Better Living through Beowulf

Silko Foresaw Arizona’s Water Crisis

By Robin Bates | Published: January 22, 2023

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Monday

The apocalyptic future that Laguna Pueblo novelist Leslie Marmon Silko predicted for Arizona in 1991 is coming to pass. Actually, Silko makes a lot of dire predictions in her dystopian novel Almanac of the Dead, and some are closer to being actualized in 2023 than others. And perhaps it doesn’t take a genius writer like Silko to foretell that the state would one day have water problems.

The particular development I have in mind involves Scottsdale, located on the outskirts of Phoenix, cutting off water to some of its border communities. As the Washington Post reported,

On Jan. 1, the city of Scottsdale, which gets the majority of its water from the Colorado River, cut off Rio Verde Foothills from the municipal water supply that it has relied on for decades. The result is a disorienting and frightening lack of certainty about how residents will find enough water as their tanks run down in coming weeks, with a bitter political feud impacting possible solutions.

The reason: A historic drought has led to shrinking reservoirs and “unprecedented restrictions in usage of the Colorado River.”

Oblivious to such a future, however, for decades residents have been gobbling up land in the Sonora Desert, leading poet Richard Shelton to lament (in “Requiem for Sonora”),

men are coming inland to you
soon they will make you the last resort
for tourists who have
nowhere else to go
what will become of the coyote
with eyes of topaz
moving silently to his undoing
the ocotillo
flagellant of the wind
the deer climbing with dignity
further into the mountains
the huge delicate saguaro
what will become of those who cannot learn
the terrible knowledge of cities

In Silko’s novel, Tucson has a particularly irresponsible realtor who dreams of constructing a green oasis in the desert. She will call it Venice and wants it to have the Italian city’s water associations, with canals, fountains, and lush golf courses. She pooh-poohs the idea of having special desert golf courses

No deserts in Venice, Arizona, not for an instant, and certainly not for eighteen holes of golf. Tucson had enough desert. It was ridiculous for longtime residents to try to pretend Tucson wasn’t any different from Phoenix or Orange county. People wanted to have water around them in the desert. People felt more confident and carefree when they could see water spewing out around them.

And in fact, desert golf courses don’t sit well with out-of-state visitors:

Even the celebrity golfers [Senator Max Blue] had brought around had been too tense and nervous to play well. The desert was too close for most of the Californians and New Yorkers. Texans could not swing their irons for fear of rattlers they imagined coiled on the fairway.

Leah, meanwhile, parrots what is a fairly common refrain for many in her profession:

Tell me they are using up all the water and I say: don’t worry. Because science will solve the water problem of the West. New technology. They’ll have to.”

In other words, it’s someone else’s problem.

Leah’s water ideas help her compete with giant home-building corporations that are pushing luxury communities. The novel explains that her “water gimmick”

had really worked in Scottsdale and Tempe. A scattering of pisspot fountains and cesspool lakes evoked memories of Missouri or New York or wherever the dumb shits had come from. Leah wanted Venice to live up to it name. She planned each detail carefully. No synthetic marble in the fountains. Market research had repeatedly found new arrivals in the desert were reassured by the splash of water. They are in the real estate business to make profits, not to save wildlife or save the desert. It was too late for the desert around Tucson anyway. Look at it. Pollution was already killing foothill paloverde trees all across the valley.

Leah’s elaborate plans involve purchasing deep-well rigs on the cheap from bankrupt Texas old-fields and tapping into the aquafer. Unfortunately for her, even with these rigs she can only get salt water. Still, being a realtor, she has a way of spinning setbacks:

Leah had not worried. If the canals and lakes of Venice, Arizona, ran with salter water that lent authenticity; salter water could be used to flush toilets. For drinking water, Leah would provide bottled glacier water from the Colorado Rockies.

In Silko’s dystopian future, however, the real estate market eventually collapses and Arizona depopulates and goes into bankruptcy. Nor is that all that goes wrong in the area. There are unstoppable mass migrations of Indian descendants moving northward, prepared to reclaim the land that the Whites took from them centuries ago. (Silko sees the 500 years of White domination as only a blip in the Indian timeline.) In Mexico, meanwhile, extreme income inequality has led to gated communities, which hire private armies to defend them against gangs while the country itself descends into civil war. In addition, America also has anarchistic hackers planning to take down its power grid. Whee!

