Foster Dickson's Blog, page 84

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #103

Just opening and closing the screen door behind me was an important experience. I’d rarely leave home all alone and without feeling reluctance. Walking down the sidewalk, under the canopy of tall trees, I’d warily notice the (suddenly) silent neighborhood kids who stood warily watching me. Nervously, I’d arrive at the grocery store to hear there the sounds of the gringo, reminding me that in this so-big world I was a foreigner. But if leaving home was never routine, neither was coming back. Walking toward our house, climbing the steps from the sidewalk, in summer when the front door was open, I’d hear voice beyond the screen door talking in Spanish. For a second or two I’d stay, linger there listening. Smiling, I’d hear my mother call out, saying in Spanish, “Is that you, Richard?” Those were her words, but all the while her sounds would assure me: You are home now. Come closer inside. With us. “Sí,” I’d reply.

from “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” by Richard Rodriguez, found in Multitude: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers, 2nd edition, edited by Chitra B. Divakaruni

Filed under: Civil Rights, Education, Literature, Reading, Social Justice, Teaching, Writing and Editing

A “House of Crosses” Public Service Announcement

Though it is now falling into disrepair since its creator WC Rice’s death in 2004, the Victory Cross Garden, also known to locals as the “House of Crosses,” stands as a stark reminder of the Deep South’s unique variety of hellfire-and-brimstone evangelical fervor. Although Rice himself has been gone for more than a decade, his reminders to visitors are still uncompromising in their message.

Filed under: Alabama, Arts, Bible Belt, The Deep South

Eudaemonia

Though I certainly don’t eschew enjoyment or joy or fun or leisure, I seldom consider whether I’m happy. At least not in the way that Pharrell Williams sings about in his pop hit “Happy,” whose message I don’t love: do what feels good to you. My kids dial up that two minutes of clap-along subjectivism on the iPod in my truck sometimes, and I am reminded of these interminable suit-yourself messages. (I’d be a lot happier listening to The Band or The Allman Brothers Band or Widespread Panic, personally.)

Feel-good happiness is usually something I wave out of my face like an overzealous mosquito. These days, happiness is portrayed as a big smile on a sunny day with Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” playing. That’s what the advertising agencies say it looks like . . . but that plastic, disposable version doesn’t look good to me.

A New York Times Opinionator column from last summer, “The Dangers of Happiness” by Carl Cederstrom, has kept my wheels turning about this vague, though desirable concept. I knew in the opening paragraph that Cederstrom is my kind of guy:

As we rush to make happiness the ultimate aim both for ourselves and society at large, we might want to recall some of the wonderfully rich and depressingly contradictory history of the concept.

Yes, let’s talk about the dark, confusing side of happiness. Now we’re getting somewhere! During his quickie history lecture, he mentions eudaemonia:

The happy life, what the Greeks called eudaemonia, was one lived ethically, guided by reason and dedicated to cultivating one’s virtues.

Could it be possible, you gratification-seeking modern hedonists, that happiness isn’t derived from doing what feels good, but from doing what is right, what is best, what is most responsible, most virtuous, most admirable?

I posit an answer: Yes.

If we look at the word eudaemonia, we see its root: daemon. No, not demon, like Satan’s evil minions— daemon. My familiarity with the term comes from literary study.  Phillip Pullman used the word “daemon” for the life-force spirit-animals in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and the critic Harold Bloom’s newest book is titled The Daemon Knows. Consulting one of way-too-many online dictionaries, we get: “An inner or attendant spirit or inspiring force.” The daemon is what Jiminey Cricket meant when he said, “Let your conscience be your guide.” And that prefix “eu” means, in Greek, good or well. Eudaemonia is when you have goodness in your soul, in your spirit, in your essence.

