Weekend Arts

I think I forgot when I lived in Lourdes, in Palestine, and in Richmond what a joy it is to be in a place where there are neat things going on all the time. It's a thrill. 


This weekend Kate MacLeod, a member of the Quaker Meeting, had a concert celebrating the release of her latest CD, which is called Deep in the Sound of Terra. She got fabulous coverage in Salt Lake's Catalyst magazine - last week's cover showed her album's cover artwork, which is a fabulous representation of her playing the fiddle. 

The concert was terrific, and she was a great performer, connecting nicely with the audience, being funny, informal, and of course terrifically talented. Fiddle music is so fun. I'm listening to the CD as I write this.

Today's arts began in literature. First was the next 50 pages of Catch-22, which will be discussed in the book club tomorrow. Two interesting articles, here and here, were posted by someone in the group, and they have helped me gain appreciation for this book even if I still don't like it. The next month's reading is short stories by Anton Chekhov, and I am greatly looking forward to that! 

Yesterday I finished Burned by Ellen Hopkins, a YA book that took an unexpected turn at the end. It's the story of a Mormon girl in Carson City, NV who is in her Junior year of high school. Her father drinks and abuses her mother, and Pattyn becomes increasingly disillusioned with Church doctrine and leadership. When she starts acting out at school, her parents send her away to her aunt's ranch in the desert of Nevada where she learns to drive, ride a horse, and or course, falls for a hunky cowboy who is home on summer break from UC Davis (where apparently none of the Californians have lassoed him). 

The book's themes of dark secrets within LDC families has distracted me as I live my life in Salt Lake this weekend. I was actually thinking about the book as I biked through downtown today; I was reflecting that in religions we need to focus on the important things like justice and equality, and forget about the silly things like dress, appearance, food and drink, and other elements of behavior we focus so much on that don't have anything to do with the kind of work Jesus and other justice-oriented people have done. 

As I rode, I found myself amid a mob of pedestrians in skirts and suits, and I realized I was on West Temple and this is Conference Weekend, so the LDS conference center was swarming with mormons of all ages. I felt a little guilty about the way I looked at them after reading this book!

Once done with Burned, I have started Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I have it on audio, and the author reads his books, which is in the format of an address from him to his son. He's explaining the reality of being black in this society, and in doing so speaks a great deal about his own past and process of learning how to live in a black body and keep it safe. 

Coates refers to the black body constantly, emphasizing that the black experience is a physical one, based on a physical trait that poses an enormous liability to his safety. He speaks also of those "who think they're white," referring to how no one doesn't have blackness in them, and how whiteness is a social construction as much as any other race is. It's been powerful to listen to. I can tell I'm going to want to listen to it more than once. 

This afternoon at the Marmalade Branch library, there was an event dedicated to Rumi poetry. I didn't really know anything about Rumi before this, and it was good to hear some of his work and others' reflections on it. 

Close to the end of the event, a woman took the stage and immediately her presence and dignity changed the energy in the auditorium. She moved with grace and gravitas, and she read the following poem like it was something that really mattered. 

Jesus On The Lean Donkey
by Rumi 

Jesus on the lean donkey,
this is an emblem of how the rational intellect
should control the animal-soul.

Let your spirit be strong like Jesus.
If that part becomes weak,
then the worn-our donkey grows to a dragon

Be grateful when what seems unkind
comes from a wise person.

Once, a holy man,
riding his donkey, saw a snake crawling into
a sleeping man’s mouth! He hurried, but he couldn’t
prevent it. He hit the man several blows with his club.

The man woke terrified and ran beneath an apple tree
With many rotten apples on the ground.
Eat! You miserable wretch! Eat.
Why are you doing this to me?
Eat more, you fool.
I’ve never seen you before!
Who are you? Do you have some inner quarrel with my soul?

The wise man kept forcing him to eat, and then he ran him.
For hours he whipped the poor man and made him run.
Finally, at nightfall, full of rotten apples,
fatigued, bleeding, he fell
and vomited everything,
the good and the bad, the apples and the snake.
When he saw that ugly snake
Come out of himself, he fell on his knees
before his assailant.
Are you Gabriel? Are you God?
I bless the moment you first noticed me. I was dead 
and didn’t know it. You’ve given me a new life.
Everything I’ve said to you was stupid!
I didn’t know
If I had explained what I was doing,
you might have panicked and died of fear.

Muhammad said,
If I described the enemy that lives
Inside men, even the most courageous would be paralyzed. No one
would go out, or do any work. No one would pray or fast,
and all power to change would fade
from human beings

so I kept quiet
while I was beating you, that like David
I might shape iron, so that, impossibly,
I might put feathers back into a bird’s wing.
God’s silence is necessary, because of humankind’s
faintheartedness. If I had told you about the snake, 
you wouldn’t have been able to eat, and if
you hadn’t eaten, you wouldn’t have vomited.

