.

That forced-labor case could well have been Dillard Freeman.

JW Dickson’s prominent position in Lowndes County continued for more than a decade. In 1908, he declared himself as a candidate for tax assessor, and in 1912, for county schools superintendent. In 1915, as foreman of a county grand jury, Dickson was the one reporting to the public on the number of indictments and how monies were spent.

JW Dickson died in 1921 and is buried in Lowndes County, where it seems that he lived his entire life. Though he and his wife had no children, the Dickson name didn’t fade in Lowndes County. Later in Bloody Lowndes, Jeffries alludes to Robert Dickson, Jr., who was the head of the Lowndes County Democrat Party at the time of the SNCC effort in the mid-1960s. In fact, the grand Dicksonia plantation house near Lowndesboro is still standing today.

Though I don’t relish (or even want) a connection between my family and the brutal acts that gave “Bloody Lowndes” it’s nickname, I do think that it is important to explore and confront the past, especially our own personal past. I was already aware that my ancestor who came to Alabama from Georgia, David Madison Dickson, owned slaves. I am also aware that, on another branch of my family tree, I have other relatives who lived in Fort Deposit and Sandy Ridge in Lowndes County from the mid-1800s through the 1960s. So when I see stories like the one about JW Dickson and Dillard Freeman in 1903, or about a historic marker about a lynching in 1900 in Letohatchee, I have to acknowledge them. I’ve never seen any evidence that any of my people participated, but their connection – and consequently my connection – to “Bloody Lowndes” is still real.

Filed under: Alabama, Civil Rights, Family History, Social Justice Tagged: Alabama, Bloody Lowndes, dickson, Family History, lowndes county

Who exactly deserves their own monument?

Watch this PBS NewsHour segment on public art in Philadelphia, and then try to tell me that the arts are “non-necessity.”

http://player.pbs.org/viralplayer/3005507401/

Who and what we memorialize in our public spaces says a lot about who we are and what we value. And that includes statues and school names that honor Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate historical figures.

Filed under: Arts, Critical Thinking Tagged: Arts, humanities, PBS, Philadelphia, public art

the #newschool: #voting for who we actually believe in

The American electoral system is not perfect, but it is pretty darn good. At regular intervals, Americans get to cast ballots for a president, congressional representatives, senators, governors, state legislators, county commissioners, city council members, mayors, sheriffs, auditors, judges, and a range of other local and statewide offices. Yet, notwithstanding the criticism about the gerrymandering efforts and voter suppression schemes that end up both in the news and in the courts, the system is also being misused by voters, many of whom don’t show up at all, while some show up trying to game the system.

About the former problem, I attribute it to frustration in some and to apathy in others. Relying on campaign rhetoric for their policy positions, many Americans buy into the modern version of the old wive’s tale that PR people call “talking points.” And just like Pavlov’s dog, those voters salivate when the appropriate bell is rung. We aren’t suffering political failures in this country because of our politicians. We are suffering because of our own rampant inattention to serious matters.

If we want our politicians to represent us, we have to take the time to learn about their policy positions and know who we are voting for. If more voters ignored electoral politics and paid attention to policy positions, we’d be better off. But these more complicated matters are swept aside, in favor of accusatory bombast. I don’t know any conservatives who read National Review or The Economist, and I only know a few liberals who read The New Republic or Mother Jones. As a result, frustration carries the day because reality fails to live up to the campaign rhetoric.

Some of the other problems that face our democracy revolve around efforts to game the system: watching the TV news polls and voting for the perceived “winner,” refusing to consider third-party candidates because they “can’t win,” and trying to alter the outcome by voting for the opposing party’s weaker candidate. These practices just skew the results and sometimes elect unpopular candidates by accident.

When elections are approaching, we need to pay attention, follow multiple news sources, listen to the candidates’ speeches, read informed commentaries, and get on candidates’ websites to figure out who they profess to be. I want to walk into my polling place informed, and I want my vote to be cast for someone who I want to be representing me. That’s what the word representative in the descriptor “representative democracy” means. I’m just one guy, but I believe that, if more people – more voters – would understand our political system and do the same thing, then our representatives might actually represent us.