More than I want this-moment contentedness or comfort or pleasure, I want goodness in my soul. I want to know, at least, that I’ve tried to do the right things. Now, in my forties, my youthful idealism is long gone: I can’t fix the world, I know that. But that’s no excuse for complacency or selfishness. Because I’m more interested in eudaemonia than in “happiness,” leading a good life matters more to me than wealth or ease.

Back to Cederstrom’s opinion piece . . . He also reminds us that it isn’t the job of politicians to make us happy. Surmising my own conclusions and assuming that they might be his: if we’re looking at political news, and see something we disagree with, we don’t like it. And that makes us unhappy. And by God, I must be happy! Right?

No.

In our system of representative democracy, we send individuals with our local perspectives and problems into central legislative bodies to be debated and, hopefully, resolved. This process should be played out on the local level in city councils and county commissions, on the state level in assemblies and legislatures, and on the national level in Congress. The meaningful political bonds that tie us together as a city or state or nation represent the social bonds of cooperation and mutuality. And those social bonds have nothing to do with personal happiness; they’re about the goodness of mutually beneficial relationships— of helping and being helped, hopefully in relatively equal measure.

When the concept of personal happiness is applied to public policy, the social contract is obliterated. Governmental process becomes a mere tug-of-war, as it is now. Yet, an educated citizenry can’t look at others and say, It doesn’t make me happy to help you. In an often-referenced quip, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mike Royko is quoted this way: “. . . it is easier to give someone the finger than a helping hand.” When one person tells another to piss off, a reciprocal sentiment is soon to follow, and the spirit of cooperation is lost, totally denying the beautiful ideal of two old adages: “It is better to give than to receive,” and “We’re all in this together.”

No, personal happiness is sorely overrated. Sadly, this wonderful idea – happiness – is now used to denote a self-centered philosophy where personal fulfillment is the ultimate goal. Put in political terms, too many people observe an ideal that says, I’ll be happy when the public policy debate goes my way. A good life, personal or public, can’t be reduced to that.

Personally, I prefer community. As a person who doesn’t want to be placated with the faux contentment of consumerism and political one-sidedness, I willingly concede my right to total personal happiness, in favor of a society where we can all have what we need: physically, spiritually, socially, and economically. Eudaemonia. Goodness as a reward in itself.

Sadly, disagreeing with that narcissistic version of happiness is an act of “resistance,” as bell hooks puts it in her 2003 book, Teaching Community:

Service as a form of political resistance is vital because it is a practice of giving that eschews the notion of reward. The satisfaction is in the act of giving itself, of creating the context where students can learn freely.

hooks is writing about teaching, but her words transcend the classroom. Consideration for others builds that goodness in the soul— which is worth more than the glimmering grin in an Orbitz commercial.

Filed under: Arts, Education, Literature

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #102

Pay attention to what you are literally saying. Pay attention to what your words mean, not just what you intend them to mean. Students come to me constantly with their graded papers in hand whining, “Well, what I meant to say was . . .” or “But you know what I meant to say.” Sorry, it is your job to mean what you say and to say what you mean, and it is my job to play the innocent, unsuspecting reader. I must respond to what I read on the page. My task is not to give you the benefit of the doubt and not to read into your confused words what I want you to mean.

— from the section “Say What You Mean– Mean What You Say” in the chapter “Choosing Words” in Sin Boldly!: Dr. Dave’s Guide to Writing the College Paper by David R. Williams.

Filed under: Education, Reading, Teaching, Writing and Editing

What “Foxfire” could have been— and still could be

I had never heard of Foxfire before I went to Clayton, Georgia in the summer of 2010. I had been awarded a Writer-in-Service Residency from the Lillian E. Smith Foundation, and was heading to Clayton to spend two weeks writing in a cabin that had once been a bunkhouse in Smith’s camp for girls. After several days in my cabin, when the walls started closing in, I decided it was time to head into town before I began veering toward something like The Shining. In town, on the main corner of the main drag, what did I find but a bookstore: Prater’s Main Street Books. Inside, I browsed among local authors and books on local subjects – because what better reason is there to visit an independent bookstore in a small Southern town? – and stumbled across Foxfire.

