tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90016898966921343192024-02-22T01:24:50.888-05:00Follies O'BarryJudhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.comBlogger159125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-13609592174817564602021-01-16T08:59:00.005-05:002021-01-16T09:07:54.192-05:00Adult civics<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;"><span> </span>Since the infamous Capitol Shtup of 1/6/21 I've seen -- and supported -- numerous calls for a return to the teaching of civics in our schools. At the same time, however, my own experience of being taught the subject tells me that what we need is not so much the *teaching* of anything, but the *doing* of something that requires us to act for the common good.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;">In part this is because my experience in school has made me skeptical that the mere offering of mature subject matter to adolescents of 14 is a recipe for success. This is not a knock against adolescents of 14. A few of them would no doubt get fired up and, later in life, remember the experience as absolutely formative. I sense, though, that those few will be few indeed. I was a good and dutiful student in all of my subjects, civics included. But the only thing I remember from that class is a poetry recitation contest that kept getting me voted up in the competition with my (cheesy?) rendering of Walt Whitman's </span><i style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;">O Captain! My Captain! </i><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;">all the way to a final with classmate Barry Miller of blessed memory whose poem I don't remember but think it was maybe something by Longfellow or O.W. Holmes. Who won? I don't remember that. Probably Barry? Cheese works a lot better on pizza than on poetry. I just remember a feeling of brotherhood with Barry for allowing ourselves to embarrass ourselves so epically. This was 1968. Shall I say understatedly that grandiose, hoary patriotic poetry with extra cheese wasn't real hot among ninth graders in the spring of that year? (Prague Spring, Tet Offensive, MLK Jr. assassination, </span><i style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;">Born to Be Wild</i><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;">, etc., and let's not forget Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's </span><i style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;">Lady Willpower</i><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;">.)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;">It's not the subject of civics itself that's the problem, though. The harvest of "head learning" depends greatly on individual focus and desire. My "come to Jesus" experience in this matter was scoring best on AP tests in a subject I'd never taken a class in, but instead was self-taught through wide reading and intense interest.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 12px;">There are undoubtedly manifold ways of making the teaching of civics more effective, but they all suffer from the same weakness: they start and end at the instruction of adolescents. Our problem these days isn't adolescents not learning about civics. It's adults not doing civics.</span></div><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSF7E0steKhDSSg2_Zu7I6Dfa5fkd7_QN4-ZaEZdW1saok-JtJlhZ_mcRAF5px09c8f9sXiVFKSVjYUnv-sj3VQcP27DzU27Mx1X_jelNL4BPfqM4ypfQd-4jZnaXHmacG_bIh0XrHQ9o/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="656" data-original-width="1166" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSF7E0steKhDSSg2_Zu7I6Dfa5fkd7_QN4-ZaEZdW1saok-JtJlhZ_mcRAF5px09c8f9sXiVFKSVjYUnv-sj3VQcP27DzU27Mx1X_jelNL4BPfqM4ypfQd-4jZnaXHmacG_bIh0XrHQ9o/w640-h360/demology.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">There too, the problem isn't that we're not asking adults to do things. We do ask them. Most importantly we ask them to volunteer to do things to help their communities. And many, many give of their time (the most valuable asset we all possess) above and beyond what might reasonably be expected. I know several such people who build houses, serve on nonprofit boards, collect books for library fundraisers, and perform other such commendable and valuable activities. Their sole motivation comes from the goodness of their hearts.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">What I'm talking about here is different. It has to do what is often called civic duty, which is shorthand for the obligatory requirements of citizenship. Yes, there are some so-called "duties" that appear to be voluntary, but I want to start with the ones that are more obviously obligatory in order to emphasize what we often don't want to admit: the civil compact that protects us from chaos requires compulsion in order to enable its very existence. If there are to be laws, the laws must be enforced. If there are to be chosen leaders, there must be a system of choosing them, and once chosen, their authority must be duly respected. If there are to be revenues, taxes must be paid. If there are to be trials by jury, juries must be chosen. If there is to be civil defense, some sort of defense force must be raised and maintained.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">"Must be done," however, is a passive formulation. Must be done by whom? Who is the agent of this doing? In classic political theory, the active agent is -- must be -- the citizen. It isn't stuffy pedantry to remember that civic theory derives from the practice of city-states of yore -- the "civis" at the root of civic, civil, civilization, from which emerge the citizen: the denizen of the city.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The uber-citizens of all time have to have been the ancient Athenians, the citizens of which practiced a radical democracy in which the "demos" -- the citizens -- were the legislators, the judges, the juries, the executives, the police, and the army. Next came Rome, the </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">locus classicus</i><span style="font-family: georgia;"> of republicanism: the mix of institutions with distributed authority resting on the will of the citizenry. There followed the city-states of Renaissance Italy -- primarily Florence and Venice -- whose histories further sharpened the civic understanding of the men who founded the USA.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Lest we forget, the creation of a constitutional USA was itself a revolutionary act in the history of the world, a fact of which the founders were well aware. In studying the past, they knew the limitations of previous governmental models: Athens, Rome, Venice, and parliamentary Great Britain (which they knew best) had all yielded to the temptation of empire as a device to avoid paying their own way, only to bring ruin to their liberties. In this regard, the founders saw Switzerland as an example to follow, not only for its democratic self-defense by means of a popular militia, but also for its virtuous avoidance of imperialism.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">One common thread runs through the examples that led up to America: civic virtue is not a miasmic, notional "belief system." Only through practice can it be achieved. It is not a right to be claimed from time to time. It is an obligation, a duty. It was understood that the state could compel such duty because everyone believed that it was only through unified performance that a republic could be preserved. Who </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">wants</i><span style="font-family: georgia;"> to fight and risk being killed? Anyone? But the future absolutely depended on it. The shared burden of the state-enforced obligation watered the seeds of virtue.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">One thing that very much worried the founders was whether and how civic virtue could be cultivated and maintained in a republic as large as the United States -- and remember, this was when it was only the original coastal states, and the trans-Appalachian region was the wild west. It was finally agreed that the states -- both the existing ones and any to be admitted in the future -- would be the laboratories for the continuation of civic virtue.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Then came the great withering. The starkest example is provided by the sad history of the militia.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: georgia;"> </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">Originally defined by statute as obligatory, universal service by adult males according to a discipline established by Congress, the state militias were intended to be a great reservoir of public defense that would obviate any dependence on a standing army; they would also form the backbone of the police power in counties and cities. By the mid-1830's the notion that this should be a universal obligation had faded to such a degree that it was invisible to de Tocqueville, the French observer who decided that the genius of American democracy lay in free association and voluntarism.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The current state of the original intention vis-a-vis the militia is almost laughable. A close family member who is a public attorney can only refer to it as "arcane." As much as we may respect the volunteers who serve in our National Guard (the current "well-regulated militia") or careerist police officers -- whose admirable motto in my county is "citizens serving citizens" -- it is painfully obvious that, in the matter of the common defense, we are as far away from the intent of the founders as it is possible to be. This carries with it such pathologies as a popular understanding of the 2nd Amendment that would make an anarchist swoon with admiration.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Another factor contributing to the disappearance of any sense of small-r "republican" obligations has been the expansion of suffrage and of free speech. This -- while manifestly and hugely admirable in and of itself -- has further pumped up the notion that rights form the only real basis for citizenship. This was mostly because the sense of universal obligation had already disappeared. But whatever undercurrent remained militated against its revival: Adult white males having abrogated "universality" only to themselves in the first place, they weren't about to weaken their own grip on things by insisting on the service of the new citizens -- black males first, and then women.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The long and short of it is that the states have failed in their federalist assignment to cultivate a sense of republican duty. They have proven to be only spasmodically interested in cultivating anything other than the most basic, absolutely-necessary civil obligations. Jury duty is still obligatory, but it is uncommon: </span><a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-are-the-chances-of-serving-on-a-jury/" style="font-family: georgia;">538 cites data</a><span style="font-family: georgia;"> showing only 27% of Americans serve on a jury </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">at some point in their lives</i><span style="font-family: georgia;">. (I've served three times.) Voluntarism provided state governments with an easy way to avoid their own job of assuring the continuation of universal duties. And now state governments are the absolute worst conspirators against the franchise (the vote) itself. They spend more time in figuring out how to get certain groups of citizens *not* to vote than in doing their republican job of insisting that they do.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">An ironic exception is education. Which is pretty clever when you think about it: You can make schooling compulsory, but you can't oblige anyone actually to learn. You can be offered civics in school, not learn it, and then go on to an adult world that carries with it no obligation to apply it except in its most unpleasant form: paying taxes. Is it any wonder that our civic garden has become mostly invasive weeds, one nefarious variety of which recently came close to choking off the basic, constitutional process of ratifying a presidential election? If we are to keep that republican garden, we had better cultivate those seeds of republican virtue. There is no choice.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">And yet ... there's a reason this blog is called "Follies." Give me some arcana with extra cheese.</span></p>Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-35510698845440425392020-12-16T11:08:00.001-05:002020-12-16T11:08:38.776-05:00Swealed in a barrie an liggin intil a heck<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I've never much been one for dialect writing: the way some authors try to render speech phonetically, particularly when it's used to heighten the freakshow exoticness of a speaker with a vernacular other than standard English (such as Gullah, French Creole, or Appalachian mountaineer). My attitude is colored by the reaction of one of Horace Kephart's Smoky Mountain neighbors upon seeing printed "hillbilly" speech, as rendered by John Fox of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Trail of the Lonesome Pine </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fame. Here is Kephart’s account:</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-6e634b2b-7fff-ac59-3374-2daed56802f1"><blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span> </span>One day I handed a volume of John Fox's stories to a neighbor and asked him to read it, being curious to learn how those vivid pictures of mountain life would impress one who was born and bred in the same atmosphere. He scanned a few lines of the dialogue, then suddenly stared at me in amazement.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"What's the matter with it?" I asked, wondering what he could have found to startle him at the very beginning of the story.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Why, that feller </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">don't know how to spell!"</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> [italics in original]</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gravely, I explained that dialect must be spelled as it is pronounced, so far as <span> </span>possible, or the life and savor of it would be lost. But it was of no use. My friend was outraged. "That tale-teller then is jest makin' fun of the mountain people by misspelling' our talk. You educated folks don't spell your own words the way you say them."</span></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kephart acknowledges this as "a most palpable hit" that gave him a "new point of view," even if it didn't prevent him from going ahead and misspelling mountain talk. In fact, the account is the very opening of the chapter entitled "The Mountain Dialect" in Kephart's classic </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our Southern Highlanders</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The problem with the novelists like Fox and others -- among them Mark Twain, George Washington Cable (whose New Orleans Creole characters "toke lak theez") and of course Joel Chandler Harris of "Bre'er Rabbit" fame -- is that they are outsiders panning linguistic curiosity for publishing gold. In some cases they purport "scholarship," there is never an acknowledgment of a debt. It's high-toned circus barking.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, when it comes to reading dialect, I do make one exception: Scots. And that is because its literary purveyors -- Robert Burns, George MacDonald -- are themselves Scots. It is their own native vernacular that they are rendering, not anything outlandish (c'mon, groan, fans of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Outlander</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). With the ethical ground thus cleared, the modes of appreciation are given free rein to enjoy it as much as any foreign language.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My principal way of enjoying foreign languages has always been through singing, and as I'm writing this in high Advent it seems appropriate to mention that most of the songs I know in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, or Macaroni (bilingual Latin-English) are Christmas carols culled from the official books of the Christmas Carol Canon (pictured here).</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU9_vb1pEjhqMnpewGi3j3luBWDEEjiD80pwQXFhwK6BXVBAhFEtaMCJEHG_bsqj-PA05vCwGHhYS-I7prY5ZiEb05pIBTbwBOtWh6yAV5pTY8gvOdzvIFrof0o2KFPt4yu0dgsPl9RS0/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1689" data-original-width="2048" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU9_vb1pEjhqMnpewGi3j3luBWDEEjiD80pwQXFhwK6BXVBAhFEtaMCJEHG_bsqj-PA05vCwGHhYS-I7prY5ZiEb05pIBTbwBOtWh6yAV5pTY8gvOdzvIFrof0o2KFPt4yu0dgsPl9RS0/w320-h264/1213201402.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /></span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Regrettably, Scots is not well-represented in the Christmas Carol Canon. If it were competing in an EU Wassail Derby, Scots would finish so far behind other regional dialects such as Flemish or Catalan that it might almost be said not to be trying.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The reason is probably to be found in Reformed theology, which particularly in Scotland reviled anything smacking of a popish "mass." With Christmas it's right there in the name; not much use trying to get around it. What the reformers objected to were the centuries of cultural encrustation. It was the Bible or nothing. This put an emphasis on Biblical text as the only true basis for religious observance. All else was suspect.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But there I have discovered a new music, as it were. It comes out of where poetic recitation is itself a form of music. Familiar passages of the Bible are chief among this kind of music, particularly (to me) the passages in the second chapter of Luke that describe the "adoration of the shepherds." I recently discovered it as it appears in the Scots Bible, and to me it is thrilling:</span></p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span> </span>Nou, i that same pairt the' war a when herds bid in the rout on the hill and keepin gaird owre their hirsel at nicht. Suddent an angel o the Lord cam an stuid afore them, an the glorie o the Lord shined about them, an they war uncolie frichtit. But the angel said tae them: "Binna nane afeared: I bring ye guid news o gryte blytheness for the haill fowk -- this day in Dauvit's Toun a sauviour hes been born til ye, Christ, the Lord! This gate ye s'ken it is een as I say: ye will finnd a new-born bairn swealed in a barrie an liggin intil a heck."</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span> </span>Syne in a gliff an unco thrang o the airmies of heiven kythed aside the angel, giein laud tae God an liltin: "Glore tae God in the heicht o heiven, and peace on the yird tae men he delytes in!"</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span> </span>Whan the angels quat them and gaed back til heiven, the herds said til ither, "Come, lat us gang owre-bye tae Bethlehem an see this unco at the Lord hes made kent til us." Sae they hid owre tae Bethlehem what they coud drive, an faund Mary an Joseph there wi the new-born babe liggin intil the heck; an whan they say him, they loot fowk ken what hed been said tae them anent the bairn. Aabodie ferliet tae hear what the herds tauld them, but Mary keepit aa thir things lown an cuist them throu her mind her lane. Syne the herds gaid back tae their hirsel, praisin an ruisin God for aa at they hed hard an seen; aathing hed been een as they war tauld.</span></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span> </span>Behind the appreciation of this is of course the familiarity of the passage in King James English. What a delicious, savory contrast between "baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying a manger" and "bairn swealed in a barrie and liggin intil a heck."</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span> Mythical shepherds for the shepherding: </span>The Scots have been among the world's chief pastoral peoples. Famously, their sonic identity attaches to the chief instrument of pastoral peoples, the bagpipe. But judging from the extant, seasonal music associated with the instrument, Christmas pipes are for the most part continental: Italian, Provençal, German, Polish: all those minority dudelsacks, cornemuses, and zampgnas that any other time of the year get short shrift in the public imagination of bagpipes.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span> </span>The only remedy for any Christmas-loving Highland piper is to ran(dudel)sack the canon, an appropriately military-sounding activity for everyone's favorite musical weapon. Where the tunes don't "work," bend them to the instrument's will. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The First Nowell</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> doesn't "work" on the bagpipe's scale, because the instrument's "ti" absolutely refuses to toe the line. <a href="https://youtu.be/xoO7GOycP3E" target="_blank">The bagpipe is going to do what it's going to do.</a> But how else to participate in all that liltin o the unco thrang o the airmies of heaven?</span></p><br /><br />Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-13768185896143494282020-12-05T12:25:00.000-05:002020-12-05T12:25:03.583-05:00Deaf Diary<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzlZcMcr-Eu-cYKAoFGIWsQC4cbz4_m-2pK-qxok61VEBk1tKwa7HVh1Ql7tRpv4rfW7eN8tIlbGdpMj94XI0tz3e7YR8OorjH3I7V1Ew5nbrJ5x8dUx9QVhVNPuMfwTtb0z1UsodhnqQ/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzlZcMcr-Eu-cYKAoFGIWsQC4cbz4_m-2pK-qxok61VEBk1tKwa7HVh1Ql7tRpv4rfW7eN8tIlbGdpMj94XI0tz3e7YR8OorjH3I7V1Ew5nbrJ5x8dUx9QVhVNPuMfwTtb0z1UsodhnqQ/w240-h320/deaf+diary.jpg" width="240" /></a></div></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I don't know who needs to hear this, but I'm really quite deaf.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Get it? Hear. Deaf. Haha.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's not as bad for me as it might be for other people, because I grew up "hard of hearing." I'm well prepared for the daily embarrassment that accompanies the failure to interpret the sounds that come out of other people's mouths, along with the ensuing struggle to get to a sense of what is actually being said.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's work. It helps unimaginably to "read lips." So what happens when we have to "wear masks"? Zoom and gloom.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">E.g. a masked woman checker is telling my masked wife something, and the masked me (complete with hearing aids) has no idea what she's talking about, but it's something about the upcoming holidays, and there's something in it that sounds funny, so I'm smiling as hard as I can. Out in the parking lot my wife tells me how the checker was talking about losing her job up in Boston and being forced to move and not being sure that there'll be anything for her kids under the Christmas tree. It horrifies me that what the woman said registered with me as funny. Thank God my smiling was concealed by my mask. I hate them anyway.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">E.g. 2 the family zoom. No masks! But there are micro-second time lags, ambient reverberation, and shifts from speaker to speaker that dizzy me: whose lips do I read? What I do hear at one point is one dear nephew talking about how he'd just "quit his God," and this is a family that does not do that, but there's everybody nodding and smiling! It turns out (as you probably have guessed by now) that my nephew's announcement was that he had just quit his <i>job</i>, and for very positive and commendable reasons, thus the nodding and smiling.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It <i>can</i> be funny in an absurd kind of way.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">These kinds of interactions are made more complex than they are for most people because of my hearing loss. But, as I said above, I'm prepared because I've lived with it to some degree since that long-ago time before the onset of memory when an ototoxic antibiotic started me on this road. Pity the poor person who has had perfect hearing for a long time and has to adjust to losing it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Still, it's somewhat startling these days when I take out my hearing aids, and a smothering silence descends. It didn't used to be this way. Sure, my coping mechanisms are well-developed; they include excellent hearing aids and a wise audiologist. But the moments without hearing aids when I look at a grand-daughter and I can see that she is speaking to me, but I. Hear. Nothing. For a moment I'm staggered.</span></p><p>Naps are easy, though: Smothering silence is a good pillow.</p><p>Don't cry for me, Sergeant Tina.</p>Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-13779376003412583832020-08-03T14:15:00.000-04:002020-08-03T14:15:08.718-04:00Suffrage, by Ellen Carol Dubois<div class="p1">
In the present climate of re-examining the appropriateness of certain types of monumental public art, one of the things that's said -- by way of arguing that those certain types of monumental art should remain -- is that the men in question "should be judged by the standards of their time," or some such variant of the sentiment that people in the past didn't have <i>available</i> to them the same ethical or moral norms that we have today, and thus can hardly be blamed for thinking, speaking, or acting outside of them.</div>
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We could let this slide by if -- let's say in the context of the mid-19th century -- we were talking about such scientific concepts as germ theory: there was no scientific knowledge available to contradict the firmly-held belief among Civil War battlefield surgeons that boils populating the site of a wound were filled with "noble pus" and therefore to be encouraged.</div>
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This is most emphatically not the case when it comes to human relations, particularly in the Christian West in any of the <i>Anni Domini</i> following 33 (or, ok, I'll give you up to 333). Either there is no man, woman, slave, Jew, or Greek, or there is. It seems to me that a lot of American history is spent saying that, regardless of how Jesus may have thought, we think differently -- or at least we act as if we think differently, with our absurd, Escherian upstairs/downstairs distribution of who is qualified to rule. Worse (for Americans) we can't even act as if we understand the sense of our own founding revelation (the Declaration of Independence) which essentially repeats the belief in universal human equality even if it puts it on a more agnostic plane better suited to the one that will finally reach germ theory.</div>
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The problem, then, is not lack of availability. It is, rather, that Thomas Jefferson cannot <i>actually</i> take a piss without lifting the lid, even though he knows it's the right thing to do. Thomas Jefferson cannot <i>do</i> as Thomas Jefferson<i> reasons. </i>And this is the case even when there are people hollering that, in fact, up can be up!</div>
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In fact, of course, the problem is much worse, since so many people of influence and power don't even rise to the level of hypocrisy. They use might to defy right and manufacture patriotic bunting, theological apologesis, and pseudo-science to disguise demonic actions that some explainers fob off as "the law of the jungle," but which would horrify a baboon.</div>
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All this is by way of saying that <i>Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote</i> by Ellen Carol Dubois should be on every American's bookstand in this month of the centennial of the 19th amendment. It is thrilling to read, particularly if, like me, you come into it with only the sketchiest knowledge of the history of the subject. Of particular interest to me were the ways in which the movement for woman suffrage interacted with the movement for Black (male) suffrage: the early unity between the two fractured and spun out into separate orbits as if by some peculiar physical law of American politics. Oh, and racism.</div>
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The overall impression, however, is that the women who dedicated their lives to this cause themselves caused the USA to bring itself into at least 51% better focus than it had been before. Moreover, they were forthright from the very outset in such a way that no one can say there was no sentiment <i>available</i> for changing the way things were.</div>
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This book's appendix includes the text of the movement's founding document, the 1848 <i>Declaration of Sentiments </i>written by a group of women including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and promulgated to the world after a 2-day meeting in Seneca Falls, NY. Says author Dubois, "News of a public protest meeting in favor of women's economic, civil, educational, and political rights went viral throughout New York state and into Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Cady Stanton and her sister organizers knew that what they were doing was unprecedented, but they did not anticipate the mean-spirited, demeaning ridicule that came down on them, drawing on every possible negative stereotype of manly women and effeminate men. The women were called 'Amazons,' their dignified proceedings 'A Petticoat Revolution.'"</div>
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But the genius of the <i>Declaration of Sentiments</i> is that its style, organization, and even verbiage all derive from the Declaration of Independence. It both stakes out the high ground and takes it. The old standard thus becomes the new standard, easily available to everyone who subscribed to the old one.</div>
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From there -- in a dramatic story well told by this book -- followed a cloud of dedicated witnesses to see its suffrage aspect, at least, to fruition some 72 years later. For such Amazons we should be ever grateful, especially given that so many American males still cannot be brought to lift the damn lid before they piss, not to mention <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/16/men-masks-coronavirus-protests-masculinity-kills">wear a mask for the safety of others</a>.</div>
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-59925563470194982392019-12-14T10:45:00.000-05:002019-12-14T10:51:10.785-05:00No flag waiver<div class="p1">
In her apparent bid to become the standard-bearer of the Trump legacy, former SC governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley has chosen a likely banner: the Confederate flag. In a widely-reported radio interview with Glenn Beck, she stood up for the flag as a symbol of "service, sacrifice, and heritage" that race murderer Dylann Roof had "hijacked." In the wake of backlash provoked by the interview, Haley wrote <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nikki-haley-todays-climate-wouldnt-allow-us-to-remove-the-confederate-flag-in-south-carolina/2019/12/11/67373682-1c3c-11ea-8d58-5ac3600967a1_story.html">an op-ed column in the Washington Post</a> to clarify her remarks, saying that they are consistent with what she has always said.</div>
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She is wrong. What she did not do in the Beck interview that she <i>did</i> do after the Charleston massacre was also to say that "for many others … the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past." This omission is a clear sign that she is staking her political future on the rose-colored-glasses view of the Confederate flag and leaving out the rest.</div>
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This view represents as much a hijacking as any. It willfully refuses to engage the subject of slavery. Rather, it trades in an incomplete rendering of history for the sake of a sentimental, modernist, anachronistic re-ordering of values: we prize the timeless battlefield valor of our Confederate ancestors, but must never discuss their beliefs regarding the enslavement of Africans.</div>
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The so-called "Confederate flag" is not alone in this. The star-spangled banner is not without its own problems that arise when reverence promotes ignorance. It should be the case in a country with "freedom of speech" encoded in its Constitution that an unvarnished, warts-and-all history is to be preferred to a perfectionist mythology that faints before cross-examination quicker than a Southern belle with the vapors. This is particularly true at a time when the future of the country depends on real -- not symbolic or superficial, but actual -- racial reconciliation.</div>
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It would be a step in the right direction if Southern "heritagists" stopped tiptoeing around the subject of race-based, African slavery and admitted that -- regardless of who was to blame for its beginnings and its spread, and regardless of the way in which its social and psychological impact continued to be felt after its abolition -- African slavery was the institution around which the Confederate States of America was formed.</div>
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By the national power invested in it, the assembly embodying the CSA endowed certain designs to be flown on flags in order to personify -- the word is not too strong -- the principles that bound the nation together and gave it meaning. The only way to understand the meaning of the Confederate flag is to understand the meaning of the Confederate States of America. </div>
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The CSA was not about grits and biscuits or whatever passes for "Southern heritage" these days. It was about the enslavement of African-Americans. No slavery, no CSA. States' rights? The most ardent advocates of states' rights before the 1860 election were the Northern states complaining about the federal Fugitive Slave Law. Where were the Southern states' rightists then? Advocating for vigorous federal enforcement, that's where.</div>
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The core meaning of the CSA -- the thing that brought it to life -- was one thing and one thing only: the enslavement of people with African ancestry. Following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the perceived need for governmental protection of the institution is what drove the first wave of secession in the deep South. Yes, Lincoln's post-secession call for volunteers to enforce union pushed the upper South (and people like Robert E. Lee) over the edge. However, by that time the CSA was already there. Those johnny-reb-come-latelies signed on to defend a purpose that already existed: a nation founded on slavery.</div>
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It is bracing to read the full-throated defenses of slavery that resounded throughout the South in those days, and that tend to get covered up by today's Confederate apologists. For example: I recently read <i>The Pride of the Confederate Artillery: The Washington Artillery in the Army of Tennessee</i> by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., which I enjoyed for strictly private, genealogical reasons: one of the heroes of this battlefield history is my great-great grandfather's brother, Joseph A. Chalaron, who fought in every battle and campaign of the Confederate Army of Tennessee and who, though only a lieutenant, was its battlefield commander from Jonesboro until the end of the war. </div>
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It is in every way an admirable book of military history, yet when it comes to assigning a reason why these men went to war, it stumbles. Leading up to the unit's departure from its home city of New Orleans, "war fever" and "southern patriotism" are the only descriptors to be found, until finally, the day before they are entrained northward (destination: Shiloh), the unit gathers in the First Presbyterian Church to hear Dr. Benjamin Palmer, "a strong antislavery spokesman but a passionate secessionist," exhort them to return their obligation to Tennessee, which had rescued New Orleans during the "last war," and assure them that their cause was just, as it was "purely defensive."</div>
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Cheairs's footnotes don't clarify where he came up with the idea that Benjamin Palmer was a "strong antislavery spokesman." One of the South's most prominent preachers during the Civil War, Palmer -- a proud native of South Carolina who never seems to have tired of telling people that -- was apparently a lifelong believer in slavery, as the <a href="https://etd.auburn.edu/bitstream/handle/10415/1467/Duncan_Christopher_31.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">most recent biographical treatment of Palmer</a> makes abundantly clear.</div>