But back to Arizona’s water troubles. In my recent visit to the Sonora, I saw only too clearly the reasons for Shelton’s despair. “Oh my desert,” he concludes in “Requiem to Sonora,” “yours is the only death I cannot bear.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "Requiem for Sonora", Almanac of the Dead, deserts, drought, Leslie Marmon Silko, Richard Shelton, Sonora Desert, water problems | Comments closed

Out of Pain We Feed This Feverish Plot

By Robin Bates | Published: January 21, 2023

Italian artist (Milan of Genoa), c. 1325, *Calling of Peter and Andrew*

Spiritual Sunday

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus calls upon Peter and Andrew to follow him and fish for people. I don’t know if Mary Oliver has this passage in mind in “The Fish,” but I wouldn’t be surprised. Much of Oliver’s power lies in the way she draws on the Christian narrative of death and resurrection.

First, here’s the relevant excerpt from the Gospel reading:

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

In “The Fish,” Oliver describes the agony of a dying fish, which appears to have traumatized her at a young age. I note that I had the same experience after watching my first fish gasp for life. Eating it later salvaged the situation somewhat but I stopped fishing after that.

In addition to the fish’s agony, however, Oliver also sees beauty in its death (“the slow pouring off of rainbows”). It is in the second half of the poem, however, where the parallels with Christ’s death and resurrection become apparent.

Getting ready to eat the fish, the poet echoes the Last Supper. Note first the ceremonial way she goes about preparing the moment:

Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him.

Or as the server says every Sunday when presenting us with the eucharist, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”

For Oliver, eating the fish is about much more than simple consumption. Rather, it puts her in touch with the great mysteries of creation. That process involves pain, as we know all too well, but it also moves us past our individual selves into something greater. Using such Biblically charged terms as “risen” and “fall,” Oliver writes,

Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea.

It is all part, she tells us, of a “feverish plot,” feverish working here as another word for passionate. “We are nourished,” she concludes, “by the mystery.”

In Oliver’s version of resurrection, however, we do not transcend our earthly existence but instead become more deeply immersed in it. Perhaps Oliver can be seen here as a Buddhist Christian—or Christian Buddhist—in that her epiphany is the deep knowledge that she is connected intimately with all the world. It is a connection that Ralph Waldo Emerson captures in “Each and All”:

As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird; —
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

Oliver differs only in acknowledging that pain too is involved in this yielding. Before the resurrection, in other words, comes the crucifixion. And indeed, it is the conjunction of pain, death, and greater union that nourishes us. In our death, just as in the fish’s death, we become part of something larger.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

The Fish
By Mary Oliver

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

“Nourished” is the perfect word here, merging the earthly and the spiritual. The risen Lord glitters within us.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "Each and All", "Fish", Fishers of People, Mary Oliver, Ralph Waldo Emerson | Comments closed

Books Banned Because They’re Powerful

By Robin Bates | Published: January 19, 2023

Banned books installation (on Nazi book-burning site) by Marta Minujin

Friday

The authoritarian right continues its onslaught against books with Virginia’s Madison County School Board last week removing 21 works from the high school library, including some high-quality titles. Here’s the list:

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Shatter Me series of 6 books by Tahereh Mafi (Defy Me, Ignite Me, Restore Me, Shatter Me, Imagine Me, Unravel Me)
Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Sula by Toni Morrison
Love by Toni Morrison
The Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
Empire of Storms by Sarah Maas
Bag of Bones by Stephen King
11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King
It by Stephen King
Furyborn by Claire Legrand

What kind of pattern can be found in the selections? Well, there are books about female empowerment (Handmaid’s Tale); about negotiating interracial relationships (Part-Time Indian, Tar Baby, Bluest Eye, Love, Snow Falling on Cedars); and about the turmoil of adolescence (Part-Time Indian, Perks). There are also gothic thrillers (the novels by Anne Rice and Stephen King) and sword and sorcery novels (Shatter Me, Empire of Storms, Furyborn).

I would imagine that relatively few of the Morrison novels get checked out—they are not easy reading—but American conservatives love to beat up on the one African American author to win the Nobel prize. As for the gothics and S&S novels, I suspect that someone saw young people having just too much fun reading them and so decided they were bad. This, after all, is what happened with the Harry Potter novels.

