Foster Dickson's Blog, page 80
April 26, 2016
CNN’s “United Shades of America”
If you missed Sunday night’s premier of W. Kamau Bell’s “United Shades of America,” then you missed one the most important shows to come along in a long time. In the opening episode, Bell, who is an African-American comedian, seeks out the Ku Klux Klan in three different small-town locales, and goes to interview members onsite.
Here’s a link to the trailer:
Filed under: Civil Rights, multiculturalism, Social Justice
April 24, 2016
A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #116
Think about tackling the problems when you don’t have the answers. Once you get in gear, you’ll be surprised how easily some of the solutions appear.
– from chapter six, “Prototyping is the Shorthand of Innovation,” in IDEO
" target="_blank">The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm by Tom Kelley, with Jonathon Littman
Filed under: Critical Thinking, Reading, Teaching, Writing and Editing
April 21, 2016
The 2016 Alabama Book Festival
On Saturday, April 23, the Alabama Book Festival will held in Montgomery’s Old Alabama Town. The website offers plenty of information about the authors who are presenting and the vendors and exhibitors who are showing off their wares. My students and I will have a display table in the exhibitors’ area so be sure to come by and see us, too!
Filed under: Alabama, Education, Literature, Local Issues, Poetry, Writing and Editing
April 19, 2016
Listening: Sturgill Simpson’s “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth”
Led off by his cover of Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” which was released in advance, Sturgill Simpson’s new album “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth” came out on Friday, April 15. I woke up that morning to a notification on my iPhone that I could now access my pre-ordered copy— woohoo! Simpson has been a darling of alt-country for some time now, and Garden & Gun‘s recent article pairing him with Merle Haggard billed him as a “rising outlaw country star,” the heir apparent to the recently deceased singer. (In an eerie coincidence, when the subject of playing a show together came up, Haggard replied, “Yeah. We’re going to do a lot more shows together, I think, if I don’t die or something.”)
I was a late-comer to country music, not really even dabbling in it until my late teens. Though I was fortunate enough to be an impressionable youngster when Kenny Rogers was singing “The Gambler” and when Waylon could be heard weekly opening up for “The Dukes of Hazzard,” I had the misfortune of reaching my formative musical years during the ultra-cheesy era of Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks, and Trisha Yearwood. As a teenager, I was more interested in AC/DC than in Allen Jackson. It wasn’t until I was about-grown that Johnny Cash broke through my musical prejudices, via Rick Rubin a la Trent Reznor. I had heard The Grateful Dead’s version of “Mama Tried” before I ever knew that Merle sang it, and it took me a while to get over my clean-cut mother’s biting remarks about Willie Nelson’s nasty long hair and beard to give him a good listen. (I’ve now seen Willie live four times.) But, once I finally did discover this music for myself, great country music – not Shania Twain, and definitely not Luke Bryan – I’ve fallen head over heels in love with it.
So, I was quite pleased to find Sturgill Simpson among the current wreckage. When I tune in to country radio, I can’t help but wonder what’s out there beside The Band Perry and Little Big Town – this is what wins CMAs? – and I also have to wonder why alt-country and Americana acts like Jason Isbell are getting ignored. But there is hope beyond the airwaves and CMT. Sturgill Simpson’s sound and style are so much truer to what country music should be than Big & Rich could imagine in their wildest dreams. When I first heard Simpson’s voice, I found myself wondering whether he sounded like Randy Travis, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, or a mixture of all three. Matt Hendrickson put it well in Garden & Gun:
the Kentucky native has struck a nerve by defying Nashville expectations, with many seeing him as a modern antidote to everything that’s wrong with country music these days—the glitz, the beer-’n’-truck bros, the dance beats, the blandness.
That Friday morning, I got up and made my coffee, then scrambled around with the kids to get them ready for school, before I took a minute during the scurrying on that gloomy, cool morning to answer the call of iTunes and listen to the first track on “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth.” After a faint bell-ringing intro, the album begins with piano, and then comes Simpson’s voice, raw and pure. “Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)” starts out as an old-school country lament, but quickly shifts into ’60s-soul number, complete with horns blasting and shaky tambourines.
After a slow and eerie track two, “Breakers Roar,” Simpson returns to that good ‘ol barroom soul music in “Keep It Between the Lines,” this time adding in that Allman Brothers-style slide guitar, similar to what we heard on the previous album’s “Living the Dream.” The next song, “Sea Stories,” moves us into pure country with strumming guitars and pedal-steel accompaniment.