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Cheairs is correct, however, as to Palmer's passion as a secessionist. Such was his passion that Palmer -- on the Thanksgiving after the election of Lincoln, and departing from his habitual reluctance to mix politics with his pastoral duties -- delivered <a href="https://civilwarcauses.org/palmer.htm">a sermon</a> that, widely printed and circulated throughout the South, served to promote the cause of secession by justifying it as a necessary step.</div>
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What was that justification? Every nation -- every people -- has a character, Palmer says in the sermon, and along with that character has received a trust providentially committed to it. The South is such a people, and its "providential trust" is "<i>to conserve and perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing</i>." [Emphasis his, not mine; maybe this was a cue to thump the pulpit.] in the face of the advent to power of a Northern party whose abolitionist spirit is "undeniably atheistic" and whose platform of restricting slavery to the Southern states "is as big as the belly of the Trojan horse which laid the city of Priam in ruins," it is only "self-preservation" for the Southern people to form "a union of the South in defence of her chartered rights." Palmer delivers a ringing challenge to his listeners: "What say you to this, to whom this great providential trust of conserving slavery is assigned? … [T]his is the historic moment when the fate of this institution hangs suspended in the balance. Decide either way, it is the moment of our destiny. … If the South bows before this throne, she accepts the decree of restriction and ultimate extinction."</div>
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Slavery, Palmer says, is who the South is: not only is the labor of a "tropical race" required to till the soil under a "tropical sun," but "the system is interwoven with our entire social fabric … it has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling, and moulded the very type of our civilization." As we today would say, the South was a slave culture. As for the slaves themselves, Palmer says, "we know that every attribute of their character fits them for dependence and servitude. By nature the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless; and no calamity can befall them greater than the loss of that protection they enjoy under this patriarchal system." Freedom is something "they know not how to enjoy." All of this "binds upon us the providential duty of preserving the relation that we may save him from a doom worse than death."</div>
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In this sermon Palmer has laid out nothing less than the "one nation under God" of the Confederacy. What prevents us from seeing it? Our Southern ancestors were bullish on slavery not only as a positive good but as a sacred cause; they believed it to the very core of their being; and they fought under flags that exhorted them no less strongly than Palmer's rhetoric to defend a homeland providentially entrusted with the institution of slavery.</div>
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Widely reprinted in newspapers from Virginia to Texas and in pamphlet from throughout the country, the sermon's influence was such that, in the words of one contemporary, "it was found, after the delivery of his sermon, that the secession mania spread like fire in a prairie." After the war, curious Northerners visited New Orleans to see and hear "the big villain of the piece" hold forth in the very church where the "Thanksgiving Sermon" had been delivered.</div>
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It is puzzling to me that Hughes has chosen not to include any of this in his book about my ancestor's unit. Granted, his information about Palmer amounts to little more than a thumbnail sketch, but not only is it off the mark, it indulges in the familiar trope of self-defense that deflects from the underlying reality by masking it. What can one say? To cast my ancestor's cause in any light other than the actual one strikes me as disingenuous.</div>
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My ancestor shines forth in this book as a remarkably brave, valiant man who after the war devoted his life to securing the memory of his comrades, not only his fellows in the 5th co. of the Washington Artillery, but also In the Confederate Army as a whole. I am certain that he, residing as he does in the land of truth, would prefer that we understand him and his cause -- including its flag -- with unflinching and unapologetic honesty. I feel sure that he, as the honorable and dutiful person he manifestly was, would advise you not to fly the Confederate flag unless you make its cause your cause -- and that means the belief in an African race suited only for slavery.</div>
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It's possible, of course, that he would have advised against its use altogether, thus sharing Robert E. Lee's stance on the subject of remembrance. Lee's post-bellum attitude clearly disfavored monuments that would stoke regional antipathies. While supportive of efforts to provide for the interment of Confederate dead, he refused invitations to participate personally in any activities related to the late war, whether it be identification of war dead or education of war orphans. In a response to one such invitation (a "Gettysburg Identification Meeting") he wrote that the "wisest" course was "to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered."</div>
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His administration of what is now Washington & Lee University was a study in the avoidance of Confederate symbology. This particular "heritage" was ignored after his death, however, when replicas of Confederate battle flags were allowed to hang in the university's "Lee Chapel." A 2014 decision by then-university-president Kenneth Ruscio to remove the flags from the chapel proved (predictably?) controversial. Among those who supported Ruscio's decision was Robert E. Lee !V, who wrote to him that Lee himself would never have approved of their use in the first place: "His actions during his five years as president of Washington College made it clear that he had put that chapter of his life behind him. It is also clear that he tried to help others do the same." Lee IV further stated that Ruscio's "returning of the actual battle flags to the Lee Chapel Museum" was "the ideal way to care for and study these important artifacts."</div>
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Anyone who defies Lee's wishes and flies a replica of one of those flags doesn't get to decide what it means. That was taken care of in 1861. All his personal ambivalence on the subject of slavery and his late coming to the Confederate side underscore the desperate wrestling with conscience that lay behind his bitter but final decision to throw in his lot with the Confederate States of America, a nation explicitly and unequivocally conceived in African slavery.</div>
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My ancestor's artillery unit having been a musical one, it can be little doubted that among the songs they sang was <i>God Save the South</i>, <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/civil-war-music-god-save-south">the closest thing to a real national anthem for the CSA</a>, although little known today. Its lyrics include a proud affiliation with the rebel status of George Washington, especially proud for a unit that bore his name. They also would have sung the verse that runs, "War to the hilt, theirs be the guilt/Who fetter the free man to ransom the slave."</div>
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That free white men keeping the African slave fettered was the God-ordained, providential mission of the CSA is no less true for being incomprehensible to so many of the descendants of its warriors.<br />
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-59552893049556852962019-11-30T11:57:00.000-05:002019-11-30T12:05:47.860-05:00Mythified: Review of "Searching for Black Confederates" by Kevin Levin<div style="text-align: left;">
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Sometimes before writing a book review I will check <i>Goodreads</i> for ones already written -- I don't want to repeat what somebody's already said. In the case of Kevin Levin's <i>Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth</i>, I found a good example of the kind of reality that Levin (and we) must contend with when it comes to discussing the Civil War in a factual manner.</div>
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It was a "one-star" review that ran,"I’d give it Zero [<i>sic</i>] stars. Kevin Levin is not worthy of publishing anything. His bias against the South and Black Confederates is we’ll [<i>sic</i>] known. He is a huge hypocrite. Black union soldiers doing the same jobs as Black Confederates are considered soldiers. Not so the Black Confederates, he dismisses them with the same old rhetoric. Don’t waste your money supporting this book of fiction!"</div>
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Were Yankees every bit as racist as Confederates? Yes! Did they abuse the good faith and loyalty of the blacks helping them by limiting them for the most part to servile roles? Yes! However, Levin's book addresses a critical difference that comes through even in the wording of this scathing review: "Black union soldiers doing the same jobs as Black Confederates are considered soldiers." Notice that the reviewer doesn't call the "Black Confederates" <i>soldiers</i>. Why is that? At the heart of Levin's narrative (and research) is a clear definition: a <i>soldier </i>serves the state in an official capacity; records attest to his service in an organized unit that is supplied, officered, drilled, and paid as part of the armed forces.</div>
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What is abundantly clear from Levin's book is that the Union had such organized, official units filled with African-Americans. The Confederacy did not -- with a clarifying exception. Read on!</div>
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Moreover, despite the neo-Confederate reviewer's pained insinuation that black union soldiers only did the same jobs as blacks working for the Confederates, Levin demonstrates another thing beyond doubt: the black Union solders also <i>fought in battle as official members of organized units</i>. My emphasis, because -- c'mon guys, is it really that hard? This is a conception of soldiery so fundamental that one wonders why the neo-Confederates of the Sons of Confederate Veterans can't acknowledge it. Yes, blacks attached to Confederate units as manservants, teamsters, cooks, or musicians sometimes picked up rifles and shot Yankees; they manhandled cannon; some wore gray; but they never advanced into battle as full-fledged, registered, acknowledged, official members of any unit operating on behalf of the state. Whereas that did happen in the Union army. There is a clear distinction to be made, and that is the point of Levin's book.</div>
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Ironically, another review grades down Levin's book for bothering to take on the "risible" notion of black Confederate soldiers, saying Levin scores easy, "gotcha" points when what's needed is a serious study of what blacks actually did in the Confederate army, because it's obvious as hell they weren't soldiers. This reviewer probably doesn't live in the South, where mythical "heritage" trumps all and where wounded pride clouds judgment to the extent that risible notions are repeated as gospel truths. It is to Levin's credit that much of his book is taken up with the sources of that risible notion, especially his discussion of the stark differences between the Lost Cause myth of the noble slave following his master through the war and the current, neo-Confederate notion of the loyal slave willingly joining his white brothers in a defense of the homeland.</div>
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To me the most fascinating story in the book -- the one alluded to above about black Confederate regiments, and the one that should put paid to the notion of black Confederate soldiery -- is the account of the effort towards the end of the war actually to raise black Confederate formations. Patrick Cleburne, an Irish-born, non-slaveholding Confederate general, proposed the idea in early 1864, but his superior Joe Johnston shut down any further discussion of the idea. Finally, in January, 1865, with the Confederacy facing the void, Robert E. Lee came out in favor of the idea of enlisting black soldiers -- to be granted freedom in exchange for service -- "without delay." The proposal was tweaked to allow for enlistment of free blacks only. Finally, in March, 1865 -- one month before Appomattox -- Richmond newspapers reported recruitment for a brigade. Some seventy men appear to have enlisted. They were in the process of learning the trained soldier's drill when Richmond fell and the effort -- along with the Confederacy -- subsequently collapsed.</div>
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Why should this not be the final word on the subject of black Confederate soldiers? What is it about the neo-Confederate psyche that cannot accept that a regime whose very cornerstone was African-American slavery refused until the bitter end even to contemplate African-American soldiery? That very refusal is eminently consistent with historical Confederate ideology. It flies in the face of reason not to accept it as reality.</div>
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If it makes neo-Confederates fell any better about things, Levin commits a howler of an error about the battle of Chickamauga. There, plain as day on page 37, he writes, "Union major general William Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland proved victorious over General Braxton Bragg's Army of the Tennessee." Say what? The Confederates routed the Union army at Chickamauga and then besieged it inside Chattanooga. Neo-Confederates get to keep their victories. Those realities can't be gainsaid. Why bother with gaudy and untrue embellishments?</div>
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-92005435539180524342019-11-17T08:19:00.001-05:002019-11-17T08:19:27.465-05:00Pyramid of hobbits: "The Secret of Our Success" by Joseph Henrich<div class="p1">
"Slow down," I tell my imagination while reading this book when my mind takes off on a wild tear about the near-future genetic implications of current mind-bending cultural forces, like maybe political rule by tech-savvy children educated more by their online peers than by society. "Evolution," I tell myself, "takes a long time."</div>
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Only maybe not as long as we've thought. One of the arguments in this book is that the reinforcement of differential cultural adaptations through interactive learning in human societies can be so strong that one potential result is adaptive change at the physical level that comes faster than would be the case if the adaptation were left to the force its way up through chance mutations at the individual level.</div>
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"Survival of the fittest" for humans, then, in Henrich's formulation, becomes more a matter of social than individual adaptation, and -- significantly -- cultural responses to environmental challenges have replaced physical speciation as the basic evolutionary delineator among people. For example, ants "capture an equivalent biomass" as humans, but in doing so have split off into 14,000 species, whereas humans have only one hugely diversified and in some cases mutually unrecognizable species.</div>
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This is bad news for survivalists. Stock up on food and ammo and pimp your bunker all you want: you won't have a chance against a determined tribe of post-apocalyptic, acorn-eating sling shooters who teach their children well (whether or not they sing Neil Young).</div>
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The book will undoubtedly stimulate a fair amount of academic nit-picking -- as befits primates -- and parsing the arguments between "we were social because we evolved social skills" and "we evolved social skills because we were social" will necessarily provoke a clash of specialists. Suffice it to say for the sake of my own understanding that Henrich -- in the process of trying to determine at what point humans "crossed the Rubicon" and became a "new kind of animal" that passed down "toolkits" from generation to generation -- posits a "culture-gene co-evolutionary duet" between the discovery of tools and the ability to "reverse engineer" them through "causal models" that were then handed down. He concludes that, yes, humans are smart, but they aren't as smart alone in the wild as other species; rather, their smartness lies in the enduring, value-added smartness of their associativeness. Humans are smart "not because we stand on the shoulders of giants or are giants ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits."</div>
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Knowing that past scientists have produced intellectual models of human differences that have proven to be enormously deleterious, I approached the book with caution, wondering how Henrich would come out on the subject of race. Thankfully he confronts the issue explicitly early on in the book with a subsection ("Genes and Races," pp. 94 - 96) in which he says that not only do the traditional racial distinctions tell us nothing about genetic differences, they tell us less than nothing, i.e. they "distort" the genetic facts: "Our understanding of human genetic variation,"he writes, "derived from studying actual genes, completely dismantles any remaining shreds of the old racial notions." As for race prejudice, Henrich counsels awareness by making it itself a subject for study: why do we have a tendency to think stereotypically? The section concludes with a resounding, familiar-sounding declaration: "These insights will continue to fuel the spread of a new social construct: the view that all people, and perhaps some other species as well, are endowed with certain inalienable rights -- we call these <i>human rights</i> [emphasis Henrich's]. No new facts about genes, biology, or culture can alienate a person from these rights."</div>
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Most of the fun of this book stems from its broad presentation of human responses to environmental challenges. Technology (the bow and arrow for example ) can be won and lost and won again, depending on the ability of groups to carry it forward: sudden, large losses of population due to environmental disasters or disease have had the capacity to remove skills previously acquired from the toolkit transmitted to survivors. (I think here about the baroque recorder, the ability to play which was lost for generations and had to be re-learned. Surely this was not just so that elementary music teachers could experience truly unbearable noise? There has to be a better reason.) What people have done over the millennia to make foodstuffs more nutritious or even just edible -- adding burnt sea shells to maize; the evolved capacity to digest milk after infancy, which is still a "natural" capacity in a fraction of humans and the lack of which seems in some cases to be linked to the development of cheese, with its much lower level of lactose -- beggars the imagination.</div>
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Which, thus, easily imagines a society in which learning has been accelerated to the point that nimble-minded children engineer changes, both technical and social, that enable them to become political rulers through the weaponized use of baroque recorders ("Please! Stop! Anything! OK! OK! No more electoral college!"). Surely that's not all that implausible, given the starting point of a large pyramid of hobbits. </div>
Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-13637585445683537082019-11-04T14:01:00.000-05:002019-11-04T14:01:22.153-05:00Ain't no crossroads in a rhododendron hell: The dilemma of Appalachian Studies<div class="p1">
Can I be an indigene? Pretty pretty please? These days that's all I want to be: an indigene, rooted and tuted. I want to identify, and distant genealogical connections to various old countries have attenuated too badly in the American melting pot treatment for any of those affiliations to feel binding. Sure, I love to play the bagpipes and can claim a Scottish connection (by way of Nova Scotia), but only cultural sentiment elevates it over, let's say, the strain of Dutchness in me that goes all the way back to Pieter Stuyvesant. Then there's the Creole French and the Irish grandfather also clamoring for representation. That's enough hyphenation to make anybody hyperventilate.</div>
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Ah, to be an indigene! To have identification conferred as a birthright according to where you were born, and not according to your ancestry. It would make things so much easier: one is only born in one place. The result would be not so much birthright citizenship as birthright tribal status. Well, it turns out that I am an indigene. By virtue of the place of my birth I'm apparently a full-fledged member of the tribe of Appalachians.</div>
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At least that's what it says in the first chapter of <i>Studying Appalachian Studies</i> (University of Illinois Press, 2015), supplied by the book's editors Berry, Obermiller, and Scott: "Many key figures in the academic institutionalization of Appalachian studies were natives of the region. In this sense, Appalachian studies was 'indigenized' rather early in its development."</div>
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Praise Mt. Katahdin! I have for a long time hoped to qualify as an Appalachian, but it always felt presumptuous, because even though I play the lap dulcimer, have spent a lot of time following blazes on the Appalachian Trail, and played as a kid on top of the Cumberland escarpment a stone's throw away from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Bell_Miles">Emma Bell Miles</a>'s farm, I also grew up in suburbia playing classical music instead of bluegrass, was destined to get a college education because the other damn Dutch side of my family had been doing that for at least four generations already, and as for religion, my raising wasn't so much "none" as "are you kidding?" Somehow those always seemed to be disqualifying factors, but, hey, not to worry: Berry Obermiller Scott say "the majority of 'native' Appalachianists are white and educated, and many come from middle- and upper-class backgrounds."</div>
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It seems too easy, somehow, like I've crashed a wedding and made off with the bride. Also, to be honest, it takes my breath away that Berry Obermiller Scott bestow the title of "indigenous Appalachian" to everyone born into the region because there's a certain, er, <i>removal</i> of the traditional distinguishing feature of the word that connotes native Americans, a group that the editors themselves and others in their fine collection say has been slighted by Appalachian studies. I myself wouldn't be prone to taking such a drastic step as they.</div>
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But on the other hand I'm not one to turn down a free pass to membership in a nouveau tribe. Not without a scrap, anyway. After all, I'm a mis-educated hillbilly born and phrased and re-phrased by "on the other hand" and all manner of shenanigasuistry. You have to prove the spirit. Skepticism is just a safer form of snake-handling.</div>
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And Eden is known for nothing if not snakes. This is obvious when, immediately after ushering the educated middle- and upper-class academic wannabes into Appalachia, Berry Obermiller Scott cough into their collective sleeve: "When Appalachianists do not conform to stereotypical constructions of Appalachians, they may be regarded as 'inauthentic' or 'outsiders' both by Appalachian natives and by those from outside the region."</div>
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So, trouble in the garden, I guess. Hell, the garden was <i>made</i> for trouble. Damn. Just when I thought I might get to wear that "indigene" merit badge, it gets snatched away from me all because of a little damn mis-education and a daddy with a desk job at TVA.</div>
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So, what's it going to be? Am I an indigene or not? Who's an "authentic" Appalachian? And who gets to say?</div>
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Insofar as <i>Studying Appalachian Studies</i> can help answer those questions, it does so by presenting a history and critique of an academic discipline that purports to be one of many "area studies" like New West (US) and Pacific Islands studies. (To be completely accurate, their definition of "area studies" also includes the non-geography-based areas Women's and African-American studies.) The practitioners are the "-ists" who devote their lives to the study of the culture, economy, history, etc., of the region. If anyone should be able to answer my questions, shouldn't it be the people who fill the pages of scholarly journals with regional studies and who wrote the encyclopedia of the region?</div>
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It might seem so, and yet a recurring refrain of this book is that the field in general -- much to the dismay of the contributors -- is stuck in a state of mind that effectively denies "authentic" status to entire groups of people who "do not conform to stereotypical constructions of Appalachians," primarily women, African-Americans, LGBT folk, and the people formerly known as, um, indigenes.</div>
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Importantly, the term used by several of the book's scholars is not "state of mind," but "paradigm," so as to link the exercise to the ruling abstraction in understanding the formatting of knowledge, Thomas Kuhn's <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>, from which the concept comes, and from which also comes the corollary that said revolutions in structured thought occur when paradigms "shift." The Appalachianists in this volume concur that it is time for their field to experience such a shift.</div>
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If I were a revolutionary, I'd go with something stronger for my placard than "Paradigm Shift NOW!" The irony of the situation for Appalachian Studies is that its beginnings came in a much headier time than now, when actual revolution was more than just a whisper in the air conditioning of a conference room. I would give one of my Mize dulcimers for the chance to have been at the Big Bang of An Appalachian Studies That Almost Wasn't: the conference in 1970 at Clinch Valley College in Wise, VA, that pitted political activists against scholars and blew things up so bad -- and at the very outset -- that the Appalachian universe couldn't find <i>gravitas</i> until 1976, by which time mortgages seem to have cooled the activists into academicians. Thus does revolution become paradigm shift.</div>
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The paradigm that eventuated was this, according to Berry Obermiller Scott: Appalachian Studies "emerged … from an interdisciplinary/activist engagement with political and economic development strategies that sought to explain and intervene in regional economic development. At its birth in the 1970s, Appalachian studies was influenced by the world systems theory of global capitalist developments. Rather than emerging as a response to a single historical paradigm, Appalachian studies was the 'academic wing' of a broader regional reaction to hegemonic government- and corporate-sponsored economic development initiatives."</div>
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The "paradigm" in there is less than clear -- "reaction" is more the operative word -- so it isn't until the second chapter, "Representing Appalachia: The Impossible Necessity of Appalachian Studies," that Women's studies scholar Barbara Ellen Smith directly addresses and clarifies the nature of Appalachian Studies paradigm(s). Defining the paradigm within any field as that which "set[s] the terms of its scholarship," Smith describes the above-mentioned "birth" of Appalachian Studies -- "with its broadside attacks on the tradition of condescending and victim-blaming cultural explanations for regional dispossession" -- as an example of paradigm shift. She characterizes the resulting "dominant paradigms" as being the elevation of the "generic and seemingly self-evident categories" of "Appalachians" and "mountaineers" to a superior status that "overrides other forms of social identity," with the result that Appalachia became "an 'imagined community' of insiders, united by sameness."</div>
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It is now time, Smith says, for another paradigm shift, one that recognizes other aspects of identity. According to her, despite the fact that feminist, ethnic, and gender scholarship has peppered the paradigm for quite some time now with little effect, the primary reason for a shift has not so much to do with "our academic enterprise" as with "tectonic transformations in the region and the world." At a time when former adversaries have come together as "Friends of Coal," when the traditional bifurcation of male workplace and female household has been shattered, and when racism -- muted in the traditional mountain picture -- is now advanced as a political tool, it is time to replace "the unidimensional paradigm of mountaineer insiders pitted against venal 'outsiders.'"</div>
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Smith proceeds to elaborate her case that the dominant paradigms of Appalachian Studies all serve to "homogenize" the region, when what is needed is a regional representation that presents a more diverse tableau of the "human subjects of Appalachian studies." In so doing, she directly addresses a variant of my question about authenticity in a section titled "Whose Appalachia? Who is Appalachia?" What claim do out-migrants have to the identity? How about recent in-migrants from other regions of the U.S. or the world? How many residential generations back does it take to identify as an insider? Who adjudicates? She even asks, "What meaning does that term [Appalachian] possibly convey?"</div>
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In effect, Smith says, Appalachianists must confront "the ultimate impossibility of identifying fixed criteria, whether cultural traits, ancestry, or place attachment, that can separate the true Appalachian from everyone else." To say otherwise "presupposes not only that culture is static and lifeless but also that Appalachia is singular; that is, there is only one Appalachian culture (and, significantly, it tends to be deputed as rural and white). … In sum, paradigms that utilize cultural criteria to define the genuine Appalachian imagine a monolithic region; they tend to reduce its social complexity to a rural, white, place-attached mountaineer."</div>
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Within Appalachian Studies, the theory of Appalachia as an "internal colony" exacerbated this reductio, according to her, by compounding the notion of good insider vs. bad outsider. As Smith puts it, "Not all insiders to Appalachia are social equals, much less friends of social justice, nor are all outsider exploiters and reactionaries." She quotes fellow Appalachianist Dwight Billings: "The metaphor of Appalachia as a colony replaced that of Appalachia as a backward culture, but the mythical unity of the region and the homogeneity of its population remained largely unquestioned."</div>
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After decades of continued dominance, and still riding high, the original paradigm has produced an "essentialist" ideology that, according to Berry Obermiller Scott, "can result in overgeneralization, misattribution of causality, and the demonization of the 'other.' In that light, Appalachian studies needs to be careful to avoid the tendency to produce an identity politics based on exclusionary 'insider'/'outsider' dichotomies." In a separate chapter -- "Studying Appalachia: Critical Reflections" -- Obermiller and Scott carry this critique forward, citing Herbert Reid that insider/outsiderism is a "slag pile" polluting the scholastic landscape with a leachate that is "the tendency of some Appalachian studies scholars, artists, and activists to represent Appalachian communities in an ahistorical, idealized fashion that neglects political oppression and economy exploitation within the region's localities."</div>
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Well might these fine scholars rail against this downside, but after numerous scholastic cohorts since the 1970s, those "educated" in the insider/outsider dichotomy are now the dominant voices in what passes as Appalachian popular culture. One of the examples of how this has led to a blinkered, provincial, anti-intellectual attitude is the insistence on a "correct" pronunciation of Appalachia/Appalachian by prominent Appalachianists wielding great cultural and educational influence. I've written about this at length elsewhere (e.g. <a href="https://folliesobarry.blogspot.com/2015/02/pronunciamento-or-appalachian-molehill.html">here</a> <a href="https://folliesobarry.blogspot.com/2015/02/appalachisis.html">here</a> <a href="https://folliesobarry.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-united-states-of-appalachia-however.html">here</a> and <a href="https://folliesobarry.blogspot.com/2019/07/an-appalachial-state-of-mind.html">here</a>) and don't want to belabor the point. Suffice it to say that dislodging this form of political correctness will, for such as Berry Obermiller Scott, be an uphill fight. But after all, we're talking about mountains.</div>
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Or are we? To me one of the things worth thinking about in connection with Appalachian Studies is its cavalier attitude to geography. It calls itself an "area study" focusing on a region defined by Berry Obermiller Scott as "the Allegheny, Blue Ridge, and Smoky Mountains and the Cumberland Plateau, as well as the roughly twenty-five million people who live amid these mountains and valleys. In addition, Appalachian studies also embraces the millions of people who have migrated from the region but whose heritage has deep roots in the region."</div>
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Interestingly -- taking out for now the question of out-migration -- this definition of the region is the same as the Appalachian Regional Commission's (ARC), the Federal agency formed to combat poverty in the 1960s. Even more interestingly: according to Obermiller Scott, this definition of the region is another one of Reid's "slag piles." To Reid (via Obermiller Scott) the "uncritical adoption" of the Federal definition is "an indication that Appalachian studies has not escaped the hegemonic forces of the corporate state."</div>
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There are some ironies here. The Federal definition essentially papered over the older, mountain-centric one by including metropolitan areas; it had to do this in order to effect a policy of modernization that in part advanced a strategy of getting people out of the mountains into those more accessible (read urbanized) areas where development would be promoted. Where the primordial versions of Appalachian studies -- e.g. John C. Campbell's -- explicitly fixed its focus on mountain residents, the modernized, established version masked the distinction with the Federal definition and in doing so ushered the urbanites into Appalachia.</div>
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But somehow -- presumably to the chagrin of Berry Obermiller Scott -- the mountaineers not only persist, but they rule. Either their ghosts infest the discipline by haunting the insider/outsider dichotomy, or they peek through the work of naysayers like palimpsest: their book's third chapter, "Writing Appalachia," by Chris Green and Erica Abrams Locklear, is chock full of usages that treat "the mountains" as an exact synonym for Appalachia, e.g. its concluding distinction that, within the larger genre of Southern literature, Appalachian literature is "from and about the mountains."</div>
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This kind of dissonance is typical of the discipline because of its unwillingness to come to grips with a dilemma: once shorn of determinative characteristics, "Appalachian" starts to look pretty sheepish as an academic discipline. Those attributes that, once upon a time, <i>were</i> determinative in some way -- the mountaineer, the poverty, the coal -- are in the eyes of the paradigm shifters a kind of residue that needs to be cleaned away. If perhaps the paradigm has shifted and the shifters have won the field, it has been a pyrrhic victory: the work of debunking has emptied the "area" of any uniqueness whatsoever.</div>
