Foster Dickson's Blog, page 85

Why don’t we just clean it up?

I saw this story on NBC Nightly News last night and thought it worth sharing. The 21-year-old who is featured isn’t waiting on somebody to figure out how to clean up the Pacific Ocean, which is littered with plastic refuse; he and an army of volunteers are just going out and doing it.

Filed under: The Environment

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #100

It’s a new year, and this is my one-hundredth quote, offered up weekly for nearly two years now. I knew I had to make this week count.  This quote comes from Anne LaMott, the progressive writer and teacher whose nonfiction and novels are remarkable for their wisdom, humor, and insights into human life. I’ve been reading her book Small Victories lately and came across this one.

Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before before putting it on a shelf somewhere. Now, at this stage in my life, I understand just enough about life to understand that I do not understand much of anything.

– from the chapter, “Ladders,” in Small Victories: Spotting Improbably Moments of Grace by Anne LaMott

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

Greatest Hits of 2015!

As a writer, the real goal is reaching people with the words, and I appreciate all of the folks who’ve stopped at Pack Mule for the New School to read. I want to thank the thousands of people who clicked on my blog posts thousands of times. With that in mind, here are five of the greatest hits from 2015:

Well, shut my mouth!
Alabamiana: John Asa Rogers, 1853 – 1908
Alabamiana: Jim, d. 1854
An Even Dozen (Years in the Classroom)
Running Down the Devil, or . . . Sallie Mae and Me

Happy New Year!

Filed under: Alabama, Education, Social Justice, Teaching, The Deep South

Is recycling REALLY a waste of time?

After writing last month on John Tierney’s recycling op-ed in The New York Times, I wanted to do some more research about this subject, because I still have to ask, Is recycling really a waste of time? Maybe recycling won’t save the world by itself – okay, Mr. Tierney, I’ll give you that – but what is the real impact of our small, individual contributions?

The first thing I found that seemed most relevant was a Popular Mechanics article from 2008 titled “Is Recycling Worth It? PM Investigates the Environmental and Economic Impact.” This article, which is admittedly several years old, attributes the recycling craze of the last few decades to the 1987 Mobro trash barge debacle, which it says incited a new fervor to save the planet one plastic bottle at a time. Yet, reactionary verve against a potentially nightmarish trash heap may not have been the answer, since the cost in municipal dollars and gasoline-powered trash trucks may have actually caused as many (or more) problems while trying to solve another one. Likewise, we learn that the wildly fluctuating price of collected recyclables causes them to be an unreliable raw material for most businesses that would use them. The example cited is:

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, the price of a ton of mixed recyclables spiked from $33 in 1994 to $170 in 1995 and then plummeted back to $40 in 1996.

The answers about which things to recycle and which to put in a landfill may, in the end, come from an understanding of which materials it feasible to re-use. Makes sense . . . Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, trying to recycle absolutely everything, we may need to accept that some resources are too expensive and too cumbersome to re-use, and will thus become trash. The answer may be to stop using those materials altogether.

About the economic argument that appeared in PM and from Tierney, I personally don’t care if it’s profitable for cities to recycle. The function of a municipal government is not to turn a profit – contrary to conservative rhetoric, governments aren’t businesses – but they do exist to serve the public good. And if recycling serves the public good, then cities need to be doing it— and we need to accept that we will be paying for it.

After going over the pros and cons of “single stream” versus “dual stream” systems, “The Verdict” comes in a form that would mean more to a city manager than to a private citizen like me. The final word, in 2008, was that :

recycling is generally desirable, but it’s not automatically good and efficient and cheap. It takes significant up-front capital investment to implement a state-of-the-art single-stream recycling program. For that reason, the newfound stability of the recycling market is just as important as the high prices, because it allows cities to plan investments around future revenue streams.

Though I learned something from Popular Mechanics, I needed more to really help me to understand whether recycling is a waste of time.