Recent political developments show us that we can no longer assume that teaching mind-expanding works in our classes will go unchallenged. With the rise of Trumpist authoritarianism, we should expect that certain people will object when we instruct our pupils in critical thinking skills. What we thought was settled teaching practice now appears to be something we must fight for.

As one who experienced first-hand the desegregation battles of the 1960s, I remember the moment when I thought we could stop fighting. As a child, I had thought that segregation would go on forever, but as I was teaching a Minority Literatures class in the mid-1980s–and as I saw my Black and White students sitting together as though it were no big deal–I recall thinking, “For them, this is just the way the world is.” What seemed to me miraculous—and to this day still seems miraculous—they take for granted.

Unfortunately, nothing can be taken for granted, including gains we once thought were permanent. Fearful of what they see as fiction’s life-changing potential, authoritarian conservatives are doing what they can to squash it. And they’re not wrong in seeing the threat. Literature really can get kids to question old assumptions and open their minds to ideas that frighten their parents.

Fortunately, to really prevail, these parents would have to go to Fahrenheit 451 lengths and forbid reading altogether. No sooner will they ban one book then another will take its place. And then there are all those ways that kids find their ways to banned books in spite of parents. After all, there are bookstores and local libraries and the internet and book networks with friends. Still, teachers, librarians, and the rest of us need to do all we can to connect young people with the books they need.

For inspiration to keep fighting the good fight, here’s a Bertolt Brecht poem I have shared in the past:

The Burning of the Books
By Bertolt Brecht
Trans. Michael R. Burch
When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the
Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you:
Burn me

The good news is that not all the truth-telling books get burned. Many make it through the censors. Still, the banished writer’s point is a good one: good books pose a real and present danger to authoritarian regimes.

Detail from banned book installation (170 books represented)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "Burning of the Books", banned books, Bertolt Brecht, censorship, Fascism, segregation | Comments closed

Libby Changes the Way We Read

By Robin Bates | Published: January 18, 2023

Renoir, *Monet Reading a Book and Smoking a Pipe*

Thursday

With my computer-savvy youngest brother having recently taught me how to access Libby book recordings on my cellphone, I feel like I’ve entered a brave new world (in Miranda’s positive sense, not Huxley’s negative). When a mellifluous British voice reading a Maisie Dobbs mystery issued forth from our car’s sound system, I felt like I was no longer in Kansas. Enthralled, all the past week I have been sound-surrounded by a John Galsworthy Forsyte novel as I wash dishes and pick up the house. Immersion in fictional worlds has never before felt like this.

To be sure, there can be dangers to the new technology. I was so involved in the Dobbs mystery as we were driving through Arizona two weeks ago that I failed to note that, having just gotten off the interstate, I failed to adjust my speed. The officer who stopped the car told me I was lucky he wasn’t charging me with a felony. (Thankfully, he gave me the option of taking an on-line course rather than going to jail or paying a heavy fine.)

In one way, listening to novels is a throwback to Victorian times when people would sometimes assemble in the village square to hear public readings of the latest Dickens novel. George Eliot talks about reading novels aloud with her companion Henry Lewes before the fire, and many other couple and families did the same.

And that practice was itself a throwback to the days before the novel came into existence, when most literature was consumed publicly. Plays, of course, ave always public, but poems too were often meant to be passed around in a group. John Donne, one can imagine, must have had fun sharing erotic poems like “The Flea” and “Sun Rising” with courtiers in King James’s court. In the movie The Libertine, meanwhile, we see the dissolute but talented rake John Wilmot (played by Johnny Depp) recounting how he was banished from court after he baited King Charles II with an insulting poem about his sexual prowess. Imagine being the king and hearing the following passage from the poem read aloud in a public setting:

Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such
And Love he loves, for he loves fucking much.

Nor are his high desires above his strength:
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th’ other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.

The “she” in this case is Nell Gwynn, the king’s mistress, while the brother is the future James II, who was in fact somewhat dimwitted. Hearing the poem from a man who essentially functioned as his court jester was too much even for the easy-going Charles.

Despite the commotion caused in this case, there was something wonderful about poetry functioning as an integral part of social discourse. As my dissertation director J. Paul Hunter has noted, the novel disrupted all this. In an article imaginatively titled “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reader,” Hunter notes now people found threatening the privacy involved in reading a long book. Husbands, for instance, worried when their wives disappeared into the pages of Samuel Richardson’s million-word-long Clarissa. Who knew where their minds went when they retreated for days into rooms of their own (at the time called closets).