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It has become a struggle over a brand: on the one hand the heritage actors -- the mountaineers, overalled but not overawed, speaking Elizabethan Ainglish with moonshine breath while clogging to banjo music at the mouth of the mine shaft before gittin' to feudin' with their first-cousin inlaws over the distribution of good ol' gal county teacher jobs -- and on the other the pointillist forces of globalized identity "solidarity" looking to bust up the stills of honky patriarchy in their own private Idaho.</div>
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But presumably everyone's saying "Appalachia" "right," so hey things could be worse.</div>
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Brands work like billboards. The brand is a created identity; it is designed to promote a product by evoking a positive, emotional response that at some future time will become a commercial transaction. In this case the future of the brand is at the mercy of the administrators of regional academic institutions whose bottom line is students. It is really no contest: administrators will overwhelmingly prefer the heritage actors, who will bring in students who have already conditioned by the insider/outsider dichotomy put out there in the popular culture by … the heritage actors. It's practically a feedback loop. The paradigm will not shift as desired by the authors of <i>Studying Appalachian Studies</i> as long as university administrators and their marketing departments have anything to do with it.</div>
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The field will be littered with "hands-on" courses whose instructors will do little, if any, of the activity regarded as central to the field of scholarship: writing or publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. The "interdisciplinary" aspect of Appalachian Studies so heavily touted by the authors of this book, while it may work to the benefit of the brand, also works to weaken the disciplines themselves, e.g. when it is manifested in the form of "Appalachian Music" and "storytelling" courses that take place out on the Appalachian limb, entirely apart from the traditional music or literature programs. Why is this? Because the avenue of the raw material for those courses is presumably oral, which apparently means that its practitioners need not subject themselves to the confines of literacy. And this will be fine with administrators. Even better if it can be accomplished with part-time adjuncts requiring no benefits. Played right, Appalachian Studies can be a coal, er, gold mine for administrators.</div>
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That is not to say that there are not admirable scholars teaching some of these courses. It would be better, however, if they taught those courses within the framework of the traditional disciplines, where they would be freer to parse influences and look at the larger context rather than continue to push the commercialized paradigm in which Appalachian Studies is 30 banjoists gathered around a single microphone, because, you know, that's how they did it in the good ol' days.</div>
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Interestingly, a similar but openly-commercial effort to brand the Tri-Cities, TN, area where I live as the "Appalachian Highlands" received less than a glowing response from local citizens. It turns out that the tourism marketers lab-tested the proposed name among people who live in other parts of the country ("outsiders," as it were), and they responded to "Appalachian Highlands" as having positive connotations that would predispose them to visiting the area. After the idea was rolled out in Kingsport, however, the City Council wanted nothing to do with it; the Council's opinion was largely echoed in the letters to the editor of the local paper. Some people wanted no association with the negative stereotypes that in their minds went with "Appalachian," but a substantial number objected to the geographical illiteracy of the concept: whatever Kingsport might be, it ain't "highlands."</div>
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Also interestingly, in the middle of this a Facebook group launched called "The Holston Region." The timing was suspicious: it almost seemed as if the (non-academic) local historians primarily involved in the Facebook group were aiming a not-so-subtle jab at the marketers. In effect the group was saying, "If you look to history, here is the name of our region." And it is true: the general designations used in the past to refer to what was popularly known as the "overmountain" region invoked the names not of mountains but of rivers, because it was in the river valleys that settlement generally occurred. Even as of not too long ago, but pre-Federal-Appalachia, the widely-used descriptors for the upper South were river-based ones: Tennessee Valley, Shenandoah Valley, New River Valley, etc.</div>
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Along these lines, another aspect of the Appalachian reality that bears considering is that the towns -- as centers of learning, law, and culture -- were always held to be apart from the mountains. Thus you can read in an account of the Depression-Era establishment of the state theatre of Virginia -- the Barter Theatre -- in (relatively) small Abingdon that many of the early attendees brought the farm produce accepted for admission (actors gotta eat) <i>in from Appalachia</i>. Meanwhile, down the road in Bristol (a non-highland Tri-City), pre-big-bang-of-country-music, there wasn't an opry; there was an "opera house."</div>
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Then the mountains became cool. They got above their raisin'. They followed the money. They pushed the watersheds and the towns out of the geocultural terminological picture and set up their wannabe empire in the halls of academe. Was it pretension or chutzpah that led East Tennessee State University in Johnson City (also a non-highland Tri-City) to name its university archives "The Archives of Appalachia"? Wouldn't Appalachian State over in NC -- a school bearing the "Appalachian" name since 1903 and genuinely located in the highlands -- seem to have a better claim to the name? Perhaps ASU can rest comfortably in the self-assurance of its university motto, "Esse quam videri": "To be, rather than to seem."</div>
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Maybe this wannabe indigene could adopt it. Probably not. I'm still unconvinced that I deserve whatever distinction the term bestows. Similarly with the title "Appalachianist." While I <i>am</i> convinced that Berry Obermiller Scott, Smith, Green, Locklear and all the rest who contributed to this valuable book are bonafide scholars whose labors deserve commendation and publicity, I find myself reluctant to allow them -- or myself -- to use this particular word as a label. The blithe manner in which they throw it around ignores the levels of connotative complexity that the word possesses. This careless attitude mirrors the arbitrary stance of the marketer rather than the respectful stance of the scholar. While this apparent lack of concern about the label might be explained as the residue of emotional identity issues arising from the creation of the field, to cling to a name whose working definition is derived from bureaucratic realpolitik rather than examined reality seems an odd strategy for scholars to take.</div>
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It is telling, for example, that (as reported by Green and Locklear) Kentucky poet Wendell Berry refused inclusion of his writing in <i>Voices of the HIlls</i> -- "perhaps the most influential collection of Appalachian literature" -- because he "did not consider himself Appalachian." Why was he even considered? Of course he's not Appalachian! This kind of seemingly uninformed grasping at territory by hugely informed people is exasperating.</div>
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Smith's "impossible necessity" is rather a "necessary impossibility": both surrender the capacity to make geographical distinctions and at the same time accept a parochial identity. For all the talk of shifting paradigms, Appalachian Studies is trapped in a rhododendron hell of its own choosing: with "Appalachia" as its badge, its practitioners will despite their best efforts never escape the insider/outsider dichotomy that gets deeper and thicker with each passing year as quasi-intellectual pop culture and university marketers feed its mythological roots.</div>
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"The path is made by walking," says the Antonio Machado poem that inspired the subtitle of this book. If Appalachian Studies is stuck in a rhododendron hell, the way forward will require not so much walking as strenuous contortion.</div>
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-59280347088401308422019-10-05T16:35:00.000-04:002019-10-05T16:35:28.967-04:00Hillbiliad: an odysseyI realized something one day when I was downtown busking. On the sidewalk in one of the downtowns. Around here they are all small downtowns and people are as nice as they are suspicious that I might be a migrant on welfare siphoning off their SoshSecurity. Or worse, an atheist because I'm not playing bluegrass or rawk or singersongrotter.<br />
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What I realized, playing for lunch money, is that strip malls are windows on America's soul -- full of hope and dope and failure. They are built to fail. They always do; they have to; American capitalism depends on it: a steady churn of failure -- worshipped by tech-addled magimetricians as "creative destruction" -- that fuels mass migrations from one form of slavery or a-reasonable-facsimile-thereof to another (those poor symphony musicians). Who was it said money was the root of all evil? Whoever that girl was, she might've known a thing or two.<br />
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I also realized that I needed one for me, personally: a stake in a strip mall, in one of those boxes of silver-framed plate glass looking as anonymous as ancestors in a picture album: all those mom-and-popped, family-farmed, self-maidens that picked up and moved away somewhere to a doomtown monoculture that might last long enough to raze a family with scrip and liquor and asbestos siding. Almost heaven, east-by-god Pennsylvania I mean Tennessee I mean Texas I mean Oregon I mean Tennessee. Again. Bullseye on a map is whatever you hit.<br />
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Which is me, I'll admit it. What I hit is a mostly-always matter of chance: luck. Even knowing this, though, I <i>always</i> try to parse the more successful instances of luck into form. Bad idea. It doesn't work. I take good luck and turn it into bad form. It is a skill; one that I'm not proud of. It's that kind of skill that starts with Buddhism and winds up with Hello Kitty.<br />
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When I busk in the downtowns, there is always someone to laugh at the tootly toy I play. I laugh back and tell them I am the Yo-Yo Ma of the recorder: I have memorized all of the J. S. Bach recorder sweets (that's how I spell what I say it because if you spell it the other way it's some kinda music publishing bullshit), and I will melt them in the air anywhere, at the drop of a hat trick. They say "do some tricks, then, yo-yo man" and drop in a quarter with a pitying, uncomprehending -- because it's not bluegrass or rawk or singersongrotter -- smile. Unless there's a five already in there: nothing kills charity quicker than parity, like that girl said. In which case they tell me to go back to Oregon and play with the whales. My answer is pat: "You mean Denmark" which makes for an even more uncomprehending smile.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU0O_PuEWzzauT8H4uA4-FfHr-dqHNwzQ1e0fbyifAVQPgM4gHYRwCoJctJysOUJzuJPt_1uy3LvK6cBEYRbJDzuO4EVFEM_W8vw5ZlZiBQolBKUeGJgAHY07GPpQWvMtBrIq0RCsx8hs/s1600/thunberg+viking+hip.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU0O_PuEWzzauT8H4uA4-FfHr-dqHNwzQ1e0fbyifAVQPgM4gHYRwCoJctJysOUJzuJPt_1uy3LvK6cBEYRbJDzuO4EVFEM_W8vw5ZlZiBQolBKUeGJgAHY07GPpQWvMtBrIq0RCsx8hs/s320/thunberg+viking+hip.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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There's a method to my rottenness: all these small downtowns in the very particular region where I busk are in the middle of a marketing meltdown. First off, what they don't tell you: They want people to come here and start African slavery all over again. But this time everybody can be an African (all lives matter), just the way Civil War re-enactors can be fat. Also do it with volunteers this time because it's Tennessee (a right-to-work-for-nothing state); in other words some reasonable facsimile called "brand enhancement" (nothing says "slavery" quite like "brand.").<br />
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Second, what they do tell you is that the marketers (nothing says "slavery" quite like "market") have decided on a subconsciously Dada-inspired configuration of <i>anything inconceivable that conceivably could be Appalachia in the minds of people who know nothing about the, um, is it really a place? </i>Just please no washing machines on the front porch.<br />
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So my actual first thought -- busking on the recorder in one of these downtowns -- was that Appalachia is just the down-country cousin to Scandinavia.<br />
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Hear me out: Log cabins come from Sweden and fiddles come from nyckelharpa and banjos come from a strung-out skinhead from Oslo who floated a Hillbiliad dragonship to Africa a long long time ago and picked 5-string symbolist poetry before reverting to Normandy and then marching to Zion to liberate it for "The Girl Who Didn't Like Money" (A Mountain Ballad). Plus: they had recorders down in Brasstown, NC, at the Campbell <i>Folk School</i> because? Duh: Denmark, where the <i>folk school</i> was born, had recorders in their <i>folk schools</i>. And like your girl used to say: Quod Erat Denmarkrandom.<br />
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I mean, it's geometry. It's also sausage, which right away linked me with the apple butter of my eye: the strip mall where I'm determined to dip my oar into the Slough of Despond along with all the other pioneers who insisted on <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i> as the only book to read besides the Bible. Inspiration? Please, no. It's entire randomness, meaning luck, and I'm parsing it big-time, because the medium is the method, as I think some girl said.<br />
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All of that realizing, on that recorder Büsker Dü-date, came down to: A store. In a strip mall. Just off the interstate, the this-land-is-your-land ribbon of highway teeming with the modern-day equivalent of cash-flush bushwhackers looking for a place to flush their cash but never could because it was all outhouses. But this Appalachia gonna flush, to wit, yo: Buddhism:Hello Kitty :: Appalachia:Greta Thunberg dragonship figureheads.<br />
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What were you expecting? Microplastic quilts? Roundup biscuits? Artisanal typhoid from a backyard spring? MAGA limberjacks? Dagnabbit, dragonship figureheads is whittling, for singing-high-and-lonesome out loud! Look, I just raked dry crackling leaves in 94 degree heat in October. You think we don't have something coming? Or maybe you're one of them waiting on the next ice age to kick in. In what? 3,000 years? So, just enough time to walk back civilization, right?<br />
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Sombeody's got to do something, and my strip mall outlet selling small-batch Greta Thunberg dragonship figureheads -- carved out of sustainably-harvested, downed timber and cleverly devised so as to conceal a storage compartment for a slim cigaret of high-grade Goosepimple Junction Kush (extra: address the blind tiger) -- will provide nothing less than a 21st c. equivalent of the Isle of Lewis whalebone ivory chesspieces: miniature monuments to an uncertain future full of hope and dope and failure.<br />
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Bullseye on a map is whatever you hit.<br />
<br />Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-15977581689452916822019-09-25T20:11:00.000-04:002019-09-25T20:11:30.945-04:00Good, bad, and ugly: The case of Michael Bellesiles' "Arming America"<div class="p1">
Recently I eased my cogitative boat into an interview found via a new, online history publication called <i><a href="https://contingentmagazine.org/">Contingent Magazine</a></i>, recently begun and edited by some fine and approachable historians I follow on Twitter. The magazine describes its purpose as follows: "<i>Contingent</i> is a nonprofit magazine for everyone who asks questions about the past. Our contributors are largely historians outside the traditional professoriate -- adjuncts, museum workers, librarians, park rangers, grad students, high school teachers. They are all paid." Via Twitter I learned of the editors' efforts to establish a modest, monthly budget for paying contributors. I'm somebody who can't pass buskers on the street without chipping in something. Here was history busking outside the concert hall of academe. I chipped in.</div>
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But not until after I had listened to <a href="https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/08/24/bellesiles/">the interview</a>, a production of <a href="https://theageofjacksonpodcast.com/">The Age of Jackson Podcast</a> sponsored by the Andrew Jackson Hermitage and hosted by Daniel Gullotta, a Ph.D. student in religious studies at Stanford University.</div>
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Rather than summarize the interview here (there'll be more downstream), at this point I'll just say that I found its subject matter irresistible, in the same way you would find it irresistible if you were out on the street and ran into an old acquaintance who -- clearly the worse for wear -- said, "Boy, do I have a story."</div>
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Back in 2000 I was blown away by <i>Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture</i>, written by Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University. Among other things, it recounted and documented the failure of an important American experiment: a well-regulated militia of all military-age citizens (c. 18-50) whose self-armed constancy and patriotism would obviate the need for a standing army. And when I say "failure," I mean dismal, embarrassing, "what-the-fuck-were-we-thinking?" failure so that within just a couple-score years, three at the most, what was at the beginning (1787) bruited by Federalists and Anti-federalists alike as an institution essential to American republicanism had become a literal laughingstock.</div>
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This was my first encounter with this history, with the <i>fact</i> that it happened. I was less interested in Bellesiles' larger thesis about the Civil War being a watershed event that ushered into American society a "gun culture" that had previously not existed. I was just really, really impressed by how badly the Founding Fathers had screwed up on the militia thing.</div>
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What happened soon thereafter was that I in my capacity of public library director had to address a request that <i>Arming America</i> -- due to well-publicized flaws in some of its research having mostly to do with probate records -- be removed from the collection or given a warning label of some sort in the front of the book. Thanks to American Library Association stances on intellectual freedom, I was able to keep the book unlabeled on the shelf.</div>
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But in effect the book as a whole was discredited, even if only part of its research had been called into question, and none of that (as far as I knew at the time) had to do with the militia, my area of interest. This was altogether a disappointment to me, because the book had been broadly informative, quite well written, and had left me looking forward to great things from author Bellesiles. Instead, thanks to the controversy, he dropped from view.<br />
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Every now and then I wondered what happened to him. So when on Aug. 24 <i>Contingent</i> put up an interview with him, it very much was like running into that long-lost, beaten-up acquaintance on the street.</div>
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Interviewer Gullotta draws out a relatable Bellesiles on a wide range of topics (how to put a twist on an Old Fashioned; some refreshing home truths about what bullshitters -- my word -- Jefferson and Tocqueville were), but necessarily central is the book that took him to the heights of the history profession -- it won the prestigious Bancroft prize -- before the reverberations of its faults plunged him near to the nadir. Acknowledging that there are "a couple of specific errors in my research" and "a few pagination errors" in his footnotes, Bellesiles stands by his work: "I know of no research that undercuts the main findings of my book." Yes, the probate records contained "significant errors," but he points out that they relate to an insignificant portion of his book ("three paragraphs") and that he later worked to correct the information with a website and in a second edition of the book released necessarily with a different publisher -- Soft Skull Press -- because the initial publisher -- Knopf -- "rescinded" an offer to re-publish it.</div>
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Yet in Bellesiles' telling Knopf is partly (largely?) to blame for the tempest that seems to have caught him off guard. An academic publisher, he suggests, would've vetted it better, and its career would've been satisfactorily typical: offered as "the beginning of a discussion among historians," it would be read "almost entirely by scholars" and then subjected to the drip-drip-drip of academic, peer argumentation. Instead, it became red meat for a dogfight over gun rights, with gun control advocates on one side, ginned up by Knopf's dust cover polemical endorsements including one that calls Bellesiles "the NRA's worst nightmare;" and on the other the NRA and its minions, who according to Bellesiles "launched a coordinated paragraph-by-paragraph search for errors" -- turning up only seven in 1,300 footnotes" -- as well as an assault on Bellesiles' credibility using a weaponized Internet (at the time still developing into the monster it is today) that he characterizes as "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftboating">swiftboating</a>." All of this, he says, because the subject was firearms.</div>
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The interview -- which you should by all means listen to -- clearly reveals Bellesiles to have been shattered by the experience. My wondering about him was not just the musings of a provincial librarian, either. He dropped from view to the extent that Gullotta says he had to resort to some "crazy Google Foo" to find him. Bellesiles regrets publishing the book and pines for anonymity. He won't say which educational press he does editing for because he doesn't want the trolls to beleaguer them with hate mail. When Gullotta asks how a reader might approach the book should they come upon it, say, in a library, Bellesiles says, "Read it with an open mind, and without yet exploring the criticisms of it. Judge first for yourself, and then explore the criticisms. Try not to tell anyone you're reading it, because you may get some hostile responses. And hopefully do some research for yourself; look into the source materials, which are rich and full. And that's where life is, is in the source documents."</div>
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<i>Contingent</i> has made it easy to "explore the criticisms." Editor Bill Black appended to the interview the links to "additional resources" that include the principal documents generated by the controversy, mostly from 2002-3: a forum in the <i>William and Mary Quarterly</i>, an article in the <i>Yale Law Journal</i> entitled "Fall from Grace," the inquisitional-sounding <i>Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles</i>, and Bellesiles' own rebuttal pamphlet, <i>Weighed in an Even Balance</i>.</div>
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Grateful as I was to hear Bellesiles' side of things and to learn what has transpired since, I couldn't help but wonder, listening to the interview, why revisit this controversy? What about it has attracted the attention of younger scholars like Gullotta and Black? Is there, perhaps, some interest in rehabilitating Bellesiles and his book? </div>
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With this interview -- preceded and "balanced" on the <i>AofJ</i> podcast by <a href="https://theageofjacksonpodcast.com/episode-81-michael-a-bellesiles-arming-america-the-origins-of-a-national-gun-culture-2000-with-joyce-lee-malcolm-history-of-history-17/">one with Joyce Lee Malcolm</a>, a severe detractor who says Bellesiles, far from being taken aback at the furore, was at the forefront of the polemics from the outset -- Gullotta is generating original material that could be used for some kind of re-assessment. He hints at some credit for Bellesiles' introducing the idea of a "gun culture" in America; by and large, though, he appears mostly fascinated by the scandal in and of itself.</div>
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Black followed up on the Bellesiles interview with <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/865208/historical-professions-greatest-modern-scandal-two-decades-later">an article in TheWeek</a> that examines the case in order to address the question of how "academic historians should function within the public sphere. At what point does <i>relevancy</i> [his emphasis] undermine rigor?" The forces of the history marketplace, Black says, dictate a turn away from "quote-unquote serious scholarship": with tenured positions requiring peer-reviewed publishing becoming thin on the ground, trained historians face financial pressure to "create a brand for themselves" through such extramural, Internet-centric devices as self-promotion on social media and articles lacking the filter of peer review. The moral of the Bellesiles case, post-interview, seems to be that his professional remorse (I wish I'd played it safe with an academic publisher) simply points to the fact that this nostalgic alternative dates from an idyllic past less and less available to trained historians. Say Black, "It doesn't make much sense to ask whether or how historians should come down from the ivory tower, when a growing number of them are never up there in the first place."</div>
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An irony here is that one of the central players in the Bellesiles controversy was an amateur historian: Clayton Cramer, a writer on gun history topics with a history MA but by profession a software engineer, figures as a more-rigorous-than-thou correcting laborer to the academic Bellesiles' sloppy citations, which provoked Bellesiles to respond on one occasion (in <i>The Chronicle of Higher Education</i>, Oct. 27, 2000) by calling Cramer a "non-historian." Rigor, perhaps, doesn't inhere to the ivory tower alone.</div>
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In fact, if there is anyone in the whole hooraw that can be said to be a harbinger for the current malaise in the employment of historians that Black says forces them out into the general job market and onto the Internet, it is Cramer, not Bellesiles. In a c. Jan. 2003 <a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1185">online article</a> for <i>History News Network</i> (an organ of George Washington University) Cramer speaks to just these issues: Unable to support a family while pursuing a career in the academy, he became a software engineer; unable to attract serious, continuing attention from historians with his findings about Bellesiles' errors, he put up a web page in an effort to publicize them. From there -- early on, anyway -- it seems to have been controversy waged on the Internet -- with Bellesiles withdrawing, according to Gullotta's interviewee Joyce Malcolm <a href="https://reason.com/2003/03/01/disarming-history-2/">in a <i>Reason</i> article</a><i>,</i> in which she also credits the nonacademic press (<i>National Review</i>, the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, the <i>Boston Globe</i>) for spreading the word about the problems with <i>Arming America </i>that the history academy at first ignored. Yes, once they got there they turned on Bellesiles with a vengeance, but the early days of the controversy seem to complicate Black's contention that historians did not stand behind Bellesiles. If they did not stand behind Bellesiles, they at least seem to have demonstrated a passive aggression against Cramer -- not a peer -- that drove him in frustration to pursue a more independent route to publicize his concern for "scholarly integrity" and "the credibility of the historical profession."</div>
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"Disingenuous" seems to be a word often used to describe Bellesiles, but along these lines it particularly seems to apply to a remark in the interview that, on any other subject than guns, he and Cramer would be able to "appear together at a conference," when it is much more likely that Cramer's lack of institutional bona fides would prevent his being invited in the first place. The "class" division that <i>Contingent</i> has undertaken to confront (bypass?) is real, and Cramer's experience in the Bellesiles matter elucidates its mystification (oh how I love that concept) to the extent that Cramer himself seems to blame the prejudice against him on lack of ideological diversity in the academy (too many liberals) rather than a much more basic, reluctantly-surrendered professional snobbery.</div>
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For what it's worth, Cramer makes a big deal of calling out Bellesiles on incorrectly quoting the text of the 1792 militia statute, the first to embody the organization under the Federal Constitution with its now-notorious 2nd Amendment. As <i>Arming America</i> was my first encounter with a detailed history of these laws, I did not catch it, but there it is on p. 230: the quote that says every citizen enrolled in the militia <i>shall be provided</i> with a musket, when in fact the statute says every enrolled citizen <i>shall provide</i> his own musket. Huge difference! However, in re-reading the book, I found clear evidence -- seemingly unnoticed by Cramer and uncited to my knowledge even by Bellesiles in his own defense -- that this was an unintentional error, an instance of his getting tangled in the tares of his own sloppiness: subsequently, on p. 262, Bellesiles writes, "In theory every member of the militia supplied his own gun, as the Militia Act of 1792 required."</div>
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There you have it -- in my mind anyway -- the problem with <i>Arming America</i> in a nutshell: not fraud, as some have alleged and continue so to do (in full fury: peruse the lynch mob that is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Arming-America-Origins-National-Culture/dp/1932360077">the comments section</a> on Bellesiles' revised, Soft Skull edition book website), but a display of a head-scratchingly high degree of reported discrepancy between text and citation.</div>
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Nothing can be taken at face value on either side in this bramble patch, as some of the gotchas turn out to be wrong, and the accusers show themselves in as bad a light as the person they accuse. Malcolm, for example -- a fully frocked academic as much as Bellesiles -- tries to score a point by truncating his statement that "[m]ost personal violence in early modern England occur not on lonely highways but at public festivals, often between competing teams of Morris dancers and such other representatives of community pride." [<i>Arming America</i>, p. 36] Malcolm's version of the quote ends at "dancers," which clearly changes the scope of Bellesiles' assertion; she then scoffs, "Bellesiles assertion that these charming, white-costumed folk dancers, sporting bells at their knees, were responsible for most of the era's violence struck one British historian as Monty Pythonesque."</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPXQvWpuNOg298-TJtzkBoegQQJWK9ZH5vFeRy5nZ5TxndJVY5ob6rsZzbsFN77zKpYl8emTKWFtMWZe_5wXhPgYcbCvdw6FlwKzNTnm7dVKOfOrVQx0AnPBdElWOvJq6jbMT2r0Ot8qU/s1600/morris+line+1.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="80" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPXQvWpuNOg298-TJtzkBoegQQJWK9ZH5vFeRy5nZ5TxndJVY5ob6rsZzbsFN77zKpYl8emTKWFtMWZe_5wXhPgYcbCvdw6FlwKzNTnm7dVKOfOrVQx0AnPBdElWOvJq6jbMT2r0Ot8qU/s640/morris+line+1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Since the fighting Morris dancers seem particularly absurd to Malcolm -- indeed, she doubles down on the criticism in the interview with Gullotta, where she says she examined the sources and "not one of them said what he said" (<i>AofJ Podcast</i> 081 10:30-11:20), I decided to follow Bellesiles' footnote to the source: <i>Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660</i>, by David Underdown, p. 69. Well, p. 69 has nothing about Morris dancers, but a little experience with Bellesiles teaches you some basic gumshoe, and sure enough on p. <i>96</i> there's a description of a fight at a local revel involving leg-belled, "apparently innocent" Morris dancers that resulted in "a bloody affray." So Bellesiles got the fact right, included it in a qualified generalization that Malcolm distorted, but cited the wrong page. Faults all around!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1x23du6eD7IWuan383Wc4sLiH-IzB_m_oXik5kFuZN3rbVDgOiYsXwsP2oQhg1yrVAt5b0mRaMfBpNVIZi-Zdz_xDutQARrbBn_7Wl_NbY7O9Iet3RzyscSyT7dcCylADcPyE3NJX1vY/s1600/morris+line+2.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="80" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1x23du6eD7IWuan383Wc4sLiH-IzB_m_oXik5kFuZN3rbVDgOiYsXwsP2oQhg1yrVAt5b0mRaMfBpNVIZi-Zdz_xDutQARrbBn_7Wl_NbY7O9Iet3RzyscSyT7dcCylADcPyE3NJX1vY/s640/morris+line+2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Once again in this regard it is the "non-historian" Cramer who is most dependable and also the most damning, but even his claim to be able to find errors "on almost any page, picked at random" requires testing. I took this <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/why-footnotes-matter-checking-arming-americas-claims.pdf?c=plag;idno=5240451.0001.016;format=pdf">"pick a page, any page"</a> challenge for a short ride. Mostly using HathiTrust to check official sources, I did find a number of errors, most of them along the lines of the mis-cited morris dancer page, but accuracy prevailed over the handful of pages whose handful of citations I was able to check, given my limited, provincial library resources and the time constraints of interlibrary loan. My feeling is that Cramer <i>might</i> be overstating his case somewhat, but it has enough basis that I feel the need to scour same pages in the the second edition to see if Bellesiles did indeed revise or correct these mistakes as he claims to have done in the interview.</div>
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This being the case, the book remains strongly suggestive, although his laying out of a "lack of a gun culture" thesis is easy to nitpick (as Cramer does) due to lack of precision, e.g. "gun censuses" that report only military-grade firearms are necessarily incomplete. If nothing else it is a great bibliographic resource. However, it would seem impossible for the book to be used as a citation without first double-checking its sources. But after all -- to give Bellesiles the last word -- the "life" of history is with those source materials, "which are rich and full."</div>
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Which, for the most part, cannot be said about historians. Well, "full," maybe. Keep some deserving ones that way by supporting <i><a href="https://contingentmagazine.org/">Contingent</a></i>!</div>
Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-71957213544789948482019-08-27T08:55:00.000-04:002019-08-27T08:55:15.098-04:00Parodies Lost<div class="p1">
"Boss, Luc just quit."</div>
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"Luc? Luc Fer? Our best parodist? Hell of a guy too. Why? Did he say?"</div>
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"Not a word. He packed up his stuff and walked out the door. Left this:"</div>