Searching for this big answer using big search terms wasn’t yielding much, so I narrowed my focus, asking, what materials am I actually recycling? For me, it’s kitchen scraps in my compost, and mostly cardboard packaging and plastic drink bottles. (Though I do have a rain barrel for outdoor watering, I’m not savvy enough yet to have a gray-water system.) For me, it’s almost totally kitchen waste. I want to know whether my efforts could have real benefits.

With a little more digging online, I found the US Environmental Protection Agency’s iWarm Tool, when I was browsing the website for Recycle More Minnesota. So what is the iWarm Tool?

We created the Individual Waste Reduction Model (iWARM) to help you find out how much energy you can save when you recycle. The amount of energy saved is shown as the amount of time you can power an appliance. We used data from the iWARM model to create the Save Energy by Recycling web widget, which you can add to your website.

To be frank: on the tech side, I had trouble figuring things out. When I downloaded the zip file from the EPA’s site, it gave me a macro that I could only open as Read-Only using MS Word. Though that document contained very detailed information about what each little recycled item could mean, I couldn’t enter data into it. The website says that it’s supposed to work with Excel. It didn’t, for me.

On the other hand, the iWarm app, available on the iTunes App Store, is much easier to use, though it has less information on it. The app’s simple interface allows a user to plug in numbers, like how many aluminum cans or metal soup cans you’ve recycled, and it translates that sum into energy savings in kilowatt hours (kWh). For example, in a flash, I could find out that recycling two glass wine bottles saved 0.25 kWh, which would run a ceiling fan for 2.05 hours or a dishwasher for 0.10 hours.

Pretty cool . . . as a quick reference guide. But I have to keep those numbers in perspective. It’s not as if I toss two wine bottles in my bin and – viola!– my ceiling fans run for two hours without moving my power meter. Those savings are deferred, of course. But it’s good to know that there are savings, that recycling is indeed worthy of the effort— in environmental terms.

So . . . 

If there are indeed energy savings to recycling, as the EPA’s app would lead me to believe, then the real question is: how can we see those accumulated single-household benefits realized on a larger level? If John Tierney and Popular Mechanics are correct then we need some measurable predictability, I think, to stabilize the economic side. We need participation by individuals, recycling by cities, and consumption by vendors to become more constant. The commodities price of post-consumer raw materials needs to levelize, which will enable cities and waste-management contractors, like Montgomery’s currently closed IREP facility, to keep doing the good work.

How to do that— well, unfortunately, that’s a public policy question that’s way beyond me . . . For my part, if the bigwigs will get a system, I will – as I have done in the past – participate fully and conscientiously. And I think that a lot of other people will, too.

Filed under: The Environment

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #99

An aspiring writer could be forgiven for thinking that learning to write is like negotiating an obstacle course in boot camp, with a sergeant barking at you for every errant footfall. Why not think of it instead as a form of pleasurable mastery, like cooking or photography? Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game. Though the quest for improvement may be informed by lessons and honed by practice, it must first be kindled by a delight in the best work of the masters and a desire to approach their excellence.

— from the chapter, “Good Writing,” in The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

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

Merry Christmas!

Though I was raised Baptist, and spent most of my early adulthood avoiding churches altogether, I became Catholic as adult. The priest who was largely responsible for my conversion endeared me to the faith with a curious mix of humility and sarcasm, and with his self-effacing messages about universal human imperfection. He had, as one of his peccadilloes, an insistence that he would not say “Merry Christmas” until it actually was Christmas, and the Christmas season doesn’t begin until Christmas Eve. (Before that, it is Advent, of course.)

