Rightwing Book Bans On the Rise

By Robin Bates | Published: November 11, 2021
Robert Darnton, Censors at Work

Friday

It stands to reason that, following their war with America’s scientists and doctors, America’s rightwing would next go after teachers and school librarians. One assault is occurring in the Goddard School District in Kansas, which has directed its school libraries not to check out 29 books, including Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer-prize winning drama Fences.

KMUW reports that Julie Cannizzo, Goddard’s assistant superintendent for academic affairs in Goddard, sent out the following e-mail along with the list:

“At this time, the district is not in a position to know if the books contained on this list meet our educational goals or not,” Cannizzo wrote in the email. “Additionally, we need to gain a better understanding of the processes utilized to select books for our school libraries.

“For these reasons, please do not allow any of these books to be checked out while we are in the process of gathering more information. If a book on this list is currently checked out, please do (not) allow it to be checked out again once it’s returned.”

According to KMUW, the e-mail also noted that

the district is assembling a committee to “rate the content of the books on the list” and to review the selection process. She did not say how long the process is expected to take.

Here’s the complete list:

#MurderTrending by Gretchen McNeil
All Boys Aren’t Blue, George M. Johnson
Anger Is a Gift, Mark Oshiro
Black Girl Unlimited, Echo Brown
Blended, Sharon M. Draper
Crank, Ellen Hopkins
Fences, August Wilson
A Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe
Heavy, Kaise Laymon
Lawn Boy, Jonathan Evison
Lily and Dunkin, Donna Gephart
Living Dead Girl, Elizabeth Scott
Monday’s Not Coming, Tiffany D. Jackson
Out of Darkness, Ashley Hope Perez
Satanism, Tamara L. Roleff
The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives, Dashka Slater
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, Heidi W. Durrow
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
 The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, adapted by Renee Nault
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
The Testaments, Margaret Atwood
They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group, Susan Campbell Bertoletti
The Book Is Gay, James Dawson
This One Summer (graphic novel), Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard, Alex Bertie

Given the apparent success of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s attack on Morrison’s Beloved, I fully expect such lists to become the norm in Republican districts across the country. The trend also makes a lot of sense: if your intention is to take down America’s Enlightenment project, then few things stand in your way more than public education, public libraries, and novels.

In some ways, I’m amazed that teachers and school libraries have gotten away with offering these books for as long as they have. Literature, as I said in a recent post, is like a loaded gun, with the potential to shatter myths and stereotypes. For parents who want to turn out young people exactly like themselves—who think and behave exactly like they do—novels and poems are the enemy. Educators have been handling literary dynamite for a while now, and until recently, parental indifference—at least the indifference of certain parents—has been their friend. English teachers have been seen as just teaching stories, and what harm can stories do?

All that may be about to change as we see educators (I include librarians under that label) suffering the same attacks as medical professionals. Who knew that recommending a mask to protect others would suddenly have angry citizens shouting, “We know where you live!”? Doctors and nurses, like climate scientists before them, have learned that they can’t stay aloof from politics. When your very approach to the world is seen as political, then you have to figure out how to be political in return. The key is to be smart about it.

In some ways, the problem is that educators have become more responsive to kids’ needs, as have the authors of many of the books being banned. When I was a child and a teenager, our teachers didn’t concern themselves with the books we needed to negotiate life’s challenges. They assigned canonical texts which, because they had been written long ago, weren’t seen as having much to do with actual life. Literature was a comfortably boring subject.

Now, however, we are living in the golden age of Young Adult Fiction, and one finds novels exploring every aspect of teenage life—and often getting attacked and even banned as a result. Add to this how much more complicated the world has become and the conditions are ripe for parents lashing out. They are afraid of the world their children are entering, even as their children are hungry for the information that these novels provide.

I wrote recently about a Texas legislator compiling a list of 800+ books that he wants investigated, including John Irving’s Cider House Rules. He’ll want banned any books that

contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

To that story we can now add another, this one in northern Virginia, where school board members want books not only banned but burned. The Washington Post reports,

 Shortly after the election result in Virginia, a pair of conservative school board members in the same state proposed not just banning certain books deemed to be sexually explicit, but burning them.

As the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star reported Tuesday:

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.

“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

Abuismail reportedly added that allowing one particular book to remain on the shelves even briefly meant the schools “would rather have our kids reading gay pornography than about Christ.”