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Some people can just dial up <i>Sympathy for the Devil</i> in their minds: the "mad samba" percussion that introduces the song and ties it together; "Please allow me to introduce myself" over the percussion and block chords, then the busy bass part kicking in, doubled in the piano left hand, while the piano right hand anchors the harmonic rhythm, instead of -- as you would expect of the Stones -- electric guitar; all of it wrapped up in a relatively straightforward verse-chorus structure, no bridge, broken only by Keith Richards's electric guitar solo.</div>
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Conceptually, it couldn't be simpler: Simply replace "sympathy" with "Trumpathy." But as alien as those two concepts are one from the other, it would mean an overhaul of the original, even if functionally you have to leave enough elements to make it recognizable. Sorta like how there's "pathy" in both words haha.</div>
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Music-wise, the parodic idea was to keep the simple structure of the song, more or less, as well as the basic musical elements like tempo, but flesh it out as a different genre. The percussion would set the tone as in the original, but there couldn't be any suggestion of samba because the lyrics have Trump making fun of how the drums in the original are "way too Latino." The triadic harmonies of the original bass and piano become dissonant and jagged in the parody--think angry Melodica Men on shrooms. The most "faithful" element, musically, of the parody (besides the basic chord structure) is the guitar solo, which the parody "covers" with three overlapped synth sounds as a way of expressing the artificial "muzak pandemonium" that Trump says is his "heavenly music."</div>
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The vocals are spoken in the manner of Trump speechifying, but he winds up, quite unintentionally, sounding like a poor imitation of Obama rapping badly. Good work if you can get it.</div>
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The lyrics were written in early August, 2019, after the Trumpista fear of an "invasion" of mostly unarmed migrant families and children found murderous expression in the Aug. 3 mass shooting in El Paso, when a Trump-echoing white nationalist targeted Latins in a Walmart and killed 22.</div>
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The words "cheap pewter and crap zirconium" refer to an incident in which Trump gave supposedly "platinum diamond Harry Winston" cufflinks to actor Charlie Sheen, who had them appraised by a jeweler. In four seconds the jeweler assessed their actually worthless components.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj09G8bM6ozRvYdqFpNOENwt9A2rdrM_l8ofytJ2ymkT16CYQGiw76wsS5XAzeLTfrBqVIgMUSzvMOQaEm4zxptAI7dsO9W_diwpFdn5sbqdPlS4Cz1tfJMtA9akdvmuwYNvpj3SauyplA/s1600/trumpster+fire.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj09G8bM6ozRvYdqFpNOENwt9A2rdrM_l8ofytJ2ymkT16CYQGiw76wsS5XAzeLTfrBqVIgMUSzvMOQaEm4zxptAI7dsO9W_diwpFdn5sbqdPlS4Cz1tfJMtA9akdvmuwYNvpj3SauyplA/s400/trumpster+fire.jpg" width="334" /></a></div>
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I'll leave any other deep diving on the lyrics to you all, except to say that the chorus reverses the Jagger/Richards "name/game" and otherwise echoes the original J/R words with Trump's native language, insult: "hope" becomes "dope" and "puzzling" becomes "putz."</div>
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I'd almost written and wrapped everything by Aug. 19, when a story emerged that Trump was interested in buying Greenland. I thought this would be an example of Trump in his standup comedian persona (a much stronger aspect of his personality than people realize), but it turned out he was serious and canceled a visit to Denmark because the PM there dismissed the idea out of hand. And then Trump referred to himself as "the chosen on;" the parody song has him invoking a "second coming" that his supporters are trying to "crank."</div>
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Right then and there I knew I was done. When reality becomes parody, parody is done. I spent the afternoon painting over the loop of a video of Trump saying that if the economy failed and everything went down the tubes, there'd be no choice but to vote for him. The loop has a guy punctuating things with a thumbs-up. </div>
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For what it's worth, <a href="https://youtu.be/kbUL4Sz7iKs">here it is</a>.</div>
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So I'm going back to Pandemonium in the hopes that the good lord gives me some other world to warp. Trump and Thumbs-Up Guy don't need my help.</div>
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Luc I. Fer</div>
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-81387603317313267792019-08-13T22:36:00.000-04:002019-08-13T22:46:14.441-04:00Face it<div class="p1">
[Re-posted from a book review on Goodreads]</div>
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If this review had a subtitle, it would be "The problem with subtitles." The problem is that subtitles try to squeeze all the meaning of an entire book into a few words. Functionally, it's stupid. Nobody goes around saying, "Have you read the latest subtitle?" But maybe they should. After all, it's essentially a headline, and how often do we know anything about anything beyond the headlines that parade before us on our "wall" or in our "feed"?</div>
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Feed. Good word, that, for us human informational bovines. Here is a book with a perfectly good title -- <i>Anti-Social Media</i> -- whose subtitle goes on to tell us what the title means -- <i>How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy</i> -- so that we can have something to add to the coffeehouse chatter: "Hey, did you know that Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy? Terrible, innit? Hey, look what just popped up on my feed: Ronaldo and Neymar, and they're not playing soccer, they're boxing! Hahaha!"</div>
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I think I prefer the quaint, old-timey way that publishers used to provide a seemingly alternative title: "<i>Anti-Social Media -- </i>Or<i> How Facebook Primarily But Also Google, Not to Mention a Host of Others, Profits by Providing a 'Free' Service that Tickles Our Inner Compulsion to Use the Cotton Gin to Generate Profits and Other Glib Excuses for Enslaving Others."</i></div>
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In fact, this book doesn't mention the cotton gin. But if you will allow yourself to go beyond the subtitle and actually <i>read</i> the entire book, you'll learn that author Vaidhynathan is onto something much deeper than the manner in which the architecture of Facebook willy-nilly acts on the human spirit like a steady diet of Coca-Cola acts on a set of teeth.</div>
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(I said "spirit." I meant "brain." But I couldn't use that word, because it connotes "rational," which as Seth Godin says, no one is. And everybody knows that Seth Godin must be right because Seth Godin is a Marketer and we are all Brands and Brands don't use rationality because it isn't sticky and lacks the potential for virality, which autocorrect wants to change to "virility," but that was another time.)</div>
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So, anyway: spirit. Why do people drink so much Coke? There's 9.75 teaspoons of sugar in one 12 oz. can. Imagine putting that much sugar on a bowl of cereal. I mean, it's total junk, and it funds an EMPIRE. Full disclosure: part of the empire is a university I got a degree from, so totally worth it, right? Just like slavery, except rotten teeth and obesity! That's the spirit!</div>
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And then there's Facebook, and not only is it FREE, but it doesn't rot your teeth or make you fat, and it comes complete with an afterlife by keeping you friends with people after they (or you) die! Who wouldn't want it? So, it's completely neutral, right?</div>
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If you think that, you've never concerned yourself with advertising. Back in the graybeard days of advertising -- all of 15 years ago -- they used to say that 20% of your advertising budget worked, but you didn't know <i>which</i> 20%, so you had to go ahead and spend the other 80% on stuff that didn't work. Now, with Facebook sucking up all kinds of personal and browsing data that its users give up for FREE and fire-hosing it to advertisers, anybody with any kind of advertising budget can customize many messages to many audiences and gauge the responses. With that kind of feedback, no wonder the traditional "Waste 80% of Your Advertising Budget With Us" newspapers are struggling.</div>
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And guess who have massive advertising budgets to saturate an atomized market with targeted messages? Political marketers, with dictators like Vladimir Putin showing the way. Here's Vaidhyanathan: "By segmenting an electorate into distinct sets, candidates move resources toward efforts to pander to small issues with high emotional appeal instead of those that can affect broad swaths of the electorate and perhaps cross over presumed rifts among voters. It's not necessary -- and may be counterproductive -- for a campaign to issue a general vision of government or society or to articulate a unifying vision. It's still done, but it's not the essence of the game anymore. Voter targeting … encourages narrow-gauge interventions that can operate below the sight of journalists or regulators. A campaign like Trump's can issue small, cheap advertisements via platforms like Facebook and Instagram that disappear after a day or get locked forever in Facebook's servers." (p. 162)</div>
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"High emotional appeal": your brain on Coca-Cola. We love it, we can't get enough of it, and we are powerless to resist, and the first three letters of Seth Godin's last name are G-O-D. Sweet.</div>
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Even if Mark Zuckerberg has good intentions, and even if his company makes occasional interventions, they manifest the naiveté of the libertarian Silicon Valley mindset. His creation is a Frankenstein monster, out of his control: "Facebook is simply too large and the variety of human depravity too vast for the company to deploy enough people or computer code to anticipate and regulate the misbehavior of millions." (p. 204)</div>
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The broader value of the book -- beyond the narrowness of its title and subtitle -- is that Vaidhynathan transcends his own characterization that "Facebook is itself the problem" with the larger problem of people and how they respond to technological innovation: "[N]ot for the first time, market and political forces have turned products of the Enlightenment against enlightenment. … When we make a cult of technology and welcome its immediate rewards and conveniences into our lives without consideration of the long-term costs, we make fools of ourselves." (pp. 202-3)</div>
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As to what should be done, the author argues both for the application of more accountability and transparency to the lesser problem of Facebook, e.g. by extending Federal Election Commission oversight of political advertising to web-based platforms (presently not the case). As to the larger problem of the human response to technological innovation, at one level he says resistance is futile -- he himself is not leaving Facebook, and it would be a mere "blip" for readers of his book to do so -- but on the other he counsels that we "reinvest and strengthen institutions that generate deep, meaningful knowledge," (p. 215) e.g. universities, museums, libraries, science, responsible journalism. He also says that we must get political. The libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley has produced at the corporate level "the hubris of self-righteousness" that threatens the very notion of democratic self-government. "Only the threat and force of stern state regulation can push companies to straighten up," concludes Vaidhynathan. "That's both how it is and how it should be." (p. 219)</div>
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So uh who won the boxing match? Neymar or Ronaldo? Wait, wait, don't tell me, it no longer matters, cuz it looks like Scaramucci and Omarosa are gonna tangle, but mostly I can't wait til five years from now when they will be gone. Trump will be gone, the US will have a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, a well-regulated militia armed with flintlocks, Facebook and Google will be public utilities, and the EU will move its capital from Brussels to London. Also, people will have actually read this book, gone beyond its publisher's marketing crapshoot of a subtitle, and brought policy back into fashion. Because yes we can … think.</div>
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And I will have written a book called <i>9.75 Teaspoons and the Truth: Drink the Kool-Aid. </i>No, no, no. Listen to my inner Seth Godin; pack it with virality; then go all virile and kick him to the curb: <i>Think the Kool-Aid</i>.</div>
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-45312228969793299392019-07-09T23:29:00.000-04:002019-07-10T14:57:03.222-04:00An Appalachial Estate of Mind<div class="p1">
There are two Appalachias, which I'll call "Appalachia I" and "Appalachia II." They're pronounced differently because they refer to different things. Kind of like the different things referred to in "No ofFENSE, but recently the Vol OFFense has been more dog than hunt." So, even if it causes a row, allow me to put my ducks in a row and present my defense (however you pronounce it) of the idea that Appalachia means two different things depending on how it is pronounced.</div>
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First off, these aren't the Appalachia One (rich) and Appalachia Two (poor) that Cumberland crusader Harry Caudill wrote about. As will be shown, these Appalachias require Roman numerals.</div>
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As to pronunciation: the usual explanation for two of them in opposition is, essentially, a pissing contest across the Mason-Dixon line. One is Southern, the other is everywhere else. Each is intolerant of and excludes the other. One is right; the other is wrong. <i>When in fact there's every reason to accept both pronunciations as referring to different conceptual entities.</i></div>
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By way of easing into the subject, let me relate an experience from my Knoxville days (back when the Vol OFFense showed enough inspiration to go 10-2). I went into a record store and scanned the back of an album: "Here is Bach as he heard it in his head" -- or something to that effect -- proclaimed the liner notes to a switched-on Moogish compilation of Bach fugues. A fan of the cantatas, I thought, "Ah, to hear Bach's music as it sounded inside his head, not timbred of his time, but timbred by his timeless imagination.</div>
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I was totally sucked in. By the stupid, self-satisfied, imperial presentism of a passing fad. I knew as soon as I dropped the needle that I'd been had. Some clever marketer had defrauded me just as sure as a card sharp on the street. What I heard was Bach -- Bach as I'd always heard it, Bach as he had always been, Bach as would always shine through whatever glitzy timbral rocketman bullshit anybody might slather it with.</div>
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It's this sort of thing -- though at a deeper, decidedly un-stupid level -- that bothers me about the current age of studies of Appalachia, all of them (seemingly, judging from their citations) conceptual shoots from one seminal big bang: <i>Appalachia on Our Minds</i>, by Henry Shapiro, published in 1976 -- a coon's age ago in academic time, not far off from when a half-timbred Bach was flatmate to a Vol OFFense that put up enough points to win lots of games.</div>
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Shapiro's "our minds" is a temporal community that stretches from the last quarter of the 19th century until, presumably, the publication of his book and -- through the thinking of all the scholars who continued to advance his idea -- up into the present. His title is an obvious play on the popular song "Georgia on My Mind." Less obvious is the fact that both place names -- Georgia and Appalachia -- are formed with the Latin honorific suffix -ia.</div>
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The -ia honorific is ubiquitous when you start seeing it, even only in America: Georgia, the realm of King George; Virginia, the realm of the Virgin Queen; Pennsylvania, the wooded realm of William Penn. Even the capital city sports one: Columbia, the gym of the ocean.</div>
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But Appalachia? What is the background of this honorific? The "duh" answer -- that it is an erosion from "Appalachian" -- is false. While it is true that, historically, the adjective appeared first and refers to the Apalaches, a Florida-coast indigenous tribe, its derivation from French/Spanish cognates and its various, non-standard endings (e.g. -en and -ean) clearly demonstrate that "Appalachian" evolved as a neutral attributive, not as an honorific.</div>
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On the other hand, "Appalachia" was born as an honorific. It is a coinage whose birth is clearly documented. In 1838 Washington Irving had an idea. Not satisfied with the generic sense of "America" in the "United States of America" (it could include Peru for all anyone knew), he proposed to replace it with a different A-word, something that could represent the grandeur of the nation with the example of a physical reality, namely, the eastern chain of mountains stretching from Canada well into the South. He had two suggestions: "Alleghania" and "Appalachia." For unstated reasons Irving preferred "Alleghania." </div>
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In 1846, however, in an unsigned paragraph in <i>Graham's Magazine</i>, a self-professed admirer of Irving's, while approving the idea of a substitute for "America," offered reasons why "Appalachia" was in fact the better choice. Among the reasons, "by far the most truly important consideration of all" had to do with the "music of 'Appalachia' itself." The problem with "Alleghania" is that it was too "guttural." But "Appalachia"? In the mind of this writer, "nothing could be more sonorous, more liquid, or of fuller volume, while its length is just sufficient for dignity."</div>
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Here, then, was a word that from its very creation bespoke the "lay" of the land, not anything so curt and rude as throwing an apple atcha. And who was this anonymous writer in <i>Graham's </i>refusing to gag on Alleghania and extolling the sonorous liquidity of AppaLLLAYYYchia? None other than Edgar Allan Poe.</div>
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Irving's coinage paired with Poe's pronunciation seems to be unknown in the contemporary scholarship of Appalachia. Neither fact appears in Shapiro. In his effort to establish an "Appalachian otherness" as the meaning of "Appalachia," he buries a truncated history of the word in the academic's version of a balladeer's shallow grave -- in footnote #3 of chapter 3. And well might he, because the honorific Appalachia is not the one that he inserts parasitically into our minds. His "our" Appalachia is the cultural, "other" Appalachia that Shapiro's scholarship labors to establish, in but not of the United States. It is the "problem" Appalachia of mountaineer isolates: unshaven, unchurched, unschooled. Not us, for sure.</div>
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Alas, poor Appalachia, we knew him: its skull is Irving's coinage. But the corpse in Shapiro's shallow grave lacks it. In its place, topping a kind of etymological Frankenstein's monster, is an idea belonging to Berea College president William Goodell Frost, who Shapiro says "seems to have been the first to suggest that the southern mountains composed a region in the modern sense of a territory defined by its characteristics and its civilization as well as by its location."</div>
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The Modern Sense! Bach as he heard it in his head! Behold Appalachia! But wait! Look back in the grave! "Although <i>Appalachia</i> was the title of the journal published by the Appalachian Mountain Club of Boston, an 'outing' organization, from 1876, …" Holy baroque organ harvesting! "Although"!? Here is the heart of Shapiro's Frankenstein. In order to animate an anachronistic, modern sense of the word, he kills off a different sense altogether that just happens to have been contemporaneous with the time period of his study. </div>
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Because there was in fact an Appalachia on the minds of the 19th century educated class about which Shapiro writes. It was in direct line of descendence -- and transcendence -- from Irving's and Poe's: the mountain realm stretching from Maine to Georgia. By that time the Appalachia that was on their minds was more than symbolic. It was no less than the realized nirvana of the lapsed-Congregational, secular, scientific heirs of Transcendentalism. On the rocky slopes of Mt. Katahdin, Appalachia was where Henry David Thoreau had felt the cold breath of absolute, man-disdaining Nature and screamed his ecstasy: "CONTACT!"</div>
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And the Appalachian Mountain Club's journal, <i>Appalachia</i>, published from 1876? It is still being published today. Shapiro calls AMC an "outing" organization. Buried in a footnote, those quote marks work, rhetorically, like air quotes. They serve not only to discount the importance of the AMC but to render it irrelevant to Shapiro's thesis.</div>
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This is like being frozen out of the Northwest Passage. Here, in fact, is the way to understanding the sense of "Appalachia" contemporaneous with the historical period that concerns Shapiro. Admittedly, this is not "our" sense of the word. But why should "our" sense be shipped by time-travel UPS into the minds of people who had a different understanding? More importantly, to follow Shapiro's lead is to lose utterly the lost sense of the word, which can inform our current understanding in profound ways.</div>
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In naming its journal, the AMC fell into the inspirational embrace of "Appalachia," applying Poe's music to evoke the patriotic grandeur of peaks in its New English heartland, many of them named for nation-builders: Washington, Adams, Madison. The AMC belongs in the same class as the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society. Moreover, it was formed before either of them. It had the quasi-religious mission both to preserve and glorify the mountains -- as well as to make them more accessible, for reasons some of which had to do with national physical and mental health. It influenced the passage of legislation creating the national forest system; it spawned regional affiliates, including one way down in Asheville, NC; and it was one of the organizations responsible not only for the creation of the Appalachian Trail but also for the assurance of its future as a National Scenic Trail. To leave out this aspect of Appalachia is to fail to see the continuous intellectual chain that manifests the philosophy of Transcendentalism with the physical reality of the Appalachian Trail.</div>
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Similarly, Shapiro footnote 3/3 damns with faint praise writer Horace Kephart, the unexcelled interpreter of mountain life in the early 20th century Smoky Mountains. He is credited with causing "Appalachia" to catch on in the 1920s as a term for the "southern mountain region," but once again the detail that the book first appeared in <i>Outing Magazine </i>-- while factual -- consigns Kephart to the category of writer who, were he alive today, would be producing copy for <i>Outdoor Life</i> or <i>Garden & Gun.</i></div>
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While this accurately captures an important aspect of Kephart's appeal, it slights the full nature of his influence, particularly as regards the word "Appalachia." Kephart was a star librarian (if there can be such a thing) before he left his job and family in St. Louis in 1903 and sequestered himself in the Smokies. He also took with him his lifelong experience as a camper and a hunter -- yes, an outdoorsman. But there can be little doubt that what drew him to the mountains was a Thoreau-like belief that the mountains were themselves the essence of nature; they were the "Back of Beyond" whose mercilessness would test his ability to belong there. There can also be little doubt that this former star-librarian-and-expert-outdoorsman knew of the AMC journal <i>Appalachia</i>. By incorporating the word into his own nomenclature, Kephart applied to the Southern mountains -- his touchstone -- the same honorific sense that the AMC had inherited from Irving and Poe. It is a glorious place, this Appalachia, Kephart says. And let us be clear about one thing: it is not the towns or the valleys. It is the mountains. It is only the mountains.</div>
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Once there, of course, he immediately discovered and engaged the uniqueness of his mountain neighbors. Eventually, they became the focus of his writing, but it was the mountain-shaped lives alone that interested Kephart; townies and valley dwellers need not apply. Also, as in the case of the AMC, Kephart became an advocate for the preservation of unspoiled mountain refuges apart from any settled humanity. He was instrumental in the creation of the Great Smokies National Park and helped lay out the path of the Appalachian Trail there and in Georgia, because he believed in the intrinsic value of the mountains as a source of human well-being.</div>
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Kephart certainly didn't refer to the mountains as "Appalachia" because the mountaineers did. He records that "the Carolina mountaineers" still referred to their homeland as "the Alleghanies" (a nice irony, remembering Irving's preference). In the mountain south, when the word was used, as Appalachian historian Ron Eller writes, it had a very, very specific connotation: "The word 'Appalachia' itself was seldom used by mountain residents, <i>except in reference to the town of that name in southwest Virginia,"</i> [italics mine] a rail junction coal-mining boom town formed in the 1890s.</div>
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The observation as to the historical non-use of the word or its derivatives by the region's inhabitants as a term for the region -- mountain or human -- is confirmed over and over again. Read the interviews with such now-classic culture warriors as James Still and Harriette Arnow Simpson in <i>Interviewing Appalachia</i>, and they confirm what Appalachian poetry pioneer Jim Wayne Miller also says therein: when he studied literature at Berea in the early 1950s "there was no such thing as Appalachian studies at that time." And if ever there was an Ur-Appalachian college, it was Berea. Its President Frost (he of the Shapiro footnote) spoke all over the country -- even in Boston, the cradle of Appalachia I, where in 1898 his audience was the AMC -- to raise money to educate the mountain youth of the area he called Appalachia. The Berea president knew this word would strike his listeners with a grand, inspiring, unifying impression of a mountainous region. But back in Berea, among his students, there was no such organizing, cultural principle. </div>
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Here, then, is the ultimate comeuppance to novelist Sharyn McCrumb's take-no-prisoners defense of the "Apple-atcha" pronunciation and her snide dismissal of any alternative. Her account of some hoary folkish usage of "Appalachia" is a fiction (which is, after all, her craft) employed for purely polemical reasons. There was no such thing -- other than the Virginia town -- except among furriners.</div>
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In Kephart we do see the cleft in Appalachia I that will completely break off in Appalachia II. Even if it was the mountains that drew him into the Smokies, he fell under the spell of his mountain neighbors from the get-go; and even if his first book was about how to live in the woods, his second book was entirely given over to the lives of his mountain neighbors. It wasn't man against mountains so much as man among mountaineers.</div>
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But by the 1950s -- when that second book got into the hands of Jim Wayne Miller, a young man in North Carolina attuned, like Poe, to the music of words (he became the poet laureate of Kentucky) and reared in a family with middle class on one side and hillbilly (his word) on the other -- an idea of Appalachia began to sprout in the minds of some of its natives. Miller is explicit as to Kephart's influence: "The first book I read which influenced me on the subject of Appalachia was, without a doubt, Horace Kephart's <i>Our Southern Highlanders</i>. It really set me off. … It was probably the most important single factor that put me in touch with my regional identity." Miller had found a life-forging identity. At high school's end, trying to decide what to do next -- business college in Asheville? Army, navy? Detroit? -- Miller chose Berea: "By that time, I had already read Horace Kephart. I figured I was a southern highlander, and here was a school … that existed for southern highlanders."</div>
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But by that time as well had long disappeared the highlanders' agrarian base, the subsistent forest "commons" that had flourished in the southern mountains between the time of the Indian Removal and the invasion of large-scale resource commodification, mostly timber and coal. Steven Stoll's 2017 <i>Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia</i> vividly describes this process, calling it no less an "enclosure" than the well-known example of commons clearances in the British Isles. The real irony for the word "Appalachia" is that, by the time its natives began to use it -- with its southern pronunciation -- to refer to their homeland, the economic culture whose characteristics had attracted the attention of those furriners described by Shapiro had been destroyed.</div>
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And many of those furriners had seen it coming. Miller would have read the words that end Kephart's <i>Our Southern Highlanders</i>: "The great need of our mountaineers to-day is trained leaders of their own. The future of Appalachia lies mostly in the hands of those resolute native boys and girls who win the education fitting them for such leadership. Here is where the nation at large is summoned by a solemn duty. And it should act quickly, because commercialism exploits and debauches quickly. … It is an economic problem, fundamentally, that the mountaineer has to face."</div>
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So by the time the native boys and girls are educated and self-aware as to the existence of something they call Appalachia, the exploitation and debauchery of commercialism have run rampant two and three regimes over, and now beyond that to the point that whatever Appalachia has become, actual mountains are irrelevant. "Bluegrass," for example, is often described as the music of the southern mountains -- it is indeed popular there -- but anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Kentucky geography must know that the name of the music comes from the grand region of Kentucky distinguished as entirely distinct from the mountains. Radio music marketing had the further flattening effect of enabling "hillbilly" to apply as much to the Indiana lowlands as the Cumberland hollers. The hills are alive with the sounds of Nashville -- which isn't mountains by a ways. Keep going along that line awhile and next thing you know you wind up with an Ohioan-gone-to-California expat like J. D. Vance claiming to speak for hillbillies.</div>
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With the mountain economic regime a thing of the past, never to return, this new idea of Appalachia became "history and culture" in the mind and words of Miller, a German professor by day job (make that <i>Geschichte und Kultur </i>high and lonely). "Appalachia" resonated because it thumped like a washtub bass the class division found in his own hearth and home. Even in his "hamlet" of Leicester, there were "the better people" with their "mindset" like those who lived in towns -- his father's family, one of whom had been mayor of Asheville -- and, on the other side, the "hillbilly class" and their "country" ways like those of his mother's family -- particularly the maternal grandfather, a tenant farmer and fox hunter -- who attracted the "feelings and affections" of his grandson. In fights at school no less than his literary career, Miller's "stand" was always with his "friends from the country." Now is the time to throw that apple atcha.</div>
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Cultural Appalachia hollowed out mountain Appalachia into a repertoire of cultural characteristics exhibited like wooden bowls on sale to tourists. The mountains retreated into a backdrop, like a painted sheet for the annual Big Stone Gap community theater production of <i>Trail of the Lonesome Pine</i>. Whatever people did "down there" -- hauling moonshine in a coal truck to goose up a feud -- mountains had less primacy than a good set of tires. This is quite a change from Kephart. Miller's "regional consciousness" was a town-country divide transportable to any other modernized region in the world, like, say, Detroit, where it was in fact transported. Cultural manifestations lost their essential link with a well-defined topography. It wasn't long after this "<i>Erwachen nach Appalachia</i>" that the cultural manifestations of poverty -- promulgated by newly televised mass media -- became the essential marker calling forth the federal Appalachian Regional Commission, which with less than poetic justice entitled its journal <i>Appalachia</i>. </div>
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And along came Shapiro (hey, there's a song in there) with his conceptual bulldozer, burying Appalachia I into a nonentity. But once you realize that there is not one but two mythical Appalachias -- one alive, vibrant, and symbolic of the highest the earth has to give; the other downtrodden, abused, and symbolic of utter dereliction -- and that Shapiro downplayed the former to the point of extinction, you can't read <i>any</i> of the subsequent scholarship about Appalachia without the noise of the synthetic, anachronistic fallacy ruining the mix.</div>
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Circa 2019, those who purport to explain Appalachia -- like Elizabeth Catte in <i>What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia</i> -- cannot even say what it is. They expressly relegate geography to the "unimportant" file. The remote, elevated wildness standing in for the power of nature has been replaced by a hodgepodge catch-all of internal combustion, Southern-ish cultural you-name-it. The bloat is due in large part to the Federal government's county-based system of defining Appalachia for the purposes of fighting poverty. Not surprisingly, perhaps, its "development" strategy favors those locations that are most, er, developable, which -- surprise! -- tend to be less than mountainous. Unsubtle bureaucratic cartography has had the staggering intellectual ripple effect of rendering Appalachia indistinct and undistinguishable. We are now at such a pass that even the ultimate townie Thomas Wolfe is considered to represent Appalachia, simply because the home he couldn't go back to is in a county considered, according to the government's criteria for poverty, part of Appalachia. This is bunkum (literally: look it up). </div>
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As a cultural construct, Appalachia II has had no choice but to follow along in the subjugation of the mountains by the forces of extraction and development. In its watershed TVA puts in a series of dams, and a lake culture all but replaces river and creek culture. Federal and state highways dilate the capillaries of the ox-drawn sledge into arteries for the almighty automobile. Radio, TV, and the Internet deliver a turbocharged stream of furriner. Beneath the quaint syndrome sold to tourists in Dollywood -- the cosplay feudin' and moonshinin' and log flumin' -- Appalachia has come into its commercial own as the branding iron of choice for any small business or community organization or university department hanging out a shingle in the upper South. What passes for tradition these days is ubiquitously symbolized by the Confederate battle flag, a complete inversion from the days of Appalachia I, when the mountaineers were lauded for their loyalty to the cause of the Union. Kilted bagpipe bands proclaim the Scots-Irish heritage of a region that <i>never</i> knew a bagpipe until recently. Call it "Appalachia" and fill it with <i>anything</i>. It's not so much Dystopia as Entropia.</div>