Track five is the pre-released Nirvana cover. During my anti-country teenage years, Nirvana’s Nevermind was a staple of my senior-year-into-college musical diet, and to hear this really nice interpretation of it— yep, I was thinking, he did that . . . and it works. Revamping a post-punk classic from an album that almost every Gen-Xer owns into a dynamic country song where the horns bust in halfway through and drive it forward— that’s risky. But it works. Bravo, Mr. Simpson.
He follows up that four-minute triumph with a swaggering, guitar-driven Southern rock tune called “Brace for Impact (Live a Little).” This one was also pre-released. At nearly six-minutes, the instrumental sections run a little long, but not too bad. One of things that I have liked about Sturgill Simpson’s music is his ability to combine things I’ve heard before into something new that I haven’t heard. In “Brace for Impact,” the vocals reminded me of Bad Company in the ’70s, while the music side kind of reminded me a little bit of JJ Cale’s “Ride Me High,” though not as funky.
Rolling into the final third of “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” Simpson settles into the really nice thing that he has created. The Hammond organ-heavy “All Around You” could easily have been an Otis Redding song, and after that, “Oh Sarah” moves along softly with accompaniment from a strings section.
Closing out, Simpson cranks up the electric guitars for “Call to Arms.” We’re back in the barroom for track nine. In this one, the instrumental sections are perfect, jumping from solo to solo, jacking up the energy, and quieting down only to ramp back up. We get the feeling that he has waited until the end to really cut loose, to show us what he and his band can do.
“A Sailor’s Guide to Earth” was worth the wait. From his previous work, I’ve been partial to “Livin’ the Dream” and “Voices,” back to back songs on his Metamodern Sounds in County Music album, and frankly, I had just about worn out what I already had. “A Sailor’s Guide” is not necessarily a pure country album, but hell, is there such a thing as pure country? If Johnny Cash can put miriachi brass on “Ring of Fire” and still be called country, then Simpson’s strays into soul and Southern rock won’t hurt his chances.
If you want to hear more from Sturgill Simpson before you buy “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” you can listen to him on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts or on Live on KEXP. Both programs are from 2014.
Filed under: Arts, kentucky, Music, the South
April 17, 2016
A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #115
Inquiry, finally, is intrusive. It slides into impacted formations of social and public experiences that will seek to divert or receive the intruding gesture, but such spaces do not accept the critical gesture easily. Perhaps this is why poetry provides an opportune genre of linguistic inventiveness and moral certitude. Poetry plays into a contradictory public imagination of the art’s power to produce revolution or voiced dissent. Poetry can put forward the affective possibilities that motivate existing situations.
– from the “Afterword: Poetry as a Modality of Rhetoric in Modernist Inquiry” in Poets Beyond the Barricade" target="_blank">Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 by Dale M. Smith
Filed under: Critical Thinking, Poetry, Reading, Teaching, Writing and Editing
April 14, 2016
April 12, 2016
Alabamiana: The Murder of Sloan Rowan, 1912
According to the Atlanta Constitution‘s coverage of his murder, Sloan Rowan was sitting on a stopped train in Montgomery’s Union Station, waiting to head home to the small community of Benton, in Lowndes County, when C. Walter Jones boarded the train, found Rowan, and unloaded both barrels of a shotgun “at close range.” As one could guess, “Rowan died almost immediately.”
At the time of the murder, in July 1912, Sloan Rowan was a merchant in Benton and a grand jury witness in an arson case against Jones, who was accused of burning several stores there. The accused man’s opposition to Rowan’s participation is evident in its degree of violence. That startling and grisly image of the shotgun-blast killing from the ominously titled article, “Hunted His Foe and Killed Him,” leads into an explanation of Jones’ next move, which may be even stranger than the first: rather than flee or try to shoot his way out, Jones then “walked to the county jail and gave himself up.” He was charged with murder.
I found the narrative about this startling event in Alabama history when I was thumbing through The Heritage of Lowndes County book in the Alabama Department of Archives & History’s Research Room. My mother’s maternal family line, the Taylors and the Deans, lived in Lowndes County through half of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, and I was fishing for information about them when I went right past the bold heading “The Murder of Sloan Rowan,” and flipped back. Though the tale of Rowan and Jones has nothing to do with my family, it was too compelling to ignore.