Do you remember the good old days when Republicans excoriated a publisher for choosing not to continue publishing certain obscure Doctor Seuss books for their racist caricatures. Lambasting liberals for “cancel culture” was all the rage then. America’s rightwing extremists, it’s now clear, have never believed in free speech. They’re willing to allow only speech that agrees with them.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Death Has Made Me Wise, Bitter, Strong

By Robin Bates | Published: November 10, 2021
Kyffin Williams, The Old Soldier

Thursday – Veterans Day

Judge Walter Kurtz, my tennis partner and a decorated Vietnam vet, joked the other day about his children calling him on Memorial Day. “You’re supposed to call me on Veterans Day,” he tells them. “Do you want me dead?”

On Memorial Day we honor our fallen military, on Veterans Day those who are still alive.

World War I veteran Siegfried Sassoon has a powerful memory poem where he contrasts life before and after he witnessed death in the trenches. The fact that, in the second stanza, he sounds like an old man, even though he was only 31 when he wrote the poem, tells us all we need to know. Death has ripped away his innocence and, while it has made him wiser and stronger, it has also made him bitter. Whereas once he reveled /gay and feckless as a colt/
Out in the fields, with morning in the may,” now he asks to be brought

the darkness and the nightingale;
Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home,
And silence; and the faces of my friends.

I’m thinking that poet Dylan Thomas was inspired by Sassoon’s childhood memories, echoing them in his “Poem in October” (which I wrote about recently). Sassoon was an admirer of Wales, so maybe that played a role in the Welsh poet’s allusion.

And as with Thomas, the mood turns dark. Sassoon isn’t certain that he will in fact achieve peace of home, silence, and memory of his friends. His heart is “heavy-laden” and his dreams are burning away.

Memory
By Siegfried Sassoon

When I was young my heart and head were light,
And I was gay and feckless as a colt
Out in the fields, with morning in the may,
Wind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom.
O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free
And all the paths led on from hawthorn-time
Across the caroling meadows into June.

But now my heart is heavy-laden. I sit
Burning my dreams away beside the fire:
For death has made me wise and bitter and strong;
And I am rich in all that I have lost.
O starshine on the fields of long-ago,
Bring me the darkness and the nightingale;
Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home,
And silence; and the faces of my friends.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Poetry for Couples Counseling

By Robin Bates | Published: November 9, 2021
Couple Quarreling, from John Bull Magazine (1950s)

Wednesday

As I continue to reflect on Thor Tangeras’s Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences (see my previous posts here, here and here), I’ve just had a realization: if I respond so strongly to Tangeras analyzing life-changing reading experiences, it’s because it’s what I used to do with my students. It’s the part of my teaching that I miss the most.

Today I report on Tangas’s interview of a Norwegian psychotherapist who said that an Ingrid Hagerup poem changed the way she understood her parents’ constant quarreling. I also helped launch her decision to study psychology. Here’s the poem:

Episode

Theirs was not a quarrel, not in the slightest.
Of course not, he said. – Thank you for the meal.
And though their polite words were uttered lightly
They gleamed with old hate under icy seal.

You are welcome, was all that she replied.
She pushed the chair up to the table, intending
With narrow mouth and lips so firmly tied
To build a fence behind her words, unbending.

They stood silent for a moment, on guard,
Both searching for new weapons, the most searing
phrase conceivable, to be thrust so hard,
A poisoned dagger-blade through love’s woof tearing.

She felt venomous words well up inside.
A yellow delight at the thought of harming
Him rose up in her so ruthless and snide.
Then fingers fumbled through his hair, disarming

Her – and now, suddenly, her eyes were filling
In a powerless, inexplicable pain.
She sensed deep beneath all the hate so chilling
The tensed cord from his heart to hers again.

Esther said that the poem, which she read in school as a 17-year-old, it gave her insight into “the complexity and contraries of my parents’ terrible marriage.” She recalls the moment with Tangeras::

I had an instant illumination: ‘Yes, this is them! Two forsaken people.’ ‘Oh, my God!, is that how it is?’ And I also thought: ‘So I am not the only one to have experienced something like this. It can’t be just them two who are like that. It must be universal.’ Yes, I realized that this experience must be common to all people. All of a sudden I could see them as they were, as human beings. As two vulnerable people. That there was a reason why they were like that. And that there was a depth there; something went on beneath the surface behavior. I could see this, because the poem describes precisely how they would act….

A realization went through me: ‘poor mum and dad. They must be suffering so.’ The poem helped me over – into that experience.

And further on:

All this I began to understand then, although that would take many years and I had to move out and start my own life. Which I did as soon as I could. Because it was still a burden to live in the conflict zone between my parents. Her silence and anger, and having to listen to all her moaning and complaining about how awful he was. He was almost frightened of his wife, he was. And she would scream at him what a coward he was. We had to cover our ears on occasions, to protect ourselves.