I saw your condition and drove my donkey hard
into the middle of it, saying always under my breath,
Lord, make it easy on him. I wasn’t permitted
to tell you, and I wasn’t permitted to stop beating you!

The healed man, still kneeling,
I have no way to thank you for the quickness
of your wisdom and the strength of your guidance.

God will thank you.

What occurred to me as she read was that this "Jesus" figure is every neighbor who feels compelled to act on behalf of compassion. Jesus was not unique in history. There are thousands of people who would do and do do "What Jesus would do" in this and other situations. Why do Christians insist on the singularity of Jesus? Well, I suppose they do in order to be able to distinguish an "us" from a "them" - those who are saved by this specific Jesus and those who aren't. What a ridiculous boundary to draw around goodness and righteousness. 

This performance reminded me that how poetry is read has utmost importance. It is not powerful if it is not read powerfully. At least, that's the impression I had. 

The other person who spoke very well was an 83-year-old man who has retired from 25 years of teaching English at East High School and now teaches poetry classes for senior citizens. I'm not sure why, but he read the opening to a T.S. Eliot poem (actually, I do know why. He had been asked to talk about the importance of poetry, and he used some poetry which had been important to his own experience in his answer). The Eliot poem is called "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock". Here's the opening stanza: 

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

I recognized the poem when he read it as one I had read this past summer in the poetry class at Bread Loaf, but I couldn't remember the poet. And I didn't have many feelings about the poem itself. This experience helped remind me that poetry sticks in my mind when someone tells me it's important, and talks about what they get out of it. This man said this poem helped him know what to expect from life, when he read it in his early 20's. 

Rumi

Poetry reading and races, and Catch-22

Evie Shockley

On Thursday night there was a poetry reading at Westminster College featuring the work of Jay Hopler and Evie Shockley. I really like hearing poets read their work. I don't think I had listened to much poetry read aloud before Bread Loaf this summer. Students and teachers read their work at Blue Sky readings each week, and I loved it. I especially enjoyed listening to the professors read their work (poetry and prose) and discuss their thinking and writing process.

On Thursday the work of Evie Shockley reminded me how key poetry seems in addressing injustice and racism. Poetry has a way of cutting through the nonsense and declaring things as they are. The form offers a license to be succinct and blunt. Shockley read a powerful poem called "Supply and Demand" about how treatment of blacks remains as unjust as it was in previous centuries. I'd like to get it to my students, but I'm not sure which book it was from... I'll have to visit a library and find out.

Our RefEd race team.

On Saturday I got to school at 7:15 to drive some of our students to Kaysville for the Refugee Education race. We had 14 runners participate in this 5K which funds refugee camp education in Chad. It was terrific to participate with students in something outside of class. And several of our students placed in the top three and were awarded medals (the event was pretty small).

I'm reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Perhaps I should say I'm skimming it, because that's what I'm doing at this point. I need to finish it for a book club discussion next sunday and I have 250 pages left. Besides, it's not my cup of tea. The cynicism and jumpiness of the narrative create a style that is discomforting and prickly, which surely is appropriate for a book about the ridiculous contradictions and dead ends of war (and of rational, hierarchical human systems, generally). Some of the writing, though, pleasing at the craft level. Look at the beginning of this paragraph. Look at how sensory details are used to create such a negative perspective on this view of the ocean, something that is typically portrayed as soothing and pastoral. How much this tells us about Yossarian's mental and spiritual state, that this is the way he experiences this view:

Or here, where the character description succeeds in making the reader embarrassed. How dare the narrator give us such an unfavorable and intimate look at someone before he has a chance to speak for himself? All the c's make the paragraph sound harsh, and the narrator seems like the disgruntled, hardened, army slave he is. Why should he do any favors for people like Colonel Cathcart, after what the war and the armed forces have done to him? 

What I realize most, though, is that I don't want to have one conversation with a book club about this book once I'm done. I want to discuss this book as I'm reading it. I want to talk about one passage at a time, not a whole 550 page book in one go. And I'm doubtful that a conversation with 12 people can feel substantive. I know I certainly won't be able to talk as much as I want to!

After the race yesterday Mum and I went to work in the garden, putting it to bed a bit. It was great being in there pulling up plants with Mama. Reminded me of when I was very young, like 10 or 12, working in the garden with her, assuming that I'd be the empress of my own gardened paradise one day. That didn't turn out! But I'm lucky enough to walk away from Mom's house with a bouquet of flowers from this bucket, plus some massive carrots to use for soup. 