So in honor of Father Carucci’s memorable hard line on this issue, I say to all of you, “Merry Christmas,” and share with you a historically mindful prayer about The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ:

The Twenty-fifth Day of December,

when ages beyond number had run their course

from the creation of the world,

when God in the beginning created heaven and earth,

and formed man in his own likeness;

when century upon century had passed

since the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after the Great Flood,

as a sign of covenant and peace;

in the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith,

came out of Ur of the Chaldees;

in the thirteenth century since the People of Israel were led by Moses

in the Exodus from Egypt;

around the thousandth year since David was anointed King;

in the sixty-fifth week of the prophecy of Daniel;

in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad;

in the year seven hundred and fifty-two

since the foundation of the City of Rome;

in the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus,

the whole world being at peace,

JESUS CHRIST, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father,

desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence,

was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

and when nine months had passed since his conception,

was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah,

and was made man:

The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

Filed under: Catholicism

Re-reading “The Dog Star”

The Dog Star, a novel written by Donald Windham and published in 1950, follows a bleak protagonist through the mid-century Deep South. Blackie Pride is a fifteen-year-old boy living in Depression-era Atlanta whose disaffected attitude toward everything around him lies somewhere between JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Albert Camus’ Meursault. He is a Southern existential anti-hero, one who predates Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling by more than a decade.

I read The Dog Star ten or fifteen years ago at the urging of a friend, who was a fellow editor with very modern and usually impeccable taste. (This same friend turned me on to Dennis Cooper‘s George Myles Cycle, to Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren, and to Iceberg Slim.) With his recommendation and an undeniably great title, The Dog Star – which as a Gen X-er reminded me of the Mother Love Bone song, “Stardog Champion” – I couldn’t resist. And in the spirit of truly dedicated readers everywhere, I stumbled across my copy on a dusty, cluttered shelf recently and decided to read it again.

As the novel begins, Blackie is walking out of reform school, of his own volition, holding the guitar that his friend Whitey Maddox has given him. Whitey has just committed suicide in the second-floor isolation room the day before. Blackie hitches a ride on a flatbed truck then attempts to re-place himself right back into his old life and habits— but it won’t work. He is not the same after knowing Whitey.

In the earliest chapters, we immediately suspect that something homoerotic was going on between the angry teenager and his dead friend. Blackie recounts fondly – for his reader, though not for his family or friends – how he and Whitey used to skip out on work detail, swim in a wooded creek, and lie naked together in the sun. He apprises us that Whitey was tough and distant and wanted nothing to do with anyone— except Blackie. Made to feel special by the attention of this loner-rebel – who smacks of Alain-Fournier’s anti-hero Augustin Meaulnes, too – Blackie becomes . . . let’s call it obsessed.

However, we have to ask ourselves whether Blackie is gay at all. Big and muscular, Blackie is mannish compared to the brothers Dusty and Hatchet, his friends who also hang out in the local parks, and he was sent to reform school after a series of incidents involving a girl in the neighborhood. On his first day back in town, he meets and sleeps with a young married woman named Mabel and soon returns to her for a few weeks of daily sex in her hotel room. Yet, unable to reconcile his confused feelings with his new relationship, Blackie is a pretty pitiful boyfriend.

After trying to ruin his relationship with Mabel, Blackie starts trying to ruin his relationships with his grown sister Pearl and his mother. Mabel had come to Pearl’s house looking for Blackie, and Pearl warned him not to get in over his head. Blackie doesn’t take the advice well. Soon after that, he gets into it with his mother over him quitting his menial job and over his indifference to his sister Gladys’ sketchy pre-teen behavior.

However, Windham wants us to see Blackie Pride as something more than a lazy dullard. This is where he becomes much more like Holden Caulfield, a character who didn’t appear until a year later in 1951. About Blackie having quit his job, Windham writes,

The job was endless but not fascinating. There was no climax or satisfaction. Until five o’clock it took his energy, but when he was off for the day there were four hours of light during which he was restless and dissatisfied. There was nothing to do of enough interest to make him forget himself. [ . . . ] He would have given up his life gladly to any cause that enlisted him and demanded that he give his all. He was bored and he wanted excitement.

And about Blackie’s disaffected treatment of his lover, mother, and siblings, Windham writes this über-introverted explanation:

Everything he had done lately had seemed to go wrong. He did just what he wanted to do, yet somehow his actions seemed different when they were reflected in other people. He looked the way he wanted to in his own eyes, but Mother and Pearl and [his brother] Caleb gave back a different impression from that which he had of himself. This made him angry, but his anger did not change their impressions. He knew that his idea of himself was the right one, that it was what he wanted to be. But the failing of others to see him as he saw himself angered him into suspecting that something of which he was unaware was wrong.

