Elizabeth A. Havey's Blog, page 22
December 16, 2018
A New Look At: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
Now playing on Broadway
Harper Lee probably had no idea the impact her novel, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, would have on American society when it was published in 1960. Lee herself, pulled back on some of her more open beliefs in the first draft of the book, which was published after her death under the title, GO SET A WATCHMAN.
A NEW LOOK: A PLAY ON BROADWAY
Now TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, definitely an American classic, forms the basis for a play written by Aaron Sorkin of THE WEST WING and NEWSROOM fame. Currently running on Broadway, every reviewer is eager to evaluate this new take on a beloved story. As Charles McNulty writes in the LA TIMES, this is the story about ...an idealistic attorney forced to confront the limitations of the law as an instrument of justice in a racist society.
Greg Evans writes in DEADLINE HOLLYWOOD: You know the plot. Scout and Jem Finch and friend Dill while away a summer that would have been sleepy without the drama and ugliness stirred up by the trial (Mayella Ewell has accused a black man, Tom Robinson, of raping her), a local event of outsize proportion that has unleashed a torrent of hate, bile and bigotry that a good man like Atticus Finch (who will defend the accused) didn’t see coming. He doesn’t recognize his own neighbors. Or as McNulty states: The Ku Klux Klan is made up of the same folks who shop at the hardware store on Saturday and fill the pews on Sunday.
KNOWING OUR NEIGHBORS
This last point is the major tension in the novel. The Finch’s neighbor, old Mrs. Dubose, calls Scout an ugly little girl, and also uses racial slurs to attack Atticus for defending Tom Robinson. Truth: it was Mayella’s father who beat and raped her and then with no shame, blamed a black man.
Lee laid out many truths about our society—and Sorkin now chooses to highlight these, emphasizing that then and now we don’t often know the hearts and minds of our neighbors. In the south in the time of MOCKINGBIRD, this was a truism, one that Sorkin uses in his modern version to flash on recent sorrows that was Charlottesville. In the novel, Mrs. Dubose has chronic pain and is addicted to morphine. Is the United States, the southern states, addicted to racism?
RACISM, PART OF THE FABRIC OF OUR NATION
An article found on a site entitled Education, Seattle PI states: Mrs. Dubose’s addiction to morphine symbolizes the hold racism has on the South during the time period of the novel. She strives to restore herself and her traditional Southern values. Figuratively, the drug-induced stupor of Mrs. Dubose illustrates the South’s refusal to own and overcome its prejudice. Mrs. Dubose works to eradicate the morphine from her body and thus models the vigilant approach we also need to address social injustice, even if that was never her intent.
Calpurnia, the African American woman who keeps house for Atticus and helps raise Jem and Scout, has morphed into a stronger speaker in Sorkin’s play. Reviewer Evans writes: Calpurnia verbally dresses down Atticus for his naive faith in the goodness of his neighbors, his conviction that they’ll do the right thing when push comes to shove. They’re racist, sure, (Finch believes) but not to the extent of sending an innocent man to jail or worse.
Cal, of course, knows better, and she knows the white community in ways Atticus couldn’t imagine. Mrs. Dubose, Cal says, was a “Negro-hater” even before taking ill, before the morphine stopped easing the pain, before whatever other excuse Atticus has for the old woman’s hatefulness. Cal is barely surprised at the cops’ latest killing of an unarmed black man, and she lets Atticus know, in no uncertain terms, just how blind he is.
Evans writes in his review: Let Cal say what she wants, no explaining — this is the Mockingbird of our collective daydream, the Mockingbird we’re revisiting with our 21st century notions, and her boldness is as satisfying as the laugh that erupts from the actor who plays Tom Robinson, Gbenga Akinnagbe, when Atticus reveals his quaint notion of courtroom justice. And McNulty writes: Atticus’ insistence that you can’t judge a person till you crawl inside his skin and walk around in it is simplistic. Empathy is a weak defense against murderous, irrational hatred.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I find Lee’s choice of title for her novel to hold a truth we don’t see anymore–about the novel and maybe about ourselves.
Atticus Finch tells Scout: “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it is a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
When Scout ponders this, Miss Maudie, a neighbor, who also stands for the good in MayComb County, explains that mockingbirds are completely innocent song birds. They don’t harm and don’t deserve to be shot. This statement haunts the novel, for Boo Radley means no harm when he saves Jem and Scout, causing Tom Ewell’s death, and Tom Robinson was totally innocent, his only fault or crime being a black man in that place and in that time.
In our society today, we have many opportunities to meet people of all backgrounds and cultures and to enjoy the variety that makes the United States a unifying nation of people and ideas. Harper Lee knew the power of her story and how to bring it to the page. She knew that overplaying the small emotional moments in her characters lives would remain with the reader for years to come. As for our nation’s major sorrows, they are still with us. But it is the small moments of reconciliation, friendship and reaching out that will create a nation where mockingbirds are not harmed and good literature is still able to guide us.
Photos: thanks to Deadline Hollywood Website.