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This is the most American kind of decadence there is, the decadence that comes with following the money, the closest thing to an ideology that America has. In practice it is of course the opposite of anything as intellectual as ideology, because no set of beliefs can hold up to the moral and ethical perversions that come with mindlessly privileging profits over people. Example after example comes easily to hand from American history, from slavery to the election of Donald Trump as US President.</div>
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There's no reason to think that the southern Appalachians could have been spared. As mentioned above, the trampling of the southern mountains by commercialism was not unforeseen by those who regarded the mountains with a quasi-religious reverence, but what, after all, could they do against a juggernaut? In the wake, the prophets of Appalachia II rage impotently against the destruction visited by human upon human for something as empty and irreligious as wealth. But there is little to be done where exploitation is in fact the solution, because the formula is as baked into the American way as apple-atchas are into pie.</div>
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Meanwhile, Appalachia I still exists in the ridge-running preserves carved out by the AMC and such allies as the Appalachian Conservancy, in partnership with the US government, whose crumbs (see formula above) can only be bestowed so as not to threaten potential economic exploitation with something as trivial as scenery. But the champions of Appalachia I -- for all that they deserve pride in the accomplishments of long, steady effort for the public good -- seem to have abandoned any pretensions to the name, even if the AMC still uses it as the title of its journal.</div>
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For example, one need only look at the introduction to <i>The Appalachian Trail Reader</i>, an excellent compilation of everything from Thoreau's CONTACT on northern terminus Mt. Katahdin to ephemeral trail register comments on southern terminus Springer Mtn. (one of which asks, "Where's the water?" Reader, I've been there; oh, how I've been there). Editor David Emblidge, whom the dust jacket lists as a board member of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, writes, "It's only a quirk of place-naming that one part of the Appalachian chain -- the extreme southern and south-central end -- came to be called 'Appalachia.' And it's only an ironic, sad fact that this beautiful area with its stalwart people came to be a poor and undeveloped (though much exploited) socioeconomic territory. For our purposes in this book, we'll acknowledge the term 'Appalachia' as belonging to specific places and people, and we won't expropriate it for use elsewhere."</div>
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Poor guy. You can almost hear the resignation in this sighing passage, with its "quirk of place-naming" and the final, sad surrender of "we won't expropriate," despite the fact that the place where he lives -- Yankee Massachusetts -- is where the word first went to work. Better to stay away from Sharyn McCrumb and her apple launcher.</div>
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And poor Appalachia II. Its alienation is complete and comes -- <i>contra</i> Shapiro -- from being as fully, deeply, and exquisitely American as Illinois or Minnesota, just with fewer Democrats. Whence cometh its help? Can it look to the hills of Appalachia I? Can the preservation of a sliver of America's mountain patrimony for the public good be regarded as not only a vision but a seed for its future?</div>
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Remember that Appalachia I began as a symbolic link to a founding idealism that saw in the mountains a source of inspiration and pride. Consider that its yeomanry represented -- to those who believed in the mountains -- an independent stock that could be sustained only if it were allowed to employ the mountains and their resources in some kind of sustainable, ecological balance (which, of course, did not happen). But also consider the continuing thread -- from Kephart, who sounded the alarm; through Benton McKaye, whose visionary 1921 "Appalachian Project" succeeded in generating the Appalachian Trail, but also called for a much broader system of "camps" for community, food, and shelter; through Caudill in the 1960's, who called for a TVA-style "mountain authority;" through historian Eller, who questioned whether modern development must always be the answer; up to Stoll, who includes in <i>Ramp Hollow </i>a manifesto for an agrarian commons -- that looks for a solution in schemes that place first, foremost, and always the preservation of mountains and mountain-based living, independent of any capitalist, extractive, market-based factors unless they are kept within the bounds of sustainability. Thus might the two Appalachias become one.</div>
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I'm not much of an old book collector, but somehow or other I own an 1885 edition of <i>The Land of the Sky, or, Adventures in Mountain By-Ways</i>, by Christian Reid, the pen name of Frances Christine Fisher Tiernan, author of more than 50 novels who was born and died in Salisbury, NC. Originally published in 1876, the book's popularity was such that its title endures as the nickname for the mountain region of western North Carolina centered on the resort city of Asheville. The story is a straightforward, destination-by-destination travelogue -- with an itinerary that includes such enduring must-sees as Hot Springs, Mt. Mitchell, and Bridal Veil Falls -- overlain with the prattle of Victorian courtship. But the romance is quite incidental to the trekking, which is carried out in full dress regalia whether in a coach (this is before the railroad had made it so far as Asheville), on horseback, or on foot. As such it is a very accurate description of how a family of means would have taken an extended mountain vacation at the time. The intrepid voyagers swoon over sunset after sunset and mountain vista after mountain vista; an entire thesaurus of superlatives is emptied into the descriptions of scenery.</div>
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What makes it most interesting in connection with this discussion is the matter-of-fact way in which mountaineers are treated. There is little of the human local color -- either descriptive or linguistic -- central to the novels of such interest to Henry Shapiro. The mountaineers are pretty much just <i>there</i>, and largely they are there to provide lodging and food free for the asking, with no notification, to these strangers traveling through the mountains when for whatever reason they find themselves to far from hostelry or otherwise stranded by flooded fords. Air BnB has nothing on this system. (By the way, this hospitality confirms what is largely reported in the literature about the mountains up through Kephart.) The only downside -- for our travelers of means -- seems to have been the universality of the frying pan liberally supplied with lard.</div>
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Here, then, are no Shapirovian strange people -- unless hospitality makes them so. They are part of a mountain landscape that provides the reason for the travels. To some extent they make the traveling possible. The word Tiernan most commonly uses as the name for the area where the traveling occurs is Arcadia, the literary geographic honorific designating any rural, pastoral idyll. Coincidentally -- and importantly -- this word is also one frequently employed by Steven Stoll in <i>Ramp Hollow</i>. It is as if it provides a temporal bridge between the two books: one of them a description of travel in the heyday of an agrarian mountain commons (or before its breakdown), and the other an effort at least in part to prescribe the means by which it might be restored. We moderns think of Arcadia as necessarily mythological, and yet the globe is full of actual examples that are both well-inhabited and well-visited.</div>
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Might this not be at least a vision for a "back to the future" for an Appalachia re-united with the source of its inspiration? What kinds of answers might arise from a pursuit of restorative and sustainable solutions -- for people and for the mountains -- that held the natural beauty and fecundity of mountain Appalachia to be essential and elemental to the effort? </div>
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As for those being qualities valued only by hikers and other furriners, it isn't so. We know from Kephart and others that the mountaineers of the agrarian commons loved the water and the open air where they lived, and that they felt stifled and poisoned in cities. We can let the testimony of a West Virginia man, Julian Martin, trying to save his homeland from strip mining, as reported by Stoll in <i>Ramp Hollow</i>, be conclusive:</div>
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"All my life I've watched the destruction of my native state. When I was a little boy 40 years ago, I used to walk up Bull Creek over on Coal River. Bull Creek's not there anymore. It's gone. My Uncle Ken used to work timber up in the head of that hollow with a mule, and he did the least amount of destruction you possibly could do. That place was beautiful. It's not there anymore. It's just simply gone. It's been destroyed by a strip mine … The first time I saw a strip mine it absolutely stunned me into silence. I was sad and I was sick. I couldn't believe what people could do with a bulldozer to land that used to be beautiful.</div>
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"Is it wrong to love beauty; is it wrong to love nature? Is it wrong to say that we have only one earth and it will never be reclaimed -- you can't reclaim a destroyed mountain -- you can put something back there but you can't put that topsoil back on -- just try it. You never, never can walk through that little glade where the ferns are growing. …</div>
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"And if you think strip mining is going to bring jobs, look where they've got strip mining in West Virginia and look where they've got the most unemployment. Mingo County. McDowell County. You go to the counties where they have strip mining -- that's where they have the worst of everything. They've got the worst roads; they've got the worst schools; they've got the highest unemployment rate. Everything is wrong with those counties. Is that what you want this beautiful place to become? My daddy was a coal miner, and I understand being out of work, okay? I've been down that road myself. And I know you've got to provide for your family. But I'm saying they're only giving us two options. They're saying, 'Either starve -- or destroy West Virginia.' And surely to God there must be another option."</div>
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Appalachia and Appalachia. Pronounce it both ways so it carries sense. The sociopolitical region in the South that's made molehills out of mountains gets to throw the apple atcha; the mountain empire gets the sonorous pronunciation that so appealed to Poe. No ofFENSE, Sharyn McCrumb. And go Vols. May you have enough OFFense to at least beat Vandy.<br />
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-53518101084733057152019-05-18T10:07:00.001-04:002019-05-18T10:07:39.045-04:00Hillbilly allergy: Elizabeth Catte's itchy response to J. D. Vance<div class="p1">
So (as the first word of every narrative must be these days) let's say you're in a bookstore and you notice a book. Across the top the title yells in black caps WHAT YOU ARE GETTING WRONG ABOUT APPALACHIA, and so your first thought is, "Who, me?" Elizabeth Catte's book is meant to serve as a counterpoint to J. D. Vance's popular <i>Appalachian Elegy</i>. But there's no subtitle to that effect, and the introduction clearly indicates that, yes, you -- whoever you are -- are getting stuff wrong about Appalachia.</div>
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The comforting news for all of us wrong'uns is that we're wrong about something that apparently has no real substance. Commenting on whether or not Vance should be considered "authentically Appalachian because he migrated outside the region," Catte says, "I don't give a damn about geography." On the other hand, she gives such a damn about culture that she refuses to "ascribe" one to those who "self-identify as Appalachian." This really is like saying that Appalachia doesn't exist. I wish Catte would make that argument -- it very much needs to be made -- but she doesn't. </div>
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The <i>actual</i> meaning of Appalachia -- whatever it is and if indeed there is one -- is very much beside the point in this book. Catte does pose the question, "What is Appalachia?" at the outset, but she-who-doesn't-give-a-damn-about-geography gives a perfunctory geographical definition based on the Appalachian Mountains and then -- because it has no weight -- immediately shoves it aside in favor of a definition imposed by the "top-down process, in which individuals with power or capital tell us who we are or what we are." This definition of Appalachia -- a sort of geographical zombie arising from a pauper's grave -- is the Federal government framework devised to administer the War on Poverty. Thus, says Catte, "the region came to be defined by poverty, and subsequently poverty came to be defined by the region."</div>
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This sounds like a 3-card monte game of agency in which you-who-are-wrong-about-Appalachia are the mark, trying to follow Catte's fluid misdirection: "I'm hesitant to tell you <i>who</i> Appalachia is, but I can tell you who keeps it alive: young individuals who work in racially diverse fields, including education, hospitality, and healthcare." Because in Appalachia there are no retirees delivering Meals on Wheels.</div>
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Catte also favors tortuous argumentation pursuing tendrils of supposed influence, e.g. into a discussion Vance's association with IQ controversialist Charles Murray and their shared interest in Scots-Irish culture she drags an account of forced re-settlement, institutionalization, and sterilization at the time of the creation of the Shenandoah National Park, a story that features New Deal-era photographers, sociologists, politicians, and farmers. Tenuous conspiracy-theory connections demonstrate to her satisfaction a "strange bond between up-and-comers on the Appalachia circuit and salivating eugenicists" (maybe the audiobook will have creepy background music) and justify her condemnation: "I don't dislike Vance because he talks about 'hillbilly culture.' I dislike him because I think about children stolen from their parents."</div>
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Catte is right to take on Vance's superficial ethnic determinism and teases out his more recent influences: Colin Woodard's <i>American Nations</i> ("Greater Appalachia") and Jim Webb's <i>Born Fighting</i>, even though her quote from the former invokes a more diluted ancestral pool than just Scots-Irish. And when she hacks at the root of the myth, the best she can do is allude to the "sharp corrective" of historian Wilma Dunaway and archeologist Audrey Horning to the effect that "eighteenth-century Appalachia was a fusion of a variety of European ethnic groups and other groups that reflected African and indigenous descent." Sharp? That's like shaving with a butter knife. It would've been sharper to refer readers to Harry Caudill's <i>Darkness at Dawn</i>, in which he pooh-poohs the idea of Scots-Irish (meaning specifically Ulster Scots) influence in the Kentucky mountains by noting the relative paucity of the real markers of Scots-Irishness: not "feudin' and fightin'," as Vance's good ol' boys would have it, but enduring Scots Reformed churches and schools -- "enduring" meaning that once established on the frontier, they remained and flourished because not to have those churches and schools meant abandoning your Scots-Irishness.</div>
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Alas, Catte can't use Caudill because he was another one of those up-and-comers on the Appalachian circuit who bonded with salivating eugenicists. If you don't know who Caudill was, here is historian (and Catte-approved) Ronald D. Eller's take on his influence: "Probably the most widely read book ever written about Appalachia [<i>Night Comes to the Cumberlands</i>], Caudill's passionate account of the human and environmental devastation wreaked by the coal industry on his native eastern Kentucky was a cry from the exploited heartland for government assistance to a desperate people." Catte's rendering has a twist: "Caudill became the spokesperson for Appalachia and a translator of white mountain poverty to the nation."</div>
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Notice that word "white." Catte very much wants her readers to understand that Appalachia is more racially diverse than the white sheet Vance covers it with. This is an excellent goal: Appalachia is part of the South and as such was shaped by African-Americans even when it seems not to have been (see also "banjo" and "fiddle" and "buck dancing"). But Catte won't achieve that goal by covering Caudill with that sheet, as she clearly does: "Both Caudill and Vance set themselves to the task of drawing the nation's attention away from social unrest and racial inequality at a particular moment in time and refocusing it instead on the conditions of white poverty." Vance might have set himself to that task, but it is plainly evident that Caudill did not. Caudill's <i>Night</i> is subtitled "a biography of a depressed area," and that biography includes African-Americans (whom he calls "Negroes") as slaves, railroad workers, and miners. No, he doesn't separate them out for special treatment, but he does include them in an even-handed, matter-of-fact way. Might this not be considered an accomplishment, given the Civil Rights-era year of publication (1963)?</div>
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Catte's take on the racial component of Caudill's influence might be unfair, but all's fair in love and war, and Catte is engaged in a polemic against Caudill ("polemic" comes from the Greek word for "war," as no doubt the classicist Catte knows) apparently because -- in Catte's telling -- 11 years after the publication of <i>Night</i>, frustrated with the lack of progress, Caudill came to consider his region's poverty to be "genetic in origin" and "largely irreducible," which viewpoint he shared in a "fan letter" to eugenicist William Shockley. The two went on to meet once and continued to correspond, discussing the possibility of voluntary sterilization and intelligence testing, with Caudill's advice tending to be how to, in his words, "avoid some critical and troublesome newspaper publicity."</div>
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Catte includes Caudill's widow's opinion that publication of this part of his correspondence in 2013 was an effort to "besmirch" his reputation. Whether or not that is the case, this information is hardly shocking to anyone who's read Caudill. It was abundantly clear in <i>Night </i>that Caudill's belief in "brain drain" dilution of a "seed stock" rested at least on a dysgenic notion, even if it outlined no eugenic solution. </div>
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So, what should this mean for Caudill's influence? Catte clearly wants him read out of the Appalachian canon and bemoans the "fatigue" that comes from living at a time when Amazon links Caudill with Vance in a two-fisted vise of recommendation, which to Catte means that the two most influential books about Appalachia were "used by their authors to win the esteem of white supremacists and eugenicists."</div>
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Her warrior rage blinds her to the missed opportunity that would come from a side-by-side consideration of the two. And why should Americans not exercise the ability to choose the lesser of two evils? They are politically condemned to it anyway. The books provide a dramatic contrast: they are vastly different, not only in structure and in content, but more importantly in the nature of the solutions proposed for the region. Vance -- from the narrow confines of a memoir -- might counsel a simplistic Horatio Algerism, but the lesson of his personal experience is "get out." Caudill -- from the expansiveness of his deep and broad study -- might be absolutely brutal on everyone in eastern Kentucky, not just the poor, for permitting the wastage of their mountainous Eden, but what he proposes in essence could easily be updated into a Green New Deal for Appalachia. In other words he says, "Stay and make it right." Which side are you on?</div>
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Catte's real, overarching villain -- whose freshest, most recent stooge happens to be Vance -- is a "monolithic" narrative of Appalachian "otherness" controlled by power that enriches some at the expense of others: "[C]redibility falls easily to those given the privilege of defining who or what Appalachian [<i>sic</i>] is. It also shows the rewards that fall to individuals, universally men and exclusively white, regardless of the company they keep. It is the power to grant yourself permission for continued exploitation of vulnerable subjects. It is the power to have your work selected as emblematic of a cultural moment by individuals and organizations that didn't care one iota about Appalachia until their gaze could fill the region with pathologies."</div>
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Catte appropriates the idea of Appalachia as "other" from America from scholar Henry Shapiro (<i>Appalachia on Our Mind</i>), but by the time it emerges from her Procrustean bed, Shapiro's concept is both stretched and squeezed. What Shapiro says about local color writers and home missionaries of the 1880s and 1890s Catte applies to "outside entrepreneurs" and "industrialists" of the early twentieth century. Shapiro's concept of otherness embraces <i>all</i> conceptions of Appalachia between 1880 and 1920, even those of reformers who, sensitive to the interests of the mountaineers, wanted to work with them on their (the mountaineers') own terms seasoned with the lessons of the Danish folk school. One of the exemplars of that effort was the Highlander Folk School of upper east Tennessee, which is on Catte's short list of heroes. But to Catte there is only one purpose for otherness: exploitation, so that "Appalachians could be tamed and put to industrial purpose" in order to "be spared the bloodshed, vice, and moral degeneracy natural to their primitive existence."</div>
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That narrative certainly exists, but it was not the only one used by the exploiters. Catte seems to be unaware of an entirely different portrayal of mountaineers as possessing positive, desirable characteristics for developers. These portrayals were used by town boosters to attract industry to the region. It is remarkable how unchanging they were over the course of many years during the 20th century. Tom Lee, author of <i>The Tennessee-Virginia Tri-Cities: Urbanization in Appalachia, 1900 - 1950</i>, cites a 1985 promotion of Johnson City: "Over 200,000 conscientious workers uphold the dedicated 'pioneer' work ethic in our Right-to-Work State. … A fair day's pay for a hard day's work." This "rhetoric of promotion," Lee says, was largely unchanged from the beginning of the century when boosters boasted of the "unlimited supply of intelligent, white female workers." Of course, paternalistic, capitalistic exploitation of unorganized workers was still the purpose, but the labor force was depicted positively, not as morally degenerate primitives.</div>
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(It is odd that Catte should describe the narrators of the Appalachian "other" to be "universally men." From the beginning women have been among the most articulate and influential definers. Local colorist Mary Noailles Murfree was there at the creation; Emma Bell Miles was an early interpreter of the mountains for valley folk and other furriners; Ellen Churchill Semple's 1901 "anthropogeography" was one of the first true scholastic studies of the human aspects of Appalachian geography; and Olive Dame Campbell, besides being a folksong collector, took her late husband John C. Campbell's "mass of notes" and an outline to write the book that he could never bring himself to write.)</div>
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If there is a defective, monolithic narrative abroad these days about Appalachia, it is that Appalachia is all about coal. Catte seems happy to accept that monolith shaft, tipple, and flue. Granted she is reacting to the latest incarnation of Appalachia as coal-crazy "Trump Country," and she is most concerned to show how Appalachians have struggled against the economic, social, and geophysical depredations of coal extraction. The result, however, is that effectively Appalachia becomes eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. It's time to bring back the Georgian "expatriates" of the Appalachian Studies Conferences from the 1980s who adopted the refrain "Not in North Georgia" to remind their coal-leagues that Appalachia is neither monochrome nor monotone and is nothing if not complex. Catte gets the complexity, but the reactiveness of her approach allows the monolith of coal to dictate her narrative to the extent that it weakens her advocacy for an expansive understanding of the region. If we knew more about the breadth and variety of Appalachian geography, history, and culture, and understood that Appalachia has a future that transcends coal -- even in Kentucky and West Virginia -- maybe we'd have a better chance of not being wrong about it. Maybe we'd feel some hope and start getting things right about it. </div>
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But to do that, you have to give a damn about geography and its economic, political, and human consequences. Because if you're talking about Appalachia, that's pretty much all you got. If you try to erase it, as Catte seems to want to do, you got nothing. The irony is that she cares more than she lets on. After a Tennessee upbringing, it was during a brief hiatus in a Texas town as polluted by oil as Appalachia was by coal that she was somehow convinced to return to her Appalachian homeland, and so back she came, as she says, "to fight smarter" on behalf of everyone who was "not important enough not to be poisoned." How somehow was she convinced to return? It seems to have been at least in part the aesthetics of geography: Silas House's "language in the kudzu and it is all ours" or the "bright purple of ironweed" that is a "symbol of Appalachian women."</div>
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She now works with others "with the hope that we might call into being the end of what Rebecca Scott called 'the dismal banality of the dominion of coal.'" How to call into being that end? We have to multiply the possibilities, and they are endless, once you start looking at the land and, yes, the culture, and see the infinite ways it can nourish and inspire, and then build on those ways that create rather than destroy.</div>
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If that sounds like moonshine, so be it. It wouldn't be the first time for Appalachia.</div>
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-84663101429429271042019-01-21T10:54:00.000-05:002019-01-21T11:37:27.360-05:00Frederick Douglass and "The Bagpipe Lesson"<div class="p1" style="text-align: right;">
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I will come to <i>The Bagpipe Lesson</i> eventually, but will start of by examining a different instrument-inspired painting.<br />
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<span style="text-align: left;">It is one of those iconic works of art whose very familiarity contributes to under-appreciation: </span><i style="text-align: left;">The Banjo Lesson</i><span style="text-align: left;">, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, in which a young boy sits in an old man's lap and plays a banjo, which the old man supports up at the nut end while the boy frets and strums. Both the figures are of African descent, as was Tanner himself.</span><br />
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There are several reasons why I have tended to under-value the work. Probably the chief one was the faded, poor print that I used to see on a daily basis in a dispiriting location in a library, rather than a vivid original exhibited with positive optimality at a museum.</div>
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Also -- to me, anyway -- its subject matter and treatment wafted a hint of that cloying air that has spoiled Norman Rockwell for me. Perhaps it is unfair to Rockwell that his work has come to personify -- quite literally -- the happy-face superficiality of the commercial American soul, when in fact he was capable of capturing, incisively and glaringly, such challenging subjects as the racial millstone hung around the necks of American children. </div>
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Thanks to an <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/art-between-wars/american-art-wwii/a/tanner-banjo-lesson">informative appreciation by Farisa Khalid</a>, however, I can not only give <i>The Banjo Lesson</i> its due, but can also see that there is a more complex, almost ironic connection with Rockwell than the one I had always felt. Besides providing the nice archival service of showing Tanner's photographs of his original subjects, more importantly Khalid's article situates the work in two cultural contexts: an endlessly suggestive (because of the subsequent history of the banjo) Appalachian one as well as the more general one of blackface minstrelsy, by which it becomes clear that Tanner -- painting in the 1890's -- sought through the medium of high dignity to rescue his subject matter from Ol' Zip Coon.</div>
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This is not to demean the journeyman Rockwell, who increasingly chafed against the prevailing caste rules and to some extent broke loose of them later in life, so much as to provide a stark example of the conceptual prison of color racism into which America seems to be locked. Tanner himself said it well: residing in Paris, where he did not experience discrimination due to the color of his skin, he said, "In America, I'm Henry Tanner, Negro artist, but in France, I'm 'Monsieur Tanner, <i>l'artiste américaine</i>.'"</div>
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In today's America it has become politically incorrect, even in the Republican Party, to utter -- or appear to utter -- white supremacist notions, as Iowa's Steve King recently found out. Yet if we parse King's words as he wants us to, we uncover a notion that I bet the vast majority of Americans agree with: Western civilization is white.</div>
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I'm going to let that statement sit and stew for a moment. My hope is that the longer it sits, the more ridiculous it begins to seem. I do not begin to know what images and notions will come to mind with "Western civilization," but if we assume it to mean the ascent of certain aspirational and idealistic concepts, "white" is nowhere among them.</div>
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By coincidence I'm writing this on the eve of the celebration of the day given over to a different King -- Martin Luther King Day -- when it would be reasonable to expect Americans of visible African descent to look for some evidence that their fellows of visible non-African descent have at long last gathered them in the embrace of citizenship, social equality, and cultural affirmation. The last is perhaps not hard to find, but as is demonstrated by the history of jazz, r&b, rap -- not to mention the vast domain of professional sports -- the benefits of the cultural marketplace don't automatically trickle down or radiate out any better than the economic ones. Jackie Robinson desegregating professional baseball can happily coexist -- as a phenomenon -- with lynching and restrictive housing covenants.</div>
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I have long believed that the essential ingredient of understanding American culture -- politics included -- is the study of its long and torturous struggle to live up to the promise of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as personified, if you will, by the Statue of Liberty. That means coming to terms with Indian removal; with slavery and the dismal, continuing record of racial discrimination; and with gender-based discrimination; all of them noxious to the self-professed notions of "liberty" and "justice" pledged by the mass Americans from youth.</div>
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And yet this belief of mine runs counter to the notions of patriotism at large today in which the flag is associated primarily with a standing army! Of all things to make a true Spirit of '76er roll in his grave! Aaargh! A standing army is one thing they fought to get rid of! Did we learn nothing in school?</div>
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Perhaps less than nothing. Perhaps detrimental habits of thinking, like believing Western civilization is white. Happily there is a cure. If only I could prescribe it. I can at least recommend, though. As good a place to start as any is David Blight's recent, landmark biography -- subtitled "American Prophet" -- of Frederick Douglass, the escaped-slave abolitionist and autobiographer who achieved celebrity status as a writer and lecturer both before and after the American Civil War. The book is long and to me was bogged down by the minutiae of family "warts and all," -- as landmark biographies require -- but forewarned is forearmed: the informed reader should persevere. It is worth it.</div>
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It is worth it because Douglass and the manner in which he shared the lived experience of slavery and racism are exactly the kind of lens by which to view American reality. It very much matters how we view our past: Douglass himself was indefatigably motivated by this idea. As Blight writes, "he knew that peoples and nations, like individuals, are shaped and defined by their pasts. Douglass was acutely aware that history was both burden and inspiration, something to be cherished and overcome. He also understood that although all people crave stories, some narratives are more honest than others."</div>
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Thus it was that Douglass -- who soared to prominence with his riveting accounts of life as a slave and his searing indictment of the institution and its evil effects -- faced the rapid washing away of civil rights gained during the Radical phase of Reconstruction, due in part to the rise of a Lost Cause narrative that portrayed the Confederates as noble warriors whose bravery was due the respect of their Northern, white "brethren." Douglass would have none of it. Slavery was the essential foundation of the Confederacy, and he unrepentantly "waved the bloody shirt" after the Civil War to remind his fellow Americans of that fact.</div>
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When Robert E. Lee died, for example, Douglass was appalled at the national veneration for the Confederate leader. "It would seem," he wrote, "that the soldier who kills the most soldiers in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven." Douglass boiled it all down to "he was a traitor and can be made nothing else."</div>
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It is interesting to read this in the context of today's sanctimonious reverence for "heritage," especially in the South, where the word seems inevitably to accompany the display of Lee's anti-USA battle flag. Here again, Douglass had his finger on the pulse of the "wickedly selfish" American character: "Whoever levies a tax upon our Bohea or Young Hyson [types of tea] will find the whole land blazing with patriotism and bristling with bayonets," but "millions of a foreign race may be stolen from their homes, and reduced to hopeless and inhuman bondage among us, and we either approve the deed, or protest as gently as 'sucking doves.'" The very Americans celebrating their "own heritage" are "content to see others crushed in our midst."</div>