The turning point in the poem occurs when the wife sees the husband fumbling with his hair:

Thor: In the poem it says ‘and suddenly …” It’s the language of the body. He is despairing.
Esther: When he, he puts his hand to his head, yes, and strokes his fingers through his hair. Then suddenly she becomes aware that he is not out to hurt her. He doesn’t understand much either, and really he feels quite helpless, doesn’t he. And so she no longer feels the urge to say the poisonous things she had intended to.

The metaphor of the tensed cord also leads to a fascinating insight:

Thor: What about that tensed cord? It can only be pulled so far?
Esther: Yes, but that’s when they feel – and this is something that I only thought much later, not when I  first read it  – what she feels then is the emotional tie between the two, which is a tie that holds them, it has not been torn asunder despite all the pain they have undergone. And that is what I realized was the case with my parents too…Thor: I find it fascinating how she has this sudden insight in the poem, and you have a sudden insight about your parents when reading this.
Esther: They were in need of compassion. That’s what I suddenly understood. They weren’t to blame for it! There was love there. And this love was very hard to understand for a young person. Is this love, all the shouting and the silences and the black, black moods? Can there really be something warm, true goodness, underneath it all? Yes, there was. And that’s when I realized: ‘There is a good reason why they are together.’ It has helped me ever since. When I have been working with couples who apparently hate each other’s guts, when one of them screams: ‘I hate you!’ – I never believe that to be the case. That affect is a form of camouflage emotion. ‘Deep below hatred and cold’ there is that emotional chord that binds them.

The truth delivered by poetry never ceases to amaze me.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Great Novels Tell Uncomfortable Truths

By Robin Bates | Published: November 8, 2021

Tuesday

I’ve written a couple of times about Glenn Youngkin’s attack on Beloved (here and here), which may have helped him win the Virginia governorship, but I want to make one final point. Because Toni Morrison’s novel is in fact social dynamite, it makes sense that those “tap-dancing” with white supremacy (that’s the phrasing of MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart) would be disturbed when their children are assigned it.

But at least those parents acknowledge that stories are powerful. I saw historian Michael Beschloss the other night on MSNBC observe that the incident is overblown because Beloved is only fiction. In saying so, he underestimates the disruptive potential of novels. Indeed, Beloved is meant to disturb readers, Black as well as White. Great literature is often great because it disturbs.

As I reflect on this, an interchange from the Lawrence Kasdan film Grand Canyon (1991) comes to mind, one that I mention in my book. Danny Glover, in the role of auto mechanic, is confronted by a gun-wielding gang leader while attempting to help stranded motorist Kevin Kline. Asked by the man whether he respects him or not, Glover replies, “You ain’t got the gun, we ain’t having this conversation.” One reason why schools are having conversations about Beloved (and why certain schools have also banned Morrison’s Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon) is because Morrison’s fiction is like a loaded gun that could go off at any moment, shattering complacency.

This is a point made by a recent Washington Post column, written before the Virginia election. After reading about the boy—now a Republican operative—who “gave up” on the novel because it was “gross” and hard to handle, African American columnist Cristine Emba recalls her own high school encounter with it:

I was also asked to read Beloved in a high school English class, also in Virginia — Richmond, to be precise. It was a hard read. You felt bad. It was also an illuminating corrective, studied against the Virginia backdrop of Robert E. Lee worship, Stonewall Jackson fetishization, and the plantations where enslaved people, we heard in our history classes, worked mostly happily for noble, caring masters.

Beloved in her case proved to be life-changing:

The novel taught me the power of literature, how words could transmit deep emotion. It did keep me up at night, because I was grappling with the pain of another person, wondering how someone could get to such a place, how people could do these things to one another. The gory details of the book fled my mind in the ensuing years. But the feeling — I never forgot it.

Rightwing Americans, Emba says, fear facing up to the past into which Morrison plunges them. And she does so in ways they never forget:

They fear it because examining our racial history, engaging in empathy for the enslaved and their descendants, might occasion a bit of guilt, a bit of knowledge that our national mythology (and its embedded racial hierarchy) is false, and a bit of responsibility to address racial inequality. It might occasion a bit of change, in short — and we can’t have that.

Youngkin’s promise to Virginiains, in other words, was “Elect me and your kids will never be forced to confront uncomfortable issues”:

In Virginia, all of this hides under a dad-like candidate in a fleecy vest, and in the beseeching eyes of a suburban mom protecting her little boy from books that made lawmakers turn “bright red with embarrassment.” But it is obvious from the segregationist history of “parents’ rights” discourse — and in the particular parts of curriculums most frequently opposed — what the real agenda is.