It's been steadily raining all day, which has been quite enjoyable. Time to plan lessons about Angry Men for the week!

An obliging late harvest of massive carrots.

Early fall color palette.

I'm not sure I'll ever be able to do this! But mum makes it look easy.

Townie, by Andre Dubus III

Another book on Penny Kittle's list of student favorites is Townie by Andre Dubus III. This was the first one I could find that the public library had on audio book. It turns out (I read in his bio on his website) that Dubus won multiple awards for this audio recording, including being the 2011 "Voice of the Year" on audio. 

I am loving it.

The book feels like a properly fleshed-out and down-to-earth version of Good Will Hunting. Dubus recounts what it was like to grow up outside Boston in the 70's to a single mother. The violence, the drugs, the sex and the family dysfunction are all there, but told through the lens of a young man who takes it all in stride, as I guess you simply do when that's what you've grown up knowing. 

It is a strange feeling, looking into the lives of kids who grew up with so little parental supervision and so little emphasis on future goals. The need to protect oneself is constant. Dubus has one humiliating experience in which he can't fight back when someone else swings at him - he's not strong enough - and the flavor of defeat that was left in his mouth motivates his devotion to weight-lifting and boxing, where he gets "chipped" enough to send other guys, even strong ones, to the hospital with one jab.

One thing that strikes me is the role the police play in these neighborhoods. They show up to break up fights all the time. Neighbors call the cops, cops arrive and break up a fight. They save lives nearly every time they break up a fight. Where should these kids be? What should they be doing? Organized sports? Hunting? Building houses for themselves? It seems like a grave fault in our society that our strongest and most energetic demographic are being chased by some of our most street-smart and strong men, a police force that is reduced to holding teens' fists apart.

The thing that shocked me in the last chapter I heard was that Dubus went to a Red Sox game when he was in college, and it was his first baseball game. He didn't know who the Yankees were. He grew up 40 miles from Boston, and didn't know what Fenway Park was, much less about the rivalry that went on inside it. I liked Dubus' narrative style here - he didn't point out that this situation might strike readers as absurd. Even in Maine the Sox/Yankees rivalry was basically imbibed with breast milk. His unawareness simply becomes known through the chapter. 

I'm only halfway through the book and I'm rather amazed that Dubus ended up a writer and teacher. His father was one, but the image I have of him now is of a built college guy who feels out of place on a campus of liberal arts light weights. I'm looking forward to hearing the rest, then suggesting this book to more advanced readers in my classes.

I am constantly astounded by the way reading allows me to live so many experiences that are not my own. In other weekend reading, this essay from the Sept 11 issue of the New Yorker relates the story of a young Somali woman and her women's basketball team which fights for the right to play in a country where extremism forbids that women participate in sports. They walk a fine, dangerous line in order to pursue their sport. I plan to read this in class (broken up and made interactive) in a few weeks. Here's am excerpt that conveys this young woman's bravery: 

One evening after practice, she and five teammates were leaving a court in Hodan District—known as a dangerous place, where shootings and attacks were common. Aisha was on the phone with her mother, who was asking her to pick up milk and cooking oil on her way home. As the players walked, a black sedan stopped alongside them, and the driver asked if they needed a ride—a common occurrence in Somalia. Aisha didn’t recognize the man; he wore his beard long, and had on a white qamis, a linen robe. One of the girls asked him to drop them off down the road. Aisha wedged herself into the back seat with her friends.

After a few minutes, the driver pulled over, and then turned around to tell the girls that he knew who they were, what they were doing, everything about them; he named the neighborhoods where they lived. Aisha felt pricks of fear spread through her. “I know that you all are playing basketball,” he said. They shook their heads furiously and said that they had nothing to do with the sport. “I’ve been watching you play basketball,” he said. “All of you.”

The man’s phone rang, and he got out to take the call, locking the car behind him. The girls, panicking, pounded on the doors, but they wouldn’t budge. The man came back and rolled down a window so that he could watch them as he talked. Aisha pushed herself through the open window and fell onto the ground. Looking desperately around her, she picked up a big stone. She told the man that if he didn’t let them leave, she would throw the stone at the windshield. “I know I’m crazy, but I had to do something,” she told me. “If we stayed scared, this guy would kill us.” The man said, “Now you want to destroy my car? I wasn’t going to harm you. Calm down.” He unlocked the doors, and the girls scrambled out.

Aisha hailed a tuk-tuk and they got in, sitting tightly next to one another to feel safe. On the way home, they reported to the police that a man from al-Shabaab had threatened them. Aisha told no one else. “I had to hide it from my family so that they wouldn’t stop me playing,” she said. She was sure that if her parents found out they would send her to stay with her aunt in Ethiopia or, worse, keep her at home.