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Voting Tagged: elections, new school, Pack Mule for the New School, politics, vote, voting

A few thoughts during #ArtsEdWeek 2017

Non-necessity. That’s what some education leaders and politicians call the arts. The sentiment mostly comes up when funding goes down, but before anyone uses that absurd term to describe arts education, I hope that person would stop and imagine a life without the arts: no music, no dance, no theater, no visual arts, no literature. I can’t fathom the emptiness and the boredom that would be left.

Certainly, the core academic subjects are important. We need our schools to steep young people in the rational thought processes involved in language, mathematics, science, and social studies. We need them to become adults who can think and communicate and interact with other people and with the natural world. But that isn’t all we need them to know how to do.

Creative thought is a great necessity to move the human race forward, since, it’s pretty clear, things aren’t perfect here on Planet Earth just yet. And if we’re to solve the problems of our century, we desperately need creative thinkers, not just more and more employees. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his 1821 Defence of Poetry that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” These dreamers, who the Romantics praised and sought to be, teach us about ourselves, even about those things we’d prefer not to know.

It takes a short-sighted view of both education and humanity to regard education as nothing but job training, yet some naysayers against arts education proclaim their stance by asking, “How’s a kid gonna get a job with that?” To that logic, I can only reply, “So if a kid can’t get job throwing a ball through a hoop or tackling people, should we eliminate basketball and football?” No, arts education provides hands-on learning experiences that show children how to think creatively, how to do more than regurgitate what they’ve been instructed to repeat, how to combine and re-combine existing elements in new ways. No matter the medium, that’s what arts education does.

And that is why the arts will never be non-necessity— because we need those “unacknowledged legislators” to lead us through the great human conundrums that, so far, don’t seem to be solved.

Filed under: Arts, Critical Thinking, Education Tagged: Arts, arts education, Education

the #newschool: honoring some real #heroes

Monday, September 4 is Labor Day, a national holiday meant to honor the working people who have built this country but who often go unappreciated. Born out of the labor movement’s effort to coordinate an immense general strike on the first Monday in September, this holiday has now come to mean little more than the unofficial end of summer.

However, Labor Day celebrations should not neglect to honor the men and women of the working classes, whose names don’t show up in history books or on monuments. This is their day, and just like we are encouraged to say thank-you to members of the armed forces on Veteran’s Day, it seems like a good idea to say thank-you on Labor Day to our nation’s laborers, the ones on the ground level keeping America running like it should: the maintenance workers, factory workers, farm hands, clericals, teachers, custodians, cleaning crews, truck drivers, and more. And if you don’t see these folks today while you’re off, say thank-you tomorrow when you’re back at it.

Happy Labor Day weekend!

Filed under: family values, Social Justice Tagged: labor day, Pack Mule for the New School, The New School, working-class

#thestack (high five!)

You probably ought to read the first post “#thestack” before this one.

Poems are hard to read one after another. I already kind of knew that, but reading these issues of American Poetry Review is reinforcing it. It’s one thing to read page after page of a sustained narrative, but page after page containing multiple works by multiple authors on multiple subjects is another matter, and this self-made challenge of reading a whole stack of APRs is getting more daunting . . .

The fifth issue in the stack is from January/February 2006. The cover on this one is sky-blue and neon orange, and features an Iranian poet named Forough Farokhzad, whose expression lingers somewhere between a playful “Come and get me” and a more serious “I know something you don’t.”  As I went to read this issue, I was cognizant of the fact that I’ve spent more time, in earlier posts, discussing the essays than the poems. So, I was resolved to give more attention to the poems.

Good thing, since this issue had fewer essays. Donald Hall had another “Knock Knock” column, and John Yau had a long piece about artist Jasper Johns. (I picked through Yau’s essay, and like the Charles Dickens prison essay, I couldn’t figure out what it was doing in this magazine.) Hall’s column bounced around a little bit, from setting up poems in print to “literary friendship” to creating textbooks. Not much there that grabbed me, except this:

But then I discovered from my publishers and the teachers they hired to read my manuscript, that if my book were to sell any copies at all I had to include a section on Rhetorical Patterns in Exposition: Example, Comparison and Contrast, Process Analysis, Classification and Division, Cause and Effect, Definition, et cetera. I loathed this way of thinking about language. No writer ever wrote a decent essay considering that he was accomplishing a Process Analysis.