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Any real understanding of Southern "heritage" has to include the history of Ku-Klux-style repression and lynching. Of this latter Douglass said in a letter promoting a pamphlet by anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells, "If American conscience were only half alive, if the church and clergy were only half Christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened … a scream of horror, shame, and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read." One has to wonder how many Southern heritage websites include a link to <a href="https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/">Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative museum</a> in Montgomery, AL?</div>
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It is also suggestive and saddening to "read forward" African-American despair -- from expat Henry Ossawa Tanner to W.E.B. DuBois to the Southern leavers of the Great Migration to Ta-Nehisi Coates -- from Douglass's insistence that anything other than blacks staying in the South, no matter how deep the nadir of race relations, how bitter the exploitation, or how strangling the rule of the lynch mob, meant "a premature, disheartening surrender" of emancipation and the civil rights gained by the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution. These seem in some ways like the glib words of someone ensconced in the relative security of a federal job in Washington, D.C., but Douglass was if nothing else unmoving in his constancy to the need for struggle despite the odds. He had seen miracles accomplished before, and they might be again. As biographer Blight says, this prefigures the reality of the modern civil rights struggle, in which people "have to fight to protect political and constitutional triumphs, as well as a new national historical memory, while they also face a deepening crisis of structural repression and inequality." </div>
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Blight's prophetic Douglass trumpeted the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence. These, it must be remembered, are universal ideals, applicable to all humanity. They are meant to be effected by the U.S. Constitution, as Lincoln reminds us in his Gettysburg Address, as an example available to the world to follow. Douglass's voice -- steeped, as was Lincoln's, in an autodidact's immersion in the Bible -- serves as the prophet returned from Babylon saying "it is up to us to build it here." And who is "us"? It is nothing less than the entire mongrel segment of humanity resident in the United States, acting on behalf of the world.</div>
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Douglass insisted on the universality of his humanity. An enduring part of his message had to do with his bi-racial status: he was the son of a slave mother and a slave-owning father. He would use this to taunt his hearers in lectures that sometimes spilled over into a seething fracas of brickbats and fisticuffs as a result. In some instances, though, his racist challengers seem to have been charmed by his courage and forthrightness, as happened in 1850 in New York City, when a speech to the American anti-Slavery Society was interrupted by a "mob" led by German-Irish ward boss Isaiah Rynders, "the nation's foremost political thug," whose gangs--Plug Uglies and Dead Rabbits--rioted to attain their ends and were able to face down the police. Invited to have their say by Garrison (Blight calls it "theater of the absurd") a Rynders-surrogate discoursed on the inhumanity of blacks and said they were a species of monkey. Douglass--standing right next to Rynders--appealed to the audience to look at him and his "wooly" head and asked "Am I not a man?" Rynders, interrupting, said he was only half a Negro; Douglass drew laughter when he said that yes, as son of a slaveholder, he was "a half brother to Mr. Rynders." Douglass argued on behalf of the community of all immigrants; blacks had after all produced the cotton and sugar that they all enjoyed. "We only want our rights. … I have a head to think, and I know God meant I should exercise the right to think … I have a heart to feel, and a tongue to think … and God meant that I should use that tongue in behalf of humanity and justice for every man." On this occasion the rioters left peacefully, having apparently vented their bile to their own satisfaction.</div>
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(By "man," Douglass meant women as well. He was an early and enthusiastic supporter of equal rights for women.)</div>
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The identification of Douglass with universality is perhaps best captured by his connection to Scotland. This might come as a surprise to those who display the twin x'es of the Confederate battle flag and the Scottish cross of St. Andrew on their bumper and think that is all there is to be said on the subject. But consider the following:</div>
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<li class="li1">Douglass's last name was his "freedom" name (his birth name was Bailey) first suggested by his rescuer Nathan Johnson, who according to Blight took the name from Sir Walter Scott's <i>Lady of the Lake</i>. The recently-escaped Bailey liked the Highland clan name's "strength" as a word, stamped it with an extra "s," and entered into his new and ultimately historic identity. Later on, after he himself had read the novel, Douglass found pride that he shared his name with "the great Scottish chief."</li>
<li class="li1">Douglass freely imbibed Robert Burns and found inspiration in the way Burns opposed the "bigotry" of the clergy and the "shallow-brained aristocracy." Douglass used not only Burns's poetry but also his example as a writer whose (in Blight's words) "performative intensity" provided Douglass with a "model in life and on the page." </li>
<li class="li1">Steeped in Scott and Burns, and unafraid to anathematize the Free Kirk for "blood money" -- income from slaveholders -- Douglass was a huge hit in Scotland in 1846. This was a critical time for Douglass, as part of the reason of the tour was to get him beyond the reaches of his former owner. He had already tasted freedom elsewhere in the British Isles, but as he wrote from Edinburgh, it was there that he experienced equality: "I enjoy every thing here which may be enjoyed by those of a paler hue -- no distinction here."</li>
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Douglass took his inspiration from anything, regardless of its source, that promoted the ideal of one, single, universal human race. Thus was there a connection between the poetry of Burns and the music of his own "brethren in bonds": it was the sound of pride and dignity butting up against prejudice and oppression. Douglass used the poems of Burns to get his listeners to feel that "A man's a man for a' that," despite color. And of the songs of slaves, Douglass understood their visceral purpose by hard experience: "To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. … If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul."</div>
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The ensuing, sorry record of master-race misapprehension of the cultural products of the enslaved and of those forcibly, violently separated from civil society begins with Douglass' bald statement that "I have been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by tears."</div>
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One wonders, with this mournful cast shaping his taste in music and with his affinity to Scotland, what Frederick Douglass might have thought of that most evocative of sorrowful instruments, the bagpipe? This isn't just a random thought that comes out of the wild blue from someone devoted to folly who himself plays the bagpipe. It is more an effort to fill by surmise a blank left by biographer Blight, who notes in his book that, late in life, Douglass dabbled in art patronage; among other things he, along with some others, donated to the library of Hampton Institute a painting by none other than Henry Ossawa Tanner, discussed above. The painting was called <i>The Bagpipe Lesson</i>.</div>
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Douglass was solicited by Tanner himself, by letter, and did not see the painting before it was bought. One wonders what came to mind when he read the letter, which included the painting's title? Who would not assume a Highland bagpipe, that noble stereotype of bagpipes everywhere? Only a member of that minority of cosmopolitan bagpipe nerds might imagine an Italian <i>zampogna</i> or a Breton <i>biniou</i> -- which is in fact the instrument depicted in the painting, all bag and no pipe, an appearance both more rotund and jovial than the Highland pipes, with their elongated drones, the howitzers of a perennial Om.</div>
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As it happens Tanner, studying in Paris at the time, toured the countryside in search of genre settings to paint and lighted upon an educative scene paralleling the one in <i>The Banjo Lesson</i>, which he had painted in Paris less than a year before. Both paintings now reside in the Hampton University Museum, the bagpipe one due in part to the largesse of a Frederick Douglass to whom music was the mournful means of living through pain, whether it be felt on a plantation in the American South or a pasture in Scotland. </div>
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At last, then, we come to the question -- or rather the challenge -- posed by the paintings: how do we teach the children? And what? Is it only fact and technique? Or can it contain meaning? Here again we can turn to Douglass for an answer.</div>
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A close associate of John Brown, Douglass was widely deemed guilty by this association after Harpers Ferry and had to flee into temporary exile to escape the consequences of this alliance (despite the fact that he'd counseled the raider against striking the Federal arsenal). Afterwards, Douglass helped construct the martyrdom of Brown, but the "detailed historical and mythic image" (Blight's words) that he imparted was "not a story to please but to pain" (Douglass's words). Blight again: "Brown was a martyr and a victor, but also a classically tragic hero never to be forgotten, a symbol always to trouble and spur the American conscience."</div>
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America suffers from a whitewashed conscience, a whitewashed culture, a whitewashed memory, and a debased level of civic participation because it fails to confront the extent to which the majority culture is built on blindness to the fact that the roots of its heritage are deeply sunk into oppression and facile, superficial, criminal expropriation -- to me a necessarily stronger and more appropriate term than "appropriation." That long musical history mentioned above -- minstrelsy, jazz, blues-and-r&b-inflected rock, rap -- can be understood as not so much a borrowing as a stealing with an intent to ignore when it does not demean. Commercialism, like drumming, covers a multitude of sins. It is part and parcel with Woodrow Wilson introducing progressive government along with federalized Jim Crow segregation. It is part and parcel with insisting on a bleached national anthem that exists only for "the troops" -- a concept alien to the 1776 founding spirit if there ever was one -- and cannot comprehend the continuing inability of "the brave" to provide a home for freedom.</div>
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We cannot teach what we do not know. And if we do not teach the true and ongoing pain of the nation, we cannot teach its aspiration to glory. If all we teach amounts to "tech," we miss the whole point of America.</div>
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To me one of the greatest musical discoveries of all time is the "blues" harmonica. This does not mean the technical artifact itself, the row of brass tongues inside a shiny metal housing, but rather the <i>musical</i> invention of playing that artifact in a way different from the one it was meant to be played -- off-prescription, as it were. It's like the backbeat taking over THE BEAT from the downbeat.</div>
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I was privileged one time to share with an African-American audience in the auditorium of what used to be Frederick Douglass High School a personal rendition of the "history" of this musical invention: whether or not it came as a result of "freaking" the inhaled (drawn, pulled, sucked) notes low down on a harmonica, at some point someone in America of African descent struck upon the idea that the basis of harmonica playing is not blowing, but inhaling: when you pick up a harmonica, don't blow; draw. That is your key. And this changes <i>everything</i> for a harmonica player. It is to me a discovery right up there with Franklin's lightning: it is musical electricity. I can be thankful to whatever unnamed musician(s) made the discovery, and turn the power to my advantage. But at the same time, if I do not carry with me an understanding of the historical context of this music -- an appreciation as it were, as informed as everyone ought to be of where Henry Ossawa Tanner's paintings came from -- and accept the gift as a challenge not only to mourn the wrongs of the past but, as well, to try to right their continuing consequences, then I'm just another American celebrating a soulless heritage like a sucking dove.Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-75321627281613541812018-12-25T00:10:00.001-05:002018-12-25T00:10:09.928-05:00Wise Man<div class="p1">
"I just want to learn to play the one song," he said.</div>
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Just to be sure I understood, I asked if that was the only thing he wanted to learn.</div>
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"That's right. There's this one song. And I want to learn it. Ain't no other a one I want to learn."</div>
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I met him one December day in the studio up in Bristol, where I was unrepentantly follying: recording a song to be played on loop in my casket after I die. (The best part of THAT trick is I expect to be cremated.) Anyway, there are frequently characters lounging on the fringes at the studio in Bristol, which you might expect from a place that records everything from ghettotech to truck-driving country to zombie rock to hardcore Southern gospel quartet.</div>
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These are for the most part non-musical characters who can teach you a lot of important things, e.g. the kinds of sharks drawn to your surfboard in Florida depending on whether you're hung over from tequila or whisky. And this guy was no exception. He was there with a friend who was recording his chickens so he could get pristine sound to lure trespassing coyotes, and sure enough, back there in the glass booth was a straw-filled box with a hen in it.</div>
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"You got to scare it up a little bit to get the right note of helplessness that a dog'll come to. Wild turkey or woodpecker's really best, but chicken's'll do in a pinch. Plus they're a whole lot easier to get in the studio."</div>
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He was from up in Virginia, up in Wise County "almost over to Lee County, where Virginia gets whittled into Kentucky," and he was telling me how to catch snapping turtles by sticking your hand in the air pocket of a muskrat den submerged in a creek bank. I was feeling all "Wind in the Willows" excited, learning this important thing, when he stopped and asked, "By the way, where do you live?"</div>
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I told him I lived down in Kingsport, and when he asked what part, I said I lived out in Colonial Heights; Kendrick Creek area.</div>
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"You don't know Boogaloo Ridge, do you?"</div>
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I asked if he meant Buckaloo Ridge, uphill from the creek; I live in a suburban development on the slope of that ridge.</div>
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"Hm," he grunted with a smile, as if there was something he knew. "My papaw's buried down there. On top of that very ridge, just up from the last gap to the south. It's hard to find. You can't see it from the road unless you know what you're looking for and all the leaves are down. Looks like a little chapel. I doubt you know it, but if you did know it, you'd know it."</div>
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I told him I liked to walk on the roads over the ridge for exercise, but I didn't know about his papaw's grave. That was when he said he wanted to learn the dulcimer. I was sitting warming up on one for my session, so it's not like the request was out of the blue.</div>
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"My papaw had him, oh, I don't know, a bunch that he'd made. I kick myself for not learning from him, but he was gone before I was really old enough to know any better. Anyway there was this one dulcimer that he had that was set up to play slide-style, not noter-style or finger-style, and there was this one song he played on it. And that's the one I want to learn. I just want to learn to play the one song."</div>
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We shook on the deal: I'd teach him the one song. I asked him what it was. I figured it'd be a commonplace, like "Amazing Grace."</div>
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"Nah, you don't know it," he said, shaking his head. He was silent a long moment, and then he asked, "When is Christmas?"</div>
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To say I was taken aback by the question is to put it lightly, but I hadn't conversed with a legion of studio characters in the course of my lifetime for nothing, so I deflected: "You tell me."</div>
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He weighed me a moment, as if he wanted to be sure I was deserving of hearing what he was about to say. Catching snapping turtles was one thing; Christmas was another.</div>
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"I mean," he began, "it could have been any day, right? We weren't there. You ever heard angel music? You live your whole life -- you work, you go to school -- and you just accept it like you accepted bell-bottoms or low-ride jeans or shooting people in the back because that's just the way it is, and don't tell me you don't! Well, I ain't no different, really, except maybe in the fact that the one thing I could never accept was this one-day Christmas thing. I wanted Christmas to be all the time, and I mean the real thing, the birth of Jesus thing, with me as one of the Wise Men who'd just stick around and not return home by another way just to avoid Herod and let him slaughter the innocent. That's where we are, all the time, in a world that slaughters the innocent because adult nonsense is the millstone that we hang around all these babies' necks! Excuse my French here for a moment, but doesn't it piss you off that there's only one day a year when we say 'peace on earth, goodwill toward men,' and can't mean 'everybody' by that? And here we got people thinking they're punching a ticket for eternal life and meanwhile they go screwing up everybody else's lives. To hell with that! Man, you can look at me and know I don't have much. And you and me, our candles are burning now but for how much longer? You might not make it to dinner! Look at you, smiling at me like Mona Lisa. You probably think I'm some kind of a nut. Well, that song I want to learn, it's that song that makes me think this way. I never heard it outside my family. My papaw said he learned it from his papaw. I don't know if that's true, but …"</div>
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He was pretty much ranting, so I cut in to help him focus and asked him to sing the song for me, which he did. His voice was pitched real low -- it was a bass melody. Easy folk tune, nothing to it. Then I got him to sing it in snatches so I could get the words notate the melody.</div>
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<i>As the story is told/it was a cold, starry night in winter/when a baby was born to a woman who'd known no man.As a boy he would never grow old/but he gave up his life for sinners/so the whole world might understand/the grave has no song to sing;/death has no sting;/our lives are a gift we bring when we live for one thing:/As the story is told, when we join our hearts together,/lift our voices in song,/give the gift that belongs/to the now and forevermore.</i></div>
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I was only just done when he said, "Hey you gotta go, there's Mike waving you in."</div>
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And there was Mike, the studio engineer, waving chickens out and me in. I went to work follying, and in the meantime the turtle-hunter left while I was in there. I haven't seen or heard from him since.</div>
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But I did go looking for his papaw's grave. The very next night I walked the road over the ridge and was where the power line cuts through close to the summit when I encountered thundersnow and an abandoned TV. How could that not mean something, right? So next day I went back and where the TV had been (it had apparently apotheosized) I cut down the ridge and bushwhacked over away from civilization down toward the last gap from the south. It was getting colder and clearing but still snowing some. I wound up going too far, all the way down to where there's a water tower, so I made my way back north and when I came to the first gap, I just got on the ridge line and followed it up, and there it was.</div>
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Just as he'd said, a little chapel, complete with gothic windows, but they were empty, and the roof had long since fallen in. There was a stone floor, but no indication that this was a grave. I looked around but didn't stick around.In spite of the turtle hunter's implied invitation, I didn't want to push my luck. And there were spirits to think about. After all this was someone's grave.</div>
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But now that I'd been there, I had to go back. It was a folly after my own heart. And now that I knew where it was, I could reduce the amount of trespassing involved: approach from the other direction, off the road, down into the gap, up the slope, and there I was.</div>
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This time it looked like someone else had been there, and from the looks of it a child: there were toys set up in a scene from a juvenile phantasmagoria: a trio of thumbkins, two of them capped with an oversized hand, arrayed before a decapitated faun into whose hollow body had been poked a branch from some weedy bush.</div>
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Then something happened to make me seize with terror: music came from underneath the floor. That is, from the grave. It was the turtle hunter's song -- "As the story is told …" -- accompanied by the sound of a distressed chicken meant to lure trespassing coyotes.</div>
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Something told me I might not ought to stick around, so <a href="https://youtu.be/Q578fGJhfuM">I returned home by another way.</a></div>
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-49218791276051999972018-11-16T13:21:00.000-05:002018-11-16T13:21:59.998-05:00Orphean orphan: rehearsal for dyingI went to the doctor the other day for the checkup that carried me over the threshold into Medicaredom. Which, 55+ senior discounts and 70-is-the-new-40 aside, is as official as it gets: I'm old. [Insert champagne-cork-popping and party-hat-confetti smileys here.]<br />
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It was a great success, the checkup. My only complaint was that my hearing is not going gentle into that good night. Going gentle was birdsong: it left when I was very small. As a result there has never been to me any such thing as birdsong. It is the fictitious invention of a dangerous subset of hypersensory people, i.e. the mass of humanity, and deranged as divine revelation.<br />
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Not going gentle, on the other hand, is me playing a note on a keyboard and hearing -- instead of a clear, ringing pitch that my voice could hit, dead center, as was heretofore the case -- an amorphous penumbra of jangle that requires a Venusian probe of harmony, solfege, and vocal slide-rule to triangulate. Or when I play an octave -- the first two notes of "Somewhere over the Rainbow" -- and hear an interval that is more like somewhere over a bebopper's wet dream.<br />
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Why did the musician leave the unnerving performance? Because it was disconcerting.<br />
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In moments of despair I self-medicate by grabbing a 12-oz. plastic soda bottle from the recycling bin, blowing across the top to make it sound, and simultaneously humming. When the hum matches the bottle's fluted pitch, the bottle leaps into vibrating mode in my palm like a pager telling me my food is ready to be picked up. It is the greatest symphony ever.<br />
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But this isn't how I complain to my doctor. I complain by talking about a thing I'll never do again -- tune an orchestra to A440 -- and then going off on the tangent that A440 hasn't always been the standard pitch; in fact, back in Bach's day it was more like A415 and the oboes were without keys, more like recorders, but isn't it funny how extinct technology can be re-invented because now early music purists are demanding to hear that music on those instruments at their A415 pitch, which I've only done once back when I took an adult student of mine down the back roads of northern South Carolina to the Atlanta workshop of Harry Vas Dias, where it was actually a baroque oboe d'amore -- an alto oboe -- that Vas Dias put in my hands along with a reed and opened Bach excerpt book to an oboe d'amore duet from the Christmas <i>Oratorio</i> and he said let's play and <i>mirabile dictu</i> (how I love that phrase) I was able to play it thanks to the forked fingerings that I knew from recorder, and man it sounded so good and true, we went on for a whole hour like it was 1734 in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig all over again.<br />
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and if that is gibberish to you, well, lots of people say there is such a thing as birdsong.<br />
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So I didn't complain to my doctor so much as gush, as wipe out entire communities downstream from a breached TVA dam, spewing tsunamic tales of playing Dvorak and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and my doctor, what does he do? Wiseguy, he goes into librarian mode for the patient who's a career librarian: he recommends a book, and nothing medical or healthcare related, either: a novel. And I don't think he does it thinking or knowing that it's bibliotherapy. I think it's his friendly way of trying to save lives by patching that TVA dam back together.<br />
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I immediately go to the public library to pick up my Rx: <i>Orfeo: A Novel</i>, by Richard Powers. And consume it. And enjoy it almost as immensely as a plastic bottle vibrating in the palm of my hand. The plot is good enough to keep you turning pages and wondering where things are headed, and on that basis I can recommend it to anyone intrigued by the crossover implications for music of genetic modification and the security needs of the anti-terror state.<br />
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But the best part to me is the writing about music, 20th century classical music in particular. Even though Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven figure to some extent -- Bach especially -- most of the love in this book goes out to Mahler, Messaien, Shostakovich, Reich, and to a lesser extent Cage. I say "love" because of the lengths to which Powers has gone to describe performances of their works.<br />
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Describing music in words is necessarily nothing more than a flight of fancy bullshit -- unless a composer has given you the "program" the music is describing. For example, the first four notes of Beethoven's fifth symphony are commonly believed to "be" Fate knocking at the door. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._5_(Beethoven)#Fate_motif">It is debatable that Beethoven himself intended any such meaning.</a> It is also possible that he intended only to suggest the song of an Austrian bird, the yellow-hammer. Or he might have intended no meaning at all and used such fairytales as these to fob off busybodies obsessed with meaning in music.<br />
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About the only thing that can be said that is indisputable about the opening of Beethoven's fifth is that, in 2/4 time, allegro con brio, there is a silent downbeat followed by three eighth notes on the fifth of the scale of C minor followed by a half note (with fermata) on the third of the scale; these two measures are immediately followed by the same pattern involving the fourth and second notes of the scale.<br />
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And there you have the whole of the problem of writing about "pure" music, i.e. music that has no pre-determined meaning: which do you prefer, dry technical jargon, meaningless to the layperson, or some kind of bullshit about Fate singing the song of an Austrian yellow-hammer?<br />
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Richard Powers is well aware of this problem and addresses it thoroughly in an extensive <a href="http://www.musicandliterature.org/features/2014/9/4/a-conversation-with-richard-powers">interview</a> with arts journal <i>Music & Literature</i> that appeared soon after <i>Orfeo</i> was published. In his response to the question, "Was it daunting to start writing about music, trying to touch upon its effect on people through writing fiction?" Powers says right off "it's something creative writing teachers and those who expound on fiction traditionally warn writers against trying to do." He never took the "prohibition" to heart because, a musician himself, he always related to music in a linguistic way. He says that there are things like timbre and texture that language can't get to, but he found that his affinity to such things as harmony and structure had a parallel in literary composition. Most convincing to me, though, is what he says about music "as the primary subject matter of the novel," and by music he means not so much its sound <i>per se</i> as "the effect of sound on makers and listeners," and as a cultural activity, as a social act, an historical act, a political act."<br />
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Thus when writing about performances of pieces by these twentieth century composers, Powers is sure to situate them in a deep bed of context from the composers' (or, in the case of songs, the lyricists') personal lives or times, e.g. the tragic death of young children that produced a feverish bout of grief-stricken versifying and produced the <i>Kindertotenlieder</i> set by Mahler; the concentration camp setting for much of the composition and the performance of <i>Quartet for the End of Time</i> by Messaien; or Shostakovich's quizzical response, in his Fifth Symphony, to potentially deadly criticism of his music by the despot Josef Stalin.<br />
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But -- all of the epiphenomena aside -- there is still the actual performance to be reckoned with -- or in Powers's case, the description of it. For the purposes of this excursion there is a good brief example from <i>Orfeo</i>: the first song in Mahler's <i>Kindertotenlieder. </i>If you're not familiar with it and your ears are reliable, it would be worth the 6:02 to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqTyEKB64EE">listen to it</a> before reading on. (My unreliable ears and inexact memory needed help in the form of a musical score -- ah, the synesthetic marvel of literacy, where seeing is hearing.)<br />
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Here is most of Powers's description. The listener whose seance is described is Els, a composer, the main character of <i>Orfeo</i>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A click on the remote, and the music starts up. And one last time, in the bare opening notes, Els makes out the sounds of a death foretold. The death of a child he spent his life trying to revive. At first there's only a thread of frost spreading across a pane. Oboe and horn trace out their parallel privacies. The thin sinews wander, an edgy duet built up from spare fourths and fifths. The singer enters, hesitant, hinted by a bassoon. She channels a man wrung out after a sleepless night, a father with nothing left to keep safe. <i>Now the sun will rise so brightly.</i> [lyrics translated by Powers in italics] ... The sun rises, but the line sinks. The orchestration, the nostalgic harmonies: everything wrapped in the familiar late nineteenth century, but laced with the coming fever dream. Bassoon and horn rock an empty cradle. Scant, muted violas and cellos in their upper registers enter over a quavering harp. The line wavers between major and minor, bright and dim, peace and grief, like the old hag and lovely young thing who fight for control of the fickle ink sketch. The voice sings, <i>It's almost as if nothing terrible happened in the night!</i> Nerves gather in the broadening orchestra, joined now by clarinet and bass clarinet. Then the killer touch, the daub that Els would have traded his soul to make. The ensemble falls away to two pianissimo strikes on the glockenspiel. Then two more. A child's toy, a funeral chime, a light in the night all rolled into four soft, ringing high D's. ... In the fourth return of the instrumental interlude, the song turns deranged and the twentieth century begins. The orchestra sets off in a frantic ecstasy, gusting through chromatic swells and counterswells, shaking loose of all center, anchored only by a deep, droning pedal point in the horn. The frenzy breaks. Flute and oboe attempt the opening lines again, but they're dogged now by the tolling glockenspiel. A small voice says, <i>A little light has gone out in my tent.</i> The notes set a path where their offspring must go: upward into the light, over the surrender of the strings and hollow harp. But the song stutters and catches. The voice drops out, while the surging orchestra carries the melody forward. Two measures too late, the singer rallies -- <i>Heil!</i> -- to welcome the joyous light of day. The orchestra obliges, pushing toward redemption. But at the last moment it falls back into minor. The last word belongs to the glockenspiel, repeating the singer's final note three octaves higher, throwing off glints from a place unreachable by grief or consolation. [paragraph] At eighteen, hearing these songs while holding Clara's breasts was like graduating from the Crayola eight-pack to the rainbow box of sixty-four. At seventy, alone in the house with an untouched glass of scotch, Els can still make out, in the songs' recesses, the germ of freedom that isn't done with him. Why should the bottomless grief feel so bracing? <i>The day is lovely; don't be afraid</i>. Over the decades, he'd read many theories about why sad music lifted the listener ... Mahler himself expressed pity for a world that would one day have to listen to these songs. Yet the cycle has sweetened Els's life beyond saying. [pp. 34-6]</blockquote>
Els the composer listens intently, affixing thoughts to passing sound: the thread of frost, the parallel privacies, the harmonies at once nostalgic yet laced with the coming fever dream, the rocking of the empty cradle, the derangement of the song and the beginning of the 20th century. The carriers of the actual music are the instruments (our imaginations provide their characteristic timbres) and the singer's words.<br />
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The prose here is technically a hodge-podge of information about the composition (orchestration and harmony) taking on by association the meaning Els assigns to grief, Mahler's biography, and the twentieth century. But technically so what. This is very effective writing about music.<br />
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It is only when Els breaks into memory of his own life that a jarring, seemingly false note intrudes. I guffawed at the sentence about the breasts and the crayons. But Powers follows this with a matured reflection on a life sweetened by this sad music. Maybe the comic dissonance is intentional, the garish crayons meant to contrast with the aged and the blended: the glass of scotch. Untouched.<br />
