Visiting Sacramento

I'm sitting at a Pete's Coffee and Tea in Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport. The seating area is so tight that this is reminiscent of Paris, complete with the Phoenix couple at the next table, who have, I feel certain, been to Paris together. I guess the difference is that it's 70 degrees here, and I can look out and see a remarkable skyline of jagged mountains, while in Paris it's 27 degrees and visibility is low.

Perhaps you can tell that I'm unabashedly in favor of warmer climes these days. This morning I went on a run around Lake Merritt in Oakland CA, where I've been visiting Tess for the past several days. There was nothing like it. This is exactly what the lake looked like at 7:23, before the sun officially rose at which precise moment the fairy lights turned off. It felt so glorious to be able to be outside on December 30th before sunrise!

I went to Sacramento on Wednesday. I am considering a move to Sacramento after this year of the MAT. There is a teacher shortage in California, and there is a temperature shortage in Indiana, and a shortage of a commodity in very tight supply anywhere outside California: Tess Marstaller.

I took the Capitol Corridor train to Sacramento. The ride was beautiful, affording many views of the water and of the countryside. It reminded me of the ride from Toulouse to Lourdes. Well, actually le Sud-Ouest is much, much more beautiful, but the similar climate pleased me. I loved the idea of living in the Southwest of France when I lived there, but could never figure out how I could adjust to living so far from family, and to being a foreigner all the time. Northern California seemed to be offering many of the same benefits, much closer to home.

I had been in touch before I arrived with the Quaker Meetings in Sacramento to see if there were any public school teachers in their midst. I was connected with Alison, who came to pick me up at the train station, and dedicated the next two hours to driving me around, touring schools and neighborhoods, talking school culture and district climate with regards to things like administrative oversight, emphasis on testing, and profile of student bodies. I'm overwhelmed by gratitude for this Friend who donated her time and energy to helping me make an inroad into this city.

Here's the upshot of the day: I want to live in Tahoe Park, and teach at West Campus high school!

My time with Alison and my exposure to the schools would have been enough to make me feel good about moving to Sacramento. A few other things glazed the cake with icing:

1. The art museum.
The Crocker Art Museum is phenomenal. Fairly small, but with wonderful traveling shows and a stunning permanent exhibition in the original mansion, which itself is an elaborate building like an art jewelry box. I felt like Mary Crawley walking down the grand staircase.










2. The waterfront walk.
A path goes for 32 miles along the rivers in Sacramento.




















3. The cops on horseback.

Nothing steals a girl's heart like seeing three cops on horseback. Rather gives the impression there isn't a ton of crime.

4. The park full of homeless people.
I had my picnic lunch in a park where homeless people had gathered to talk and spend their day. Alison told me that on Christmas there were three organizations providing food, and they had way too much. I liked at least that the homeless were allowed to congregate here, right outside the public library in the center of downtown, and that there are organizations, even if not exceptionally organized ones, to help them.

5. The flat whites, and coffee shop patrons like Lisa
At the end of the day I was at a Starbucks next to the train station, waiting for my train to board. A woman ahead of me ordered a flat white. I asked her what it was. I got one too, made with almond milk, and it was the best thing ever. I just had another at this Pete's. Lisa, the woman who explained flat white to me, had the most fantastic colored purple lipstick on. Feels silly to say a caffeinated drink helped secure Sacramento in my mind, but it did.

6. At this Starbucks I saw the headline of the NYtimes having to do with how CA is at the forefront of the climate challenge. Encouraging.

Autobiographical fiction; the importance of letters

Two recent articles in the New Yorker have profiled female writers who insert themselves unabashedly into their fiction. The first is Chris Kraus, and the second is Helen Garner (whom I mentioned in my last post). 

Kraus told an audience at a book talk in no uncertain terms that she is a writer because she is a person with a life: 

"It all happened. There would be no book if it hadn’t happened.”

A friend of mine objects to this kind of personal writing, which tends to be self-involved and doesn't tend to say much of significance about the state of the world, only the state of one's heart and mind. Those are good topics too, but can't they be incorporated into books that have something grander to say? 

Flannery O'Connor, who had much grander things to say, about black and white identity in the South in the 60's, believed she should not be present in her stories. She wrote:

To say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration. A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen. . . . Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.

I think I agree with her. My experience is that I can be much more honest about what I find in myself when I read it in other people's fiction, not when I try to put it into mine. I don't have good enough vision of self to portray with any accuracy my own character, and I always end up feeling shallow and as though I'm trying to be "clever" by getting into my own head and subjecting myself to my own cynicism. 

How do we know that Flannery O'Connor felt this way? Because she wrote a letter to a friend, from which is pulled the above quote. What are we going to do without letters? How will we know how the great writers and thinkers were thinking? I believe that we cannot trust their blogs. 

In a recent paper I wrote for my MAT I quoted from journal articles about writing in the English classroom. One teacher wrote about the role of audience in writing: 

"It is precisely the acts of responding, analysing and reflecting that are required in the process of writing but, with no ‘real’ audience, these seem impossible for many boys."

(This entire, excellent article is available here.)

I wonder about the difference between the audience of a blog, and the audience of a friend. I am certainly more discerning and stylistic in what I write in my letters to individual friends than what I write here. Email has never inspired the same thoughtfulness as writing on paper. I flinch actually, to mention it in the same paragraph with real letter-writing, not because I object to writing emails, but because it is such a different endeavor from writing a letter.

Some of the best articles I've read about figures and writers I like include parts of their letters. This is an excellent one containing correspondence between Nabokov and his wife.

I think I shall start scanning and saving all the letters I receive from my few correspondents. I have some in boxes, but certainly not all survive, and I must be the change I wish to see in the world!

Brahms and Garner on Solitude

I love the public radio program Performance Today, but I often complain to myself that Fred Child a) speaks too quickly after the end of a piece and b) repeats the snippets of cocktail party knowledge about a piece both before and after it, which seems to me to render the sparkling gems of context rather less titillating. If something is said once on the radio, it is the precious possession of those lucky enough to be tuned in. If it is repeated, the club of the informed grows unpleasantly larger.

Brahms, when he was
"free and lonely"

Tonight I was the happy beneficiary of FC's repetition of the story behind Brahms' third symphony. He and his friends, when they were young, developed a slogan, which they snuck into their music, "free but lonely," to describe their single status. Brahms, a lifelong bachelor, wrote the symphony #3 when he was fifty, and in it re-configured the original slogan to be "free but happy." As FC points out, the symphony is not what my tenth graders would likely describe as "happy" music, but it certainly, to me, conveys the thoughtful contentedness that single life affords. 

Brahms, when he was
"free and happy".

I am single, and 26. Perhaps I can save myself many years of unhappiness by adopting the Brahms-at-50 version of the slogan. Here's the episode (hour 1), which has the story at the beginning, and the symphony (and again the story!) at the end of the hour.

No sooner had the symphony ended than I read this book review of Helen Garner's new book, "Everywhere I Look". Imagine my surprise on reading this excerpt:

“This isn’t really a story. I’m just telling you what happened one summer when I was young. It was 1961, my first year away from home. I lived at Melbourne University, in a women’s college on a beautiful elm-lined boulevard. I was free and happy. Everyone was clever and so was I.” 

How easy it is to be free and happy when young and clever. I wonder at what age free and happy became free and lonely for Brahms -- when it does for all those not entwined in matrimony. 

Incidentally, Garner's first book "The First Stone," which is discussed in the article, is about young women who were assaulted by a professor when they were in college. The title seems to allude to the parable in which Jesus says, "Let the sinless among you cast the first stone," when a woman has been accused of adultery. 

This parable ran through my head today when, in the tenth grade class, we discussed "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. Our first focus was narrative point of view, and I asked students to rewrite the climactic closing scene from the perspective of one of the characters present. (The entire story is told from a third person objective POV). 

(Spoiler alert) In the scene, the woman whose named has been drawn in the annual "lottery" is stoned to death by her neighbors.

One of the boys in period 1 wrote, "Everyone was looking at me to begin, so I had to throw the first rock." 

Another said, "As soon as I saw the first rock fly, I hurled mine at her as hard as I could." 

Both responses reveal the weight of that first stone. The story seems to me a comment on how much easier it is to act inhumanely when one is part of a group. I was first introduced to this idea in my Capitalism and Socialism class at Utah, when we read Niebuhr's "Moral Man, Immoral Society." 

Tenth graders speak wisdom. 

I wonder how many of them would describe themselves as "free and happy". Or, for that matter, either "free" or "happy". 

Appreciating professional symphonies

I was relieved this evening when, upon leaving the concert hall where Earlham's symphony orchestra gave its winter concert, that my companion was the first to say, "It makes you appreciate all those professional orchestras so much more, doesn't it?" 

The orchestra had put together a technically and technologically ambitious program, complete with film screenings of silent films to which they played the scores. Technical and logistical glitches were several; the orchestra had not rehearsed without the house lights, and when the film went on and the stage lighting went down, they discovered they could not see the conductor and had to stop. At one point the film score was playing over the orchestra- the sound tech had forgotten to mute the movie. At another point the play button could not be played in such a way that the film was the only thing on the screen, besides other elements of an Apple desktop. The conductor discovered, at the beginning of another piece, that his score was still backstage. When he called for the baritone featured in one piece to come forward, it appeared the singer was not in the room.

You have to love a small town, and no less a liberal arts college community, for its ability to play the loving and forgiving audience. "It makes it so much more interesting! I love getting to see how they deal with challenges. The more real, the better!" exclaimed my companion. To borrow a line from my reading in Emma today, "Emma (Mimi) denied none of it aloud, and agreed to none of it in private." I was exceptionally uncomfortable for the conductor, whose embarrassment and frustration must have been extreme, even with the loving audience. He handled each development (or unraveling) well, as did the musicians, but indeed I would prefer a concert that goes according to plan. 

They played Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 1, op 13, "Winter Dreams", which I was not familiar with and which I like very much. Here is a version of the whole thing. 

This afternoon while holed up in my room reading Emma I was struck by how unlike Emma's society of English nobility is from our own. So little emphasis on gainful work, so much leisure time to fill, such necessity to draw every bit of news or diversion out into something substantial to fill the otherwise unoccupied hours... it sounds pretty dull. Days and days spent looking forward to a picnic, and the picnic spent in the company of tiresome people (Mrs. Elton, Miss Bates, Mr. Elton). 

I remember when a high school friend told me, "I'm done hanging out with people I don't like." It is clear to me that evasion was an impossibility in Emma's circle - that people simply had to engage with people that they might not choose as friends, simply because of the size of the country circle. Mr. Darcy describes Hertfordshire society, as "confined and unvarying," and I think it would certainly seem so to those of us used to a wider social radius. 

As I sat in the concert hall before the performance began, I was struck by just how similar our society still is to that which Jane Austen so magnificently dissects in her novels. We were all part of a fairly small community, and with each grand entrance into the room of a new person, we, the seated, took stock of that person's beauty, attire, and social status - were they meeting friends? Did they look confident? Were they accompanied? Did they quickly make eye contact with a friend who was reserving seats? 

We haven't progressed too far beyond the pump rooms at bath after all. 

Fiction telling real tales

Last week with the 9th grade we looked at how what happens in dystopian fiction can also happen in our own world.

Of Windows and Doors illustration

This weekend's reading and viewing has reiterated the power of fiction/art to hold up a mirror to contemporary society.

First, the short story "Of Windows and Doors" provides a gently horrible episode in a (Syrian?) city under Islamist rule, and the efforts of a young couple to escape the city with the help of plentifully remunerated "agents". I learned more, through feeling and through imagery, of the experience of being under siege, from reading this story than I have through dozens of BBC news segments on contested cities in the Middle East.

There is a moment in the story when you think the plot line will delve decidedly into fiction (when the rumors of doors that lead to foreign places start to become real to the city's residents). As you read on, you realize that the story of the magical doors is true, but you also realize that the improbability of such doors is quite possible, and doesn't, in the end, strain credulity. It seems to me a masterful playing with the edge between make believe and real life, as if the story asks, "Doesn't make believe and the fantastical have a real role in our lives? Don't we live and die based on unreal narratives?"

The second tale was of Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist in Mississippi, born in 1917, the 20th child of a sharecropping family who was fired for registering to vote, and dedicated her public life to helping blacks register, despite fierce Jim Crow laws and discrimination that left so many dead.

This image, part of the Fannie Lou Hamer show, reminded me of the New
Yorker illustration of the blown-out door. This is the Freedom Rider Bus
that was bombed in 1961.

The retelling, a one-woman show and a fundraiser for Richmond's Townsend Community Center, was terrific, and introduced me, through a fictionalized account, to a remarkable woman, who confirms my theory that there are Jesuses in every era - those who lovingly and unquestioningly challenge injustice and face insult, injury and death with faith and courage.

Retelling history, and Aram Khatchaturian

In a recently explored passage of Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist questions his firefighting profession in front of his boss Beatty.

"Was-was it always like this? The firehouse, our work? I mean, well, once upon a time..."
"Once upon a time!" Beatty said. "What kind of talk is THAT?"
Fool, thought Montag to himself, you'll give it away. At the last fire, a book of fairy tales, he'd glanced at a single line. "I mean," he said, "in the old days, before homes were completely fireproofed " Suddenly it seemed a much younger voice was speaking for him. He opened his mouth and it was Clarisse McClellan saying, "Didn't firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and get them going?"
"That's rich!" Stoneman and Black drew forth their rulebooks, which also contained brief histories of the Firemen of America, and laid them out where Montag, though long familiar with them, might read:
"Established, 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies. First Fireman: Benjamin Franklin."


We reached the consensus that history had been rewritten. We asked why history might be rewritten. They said "To get people to follow you. To make yourself seem better than you are. To act as if what you're doing is the norm, something that's always been done."



Today, to follow up our discussion of a dystopian fictional world, we looked at rewriting of history in US history and the present: The story of Thanksgiving. They looked at textbook excerpts, bits of John Smith's journal, videos for school children, children's books (illustrated) youtube videos made by native folks, they listened to speeches by native folks

 - it was too many texts for one day, that I acknowledge - 

and they were asked to consider who the purpose and the audience for these texts were. They were asked to compare histories. These are some of the interesting questions that emerged:

- Why is the version told to school children so different?
(Because kids can't handle the violence and wouldn't understand the concepts of death and slavery).
- Is it all right that kids get the sugar coated version? 
(Yes, because they'll learn the right one when they grow up). 
- When are they old enough to learn the truth?
(Middle school)
- How will they learn the true story?
(Various answers, most being "Their parents. Their teachers. One person said "They'll look it up."
- If we only know one version of the story, how do we know to look it up to find out alternatives?
....silence.

Tomorrow I hope to reiterate with them that there is a shared responsibility to find out and preserve the truth. We need to have multiple voices in print (not just the fireman's manual of the story). We also need to accept our own responsibility - yes it's up to parents and teachers to tell us the truth, but we also need to be critical readers ourselves and demand multiple perspectives on an issue.

I was surprised how little they seemed to know about the true nature of relations between the native Americans and the pilgrims. Many of them, when asked at the beginning of the class for their understanding of the history of Thanksgiving, gave the sterile version - the two sides exchanged tricks on how to survive the winter, and celebrated with a harvest meal. I will find out tomorrow during the debrief how they felt the activity went.

Here's a piece of true history, though there are no other witnesses for you to compare my story with. 

When I was in elementary and middle school, I took piano lessons with a marvelous teacher named Deb. I played a piece called (by the editor of my book, at least) "Ivan Sings" by Aram Khatchturian. I was obsessed with it, and after all these years it remains one of the two pieces I can still play by memory. It is slow, and sad, even mournful. I always slowed down the tempo, and drew out the phrases that tugged at heartstrings. My household must have felt like Marianne Dashwood's household when she continued playing a funeral soundtrack after her father had died.

Aram Khatchaturian in 1964.

Tonight I was listening to Performance Today, one of the greatest programs on Public Radio, for the life it breathes into classical music and its composers and context (if I could do for literature in my classroom what Fred Child does for classical music on the air, I would be happy). The first piece of the house was a lullaby by the same Khatchaturian, from his ballet Gayane. This link on youtube plays a slightly slower version than was on the episode, which can be found here.

I cannot believe how lucky I am that I get to come home and listen to music like this. 

Incidentally, Khatchaturian was once censured and banned as an unacceptable form of music in the Soviet Union, (he was Armenian). Here's the section from wikipedia:

Denunciation and restoration (1948)

In mid-December 1947, the Department for Agitation and Propaganda (better known as Agitprop) submitted to Andrei Zhdanov, the secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee, a document on the "shortcomings" in the development of Soviet music. On 10–13 January 1948, a conference was held at the Kremlin in the presence of seventy musicians, composers, conductors and others who were confronted by Zhdanov:^[39]

We will consider that if these comrades Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Khachaturian, Kabalevsky and Shebalin namely who are the principal and leading figures of the formalist direction in music. And that direction is fundamentally incorrect.

Thus, Khachaturian and other leading composers were denounced by the Communist Party as followers of the alleged formalism^[15] (i.e. "[a type of] music that was considered too advanced or difficult for the masses to enjoy")^[6] and their music was dubbed "anti-people".^[40] It was the Symphonic Poem (1947), later titled the Third Symphony, that officially earned Khachaturian the wrath of the Party.^[39][41] Ironically, he wrote the work as a tribute to the 30th anniversary of the October Revolution.^[42] He stated: "I wanted to write the kind of composition in which the public would feel my unwritten program without an announcement. I wanted this work to express the Soviet people's joy and pride in their great and mighty country."^[43]

Musicologist Blair Johnston believes that his "music contained few, if any, of the objectionable traits found in the music of some of his more adventuresome colleagues. In retrospect, it was most likely Khachaturian's administrative role in the Union [of Soviet Composers], perceived by the government as a bastion of politically incorrect music, and not his music as such, which earned him a place on the black list of 1948."^[44] In March 1948,^[25] Khachaturian "made a very full and humble apology for his artistic "errors" following the Zhdanov decree; his musical style, however, underwent no changes."^[44] He was sent to Armenia as a "punishment",^[15] and continued to be censured.^[25] By December 1948,^[25] he was "restored to favor later that year when he was praised for his film biography of Lenin.

He first performed at the Moscow Art Theater, which I walked past several times in Moscow last spring, and which had and still has a reputation for playing adventurous and avant garde art. 

The President's Power

When my mentor teacher and I opened the floor on Wednesday for people to share their thoughts and questions about the election and the president elect, one question that came up in every class was: What can the president do? Can he really build a wall? What can he do without the approval of Congress? 

I was at somewhat a loss of what to say. I don't know how far executive orders can go. I also don't know how much a Republican-controlled House and Senate will provide a significant "check" to presidential power. 

Kirk Johnson

I'd been thinking about this questions a good deal when I listened to this episode of This American Life, first broadcast in 2013, about a man, Kirk Johnson, who unwittingly found himself enmeshed in an effort to help Iraqis who has worked with the US in Iraq during the war, and who were now seeking an accelerated path to US citizenship to escape the threat that continuing to live amongst the US's enemies in Iraq posed. 

Johnson was at the same time successful and unsuccessful. He worked with senators, including Ted Kennedy, to pass a law that provided 25,000 immigrant slots to people employed by the US in Iraq. Bush administration officials made it almost impossible for these people to actually come to the US. Very few cases were processed, and Johnson's book details the frustrations of one man, alias Omar, trying to work with the bureaucracy that should have granted him asylum. 

The episode relates how it would have taken President Bush or Obama to issue an executive order to air-lift Iraqis to a secure military base outside the US where they could be screened. This is called the "Guam Option". It had been done before. Johnson's point is, the president has to act first, calling on the military to do the heavy lifting: getting the Iraqis out of Iraq. Then the bureaucracies can do their screening work. 

When the episode was published, it was just after the Boston Marathon bombings, and Johnson was concerned that efforts on a new Visa piece of legislation would be stymied by the anti-muslim backlash that promised to follow the bombings. 

This is one thing the president can do: make decisions that help us behave like neighbors of good integrity on the international stage. Britain, Australia, Denmark, he says, have all done the responsible thing and made sure that their allies from war time are safe outside the countries where they risked their lives to help the US forces. 

I cannot imagine our president elect making a decision to make immigration easier for any Muslim, regardless of whether he or she helped the US overseas. This is a small answer to the question of what the president can do, but it feels substantial in that it represents an area of governance that I've certainly never thought about. There must be hundreds of such areas. 

Lit, art, and music

I feel as though we live in a wonderful world. Sitting in my Richmond apartment, I can access world-class lit, art and music, all in one evening. 

Art: 

The other day my neighbor lent me a coffee table. I suddenly, and for the first time in my life, had the opportunity to have coffee table books. I love coffee table books. I didn't really want to buy expensive books that would just sit around and then have to be lugged to a new location next year. 

I went to Earlham's library and browsed the fine art books. I took down two that caught my eye: 

O'Keefe and Texas

This has simple, brightly colored paintings by O'Keefe during an evidently prolific and influential period that she spent in Texas. I've been leaving it open to a different page each day, which has been nice. I know nothing about O'Keefe's life or work and haven't read the essays yet. 






Women Impressionists is the other book. 


The first artist featured, Berthe Morisot, is one I've never heard of. Each page provides another work, housed in a different museum or gallery, which it would take years to visit, and yet here I am seeing them all in a few short minutes. 

"The young woman at a window in Summer" might
want to venture beyond the window pane today.

Her work is beautiful, but it renders me sad and physically uncomfortable because of its portrayals of women in the 19th century, which looks like a very uncomfortable century. The clothes they are wearing are not to be borne. Not only that, but the women look so intensely bored with lives of confinement and leisure. 

They remind me of what Elinor Dashwood says to Mr. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility: 

"You talk of feeling idle and useless. Imagine how that is compounded when one has no hope and no choice of any occupation whatsoever." 

Thus seems to be the fate of the women in many of Berthe's paintings. What a relief it was to turn the page eventually and see a peasant woman in reasonable clothes, bearing a bowl of milk, ostensibly in the middle of some task. 

"The Milk Bowl" is a relief

Lit: 

Today we read Fahrenheit 451's opening passages. I'll just add here the passage we asked our final question about: 

They walked the rest of the way in silence, hers thoughtful, his a kind of clenching and uncomfortable silence in which he shot her accusing glances.

This is after Clarisse and Montag have had their opening conversation. I asked the students why the silence might be described like this. Sixth period rocked it. They said she was making him uncomfortable because he knew that everything she was saying was true, but he didn't want it to be true. He felt, they added, that she knew him too well, and could see through his facade too quickly. 

I worried this summer that there wouldn't be enough depth to mine with this book. That may be a concern with period six, because they are so clever (rather like 12e last year in Ramallah). But the other classes took much longer to come to much less profound conclusions about Clarisse's effect on Montag. This book may provide just the right amount of challenge for them. 

Music: 

Performance Today is a gift everyday, but today I particularly liked this hour for its feature by Max Bruch: Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, Op. 83; No. 1 in a minor: Andante  

Here's the link to the episode. 

Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves

I've been listening to opera a good deal this weekend. The colder november weather calls for some vibrato. I was also put in the opera mind on Friday night at a concert where Danielle told me that the spring community chorus will sing opera choruses at its April concert. I thought of the chorus I enjoy most: the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves by Verdi, from the opera Nabucco (which I have never seen). 

This video shows the scene. The staging I find powerful, even though I don't know the opera well - the slaves' stillness during their chorus seems to represent their bondage; their exhaustion. And the oversize chains are evocative, whereas is someone had described them to me I might have thought they sounded tacky. I guess props need to be much larger than life if they're going to make an impact on the back row of the balcony section.

The music is beautiful; the lyrics are poignant to read because they so aptly describe the Palestinian situation today. Here is the original Italian and an English translation:

“Va pensiero” in Original Italian Va', pensiero, sull'ali dorate; Va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli, ove olezzano tepide e molli l'aure dolci del suolo natal! Del Giordano le rive saluta, di Sionne le torri atterrate… Oh mia Patria sì bella e perduta! O membranza sì cara e fatal! Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati, perché muta dal salice pendi? Le memorie nel petto raccendi, ci favella del tempo che fu! O simile di Solima ai fati, traggi un suono di crudo lamento; o t'ispiri il Signore un concento che ne infonda al patire virtù!

“Va pensiero” English Translation Hasten thoughts on golden wings. Hasten and rest on the densely wooded hills, where warm and fragrant and soft are the gentle breezes of our native land! The banks of the Jordan we greet and the towers of Zion. O, my homeland, so beautiful and lost! O memories, so dear and yet so deadly! Golden harp of our prophets, why do you hang silently on the willow? Rekindle the memories of our hearts, and speak of the times gone by! Or, like the fateful Solomon, draw a lament of raw sound; or permit the Lord to inspire us to endure our suffering!

The invocation of the Golden harp of our prophets which hangs silently on the willows, is beautiful. Indeed the silence on the Palestinian issue is painful, where songs might be sung of a homeland, so beautiful and so lost; of memories, so dear and yet so deadly. 

Palestinians try to draw out a lament of raw sound, but the consumerism bought by the Oslo accords rather tamps down the protests, so those who are willing to resist for justice are left to ask the Lord to inspire them to endure their suffering. 

Knowing, and being known

My grandmother sent me a copy of The Fruit of the Vine in the mail this week. For years when I was a child I listened to her stand up during announcements at the end of Meeting and say "I have copies of Fruit of the Vine if someone would like one." And I never asked what it was. I thought it was like another Quaker Life, which was the most boring-looking periodical around the house (it seemed to have pictures of farm animals on the cover strikingly often - I never read it). 


I called her from Richmond a few months ago and asked what version of the Bible she liked reading for daily study. I'd been trying with various devotionals written by people of different faiths, but I didn't agree with most of the interpretations that I was reading, so I figured I had better read the book itself. 

She said she read something traditional like the New Revised Standard Edition. In characteristic thoroughness, she followed-up by sending me this copy of Fruit of the Vine. It is a daily devotional written by Friends. Living Friends. The one for yesterday was actually written by a Friend who works for Reid Health in Richmond! One of the perks of living in the Quaker Mecca of the Midwest. 

Today's scripture was 1 Corinthians 13:11-12

11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

I am finding becoming a man, and putting away childish things, is a process which takes many years, and which indeed I suspect will last my whole life. 

Today bell hooks spoke at Earlham, and I left the high school early to hear her. She spoke about the white supremacist capitalist patriachy, which is the subject, at least in part, of her writing. Her writing is also about being fundamentally opposed to violence and promoting love. 

The most powerful part of her talk, for me, was when she spoke about Black Lives Matter. She said, in fact, police brutality, while a grave issue, is not the essential issue facing black men. "If all the police brutality stopped, would the plight of the black man be overcome?" No, she said, because police brutality is not the same thing as, or even the cause of, mass incarceration. That social ill starts elsewhere, and largely in the classroom, with a lack of literacy. Black men are the group with the fastest growing rate of illiteracy in the nation, she said. Without literacy these men can't get jobs, they can't think critically, and they certainly can't fight the system. 

I felt her words so keenly. As she spoke about the difficulties facing young black men in our society, I thought of J, of K, of D, of J, of I, most of whom I'd seen earlier today. It fired me up about being part of a process of showing these young men that they are valuable, that they are smart, of helping them learn to think critically and to question those in power in a smart way. 

This summer I wasn't too excited about reading Fahrenheit 451 with the 9th grade, but now I'm very keen to. It's been my lens through which I've experienced much other literature and many other events this fall. This piece which came up in my bell hooks research is one that makes me keen to ask the students whether they think literature has any value worth defending.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/reach-for-the-bookit-is-a-weapon

A full weekend

I had such a terrific weekend. I want to share some of it. 

First, events. 

On Saturday, the Open Arms ministry held their soup lunch which raises funds for the food pantry service they run. This is one of those "empty bowls" events to which people donate soup and bowls, and you're supposed to be able to bring the bowl you ate out of home as a constant reminder of those who are needy, in your community and beyond. 

However, there are not enough bowls contributed to this event for that to work, so everyone eats out of the Meetinghouse's plastic bowls, and the donated ceramic bowls are for sale. 

It does not have the same effect. 

Apparently the event, which had lines out to the street the first year, has seen a precipitous drop in its popularity since it came to resemble a bean supper amongst the town's elderly. Taking the bowl home was the novelty, and the party favor. I think they need to rethink this event of not have it. 

After lunch, Lisa, another YAF, and I went to 10 Minute Plays on Trayvon, Race and Privilege at Earlham. It was meaningful, but made all the better by the community discussion that took place afterwards, in which many people of color and of whiteness spoke about, praised and criticised elements of the production. Theater is to be talked about!!

That night I went to Connorsville with Mary Alice to see Godspell. While I was fairly horrified by some of the ways religion and following Jesus were portrayed, both in the lyrics and in this particular staging (people blindly agreeing to baptism and then appearing as if they had just won the lottery and had a makeover) it was nice to see some energetic community theater, and to support Jesus, who is a member of West Richmond Friends. 

Sunday had its own joys in store. 

The first were textual. The morning's readings were all from the New Yorker, and covered lots of ground, culturally and geographically. 

Looking toward a cashless society: 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/imagining-a-cashless-world

A challenge to Uber (which I fell in love with while I was in DC)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/juno-takes-on-uber

Not all those who are voting for Trump are who you think they are: 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/in-the-heart-of-trump-country


Meeting was great (we distributed pies for our Christmas dinner ministry). Then College Meeting for Worship was truly excellent, with a message from Hashem, a Palestinian student who spoke about resistance and about the difficulty of knowing how to relate to home. There was not a dry eye in the house, and the unprogrammed part after the talk was filled with people who spoke up about how much Hashem's example meant to them, and how significantly he had influenced and inspired them. It was absolutely beautiful; a kind of tribute to both Palestine and Hashem. 

Cincinnati's Freedom Center

Aletha told me on Thursday that she was taking her students to the Freedom Center, the museum of the Underground Railroad in Cincinnati, on Friday. I asked if she had an extra seat, and went along.

I had not encountered a timeline or many of the facts of the Underground Railroad since junior year of high school when I took U.S. History. I had forgotten, for example, that the international slave trade was outlawed in 1807 (effective 1808), or that Britain began emancipating slaves in its colonies in the early 1830s.

It was powerful to be reminded of the stories of individual runaways who, having been sold down the river through the internal slave trade, which continued until 1865, escaped north. Even once across the Ohio river (poignantly framed by the massive, southern facing windows of the Freedom Center) former slaves were not safe, thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act which allowed slave owners to pursue them into non-slave states, and punished anyone who helped slaves escape.

Two things struck me about the exhibit (which is only part of the museum's purview: it also has sections on slavery today, mass incarceration, and a contemporary photography exhibit). The first was the importance of literacy and literature for slaves. Before literacy was important as a tool for survival during the escape, literacy led slaves to understand what freedom was. Imagine being a slave and reading about the Israelites, enslaved in Egypt and eventually freed into the promised land. Reading stories of other slaves fuelled those still in servitude. I hope to bring up this important function of literature when we study Fahrenheit 451 in a few weeks, which raises the question of the value of literature in the culture.

The second thing was the complete lack of a recognition of the role faith plays in the lives of slaves and those who helped them escape to freedom. There is credence paid to courage and perseverance, but I have the impression from my own outside reading of fiction and poetry that faith in God kept many going who otherwise would have given up the fight for justice.

"A band of angels" might also mean a band of angels.

For example, there was a small interactive panel that showed the lyrics to slave songs: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Wade in the Water, and Follow the Drinking Gourd. You could hit a button and hear some measures sung, then you heard an explanation of what the lyrics meant. The interpretations were painfully literal. "The old man" who's "a-comin' for to carry me to freedom" might be, they say, the people on the Underground Railroad who helped the slaves. And while "Wade in the Water" reminded people to get into the rivers to lose the scent of slave hunting dogs, there was no mention of the allusion to the Red Sea, which was "troubled" when God moved to help the Israelites escape. Indeed, the idea of getting into the water, the very water that God is going to trouble, seems to me to be a broader invitation to join the cause for justice - get into God's way so that when he moves, you'll move in the right direction with him!

I suppose the museum is for younger children, for whom abstract ideals might be harder. But then, perhaps the abstract ideals are harder for adults, who are less accustomed than youth to using their imagination and having faith in things they cannot see.

Francie, from Brooklyn, and Veblen, from Wisconsin

I was glad to see this week that the economics textbook used in Richmond High School's classes includes mention of my oft-cited, favorite political economist, Thorstein Veblen. I've been thinking of Veblen's ideas this morning as I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Francie, the young protagonist, lives with her family in Williamsburg in 1908. Very little happens in the first 150 pages (and, I've heard, in the entire book, but I haven't read it all), but the reader is treated to pleasing accounts of daily life for poor, working class families of various immigrant backgrounds in Williamsburg. One notably absent minority is yuppie.

Veblen says that we only ever feel badly about our own lack of wealth when we are able to look next door and see evidence of someone else's more substantial wealth. When everyone's poor, everyone can feel OK - when I see that there are rich among us, I feel crummy about being poor.

Perhaps this is part of the justification behind the Early College program at Richmond High School, where students considered at-risk for not attending college, because of their level of wealth, or the fact that their parents didn't go to college, take class together. Not that we teach the "poor kids' class" - it's not that stark, and never phrased in anything that approaches that implication. But I wonder if they gain some comfort from knowing that they are surrounded by peers who at least come from a similar background as they do.



Consider Francie, who has never been made to feel badly about her poverty, though she is well aware of the state of need in which she lives (her stomach won't let her forget it). She eagerly anticipates school and its sensory delights: clean paper, fresh pencils, chalkboards, books, socializing with peers, drinks from sparkling water fountains. On the first day of school, however, her expectations are set straight:

Francie, huddled with other children of her kind, learned more that first day than she realized. She learned of the class system of a great Democracy. She was puzzled and hurt by teacher's attitude. Obviously the teacher hated her and others like her for no other reason than that they were what they were. Teacher acted as though they had no right to be in the school but that she was forced to accept them and was doing so with as little grace as possible. She begrudged them the few crumbs of learning she threw at them. Like the doctor at the health center, she too acted as though they had no right to live.

The doctor she refers to commented crudely to the nurse that Francie, who had rolled up her sleeve at a free clinic to get the vaccination required for enrolment in school, was a disgrace because of her dirtiness.

I was surprised when I read about Francie's anticipation of school - I had not realized she wasn't going to school, probably because she was learning so much through daily life. She learned how to buy meat, and how to stand up for herself when the vendor tried to sell her old or low-quality cuts; she watched the neighborhood horse hand brush and care for his horse; she saw her aunt use her attractive appearance to win privileged treatment from men; she had examples of several kinds of morality demonstrated for her, and several brands of work ethic, from neighbors and family members; she learned how the Chinaman at the laundromat counted on his abacus; she saw how her mother saved money for a piece of land in a tin can nailed to the floor; she learned about English through her mother's reading of two pages of literature a night: one from the complete works of William Shakespeare, one from the Bible.

When Francie goes to school, she learns about the class system, a necessary lesson, I suppose. I have struggled with the apparent difficulty of defining why children need to be in school when there can be so little learning happening. The challenge of understanding why bright children must be shut in a building with poor conditions and often unsafe social conditions is echoed in Francie's mother's justification of both the vaccination and school attendance:

Katie was home for lunch when the children got back. She looked at their bandaged arms with misery in her eyes. Francie spoke out passionately.

"Why, Mama, why? Why do they have to ... to ... say things and then stick a needle in your arm?"

"Vaccination," said mama firmly, now that it was all over, "is a very good thing. It makes you tell your left hand from your right. You have to write with your right hand when you go to school and that sore will be there to say, uh-uh, not this hand. Use the other hand."

This explanation satisfied Francie because she had never been able to tell her left hand from her right. She ate, and drew pictures with her left hand. Katie was always correcting her and transferring the chalk or the needle from her left hand to her right. After mama explained about vaccination, Francie began to think that maybe it was a wonderful thing. It was a small price to pay if it simplified such a great problem and let you know which hand was which. Francie began using her right hand instead of the left after the vaccination and never had trouble afterwards.

Certainly we make up rationales for the tasks that children have to do, and with reason, at Francie's age. But what am I supposed to tell my students about the tests we're perpetually supposed to be preparing them for? Why do they need to take arbitrary tests in order to graduate? Beyond that, why do they need to graduate? I know this is pushing a bit, but it is by no means obvious, during the school day, why high school is a better alternative than not-high-school, except that, like vaccination for Francie, it's required by law.

Yes, high school grads have higher earning power, but isn't there some way for us to make high school feel worthwhile while students are sitting there? I hope and believe so.