The problem with avoiding fearful issues is that we don’t so much escape them as push them under, which in turn renders them toxic. Facing up to them is how to break their hold over us, and doing so through novels is one of the most powerful means we have for doing so.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments closed

No Flowers, No Leaves, November

By Robin Bates | Published: November 7, 2021
Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day

Monday

November is often a tough time for people who grapple with depression, but many of the poems about the season at least let them know they’re not alone. I’ve shared dark autumn poems by Mallarme and Mary Oliver in the past (here) and have a couple more poems to add to the list.

First, there’s the 19th century poet Thomas Hood brightening up November’s dark aspects with a playful final punchline:

November
By Thomas Hood

No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon –
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! –
November!

Amy Lowell has her own dark November moods, during which time she reports being abandoned by her own cat (!):

November
By Amy Lowell

The vine leaves against the brick walls of my house,
Are rusty and broken.
Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees,
The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes
Sweep against the stars.
And I sit under a lamp
Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart.
Even the cat will not stay with me,
But prefers the rain
Under the meagre shelter of a cellar window.

Finally, Rita Dove figures out how to handle the month in “November for Beginners.” The secret: step into the gloom, whether by memorizing “a gloomy line or two of German” or essentially telling the season to bring it on, with its rain and wind. There’s an echo in the poem of King Lear commanding the elements not to spare him:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You can dream of spring all you want, Dove tells us. In the meantime, however, embrace the darkness:

November for Beginners
By Rita Dove

Snow would be the easy
way out—that softening
sky like a sigh of relief
at finally being allowed
to yield. No dice.
We stack twigs for burning
in glistening patches
but the rain won’t give.

So we wait, breeding
mood, making music
of decline. We sit down
in the smell of the past
and rise in a light
that is already leaving.
We ache in secret,
memorizing

a gloomy line
or two of German.
When spring comes
we promise to act
the fool. Pour,
rain! Sail, wind
with your cargo of zithers!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Birds on His Shoulders, Faith in His Hands

By Robin Bates | Published: November 6, 2021
St. Francis

All Saints Sunday

Today we remember our dead and turn back our clocks. Both are included in Dionisio D. Martinez’s “Standard Time: Novena for My Father,” a tender prayer poem directed to the speaker’s deceased father.

Early on, wind chimes remind the speaker of his parent, leading him to work “All Hallows Eve” and other names for the day into a little ditty. These thoughts of death lead him to Saint Francis, who in addition to welcoming birds embraced “Sister Death.” By not living in fear of death—this is what Martinez means by Francis “having nothing but faith in his hands”— Francis believed we could open ourselves fully to God.

Having sat all day with a statue of Francis, the poet no longer needs to hear the wind chimes to imagine his father as present. He thinks of Francis’s birds as dead souls (night birds), which

breathe music back into the wind chimes when
the forecast calls for stillness.

I must admit to difficulties with the next two stanzas, even though I love some of the imagery. Here they are:

I still remember what you said about belief,
how you laughed when I said I thought
the world could carry the cross I’d carved
around my shoulder and through my fist.

The world is busy with its clocks and its
wind chimes and the night birds that never fly
home once they learn the secret of exile.

Perhaps, thinking back to his disagreements with his father over belief, he now questions his need for tangible evidence. When he says, in the first of the stanzas, that the only thing he believed in was what he could carry on his shoulders and accomplish with his fist—he believed more in the crucifixion than the resurrection—his father laughed at him. Unlike the senior Martinez, the son doesn’t have St. Francis’s faith, which draws birds, not heavy world responsibilities, to his shoulders.

Similarly, if he is still obsessed with resetting clocks and finding signs of his father in wind chimes and imagined night birds, then he has yet to achieve the faith. But I’m still puzzled about what he means by “secret of exile,” even though I love the phrase. Is he saying that his father, once having flown to God, would not fly home again? And is the poet, having thought that he detected the presence of his father, now wondering if it just been an illusion? After all, why would a bird fly home after having discovered the secret of eternity?

The questioning takes me back to three successive Sundays after my eldest son died. Each time, as Julia and I stood atop the churchyard bluff looking down at where Justin had drowned, an osprey landed in the tree above us and stayed there until we left some twenty minutes later. It provided us comfort at a very dark time, a seeming sign from Justin, but I can understand Martinez’s doubts.