That section in The Heritage of Lowndes County is fairly short, only spanning a little more than one half-page column, and its content is heavily laden with quotes from news sources of the time. Jones, it says, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death within two weeks, and his was “the first execution of a white man in Montgomery County since the Civil War.” Toward the end of the section, I learned that C. Walter Jones must’ve been a man to steer way clear of. Jones had killed another unarmed man from Benton, Charles Miller, in 1901, and he had shot a black man (but not killed him) in Montgomery in the 1890s. He was also known for “selling illegal whiskey.”
Despite his criminal predilections, Jones occupies an unenviable and fortuitous place in Alabama history: his botched hanging was a catalyst for Alabama’s use of the electric chair. When Jones was executed in April 1913, hanging was the method that Alabama used to carry out a death sentence. However, in his case, the rope that was used was either too long or it slipped, and Jones’ feet touched the ground. Rather than having his neck snapped by the impact the taut rope, which would have meant a quick and sudden death, Jones was strangled by the noose for more than thirty minutes.
According to coverage from Winston County, Alabama, at the time, that scene was common:
Under the system now in vogue, condemned men are hanged by the sheriff of the county in which they are convicted. Very often the hanging is a failure and the victims die horrible deaths.
I don’t know how smart a person has to be to cut a piece of rope seven feet shorter than the distance to the ground, but it seems that some lawmen couldn’t do that math. Seeking a “more humane” way to execute convicted criminals, then-governor Emmet O’Neal called for the use of the electric chair, which was supposed to be better.
It was ten years after the botched execution of C. Walter Jones before Alabama’s legislature yielded to O’Neal’s suggestion. In 1923, the state’s governing assembly changed the form of execution, though the change was not implemented until 1927, and the so-called Yellow Mama become Alabama’s preferred tool for officially sanctioned ending of human lives. (According to al.com, Yellow Mama was painted that color because the highway department that constructed it used its abundant supply of road-striping paint.) Use of Yellow Mama continued until 2002.
Among its plethora of ongoing legal quagmires, Alabama’s continued employment of the death penalty is another questionable and still-unresolved matter. If news sources from a hundred years ago are to be believed, the logistical realities of the death penalty have long been recognized as flawed. While we must recognize the tragedy of the murder of an unarmed father and husband who was trying to play his role in serving justice against a well-known menace to society, the state’s role in carrying out justice for Sloan Rowan was no less tragic. (Remember, in 1913, Alabama was still in the thick of its cruel and highly immoral convict-lease system, which wasn’t abolished until 1928— roughly the same time as Yellow Mama was brought on the scene.) C. Walter Jones may have been a bootlegger, arsonist, and murderer, but what was done to him at the hands of the law was not much better than what he did to others.
Filed under: Alabama, Black Belt, The Deep South
April 10, 2016
A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #114
Start with your own interests. You should be curious about people, events, documents, or problems considered in the course. This curiosity should make you pose some questions naturally. [ . . . ] The good historian is a questioner.
– from the section, “Step 1: Find A Topic,” in chapter four, “Gathering Information and Writing Drafts,” in A Short Guide To Writing About History, Third Edition by Richard Marius
Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing
April 7, 2016
TED Talk: Alice Goffman
After reading The New York Times Magazine‘s feature-length treatment of Alice Goffman and the controversies surrounding her book, On The Run, I was prompted to find out more about her and her work. Goffman is a sociologist-ethnographer-journalist person who embedded herself into a poverty-stricken black neighborhood while she was a students at the University of Pennsylvania, and her subsequent has drawn a lot of attention, both for its assertions and its methods. (This TED talk was mentioned in the article.) Though I’ve not read her book, Goffman makes some compelling arguments for criminal justice reform in America in this sixteen-minute talk.
Filed under: Education, Social Justice
April 5, 2016
April’s Southern Movie of the Month
1961 was a year of turmoil and change. The newly inaugurated president John F. Kennedy was dealing with the Bay of Pigs. The Freedom Riders were shaking things up in the South, taking interstate buses to New Orleans to test Jim Crow’s muscle. And in December, the Vietnam War began, as 400 US servicemen arrived by helicopter in Saigon. Amid this climate, the film adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play “The Children’s Hour” was released, starring Shirley MacLaine, Audrey Hepburn, and James Garner.
Though we are never told where the film’s story takes place, we recognize the South immediately. (The playwright Lillian Hellman was from New Orleans, and her family had roots in Demopolis, Alabama.) But this is not the South of Bob Ewell or Quentin Compson or Scarlett O’Hara— this is a very different South where unmarried, well-educated women make their own choices and handle their business without the interference of men. Which sets up the conflict for the story.