Indeed, Hunter notes how anxiety over the new privacy was the subject of novels themselves. In a work like Tom Jones, one regularly encounters characters telling stories, while Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy treats readers as though they are actually in the room with him. (At one point, he tells the reader that he/she can leave the room while he recounts the next chapter.) In short, the novel represented a disruption to normal literary consumption that novels themselves noticed.

The rise of books on tape and disk bring back some of that social dimension, even though often we’ll listen to books in the privacy of our cars. But there’s something else that happens with Libby that adds a wonderful new wrinkle, albeit something that 19^th century listeners might have experienced: when I listen on my phone, I don’t know how much of the book is left.

Jane Austen calls this “the tell-tale compression of the pages.” In the final pages of Northanger Abbey, she worries that the suspense about Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney has been ruined for readers because of where they are in the book:

The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.

This passage is the subject of a literary discussion between two English professors on the final page of David Lodge’s comic campus novel Trading Places. Apparently looking for a way to end the work, the author–a literary theorist before he turned to novel writing–decides he’ll do so by focusing on endings:

Philip: You remember the passage in Northanger Abbey where Jane Austen says she’s afraid that her readers will have guessed that a happy ending is coming up at any moment.
Morris: (nods) [quotes the passage]

Philip: …Well, that’s something the novelist can’t help giving away, isn’t it, that his book is shortly coming to an end? It may not be a happy ending, nowadays, but he can’t disguise the tell-tale compression of the pages. I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As you’re reading, you’re aware of the fact that there’s only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it.

Philip goes on to contrast novels with films, where

there’s no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to be. There’s no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we’re watching them, and at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just…end.

And then, to complete his novel, Lodge gives us one final paragraph:

Philip shrugs. The camera stops freezing him in mid-gesture. THE END.

Libby has added this filmic experience to my engagement with novels. And the experience doesn’t occur with disks and tapes because one knows when one is listening to the last one. Nor does it happen with Kindle books since one is reminded constantly of the percentage of the book remaining (or is this a feature that can be turned off?). But happens with Libby books unless one takes the trouble to scrutinize the screen (which I don’t).

As a result, I found myself looking for subtle clues as to when Galsworthy’s novel would end. Only because the last chapter is entitled “The Final Chapter” did I realize that I was nearing the end, and even then I didn’t know how close I was. Instead, the novel seemed to feel as though, potentially, it could go on forever. Or in Lodge’s words, it went along just as life goes along.

It was a wonderful feeling and something quite new to me. Or rather, I hadn’t experienced something like this since reading as a child, when I lived more in the moment so that books seemed infinitely expansive.

Who knew that I’d develop a new relationship with novels after turning 70?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged books on disk, David Lodge, Jane Austen, John Galsworthy, Libby, Northanger Abbey, To Let, Trading Places | Comments closed

Roth and the Hamline Mess

By Robin Bates | Published: January 17, 2023

Wednesday

When my sons and their children were visiting us over Christmas, I had a moment of revelation that I connected with a small moment that occurs in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. It’s not related to any of the novel’s main themes, but that’s the thing about literature: sometimes it provides tiny but useful windows for individual readers.

Before sharing it, however, allow me a detour about how the novel applies to a recent event that occurred at Hamline University. As Jill Filipovic reports the story,

In a course on global art history, adjunct professor Erika López Prater showed an image of a 14^th-century painting that depicted the prophet Muhammad. On the class syllabus, she noted that the course would include images of religious figures, including Buddha and Muhammad, and that students could reach out if they had concerns—none did. Before showing the image, she told students that she was going to show it, and gave them the option to opt out—none did.

And yet for showing the image, she was essentially let go.

The Hamline administration, responsible for maintaining a diverse community, has since tied itself into explanatory knots, with respect for minority students seeming to clash with intellectual freedom and freedom of speech. In my mind, the professor handled the situation well while the administration botched the response, but liberalism has always had a tough time in such situations. Authoritarian conservatives may think they have more moral clarity, but Governor Ron DeSantis’s attempts to censor academics in Florida’s state universities reveal their true colors: such people just ignore or ride roughshod over the sensibilities of people who don’t think like them.

Anyway, there’s a college kerfuffle in Human Stain as well. Coleman Silk, a former revered dean and now professor, refers to a couple of African American students as “spooks” when they start missing his classes. “Spooks” was once a derogatory term applied to African Americans—I don’t know if racists still use it—but it’s unclear that the teacher knows this. And it’s not like Silk has used the n-word. It appears that the situation will be resolved until, unexpectedly, he angrily resigns.

At first glance, the spooks incident seems to be Roth indulging in a not very interesting caricature of academe, a case of political correctness run amok featuring overly sensitive students and cowed colleagues and administrators. Roth being Roth, however, there are layers upon layers to the story, the major one being that Silk himself is a Black man who has successfully passed as White for his entire professional life. Issues of motivation arise, including the question of whether he applied a racist term to Black students because of his own self-contempt. And what does it mean that Silk has also passed himself off as Jewish? Suddenly the narrative has morphed from a story about oversensitivity to a profound exploration of American identity.

What could Hamline learn from Human Stain? Well, college is an opportunity to engage in a similarly complex exploration of values and traditions, and that’s what the administration could have done. For instance, it could have set up a forum exploring, among other things, why many (although not all) Muslims object to portraits of Mohammed. Perfunctorily firing a teacher just looks like the college was siding with the most trenchant strains of Islam.

But all this is taking me away from my original thought, so back to that. When my sons showed up for Christmas, I was astounded at how they walked in, confident and self-assured in how they were taking on the world’s challenges. I watched in awe as Darien negotiated million-dollar contracts for a company he has just started and the same as English professor Toby articulated teaching insights and book ideas (and all this while managing his four children). Gazing at these two men, I was put in mind of Silk’s sons when they show up for his funeral.

Narrator Nathan Zuckerman reports that the Silk sons succeed beyond his wildest expectations:

The service for Coleman had been arranged by his children…The idea to bury him out of Rishanger, the college chapel, was a family decision, the key component of what I realized was a well-planned coup, an attempt to undo their father’s self-imposed banishment and to integrate him, in death if not in life, back into the community where he had made his distinguished career.

The funeral service includes one of Coleman’s colleagues, the college’s first Black professor, coming to Silk’s defense—“The alleged misconduct never took place. Never.”—and apologizing for not having stood up for him. Zukerman realizes that the turnout and the apology have also been engineered by Silk’s extremely competent sons:

That the place was nearly full was probably no chance occurrence. They must have been on the phone ever since the crash, mourners being rounded up the way voters used to be herded to the polls when the old Mayor Daley was running Chicago. And how they must have worked over Keble, whom Coleman had especially despised, to induce him voluntarily to proffer himself as the scapegoat for Athena’s sins. The more I thought about these Silk boys twisting Keble’s arm, intimidating him, shouting at him, denouncing him, perhaps even outright threatening him because of the way he had betrayed their father two years back, the more I liked them—and the more I liked Coleman for having sired two big, firm, smart fellows who were not reluctant to do what had to be done to turn his reputation right side out.

And further on:

It was hard to believe, given the ardor and the resolve, that out in California they were college science professors. You would have thought they ran Twentieth Century Fox.

Okay, so I can’t imagine Darien and Toby twisting arms to this extent. But yes, they are two big, firm, smart fellows.

Further thought on Hamline: Whether coerced or not, parts of Professor Keble’s funeral oration remind us of the purpose of college. The liberal arts goal is to get students to think for themselves:

Here, in the New England most identified, historically, with the American individualist’s resistance to the coercions of a censorious community—Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau come to mind—an American individualist who did not think that the weightiest thing in life were the rules, an American individualist who refused to leave unexamined the orthodoxies of the customary and of the established truth, an American individualist who did not always live in compliance with majority standards of decorum and taste—an American individualist par excellence was once again so savagely traduced by death, robbed of his moral authority by their moral stupidity.

Then again, Coleman Silk’s belief that he could assert his individuality by denying his skin color—by which means he escaped rather than fought back against a censorious community—shows that these things are never easy. And fighting for the right to use the word “spooks” is not quite as heroic as Keble makes it sound.

Still, college should indeed be all about examining “the orthodoxies of the customary and of the established truth.” And these include Muslim orthodoxies, Christian orthodoxies, and liberal orthodoxies.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged censorship, fathers and sons, Hamline University, Human Stain, Philip Roth | Comments closed

School Panics about Dr. Seuss Discussion

By Robin Bates | Published: January 16, 2023

Tuesday

If evidence is needed that attacks on “Critical Race Theory” have nothing to do with actual CRT—that they are instead attempts to prevent teachers from mentioning America’s tortured history with race—you have but to look at a recent incident involving Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches. In this instance, it wasn’t even the teacher who was censored but one of the students.