Incidentally, the 17th century metaphysical poet uses the same flown bird image to contrast the earthly and the spiritual in “They are all gone into the world of light”:

Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust
Could man outlook that mark!

He that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest, may know
At first sight, if the bird be flown;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now,
That is to him unknown.

Returning to Martinez’s poem, in the next stanza he emits an “almost musical sigh” after lighting a votive candle. If we have no other contact, maybe you can at least hear this, the poet says to his father. Then he launches unexpectedly into hell imagery.

Perhaps “all the souls in hell” represent materialist doubt in the divine—that’s partly what hell is for Dante—because Martinez indicates the weapons these souls use to plunge us into hell (“set the world on fire”) are mathematics and equations. Despite their efforts, however, they cannot prevail over the way we “cling to the last flame in the equation.” That flame could be both the candle Martinez lights before his father’s picture or and the Pentecostal flame, where the Holy Spirit entered us after Jesus departed the world.

In other words, when we lose a loved one and all the world is dark, when we doubt an afterlife because it makes no rational sense, some small flame of hope persists. Its ability to override our doubts is all the more impressive.

Standard Time: Novena for My Father

By Dionisio D. Martinez

We’re turning back the clocks tonight
to live an hour longer.
I suppose this is a useless ritual to you now.

Late October brings life to the wind chimes
with that perpetually nocturnal music
so reminiscent of you.

I memorize a small song, a seasonable dirge
for the night that lives outside my
window. I call each note by name:
All Hallows Eve; All Saints Day; all the souls
in my music pacing, talking to themselves.

All day I sit by the statue of Saint
Francis of Assisi, birds on his shoulders,
nothing but faith in his hands.

At dusk I return to the house you knew
and a life you would probably understand.
There are night birds waiting to
breathe music back into the wind chimes when
the forecast calls for stillness.

I still remember what you said about belief,
how you laughed when I said I thought
the world could carry the cross I’d carved
around my shoulder and through my fist.

The world is busy with its clocks and its
wind chimes and the night birds that never fly
home once they learn the secret of exile.

I let out one sigh that is almost musical.
I know you can hear this much.
I take a small step back and picture
you here before I light the last candle.

All the souls in hell couldn’t set this world
on fire. Even if they prove that our lives
are mathematically impossible, we
will cling to the last flame in the equation.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

On Revisiting Intense Experiences

By Robin Bates | Published: November 4, 2021
The Wye River

Friday

I hope readers will indulge another reflection upon my return to my alma mater Carleton College this past weekend, where I participated in 50th reunion planning. I discussed my mixed feelings about the school on Monday but didn’t mention my meaningful encounters with former classmates. In one of the English language’s greatest poems about revisiting old haunts, Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey talks about the importance of having someone with whom to share intense memories.

Given the power of Wordsworth’s trip down Memory Lane, I’ve always found it funny that the poem memorializes a fifth-year reunion, maybe the least dramatic of all reunions (it stands in stark contrast with the 50th). Maybe, given Wordsworth’s intensity, five years for him is 50 for anyone else. In any event, the year is 1798 and Wordsworth is returning to a spot “a few miles above Tintern Abbey…on the Banks of the Wye” that he first visited in 1793 at the age of 22.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

Since then, the poet has carried the scene and the accompanying sensations with him wherever he has gone:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration…

Nor is that all the remembrance does for him. Because he recollects so deeply, he has an out-of-body experience:

To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Wordsworth acknowledges that not everyone will have a mystical experience when looking back, and I must admit that my Carleton memories have not put me in touch with the divine. What Wordsworth says about his intense nature moments, on the other hand, resonates with me. In Tuesday’s post I recounted how Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October” took me back to experiences with Julia in Carleton’s Arboretum, and the following Tintern Abbey passage also captures the heightened emotions that I remember:

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led…
                                                         For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love…

Contributing to my own “glad animal movements” was the pulsating animal poetry of D. H. Lawrence, one of which (the sexually explicit “Tortoise Shout”) Julia and I included in our Commencement-day wedding.

I promised this post would be about reunions as shared experience, however, so I turn now to where Wordsworth talks about the importance of having a companion. His sister Dorothy accompanies him on this second visit, and he now looks at the scene through her eyes. To continue with my reunion theme, he resembles the parents who, Carleton graduates themselves, want their children to have the Carleton experience:

For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! 