Foxfire is a student-produced journal created and led by a man named Eliot Wigginton when he was an English teacher in Rabun County in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The periodical version eventually led to the full-length Foxfire Book, published by Anchor Books/Doubleday. Being a fan of the sixties and seventies in general – the music and films from those decades are some of my favorites – I was enthralled immediately by this student project led by a high school English teacher, whose teaching style and ideas seemed similar to my own. Though two or three decades and two states stood between his work and mine, we each shared a desire to bring students to local culture through experiential learning— in his case, Appalachian folk culture, and in mine, Civil Rights and the arts in Alabama’s Black Belt.

However, there’s a tightrope to walk in professing any admiration for Eliot Wigginton. When I got back up on the mountain, I set about telling the artist in the other cabin about what I’d found. She is an artist of an elder generation and had been around that part of the country for much longer than I had. After she patiently listened to my enthusiasm about my new find, she apprised me that Wigginton’s downfall came when he was accused of and confessed to child molestation. He had done great work, she told me, and was a real star on a local scale, but had overstepped the teacher-student boundary in the most unseemly way. Immediately and completely repulsed, I backed off from my zeal and did not return to Prater’s to buy up copies of Foxfire, which I had originally planned to do later in the week. But I still do think from time to time about this man and his work— and the circumstances that overshadow his accomplishments.

In November 1992, forty-nine-year-old Eliot Wigginton plead guilty to one count of child molestation for fondling a ten-year-old boy. The matter of his small-town English teacher was covered by The New York Times, which explained summarily what Foxfire was:

Named for a phosphorescent lichen common to the mountainous north Georgia area, Foxfire began as a student-produced journal in Mr. Wigginton’s high school English class at Rabun County High School in the late 1960’s. It sent the students out to interview their neighbors and examine their communities and eventually grew to an enterprise that sold more than four million books worldwide, inspired a Broadway play and a created a network of more than 1,200 teachers in about a dozen states who actively promote the idea of the journals as learning tools.

and this about the teacher’s continued success in the 1980s:

Mr. Wigginton was seen by many as the embodiment of this experiential approach to learning. Some education professors used his 1985 autobiography, “Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience,” as a required text in their courses. In 1989 he received one of the so-called genius grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

However, as acts of intolerable impropriety came to light, Wigginton’s stellar career was over.

From the period right after his guilty plea and subsequent jail sentence, a 1994 article, “Fall from Grace,” published in Education Week, sheds more light on Wigginton, whose involvement with this one boy may not have been an isolated incident. The writer, Debra Viadero, recounts the increasing severity of the accusations against this once-lauded teacher:

All of the accolades stopped two years ago, however, after a 10-year-old boy from Athens, Ga., accused Wigginton of fondling him during an overnight stay at the educator’s log cabin near Clayton. Soon after that news broke, other young men began to come forward. They said they, too, had been molested by Wigginton when they were teenagers, and their stories were remarkably similar. By the time the case brought by the Athens boy was scheduled to go to trial, a total of 18 young men were prepared to testify that Wigginton had molested them – or had attempted to – on 23 separate occasions.

Viadero goes on to relay that Wigginton was forbidden to have any contact with children for twenty years and that the foundation built around the Foxfire ideal had “divorced him.”

Viadero also interviewed Wigginton himself for her 1994 article. About any attempt to draw connections between his teaching and his crimes, he had this to say:

“Anyone,” he says, becoming more animated and forceful as he speaks, “anyone who discounts or dismisses the principles and the pedagogy and the exploration that is going on with committed professionals and the [Foxfire] teacher-outreach office would be in my estimation an extremely small-minded, mean-spirited, ignorant individual.”