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In describing musical performance in this way, Powers allows the imagined sound -- in the ear-fueled brain of an imagined listener -- to take the mind where music cannot dependably take it: to the verbal articulation of a discrete, inspired, mystical idea. Another poignant example is this from his description of the end of Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The end of the End, when it arrives at last, comes as a solo violin above piano throb. Pared back to its essence, the melody abides, burnt pure in the crucible of the war. Out of a cloud of shimmering E major chords -- the key of paradise -- the violin hints at all a person might still have, after death takes everything. The violin rises; the piano climbs along toward some final immobility beyond human patience and hearing. The praise wanders higher, into C minor, through a frozen minefield of ambiguous diminished and augmented chords, rising again to another major, then one more in the octave above. From out at the edge of the key- and fingerboards, the line glances back at a lost Earth on a cold night, when there is time no longer. [p. 117]</blockquote>
All that a person might still have, after death takes everything; some final immobility beyond human patience and hearing: Messaien's music -- assisted, granted, by his own descriptive program -- only "says" these things because his use of E major, C minor, and violin and piano ascending into their highest notes inspires Powers to think them and articulate them. The reader can well believe that the listeners themselves -- either the original concentration camp audience or Els -- would have had an inchoate and inarticulate sense of those things rather than the full-fleshed idea. But that is what words are for.<br />
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I have a purely personal favorite thing about <i>Orfeo:</i> the high point of Els's career as a composer, and his one real success, is an opera written on the subject of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnster_rebellion">rebellion and siege of Münster</a>, Westphalia, in 1534-5, during which an Anabaptist attempt to establish a radical City of God went badly awry and was brutally suppressed by Lutheran forces. Powers puts in a bravura performance describing a performance of an opera that does not exist (unless he himself has written it). What possesses me to favor this aspect of the plot is that one of the novels I've written, also about music and its epiphenomena -- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Oboe-Jud-Barry/dp/110503495X">Blue Oboe</a> -- uses the same event as the pattern for a similar, ill-fated theocratic adventure in contemporary times in Kingsport, Tennessee, of all places.<br />
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The title of Powers's book is of course a reference to the Classical myth of Orpheus, the singer-lyre-player who took his ability to charm nature with his music down to the Underworld to charm Hades into releasing his dead wife Eurydice, which Hades does on the condition that Orpheus not look back on his return journey. This very thing Orpheus does, and back Eurydice goes. It would make for good book club conversation to try to figure how the myth figures in the plot of the book -- I haven't found that Powers gives this away anywhere, and I haven't settled on a favorite interpretation.<br />
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But it seems not really to matter because the book's resonance -- particularly with the choices of music -- seems more Judeo-Christian than Classical. The life and death on offer here are metamusical riffs on transcendence rather than the stay of execution bargained by the original myth. The prominent place of the Christian Messaien; the use of Reich's <i>Proverb</i> -- with its lyric lifted from a spiritual Wittgenstein; the assignment of the composer's high point to an opera about an Anabaptist visionary theocracy: all of these seem to fix the vibe well beyond the territory of Hades.<br />
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Maybe music is the closest we get to the City of God so sought-after by crackpot, delusional, would-be saints. All of the Judeo-Christian attempts to verbalize that City seem only to collapse to the ironies that the IAMTHATIAM is inarticulate and the Word is inarticulable. But with music we are able to express something along the lines of "We might not understand you, God, but we do feel you, we really do," especially when we have something like Messaien's violin (via Powers as Moses) ascending into the Hint At All a Person Might Still Have After Death Takes Everything.<br />
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So that when, like me, you can no longer hear what you once could, except in your mind, it brings you to a place not unlike death and you can start to see what that something might be.<br />
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I'll be damned if it isn't birdsong.<br />
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<br />Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-59150425649247120312018-10-30T12:10:00.000-04:002018-10-30T12:10:44.432-04:00Mourning in AmericaWalking into the public library this morning, I noticed the flag at half-staff. The occasion is the murder of 11 people in Pittsburgh, shot by an anti-Semite while they observed the Jewish Sabbath in a synagogue. At the sight of the flag my first thought was, "With the frequency of these kinds of killings, when will half-staff become the standard practice, and full-staff be the exception?"<br />
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It's impossible to put thought into these kinds of events without the mind being mobbed by emotions and notions clamoring for attention. Which ones to pursue? Which ones to allow to burn out? I let myself think for a little bit that half-staff days might be a good measure of sociopolitical climate change in the US, but then discarded the idea: in the first place nobody seems to be keeping track; in the second there are better indices of mass murders and hate crimes; and those better indices cover such deaths as those of Vickie Jones and Maurice Stallard, two African-Americans who were shot earlier in the week in Jeffersontown, KY, by a white gunman with apparently racist motivations, and who deserve their own half-staff remembrance, as do all victims of sectarian hatred, the bile in the American melting pot.<br />
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As I try to think about these things, I am influenced by the speech given by Rabbi Arthur Rutberg of Congregation B'nai Sholom, who spoke last night in Johnson City at a vigil in remembrance of the Pittsburgh victims. He talked about the fact that these were Americans struck down in the act of worship on what was to them a holy day. To me this is like a kick in the gut. If our constitutional pact of citizenship does not protect them, whom does it protect?<br />
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I am also influenced by having just completed a book by Michael Lewis called <i>The Undoing Project</i>, which is about the work of two secular Jews, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, to understand how the human mind actually functions when it thinks -- or tries to think.<br />
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I read Daniel Kahneman's <i>Thinking Fast and Slow</i> a few years back and heartily welcomed the culture-clearing gust it blew into the study of the act of thinking. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Freud, he at least indicated the complexity that besets human brains in the process of cogitating, and yet for decades (if not centuries) the model of human thought was the one-dimensional rationalism of <i>homo oeconomicus</i>. Kahneman's book put paid to that notion and begins to scratch the surface of the layers of psychological bedrock that show "I think therefore I am" to mean little more than "hold my beer."</div>
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Throughout that book Kahneman credits his partnership with Amos Tversky as having produced the breakthroughs in speculation and modeling that led to this sea change in thinking about thinking, but the focus was on results, not on the partnership. Michael Lewis's book brings the partnership to center stage and in his usual, very readable way delves into the interpersonal dynamics that produced insights that might have gone undiscovered or undeveloped to either man working alone.</div>
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As such it underscores the necessary tragedy entailed by the hubris of human thinking, particularly in isolation. In Kahneman's words, from a 1973 talk, "an organism equipped with an affective and hormonal system not much different from that of a jungle rat" had given itself "the ability to destroy every living thing by pushing a few buttons." It was "troubling" (Lewis's word) that "crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority." Lewis adds, "the failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings," place the entire human race at the mercy of leaders who could doom it "by a series of avoidable mistakes."<br />
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But where the book hits hardest, right now, is with what is invoked by its title: the undoing project. It refers to the instinctive reaction that humans have to an unfortunate or tragic event. How might it have been avoided or prevented? This is the human brain working to "undo" the event. To Kahneman and Tversky it was useful to examine how people responded to questions having to do with, for example, the death of someone in a plane crash. In imagining that the person's death could have been avoided, what was easier to think, that the plane did not crash or that the person took another plane?</div>
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What anyone engaging with the Pittsburgh tragedy is doing right now, at some level, is trying to undo it. It is as natural a human response as any other emotion. Whether the response is Donald Trump's "more guns" or Moms Demand Action's "Disarm Hate," anyone pondering the event cannot help but try to imagine how it might not have happened. To say that there must be a period of mourning before thinking these kinds of thoughts is to believe in the man in the moon; it is positively inhuman to the point of being sociopathic. Anyone disavowing political intent in the act of mourning an event like this is too detached from actual grief to be listened to.</div>
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Kahneman and Tversky gave us a starting point: the process of undoing can be a positive one if we allow it to sift through all the wreckage of our tragedy-strewn thoughts and ideas. Nor is this something we can do by ourselves. In response to a situation like Pittsburgh -- or any other of the tragic killings so common in America -- we could assemble the will and the wit of the nation to think how it might not have happened so as to take appropriate action in the hope that it might prevent such events in the future.</div>
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It is the job of leadership to motivate the will and convene the wit of the nation to this end. Will this happen? One of the most discouraging things about these events is the evidence not only that such leadership is nonexistent, but also that its nonexistence is as quintessentially American as the bile in the melting pot. If that's the case, it's not something that can be undone.<br />
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That would be not so much mourning in America as just mourning America.<br />
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<br />Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-57198812703141497892018-08-27T22:06:00.000-04:002018-10-11T20:42:24.163-04:00The sermon that no one will hear<div class="p1">
The cover letter clipped to the manuscript began, "She lived in a dream."</div>
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I looked back at the brown glassine envelope, addressed to "Director," to see the return address -- All Saints Church/Speke, Merseyside, UK -- and at the fountain-pen message on the back, "Do not mail until 2018."</div>
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Inside, the letter repeated the address at the top, along with a date -- 23 May, 1956 -- and began, "Dear sir or madam:"</div>
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"She lived in a dream. She showed up one day straight from the Speke airport right across the street. American. 'I'm looking for a Wet Nelly and a flat.' A flat in postwar Speke? When they couldn't throw up council houses fast enough? But dreamlike the estate agent knew of an old woman way over on Western just across from the 86 line stop who needed a lodger. Eleanor came to see me every day, always bringing me a coffee and a Wet Nelly, which she'd also had no problem finding. She lived on them.</div>
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"And died of them. Wasn't here long. Seven years? Every wedding we had she was there. She collected the rice after and then made a little sachet with a lovely note, all smiley faces and hearts and congrats, very American, for the couple. 'I borrowed them anyway, so it's only fair,' she told me, meaning she put the people into one of her novels that she never published ('Horrors! The stain of publicity!'). She would also sit at the front window of her flat and look out of it at passersby. She was borrowing them as well. Another thing she did was keep a paper face in a jar by the door for when an unexpected visitor rang; she would slip it on and open the door, so that the unexpected visitor would be faced with a bearded man in a Highland bonnet wearing -- horrors -- pants. This gave her such a laugh. And the visitor's reaction was something else to borrow. She would even go outside with it when a bus passed by and "flash" (her word) schoolboys. 'They are so easy to scandalize!'</div>
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"One day, along with the customary coffee and afters (with her there were no befores) she brought me the enclosed manuscript. It was, she said, 'the sermon that no one will hear.' Why not? I asked. Her answer: 'Thomas Jefferson is my only communicant, and he is dead. And really, padre,' she went on, 'you must read something besides Westerns. They're not good for you. Eisenhower reads them.'</div>
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"Not long after, she died right in front of me. Lights out, just like that. Probably the Wet Nellys. They're good but you're meant to eat other things as well. Westerns for the body is what they are. I should've thought of that for Eleanor Rigby. She'd have taken umbrage, which would've been good for a laugh. Anyway nobody came to her funeral because I didn't need any witnesses to my dodgery. I had the undertaker bring the coffin back to a spot in the churchyard as close to the gate as possible so she could have a view. Had the hole dug but filled it in myself and was just wiping the dirt from my hands when two lads walked by, back towards the estate from the airport. "George here was just showing me where Birdman was killed the other day," said the more gregarious one by way of a conversational device by which to mine me of information. They asked who it was and where was her stone? I said it was Eleanor Rigby, but now she was buried along with her name. Even though she was unsaved I gave her the ground; it went a wee bit shy of protocol, but I didn't care -- and that is what I told them. Was it a good thing for me to put the truth onto these young and accidental witnesses? For me it was a scapegoat mechanism, I suppose. By putting it onto them, my secret was safe. No one would ever hear more of Eleanor Rigby.<br />
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"They walked away. I heard the reserved one, the one named George by his baby-faced companion, muttering, 'With a story like that, it was probably the lady from that wedding who picked up the rice and who flashes our bus with that Highlander mask. All the crazy people. Where do they all come from?'</div>
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"As to their question about the stone, I finessed it into silence. How could there be a stone with the dates 'Born Dec. 25, 1990 - Died May 21, 1956' on it?</div>
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"There, it's told. All this writing! It's night and no one is here. Anybody walking by would think <i>I </i>was writing a sermon! Now I can get back to darning socks. </div>
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The letter was signed Fr. H. M. McKenzie.<br />
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The sermon that no one will hear:</div>
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My text for today is Richard Hofstadter's <i>Anti-Intellectualism in American Life</i>, published in 1963, in that heyday of America when the U.S. President -- himself not only a Harvard man but the author of a slim tome -- possessed a broadly-informed and questioning mind, which inspired the wisecrack that he was less the successor to Eisenhower, who read Westerns, than to Jefferson, who read Adam Smith. This, together with a certain Cold-War, post-Sputnik mobilization of expertise, made it a moment of promise for the American intellectual. It was nonetheless tenuous, since it came only a few years after a junior senator from Wisconsin gave his name to an era of publicly slandering the patriotism of those who exhibited broadly-informed and questioning minds. And that, wrote Hofstadter, was just the lurid worst of a general condition.</div>
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What is this "anti-intellectualism" that is a defining characteristic of American life? For the most part, it is not so much an -ism as it is -- in the mouths of farmers, evangelists, workers, or businessmen -- an antipathetic grunt of disrespect for the sniffy elitism of the learned, those self-anointed popes of a bookish truth -- useless and impractical to a man, and effeminate to boot -- pontificating from lonely, lofty perches in isolated ivory towers or filthy bohemian garrets. (And this was, remember, before women figured as a class capable of higher thought.)</div>
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But Hofstadter also includes some less likely candidates in his league of "antis." Among them are educators: the Presbyterians and especially the Methodists of the Great Awakening, who -- while prompted to convert through inarticulate spiritual processes -- nonetheless championed basic education as the key to unlocking the Biblical source of the holy djinn; also progressive education reformers of the first half of the 20th century whose goal was to make the child -- each and every one of them -- the font of his or her own education, which, given the culture in which he or she was raised, might favor manual over textual or linguistic learning.</div>
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With these it becomes clear that Hofstadter's intellectualism is the bookishly studious descendent of traditional humanism and its regnant <i>modus sciendi</i>. Not the downstream branch that in the 21st century has become almost synonymous with atheism, traditional humanism hails from halls of classicism that rang with grammar-based learning of languages (at first Latin and Greek) and the close reading of texts (at first Latin and Greek), which became the basis for logico-rational argumentation, most often in writing. Not for nothing did the Puritans of New England call their primary schools "Latin schools." They meant "Latin (and Greek)", and it was the only real way to proof the Holy Writ and rub the djinn-bottle.</div>
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And from thence the way to arrive at the linguistic jungles of <span class="s1">Finnegan's Wake</span> or the inundations of <span class="s1">Infinite Jest</span> or the efflorescence of the New Textamental, parabolic fictions in search of reality. How did we get from the Puritans to <span class="s1">Handmaid's Tale</span>? </div>
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It was not so much a tortuous path as it was an amazement, the cultivation of a semiconscious state of ratiocination in which to lose oneself, never caring to find the exit because it is the only reality that matters. More: it is reality itself. In the beginning was the word, and from there it's words all the way down.</div>
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Garden of Eden become Garden of Earthly Delights, it has become the only reliable way by which things are known, understood, given meaning, and proliferated to each fresh generation. The rubbing of the djinn bottle produced more and more exotic and non-Biblical djinni -- here a Declaration of Independence and a U.S. Constitution, there a Uniformitarianism leading to the idea of a blind evolution of species -- but the methodical exploration pushing back the horizon of truth continued unabated, even if its refinements, grotesqueries, and idiosyncrasies made it a puzzle to the uninitiated that remains unsolved. It is an acquired taste, the apprenticeship is long and lonely, there is no guarantee of material gain, and no one in the family understands what the hell it is you do or why. But with the right reading and writing materials, the self-exiles in this garden are happily stuck with even such a boor as Socrates for a neighbor. "The unexamined life is not worth living": etched, cross-stitched, or aerosol-painted?</div>
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Theirs is the quest in questioning, the inheritance of the great salvific torment: How do I know I am saved? With death holding the answer, all life becomes an ever-larger question that winds up burying the afterlife. That is the great, the important, the only thing, burying all else: the Vesuvius to the Pompeii of the world; the destruction that is an ending and a beginning.</div>
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Seek and ye shall find that which keeps you seeking. </div>
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Hofstadter does well to question why, in the minds of progressive educators, this text-based enigma-cracking was not something that most children wanted to do and thus why it should be replaced by wood shop and home ec; and also to castigate them for organizing entire schemes of instruction that gave preferment to this displacement. But is the progressive response a thing to be lumped with foaming-at-the-mouth Billy Sunday's learning-is-from-the-devil vituperations? It is not, and Hofstadter is wrong to cast them from the same mold.</div>
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The progressives were not antipathetic to the project of solitary, book-based exploration; they just didn't see why a kid curing <i>Sitzfleisch</i> in the library should be the beneficiary of public resources when he or she was obviously perfectly happily being left alone with legible crumbs. What help did they need? They're fine by themselves. Look at all the others! They need wood shop and home ec!</div>
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Interestingly, there is a parallel story, one that comes from the [ahem] temple of learning itself: the public library. It is the story of the "library faith" that puts Jefferson with his Adam Smith on the same plane as Eisenhower with his Westerns. If Hofstadter-style American anti-intellectualism were looking to make a Hollywood blockbuster, this is the story it should tell. But Hofstadter missed the story altogether.</div>
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In his epic the [ahem] temple of learning is overlooked; it doesn't even make green room cash bartender, much less understudy. The closest he gets is to mention Andrew Carnegie and his "munificent gifts to education." This generic munificence is linked, however, to Vanderbilt and other tycoons' investment in the reform of higher, i.e. university education, stultified in their view by the dead hand of reliance on dead languages and much in need of a modernizing lava bath. There is also mention of Carnegie's own love for "liberal" education, which in Carnegie's words "gives to the man who really absorbs it higher tastes and aims than the acquisition of wealth, and a world to enjoy, into which the mere millionaire cannot enter." </div>
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But how did Carnegie get there? Hofstadter doesn't say. The contextual implication is that it must have been through some pre-reform institution of higher learning. In fact it came through a disciplined, self-directed program of reading books borrowed mostly, in Carnegie's telling, from the 400-volume private library of an iron manufacturer with a soft spot for broadening the horizons of ambitious but impecunious working boys. That was the learning device that Carnegie wanted to make available to every ambitious but impecunious working boy out there, by planting a public library in every American town.</div>
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The common school? Provide this kind of education? Whom are you fooling? You can stuff a turkey, but you can't stuff a brain. Real learning was an inner-directed, lifelong habit of mind. It didn't need classrooms. It didn't want classrooms! It wanted libraries full of books.</div>
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Public libraries, of course, already existed, but Carnegie's enthusiasm for them kicked the institution into national high gear. It was in its original conception to be the university for the Carnegie-style Everyman, where a person of sufficient passion for learning would find the resources (books) to advance his knowledge. It is a very American story with many pre- and post-Carnegie exemplars, notably such as Benjamin Franklin, the mid-19th century Boston Brahmins, and the women's club movement of the Progressive era that changed the civic landscape: by building temples of learning, where the American masses would achieve their higher education.</div>
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Give me an [ahem] somebody! The American Everyman showed his interest in disciplined, self-directed learning through reading books by staying away from the public library in droves. There were a few little Carnegies, people like Thomas Edison, just not most people. What was a library to do? Mr. Carnegie hadn't said; he didn't know; he thought everybody was like him. Librarians ensconced in their cobwebbed reference collections consulted their existential tea leaves and lo! Out of whole buckram appeared the notion that leisure reading led ineluctably to serious reading. <i>Mirabile dictu!</i> The "library faith" was born. It didn't matter what you read. Reading = good. A pulp diet inexorably leads to dolmata with Socrates.</div>
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Despite the offer of free popular reading, most people continued to favor the alternate technologies of radio and long automobile drives in the country to the point that, after World War II, there was serious concern about the viability of the entire public library project. It was time for a reckoning. The Carnegie Foundation sensed that something had gone awry. It funded the Social Science Research Council to carry out a "Public Library Inquiry," national in scope, that would study the "empirical research literature on the users of public libraries and what they use them for." Involved in the project were such library lights as researcher Lester Asheim, who helped formulate the library gospel on censorship ("We're agin' it."), and Mary Utopia Rothrock, library consultant to TVA, who served as the only woman and one of two librarians on the 7-member project committee.</div>
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The PLI released a number of reports. One of them, published in 1949 as <span class="s1">The Library's Public</span>, was the first to document and define the unempirical "library faith" that put all reading on the same plane and posited the existence of what became known as the "reading ladder": as a person read more and more, he/she naturally and effortlessly went up rung-by-rung from good (it's all good!) to better, or more challenging. Despite the lack of evidence for this, librarians to this day embrace the notion without a second thought, or remove the ladder altogether (it was blocking the reading rainbow). Intelligent design, meet library science.</div>
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<span class="s1">The Library's Public</span> also delivered the bad news: 10% of adults used the public library on a monthly basis. The slightly better news was that a third of children/youth did the same. However, this positive finding was darkened by the apparent fact that this use was dictated by school requirements. Information? "As a source of information, the public library has little reality for most people." Bottom line: "The general public has little knowledge about the public library and its services and seems to regard the public library as a fine thing for a community to have--for other people to use."</div>
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Here was the report's silver lining: those other people -- that 10% -- made <i>really</i> good use of the public library, to the point that the report referred to them as "a kind of 'communications elite'" because they were also heavy users of such mass media like newspapers, magazine, and radio (this was before the widespread use of TV). This was an elite formed not by maldistributive factors, which is the case with wealth and class, but by the mere personal use of a generally-available public resource.</div>
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The report recommended in very general terms that public libraries should embrace the reality of being a niche service and should provide more direct support to the 10% of the people who used them. Public libraries as a mass institution? Fuhgeddaboudit.</div>
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What public libraries then did fuhgeddabout was the PLI, except when they wanted to trot out a scapegoat. Its recommendations were entirely ignored. Public libraries doubled down on scratching the public itch for popular reading. In libraryland the catchphrase became "Give them what they want." With the advent of feature films on video, public libraries enjoyed the same brief seventh heaven as Blockbuster. Popular culture trumped everything. Self-education was a cynical rationale to be trotted out at budget time, arrayed in the vestments of the library faith.</div>
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Along came the computer-Internet revolution. Many public libraries, particularly small ones, were lifted into the new era by the philanthropy of Bill Gates, the Carnegie of the Information Age. But Gates has in mind more than just a technology upgrade. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is making an ongoing, global effort to "support the transformation of libraries as engines of development" as well as "to foster innovation in libraries." If this effort has an analogue to the PLI report, it is the 2014 report of the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries entitled <a href="https://csreports.aspeninstitute.org/documents/AspenLibrariesReport.pdf"><span class="s1">Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries.</span> </a></div>
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Even though the report's peppy tone tries to give the impression that libraries are raring to embrace change, it's easy to read between the lines that these are the soothing words to the press of the coach who has just spent half-time in the locker room screaming at a chronically under-performing player: "One more screw-up, and you're done!"</div>
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No more being a mere "repository of materials"! It will take on new roles that will extend "far beyond book lending." As for its staff, fewer will be needed "to put books on shelves" and "a lot more" will need to be educators. "What libraries need is to become more intentional in the ways that they deploy resources in the community." And they're going to have to show solid, measurable "outcomes" -- not "outputs" -- that "report how the library is helping to achieve community goals and objectives."</div>
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At the same time, the report acknowledges that there is lots of good to build on. Usage is up from the PLI days, with a quarter of the population reporting monthly use according to the <a href="http://libraries.pewinternet.org/files/legacy-pdf/PIP_Libraries%20in%20communities.pdf">2013 Pew Research survey cited by the study</a>. Score one for popular reading!</div>
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And, in almost a direct echo from the PLI study, people still value libraries as a community asset even if they don't use it. The report quotes an Illinois city manager -- one imagines a dyspeptic curmudgeon slumped in the back of the meeting room with an allergic reaction to flip chart brainstorming -- warning against a too-quick embrace of "the next big thing" and saying, "The library is a place you don't know you need but couldn't live without." No stinkin' outcome measures for that guy.</div>
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His is very much a lone voice in this report, which in large part is a shitstorm of technocratic, nonprofit management platitudes and cliches for the Information Age: "The emerging value proposition of the public library … knowledge economies … exploitation of means of production and knowledge … entrepreneurial learner … new channels of sharing and distribution of knowledge." And there better be measurable outcomes or you're off the team.</div>
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Nonetheless, despite its complete lack of anything resembling authenticity or humanity (can bots commit cultural appropriation?), the report has the unintended value of serving as a progress report of public libraries since the PLI. But what the Aspen report characterizes as passivity is more a stubborn refusal to abandon the notion that libraries should favor leisure above learning. It is the settled habit that understands popular reading or viewing -- elevated by the annual intoning of the mantra of the library faith -- to be its meal ticket.</div>
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Ironically, the Aspen report -- for all its futuristic pretense -- effectively brings the public library full circle, to its original, serious, unfulfilled purpose. The Aspen participants may think they are "re-envisioning the role of the public libraries as a vital learning institution and engine for individual, community and civil society development," but in fact there is no re-envisioning at all. The public library founders of the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie, and the Progressive-era women's clubs thought about the role of the library in pretty much the same way. They just didn't have computers, the Internet, or "emerging value propositions" chained to arbitrary outcomes, however measurable.</div>
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Where the traditional library and the Gates library diverge, however, is in their understanding of where the library's beating heart lies. The truest conception of the library is that it is where a questing individual can go in search of knowledge. It was knowledge that was to undergird the education of Jefferson's yeoman's farmer, who in turn was to undergird the American republic, and it was this ideal that drove the public library project from the outset. It is still paid lip service in the library faith of the contemporary public library, and a faint echo still reverberates in the Aspen report.</div>
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<br /></div>
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For the most part, however, the Gates project refuses to listen to this voice and, when it isn't trumpeting the next-big-thing version of wood shop -- the 3D printer -- it follows the siren call of the "problems" approach: identify the "problems" facing the community and work on them. Anyone who has ever spent the least bit of time working on an effort to prioritize community "problems" knows that wherever the planning vessel winds up, the outcome is as likely to be a smashup of a politically-influenced, advocacy-laden exercise in social marketing as it is to be the actual, truest need. And the library, as a result being "intentional" in how it "deploys resources," finds those resources disappearing into the maw of more astute players of the game.</div>