Sounding like someone who is my age (70) rather than 27, Wordsworth hopes that his sister’s memories will help him hang on to his own. “When these wild ecstasies shall be matured/ Into a sober pleasure,” writes the still young William to Dorothy, your mind will be

a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies…

Because they share the moment, the poet concludes, this magical spot on the Wye River will always be special. Or as he puts it,

                              Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

When I attended my 40th reunion ten years ago, my classmates sharing their varied life experiences revealed how much we had been shaped by both Carleton and the early 1970s. Despite differences, we all carried with us a similar vision of life because we had all used our liberal arts education to negotiate the same historical forces—those being the Vietnam War, the protest movement, the racial strife, and the Nixon White House. I have always told my students that, to understand an author’s vision, look at the world when he or she was 21. One can apply that lesson to college reunion classes as well.

The planning committee came up with a logo and a slogan for the reunion that captures what we share. There is a sketch of Carleton’s landmark “Hill of the Three Oaks,” the three individual trees having their roots intertwined below ground. The slogan will probably be, “Shared Journeys, Deep Roots.”

As I have just been reading Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a sublime novel about trees and humans, I can see the theme to be even better than I would previously have thought. Powers lets us know that, even when trees appear separate, they are actually joined in complex ways, sometimes through root systems, sometimes via the chemicals they send off. For instance, here’s his botanist Patricia Westerford responding to an aspen forest:

The oldest downed trees are about eighty years. She smiles at the number, so comical, for these fifty thousand baby trees all around her have sprouted from a rhizome mass too old to date even to the nearest hundred millennia. Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they’re a day. She wouldn’t be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years.

And here are maples communicating through the air:

Confirmation comes the following spring. Three more trials, and she’s convinced. The trees under attack pump out insecticides to save their lives. That much is uncontroversial. But something else in the data makes her flesh pucker: trees a little way off, untouched by the invading swarms, ramp up their own defenses when their neighbor is attacked. Something alerts them. They get wind of the disaster, and they prepare. She controls for everything she can, and the results are always the same. Only one conclusion makes any sense. The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.

As she writes up her results, Westerford observes,

The biochemical behavior of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community.

Our own lives make more sense if we see ourselves as members of a common experience. When this experience occurs at one of the most impressionable moments of our lives, it’s important for the members to reassemble and ritually revisit it. I didn’t think this when I was closer to Wordsworth’s 27 years—in fact, I avoided all reunions until the 25th—but I think it now.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

First They Came for Toni Morrison, Then…

By Robin Bates | Published: November 3, 2021

Thursday

I don’t know the degree to which attacks on Toni Morrison’s Beloved contributed to the GOP’s victories in Virginia Tuesday night. To the extent that education was a voting issue, I suspect the Democrats’ losses had more to do with people feeling unhappy about continuing Covid-caused chaos in the schools, for which they blamed the party in power. But Republican Glenn Youngkin was definitely employing racist dog whistles, which apparently never get old in American politics. The trick is to attack Black people while pretending to care about public safety or children’s education or some other noble cause.

Nevertheless, the idea that any literature that makes students “uncomfortable” is now red meat for aspiring rightwing politicians is disturbing. It leaves teachers and school administrators hunkering down, hoping to fly beneath the radar as Trumpists go looking for something to sink their teeth into.

Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri, thankfully, offers us a little levity. Before the election, she imagined what school reading lists would look like if (as in fact has happened) Youngkin were elected governor. The column begins cheerfully:

Hello, everyone! We’re going to have a great year! Some minor, barely noticeable adjustments to the curriculum have taken place since Glenn Youngkin took office. This is a college-level class in which we’re supposed to be tackling challenging material. But you may remember the Glenn Youngkin commercial starring the mother who was trying to stop “Beloved” from being taught in her senior son’s AP English class on the grounds that he thought it was “disgusting and gross” and “gave up on it.” Anyway, he supported that kind of parental control over the curriculum, so we’ve had to tweak just a couple of things!

Now for some of her imagined tweaks:

Below please find our reading list new and improved reading list after being forced to bend to every concern from a parent:
—The Odyssey mutilation and abuse of alcohol, blood drinking
–Brideshead Revisited not sure what’s going on with that teddy bear; house named after something that should be saved for marriage
–The Handmaid’s Tale everything about book was fine except its classification as ‘dystopia’
–The Catcher in the Rye anti-Ronald Reagan somehow though we’re not sure how
–The Importance of Being Earnest includes a disturbing scene where a baby is abandoned in a train station in a handbag and the people in the play regard this as the subject of mirth
–Candide buttock cannibalism
–Don Quixote makes fun of somebody for attacking a wind-or-solar-based energy source
–Great Expectations convict presented sympathetically
–Les Miserables see above
–King Lear violence and it’s suggested that there are scenarios where parents actually do not know best
–The Sun Also Rises offensive to flat-Earthers
–Death of a Salesman features a White man to whom attention is not paid