As a teacher who has struggled for more than a decade to build a writing program based on experiential-learning, I see two main themes in Eliot Wigginton’s remarkable successes and failures. First, and most obviously, the non-negotiable “line” between teacher and student should not be crossed, ever. And no teacher is immune from the scrutiny that comes with crossing it.

Beyond that though, another theme has to be acknowledged: the verve with which so many people – educators and students alike – recognized the value of experiential learning. Wigginton’s success was not built on testing, discipline, dress codes, computer software, or federal programs— all the go-to “solutions” of today. It was built on getting students into the community, where they were encouraged to understand and appreciate their own natural and cultural surroundings, and write about it. That approach invests everyone in the education of children, from parents to . . . well, moonshiners. No amount of dollars, nor any computer-based program will ever accomplish what human beings working together can accomplish. About the value of community-centered experiential learning, I’ve told my own students’ parents many times, “They may not remember my lectures the next week, but they’ll remember every field trip we ever take.”

So what ever happened to Foxfire?

It’s alive and well. Today, The Foxfire Fund, Inc. continues the work that Eliot Wigginton began, yet was forced to abandon. (Their Magazine page still lists Wigginton as the founder, though the About page doesn’t mention him, just a Board of Directors and a Community Board.) The website offers a range of Teaching materials and News, which right now include pictures from the Foxfire Mountaineer Festival last October and a scholarship opportunity for local students. The educational ideas behind Foxfire haven’t been abandoned at all. Nor should they be.

I’ve only been back to Clayton once since 2010, and that time I didn’t come down off the mountain much. But knowing a little more about Foxfire on that second trip, I did look at Rabun County differently. Thinking about how Eliot Wigginton’s actions ended his career, I wondered, had he not done those things, might experiential learning have taken hold nationally, like standardized testing did instead? On that second trip, when I would walk in the woods around the Lillian Smith Center, among the multitudinous wild rhododendrons, I would look for that luminescent lichen called foxfire . . . though I never would have seen it. The sad truth is: This Alabama boy is too frightened of bears to go out there in the dark.

Filed under: Arts, Education, Gardening, Georgia, Teaching, The Deep South

The Passive Activist #5

We Americans are living with an unprecedented absence of leadership. In the Deep South, we have lived with this void for most of our history, so we’re a little more used to it than the rest of the nation— but that doesn’t make it OK. In the face of Congressional deadlock, soaring national debt, secular/religious strife, rogue policy actions by state legislatures, mistrust of the police, declines in public education funding, exorbitant college costs, internet predators and trolls, crumbling labor unions, global warming, and too many choices at the optician,  the Passive Activist series offers ideas for how ordinary people can create and implement positive change in our own lives. Movements are made up of people.

#5. Support and patronize public libraries

Today, with broadband internet, wireless hot spots, and 4G LTE service, many of us can access any information any time. But all people aren’t so fortunate. For many people, the resources in public libraries offer their only access to searchable information, including through the internet. Let’s be honest, if a person is struggling to afford adequate food, clothing, and shelter, having a broadband connection or a smart phone isn’t a priority, and as smart phones get more and more sophisticated, pricing and other factors limit access to those. In an information society, public libraries are a leveling force.

Libraries are no longer the places where an old lady with a bun shushed you for giggling with your friends. The American Library Association recently published a new report titled “After Access: Libraries and Digital Empowerment”, which acknowledges that they are there “to help people harness the transformative power of digital information to support education, employment, entrepreneurship, empowerment and engagement—or The E’s of Libraries.” And the Libraries Transform program is working to move these institutions forward, too.

The Institute of Museum and Library Service’s annual report for Fiscal Year 2012 – the most recent year for which a report is available – also confirms the benefits of libraries:

Public libraries provide learning and information resources for individuals, families, businesses, and nonprofit organizations. In their role as community anchor institutions, they create opportunities for people of all ages through access to collections and technology. Public libraries support community improvement by providing programming that addresses the health, education, and workforce development needs of local residents. Libraries are places where people can gain assistance with research and information needs from knowledgeable library staff. In communities across the nation, local public libraries complement commercial development activity and provide attractive neighborhood amenities in residential settings.