The Sneetches is a parable about discrimination, where the sneetches with stars oppress those without:

Those stars weren’t so big. They were really so small.
You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all.
But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches
Would brag, “We’re the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches.”
With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they’d snort
“We’ll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!”
And whenever they met some, when they were out walking,
They’d hike right on past them without even talking.

The results of this prejudice are put in terms that a child can relate to:

When the Star-Belly children went out to play ball,
Could a Plain-Belly get in the game…? Not at all.
You could only play if your bellies had stars
And the Plain-Belly children had none upon thars.

Written in the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement, there’s no question about what kind of discrimination Dr. Seuss had in mind although the story of course applies to other kinds of prejudice as well. Now for the news story:

The assistant director of communications for Olentangy Local School District abruptly stopped the reading of the Dr. Seuss book “The Sneetches” to a third-grade classroom during an NPR podcast after students asked about race.
Shale Meadows Elementary School third grade teacher Mandy Robek was reading “The Sneetches” to her class as part of NPR’s latest episode of Planet Money about the economic lessons in children’s books. During the podcast, which aired Friday, Amanda Beeman, the assistant director of communications for the school district, stopped the reading part way through the book.

In the episode, it wasn’t even the teacher who applied the lesson but a student. Here are further details:

“It’s almost like what happened back then, how people were treated … Like, disrespected … Like, white people disrespected Black people…,” a third grade student is heard saying on the podcast.
Robek keeps on reading, but it’s shortly after this student’s comment is made on the podcast that Beeman interrupts the reading.
“I just don’t think that this is going to be the discussion that we wanted around economics,” Beeman said on the podcast. “So I’m sorry. We’re going to cut this one off.”

Queried afterwards about her decision, the clearly defensive Beeman revealed how much pressure schools are under regarding discussions of race:

Beeman explained to The Dispatch on Monday that the school district agreed to be part of the “Planet Money” story “to feature the great work that Mrs. Robek does.”
“We do not ban any books,” Beeman said.
“As (The Sneetches) was being read, I made a personal judgment call we shouldn’t do the reading because of some of the other themes and undertones that were unfolding that were not shared that we would be discussing with parents,” Beeman said.

A good work of fiction, of course, is never about just one thing and a good teacher will be open to teachable moments when they arise. Given how one of the students started applying Sneetches to things he/she had encountered elsewhere, this was definitely a teachable moment. Because of rightwing pressure on schools, however, such moments are seen as dangerous.

A couple of years ago, conservatives were upset that a publisher was choosing not to republish certain Dr. Seuss books because they contained racist caricatures. (See my post on that here.) The books weren’t among the author’s popular books, (with the possible exception of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street) so few would even notice. Nevertheless, passionate defenses of Green Eggs and Ham (which is still being published) were launched on the floor of Congress.

Now that the right is aware of Seuss liberal sentiments, however, can we expect the right to defend the author’s other message books, like The Lorax (about trashing the environment) and The Butter Battle Book (about the arms race)?

For these books do have an impact, encouraging kids to grapple with significant issues in ways that are both stimulating and fun. Of course, that’s not a problem if you want to teach kids how to think for themselves. And really, only the most inveterate racists will quarrel with the ending of Sneetches:

But McBean was quite wrong. I’m quite happy to say
The Sneetches got really quite smart on that day,
The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches
And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.
That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars
And whether they had one, or not, upon thars.

Then again, I guess this is indeed White supremacy’s great replacement fear—that the formerly privileged will no longer retain those privileges.

Further thought: While it sounds like the Olentangy teacher is quite good, I do share the administrator’s confusion about the book’s economic applicability. I suppose it might address issues of class disparity—haves and have-nots—only the plot informs us that stars can be added and erased by Fix-it-Up Chappie’s wondrous machine. Markets don’t exactly work this way.

Unless the teacher was trying to teach a version of Thorstein Veblen’s ideas about conspicuous consumption (in Theory of the Leisure Class)—how the lower classes strive to imitate the upper class. Such behavior helps explain the tulipmania in 17^th century Holland, which led to one of capitalism’s great crashes.