The thing that everyone else sees, Blackie can’t: he is being an asshole. Yet Blackie can’t see that because he’s damaged, heartbroken by Whitey’s suicide, which he can’t comprehend. Not only has his hero been knocked off the pedestal, Whitey knocked himself off, leaving Blackie with no chance for asking questions. Blackie’s response is to internalize the dead boy’s posturing as an homage: Nothing can hurt you if you don’t let anything get close. Rather than recognizing Whitey as a failed ideal, Blackie embraces it out of reactionary stubbornness. It’s as teenage as teenage can get.

For much of the novel, Blackie has his way, doing whatever he pleases, never facing more than a verbal reproach, but that can’t go on forever. As the story wanes, he tries to buy a used 1927 Ford by only paying a forty-dollar down payment (intending to skip out on the rest), but that fails when the seller raises the required down payment to fifty. Shortly thereafter, he tries to finagle the other ten dollars by snitching on his friends, but is rebuked by their potential victim. Then he gets beat up in an alley by a group of boys whose faces he never sees. Like all unrealistic fantasies conjured up by naive young men who don’t want to face adult responsibilities, Blackie’s plan is unraveled by real life.

By the end of the novel, we get a tiny smidgen of understanding about what has happened to set Blackie off. During a “date” with his sister Gladys to a party his mother tells him he has to attend with her, Blackie’s memory is sparked and he recollects the circumstances of Whitey’s demise. The “fatassed kid” at the reform school had touched Whitey’s guitar and Blackie attacked him for it; the kid then told on him, and the consequence would be to separate Blackie and Whitey, putting them in different dorms, disallowing contact between them. A distraught Whitey freaked out and killed himself, an action that reinforces that there was something more than friendship between the boys.

The author of The Dog Star, Donald Windham, is far less famous than his literary friends, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. And though The Dog Star is a pretty good novel, the fact that it falls short of the fame achieved by To Kill A Mockingbird, for example, isn’t surprising. If the South wasn’t ready in 1960 to deal with unjust lynchings and the deadly comeuppance of poor white trash, it surely wasn’t ready in 1950 to deal with the perverted logic of a suicidal possibly-homosexual teenage delinquent. Blackie Pride would never have been a crowd favorite.

As for the novel’s quality, I kind of agree with the assessment of a 2004 review in Oyster Boy Review:

For its reissue, Hill Street applies a different spin, haling The Dog Star as, “a landmark classic of southern literature.” It’s not. [ . . . ] The gender dynamics of the novel are equally atypical of regional southern fiction and bear a closer resemblance to pulp fiction of the “hard-boiled” variety.

Though Windham’s novel is Southern, the adjective “atypical” fits. The Dog Star will never make a top-ten list graced by the other mid-century Southern novels that get the most traction from reading groups and on course syllabi. Its anomalous quality, though, it what makes it interesting.

That reviewer for the Oyster Boy Review also brought up something about the novel that bears repeating in closure. The novel apparently “earned the praise of Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster, and Messrs. Gide and Camus.” Though that OBR review ends by expressing “satisfaction” at Blackie’s suicide, a host of European greats found the same praiseworthy qualities that I found. In my reading, I never wanted to glamorize Blackie at all. He reminded me of the dour, confused, sometimes-violent boys that I knew when I was growing up in the Deep South six decades later, boys whose agitated, reprobate behavior was spurred not so much by immorality as by a desolate realization that life won’t have much to offer them. No, suicide isn’t “something some people DESERVE.” It is an unfortunate conclusion that some young people choose over the realities of living an “endless but not fascinating” life.