Agreed, once again, Mr. Hall.

Now, the poems.

I liked Landis Everson particularly. Without an author picture, I first thought he might be writing currently, but found in his bio that he was part of the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1960s . . . and that made me wonder if he was any kin to old bearded William Everson. (When I looked it up, I didn’t find whether they were related.) Everson’s poems mixed cultural allusions with a wry sense of humor that reminded why I like West Coast poets from mid-century, Lawrence Ferlinghetti especially. The opening poem “Lemon Tree” ends by remarking, “It hides the smell / of new babies,” and in “Hollyhocks,” we have “the king [who] acted in a kingly way.”

I wish I could say that I enjoyed the poems by Susan McCabe, who came next, but Teresa Leo, with her Pre-Raphaelite author photo, reeled me back in. Leo’s sense of the nuances of sex and relationships is really strong in both of her poems: “Narcissists Anonymous” and “To the Next in Line,” which contains this gem of a stanza:

Just once, during sex, look over your shoulder to see

the not-quite-there of the not-quite-thereness behind you.

And this one, too:

Talk is a saltlick and some smoke. Touch is grounds

for what’s he’s doing when he’s doing you.

Then I got a surprise— Jim Harrison! I love Jim Harrison! I discovered his work in the ’90s after seeing the film adaptation of  Legends of the Fall then reading it, then I read Wolf and The Beast that God Forgot and Sundog . . .  I hadn’t realized he was in this issue of APR, since on the cover his full name isn’t featured, just a simple “Harrison” at the bottom, which could have been anybody.

Harrison’s poems contained some of his usual subjects: the outdoors and individualism, both laced with biting indictments of lifestyles that disconnect us from nature and each other. I don’t want to gush about passage after passage, but I could – I underlined a bunch – but in the interest of brevity, here are two, both from the longer poem “Modern Times,” from sections III and IX:

We worked for food and shelter

and then bought the arts and better cars,

bigger houses, smarter children,

who couldn’t really learn to read and write.

It was too hard. The arts escaped

to a different heaven to get rid of us.

Our lives are novels we don’t want to read

and we so gracelessly translate their world

for our own purposes.

There he is. Jim Harrison, everybody.

Like I said, it’s tiring to read poem after poem, and that task is even more cumbersome after reading something that I really liked: Gerald Stern’s long poem in the first issue, or Donald Hall’s essay in the most recent one. I’m incited to stay there, mull it over, take time with it, and I don’t necessarily want to continue reading other things.  Now that I’m considering it, that might be a weakness of the literary magazines format.

However, I did keep reading. The ancient Greek poet Kallimachos’ name-dropping allusions reminded me of the Roman poet Catullus, whose vulgarities make me laugh. I was glad to learn about Forough Farokhzad, even though translator Meetra Sofia’s self-hugging, spacey-eyed author photo was creepy and awkward. (I had never heard of Farokhzad’s “My Heart Aches for the Garden” before.) One thing I will say for Clayton Eshleman: he has one hell of a vocabulary: subjectility, amnion, gutta percha, bolgia, lambent, crottin, analphabetic Lascaux. I wondered if subjectility was even a word at all, but apparently it came from Jacques Derrida and Antonin Artaud, so there you go. After that wordy experience, Peter Jay Shippy’s playfulness in his single half-page poem was welcome, and that’s about all I had the energy for.

As a person who regularly reads print magazines and who enjoys poetry, the fact that I’ve gotten burned out this soon — five issues into the stack — is fascinating to me. I’ve also wondered if I actually like poems as much as I think I do, since I’m tending naturally toward the essays. Or it’s also possible that I do like poems, I just don’t like all of the ones I’m reading in these magazines. Nobody likes everything, do they?

Filed under: Literature, Poetry, Reading Tagged: 2006, American Poetry Review, Donald Hall, Landis Everson, poetry, reading

the #newschool: having an #openmind

On the back of my old 1983 Toyota Celica hatchback, I used to have a bumper sticker that read “Minds are like parachutes. They only function when open.” I drove that car from 1992 until 1998 and, while in traffic, would periodically get honks and signs of approval for the sticker. Rarer were the times when some antagonist – at a gas station or in a parking lot – would make an ugly remark about the message, preferring, I guess, that we were all as closed-minded as they were. (The metaphor of the consequences of an unopened parachute was clearly lost on that latter group.)