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Why, with the cornucopia of informational resources showering upon us, do we have to focus elsewhere than on individual learning that can be turbocharged with the help of libraries -- particularly when they cooperate and collaborate. Libraries are among the most collaborative of institutions, but public libraries, especially small ones, depend on local and state funding that If they can doesn't even allow them to keep pace with technology's new added costs, and now the champions of tech want what there its to be diverted to wood shop. That this should be the "next big thing" in the face of the failure of the Internet Public Library (1995 -2015) is clear evidence Hofstadter-style anti-intellectuals are running the show and are thus wasting real opportunities.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Meanwhile the Federal government resolutely refuses to lead and fritters away its "library" money on atomized grants for the industry-subsidizing networking that are the opioids for the poor little libraries' tech addictions. It's not like they have a choice, either. When it was canals and railroads that could tie the country together, the Federal government didn't hesitate. And now that the linkages are virtual, it washes its hands and say, "No can do"? Game-changing projects that would be national in scope are not hard to conceive. The best example I know is the Hathi Trust online collection, with full-text searching inside its 13.7 million scanned volumes, but more is possible. </div>
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Why not, at long last, simply respond to the interests of those individuals who come to the library with a serious interest in learning? Yes, help them with the new tools that computers and the Internet have made available. But be intentional in deploying library resources not just to meet their needs but to extend them and elevate them, whatever knowledge they pursue. Libraries have always recognized the full gamut of subject matter to be deserving of support. There is no need to privilege STEM, for example, any more than there used to be a need to privilege Latin and Greek. The processes and patterns of support will be the same for everyone regardless of subject matter:</div>
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<br /></div>
<ul class="ul1">
<li class="li1">Physical books remain not only a huge "value proposition," but are also the enduring "library brand" (much to the chagrin of public libraries, some of whom have called it "an incredible disconnect" from reality). However, the emphasis should be on a collection carefully selected and maintained to encourage and support individual learners.</li>
<li class="li1">The copyright death of Google Books (although alleviated to some extent by the Hathi Trust) places all the more value on a national network of inter-lending libraries, which already exists but the full use of which is hampered by burdensome user fees. Interlibrary loan in support of registered research projects should be subsidized so as to enable borrowing from private research libraries.</li>
<li class="li1">Establish a national purchasing consortium to pay for access to copyrighted material in digital form (ebooks, journals, etc.)</li>
<li class="li1">Make registered autodidacts the library's core constituency and the focus of the mission. </li>
<li class="li1">Offer a READ (Reading-Educated AutoDidact) degree.</li>
<li class="li1">Use data to demonstrate the superiority of the READS degree to the university one. This should be a piece of cake. Hunger beats forced feeding anytime.</li>
<li class="li1">Transition library staffing away from clerical functions (processing, circulation) in the direction of knowledge functions that support self-learning. Establish a "Peace Corps"-style Federal program to develop a new professional program and recruitment for this new focus, with premiums for candidates with high levels of student debt.</li>
<li class="li1">Publish papers, essays, blogs, games, movies, musical compositions, etc., that derive from the work of autodidacts.</li>
<li class="li1">Develop programming (lectures, podcasts, presentations, book reviews/talks, discussion groups) based on the work of library "students."</li>
<li class="li1">Provide lengthy blocks of computer time (4-8 hours) to enable adequate research time and focus, particularly with multimedia. Use equipment logs to insist on appropriate use.</li>
<li class="li1">Embrace the shush along with noise-canceling design and technology.</li>
</ul>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="p1">
Why privilege these individuals? In the first place, let us remember what has been privileged, already, instead, with public money: on the education side, an enormously-expensive facsimile of learning via classroom instruction and on the library side Eisenhower's leisure over Jefferson's learning.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In the second place, it's the wrong question. The right question is "why privilege learning?" I won't try to answer that question except to say that our society has said that it does, but then proceeds to go about it in a way that is not only inefficient in terms of resources and results, but also discouraging of those habits of mind that will lead to lifelong learning. Why privilege the classroom instruction of an arbitrary selection of facts or skills, presented as a pre-ordained array, when real learning best proceeds along an inner-directed path?</div>
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If this is American "anti-intellectualism" -- as Hofstadter says -- it is a strange beast. It apotheosizes knowledge as the spiritual guarantor of democracy and then builds an educational system that ignores the truest form of it. Well-meaning attempts at re-invention (Carnegie, Gates) have built and outfitted many buildings, but their most important contributions have been to perpetuate a hollow institution.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
E. Rigby, M.L.S. (2012), University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN</div>
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I went looking for Eleanor Rigby. She was back at her desk, eating a doughnut and drinking coffee as she updated the library website. One feels slightly sorry for a person who's been saddled by her parents with a notorious name. Such an imposition. It's doubly sad to think of her gilding the lily like that, too. If any song had a completely prosaic birth, it was her namesake. Paul noodling "Daisy Hawkins" and something about rice at a wedding and then tossing it like a carcass to his mates -- not including John Lennon -- so they could cure it.</div>
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"Nice [ahem] fountain pen font on the back," I said, handing her the envelope with the manuscript inside, "but you can't fool me. Time travel notwithstanding, there is still just one Eleanor Rigby who could've written the review. And she went to Catholic, not UT, didn't she? So no, the review can't go on the library's book review blog. You are staff, Eleanor. You are not one of our wacky autodidact contributors thinking she is writing for the <i>New York Review of Books</i>. You know the rules for adult staff as well as I: only books published in the current year, with 5/1 preference for popular fiction or genre fiction. Books that people will read, Eleanor."</div>
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She flipped me off with a 3-beat finger: "WESTerns. FUCking. SUCK! And Goodreads has a character limit of 20,000 characters, so FUCK YOU!" and went back to work.<br />
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Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-90332398213723313362018-08-14T21:13:00.001-04:002018-08-14T21:13:37.496-04:00Feel free"<i>Freebird</i> wasn't really free." He was probably <i>that</i> guy, the one who made <i>that</i> argument on the way back from the Skynyrd show. "It cost somewhere between 1/15 and 1/10 of the ticket price, factoring in the solos, and not including how much of your cigarette lighter you used up."<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj21MHczh0_HEM6TDcehERYpojH9l43WMGL-oqZW0zJrRnJI-VhbxbKTen5aW9-YGg2OxNo2GTNAN33EHFc278M4wZuNtAC0W5Zwd6iET88bu-llODN9DEJPX9PjEoVciG52iG8QKNrY3A/s1600/freebird.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj21MHczh0_HEM6TDcehERYpojH9l43WMGL-oqZW0zJrRnJI-VhbxbKTen5aW9-YGg2OxNo2GTNAN33EHFc278M4wZuNtAC0W5Zwd6iET88bu-llODN9DEJPX9PjEoVciG52iG8QKNrY3A/s400/freebird.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
And now forty or so years later he's trying to argue that you can replace public libraries with Starbucks, and he's breaking the Internet by getting stuffed for it, before retreating to the position that "public libraries aren't free anyway. You have to pay taxes for them."<br />
<br />
Economics isn't free either. There's a cost for its truncated visions of human nature: you can't save the last dance for <i>homo oeconomicus </i>unless you want to be stepped all over while having cost-benefit analyses whispered in your ear.<br />
<br />
Not that economics isn't without imagination when it comes to the concept of "free." But, as one might expect from someone who devalues the waltz <i>per se</i>, its products along this line take on some perverse characteristics, e.g. <i>laissez-faire</i> a.k.a. "free market" capitalism, for which we can credit the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the American cotton lands.<br />
<br />
I don't doubt that economists argue with St. Peter at the pearly gates of Free Grace heaven. "Free? What do you mean free? Jesus died for that grace! And the value of his life alone was, what, 33 years time $130,000, or $4,290,000 in today's dollars! So you have to figure the fraction of ..." at which point Free Grace Peter refers the economist down the cloud to where Prosperity Gospel Peter is collecting admissions fees.<br />
<br />
The point that these economists make is so obvious that the only answer is really to turn it back by saying, "You're missing the point." The point of free public libraries was well-known when they were established in the middle of the 19th century. The point was to leverage self-education through tax-supported institutions that promoted reading by providing free access to books. The point was to eliminate a monetary <i>quid pro quo</i> for a book by spreading the necessary support around like a thin layer of manure on the spring corn.<br />
<br />
This was in Boston, where besides manure on spring corn everyone also understood "free beer" to mean that however it was being paid for, the saloon-keeper was giving you a frothy mug in exchange for exactly nothing. The hope was that libraries -- with their offer of free books -- would be able to draw some of the clientele from the saloons.<br />
<br />
This didn't exactly happen, although public libraries have become a not-insubstantial marketplace for illegal drugs, which, however, have the very non-library, ironic downside of <i>not</i> being free. As if to demonstrate, at the nearby reference desk, is our spaced-out, for-profit, drug-industry economist arguing with the nice librarian that, in getting "high," one does not physically attain altitude, and then threatening her that she should go "get stoned" unless she accepts his demand for her dowry because "can't buy me love" be damned!<br />
<br />
Part of what we are experiencing here is "the tragedy of the Commons," in which the Lords are past the point of making a positive contribution to society, so the police are called and the economist gets the criminal justice version of interlibrary loan: a free ride to jail.<br />
<br />
With handcuffs! Lagniappe! Laissez-faire les bons temps rouler!<br />
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<br />Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-29981664514271084952018-08-07T20:14:00.000-04:002018-08-07T20:14:33.297-04:00Renunciation, The<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"></span>"Shhh!"</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
She opened her eyes. Had she heard something?</div>
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<br /></div>
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"Shhh!"</div>
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<br /></div>
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She had heard something. Something distinctly like a shush.</div>
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<br /></div>
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"Shhh!"</div>
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<br /></div>
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She was afraid.</div>
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"Don't be afraid." The whisper came from the same direction as the shush.</div>
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She wanted to dive down under the covers, but somehow she pulled herself up against her fear and looked into the gloom.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
"Don't be afraid, but shhh!" It was a woman with short bobbed hair, a blue suit, and sensible shoes. It was Nancy Pearl. She recognized her right away. She had her action figure.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
"Nancy Pearl!"<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-xyShRHJ-1QcgdQGWQzAJp8aPfAWjEGIhDesNHsfmCz6e3VsKE900bLR-YcYhTrTmMJJFvfelccs4b4pTXyAliQx6o43tU_PL-PcoBYA-wdJYz5NsWg2dfnJvJVYD0Ki-jCFGpCXE4sY/s1600/IMG_1058.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-xyShRHJ-1QcgdQGWQzAJp8aPfAWjEGIhDesNHsfmCz6e3VsKE900bLR-YcYhTrTmMJJFvfelccs4b4pTXyAliQx6o43tU_PL-PcoBYA-wdJYz5NsWg2dfnJvJVYD0Ki-jCFGpCXE4sY/s400/IMG_1058.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>"Shhh!" said Nancy Pearl, the action librarian.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>"What are you doing here, Ms. Pearl?" she asked, keeping her voice low.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>"I'm here to tell you that you're not pregnant," whispered Nancy Pearl.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>"Ah!" She hoped her voice registered neither relief nor disappointment at what she felt to be, at best, a non sequitur. Which, come to think of it, was the presence of Nancy Pearl standing inside her bedroom window. "I didn't know you were a fertility coach, too!" She said this out of politeness. But the intended perky note failed to penetrate the whisper.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>"Hello? <i>Book Lust</i>? <i>More Book Lust</i>? <i>Book Lust To Go</i>? <i>Book Lust in Your Dreams</i>?" Nancy Pearl's sarcasm had no problem penetrating the whisper.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>She had heard of them all except the last one.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Nancy Pearl wasn't done. "<i>Book Lust: Casting Nancy's Pearls before Swine</i>?"</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Oooh, she felt that one. "Yeah, well, sorry? Are you recommending that I read something? To get pregnant?"</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Did Nancy Pearl smile behind the finger held up to her mouth? "Shhh!" was her only response, after which there was the general appearance of vanishing.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>She got out of bed and verified the presence of her Nancy Pearl action figure on a shelf with eight Beatles, a Blue Meanie, and J. S. Bach, whose <i>Magnificat</i> she now put on the CD player to help her get back to sleep.</div>
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<br /></div>
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She felt bitter already. </div>
Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-75941030884812607682018-08-02T07:41:00.001-04:002018-08-02T07:41:37.218-04:00If a downbeat falls on a rest in the forest, does anyone hear it?First my review of <i>The Music Shop</i>, a novel by Rachel Joyce:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This was a fun book to read, very quick and lively -- if you find thinking about music to be lively, which I do. I was completely taken in by the charm of the self-proclaimed "community" of characters who own shops (tattoo, fallen high-church kitsch, a funeral parlor) in a sort of rundown, industrial-revolution-era-version-of-a-minimall (as near as I can figure) in a British city with docks that smells of cheese and onion (important detail). Among them is a wounded (psychically) fellow who runs a record shop (vinyl ONLY before vinyl ONLY was cool) who has an uncanny gift for picking exactly the music that anyone needs to listen to. When along comes one day a mysterious young woman with green gloves (important detail) who stands out front of his shop and passes out. In reviving her, the record shop owner is smitten but at the same time being psychically wounded he cannot allow himself to get close -- psychically -- to her, but she returns and hits him in his weak spot by asking him to teach her what he knows about music.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
By the way, did I say this was a romance? So of course things don't work out! I mean, not yet.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I was completely charmed by it in the way one is when one knows people who get married and one wants things to work out especially after an actual wedding, with the book having the tremendous advantage of enabling one to find out very speedily if that does in fact happen. I sped through this book in only a day and a half! Magical realism indeed!</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Or maybe just magic without the realism? Wherein perhaps lies the charm! Whatever. That is all mechanics I'm sure, and we're all susceptible, particularly "Americans" (psychically) suffering through a presidentially-imposed episode of "greatness." If only things would smell like cheese and onions, and tattoo artists and lapsed priests and handholding-brother-morticians provide us with universal health care and a sense of community!</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Not to mention a saintly music shrink, someone who has listening booths in his shop where people can come in and listen to VINYL as long as they want and never buy anything. Not that they will ever find anything they are looking for in the shop, because. It's. Not. Organized. That. Way. It's a jumble of associational filing according to the associational juices of the record shop owner, who being a saint, knows what goes with what. He just knows. The miracles! He cures one man of his Chopin fixation -- not that there's anything wrong with Chopin at all; it was just not really what the man needed since his bride slept with the best man on the wedding night -- with Aretha Franklin. And not just any Aretha: <i>Spirit in the Dark</i>. It has to be that one. So the whole enterprise functions like an atavistic public library in the American imagination, only better, because a psychically-wounded British music saint beats a shushing librarian any old day. I mean, he's got kids -- kids! --coming in who are happy not to find what they're looking for, because they slip on some headphones and wind up music tripping! It's wonderful! No LSD, just Miles Davis! No one expects Miles Davis!</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
On the other hand: the <i>Hallelujah Chorus</i>. Expect the <i>Hallelujah Chorus</i>. Not for its sound but for its silence. Because all music is about silence, in the wisdom of this book. Although John Cage's<i> 4'33"</i> isn't on the playlist. Hmm. But here it is: Happily ever after in a day and a half. Fiction, but charming! Particularly the psychically wounded cheese-and-onion community for all the suffering "Americans."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Like me.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
****************************************************************<br />
<br />
So, the rest of this is kind of in the way of a spoiler, so if you think you might want to read this fun book -- which I especially to those who you love music either as a performer or as a listener -- best leave for now and come back later.<br />
<br />
Music is so so so so SO vast. And tastes and opinions occupy such disparate places within the arc of that spectrum. Let me just say that my music shop owner would recommend music different for the most part from Rachel Joyce's. He would be wedded to other pieces from the various genres and sub-genres of music. And within classical music, different composers or, if the same composer, different pieces. And it would be that way for anybody, so no point boring you with my choices since yours would be different and every bit as boring.<br />
<br />
Except for one area that has to do with silence in music. This is the organizing principle of Frank's philosophy of music. Frank has a fixation on the Hallelujah Chorus, and seems to find particular meaning in the moment of dead silence before the final "Hallelujah!" Because of this moment of silence, music is therefore all about silence, in Frank's mind anyway.<br />
<br />
Not wanting to plumb this particular bottomless pit of speculation, I will say that I would pick a couple of different moments of silence in music as having that opening-trapdoor-of-the-scaffold feeling to them:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. <i>Ezekiel Saw the Wheel</i>, arranged for treble choir, by ??? I was an aspiring chorister in the audience of a Chattanooga Boys Choir performance of this song, and I was bored. I was also 10 years old, no adults or other children were with me, and I was sitting by myself in the back row way behind anybody else. I found I could alleviate my boredom with the cap of a lipstick tube that I had found on the floor by popping it with my thumb in time with the music. It was a soft pop -- a satisfying, soft pop that I could hear underneath the sound of the choir, which I could now give a nice little offbeat rhythm for the lively, syncopated song that without my help had been so boring. But I was digging it now with my little backbeat. The song went into a grandiose coda in which the choir was almost yelling "way up in the middle of, way up in the middle of, way up in the middle of, way up in the middle of ..."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And then, nothing.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And then, a soft pop from the top of the lipstick tube. By itself. A pop. My thumb slipping a pop. Alone. In rhythm, but alone. Very, very, stunningly alone. I could not believe it. People way in front of me whirled around and glared, as the choir roared, "THE AIR!"</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. The downbeat of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the preparation for the most famous motif in all of classical music: da-da-da-dum! If you just listen to the music, you miss one of the most significant moments of the piece: the silent downbeat. If you're <i>watching</i> a performance and seeing the conductor delivering the downbeat, only then do you get the complete sensation of what must be one of the most exciting moments in music: when the baton crashes down and out of the silence sizzles this orchestral flash of lightning.</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYlqrabf7HTrSla48O0DmoQB3uNd-nNKgt4yoZofczfnA10ZhMqCyKsj0HlYOUsZYAqOJMMeUDBLCmptyus-9ZjzBwr6z-G6e3SnWGdEENktSj7AXmprB6tx1WEHRLecezImOSEQpyD1A/s1600/fifth.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYlqrabf7HTrSla48O0DmoQB3uNd-nNKgt4yoZofczfnA10ZhMqCyKsj0HlYOUsZYAqOJMMeUDBLCmptyus-9ZjzBwr6z-G6e3SnWGdEENktSj7AXmprB6tx1WEHRLecezImOSEQpyD1A/s1600/fifth.jpg" /></a></div>
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<br />Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-86123392764903847322018-07-19T14:25:00.000-04:002018-07-19T14:29:42.580-04:00 Buy now! Grab 'Em By the Pussy Riot Collusion Insurance! Now with Ivanka Scent!Hahaha! It's me, Planet 3799 Novgorod, here to help you America with some great product! As a hacker for the Russian government, my only purpose in life is to help make sure your elections produce the best result for the number one country in the world! And can you guess which one that is? Here is a hint for you: Donald Trump is not the president of it.<br />
<br />
However, now with this new but great product, you can rest assured that even if we hack the election, there will be insurance to cover you against collusion. And the best part about this insurance? Lean in. I must whisper. Closer. Closer. ... IT'S COMPLETELY WORTHLESS! Hahaha. You just let me shout in your ear.<br />
<br />
Except for Ivanka Scent. It is very great product. After all, doesn't everyone want to smell nice when they are getting screwed?<br />
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America, you are such a source of great pride for me today. I cannot tell you how it feels to be the team responsible for the election of the worst president ever in America. When we started, we sat down and mapped out all the characteristics of a bad president -- uninformed, inexperienced, incurious, lazy, dishonest, unethical, immoral, cowardly, etc. -- and then thought, "We will try to elect someone with maybe 20% of these characteristics." Then Trump turned up, and we couldn't believe it. "He's the perfect terrible president! He has so many of these characteristics! And he's off the charts as a liar, a coward, and as someone who doesn't give a shit about learning anything! This can't be possible!"<br />
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But it was. And did we score. Big time! I am thinking about the World Cup 2018 obviously, which was a glorious thing for us in so many ways. Too bad for our team, but they still represented us well. But America did you see the moment in the Final when France was waltzing to victory 4-1 over Croatia and the French goalie -- overconfident? clumsy? just plain stupid? -- put the ball on the pitch for what should have been a soaring goal kick downfield but instead he tried to dribble the ball around a lone but stellar Croatia player who reached a leg out, intercepted the ball, and scored? Did you see that?<br />
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What a moment! That moment right there was the Helsinki Summit. Trump is the French goalie going it alone, dribbling on the pitch against our glorious Vladimir. Trump is completely outclassed by himself on the ground against Putin, but Trump is so deeply dishonest -- even with himself -- that he has no clue.<br />
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I don't pretend to know the details of what we have on the poor fellow -- except to say it is money, the only thing that registers in his capital-reptilian brain. It doesn't matter. He is covering himself with shame, and me, personally, I have confessed to feeling sorry for my American adversaries (<i>but only fleetingly, Russian comrades, and never in such a way as to deter me from the pursuit of our goal!</i>) Still, though, one has a romantic notion of the classic joust between two equal champions, like the Crusader notion of Richard with the lion heart against the Muslim warrior Saladin. What can I say except the unpronounceable lingo SMH: America has fallen so short. I can laugh at it, but at the same time I am embarrassed for them.<br />
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And to watch Trump trying to "walk it back," and then contradict his walking back, and then "walk it back" again. Who does he think he is, Michael Jackson? I will invent a new dance for him. It will be Russian and it will be a huge hit and it will look like people running around on a soccer pitch with Russian security in hot pursuit and it will be called "Grab 'Em by the Pussy Riot Collusion Insurance! Now with Ivanka Scent"! Hahaha! America, my gift to you! Great product! Buy now! And don't forget to dance!<br />
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But what is truly baffling is the people all around Trump who know he is lying and ignorant and a coward! How is it possible that they can't see us behind him, through him, under him, over him, using him to score goal after goal after goal? Can they really not know what's going on? Do they not care? There is a single, simple, easy, obvious thing that could be done to block us: get everyone behind an effort to secure the American system of elections. Everybody would be for that. Unify America, like, you know, it says: the United States of America.<br />
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But no. The Republicans are happy to have our help, as long as it beats Democrats. Democrats are the enemy. NATO is in good shape compared to America. America isn't even a banana republic now. It is a banana split. A giant banana split. The biggest in history. All peeled and sliced banana served up with ice cream and whipped cream and offered up for sale! America the banana split! America for sale! No republic anymore, just one big huge economy that anybody anywhere can buy into or hack into or sway or swing to your heart's content! "Give me you tired, your poor ..." Hahaha Miss Tired Statue of Flibbertygibbet! What's tired and poor is your American ideals! Forget them. Eat the banana split! Buy now! What great product! The best!<br />
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Who needs a republic anyway? After all, what's a republic? Can't expect an American to know, especially not your president! And he doesn't! He has no clue what a republic is. Don't believe me, Planet 3799 Novgorod who knows more than you about America and who flipped your election? Then be on the safe side! Buy my Grab 'Em By the Pussy Riot Collusion Insurance, now with Ivanka Scent! Guaranteed worthless! Just like the Constitution your cheating President swore to defend!<br />
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Hahaha! It would hurt if it weren't so funny!<br />
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<br />Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-77956633990454552872018-07-03T15:56:00.000-04:002018-07-03T16:12:47.284-04:00Hedonist's treadmill, philosopher's comb (in praise of Folly (Beach))The waves lap upon the shore as they have done since time immemorial and as they will do for time unforeseen. They were they are they will be: there, beyond the reckoning of any wreckage.<br />
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Sometimes they are perfect in form: a long, rolling ridge that rises and then breaks forward into a scroll that comes crashing down into a wash of foam. One after another they come, as incessant as they are patient as they are determined to meet a destiny the same as doom.<br />
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From my home in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee to Folly Beach, SC, is as easy and unbroken a trip by interstate highway as anyone could want. It is also almost the shortest distance between two points: me @home and the Atlantic Ocean. A happy coincidence. As is the overlap between the name of the beach and the name of this blog.<br />
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I have been there before, a while ago: before a hurricane washed away all manner of manmade protuberances and appurtenances. Those are back, in greater profusion and lushness than before, tempting another reckoning with the wind, but bravely and brazenly and lushly squeezing every margarita moment until then.<br />
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The dry sand is soft and floury. But beyond the tidebreak litter of sharp, broken shells, where it has been wetted and pressed and molded by the onrushing water, it is terra firma suavis; together with the water it is the rhythmic flowing encyclopedicure that needs no looking up and that no algorithm can replace.<br />
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Feel is the oldest of the senses, and the deepest, and here is its home, après womb, the closest thing to the garden from which we have all been cast out and to which we seek to return. The other senses are not absent: from afar sight imposes the occasional as the ideal, with a classic sameness, a geometry of gravity upon a graph; sound highlights the distant crashing to which we are only an audience; taste does not seek the overweening saltiness; and smell is rewarded mostly by the absence of effluvia or the spritzy industrial bouquets of sunscreen.<br />
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But it is feel that wraps the experience into a single, singular inheritance that begins with a look back over the shoulder at the rising, approaching ridgecomb into which you are pulled by the outward rush of undertow and into the path of which you dive, thrusting the arms back and leaving them by the sides and surrendering to the force of the downward curl that throws you face-forward through the roaring, salty surf and propels you along until you stand in the shallows, always with one desire: to go back and do it again.<br />
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Body-surfing is the only way to experience this. Admittedly, compared to the grace and athleticism of surfboarding, it is ridiculous -- indeed risible -- to watch: a head disappears into the foam and moves forward fifteen yards or so. But the point is not to entertain or to be watched or to master a wave with a board. The point is to become part of the wave itself, part of the energy that rises and crashes and propels. You become part of the medium not by embracing it, but by throwing yourself forward into the force that sucks you in and throws you forward, propelling you in a liquid jet through face-striating bubbles and enveloping you in a soothing salt wash.<br />
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It does require a modicum of skill: catching the right wave at the right place and at the right moment in its breaking; maintaining a shaft-like form without legs so high or head so low so that you are roughly tumbled, which it seems even the smallest wave can do. But the child can ride as well as the geezer, and vice-versa.<br />
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Conditions can be better or worse. Mostly it's a matter of waves being too chopped up by wind or too becalmed or too rude can be better or worse, but current can be a factor as can the quality of the water. I was rewarded (for what, I don't know) this time at Folly Beach with warm (not hot) water and modest but majestic waves, chariots of water rolling in like clockwork.<br />
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The hedonist's treadmill. Not a hedonic one. The hedonic one is the one you have to tread to maintain the homeostasis that keeps you at a mere baseline of happiness. Nobody ever mounted a treadmill in pursuit of pleasure. On the other hand, the hedonist's treadmill -- the wave -- is happiness itself. It is flow inside of flow, the cyclical surf in which pleasure reiterates again and again, without any more effort than a little timing and throwing yourself into it. It is the possession of pleasure by the medium of pleasure. The hedonist's treadmill is the philosopher's comb.<br />
<br />Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9001689896692134319.post-25103523827094238592018-06-19T19:57:00.001-04:002018-06-19T19:57:52.494-04:00Future perfect USASU perfect futureBy then it will have been almost time for Independence Day. Whimper. No more bang.<br />
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Not long before the rising tides swamped Manhattan, there will have been a nation called the United States of America that no longer knew itself. Americans will have stopped catechising themselves with the Declaration of Independence, which will have been tamped once too often into a fireworks tube for wadding and sent aloft to shower its last smoldering remains onto the grounds of what used to be a state park but which will have become a tent city operated by a for-profit prison company called "Freedom Isn't Free" on behalf of bankrupted people with pre-existing conditions, where the sulphurous smell of the smoking Declaration will have delighted the nostrils of a 2-year-old chasing lightning bugs and listening to her pre-existing brain-tumored, insolvent grandfather rave about the Martian colony's revolt against the USA Space Usurpation: hadn't he seen it coming, he will have raved, because <i>who didn't fucking know</i> that going into a fiscal hole for imperial military adventurism is the root cause of all revolutions? But, he will have already known that, believed that, said that, long before his death throes, which will not have been long off at that point when he was sobbing: what could you expect from people who didn't even know that it used to be, once upon a time, right there in the D. of I. that government had a purpose! A higher calling, as it were! As it <i>might</i> have been! And what was it? What <i>might</i> it have been? "Can <i>nobody</i> tell me?" the grandfather will have sobbed at the sky as the smoldering bits will have showered down. "Chapter and verse! Tell me, slaves of the American Empire! What is the trinity of government?" And what answer will he have heard as his grand-daughter will have gone skittering around after the smoking paper hoping for lightning bugs? Rapid-fire silence behind the smoke. Nothing of securing rights, nothing of safety, nothing of happiness.<br />
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No more bang. Whimper. By then it will have been almost time for Independence Day.<br />
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<br />Judhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08637142478301778376noreply@blogger.com0