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December 9, 2018
My Patch: Appropriate for this time of year…
Writers steal from other writers. It’s a fact. We read a novel and are inspired by the arc of the plot or the way the author used setting. The writer knows EVERYTHING IS GRIST FOR THE MILL–as long as what lands on your page comes from INSPIRATION and not COPYING. So…
John McPhee has a new book. McPhee who has written on subjects from his love of geology to the game of tennis and has appeared over the years in publications like TIME and THE NEW YORKER, saved all his drafts. I don’t know how he stored these “patches” of work–but he has. Now his latest book is called The Patch, as McPhee decided to go on a treasure hunt, rereading works he had filed away and selecting some for this new compilation. Kevin Canfield in the Star Tribune writes: Now, at 87, McPhee has raided his stockpile of stray sentences and used them to assemble an unusual, and at times fascinating, prose collage.
Carol Surges on Goodreads writes: Pulling together bits and pieces of writing, much like sewing together bits and pieces of writing sounded too intriguing. McPhee was in the perfect position to pull this off.
WOULD I BE ABLE TO DO THAT? Well, I’m going to try.
Sitting one afternoon up in the bleachers of the tennis courts while my son Andrew takes a lesson…listening to the thump, thump of the ball and staring into space, I hear HAVEY. The name. Of course, the coach is talking to my son, kidding him on, saying way to go Havey, or something. But my skin is tingling and my heart has skipped a beat–drawn back in time…I’m a teenager hanging around the park near my home, swinging on a swing or sitting on a park bench with girlfriends–waiting to hear the name, that word blow across the baseball field, waiting for the so-young guy who will become the love of my life–waiting for him to show up with his friends… my older brother writes back to me about a recent essay on limiting children. He remembers our mother and her vocalizing that she wanted six children. She only got three before my father died. My brother speaks about the border crisis and says that it is our moral obligation to have charity and provide help for those already living on this planet…which makes me think of my limit, my three. And I remember when my middle child was seven and announced: “When I was three, Mom, and I couldn’t ride a bike or catch a ball or turn on the lights, I thought you were magical because you could.” Magical…like Christmas? Like believing in Santa Claus or like believing as a child that the world would always care for you? That the world was a beautiful and loving place? I remember trying to tell her that eventually she would be able to do all of these things–and realized that when you can do them, maybe they aren’t special anymore. Maybe they aren’t magical….but there is always the magic of making choices…like when I did Dancersize with other women in their thirties and I felt like a Rockette; just for an hour I was part of the blur of bodies…just for an hour and did not have to remember that I was like Janice Ian At Seventeen, always the last to be chosen for basketball…but I learned to accept what I was good at, teaching, writing, mothering…when I was three I couldn’t...now that I’m older I’m no Rockette anymore…but as Christmas approaches, I’m am, so very here. No video or camera or tape can really hold the memories of life. I may ask to have them back, I may have a physical reaction to a smell or the line from a song, or even the texture of some fabric…Santa? Did you hear him on the roof? Andrew and tennis..Andrew now a wage earner and living in Chicago; I remember the first time he was peeking from behind the bathroom door and he discovered that it moved, he could walk and MOVE that door, close that door. He could separate himself from me…Magic. I probably clapped to say I understood his wonder…if you have a child living in your home..yours or your grandchild this time of year, focus on them. My older daughter once looked at Andrew when in his high chair he had his arms raised up in some kind of benediction (her words) over the crumbs he was finding on the chair’s table. She talked about his claiming his small world with his fingers. I think we all do that, whether it’s in total reality or mixed with whiffs of magic. If I no longer dance like a crazy person, but I can still sing…oh and I can pull my children around me and call out Hey Haveys. Now that’s magic. .
For more Christmas thoughts go here…
photo: Thanks to Christmas Santa Album Quilt: Etsy
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December 3, 2018
Let’s Get EDUCATED
Because we live in crazy times, my BS meter is on high alert. So recently, at a neighborhood dinner, when a woman I did not know said that Irish slavery occurred in bigger numbers in the US than African slavery—I had to bite my tongue. In retrospect, there were two words I could have said, but failed to—indentured servant. Yes, the Irish took that on in great numbers, but that’s not slavery, that’s not being dragged from your home, chained almost naked in the bottom of a ship and whipped if you don’t comply. NO COMPARISON.
Being told lies to control a population is not a new thing—think Nazi Germany. That’s why I think Tara Westover’s book, EDUCATED, has sprung to the top of the charts. In remembering her childhood and the lies her father told her, in letting us see her life as she believed it was and then how she managed to EDUCATE herself, Westover is a modern hero.
Here is the review I wrote for Goodreads. I’d add this book to your must read list or ask someone to get it for you as a holiday gift.
Westover takes us into a world that is frightening in its composition and isolation. Her father, who believes in some aspects of the Mormon faith, has isolated his family on a mountain in Idaho. The family is a large one, Westover’s mother becoming a midwife to help others in the community birth their children without the help of a hospital or doctors with degrees in medicine. This negative attitude toward anything that I, as a midwesterner growing up in a community of doctors, lawyers and teachers and business people, cannot begin to imagine.
Westover’s father has the last say on everything and has chosen to absent himself from the social concepts most Americans take for granted: education, medicine, freedom to practice religion ie Christian, Jewish or your choice; also trusting banks and the government. She is not allowed to go to school and often finds herself working in a junk yard that her father considers his business–doing work that risks her physical body–not to mention her very soul.
But Westover is smart and slowly begins to see there is a wider world beyond the mountain of Bucks Peak. This is a memoir of growth and escape, of moving forward and falling back, until the sheer power of her intellect and her realization that members of her family might even kill her propels her to a positive end.