The mother who led the attack on Beloved said that the book gave her son nightmares. Yes, literature is filled with nightmare-inducing scenes. Once scene Petri may have in mind is this one from Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops:

Neither reply nor pity came from him,
but in one stride he clutched at my companions
and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies
to beat their brains out, spattering the floor.
Then he dismembered them and made his meal,
gaping and crunching like a mountain lion–
everything: innards, flesh, and marrow bones.
We cried aloud, lifting our hands to Zeus,
powerless, looking on at this appalled;
but Kyklops went on filling up his belly
with manflesh and great gulps of whey,
then lay down like a mast among his sheep.

I remember, as a high school student, reading this scene with horrified fascination. I also was riveted by Raskolnikov taking an axe to the old lady in Crime and Punishment. I gazed in horror as Milton’s Satan rapes his own daughter (Sin), who thereupon gives birth to Death, who then rapes his own mother, blasting her vagina and giving birth to hounds who live there, howling incessantly. And then there was Oedipus, who when he learns he has committed both patricide and incest blinds himself with his mother/wife’s brooches.

We’re trying to figure people out in our teenage years, and we get a sense of humanity’s darker side when we encounter such works. We read and we survive. High schoolers are tough that way. Our parents, however, although normally silent, swing into action when race and sex are involved.

If “student discomfort” is the new criteria about whether certain books should be taught, then we are indeed on a slippery slope. Petri makes this clear in her conclusion:

Nope, sorry, we aren’t reading anymore. A parent complained that the books on the reading list transported them to different times and places against their will and forced them to imagine the lives of people different than themselves. This is like kidnapping and probably also brainwashing, and we can’t possibly read any texts that do this.

We’re looking forward to engaging with complex, challenging texts that will teach us to read critically, write compellingly and look at the world with new eyes sitting here staring at the wall thinking about what it might have been like to read books all semester long!

When parents “protect” their kids against these books, they risk turning them into frightened adults who fear tough conversations and retreat into reactionary, fear-based politics. The nation is impoverished when this happens.

Further note: Lest you think I exaggerate about the passage from Paradise Lost, here is an excerpt. Sin is explaining to her father Satan what happened after he raped her and she gave birth to Death. First, here’s Milton’s description of her:

The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair,               
But ended foul in many a scaly fold,
Voluminous and vast–a serpent armed
With mortal sting. About her middle round
A cry of Hell-hounds never-ceasing barked
With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb,
And kennel there; yet there still barked and howled
Within unseen.

And now for her birthing story, which is a delivery table nightmare

“At last this odious offspring whom thou seest,
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way,
Tore through my entrails, that, with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transformed: but he my inbred enemy
Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
Made to destroy. I fled, and cried out Death!
Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded Death!
I fled; but he pursued (though more, it seems,
Inflamed with lust than rage), and, swifter far,
Me overtook, his mother, all dismayed,
And, in embraces forcible and foul
Engendering with me, of that rape begot
These yelling monsters, that with ceaseless cry
Surround me, as thou saw’st–hourly conceived
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me; for, when they list, into the womb
That bred them they return, and howl, and gnaw
My bowels, their repast; then, bursting forth
Afresh, with conscious terrors vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.
Before mine eyes in opposition sits.

The endlessly proliferating hounds are a powerful expression of how sin endlessly engenders sin. I’ve never heard of parents objecting to English teachers teaching the episode.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Holding on to Our Imperiled Humanity

By Robin Bates | Published: November 2, 2021
Eero Jarnefelt, “Portrait of Arvid Jarnefelt” (Finland, 1888)

Wednesday

My friend Rebecca Adams alerted me to an American Scholar article in which a retired English professor, James A. W. Heffernan, makes a compelling case for the humanities: without literature, he contends, we lose touch with our humanity.

The article begins with the latest alarming stats on literature majors:

The Summer 2021 newsletter of the Modern Language Association reports a troubling statistic about American colleges and universities: from 2009 to 2019, the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded in modern languages and literature has plunged by 29 percent. “Where Have All the Majors Gone?” asks the article. 

Then  Heffernan asks a question very much in the spirit of this blog:

But here’s a more pragmatic question: what sort of dividends does the study of literature pay, out there in the real world?

Is literature the ideal major for future entrepreneurs? Heffernan considers the question and decides no. On the plus side, he says, there are the 15 different perspectives that one encounters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which theoretically prepares one to

develop the kind of adaptability that it takes to succeed in business, where the budding entrepreneur must learn how to satisfy customers with various needs and where he or she must also be ever ready to adapt to changing needs and changing times.