When I think back on it now, those grouchy people remind me of the Bergins in the movie Trolls, who remain steadfast and insistent that the only way to be happy is to smother, imprison, and devour the joy of others. For them, even that tiny bit of joy will only last for a moment, so they find themselves craving opportunities to do it again. Sadly, there is too much support for those attitudes in our society.

Close-mindedness might be the plague of our era. It pervades everything in our culture, including how we handle things that affect all people: healthcare, education, the environment. When we hunker down on our positions, especially on either-or positions, there’s no room to accept new facts that might lead to a better decision, nor is there room to make exceptions where ones should be made.

In late July, the PBS NewsHour ran a story about how closed-mindedness is hurting our whole nation, as the two political parties get more deeply entrenched. As problems arise that need solutions, the viewpoints then are not focused on helping the most Americans possible but on defeating the opposing party. That’s when politics becomes a team sport, and the blame-game becomes more important than governing. Thus, we are all frustrated – both the representatives and the citizens – but what is the root cause? Closed-mindedness.

I live in Alabama, a deeply conservative state that has emerged once again in the 21st century as a player in America’s culture war. After its staunch support for secession in the 19th century and its inclusion in the Solid South of the 20th century, our electoral votes can once again be depended-upon . . . by any Republican candidate who campaigns on being uncompromising. That strategy wins. The super-majority in our state legislature has been used to institutionalize conservative social positions and to cling to fiscal conservatism, while neglecting to solve glaring problems. And anyone who opposes such stolidness is labeled “too liberal for Alabama.” The state is a case study in the historic failures of a one-party system and of closed-mindedness.

If you didn’t watch the PBS NewHour segment linked above, I’ll let you in something that you missed. At the end of the segment, the following factoid was presented:

Roughly a third of Republicans and Democrats say when they discuss politics with people they disagree with, they usually find they have more in common than they thought. – Source: 2016 Pew

That leads me to two conclusions: those two-thirds who didn’t find as much in common need to be more open-minded, and the one-third of us who do find common ground need to start taking the lead in our country.

Although I regularly write to my representatives in Congress and in our state legislature, I don’t see those small groups of people as the solution to the problem of closed-mindedness. Ordinary citizens, who talk with each other every day, will form the grassroots movement that shifts the tide. In millions of conversations, this tendency toward obloquy can be undone when we listen to each other and expose that common ground. But we must first recognize what David Cannadine wrote in his introduction to The Undivided Past:

The real world is not binary— except insofar as it is divided into those of us who insist that it is and those who know that it is not.

Open-mindedness isn’t a plank in the left-wing political platform, and the willingness to listen and to acknowledge that opposing viewpoints have validity are not signs of weakness. Strict loyalty to a political party ideology is also not the path to crafting public policy that works for all people. The answers will not come supporting one of two warring factions, but they could from genuine concern for all people, including the ones whose lives don’t resemble our own.

Not too long ago, the poet and writer Wendell Berry tweeted out this friendly reminder, and I couldn’t have put any better than he did:

The Amish question "What will this do to our community?" tends toward the right answer for the world.

— Wendell Berry (@WendellDaily) July 20, 2017

Filed under: Civil Rights, Critical Thinking, Social Justice Tagged: caring, open mind, Pack Mule for the New School, public policy, The New School

The economic impact of #craftbeer

I’m no brewer. Let me be clear about that right up front. (The sad truth is that I’m too lazy to do all that cleaning.) But I do my part to keep them in business, and watching “Crafting a Nation” gave me one more reason to do so: creating and sustaining American jobs.

According to figures from the Brewers Association, the economic impact from “small and independent craft brewers” is $55.7 billion and includes 424,000 jobs, some in the breweries and others in engineering, manufacturing, sales, and distribution. That’s a lot of jobs for a lot of bearded guys in Carhartts.

 

 

Filed under: beer Tagged: America, beer, breweries, craft beer, jobs