In “The Children’s Hour,” best friends Karen Wright (Hepburn) and Martha Dobie (MacLaine) operate a boarding school for girls. In the early moments of the film, we see them scurrying about, getting the young girls ready for bed in the voluminous house where they all live and learn. The women are long-time friends and have gone into this venture together, with Martha in the lead. In one of their first conversations, while cleaning up the dishes with the school’s only other employee, Martha’s aunt Mrs. Lily, we learn that after two years the school is finally making a profit. The exhausted but happy women ponder what to do with the scant dollars they have long hoped to have.
In the early part of the film, we also meet two other characters who quickly become significant: Mary, the school’s manipulative bad girl; and Joe Cardin, a handsome young doctor who is Karen’s fiancee. As the scene unfolds for us, we understand Mary to be an instigator, an eavesdropper, and a liar. Ever on the lookout for ways to gain an upper hand, she discovers her schoolmate Rosalie’s theft of another girl’s jewelry, and she overhears an outburst from Martha who is upset that Karen wants to get married just as the school is getting on solid ground. Joe Cardin is the counterbalance to Mary’s predatory influences; he is continually level-headed, kind, and patient, only allowing himself minimalistic remarks about the unseemly situations that he sees.
The real plot develops in the wake of a seemingly minor event: Mary has come to class late, and has brought Mrs. Lily some flowers that she found in the trashcan outside as a way to butter up the vain old spinster. Mary claims that she picked the flowers herself, but Karen calls her on the lie. After an angered Mary cries foul then feigns a conniption, Dr. Joe comes to do his due diligence, but Mary demands to see her overly doting grandmother, who is also Joe’s aunt. As those three contend in the next room, Martha is also bickering with Mrs. Lily, and soon fires the quibbling woman, telling her to move out right away.
As a means of escape from punishment, young Mary fabricates a nuanced version of life at her school, one just factual enough to seem true, for her grandmother. She cites having overheard Mrs. Lily’s admonition to Martha that her attachment to Karen is “unnatural,” and she shares having seen Karen and Martha quarrel. As she is egged on by her grandmother’s curiosity, Mary makes the ultimate charge, through a whisper that the audience doesn’t get to hear: the two women who run her school must be lesbians.
Immediately appalled and shocked, grandmother Mary Tilford chooses not to confront Martha and Karen with the charges, but instead decides to inform all of the other girls’ parents, so they can get their children out ASAP! The girls are all withdrawn, one by one but immediately, as the two women are left to wonder why— until one girl’s father, in a fit of pacing nervousness, tells Karen. Then Karen tells Martha. Again, just as director William Wyler did with Mary’s whisper to her grandmother, we don’t get to hear what is said— but we know.
The happy scenario where the story began has totally crumbled: the nearly successful school now has no students, Mrs. Lily has been fired and told to leave, the ever-faithful Joe has to choose between his love for Karen and the will of the town, and the friendship of Martha and Karen is strained. Our completely innocent protagonists are left asking, what do we do now? The first order of business is to confront Mary and her grandmother.
In the charged argument at Mary Tilford’s house, young Mary is caught lying about what she claims she to have seen and heard, but covers herself well. She drags Rosalie into her lies, holding the fact of the stolen jewelry over Rosalie’s head. Young Mary now has another lying (and thieving) child corroborating her story, so the grandmother holds fast to her belief. The two schoolmistresses decide to sue Mary Tilford for slander.
The next time we see Karen and Martha, some time has passed. They have lost the slander lawsuit, and the scandal has been national news. The two cannot leave town, and they cannot stay; they have no options, no opportunities. Suddenly, out of the blue, Mrs. Lily waltzes in the door, home from being on tour with her theater group. She has surreptitiously ignored the summons to come to court to explain her “unnatural” comments, and her absence from court was taken as an affirmation that the accusations are true. Now, Mrs. Lily has returned, having evaded the storm, wanting her old job and old room back . . . but Karen and Martha are having none of it.
As the remaining parts of the women’s lives fall apart, including an ugly argument between themselves and another between Karen and Joe, all hope seems lost. However, one fortuitous circumstance changes everything: Rosalie’s mother, while packing her daughter for her new school, discovers the stolen jewelry. Though we don’t get to see Rosalie gush out the truth, we understand what the discovery means. Now, Mary’s world will implode too, as her lie exposed.