Yes, it’s only her point of view–how she delineates this family. But it is one we all need to realize could be one of many, that there are probably children right this moment suffering as she did.
So consider this book. Two of my book clubs are reading it. Also:
P.S. Books are great gifts. So is kindly opening the eyes of others to understanding and empathy.
P.S. Another review from Arts and Culture. Here.
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November 24, 2018
Lists: They Can Keep You Living
My Father and Me. I was being treated with eye drops. My father died soon after this photo was taken.
I have been rereading a text I wrote called THE STORY OF A FAMILY. It recounts childhood memories connected to living in our family home, a frame house with four small bedrooms on the Southside of Chicago.
A paragraph on the first page reads: In a corner by our bookshelves, a dingy red fabric chair finds a stream of western sunlight. My brothers and I would climb the wide arm of that chair and jump off, hugging our bodies, knees to chest, to roll down the carpeted floor of the living room. My father, Dr. Albert Pfordresher, died in that chair on a Sunday morning one June….
A LIST OF CHORES
In retelling that story, I combine what my mother told me about that day with my own observations. I was three at the time, thus writing THE STORY OF A FAMILY a challenge. What did I remember about that day, and all the days after as I grew, guided by one loving parent?
NOW–early this morning, a father, young like my did was, died. He’d been ill for years, fighting a cancer. He has two young sons and a wife with strength to fight for him and their family until his last breath and beyond. In this post, I will call her Jane. When I heard of her husband’s death, I thought of my mother–also widowed with young children, 6, 3 and three months.
BACKSTORY
The morning my father died, he’d been having chest pain, feeling ill. He did not go to church. He sat in the aforementioned red chair and was reading the Chicago Tribune. My mother had a list–things to do that day that kept her going: Bill’s baby formula; the makings of a pie.
This is what I wrote in THE STORY OF A FAMILY–and of course this is also MY STORY, gleaned from what over the years and little by little my mother told me about that day.
In the kitchen, my mother replenishes Bill’s formula. The house is quiet. Though blocks of sunshine fall on the kitchen floor, a chill rides the wind. She shuts up the house windows so he’ll be comfortable. As she works, maybe she is wondering about her two older children who are now at her mother’s for the afternoon. Are they behaving?
Fear hasn’t found her yet, instead strength slowly builds in her. Maybe her willingness to do kitchen chores and not ask my father every five minutes, “How are you feeling?” “Should we call the doctor?” “Should I take you to the hospital?” is the beginning of her amazing strength.
Then after a while, she hears his newspaper crackle and fall. She wipes her hands on her apron and goes into the living room. He is still there, but now slumped over, his head angled against his chest. When she calls to him he doesn’t answer.
She tries to save him, rushes into the kitchen hallway where the phone is, fumbling, calls the doctor, the priest, the fire department asking for an ambulance and a pul motor, which must have been whatever equipment they used in those times for cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
In minutes, the quiet of the house is shattered: Dr. James West pounds up the front steps, moves my father’s body to the floor and gives him mouth to mouth resuscitation. He’s a personal friend, loves my father. Rev. Boyle, who is only two blocks away at our church, appears over Dr. West’s shoulder. He waits, then kneels by my father, blessing his passage. It is soon understood that the ambulance is not needed.
Eventually my mother makes her way back to the kitchen. Bill’s formula has to be finished. There, standing by the stove, her life has taken an irreversible turn.
WE ALL HAVE LISTS
I am thinking today of Jane’s strength, how she knew her husband was going to die, that she would be left to raise her boys, that she would be alone to earn a salary, pay bills, help them with their homework, cheer them at their baseball games, guide them to lead promising and fulfilling lives.
My mother did all of those things and now Jane will too. Though she knew this day would come sooner than some wives and husbands know, she is still caught up in sorrow, while trying to comfort her sons, arrange a funeral, make sure there is some sunshine in their lives, some opening to the advent of happy possibilities.
FINALLY…
Life can sweep us into sun-streaked clouds of happiness or come down on us like a hammer. I think of Jane and I also think of those burned out of their homes. Yes, there are articles in the papers about Thanksgiving meals shared by folks now homeless. They speak of tears of loss and yet gratitude. BUT WE ALL KNOW THEY ARE IN PAIN.
The only cure for death and loss–is accepting life. If you still have it, you must cling to it. And if you cling to it, it’s time to make a list, time to figure out what comes next on that list. In time, everyone who experiences loss will make this the major heading on that list:
GO ON LIVING.
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November 17, 2018
Counting Blessings: Short and Sweet
The sun is out, the air is clearer, but our Saturday drive to the duck pond? No ducks. Our three mile walk? No walk. Yes, the pond is calm, but the small garden structure is now roofless, and all around the hills are tarnished with soot and burned vegetation. A group of firemen are cutting down a burned tree. As we drive, we find the wide expanse of the park is still green, but any part of this open space that touched the hills are scarred by fire.
This is the Woolsey Fire. It missed our home, our neighborhood of fifteen buildings. But this is a fire that scarred land all around us, that burned along the road that abuts our neighborhood–Kanan Road– the one you can drive all the way to the ocean. The fire sped that way, changing the topography of Malibu, burning vineyards and homes to the Pacific Coast Highway, famous for creating a border between homes and ocean. Zuma Beach? That’s famous for bathing beauties and life guards, but quickly became home to animals: ponies, horses and dogs, who ran from the fires and found safety on the sand.