Access to information through public libraries is essential to American democracy. To my understanding, that most American of folk idols, Ben Franklin, started America’s first lending library, because he understood that. We all should, too.

To find a library near you, click here.

Filed under: Local Issues, Reading, Social Justice

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #101

Lots of people pretend they’ve got tomorrow figured out: tech gurus, politicians, CEOs and (yes) journalists. But we’re if honest with ourselves, the view ahead of us has never been murkier. That’s because the problems that haunt our world today – climate change and pollution, inequality and war – are problems for which technology, long our spur to envisioning better futures, looks more like a cause than a solution. Our future is hard to imagine because we have trouble imagining how we can possibly act to improve it.

– from the introductory material to “The Future Issue” section of The New York Times Magazine, November 15, 2015

Filed under: Education, Forthcoming, Reading, Social Justice, Teaching, Writing and Editing

One more reason to absolutely adore Pope Francis!

Filed under: Catholicism

#alabamagood

I’ve written more times than I count about my home state’s negative side: poverty, politics, you know. Yesterday, that doggone Roy Moore was at it again, denying same-sex marriage with more convoluted states-rights logic. But did you also notice that yesterday AL.com reported about professor at Tuskegee who had made a breakthrough in cancer research? Amid Moore’s prevalence in the news cycle, I guarantee that story got less traffic than it deserved.

I use the hashtag #alabamagood, because there’s so much down here to praise.  We at home in Alabama, and you folks who don’t live down here, need to be reminded that Alabama may be poor and struggling in so many ways, but we’re pretty damn remarkable in other ways. A lot of people choose to judge us or stereotype our state based on a few high-profile people, but dammit, that’s not all of us!

I mark posts with #alabamagood, because when people think of my home state, I want them to think of that lady physicist at Tuskegee and of The Drive-By Truckers and Alabama Shakes and St. Paul and the Broken Bones and Andrew Beck Grace making films and EAT South and Jones Valley Urban Farm and Belle Chevre and Good People Brewing and Blue Pants Brewery and Red Clay Brewing and Lowe Mill and Standard Deluxe and Kentuck and Saturn Birmingham and The Rural Studio . . . not Roy Moore and that kind of stuff. I’m talking about #alabamagood.

We who live in Alabama have to talk about, write about, post about the good stuff, too. We certainly can’t ignore our problems, but we can give our best attention to people that are actually worthy of our best attention.

Filed under: Alabama, Bible Belt

January’s Southern Movie of the Month

The first time I ever saw or knew anything about , I went to the Capri Theatre to watch the 1994 documentary, “Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made,” in which an aging director walks Jarmusch through the jungles that would have been the set for a John Wayne movie (that was never made). That documentary was agonizingly dull, and my buddies, who I had talked into going to see it, were pissed with me for wasting their money and their time. The next time was in 1996’s “Sling Blade,” where Jarmusch played a Frostee Cream employee who sells Billy Bob Thornton his French fries with mustard. When I saw him lean out that little window, all I could think was: that’s the guy from that shitty documentary.

So it would be a long time before I gave “Down by Law” a chance. Though I didn’t know it until later, Jarmusch had directed several films that I had already seen: 1991’s “Night on Earth,” which I had watched on Bravo years ago, back when Bravo was still an arts TV network; 1995’s “Dead Man,” a surreal black-and-white Western starring Johnny Depp; and 2003’s latter-day “Coffee and Cigarettes,” which along with “My Dinner with Andre” is one of the few movies where two people just sit and talk. No, my only real comprehension of Jarmusch’s work came from “Tigrero” and from the Frostee Cream, so seeing his name as the director of “Down by Law” didn’t incite my confidence.