Realizing her massive error of buying into a spoiled child’s obfuscations, Mary Tilford comes to the school to make things right with the women whose lives she has ruined. Tilford had already gone to the judge, asked for reversal of the judgment, and wants to pay them damages. She also offers to print a retraction in the newspaper and call every parent to ask them to re-enroll their daughters. But it’s too little too late. Even if the truth were exposed now, who would bring their children back to the school? And where could they go with the money, now that their names had been smeared all over the nation?
The outside world has failed Karen and Martha. In stereotypical Red Scare fashion, once they were accused, they were guilty. And even once they were found to be innocent, they knew that society would still regard them as guilty. As the two women talk, trying to make sense of the whole thing, Martha lets another bombshell fly: she may well be a lesbian who has been in love with Karen. Martha cries hysterically, proclaiming that no matter what a judge or society says, she is “guilty” as charged. Not knowing how to take this news, Karen goes outside for a walk, but only gets as far as the front gate before she is called back by a frantic Mrs. Lily. Karen returns to the house, runs upstairs, smashes open Martha’s locked door, and finds where her friend has hung herself! After the sparsely attended funeral, Karen puts Lily in a taxi and strides away, chin up, past the smattering of on-lookers, and the film ends there.
When “The Children’s Hour” was released, its stars were enjoying major success. Audrey Hepburn had hits in the 1950s with “Roman Holiday,” “Funny Face,” and “Sabrina,” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” came out the same year, in 1961. Shirley MacLaine had had a hit comedy with “The Apartment” the year before, in 1960. And James Garner had a thriving career on TV, including his hit show “Maverick,” which ran from 1957 – 1962. Yet, these three big-name actors appeared in this film with such a controversial subject: the mistreatment of women thought to be lesbians. But don’t get too hasty about proclaiming their bravery.
In 1961, the nation was having enough trouble digesting the fact that long-oppressed African Americans hadn’t actually been happy all along, having this indictment of intolerance brought to the big screen must’ve been a shock, though that force was blunted by the veiled presentation. In her essay, “Decades of Denial,” Alison A. Grounds writes:
The Children’s Hour represents the first major film released in the United States to deal clearly with lesbianism. The nature of the depiction of the lesbianism in this film reflects the type of images that were considered tasteful to American audiences in the early 1960s. Hollywood was ready to release a film with lesbian content as long as lesbianism was treated as an unhealthy condition with no opportunity for happiness.
In short, not everyone fell in love with this movie. Though some audiences may have disagreed, The New York Times‘ critic Bosley Crowther found “several glaring holes in the fabric of the plot,” the characters’ hasty and overzealous actions unbelievable, and had this to say of the theme: “So this drama that was supposed to be so novel and daring because of its muted theme is really quite unrealistic and scandalous in a prim and priggish way.” However, being reminded of the Southerners of the late 1950s and early 1960s, this portrayal isn’t too far off: accused meant guilty, suspicion meant ostracism, and different meant untouchable. No, in the Deep South, this reaction to a delicate matter like non-normative sexuality would have been realistic, if the actual notion were spoken of by a child witness who provided specifics.
While some critical responses about the play-turned-film focus on the effects of slander and lies, that’s only scratching the surface of it. Sure, the child Mary lies about Karen and Martha and destroys their lives— but we have to look at what she chooses to lie about. Mary’s lie involves an non-negotiable taboo in the post-war, pre-Civil Rights, pre-women’s movement Deep South. Mary wasn’t satisfied with leveling normal charges about mistreatment or favoritism; she dropped a bomb, one that was sure to incite a definite, hostile response from the conservative adults she understood well. This movie may be about lies and their effects, but it is also about intolerance and its effects. Those conservative parents would have yielded to Karen and Martha doling out discipline, but they would never answer with deference to the insinuation that the two women were lovers. That defied every social construct of the Deep South’s patriarchal, Protestant culture. What is impressive about the movie version of “The Children’s Hour” is not only that it tackled that issue at that time, but that Hellman’s play was written and produced even earlier, in the 1930s.
Decades before the Civil Rights movement, white liberal Southerners recognized the hypocrisy of their culture, and acted on that recognition in various, often understated ways. In PBS.org’s biography of Hellman, it is written: “her plays were a constant challenge to injustice,” and
Lillian Hellman will be remembered not only as an activist, playwright, and memoirist, but as a woman who could overcome the hurdles of her time and succeed on her own terms.
“The Children’s Hour” is an excellent example of that very thing.
Filed under: Film/Movies, Social Justice, The Deep South