The development where we live, where from some of our windows we can see the low hills of the Santa Monica Mountains–our view is changed. We now see dead vegetation, soot-colored shavings, charred shrubs. It will grow back. In spring there will be wild mustard parading up and down, but there will also be the threat of more fires.
THANKSGIVING
Today, we also drove down the street we had seen on LA’s Channel Seven last Thursday night. A corner house, burning. We had watched the fireman trying to keep it from spreading to neighboring homes. From our view today, the firemen were successful. But other homes have broken windows, damage that only licked the side or back of a structure, yet still not habitable.
So what are the people of Thousand Oaks, Agoura Hills and Oak Park, California shouting out this season? THANK YOU.
All the political signs from the election are gone. Now there are THANK YOU SIGNS jammed in the ground at the entrances to neighborhoods, BIG SIGNS with pictures of fire trucks so that no one will mistake who is being thanked—our firemen and women, our first responders. They saved our homes, they saved lives.
FIRE AND STORIES
People are amazing, resilient, their humanity stretching and growing in a crisis. A waste collector up near the Camp Fire (a second fire that has taken many lives) had decided to turn his truck and leave the area, when he came upon an elderly woman standing on the porch of her small home–she alone, in danger, the Camp fire swirling around them. He helped her into the cab of his truck (which he told a reporter is against business rules) and drove for another hour or more to safety. But all the way, the women chatted with him about her life, told him stories. When he had left her at a rescue center, and encountered the reporter, he told this story remaking, “That was the most amazing conversation I’ve had in a long time.”
Yes, I’m sure it was. The adrenaline of life or death can bind humans together. Its what we need to remember as we move toward Thanksgiving.
NONE OF US WOULD BE HERE, NONE OF US would be enjoying the fruits of our democracy if our founders had not talked and worried, argued and compromised, made decisions both good and bad. Through courage, tiring work and hope–they brought us to where we are now.
Let’s not forget our beginnings. Let’s stay open to those around us.
Yes, I get angry about ideas and words, actions and decisions I don’t agree with. Just look at my Twitter Page. But I also, sometimes, remember to stay silent. So, when I heard a statement that I believed to be false or exaggerated or just plain out of line, I stayed silent. (This at someone’s house for a dinner.) I couldn’t change that person’s mind in a five minute argument. Better to have her remember me as kind. Then, if she reads this, she just might decide I have good intentions. For good intentions can open hearts and minds. At least, there is always hope that they will.
And to end, I present this again, a lovely thought from author Marilynne Robinson: taken from her novel HOUSEKEEPING
“There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.”
Thanks for reading, HAPPY THANKSGIVING. Stay safe. Stay sane.
Photo: Barbara Carroll on flickr THANKS.
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November 13, 2018
#ProtectRBG Yes, It’s a Real Thing
Yes, it’s on Twitter, Young and Older People want to protect the health of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And yes, though much of it is serious-funny, what I’m advocating today is for you to GET YOUR FLU SHOT. Why?
HERD IMMUNITY: you will protect RBG and other folks by staying well. A new study done by economist Corey White has measured the effects of the public being inoculated. Using data from the 50 states, from 1994 to 2016, he found that each percentage point increase in the rate of vaccinating our citizens results in 807 fewer deaths from the flu. Yet, said another way, if 4,016 people were vaccinated this season, we would expect to save one life. The benefits only accumulate incrementally until we reach the herd immunity threshold–that means that when enough people don’t get sick because they are protected by the flu shot, the result is they protect those with weak immune systems from getting the flu and possibly dying.
If that hasn’t convinced you–here are more statistics:
a one percentage point increase in the rate of vaccination would mean 15 million fewer lost work hours nationwide. (Your failure to get a flu shot will on average cause five hours of wages to be lost.)
the University of Minnesota discovered that 1/3 of the folks getting their flu shot did not know that by doing so they were helping keep others healthy;
educating folks about the benefits of herd immunity increased their desire to get a flu shot by 7.3%.
A NEW IDEA–YOU GET PAID
If each vaccination would produce $98.00 in social benefits due to reducing work absence, that would certainly outweigh the $15.00 per-shot cost of administering the shot. So how much could a person expect to be paid for getting the shot? Another study!!! Yes, studies are rampant, but done in 2015, economists found that a $30.00 subsidy was enough to increase vaccine rates by 12 percentage points–add that to the “not missing work” benefit and a much larger carrot could be cost-justified.
MORE RESULTS OF MASS INOCULATIONS
Businesses that employ many people could expect a tax break if they hit a certain target for vaccination. The government could experiment with different financial carrots and sticks to find that which achieves herd immunity for their community.
THE FUTURE
All of this is done to change the habits of our people, make getting a flu shot every autumn a common thing, and thus avoid what could attack us in the future…a virulent strain like the pandemic of 1918 that claimed an estimated 675,000 lives in the United States alone.
And did you know that tens of thousands of Americans die every year from the flu. SO GET YOUR FLU SHOT.