Or maybe the lesson was about Whites being threatened by formerly oppressed groups (Blacks, women) rising in wealth, power, and influence. Now, that would certainly be an economic lesson—although not one the Olentangy administrator would find any better.

One other thought: The book can also be seen as having another kind of racial theme. With more and more kids of mixed race coming into the world (including all five of my grandchildren), will traditional race distinctions gradually fade away? To be sure, as both Barack Obama and later Meghan Markle discovered to their sorrow, thinking of yourself as mixed doesn’t mean that others will see you that way. Our Sneetches with stars have been very definite about labeling such people as Sneetches without stars—as opposed to, say, Sneetches with half stars. But with interracial intermarrying becoming more and more common, will things change? Of will we, in our seeming infinite capacity to find ways to divide people, insist on ever more subtle distinctions. I think of the book about How the Irish Became White.

Then again, should we object to how Seuss appears to be advocating for a version of melting pot assimilation. This became more problematic in the 1970s.

Interestingly, the first I ever encountered this notion was in John Howard Giffin’s Black Like Me (1961), which I read in high school. In it, Griffin tells how he darkened his skin and passed himself off as Black to discover what Blacks were going through. I remember the scene where, as a hitchhiker, he is picked up by a White man who explains that it’s only a matter of time before intermingling will one day make everyone indistinguishable. Black Like Me appeared the same year as Sneetches.

Isn’t having our kids launch into these and similar debates be what education should be all about? Don’t ban. Debate!

One last thing: I just learned from Wikipedia that in 1998, following the Bosnian war, NATO had Sneetches translated into Serbo-Croatian and distributed 50,000 copies amongst the population to encourage tolerance.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged censorship, discrimination, Dr. Seuss, Prejudice, Sneeches | Comments closed

Words That Burn the Center of the Sun

By Robin Bates | Published: January 15, 2023

Monday – Martin Luther King Day

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks celebrates the man we honor today. Her describing race hatred as a volcano strikes me as only too accurate, and although that hatred resulted in his death, the image of his ashes—like a volcano’s—being spread around the world is an effective reversal. Instead of destroying his message, the assassination amplified it.

And as his words of faith and power have spread, they have anointed the barricades of the resistance movement. “So it shall be done,” Brooks says confidently at the poem’s end.

In contrast to the image of volcanic hate, Brooks gives us an even more powerful and transcendent fire—that of the justice—which counteracts the earth-bound emotions. This fire reaches “the thousands and the hundred thousands.”

Brooks’s clash of visions takes me back to the rightwing American history teacher I had in 1968, when I was a junior at the Sewanee Military Academy. The day after King was killed, Jim Miller came to class and told us, “He lived by the sword and he died by the sword.” Miller was one within whom the volcanic hatred burned.

King’s genius was to counter the sword of white violence by a message of love and peace. We’re far from quenching the volcanic flames of racism—perhaps we never will—but King’s solar vision of justice has taken us far further than I ever thought possible when I was growing up in the segregated south.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Gwendolyn Brooks
A man went forth with gifts.
He was a prose poem.
He was a tragic grace.
He was a warm music.
He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes.
His ashes are
     reading the world.
His Dream still wishes to anoint
     the barricades of faith and of control.
His word still burns the center of the sun
     above the thousands and the
     hundred thousands.
The word was Justice. It was spoken.
So it shall be spoken.
So it shall be done.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "Martin Luther King Jr.", Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King Day | Comments closed

Holy Ghost: Warm Breast and Bright Wings

By Robin Bates | Published: January 14, 2023

Spiritual Sunday

Since both last Sunday’s Gospel reading and today’s mention the moment when the Holy Spirit, like a dove, enters Jesus, I share today the greatest of all poems using that metaphor. But to set you up for it, here’s a portion of today’s lesson:

And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” draws on images of industrialization to capture a “bent” world that has lost its way. By contrast, the poet depicts God’s grace through images of nature in all its freshness. Then, at the climactic moment, this grace is compared to a dove, which both sustains us and lifts us up.

God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged "God's Grandeur", Gerard Manley Hopkins, Holy Spirit | Comments closed

Trumpist Stefanik, Shakespeare Lover?!