(To be honest, too, I was starting junior high when “Down by Law” came out, in 1986. If the twelve-year-old me had encountered this stark, ironic, black-and-white movie, I probably would have turned it off.)

“Down by Law” opens with a panoramic drive through the poorest parts of New Orleans, and Jarmusch drapes the scene in the Tom Waits’ song “Jockey Full of Bourbon.” The first two people we meet are Zack (Tom Waits himself) and Jack (John Lurie), both of whom are having women troubles. Zack is wayward radio DJ, who ambles into bed at dawn, and the next time we see him, he is rocking back and forth silently as his girlfriend (Ellen Barkin) verbally and physically abuses him for his career failings, then throws him (and his 45s) out into the street. Jack is a young pimp, who sits coolly and silently while a naked black woman waxes philosophic about his shortcomings, though the two are interrupted by Fatso, a toothless loser (played by the late Rockets Redglare) who has come to offer Jack a new girl. We get the sense that things won’t go well.

In separate fortuitous circumstances, each man ends up in the Orleans Parish Prison, and become cellmates. Jack has gotten set up by Fatso, using an under-age girl, and Zack was pulled over while moving a stolen car (with a dead body in the trunk) across town. Soon, a third man is put in the cell with them: an Italian who speaks no English, who we recognize from a brief encounter with Zack earlier. Unfortunately, the jail cell scenes are slow. Very slow. Jarmusch likes to hold one camera shot for a long time, and he does that shamelessly during this part of the film.

But our anti-heroes escape! After running wildly through a watery sewer, they  evade the howling hounds and make it to a swamp. Zack even says at one point, “Out of the frying pan into the fire.”

Which is where I stop this discussion of the plot, because that’s how I felt putting myself through this film . . . Look here, the three guys do some other stuff, struggle in the swamp, find a cabin, meet a lady, yadda-yadda, and have a lot of meaningless quasi-philosophical conversations as they go. The end. I didn’t think it could be done, but Jim Jarmusch found a way to make a seedy New Orleans jailbreak movie boring.

When I decided to write about “Down by Law” for the Southern Movie of the Month, I knew it meant that I would have to re-watch it. Sigh. I did it, but suffering through this guy’s movies is like being in a two-hour all-lecture freshman Western Civ course taught by an elderly professor who is “semi-retired.” O . . . M . . . G . . .  The kind of people who like these movies probably also liked “Clerks” and . . . I don’t know, maybe Fellini films. (If you’ve ever watched “Roma” and wondered, why am I watching this? then you know how it feels to watch “Down by Law.”)

In the movie reviews section of his website, the late Roger Ebert wrote:

“Down by Law” is a true original that kind of grows on you. Maybe it goes on a little too long, and maybe it depends too much on its original inspiration – these three misfits and the oddballs they meet along the way – instead of trying to be about something.

Ebert has a point. “Down by Law” is more about being quirky and “cool” than about any storyline.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, though, that was a common indie thread: random weirdness as cool. This was back when the terms “alternative” or “indie” meant something, before corporations had totally co-opted and commodified the underground. (If you don’t believe me, look where CBGB is re-opening in an airport.) “Down by Law” fits into an older indie genre in which musicians became bad actors using questionable scripts, a genre that would include 1982’s “Smithereens” or 1983’s “Suburbia” or 1987’s “Border Radio.”

Anyway . . . as a narrative of the Deep South, this film does have some merit. Jarmusch shows the seedy New Orleans, usually unseen behind the closed doors on wrought-iron balconies, without being too forced about it. The clichés are handled tastefully enough to avoid being like . . . Dan Aykroyd’s House of Blues Brothers, with clean bathrooms so the tourists don’t get upset. This place has women pacing under corner streetlights, nasty jail cells, and mucky swamps. Despite my prejudices against the director’s plodding cinematography and mind-numbingly dull dialogue, some people might like it. I’m just not one of them.

Filed under: Film/Movies, Louisiana, The Deep South