Much of this information was taken from an article in the LA TIMES that proclaimed in its headline: GET A SHOT and SAVE GRANDMA, and any child who has an immune disorder, or any adult who takes a medication that affects his or her immune system.
Let’s increase our messaging, let’s subsidize flu shots, let’s aim for herd immunity and:
save lives
cut back on hospitalizations
please employers who won’t get that call that can truly mess up a work day, “I’m so sick, I’ve got the flu.”
PHOTO: Ana Martinez, a medical assistant at the Sea Mar Community Health Center, gives a patient a flu shot in Seattle, Wash. on Jan. 11. (Ted S. Warren / Associated Press in the LA TIMES)
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November 3, 2018
Voice Our True Empathy…VOTE
You might consider some of these ideas before you vote–or just VOTE.
EMPATHY: ...I think reading books is a good place to start thinking about and understanding people’s stories you aren’t familiar with, outside your comfort zone and experience. A novel will ask you to walk in a character’s shoes, and this can build empathy. WITHOUT EMPATHY WE ARE LOST…I have come to understand the world better through the lens of novels. When someone else’s world is different from our own, we see how we are the same. We not only become more empathetic to their experience but we see how we are equal.
The above was written by TOMMY ORANGE, author of THERE THERE. It originally appeared in TIME MAGAZINE. He ends his piece saying how important it is that schools no longer have students read ONLY books written by upper-middle-class white males. YES!
BOTH THE WRITER AND THE READER BRING THEIR EXPERIENCE TO THE PAGE. And when you vote, you have made a choice based on the voices of those who are running. You have evaluated what they stand for. You see them as helping to maintain the country that you want to live in. You see them as supporters of our democracy, our constitution. You see them as supporters of ALL THE PEOPLE, not just those upper-middle class white men whose voices we have heard for many years, and whose voices don’t always have the answers.
WE CAN’T LEARN IF WE DON’T LISTEN
Also in TIME was a piece by Margaret Hoover, a Democrat married to a Republican. She writes: The key as I’ve learned from my mixed political marriage is listening with a generous assumption that the other’s views are informed by good intentions. Too many of our conversations in the media hinge on conflict delivered in 3-second sound bites. To function as a democracy we are going to need to listen in the spirit that presumes our political opponents are engaged in civic debate for the same reasons we are–they are about the country, their communities, their families and their neighbors.
Hoover also believes that we need “time” to effectively debate ideas. Tweeting at the last minute will not help that process. She writes: …giving ideas time to air, to be developed, defended and challenged is key…Giving our fellow citizens time to truly engage in a constructive contest of ideas…will take us a long way to mending our hyper-partisan media and politics.
And: The Myth of the Moral Middle Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, writes: I find myself annoyed by the hand-wringing about how we need to find common ground. People ask how might we “meet in the middle,” as though this represents a safe, neutral and civilized space. This American fetishization of the moral middle is a misguided and dangerous cultural impulse. …There is nothing inherently virtuous about being neither HERE nor THERE. Buried in this is a false equivalency of ideas, what you might call the “good people on both sides” phenomenon.
When we revisit our shameful past, ask yourself, Where was the middle? Rather than chattel slavery, perhaps we could agree on a nice program of indentured servitude? Instead of subjecting Japanese-American citizens to indefinite detention during WW II, what if we had agreed to give them actual sentences and perhaps provided a receipt for them to reclaim their things when they were released? What is halfway between moral and immoral?
The search for the middle is rooted in conflict avoidance and denial. For many Americans it is painful to understand that there are citizens of our community who are deeply racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic. …Perhaps there is some way to look at this–a view from the middle–that would allow us to communicate and realize that our national identity is the tie that will bind us comfortably, and with a bow…As Americans, we are at a crossroads. We have to decide what is central to our identity… Compromise is not valuable in its own right, and justice seldom dwells in the middle.
If your found these excerpts fulfilling, interesting, challenging, you can read more in the current Double Issue of TIME MAGAZINE. See http://time.com/5434381/tayari-jones-...
PHOTO: thanks to TED TALKS and artist Jon Buckley
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October 28, 2018
THIS IS US is a BOUNTY of BACKSTORY
In writer’s parlance, backstory is everything the has happened to the main character (MC) when a novel begins. It is everything that flows through their arteries and veins and makes up the thoughts, emotions and pains that person has experienced. Back story has formed them. As I say in my work-in-progress (WIP)–“There was dilemma with all of it, Ella knew, for in many ways the past had formed you—there was no escaping it.” And that’s on page 48. The reader already sees the foibles and problems of each character. And though it’s nice to think a person can re-create herself, well maybe. But the past never goes away.
That’s true in life and in the world of the story. But in writing there are these dubious RULES attached to backstory–that you can’t use it in the first sentence, on the first page, etc etc. You have to be immediate to pull the reader in. The reader isn’t interested in back story. The reader wants to know “the now.”
Some of this is true, but Dan Fogelman, the writer of THIS IS US, certainly knows the POWER OF BACK STORY and how to use it. That’s why we are in the third season and aching for more.
We knew the father of this family, of Kate, Kevin and Randall, had been in Viet Nam. So okay, we knew that. But now Fogelman is using that, is GOING BACK, creating powerful tension by relating WHY Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) went to Viet Nam in the first place. He did have a medical deferment because of occasional tachycardia. But he went for his brother, for Nick Pearson. The season starts with Nick’s fear of being drafted. It’s about THE LOTTERY.