By Robin Bates | Published: January 12, 2023

Elise Stefanik, 3rd ranking member of House GOP

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Friday

As we watch the crazies take over the House of Representatives, there’s one Congresswoman who stands out to me when it comes to selling one’s soul for power. Elise Stefanik was once a moderate Republican from New York, but—to the horror of many who thought they knew her—she abandoned her previous moderation for Trumpism in 2019. She has become one of the leading election deniers, claims to see fraudulent votes everywhere, talks of the “Biden Crime Family,” and at one point contended that no president has ever been a stronger supporter of the Constitution than Donald J. Trump.

The question arises whether Stefanik actually believes what she professes or is just a cynical politico willing to do and say anything anything to advance herself. I write about her today because I learned recently that she was an English major at Harvard.

According to a Washington Post profile, among Stefanik’s favorite courses in college were Shakespeare in Politics and The English Novel. I don’t know what novels she read in the latter course but it’s likely that she has encountered Macbeth and Julius Caesar, if not in the Shakespeare course then elsewhere.

Her case allows us to address the issue of whether immersion in classic literature makes one a better person. Will it help us to hold onto our moral compass when confronted with the temptations of power, wealth, and other inducements? Or are even the greatest works–at least in some instances–no more than sound and fury, signifying nothing?

And what would Allan Bloom think of Stefanik? I recall the broad claims made by the Chicago humanities professor about the significance of Shakespeare when he was defending the canon and attacking political correctness (today called wokeness) in the early 1990s. Bloom became a hero amongst American conservatives for his book The Closing of the American Mind, but I have in mind an earlier work entitled Shakespeare’s Politics.

In it, Bloom observes that Shakespeare “shows most vividly and comprehensively the fate of tyrants, the character of good rulers, the relations of friends, and the duties of citizens.” By doing so, he argues, the bard moves “the souls of his readers, and they recognize that they understand life better because they have read him; he hence becomes a constant guide and companion.”

Among the plays Bloom examines is Julius Caesar, which he says functions as a workshop on political leadership. As Bloom sees it, Caesar himself is the ideal politician, one who draws on the wisdom of both the high-minded Stoics and the material-focused Epicureans. In other words, he knows how to balance idealism and pragmatism.

The tragedy of conspirators Brutus and Cassius, Bloom argues, is that they cannot comprehend such a combination. Following Bloom’s argument, we can see Brutus as the impractical idealist, Cassius as the cynical pragmatist.

Bloom doesn’t altogether dismiss the two conspirators. Brutus, “the noblest Roman of them all,” will inspire future revolutionaries, and the two together have become

the eternal symbols of freedom against tyranny. They showed that men need not give way before the spirit of the times; they served as models for later successors who would reestablish the spirit of free government. Their seemingly futile gesture helped, not Rome, but humanity.

Having made this concession, however, Bloom faults Brutus and Cassius for their limited vision, and his critique would apply to those successors of theirs who fail to maintain a balance. History is strewn with corrupted rebels.

Stefanik resembles Cassius far more than Brutus. Like the former, she has a “lean and hungry look.” One imagines her realizing, in 2019, that to rise in Republican ranks required attaching herself to the Trump train. And unlike Cassius, she succeeded in her rebellion, ousting the more principled Lynn Cheney and taking her place as the third ranking Republican.

Perhaps, as she prepared to strike her blow against Cheney, Stefanik thought of Brutus’s oft-quoted passage,

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

The irony is that, by taking advantage of what appeared to be a rising tide, Brutus set course on a destiny that resulted in his death. Will Stefanik consider that possibility? Or, if she thought about it, would she rather conclude that Brutus ultimately was not ruthless enough—that he should have killed Marc Antony rather than allowing him to speak, which could well have cemented his advantage. Did she conclude that Brutus’s elevated nature is an impediment, that being the noblest Roman of them all is a consolation prize for losers.

If she wanted a Shakespearean model for overriding all moral qualms, there is, of course, Macbeth. After all, he actually gains a kingship, albeit at a tremendous spiritual and existential cost. He and his wife don’t acknowledge that cost, however, until they are steeped in blood.

So could it be that Stefanik is using her college Shakespeare class as a tyrant’s guide on how to achieve political power? Given the heady smell of power, who cares if one’s life is

but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more…

Maybe, as Sir Philip Sidney warns in Defense of Poesie and Terry Eagleton cautions in Literary Theory: An Introduction, great literature can be used for ill as well as for good. Maybe Stefanik learned the wrong things from Shakespeare, hearing in the plays only what she wanted to hear.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Elise Stefanik, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, William Shakespeare | Comments closed

How great literature can change your life