Filed under: Georgia, Literature, Reading, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #98

We are teaching writing as literature because literature is central to writing. You may object that the academic expository essay is instrumental and utilitarian, a specialized form of prose, like the textbooks students have been reading most of their lives. That is the root of the problem. Writing cannot be learned as something specialized, any more than you could learn carpentry by doing repairs or cooking by working in a short-order kitchen. We cannot begin with the peripheral. Except for technical schools, there is no sense in teaching the specialized at all. Competency can refine itself. We must teach the central first. However we define it, the true beginning is the center,  because the center is the core or heart, an axis on which the rest turns, the point of concentrated activity or influence, the subject seen in its most direct and simple form, as poetry is the center of literature. Centers are, moreover, the beginnings we never leave behind. We leaf and flower out of them and ripen back to them, returning to them and renewing our sense of them at every stage.

— from the chapter, “Transition to Expository Essays: Student Writing as Literature” in Beat Not The Poor Desk: Writing: What to teach, How to teach it and Why by Marie Ponsot and Rosemary Dean

Filed under: Education, Teaching, Writing and Editing

The Passive Activist #4

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 Ryan Secrest’s ever-present face,  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.

#4. Don’t bag your leaves.

Every fall, when I drive through my neighborhood, I see piles of black garbage bags lining the curbs for the city to take to the landfill. Yet, it makes no sense to put something that will decompose inside of something that won’t. Try composting or “grasscycling” your leaves. Either of those are easier, frankly, than bagging them.

The Rodale Book of Composting explains why it’s so easy:

Leaves and yard waste — tree trimmings, grass clippings and so forth — are easy to keep separate from other household garbage and relatively simple to compost, and so they represent the most common community composting option. (67)

Unless you’re an absolutely filthy person who throws your garbage out your door and into your yard, the leaves are lying on the ground in a relatively small space, waiting to be re-used, with no sifting and no separating.

But maybe you don’t like to rake. Okay. If you want to add some fun to it, I typically rake mine into a big pile first, and let my kids jump in them for a few days, which provides hours of screen-free entertainment and breaks down the leaves into mulch. One caveat: make sure you get the sticks out first.

If you do compost or want to start, both green and brown materials are important to have. Green materials are your kitchen scraps, pulled weeds, etc. The worms, grubs and rolie-polies eat those things. By contrast, the book The Urban Homestead tells us:

“Brown” or carbonaceous materials is dead stuff like dried leaves, wood chips, sawdust and shredded newspaper. [ . . . ] Brown layers in your compost pile serve to absorb moisture and allow oxygen to reach the interior of the pile since they are generally more loosely packed than the “green” stuff. Without them the green materials go mucky and stinky. (48)

Or, instead of raking your leaves, you can run over them when you cut your grass with a mulching lawnmower, and let them fertilize the yard. This is called “grasscycling.” About this practice, the Lawn Institute website reminds us that

grass clippings are 90% water. The remaining 10% is very degradable, unlike [ . . . ] many other landfill components such as plastics, metals, glass, construction debris, etc.

Then, in the spring, when you rake out the thatch, it can go into the compost as brown material. (Also in the spring, you can sift your compost and put it out with a fertilizer spreader, instead of chemicals, effectively completing the cycle.)

Every fall, I rake a good portion of the leaves from a popcorn tree, a small oak, and two pecan trees into my flower beds — after the kids have had their fun — then leave a smaller portion where they are for grasscycling. I have never fertilized my lawn in the eight years that I’ve lived in my current house, and my lawn is just as green as my neighbors who use chemicals on theirs.

What’s funny is: this way is actually cheaper and easier than bagging. In addition to keeping my leaves out of the landfill, I don’t spend money on fertilizer or trash bags, to get the same results.

Filed under: Gardening, The Environment

How it feels to be wrong

When I first watched this TED Talk, “On being wrong,” given by Kathryn Schulz, it was like an epiphany. Schulz explains here how we react to people who disagree with us, and moreover how we react to finding out that our own assumptions, opinions, and beliefs are just plain wrong. The ideas she expresses here, if understood by more people, could have major implications for social justice, diversity, equality and tolerance around the world. How does it feel to be wrong, she asks. The same as it does to be right . . .

Filed under: Social Justice