Some of you won’t have any idea what that was, but it affected many lives, including mine. Viet Nam was not a war that many young men were eager to fight. The draft, however, was up and running, and unless you had a deferment like Jack’s, you went. Until rioting swept the country and a change was made–a lottery was held. This happened on December 1, 1969. My future husband and I were in love and in college. John had deferments for college, but this lottery would be fairer, school deferments would go away.
I remember being in my family’s living room, watching the television. The drawing was held at the Selective Service National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. All men between the ages of 18 and 26 were in this pool. And how did it work? The first birthday in a year of 365 days that was pulled from a box of all 365 would become number 1. This determined the order of call for induction during calendar year 1970.
Covered by radio, film, and TV, capsules were drawn, opened, and the dates inside posted in order. The first capsule – drawn by Congressman Alexander Pirnie (R-NY) of the House Armed Services Committee – contained the date September 14, so all men born on September 14 in any year between 1944 and 1950 were assigned lottery number 1. The drawing continued until all days of the year had been paired with sequence numbers. My husband drew 364. He would not be drafted!
BACK STORY, FOGELMAN’S FORTE
It has been written that often characters function at a level of morality that is really just moral inertia. They do things out of habit, out of biology. They do not make choices. A good writer creates a character that must make a choice, a hard choice. Thus Jack, despite his cardiac condition, purposefully gets drafted so he can go to Viet Nam to discover how his brother is doing. And that begins an entire new story for season three. We learn more about Jack and Nick’s parents, how they were raised. BACK STORY!! And now there’s this chain and medal Jack wore and a photo of a Vietnam woman wearing it–the secrets increase, we can’t wait for another Tuesday night to arrive.
STORY IS REAL LIFE DISGUISED, IMAGINED
Freud wrote: “Every child in his play behaves like a poet, as he creates his own world, or to put it more correctly, as he transposes the elements forming his world into new order, more pleasing and suitable to him.”
I find a clue to my own “writing life” in this quote. As a child, PRETENDING was my forte. With my younger brother agreeing, I could imagine the corner of our dining room to be my “house” where I was a mother and ruled the scene. (Sorry, a very female poet, I agree.) But my brother and I also were enamored of Davey Crockett and one coonskin cap could create an entire world of adventure, even in the winter when we were confined to playing in the upstair hallway or on the stairs. IMAGINATION!!
Later, I was always about MAKING THINGS UP, with a few props. I wrote a play in the early grades and performed it with my friend Jean in our basement. We even charged admission. We had too much fun creating our own world on stage or riding bikes that were really horses, or hiding behind the mock orange bushes that were really our hide-out.
DAN FOGELMAN and VIET NAM
Fogelman has always used his own experience in his writing. Too young for Viet Name, he had read Tim O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, and wanted him to consult on the scripts. O’Brien had agreed to consult for one week, to help shape the story.
“We had an idea of how we wanted to get from A to B but not how we wanted to get there,” said Fogelman of how O’Brien contributed to the story — adding that now O’Brien is a fixture in the room. “He’s now writing episodes. He’s now reading scripts that have nothing to do with [Vietnam] — like, he’s giving notes on Kate storylines,” Fogelman said recently. O’Brien said he was impressed with how seriously Fogelman and his staff wanted to portray an authentic Vietnam experience. “I thought it was amazingly subtle, no mistakes. Most veterans would see [typical depictions of Vietnam] and go, ‘Oh, it doesn’t happen that way, nobody would react that way,'” O’Brien said — but not on This Is Us. “It felt like a dream of your own life. It was an amazing experience.”
IT’S ALL HOW YOU HANDLE BACK STORY
Milo Ventimiglia who plays Jack Pearson, talked about his own father’s experience as a veteran. “My dad and I have spoken quite a bit about his experience in war. I’ve got a lot of friends that are veterans of current conflicts as well as on active duty, so I get it from all sides,The one thing that I always try and do is just bring in the emotional responsibility to represent what they’ve been through in what I do as an actor and playing a fictional character.”
The research, the sensitivity to issues that both writer and actor are considering gives even more power to the stories that we experience while watching, THIS IS US. And though I might struggle now and again with how to incorporate BACK STORY into my own work, I know how valuable it is, how decisions, secrets, hurts and successes can determine the decisions we make in the future. Fogelman gets this too. And with his penchant for research and authenticity, he has a gold mine of scripts already written and probably swimming around in his creative brain.
Fogelman has realized the bounty of backstory and is using it to profound effect. I know I’ll keep watching. Falling in love with the work of a genius can inspire one that is still learning her craft.
THANKS TO GOOGLE TV BANNERS
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October 21, 2018
WHY I READ…STORY
The world opened up for me on the couch on the southside of Chicago when my mother handed me a book. I’ve been reading ever since–weekly trips to the library, gift books, and now an audio book ALWAYS in my car, so that I am listening on my way to the grocery store etc.
When my mother was dying in Chicago and I was living in Iowa, I consumed books in my car. I also try to read every night for two hours–if I can stay awake. I read books and print material–I read a real newspaper every day, the LA TIMES. I taught reading and literature as an English teacher. I read huge tomes studying to be an RN. I read struggling authors as a proofreader. What would my world be if I could not read?
STORY
We all have one. Some of us like to remember various parts of our story, some people actually can have mental health problems as they grow, because they are working so hard to suppress their story. But we all have one that either lights our days or shadows them.
Right now in one of my book clubs, we are reading Strout is a pulitzer prize author and I’ve read all of her books. She writes fiction, allows herself to travel into the minds of her characters. She says profoundly:
I’m interested in ordinary people and what their inner lives are like. Since I was a young child, I have been aware that inside every person is a universe, and that we’ll never know what it feels like to be another person. Which is horrifying.
Yes, it is. How can we marry, raise children, move them out into the world not truly knowing what it feels like to be them. How can we praise another or dismiss another, not truly knowing what it means to be that person. DO WE TRULY GIVE A DAMN?
I hope so. Reading and writing is about immersing oneself in other lives. Someone recently questioned me about MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON. Comment: it’s so depressing? Why are we reading it?
Why are we walking this earth and having children and/or making friends, living? Strout’s book reveals LIVES. You read STORY, that life comes alive on the page. So my answer to this questions will always be: EMPATHY. We read story to get into the cells and bloodstreams of other’s lives, to understand their joys and pains. Depressing? Yes, sometimes. Joyful, yes, other times. But here’s the thing–in Strout’s book the joy is subtle, just as it is in real life. Lucy Barton tells about a grade school teacher, Mr. Haley, who taught her about the Indians.
“Until then, I hadn’t known that we took their land from them with a deception that caused Black Hawk to rebel. I didn’t know that the whites gave them whiskey, that the whites killed their women in the cornfields. I felt that I loved Black Hawk as I did Mr. Haley, that these were brave and wonderful men, and I could not believe how Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture.”
With those lines you can just see Strout recalling a personal experience, yet putting it into the life of her fictional character, Lucy, yet revealing how OUR LIVES ARE OPENED UP when we learn things in school–when our horizons grow and change.
Later, Lucy says to her mother, “Mommy, do you know what we did to the Indians?” And her mother, out of the angst of her own down-trodden life, replies, “I don’t give a damn what we did to the Indians.”
In my own life there was Anna, who cleaned for us, whose age I could never determine, whose body was permanently bent from work, who chewed tobacco, told me she had a picture of Abraham Lincoln in her apartment and once told us about a relative who had been a slave. This is a true American story. And yes, knowing Anna set my life in a direction…what, how, how much? At least a beginning. All of our lives are beginnings and they can form us IF we let STORY in–if we listen, if we cry and ask for more.
THE LOST ART OF READING
In a recent article, David Ulin writes about the importance of story and our disrupted narrative in the United States. “On the one hand, America has always been a racist country. On the other, that has never before been rendered as acceptable. No, we are now in the midst of a broken story, and we have lost the ability to parse its lines.”
He goes on: “Stories, I’ve long believed, are connective, the only tool we have to reach out of our isolation, regardless of how fleetingly. This is as close as I get to faith, this notion that narrative can save us, even (or especially) if we cannot, finally, be saved.”
(If you do read the Bible, there are many stories about THE OTHER, but the purpose of the Bible is to bring the reader to Christ, and Christ never rejects THE OTHER.)
Olin writes about the 1980s, when he took a repetitive drive through Barstow CA to LA. He writes: “For hundreds of miles, radio gave up only farm reports and God talk…and when I stopped to eat or sleep or fill the tank, I was never unaware that I was a stranger in a strange land. ‘You a Jew, boy?’ someone once asked…and though he wasn’t exactly threatening (more curious I want to tell you), there was a moment when I wasn’t sure how to respond. (Earlier in this piece, Ulin writes: how could I believe racism has been vanquished when according to the Guardian Newspaper, African American men between 15 and 34 were nine times more likely to be killed by police in 2016 than other Americans.”
Ulin then quotes Maxine Hong Kingston from her book “The Woman Warrior”: “A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution.” YES, that’s what we need more and more.To get to that resolution.
But then Ulin quotes Ernest Hemingway: “All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and there is no true storyteller who would keep that from you.” True–yet as Ulin reminds us, “most stories don’t continue far enough, which means we have no choice but to engage with them as part of a continuum.” Yes, WELCOME TO TODAY! Welcome to becoming part of another’s story through listening, though a handshake, through volunteering or sending a check.
And finally, In MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, Strout has Lucy meet and learn from a writing teacher, Sarah Payne. Payne tells Lucy: “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.”
WHAT TO TAKE FROM ALL OF THIS
I am going to go with David Ulin’s conclusion, because it says it much better than I could.
This is how the world works: first we tell ourselves a story, then we dream our way inside it as a way of bringing it to life. It’s why we have to be careful about the narratives we evoke or create, because they are bound by the limits of what we can imagine, the limits of our ability to think. The reason books and reading remain essential is because they are still the most effective mechanisms by which to crack open the universe. Think about it: when we read, we soul travel, in the sense that we join, or enter the consciousness of another human. We EMPATHIZE–we have to–because our experience is enlarged.
photo credit: Jasu Hu THE NEW YORK TIMES.
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October 13, 2018
Advances in Protection for Women is S.A.N.E.
Judith Linden RN
Photo by Cydney Scott for Boston University Photography
As the mother of two daughters–when did I tell them or how did they find out–that there was something called rape and that women in all societies are vulnerable in the face of men? I don’t remember. Did I sit down with them and have this direct conversation? (More on that later.) I do remember discussions about locking car doors, doing the same when babysitting, and later on, making sure that their university campus life included mace. But this is just me, what I remember…do you remember…
I was probably in seventh grade when I was in the dining room reading the Chicago Tribune and landed on some piece about a Jewish man in Germany during WW II who had to sit on the street with a sign around him that read, I RAPE GERMAN WOMEN.
“What’s rape?” I asked my mother. Five o’clock on a busy evening, she making dinner. She told me something vague, probably that included the word assault. I looked rape up in the dictionary. I began to understand. But not really…you start to put things together…the two missing girls in Chicago, another girl missing. Always girls. Girls aren’t safe. There is something about being a girl…
(And please note, that I am fully aware that boys and men can also be vulnerable.)
OUT IN THE WORLD
There is lots of talk these days about safety, about fear. People talk about the old days. For some, the old days were safe. But not for all. Some mornings I walked by myself to high school. Many evenings I walked home alone. It was often dark and cold in Chicago, but I was fine. I was a latch-key kid. And I was lucky.
In college a group of Catholic boys from Loyola tried to harm Kathy T when she was walking alone near Lake Michigan. Another guy, he had mental issues, tried to break into a dorm room. Before I was married, my name in the paper, I got a phone call from some guy who I admit used language I was unfamiliar with. I hung up. I learned. Being a woman can be that learning journey, that heart-stopping moment when you are encountering something frightening and weird, your body tells you–this is not right! Then another call comes one Tuesday morning when your two young daughters are in school and this voice says he “has your daughter.” You hang up. Call the school, get the principal and say I’M RIGHT HERE AND YOU WLL GO TO EACH CLASSROOM AND FIND MY GIRLS, TELL ME THEY ARE THERE, THEY ARE FINE. Your heart is pounding, but he comes back–your children are okay.
There’s the elevator door that opens mid-day in the hospital, you in your nursing school smock and there’s one man in the elevator. You get on, you are riding down together and this man, who is wearing a stethoscope, says he has some cookies in his car. Would you like to go there with him? EVEN DOCTORS! When the elevator door opens, you walk really fast.
By that time, as I referenced above, my daughters and I had talked about rape–because a teen in a shopping center near our neighborhood had been raped, it was all over the news and my older daughter wondered WHY I wasn’t talking about it. I was wrong. Knowledge is always power.
When my girls were very young, shit was going down: a couple stopped and murdered off the expressway; a woman abducted from the local gas station, gang raped and murdered; a child abducted from her secure bedroom, raped and strangled. I read too much. I’d be frantic—how could I save my children from danger? I kept reading, deciding that if I knew how these attacks had occurred, what the attackers were like, how the victim had been caught unprepared—I could save myself and my daughters.
Then I met Barbara, an older amazing woman, who developed rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that inflames the joints, when she was 17 and falling in love with her career and future husband. Overtime, Barbara discovered that meditation, moving her mind and body for 15, then 30 minutes or longer away from her pain allowed her to redeem her life. Over time, I revealed my fears to Barbara. Firmly she told me I had to stop such thoughts immediately: I was sending out bad signals and fear; my mind was using so much energy to conjure danger that I might draw trouble right to me. Just as Barbara used her mental energy to block out pain, I was using mine to bring negatives into my life.
I stopped doing that. The possible climax to this part of the story, is that after midnight one snowy night driving home from my hospital shift, my tire blew. I was on the Dan Ryan Expressway, alone and, well, not happy about it. I called Triple A. I called my husband. I waited, watched a man pull up in a beat-up car, get out and walk toward me. But the frightening newspaper articles were now outside my reach. I was a nurse at an inner city hospital, knew folks who lived and worked in the trenches of life.
Yes, I was cautious. He said right out that he wasn’t there to hurt me, he just wanted to change my tire, make some extra money. I weighed my options. I said thank you, but no. He nodded and walked away. He lingered by his car for a few moments and then came back. The snow was heavier now and I ran the window down a little more to talk to a man who I would have been terrified of before Barbara.
“I work in Labor and Delivery at Mercy Hospital,” I said, revealing myself as someone he could trust—I worked in his neighborhood.
“Do you know Nadine?” he asked right away. “She works in dietary.”
That was pretty much it. I clicked open the back of the van and he began to change my tire. When my husband arrived, they shook hands and we thanked him, paid him.
BE CAREFUL. AND THANKS TO S.A.N.E.
But there is absolutely no question that each and every woman on the planet can be vulnerable and still has to be smart and careful. Will it change? We are in a flurry of political activity now that questions women still, makes fun of them and their fears, does not understand that one 20 minute experience can implant fear on the brain FOREVER.
WAKE UP WOMEN and tell the men in your lives to wake up too. RAISE YOUR SONS to honor women. And be thankful for some changes in society, like S.A.N.E. (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) SANE nurses are specially trained in the medical, psychological, and forensic examination of a sexual assault victim. When before a nurse might walk in the ER and call out, “Who’s the rape?” that won’t happen anymore. Police, nurses, ER workers–all should now be trained to care for a victim using specific standards. To learn more go here.
And thanks for reading.
PHOTO: thanks to BU TODAY and Cydney Scott
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