Heffernan, however, then counters,

If all you want is entrepreneurial adaptability, you can probably gain it much more efficiently by going to business school. You don’t need a novel by Faulkner—or anyone else.

I’m going to disagree with Heffernan here. My eldest son, who majored in Theatre, is very entrepreneurial, even though he has never taken a business course. Darien is in charge of all internal and external communications for a thriving company, and a major part of his job is figuring out what other people need and how to mediate between different departments to get the best out of everyone. When he was acting in college productions, he wasn’t thinking that this is how he would put his major to use, but he now reports that he uses his theatre training every day at work.

I also reject Heffernan’s next argument, which which is that majoring in literature makes you a better writer. Again, he first gives a pro answer before following it up with a con. Here’s the argument for:

To study literature is not just to see the rules of grammar at work but to discover such things as the symmetry of parallel structure and the concentrated burst of metaphor: two prime instruments of organization. Henry Adams once wrote that “nothing in education is more astonishing than the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Literature shows us how to animate facts, and still more how to make them cooperate, to work and dance together toward revelation.

Now the con:

Yet literature can be highly complex. Given its complexity, given all the ways in which poems, plays, and novels resist as well as provoke our desire to know what they mean, the study of literature once again invites the charge of inefficiency. If you just want to know how to make the written word get you a job, make you a sale, or charm a venture capitalist, you don’t need to study the gnomic verses of Emily Dickinson or the intricate ironies of Jonathan Swift. All you need is a good textbook on writing and plenty of practice.

I take even stronger exception to this than I did to the first point and use my own life as an example. My first fulltime job following graduation was as a journalist for a small-town newspaper. I started behind where I would have been had I majored in journalism. But having seen many different forms of writing in my history major and English minor, I learned very quickly the style I needed for this one. In very short order, I was writing 10-20 articles a week. Indeed, my whole life has involved adapting to new writing challenges, including composing a daily blog.

Heffernan next mentions literature teaching us “moral lessons” (argument for) but asks what kind of moral can be extracted from the death of Cordelia in King Lear (argument against). Having made the point, however, he then goes on to argue that literature helps us hold on to our humanity when we are at risk of losing it.

His case is that, because literature captures humans in all their complexity, it can both offer us a refuge from the world’s inhumanity and help us confront it, often in complex and contradictory ways. This is a view I endorse wholeheartedly. Here he is making his argument:

As a refuge from such horrors, literature can offer us visions or at least glimpses of beauty, harmony, and love. They are part of what Seamus Heaney called “the redress of poetry”—compensation for the misery, cruelty, and brutality that human beings ceaselessly inflict on one another. But literature at its most powerful is never just a balloon ride to fantasy, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. Rather than taking flight from our inhumanity, great literature confronts it even while somehow keeping alive its faith in our humanity. What is the moral of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the story of a formerly enslaved Black woman who killed her own infant daughter to spare her from a life of slavery and sexual exploitation? In a world of merciless inhumanity, can infanticide become an expression of love?

This is the kind of question literature insists on asking. At the heart of the humanities lies humanity, which stubbornly insists on measuring everything in terms of its impact on human life.

Heffernan goes on to mention Robert Oppenheimer’s opposition to the further development of nuclear warfare after having been a key figure in the invention of the atom bomb. The article could have strengthened its case by mentioning the profound influence that the poetry of George Herbert had upon the scientist. I have written about that here.

The article concludes by turning to Albert Camus’s The Plague, which Heffernan sees as capturing the struggle to hold on to our humanity, even when everything seems out to destroy it. He quotes the doctor who does all he can to save lives, even though the situation appears hopeless:

“Despite their personal afflictions,” he says, [the war against terror] must be waged “by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”

Heffernan concludes,

Having spent trillions of dollars fighting terrorism with bullets and bombs, we need literature and the humanities now more than ever, because they strive to heal, to nurture the most priceless of all our possessions: our humanity.

My only argument with Heffernan is that, after having asked what dividends literature pays out, he offers only this one. Immense though it may be, it will not reverse the slide in English majors. After all, if you need literature to persuade people that they are at risk of losing their humanity, then how are you going to persuade non-readers of their peril in the first place? You need multiple incentives to get people to read.

I’m for an all-of-the-above approach. Yes, literature will help you succeed in the work world; yes, it will make you a more effective communicator—and yes, it will help you become more fully human in a world that is in desperate need of three-dimensional humans.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed