Better Living through Beowulf | How great literature can change your life

Everyperson’s Environmental E-Car

By Robin Bates | Published: May 23, 2013

Roman sun god from the temple at Aqua Sulis (Bath)

The news has just come in that Tesla, the electronic car company that received $452 million in federal stimulus dollars, is doing so well that it can pay its government loan back, with interest, nine years early. My father wrote a poem 35 years ago cheering for electric cars, and solar power generally, so it’s great to be able to celebrate a success after Solyndra and Fisker. Here’s the poem:

E Is for Everyperson’s Environmental E-Car

By Scott Bates

give me an E
give me an L
give me a Photovoltaic Cell
give me an E
give me a   C
give me a Cosmic Battery
give me a   T
give me an R
give me a Ride on Rainbow Power
give me an I
give me a    C
give me a Sky full of Energy

give me an S
give me an O
give me an Ozone way to go
give me an L
give me an A
give me an Aerial Chevrolet

give me an R
give me a CAR
give me a CAR that runs on a STAR

give me the Three
give me the Two
give me the One
that runs on the Sun

From An ABC of Radical Ecology (New Market, Tennessee: Highlander Research and Education Center, 1982)

Of course, the nation is far from producing a significant portion of its electricity from the sun, although here also progress is being made. Last year Julia and I installed solar panels and a solar water heater on the top of our house. We had to take out a second mortgage to cover the $48,000 it involved (the price also covered the cost of a new roof, which we needed), but what with low interest rates and favorable tax incentives at the local, state, and federal levels, we figure that it will pay for itself in seven years. This past year we found ourselves paying for electricity only in the coldest months, which is no small thing given the number of students we have living with us. If we owned an electronic car, it would help with that as well.

This in itself won’t stop climate change. But every little bit helps. Think globally, act locally.

Posted in Bates (Scott) | Tagged "E Is for Everyperson's Environmental E-Car", "Everyperson's Environmental Car", Environment, Environmentalism, Scott Bates, solar energy, solar power | 2 Comments

Oklahoma Tornado Recalls Dorothy’s

By Robin Bates | Published: May 22, 2013

W. W. Denslow, “Wonderful Wizard of Oz”

The horrendous damage visited upon Oklahoma by the recent tornado brings to mind literature’s most famous tornado, which is the one that carries Dorothy to the Land of Oz. L. Frank Baum, who saw the country ravaged by drought and depression from his vantage point of South Dakota in the 1890’s, describes the tornado (he calls it a cyclone) striking a landscape that is barren in every sense of the word. Here’s the environment that Dorothy grows up in:

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.

And here’s the tornado striking. One difference is that, because the ground in Oklahoma is so hard, people often don’t have the kind of basement shelters that Dorothy’s family does :

From the far north they heard a low wail of the wind, and Uncle Henry and Dorothy could see where the long grass bowed in waves before the coming storm. There now came a sharp whistling in the air from the south, and as they turned their eyes that way they saw ripples in the grass coming from that direction also.

Suddenly Uncle Henry stood up.

“There’s a cyclone coming, Em,” he called to his wife. “I’ll go look after the stock.” Then he ran toward the sheds where the cows and horses were kept.

Aunt Em dropped her work and came to the door. One glance told her of the danger close at hand.

“Quick, Dorothy!” she screamed. “Run for the cellar!”

Toto jumped out of Dorothy’s arms and hid under the bed, and the girl started to get him. Aunt Em, badly frightened, threw open the trap door in the floor and climbed down the ladder into the small, dark hole. Dorothy caught Toto at last and started to follow her aunt. When she was halfway across the room there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor.

Then a strange thing happened.

The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. Dorothy felt as if she were going up in a balloon.

The north and south winds met where the house stood, and made it the exact center of the cyclone. In the middle of a cyclone the air is generally still, but the great pressure of the wind on every side of the house raised it up higher and higher, until it was at the very top of the cyclone; and there it remained and was carried miles and miles away as easily as you could carry a feather.

It was very dark, and the wind howled horribly around her, but Dorothy found she was riding quite easily. After the first few whirls around, and one other time when the house tipped badly, she felt as if she were being rocked gently, like a baby in a cradle.

Toto did not like it. He ran about the room, now here, now there, barking loudly; but Dorothy sat quite still on the floor and waited to see what would happen.

Of the many stories of the Oklahoma tornado, here’s one reported in The New Yorker about a woman having her dog torn from her arms as her home takes a direct hit, only to miraculously find it again afterwards. It’s almost a version of what happens with Dorothy and Toto:

Once Toto got too near the open trap door, and fell in; and at first the little girl thought she had lost him. But soon she saw one of his ears sticking up through the hole, for the strong pressure of the air was keeping him up so that he could not fall. She crept to the hole, caught Toto by the ear, and dragged him into the room again, afterward closing the trap door so that no more accidents could happen.

Dorothy, of course, ends up in the colorful Oz that MGM captured so well in the 1939 film. Here’s Baum’s description of what Dorothy sees:

The cyclone had set the house down very gently–for a cyclone–in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of greensward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies.

May a similar brightness enter the lives of the Oklahoma survivors after they dig out of their ruins and mourn their dead.

Posted in Baum (L. Frank) | Tagged L. Frank Baum, tornado, weather disaster, Wonderful Wizard of Oz | Leave a comment

Returning Home to Aging Parents

By Robin Bates | Published: May 21, 2013

Have you ever thought that the books we obtain from libraries or bookstores sometimes choose us rather than the other way around? That would explain why a books-on-disk version of Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008) ended up in my possession as I drove down to Tennessee to be with my father as he was released from the hospital. I didn’t know that the book is about two people who return to the family home to be with their own ailing father.

Home is a companion book to Robinson’s Gilead (2005), one of my favorite contemporary novels. Whereas Gilead is told from the point of view of a Congregationalist minister in 1950s Iowa, Home features his fellow minister and best friend, Robert Boughton. The story is told from the point of view of Boughton’s youngest daughter Glory, who has returned home after a traumatic relationship. She begins to forge a bond with the black sheep of the family, Jack, who also has returned in an attempt to sort his life out.

As in Gilead, there are rich interactions between the characters, with psychology and religion playing prominent roles. The primary focus is the family’s attempts to understand and communicate with Jack. But what hits me hardest is how Glory and Jack interact with their father, who is sometimes remarkably thoughtful and sometimes trapped in the past. The children have to be careful not to be patronizing, even though, in another way, they have become the parents. Robinson captures the complicated dance in a way that preserves the dignity of all characters.

My own situation is different in that my indomitable mother continues to run the household and care for my father, even though she lives in constant back pain. Still, Robinson’s novel captures many of my concerns.

Those of you who have enjoyed my father’s poems will be glad to hear that his bladder infections have cleared up and that he is once again suggesting poems for me to use on this blog. Also, for those of you who enjoyed the account of how he carried an anthology of poetry with him through the European theater in World War II, you may be interested in knowing that he has now experienced what he describes as “total recall” of his World War II experiences. He feels driven to share these experiences with anyone interested.

His total recall occurred after he had spent a couple of weeks in incoherence, which may have been the result of his infections. He has started having recurring dreams of being bombed by the Germans while on Omaha Beach (he landed there two weeks after D Day). But he says it’s not a PTSD dream because it doesn’t have that level of trauma and terror. Nevertheless, he says that it is incredibly vivid.

Many of the tales he has to tell about the war, the stories of soldiers’ sexual lives during the occupation, he complains have been suppressed. He reminds me somewhat of “Word” Smith, the narrator in Philip Roth’s baseball work The Great American Novel, who claims that baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn has covered up the truth about a scandalous episode in baseball’s history. Sometimes my father invokes Aeschylus’s Cassandra, the prophetess that no one will listen to.

Tim O’Brien’s fine Vietnam novel has given me one insight into my father’s need to tell his war stories. O’Brien talks about the deep necessity of recounting these stories–there is one character, Bowker, who does not and who commits suicide maybe as a result–and my father mentions how he wasn’t able to tell many of his stories when he returned to Carleton College after the war. In fact, one story he wrote for the literary magazine in 1946, about a soldier getting venereal disease, appalled the president of the college at the time, and faculty had to come to my father’s defense. This experience of having the “truth” suppressed (my father keeps talking about the need to “tell the truth”) seems to be part of my father’s need to communicate now. As a result, I am hearing a lot about soldiers and sex.

I now understand how my father’s college story is indirectly autobiographical. The protagonist is a repressed young GI who has a sexual experience in France and then can’t stop himself and begins getting the clap. My father describes himself as so shy that he resisted most of the women who made offers–although he talks of losing his virginity during the liberation of Paris–so the story would have gotten at both his wishes and his anxieties. And then it was suppressed.

As an aside, I’m wondering how much of the repressed 1950s can be attributed to veterans who felt that they had to hide their war stories. Such suppression is the subject of one of John Cheever’s finest short stories, “The Country Husband.”

Anyway, in returning home I find myself immersed in stories of the past.

Posted in Robinson (Marilynne), Roth (Philip K.) | Tagged Aging, Great American Dream, Home: A Novel, homecoming, Marilynne Robinson, parents, Philip Roth | Leave a comment

Poems Teach Us to Be Wise

By Robin Bates | Published: May 20, 2013

Gustave Dore, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Today I write about two wonderfully complementary essays written by first-year star student-athletes in my Introduction to Literature class, neither of them an English major. It’s a feel-good story because these are exactly the kinds of conversations one hopes 18-year-old athletes will engage in. Think of stereotypes of the jock and then think of young men drawing on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (the lacrosse player) and Wendell Berry’s “Thirty More Years” (the baseball player) to move past the stereotype to a more mature and reflective view of the world.

The stereotype, I have in mind, is of careless, self-absorbed individuals who are filled with a sense of their own importance, who think they are invulnerable, and who don’t devote much thought to the future or to the consequences of their actions.

Conor has every reason to feel puffed up. Last month, in the most important victory in our college’s lacrosse history, he scored two goals in a minute to help us beat the heavily-favored and perennial national champion Salisbury State to take the conference title. Conor, however, saw Ancient Mariner as an important lesson in humility. He saw both the wedding guest and the pre-albatross mariner as thoughtless young men who think they are invulnerable. The wedding guest is looking forward to a party and the mariner relishes being cheered as his ship embarks on a grand adventure.

What drew Conor to the poem is the way that the mariner is like fellow first year students. He is at first thrilled to be setting off and then isn’t sure how to handle the trouble the ship encounters:

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.

They are saved from the ice by an albatross, who the mariners befriend and who functions as a supernatural savior:

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.

It ate the food it ne’er had eat,And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!

No one has ever been able to entirely explain why the mariner shoots the bird. Conor’s explanation is as interesting as any. If the young mariner, like the wedding guest, thinks he’s in control of his own destiny, then the ship’s dependence on the albatross is an affront. Shooting it is a way of reminding the world who’s in charge. The mariner may not know this is why he is shooting it any more than young men know why they are committing acts of vandalism. He does it bcause he can.

As the poem moves on, Life in Death wins out over Death is taking possession of the mariner, and Conor liked the idea of life-in-death as a metaphor for the depression that one experiences when one sets oneself apart from (including above) the world of nature. The mariner must humbly realize that he is a part of nature rather than superior to it, even if that nature includes “slimy things.” The vision he arrives at is voiced at the end of the poem:

He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

It is not enough for the mariner only to realize this, however, even though it is a necessary first step. He must pass the insight along to others who are versions of his younger self. For Conor, this was a lesson that he and people like him needed to hear.

My baseball player, Ben Goldsmith, is a very promising lefty who has some of Conor’s seriousness. He interprets “Thirty Years Later” in ways that are similar to how Conor reads “Ancient Mariner.” Here’s the poem:

When I was a young man,
grown up at last, how large
I seemed to myself! I was a tree,
tall already, and what I had not
yet reached, I would yet grow
to reach. Now, thirty more years
added on, I have reached much
I did not expect, in a direction
unexpected. I am growing downward,
smaller, one among the grasses.

Young men, Ben said, see themselves as trees gaining more and more control of the world. They don’t not realize that there may be other dimension to growth. Here’s Ben:

As a college student, I can relate to this young man that the narrator once was. That is just the college kid mentality, thinking you are indestructible and that you can do anything without getting hurt. Over time, the narrator came to the realization that he was indeed not invincible, but only a man.

And later:

Being humble does not mean that his man has shrunken as being a man, it just means that he no longer thinks he is the biggest thing in the world. As more important things have come into his life like a wife and kids, and possibly grandkids, his life has become less important as he cares for more people.

Conor and Ben are both in training to become future leaders. I’m pleased that literature has played a small role.

Posted in Berry (Wendell), Coleridge (Samuel Taylor) | Tagged "Thirty Years Later", Coming of Age, Education, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wendell Berry | Leave a comment

Look into Thine Heart and Write

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2013

Albert Bierstadt, “Forest Sunrise”

Spiritual Sunday

Today, in observance of Pentecost, I offer up a William Longfellow poem (here it is in its entirety) that finds the poet reenacting the Pentecost story as he wanders through nature. Pentecost is the celebration of the moment when the Holy Spirit, the “advocate with the Father” promised by Jesus, enters the disciples after Jesus’ ascension to heaven. The disciples were of course distraught at the prospect of Jesus leaving them, but he reassured them that they would always be with him/

Echoing a number of Wordsworth poems, Longfellow sees the innocence he had as a child also having departed. Like Wordsworth in “Intimations of Immortality,” the poet enters nature with the hope that he will reconnect with that spirit but finds only its absence:

Therefore, at Pentecost, which brings 
The Spring, clothed like a bride, 
When nestling buds unfold their wings, 
And bishop’s-caps have golden rings, 
Musing upon many things, 
I sought the woodlands wide.

The green trees whispered low and mild; 
It was a sound of joy! 
They were my playmates when a child, 
And rocked me in their arms so wild! 
Still they looked at me and smiled, 
As if I were a boy;

And ever whispered, mild and low, 
“Come, be a child once more!” 
And waved their long arms to and fro, 
And beckoned solemnly and slow; 
O, I could not choose but go 
Into the woodlands hoar,–

Into the blithe and breathing air, 
Into the solemn wood, 
Solemn and silent everywhere 
Nature with folded hands seemed there 
Kneeling at her evening prayer! 
Like one in prayer I stood.

Like the disciples who can’t imagine life without Jesus, Longfellow is depressed over having lost his childhood connection with nature. And just as Jesus reassures the disciples that he will leave behind “an advocate with the father”—the Holy Spirit that will enter them—so the poet is reassured that “the land of Song within thee lies,/Watered by living springs”:

Visions of childhood! Stay, O stay! 
Ye were so sweet and wild! 
And distant voices seemed to say, 
“It cannot be! They pass away! 
Other themes demand thy lay; 
Thou art no more a child!

“The land of Song within thee lies, 
Watered by living springs; 
The lids of Fancy’s sleepless eyes 
Are gates unto that Paradise, 
Holy thoughts, like stars, arise, 
Its clouds are angels’ wings.”

The song within is vital because nature, which is entangled with the world, invariably lets us down:

“Learn, that henceforth thy song shall be, 
Not mountains capped with snow, 
Nor forests sounding like the sea, 
Nor rivers flowing ceaselessly, 
Where the woodlands bend to see 
The bending heavens below.

“There is a forest where the din 
Of iron branches sounds! 
A mighty river roars between, 
And whosoever looks therein 
Sees the heavens all black with sin, 
Sees not its depths, nor bounds.

“Athwart the swinging branches cast, 
Soft rays of sunshine pour; 
Then comes the fearful wintry blast 
Our hopes, like withered leaves, fail fast; 
Pallid lips say, ‘It is past! 
We can return no more!”

Therefore, look within as you write about nature:

“Look, then, into thine heart, and write! 
Yes, into Life’s deep stream! 
All forms of sorrow and delight, 
All solemn Voices of the Night, 
That can soothe thee, or affright,– 
Be these henceforth thy theme.”

Posted in Longfellow (Henry Wadsworth) | Tagged "Prelude", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nature, Pentecost | Leave a comment

Nostalgic for Fluid Basketball

By Robin Bates | Published: May 18, 2013

Sports Saturday

I suspect that I am not the only fan disappointed by the way that the NBA basketball playoffs have shaken out. Defense is suffocating offense and teams that are noteworthy for their fluid style of play have either been eliminated or are about to be (the Knicks). The victims include the Golden State Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder, who were felled by untimely injuries. The Grizzlies and the Pacers, meanwhile, are playing ugly basketball, and the Spurs seem to have decided that they must follow suit if they want to win.

The only team that excites me at the moment is the Miami Heat. Watching Lebron James is like watching Michael Jordan in the olden days: one never knows when he is going to uncork an astounding play. I was fervently hoping to see him matched up against Kevin Durant in a replay of last year’s championship series, but we will have to wait until next year for the possibility of that happening.

In the meantime, we have only our memories to fall back on. Which is what this B. H. Fairchild poem is about:

Old Men Playing Basketball

By B. H. Fairchild

The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language
of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot
slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love
again with the pure geometry of curves,

rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away.
On the boards their hands and fingertips
tremble in tense little prayers of reach
and balance. Then, the grind of bone

and socket, the caught breath, the sigh,
the grunt of the body laboring to give
birth to itself. In their toiling and grand
sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love

to their wives, kissing the undersides
of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe
of desire? And on the long walk home
from the VFW, do they still sing

to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock
moving, the one in army fatigues
and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll,
and the phrase sounds musical as ever,

radio crooning songs of love after the game,
the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat
as her raven hair flames in the shuddering
light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,

gliding toward the net. A glass wand
of autumn light breaks over the backboard.
Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout
at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.

From The Art of the Lathe (Alice James Books, 1998)

Posted in Fairchild (B.H) | Tagged "Old Men Playing Basketball", B. H. Fairchild, Basketball, NBA, Sports | Leave a comment

Fantasy: A Rich Guy Gets His Comeuppance

By Robin Bates | Published: May 17, 2013

The economy may be slowly clawing itself back from the 2008 recession, but the stock market has been soaring as though there’s no tomorrow. Particularly discouraging are reports that most of the country’s wealth gains have gone to the very wealthiest Americans. In other words, so much for trickle down economics.

If you ever find yourself longing for the one percent to get their comeuppance, even as they appear to always end up on top, here’s a revenge fantasy from the Great Depression. Use it to vent your spleen.

Dirge

By Kenneth Fearing

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;
bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow—

O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
O, fellow with a will who won’t take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails—

Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,

And twelve o’clock arrived just once too often,
just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
just one too many,

And wow he died as wow he lived,
going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
zowie did he live and zowie did he die,

With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who
the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not,

Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T.,

Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;
Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.

Posted in Fearing (Kenneth) | Tagged "Dirge", Kenneth Fearing, stock market, Wall Street | Leave a comment

To Know Gatsby Is to Know America

By Robin Bates | Published: May 16, 2013

Mulligan, DiCaprio in “The Great Gatsby

With the release of the new Great Gatsby, I turn to what appears an excellent review in The New Yorker. Although I haven’t seen the film, I know the novel and I know the film director Baz Luhrmann, and the author of the article makes a convincing case that the two belong together.

Certainly what he says about the novel’s focus on fantasy is on target. The tragedy of the novel, as the following passage from the novel’s conclusion reminds us, is that our dreams can never live up to our expectations:

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion.

I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

I’m convinced that, more than anything else, it is the American Dream that holds us together as a nation. Our capacity for wonder, for dreaming, may help explain why we act so badly when grim reality sets in. Perhaps that’s why our politics are so nasty at the moment. Perhaps we are acting out all the rage of our disenchantment.

Here’s reviewer Joshua Rothman:

The real achievement of Gatsby, in other words, is that it shows us a state of mind. It’s a state of spiritual hunger and dissatisfaction, of restlessness and curiosity, of excitement and anticipation, in which one is, as Nick puts it, “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” All this unfolds beneath that disillusioned surface. This is how you feel when you understand that there is no obviously right way to live, but find that you must choose anyway. It’s pessimistic and ironic, in the sense that you are always only half-committed to your way of life. But it’s also exciting, because you are always on the edge of discovery. There’s always something at stake. The main thing is that you are never settled. You are always hungry, always searching, always throwing feelings away in order to make room for new ones.

It’s possible to believe, as many critics do, that this is a uniquely American state of mind, and there’s a sense in which Gatsby is describing what it’s like to be young in America. Youth is when we do the most weighing and choosing, when we try out new personalities until they become exhausted or destructive. And in a consumer society, youth is extended. We’re increasingly free to pursue our fantasies, to buy the costumes and accouterments of the lives we’d like to have. The result is a kind of national carelessness that realizes itself economically, ecologically, and politically. Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” gestures toward the link between our period and Fitzgerald’s. Our pop hits take place “in the club,” and, Luhrmann shows, so did theirs. We love cocktails and speakeasy bars, and so did they. As in the twenties, we tend to admire wealth, no matter how it’s made.

But the real strength of Luhrmann’s movie is that it turns inward—not toward psychological realism, exactly, but toward fantasy. Gatsby is, to the end, defiantly unrealistic.

America has always been a land of dreamers and probably always will. That’s both the good news and the bad news.

Posted in Fitzgerald (Scott F.) | Tagged American Dream, F. Scott Fitzgerald, fantasizing, Great Gatsby | 3 Comments

Antigone Would Bury Boston Bomber

By Robin Bates | Published: May 15, 2013

There’s a great article in the recent on-line New Yorker applying classic Greek literature to issues that have arisen over the burial of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. I provide a short version here but recommend that you go read the piece in its entirety.

The article’s author Daniel Mendelsohn sums up the burial drama as follows, noting that the

cadaver [was] seemingly so morally polluted that his own widow would not claim it, that no funeral director would touch it, that no cemetery would bury it. Indeed, even after Peter Stefan, a Worcester funeral director, had washed and shrouded the battered, bullet-ridden body for burial according to Muslim law, the cadaver became the object of a macabre game of civic and political football. Cemetery officials and community leaders in the Boston area were concerned that a local burial would spark civic unrest…While the state’s governor carefully sidestepped the issue, asserting that it was a family matter, other politicians seemed to sense an advantage in catering to the high popular feeling. “If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried on our soil,” declared Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, “then it should not be.”

And so it went until late last week, when—due to the intervention of Martha Mullen, a Richmond, Virginia woman who’d been following the story, a practicing Christian who cited Jesus’s injunction to “love our enemies” as her inspiration—Tsarnaev’s body was finally transported to a tiny Muslim cemetery in rural Virginia and interred there in an unmarked grave.

Mendelsohn than goes on to talk about burial beliefs and practices in classical Greece and mentions their appearance in various works of literature. For instance, he notes how even Achilles, driven so mad by the death of Patroclus that he desecrates the body of Hector, in the end is brought around to respecting the dead, giving up the body to Hector’s father, King Priam:

The gigantic epic ends not (as some first-time readers expect) with the Wooden Horse, or the Fall of Troy, but with the all-important funeral of the greatest of the Greeks’ enemies—a rite of burial that allows the Trojans to mourn their prince and, in a way, the audience to find closure after the unrelenting violence that has preceded.

Likewise, the suitors at the end of The Odyssey are allowed a ritual burial. And in Sophocles play Ajax, Mendelsohn notes that Odysseus makes a passionate plea to Agamemnon to bury the traitorous Ajax.

But the most famous work on this subject is, of course, Antigone. The plot, as I’m sure you know, involves Creon’s order to leave unburied the traitorous brother Polyneices, who attacked the city, and Creon’s niece Antigone choosing to administer funeral rites, even though it means her death. I love how Mendelsohn’s applies Antigone to the Tsarnaev situation:

[W]hat preoccupies Antigone, who as we know is attracted to universals, is simply another “absolute”: the absolute personhood of the dead man, stripped of all labels, all categories—at least those imposed by temporal concerns, by politics and war. For her, the defeated and disgraced Polyneices, naked and unburied, is just as much her brother as the triumphant and heroic Eteocles, splendidly entombed. In the end, what entitles him to burial has nothing to do with what side he was on…This is why, during her great debate with Creon, while the king keeps recurring to the same point—that Eteocles was the champion of the city, and Polyneices its foe, and that “a foe is never a friend”—such distinctions are moot for Antigone, since the gods themselves do not make them. “Nonetheless,” she finally declares, putting a curt end to another exchange on the subject, “Hades requires these rites.” The only salient distinction is the one that divides gods from men—which, if true, makes all humans equal.

The alternative is to label certain humans as monsters—and once we refuse to see the humanity in another, we put our own humanity at risk. Thus Antigone, along with Homer’s epics, becomes a powerful argument as to why we should accord Tsarnaev a ritual burial:

Whatever else is true of the terrible crime that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is accused of having perpetrated, it was, all too clearly, the product of an entirely human psyche, horribly motivated by beliefs and passions that are very human indeed… To call him a monster is to treat this enemy’s mind precisely the way some would treat his unburied body—which is to say, to put it beyond the reach of human consideration (and therefore, paradoxically, to refuse to confront his “monstrosity” at all).

This is the point that obsessed Sophocles’ Antigone: that to not bury her brother, to not treat the war criminal like a human being, would ultimately have been to forfeit her own humanity. This is why it was worth dying for.

Posted in Homer, Sophocles | Tagged Ajax, Antigone, Boston Marathon bombing, funerals, Homer, Iliad, Odyssey, Sophocles, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Terrorism | Leave a comment

Listen Carefully–The Books Are Whispering

By Robin Bates | Published: May 14, 2013

Carl Spitzweg, “The Bookworm” (1850)

I gave a talk last night to Leonardtown, Maryland’s Friends of the Library about—surprise!–“How Literature Can Change Your Life.” It was a busy day, what with writing the talk and turning in final grades and going to one last committee meeting and attending a retirement party (for which I wrote a bit of doggerel) and packing up to go Tennessee. (I left last night and am on the road today to help my mother care for my father, who is coming home after weeks in the hospital.) Not having had time to write a regular blog post, I’m sharing three poems that capture the magic of libraries. Enjoy.

My First Memory (of Librarians)

By Nikki Giovanni

This is my first memory:
A big room with heavy wooden tables that sat on a creaky
       wood floor
A line of green shades—bankers’ lights—down the center
Heavy oak chairs that were too low or maybe I was simply
       too short
              For me to sit in and read
So my first book was always big

In the foyer up four steps a semi-circle desk presided
To the left side the card catalogue
On the right newspapers draped over what looked like
a quilt rack
Magazines face out from the wall

The welcoming smile of my librarian
The anticipation in my heart
All those books—another world—just waiting
At my fingertips.

In the Library

By Charles Simic

for Octavio

There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

In the Library

By William Stafford

You are reading a book, and think you know 
the end, but others can’t wait—they crowd 
on the shelves, breathing. You stop and look around. 
It is the best time: evening is coming, 
a bronze haze has captured the sun, 
lights down the street come on.

You turn a page carefully. Over your shoulder 
another day has watched what you do 
and written it down in that book 
you can’t read till all the pages are done.

Posted in Giovanni (Nikki), Simic (Charles), Stafford (William) | Tagged "In the Library", "My First Memory (of Librarians), Charles Simic, libraries, Nikki Giovanni, William Stafford | 1 Comment

Poetry in the Commencement Ceremony

By Robin Bates | Published: May 13, 2013

Veronese, “Allegory of Wisdom and Strength” (1580)

Here’s a report about how poetry showed up in our 2013 Commencement—further testimony to how, at our most important moments, we rely on poetry to do much of the heavy lifting.

First, in a move that jolted a number of us, my colleague Jose´ Ballesteros of the Foreign Language Department read “Imagine the Angels of Bread” by Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada. While the poem was in line with one traditional commencement theme—the hope that this graduating class will help bring about a brighter future—it was startlingly specific about the reality that needs changing.

As you read it, imagine how this would strike a graduation crowd just settling in for the ritual platitudes we expect upon such occasions. Even when we have moved beyond platitude to poetry, it has been to verse far more serene. For instance, for many years we read Lucille Clifton’s “blessing of the boats (at St. Mary’s),” which concludes, “may you in your innocence sail from this to that.” Espada’s poem, by contrast, is a revolutionary wish fulfillment, and suddenly sailing from this to that involves squatters evicting their landlords and refugees deporting immigration judges:

Imagine the Angels of Bread

By Martin Espada

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.

Jose concluded the reading, “Class of 2013, this is the year!”

By the way, I think Lucille Clifton would have loved Jose´reading this poem. She was all about “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” and Espada keeps us from becoming too comfortable.

We didn’t hear any poetry from our valedictorian, which surprised me as she was an English major (also an Economics major). Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, meanwhile, focused more on the economics of education than on its humanistic dimensions. “We need leadership that is entrepreneurial,” he told us, and “Open up community-based solutions on a national scale.” (Just as an aside, O’Malley has been a good governor but I can’t imagine him as President of the United States, even though his name is often mentioned amongst potential Democratic candidates.)

But the student chosen by the senior class to deliver the “Quintessential Student” address did quote Maya Angelou. Wonderfully named Jasmine Jones, this African American student roused us all with her citation of Angelou:

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

All in all, it was a very good day. I hugged all my majors and told their parents how fortunate I was to have had their sons and daughters in my life. Yes, Class of 2013, this is the year. Most of you have come to know who you are, and this self-knowledge will help you get through the inevitable defeats that lie ahead.

Be angels of bread to the world.

Posted in Angelou (Maya), Clifton (Lucille), Espada (Martin) | Tagged "blessing of the boats (at St. Mary's), "Imagine the Angels of Bread, College, Education, graduation, Lucille Clifton, Martin Espada, Maya Angelou | 1 Comment

Making a Fetish of Suffering

By Robin Bates | Published: May 12, 2013

Goya, “Christ Crucified”

Spiritual Sunday

I am a member of a “Restorative Justice Faculty Reading Group” and on Friday, to finish off a semester where we focused on the meaning of suffering, we discussed passages from The Brothers Karamazov along with a 1995 Christian feminist article (by Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker) entitled “For God So Loved the World?” It was a powerful way to end the semester.

The Karamazov passages were (1) Ivan’s despairing rant about the presence of meaningless suffering in the world and (2) Father Zossimov’s discussion of hell, which he defines as the absence of love. Brown’s and Parker’s article, meanwhile, complain about how suffering has been fetishized by many of Christianity’s traditions, leading to (among other things) a celebration of female passivity and female masochism. When it becomes a positive Christian virtue to be long suffering, the authors write, then something is wrong.

Ivan refuses to see suffering as redemptive in any way. To graphically make his point, he cites instances of children suffering (a child covered in excrement by his parents, a child deliberately torn apart by his master’s dogs) and attacks those who try to see the presence of divine purpose. His rant is against those who say “Thou art just, O Lord!” in response to accounts of suffering and who assert that there must be some longer viewer, some “higher harmony,” at work. Here’s Ivan talking to his younger brother, the spiritual Alyosha:

I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to “dear, kind God”! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.

And later:

…too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.

Brown and Parker, meanwhile, argue that “suffering is never redemptive and suffering can never be redeemed.” Like Ivan, they say that to think otherwise is to diminish suffering. Furthermore, to think that God would send his son to earth to die is to see him as an abusive parent. (“Can you imagine a female god sending her child to be sacrificed?” my Religious Studies colleague Katharina VonKellenbach asked.”) It is we, in our own sickness, that see God in this way.

Brown and Parker write that

Jesus was not an acceptable sacrifice for the sins of the whole world because God does not need to be appeased and demands not sacrifice but justice. To know God is to do justice.

The authors argue for abandoning the idea that suffering is necessary to absolve us. Christ did not come to earth to suffer but to put people in touch with the divine. If he suffered, it is because he refused to abandon his mission in the face of threats. Or as Brown and Parker put it,

To be a Christian means keeping faith with those who have heard and lived God’s call for justice, radical love and liberation; who have challenged unjust systems, both political and ecclesiastical; and who in that struggle have refused to be victims, and who have refused to cower under the threat of violence, suffering and death.

This thinking leads Brown and Parker to a different notion of the Resurrection than many hold:

Resurrection means that death is overcome in those precise instances when human beings choose life, refusing the threat of death. Jesus climbed out of the grave in the Garden of Gethsemane when he refused to abandon his commitment to the truth even though his enemies threatened him with death. On Good Friday, the Resurrected One was Crucified.

Katharina noted that she herself now prefers to call humans “natals” as opposed to “mortals,” thereby emphasizing the fact that we are born over the fact that we die. Christmas she finds to be a more powerful celebration than Easter because of its focus on life.

Ivan might well agree.

Posted in Dostoevsky (Fyodor) | Tagged Brothers Karamazov, crucifixion, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Suffering | Leave a comment

Stephen Curry Explodes on the Scene

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2013

Sports Saturday

For those who don’t follow basketball closely, one of the most delightful surprises of the NBA playoffs has been the play of Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors. In the first game of the second round, he knocked down pretty much every shot he put up against the San Antonio Spurs, finishing with 44 points. I hope I don’t jinx him by posting the following e.e. cummings’ elegy about another great shooter, Buffalo Bill, but it’s the poem that came to mind:

Buffalo Bill ‘s
defunct
                     who used to
                     ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                            stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

Curry isn’t blueeyed but he certain seems like a boy and his shots have a onetwothreefourfive quality to them. Just like that. The kid is a watersmooth-silver stallion.

Best-coach-in-basketball Gregg Popovich, along with his seasoned but aging Spurs, is hoping to play the role of cummings’ Mister Death and show the Golden State boys who’s boss. The oddsmakers think he will, even though the Warriors are 1-1 and could easily have been 2-0 before blowing a huge fourth quarter lead in the first game. Unfortunately Popovich has, like Mister Death, a history of crushing youthful upstarts. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Warriors are defunct in six.

But I plan to enjoy the show for as long as it lasts. Jesus, Stephen Curry plays a handsome game!

Posted in cummings (e.e.) | Leave a comment

A Poem for Commencement

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2013

Norman Rockwell, “Boy Graduate”

The following Steve Kowit poem, published in the March 2013 issue of Sun Magazine, has been been circulating amongst our faculty, and as our Commencement is tomorrow, I thought I’d share it. I’m not as jaded as the speaker in the poem—indeed, Commencement is the high point of the year for me—but I still end where he ends.

The following Steve Kowit poem, published in the March 2013 issue of Sun Magazine thesunmagazine.org/, has been been circulating amongst our faculty, and as our Commencement is tomorrow, I thought I’d share it. I’m not as jaded as the speaker in the poem—indeed, Commencement is the high point of the year for me—but I still end where he ends.

Five Skunks

By Steve Kowit

Graduation was awful. When I handed Johlie her diploma,
that idiotic, oversized black mortarboard slid down my forehead
& covered my eyes & out in the stands everyone started to laugh
& if that wasn’t mortifying enough, at the reception a colleague,
ladling himself another cupful of punch, mentioned in passing
that final-grade rosters were due the next morning at ten.
I was seething: it meant two hours of work & it was Friday evening,
& no way in hell was I coming back Saturday morning at eight,
which is why, when that damn graduation was done & the last
cars had driven out of the lot, I made my way back through the dark
to my office, disgruntled & sullen–& that’s when I saw them:
two huge skunks in the doorway, sipping the water I leave out
for the stray cats who roam the campus by day, & just
to their left their three diminutive tykes nibbling away at the bowl
of kibble: a family of five furtive skunks, surviving the way
the despised & ill-starred often do, by desperation & stealth,
hiding by day to slink out & scavenge at night.
I stood in the shadows grinning,
taking them in—wide assed & bandylegged, snouts to the bowls–
till at last, having slurped & eaten their fill, that whole miraculous,
heartbreaking crew waddled contentedly off on their stubby little legs,
single file, like school kids, their glistening rumps high in the air
like lowriders, the stripes down their backs thick & white,
magnificent tails sweeping the grass in their wake.
I watched till they were lost in the dark & even then I kept watching,
cheering them on. I could hardly bear seeing them go.
Like the students I teach year after year, who clutch their diplomas
& vanish, their fates were out of my hands. Which is when
it came to me that in my cantankerous mood I’d missed
the whole celebration: that solemn procession, the gowns,
the ceremonial feast, & those immigrant families whooping it up
in the stands when Yasmin & Gai Lin & Juan Carlos stepped
to the stage had, in truth, been sweet all around me.
& that understood, I see myself yet again for that flummoxed buffoon
in the old Zen tale who, when the Master points to the rising moon
of awakened mind, stares instead stupidly at the Roshi’s finger.
Office key in my hand, I take a deep breath & look up
& notice at last those unbelievable millions of stars,
& low in the east an exquisite, sumptuous moon, three-quarters full.

The last image reminds me of a passage in the Cormac McCarthy novel All the Pretty Horses which I’ve sometimes associated with graduation. Two young cowboys are riding off on an adventure—with Milton one could say “the world lay all before them”—and the excitement they feel is like the wonder experienced by Kowit’s speaker:

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

So for those of you attending graduations, let the poem remind you (in case you need reminding) that what we are celebrating is the awakened mind. Our students are sumptuous moons–three quarters full–preparing to ride out in unbelievable millions of stars.

Posted in Kowit (Steve) | Tagged "Five Skunks", Ceremony, graduation, Steve Kowit | Leave a comment

V-E Day, Whitman, and My 15 Minutes

By Robin Bates | Published: May 9, 2013

Ljubljana’s dragon

Yesterday was V-E Day (Victory in Europe), which gives me an opportunity to tell you about my 15 minutes of fame. I was in Slovenia on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1994-95, which means I was there for the 50^th anniversary of V-E Day. Standing on a platform high in the air, I read Walt Whitman’s “Oh Captain, My Captain” to a packed square in Ljubljana along with a national television audience. Here’s how it came about.

The celebration was held in Congressional Square and it had something for everyone. Slovenia is known for its Alpine climbers so mountain climbers scaled the buildings surrounding the square. Slovenia’s famous white Lipizzaner horses trotted around, people parachuted down from military planes flying overhead, World War II partisans and concentration camp survivors paraded through, and the national orchestra and opera singers performed on the steps of the Parliament building. Overlooking it all and holding hunting horns were various Miss Slovenias, one on each of the four buildings. (The horns were ceremonial so they didn’t blow them.) Then, for the grand finale, there was poetry.

I wasn’t the only reader. There were six of us, representing six of the countries that had been involved in defeating the Germans, and each of us was given a poem from our country to deliver. We stood on a platform 20-feet high under the Slovene word for victory–ZMAGA–in large cutout letters. More on this in a moment.

We were treated very well. Prior to the event, they took us out for a special meal and then to a sound studio, where we were recorded. (They were worried about acoustics so we lip-synched the actual performance.) We were driven by a minister’s chauffeur so I now know what it’s like to go really fast, and, because they wanted us all dressed the same, they made us special suits. The men’s were blue and very sharp. The women’s were brown and less so.

I can’t name all the poems, but the poets were Russia’s Vladimir Mayakovsky, Spain’s Garcia Lorca (included because he opposed and was killed by the fascists), France’s Paul Éluard (“Liberté”), Britain’s Shakespeare (Henry V’s “Once more into the breach dear friends” speech), America’s Whitman, and, capping it all off, Slovenia’s France Prešeren, their national poet. This last poem, which was read by a 16-year-old Slovene girl, ended the ceremony.

There are stories to go along with some of the poems. For some reason they chose a Scottish nationalist to read the Shakespeare, and he complained to me about the English nationalism of such lines as

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more
Or close the wall up with our English dead!

and

The game’s afoot: Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,
Cry “God for Harry! England! and Saint George!”

I pointed out that it could have been worse. Shakespeare pokes fun at the non-English Brits elsewhere in the play–which is to say, the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scots—and our reader could have been chosen to read Captain Macmorris with a full Scottish brogue.

The woman who read Éluard was, for some reason, not French but French Canadian. We weren’t sure why she was chosen but speculated that, since Canada also fought in the war, they thought they were getting two countries for the price of one.

I was curious as to why Whitman’s poem had been chosen and learned that, when Marshal Tito died in 1980, Jimmy Carter presented the poem to the country. I found the selection appropriate as it acknowledges both victory and loss. Yugoslavia’s deaths during the war were staggering—worse than the Soviet Union’s—with one out of eight dying.

It was also appropriate that a young Slovene read the closing poem, signaling that the country was now looking toward the future. After all, Slovenia in 1994 was barely four years old as a country, having successfully broken away from Yugoslavia in 1991. I wondered if some of the celebration was directed more at its recent freedom than at its freedom from the Germans 50 years before.

I looked down over the square from my lofty height and read “O Captain, my captain, our fearful trip is done” with great fanfare. One of my students afterwards told me I was too melodramatic, but it’s hard to be anything else given such lines as

But O heart! heart! heart! 
O the bleeding drops of red, 
Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead.

The upshot of it was that, for two weeks afterwards, people would come up to me in buses and on the streets and tell me they had seen me.

I was impressed at the time that poetry would be given such a prominent role. Slovenes have a special reverence for poetry because they are in part defined by their language. In the 19^th century, as part of the Slovene nationalist movement triggered by Napoleon, Prešeren showed the world that Slovene wasn’t just some hick dialect but a national language capable of producing great art. As a result, there are many streets throughout the country named after Slovene poets.

Come to think of it, poetry has been raised in stature recently in our country with its inclusion in Clinton’s and both of Obama’s inaugurations.

So there you have the story of my 15 minutes. Enough to last a lifetime.

Posted in Shakespeare (William), Whitman (Walt) | Tagged "Oh Captain My Captain", Henry V, Slovenia, VE Day, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare | 1 Comment

The Ballad of Bathtub Gin

By Robin Bates | Published: May 8, 2013

My brain feels on the verge of frying or short-circuiting or something as I’ve been grading non-stop for weeks, not to mention meeting with a steady stream of students about essay revisions. I therefore turn for comic relief to a parody of Rudyard Kipling’s beloved poem “Gunga Din” that approximates my current state of mind. The parody was written many years ago by my father who (I can joyfully report) is reading again after a bout of dementia, perhaps brought on by a bladder infection.

You probably know Kipling’s poem, which you can read here. It begins as follows:

You may talk o’ gin and beer
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.

And here’s the famous ending:

So I’ll meet ’im later on
At the place where ’e is gone—
Where it’s always double drill and no canteen.
’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
Givin’ drink to poor damned souls,
An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
      Yes, Din! Din! Din!
   You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
   Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,
      By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
   You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

Anyway, bathtub gin was a real and present reality where I grew up in the southern Cumberland Mountains in Sewanee, Tennessee. (Today it has tragically been replaced by the even more lethal bathtub meth.) When I was a child we actually knew an old moonshiner named Hamper McBee who, in addition to his frequent brushes with the law, was also a fine musician. Remarkably, he sang songs as they had been handed down over the ages so that, while he normally spoke with a southern drawl, the songs themselves were sung in the English of Shakespeare’s time. The Appalachians were that isolated.

Please excuse the digression. Here’s my father’s parody. Enjoy:

The Ballad of Bathtub Gin

By Scott Bates

You may talk of Scotch and Rye
When you’re drinkin’ on the sly
An’ you feel you ain’t got nothin’ much to lose;
But when it comes to liquor
You’ll never get their quicker
Than on good ol’-fashioned rotgut, homemade booze!

Now in Sewanee’s foggy clime
Where I used to spend my time
Indulgin’ in the gentle arts of sin,
Of all the local brew
The most potent stuff I knew
Was that belly-bustin’ beverage, bathtub gin!

It was gin! gin! gin!
You super-saturated Mickey Finn!
Hey, gimme another slug!
Wipe the sawdust off the plug!
Takes the ring right off the bathtub, bathtub gin!

But they carried me away
To where a jacket lay,
A double-vested job with strings to lace ‘er;
An’ when they got me tied,
I ‘eard em say aside,
“ ’E should’ve taken Draino for a chaser!”

So now I’m getting’ bored
In the Alcoholic Ward,
An’ I’m getting’ tired o’ watchin’ my D.T’s;
But when they treats me rude
I just dreams o’ getting’ stewed,
An’ they can give me trouble all they please!

So it’s gin! gin! gin!
Though they put me in this mouldy storage bin,
I know that when I die,
I’ll be really ridin’ high
‘Cause I’ll get a swig in Hell of bathtub gin!

–Yes, it’s gin! gin! gin!
What a pandemonic pickle I’ll be in!
By the devils that distill you
And the poor damned souls that swill you,
You’re the hottest hooch in Hades, bathtub gin!

Posted in Bates (Scott) | Tagged "Ballad of Bathtub Gin", Education, Hamper McBee, moonshine, Scott Bates | 2 Comments

Novels as Dating Manuals

By Robin Bates | Published: May 7, 2013

Yesterday I turned to Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century Fiction (written by my dissertation director J. Paul Hunter) to explain why ambitious and mobile 18^th century readers were drawn to the age’s cutting edge literary genre. Today I draw on Hunter to understand what attracted young people, the early novel’s predominant audience. I use these ideas to help my own students engage with such works as Moll Flanders, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Evelina, and Jane Austen’s novels.

Here’s Hunter:

Novels have traditionally captured a disproportionate readership among the young, perhaps because youths seek knowledge the novel contains, perhaps because new readers are perpetually seeking promising new outlets as alternatives to what their elders recommend. Moralists and cultural guardians in every age regularly train their fire on imaginative literature thought to corrupt the young—they think it heightens expectations or fires desires—and the attacks on novels in the mid- to late eighteenth century (like the warnings half a century earlier about plays, romances, and other books thought to be incendiary or head-turning) presume that the imminence and depth of the danger involves the fact that most readers are at a stage of life when they are impressionable, ready to make crucial choices of their own about life and career.

Whatever their intentions about regulating conduct or influencing life choices, novelists seem regularly to make similar assumptions, repeatedly choosing plots, characters, and situations that feature choices of life and the consequences of such choices. Choices of career and marriage partner and their outcomes dominate the action of most novels in most ages but particularly in England in the eighteenth century. Novelists either began with private concerns about such matters and drew an audience along, or (consciously or unconsciously) they recognized, as cultural and moral critics did, that their potential readers were those facing imminent life choices of their own.

Hunter then goes on to make an observation that is central to how I see literature and that is at the foundation of this blog. If you find my emphasis on literature’s practical side to be problematic—say, on how novels can help us forge successful relationships or deal with insensitive parents—it may be because you were taught by teachers (and they by literary critics) such as those that Hunter has in mind:

Literary critics habitually, in their pursuit of artistic and aesthetic concerns, tend to underrate the “real-life” issues that draw readers to novels or condition their choices of reading material more generally—questions about how the world works and how other people make the structural decisions that face us all…

In my 18^th Century Couples Comedy class, we spend a lot of time talking about relationship issues that the students encounter. To cite one instance, I have learned that the courtship rules around texting are at least as complex as those around letter writing in Fanny Burney’s and Jane Austen’s time.

Neither Hunter nor I are saying that we read only, or even mainly, for practical purposes. That sounds deadly dull. But our imaginations are most fired when we read about situations in which we can recognize ourselves, our questions, and our problems.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 18th century England, J. Paul Hunter, novels, reading | Leave a comment

Novel Readers: The Young & the Restless

By Robin Bates | Published: May 6, 2013

Marguerite Gérard, “Lady Reading in an Interior” (1795-1800)

Today I turn to my dissertation advisor for help with my blog post. Or more accurately, to his book Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century Fiction. J. Paul Hunter is interested in how this explosive new (novel) literary form came to be, who was reading it, and what kinds of experiences readers were having. As a result, Before Novels offers up fascinating insights into how the novel shaped and guided people’s lives.

Looking at historical studies of literacy rates, Hunter is able to identify four characteristics of novel readers of the time. They tended to be urban, ambitious, mobile and young. The fact that such people were reading novels accounts for some of the attacks against the genre. For instance, Samuel Johnson described readers of novels as “the young, the ignorant, and the idle.” Here’s how Hunter interprets Johnson’s disdain:

[H]e was certainly right in his first adjective . . . and knew what he meant by the second, that the people he had in mind ignored classical truths and traditional values, trusting modernity, innovation, and subjectivity over received formulas and conclusions. But in using the third adjective, Johnson simply mouthed the cliché of his contemporaries; there is no evidence that readers of novels were more idle than non-readers, except perhaps at the moment of their “passive” contact with print, and there may be in Johnson, as in many of his moralist contemporaries, some deep suspicion of the contemplative life and some distrust of time invested strictly in curiosity, the basic Judeo-Christian intellectual dilemma. The evidence is, in fact, that novel readers, like most other readers and like Johnson himself in spite of his self-flagellation about his perceived indolence, were less idle in their aspirations, less passive about themselves and their prospects than non-readers. Ambition was, in fact, what moralists worried about. Novels and other works of fiction and imagination were widely believed to stimulate too warmly a reader’s sense of what might be.

Those in the rising classes most likely to be ambitious enough to learn to read were also most likely to be willing to be mobile . . . and their mobility was most likely to take them from their native rural pasts to a present in the growing towns and cities. Motivation to read, ambition to rise in the world, and desire to migrate to places associated with progress all coalesce in an increased taste for commerce with a larger world (whether of trade or ideas) and a commitment to modern life more generally.

In addition to opening up readers’ imaginations, Hunter says that novels performed another function that I find particularly interesting. They provided companionship in place of missing family:

Mobility, especially among those just beginning their careers or ambitions to raise their place in the world, involved special incentives to be literate, not just because writing and reading were skills valuable to a variety of professions but also because the act of leaving familiar surroundings for lesser known places involves, in itself, a necessity to provide cultural substitutes for home, family, and community. Books are not, of course, brothers or sisters, but printed materials had already begun to seem comparable to intimate friends, and they did provide a kind of companionship that was, however inadequately, often a substitute for human contact.

Hunter’s ideas provide the foundation for the way I teach the 18^th century novel and Jane Austen. I’ll share tomorrow what he has to say specifically about young readers of the time.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 18th Century Novel, J. Paul Hunter, literacy, reading | Leave a comment

Fiction Is Best Way to Tell God’s Story

By Robin Bates | Published: May 5, 2013

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Four Evangelists”

Spiritual Sunday

I taught Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried this past semester and realized suddenly that it has something to say to Bible literalists. I’m not sure that it will convince creationists, who have just scored a victory in Louisiana, but it may prove clarifying to others.

I’ve always thought that Biblical literalists sell the Bible short. It may have magnificent stories that speak to our deepest truths, but too often these literalists reduce it to pseudoscientific assertions about the creation of the universe and what really happened to the dinosaurs. What they don’t acknowledge is what O’Brien’s discovers: “[S]tory-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

O’Brien comes to this realization as he struggles to tell “a true war story.” At first we assume that O’Brien is merely attempting to convey happening-truth as accurately as he can. After all, the book appears to be composed of eyewitness accounts of the actions of the men of Alpha Company, and O’Brien’s fellow soldiers show up both in the book and in the book’s dedication. Furthermore, O’Brien himself appears in the book, recounting what he claims to have seen and telling us why he shaped the book as he did.

We soon learn, however, that O’Brien is a self-confessed unreliable narrator. He will tell us a story as though it were true and then, a little later, recant the story. At one point he describes the man he killed in Vietnam, at another he says that he didn’t kill this man—someone else did—but that he felt responsible. The book is entitled The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction, which may lead us to discount everything–only a lot of the book seems to be describing things that really happened.

O’Brien’s writing process is, I suspect, a lot like that of the Bible’s authors. At one point O’Brien asserts that, to convey truth,

All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth.

Elsewhere he writes,

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened . . . and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

If the Biblical authors had only told happening-truth, the Bible would be a lesser work. It takes an artist, not a chronicler, to approximate God’s magnificence.

Posted in Bible, O'Brien (Tim) | Tagged Bible, creationism, Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien | 3 Comments

Will Kevin Durant Suffer Akhilleus’s Fate?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 4, 2013

Sports Saturday

A lot of the air went out of the NBA playoffs when point guard extraordinaire Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder went down with a season-ending knee injury in game two of the first round of the playoffs.Westbrook and the sublime Kevin Durant have made the Thunder all but unbeatable, at least in the Western Conference, and we appeared to be headed for a championship rematch between the Thunder and the Miami Heat. Without Westbrook, Oklahoma City will be lucky to make it out of the first round.

For a short time it appeared that Durant would be able to step up like Akhilleus after his dear friend Patroklos is killed. Now, however, Akhilleus’s other fate might well be in store.

In The Iliad, Akhilleus responds to Patroklos’s death by going on a rampage, killing every Trojan in his path. Likewise, Durant put up a 41 point performance in game three to defeat the Houston Rockets. Here’s Homer’s description of Akhilleus’s killing spree:

A forest fire will rage
through deep glens of a mountain, crackling dry
from summer heat, and coppices blaze up
in every quarter as wind whips the flame:
So Akhilleus flashed to right and left
like a wild god, trampling the men he killed,
and black earth ran with blood. As when a countryman
yokes oxen with broad brows to tread out barley
on a well-bedded threshing floor, and quickly
the grain is husked under the bellowing beasts:
the sharp-hooved horses of Akhilleus just so
crushed dead men and shields. His axle-tree
was splashed with blood, so what his chariot rail,
with drops thrown up by wheels and horses’ hooves.
And Peleus’ son kept riding for his glory,
staining his powerful arms with mire and blood.

Okay, so maybe Durant’s devastation was not of the same order of magnitude. Still, he was impressive.

But he couldn’t keep up the pace and Houston won the next two games. Even if Oklahoma City squeezes out one more win to take the series, I can’t imagine it beating whoever it plays next. (Update: OKC did indeed manage to win game six to advance, and Durant had 27 points, eight rebounds, and six assists.)

A different passage in The Iliad may therefore be more appropriate. Right before Akhilleus goes on his rampage, his horse Xanthos predicts a dire future for him:

To this, from under the yoke, the nimble Xanthos
answered, and hung his head, so that his mane
dropped from the yokepad to the ground–
Hera whose arms are white as ivory
gave him a voice to say:

“Yes, we shall save you,
this time, too, Akhilleus in your strength!
And yet the day of your destruction comes,
and it is nearer. We are not the cause
but rather a great god is, and mighty fate.
…
We might run swiftly as the west wind blows
Most rapid of all winds, they say; but still
it is your destiny to be brought low
by force, a god’s force and a man’s!”

Durant, of course, will need to keep fighting, regardless of the odds. And to those who predict the Thunder’s imminent demise, I can imagine him responding as Akhilleus does to his horse:

Xanthos, why prophesy my death? No need.
What is in store for me I know, know well:
To die here, far away from my dear father,
my mother, too. No matter. All that matters
is that I shall not call a halt today
till I have made the Trojans sick of war!”

And with a shout he drove his team
of trim-hooved horses into the front line.

And scored bucket loads of points. And was brought low by a leg injury (albeit not his own).

A follow-up (non-sports related) thought – I just realized that Homer’s horrific image of Akhilleus’s chariot splashed with blood is alluded to by my favorite anti-war poem, Wilfred’s Owen’s “Strange Meeting.” In it, the poet meets the man he killed, who describes how war squanders human potential:

Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

Although The Iliad was used by the Athenians to train their young soldiers, I think a case can be made that Homer’s epic is one of civilization’s great anti-war works. Certain it captures all the horrors of war.

Posted in Homer | Tagged Basketball, Homer, Iliad, Kevin Durant, NBA | Leave a comment

Harper Lee’s White Liberal Fantasy

By Robin Bates | Published: May 3, 2013

Peck, Peters in “To Kill a Mockingbird”

This past Monday I had the pleasure of seeing my three senior project students present their findings to large audiences. Their talks were well received, and I played the role of proud parent (along with their actual parents, who were also in attendance). I promised updates since first reporting on their projects earlier in the year. Here’s what Wick Eisenberg had to say about “depictions of the white liberal in Civil Rights era literature.” (I reported earlier on Wick’s project here.)

Wick’s love for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is what initially drew him into the project, but he developed a more nuanced view of the novel in the course of the project. By the end, he had come to regard it as a “white liberal fantasy.”

Wick saw the novel as a response to, among other things, the Emmett Till murder and growing black activism, including the Montgomery bus boycott and the Little Rock desegregation battles. Wick said that, before the Civil Rights movement heated up, many southern liberals thought that all they needed to do was be nice to blacks and eventually segregation would vanish of its own accord. After these events, they realized that they would have to be more proactive.

To Kill a Mockingbird, however, shows them being proactive on their own terms. The case involving Tom Robinson has echoes of the Emmett Till case as an all-white jury finds a clearly innocent black man to be guilty. (In the Till case, the murderers of the 14-year-old boy were clearly guilty but were declared innocent.) In one way, Atticus seems to rise to the occasion as he bucks public opinion and stands up for equal rights for all. But Wick noted that Harper Lee softened the historical situation considerably.

First of all, she shows Atticus to be revered in the black community. No one holds him responsible for losing the case—indeed, they all stand to honor him—and Lee appears to approve of Atticus telling Scout that she should not judge Cunningham, even though he is a member of a lynch mob. Atticus’s calm claim that it’s not really possible to change anyone’s mind is not something that Civil Rights activists were prepared to accept. For them, social structures had to be changed so that minds could be changed.

About the lynch mob, Wick noted that Lee soft pedals the threat of white violence, essentially giving us what he called a “Disney lynch mob.” It’s a fantasy to think that a little girl could have caused one of these mobs to experience a sense of shame and turn from their purpose. The historical truth of the matter was that the constant threat of white violence, especially from the KKK, helped keep Jim Crow laws in place.

In a way, Wick said, To Kill a Mockingbird reframed the Civil Rights era in such a way that whites were still the ones in charge, with blacks still humbly subservient. Wick saw the book as being useful in 1960 to at least get whites engaged in Civil Rights, but he also said that black criticism of it was legitimate.

As Wick saw it, James Baldwin’s Blues For Mister Charlie, written four years after To Kill a Mockingbird, was a black refutation of Lee’s novel. Blues, like Mockingbird, has a trial at its center—a white racist murders a black activist and is brought before a judge—and in this work the white liberal (Parnell) doesn’t rise magisterially above everyone else. Rather, he discovers he has divided loyalties and is pulled in different directions by Whitetown and Blacktown. He thinks he can ride things out by remaining neutral, but his neutrality allows the racist to get away with murder. For his pains, Parnell is mistrusted by both sides.

In other words, in Blues for Mr. Charlie Blacktown doesn’t rise up in reverence for the white liberal. Once Parnell realizes the consequence of his neutrality, he asks if he can march with Blacktown and receives grudging permission. Parnell is a far cry from Atticus.

By the late 1960s, Wick said, white liberals wouldn’t even get this much acceptance as they were vilified by black militants (for instance, by Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice) and satirized by Tom Wolfe (in Radical Chic). The deeper Wick got into the project, the more he found his own white liberalism under siege.

What interested me particularly about the project was the position Wick came to in the end. He could see both the importance of books like To Kill a Mockingbird—after all, whites needed some place to start—and the limitations. He also noted that black militancy, while understandable, had its own limitations. As a political science as well as an English major, Wick charted the political balancing act between liberalism and radicalism that was needed to bring about significant change.

Through it all, literature played a pivotal role, helping define the terrain upon which the Civil Rights battles were fought.

Posted in Baldwin (James), Lee (Harper) | Tagged Blues for Mister Charlie, Civil Rights Movement, Harper Lee, James Baldwin, liberalism, racism, To Kill a Mockingbird | 1 Comment

Politics and Beowulf Wish Fulfillment

By Robin Bates | Published: May 2, 2013

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about Beowulf and Obama so let’s visit some of the leadership issues that have come up recently. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, who has been pounding Obama on his leadership for years, has been complaining that he is no Andrew Shepherd, the character played by Michael Douglas in The American President.

Defenders of Obama say that such critics are guilty of “Green Lantern wish fulfillment,” which I would amend to “Beowulf wish fulfillment.” After all, Beowulf enters an impossibly fractious community and imposes order by means of his firm grip. You can read all about it in my book How Beowulf Can Save America.

Then again, Beowulf is only a temporary solution. No sooner does he depart than fighting breaks out again. Beowulf returns a second time (his second term?) to defeat Grendel’s mother but then he leaves for good. Not long after, Hengest, who becomes Prince Regent after King Hrothgar’s death, usurps the throne from Hrothgar’s young sons and civil war breaks out. Heorot Hall burns to the ground.

In other words, the Beowulf poet believes that a single man can’t solve all our problems. Dowd disagrees:

Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership.

Dowd, as critics have pointed out, never elaborates on that “somehow.” To bring reality into the situation, here’s another episode from Beowulf, the plight of King Finn. He has been fighting with the Danes but they all try to patch up their quarrel with a diplomatic marriage between him and the Danish king’s daugher Hideburh. As I say in my book, the marriage is no more effective than a handshake between President Obama and the Republican Speaker of the House, and fighting breaks out again. In the battle, Queen Hildeburh loses both her Danish brother and her Frisian son. Only her younger brother Hengest survives.

Here’s an excerpt from my book, which unfortunately is as relevant now as it was a year ago when I wrote it:

As neither the Danes nor the Frisians triumph, the two sides must live together in Finn’s household in an uneasy truce. Think of them as Democrats and Republicans trying to make nice while President Finn works on maintaining the peace. Finn does everything in his power to prevent more fighting, including allocating separate quarters for the Danes and doling out gifts equally to both sides.

So what happens? Well, there is an uneasy peace for a few months, but as you can tell by the poem’s description, it’s temporary. Imagine it as the temporary truce that the Democrats and Republicans agreed to over the debt ceiling back in January:

                                    Hengest stayed,
lived out that whole
                                    resentful, blood-sullen
winter with Finn,
                                    homesick and helpless.
No ring-whorled prow
                                    could up then
and away on the sea.
                                    Wind and water
raged with storms,
                                    wave and shingle
were shackled in ice . . .

When the season changes, however, the frozen anger transforms into hot rage, and King Finn’s bloody death seems inevitable:

The wildness in them
had to brim over.

The hall ran red
with blood of enemies.

So we’re back in hall-running-with-blood season. And the president, unlike King Finn, has the added challenge of sharing power with two other branches of government.

In my book, when I apply Beowulf to our situation I am ultimately hopeful, but that’s not because I see a President Beowulf extricating us from our morass. Instead, exerting power must be a collective effort. Citizens must pressure politicians, as many did over the gun control push (the fight is not yet over), and journalists must get real.

Beowulf wish fulfillment is simply irresponsible.

Added note: Jon Chait of New York Magazine has an excellent post today on just this issue. Dowd and others, he says, are guilty of magical thinking, more interested in leadership narratives than in the facts on the ground.

Posted in Beowulf Poet | Tagged Barack Obama, Beowulf, GOP obstructionism, Maureen Dowd, politics | Leave a comment

Muscles and Mind, Aching to Work

By Robin Bates | Published: May 1, 2013

St. Mary’s students perform in Studs Terkel’s “Working”

May Day

Today is International Workers Day so today’s blog post features one of the great novels about workers and their rights. Although I am an Obama enthusiast, I have been disappointed that he hasn’t put more focus on unemployment. Sure, I know he has been fending off Republican attacks on the large deficit, but I feel that his own support for debt reduction is misplaced at a time when so many people are unemployed, underemployed, and underpaid. The time for debt reduction is when the economic downturn is well behind us. To practice austerity when a recession or a fragile recovery are underway is suicidal.

To his credit, Obama firmly opposes the sequestration, which is slowing growth and maintaining high unemployment with its layoffs, furloughs, and cutbacks.

Last week I attended a musical version of Stud Terkel’s Working, directed by my colleagues Michael Ellis-Tolaydo and Larry Vote. The play is inspiring in the way it shows the dignity of work and how much work work enters into our sense of self respect. In a related way, John Steinbeck shows us the blow we suffer when work opportunities begin to disappear. Grapes of Wrath conjures up the prospect of a “trampling of the vintage,” which is to say of the wrath that wrath that will be unleashed, if those in power don’t get their economic act together.

The times are not as revolutionary as they were during the Great Depression, when unemployment was much higher and there weren’t the social safety net programs for the unemployed and poor to fall back on. Nevertheless, the passage still strikes a chord. The “great owners” mentioned at the beginning of the passage (our 1%) are nervous because the citizenry is becoming angry:

The Western Land, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunder storm. The great owners, nervous, sensing a change, knowing nothing of the nature of the change. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes. The causes lie deep and simply—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times. The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments…

Steinbeck goes on to say is that, worrisome though the situation is, we should be even more worried if humans ever stop complaining about being unemployed and underpaid. If we ever start rolling over in the face oppression, then that’s a sign that we have lost this Manself that makes us great as a species.

Keep your eyes on the prize. Happy May Day.

Photograph by Bill Wood

Posted in Steinbeck (John) | Tagged Grapes of Wrath, International Workers Day, John Steinbeck, May Day, Studs Terkel, Work, Working | 2 Comments

Upon the Anniversary of My Son’s Death

By Robin Bates | Published: April 30, 2013

John Oldham

Today is the 13^th anniversary of my son Justin’s drowning death, and as always on this day I treasure the sadness I continue to feel. It no longer cuts like a knife—it’s more like an old wound that throbs when the weather changes—but without the sadness it would be as though Justin had never existed. The aching within keeps me somehow connected.

Here’s one of the loveliest memorial odes that I know, written by John Dryden to the poet John Oldham. Although Oldham died at 30, Dryden’s situation doesn’t entirely capture my own since Dryden has just gotten to know Oldham (“Farewell, too little and too lately known”). But I resonate with Dryden’s description of their special bond: “For sure our souls were near allied; and thine/Cast in the same poetic mould with mine.”

In their case, they are both satirists, not father-son, but Dryden has a fatherly feeling toward the young poet. He sees within him immense potential, pointing that he arrived at satire before Dryden did (“The last set out the soonest did arrive.”). Not entirely complimentary, Dryden does note that Oldham’s meter needs work (“numbers of thy native tongue,” “harsh cadence of a rugged line”):

O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.

Justin too wasn’t very smooth. He was very passionate and would impulsively throw himself into things, including into the St. Mary’s River, with its freak current. But that passion was also a real strength—he was “Mr. Enthusiasm”—and it made us all love him.

Likewise, Dryden praises the forcefulness of young Oldham and thinks how, had he grown old, he might have dulled. Oldham’s wit shone through his unpolished surface because of his energy. More polish, Dryden speculates, wouldn’t necessarily have made him a better poet since his force made him the poet that he was. More controlled poets don’t make such noble errors:

… wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betray’d.
Thy generous fruits, though gather’d ere their prime
Still show’d a quickness; and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.

I don’t think Justin would have dulled, even as he learned to control and channel his energies. But because he never had a future, I find consolation, as Dryden does with Oldham, in Justin’s 21-year-old quickness and freshness. That vision of him will never dull. The Marcellus mentioned in the poem, by the way, is Augustus Caesar’s nephew, who was designed to be his successor but died at 20.

To the Memory of Mr. Oldham

By John Dryden

Farewell, too little and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own;
For sure our souls were near ally’d; and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorr’d alike:
To the same goal did both our studies drive,
The last set out the soonest did arrive.
Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place,
While his young friend perform’d and won the race.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not those, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betray’d.
Thy generous fruits, though gather’d ere their prime
Still show’d a quickness; and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail and farewell; farewell thou young,
But ah too short, Marcellus of our tongue;
Thy brows with ivy, and with laurels bound;
But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.

I used to have difficulties with the final line, which seemed an unnecessary downer after an uplifting elegy. Now I see Dryden as simply describing what I know the feeling to be.

Posted in Dryden (John) | Tagged "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham", death and dying, John Dryden | 3 Comments

Answer the Door, the Truth Is Knocking

By Robin Bates | Published: April 29, 2013

Norman Rockwell, “The Young Law Student”

Lucille Clifton and Willa Cather played a role in our college’s annual awards ceremony this past Friday. Here’s how.

Lucille taught at St. Mary’s for a number of years and her poems are a constant presence on campus. Her “blessing of the boats (at St. Mary’s)” is inscribed in large letters on the wall of the Student Center. Her series of 9-11 poems appear at intervals around the pond lying at the heart of our campus. And a version of “the light that came to lucille clifton” (adapted with her permission) is read each year at the beginning of the ceremony. Here it is in its non-addapted form:

the light that came to lucille Clifton
came in a shift of knowing
when even her fondest sureties
faded away. it was the summer
she understood that she had not understood
and was not mistress even
of her own off eye, then
the man escaped throwing away his tie and
the children grew legs and started walking and
she could see the peril of an
unexamined life.
she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her
authenticity
but the light insists on itself in the world;
a voice from the nondead past started talking,
she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand
“you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.

President Joe Urgo alluded both to Lucille’s poem and to Cather’s novel The Professor in his introductory remarks, excerpted below:

Pres. Joe Urgo, Introductory Remarks, Awards Convocation

Well, here we are, at the other end of the academic year.

Today, we gather to celebrate student learning in the myriad ways of its expression and demonstration – in classrooms, in studios and labs, in solitary hours of individual research, in collaborations with others, through aesthetic and creative venues, on athletic courts and playing fields, in shared governance and other co-curricular activities.

We mark as well those singular faculty and staff members whom we see as embodying our very best efforts as a community of learners.

While student learning is our primary mission, we understand that learning is possible only if we conceive of ourselves – all of us, everyone on campus — as at once teachers and learners, in a common endeavor to improve the human condition.

I have been thinking about the class I will offer in the fall, which will focus on the writing of Willa Cather. I want to share with you her description of academic achievement, articulated by a student in a book called The Professor’s House, a student who arrives where he did not think he could:

This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. It all came together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading. Something had happened in me that made it possible for me to coordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to this one.

The character goes on to equate intellectual epiphany with “a religious emotion” for its transformative effect on his life and sensibilities. In the media hustle that seems to characterize the pubic sphere in the contemporary era, it seems wise to stop and consider the supreme importance of what we are doing here, at St. Mary’s College, and what it means to commit oneself to ideas and to the power they hold in human affairs.

And now, on to the awards. An award is a fine thing, and it is given not to have you look back and feel that your work is done, but to encourage you to look forward with the confidence that you have so much more to offer.

Today is where we have reached. What lies ahead?

As we heard from Lucille Clifton, “you might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.”

Posted in Cather (Willa), Clifton (Lucille) | Tagged "Light that came to lucille clifton", Education, Liberal arts education, Lucille Clifton, Professor, Willa Cather | 1 Comment

Dare to Be Happy, Dare to Pray

By Robin Bates | Published: April 28, 2013

Joseph Turner, “Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands”

Mary Oliver is my go-to-poet when I’m looking for a spiritual poem at a time of year when the weather is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is right now. Here’s one for those who have it in their nature to be happy and, even more, for those who feel weighed down, as if by lead, by the thorn of depression. (I think of the Shelley lines, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed.”) Oliver assures you that the earth is exactly what you want.

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

from Mary Oliver, Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press(1986)

Posted in Oliver (Mary) | Tagged "Morning Poem", Mary Oliver, Nature, Prayer, sunrise | 3 Comments

Hope Springs Eternal in the NFL Draft

By Robin Bates | Published: April 27, 2013

How crazy is America about football? Well, the biggest sports event in the States at the moment is not the basketball playoffs or the hockey playoffs or the soccer Champions League tournament. It’s about (of all things!) the National Football League rookie draft.

Alexander Pope would have something to say about this.

I’m thinking of his famous passage about hope. Hope, after all, is what the draft is all about.

In the draft, teams are hoping that the players they choose will be just the ingredients they need to pave their way to the Super Bowl. Given that football has a lot of different positions and teams have a lot of different needs, the draft is like an elaborate chess game. Do you choose the best athlete available or a player to fit a specific need? Do you use the draft pick you have, trade up to get a better player, or trade down to get more draft picks? Do you choose the brilliant player where a dodgy reputation or the good player who is a solid citizen?

At the end of the day, teams are graded by experts who argue over which teams have been successful and which ones have not. Some fans are ecstatic about their team’s draft pick, others are plunged into the depths of despair. But of course, it’s all based on speculation. It’s as though the winner is whoever fosters the most hope.

Here’s what Pope has to say about hope in Essay on Man, his effort at understanding the human animal:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

That about sums up responses to the draft. Fans never look with equanimity at their present team but always imagine the team they hope to be blessed with. The uneasy soul says to itself, “Sure we have a great quarterback and great receivers and a top linebacking corps but there’s that problem at cornerback that could come back to bite us in the playoffs.” And so it goes.

The actual season is almost an anti-climax.

Posted in Pope (Alexander) | Tagged Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, hope, NFL, NFL draft | Comments closed

Jane Austen, Mistress of Manipulation

By Robin Bates | Published: April 26, 2013

My student Jessica Chen has just alerted me to a new book—Jane Austen, Game Theorist–by a UCLA political scientist. An article in The New York Times discusses how Michael Chwe’s work looks at the intricate power plays that can occur between Austen characters. For instance, here he is applying game theory to the confrontation in the garden between Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice:

Most game theory, [Chwe] noted, treats players as equally “rational” parties sitting across a chessboard. But many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize it even needs to think strategically.

Take the scene in “Pride and Prejudice” where Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands that Elizabeth Bennet promise not to marry Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth refuses to promise, and Lady Catherine repeats this to Mr. Darcy as an example of her insolence — not realizing that she is helping Elizabeth indirectly signal to Mr. Darcy that she is still interested.

It’s a classic case of cluelessness, which is distinct from garden-variety stupidity, Mr. Chwe argues. “Lady Catherine doesn’t even think that Elizabeth” — her social inferior — “could be manipulating her,” he said.

I like the general idea although in this case I don’t entirely agree. If Elizabeth is manipulating Lady Catherine here, she is doing so unconsciously. In fact, Austen goes out of her way to show that Elizabeth is never consciously manipulative and that all of the moves that forward her relationship with Darcy are done innocently. She innocently fascinates Darcy by being cool to him at the dance, she innocently shows Darcy her best self when she visits her sick sister, she innocently meets him at Pemberley (she thought he was elsewhere), and she innocently tells Lady Catherine just what Darcy needs to hear.

The reason that Austen insists on Elizabeth’s innocence is because she wants to contrast her with the conniving Caroline Bingley and the plotting Charlotte Lucas. In the classical courtship novel, including this one, convention dictates that the heroine cannot be a “scheming little seductress.”

I actually think that Elizabeth’s innocence, which is akin to her sister Jane’s, is somewhat unrealistic and therefore one of Austen’s few flaws. Women readers identifying with Elizabeth may feel it is unladylike to make a not-so-innocent move on a man, even though sometimes such moves are necessary to catch his attention.

Apparently Chwe finds fifty instances of manipulation in Austen, which I can well imagine. I hope one of his examples is Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility, a superb plotter who always gets her way. In contrast to Lucie, Austen’s heroines, although they always get their man, never do so through conscious manipulation.

To bear this out, here’s a quick overview of the heroines in the other novels:

Northanger Abbey: “But Catherine did not know her own advantages – did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.”

Sense and Sensibility: Marianne attracts Willoughby by innocently spraining her ankle and Brandon by innocently playing the piano. Elinor doesn’t attract Edward by setting her cap at him (to choose an expression that Marianne loathes) but simply by being Elinor;

Emma: Emma tries to be a manipulator but is clueless about the two men that she attracts (Elton and Knightley);

Persuasion: Anna tries to avoid Wentworth but unconsciously captures his admiration by her expert handling of the crisis of Louisa’s fall.

If one really wants instances of master manipulators in novels of the time, I recommend Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Valmont and Madame de Merteuil in Chloderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons Dangereuses. Still, I had fun applying Chwe’s game theory to Austen.

Posted in Austen (Jane) | Tagged Game Theory, Jane Austen, Power, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility | Leave a comment

Bush’s Legacy: “Setting Aside 9-11…”

By Robin Bates | Published: April 25, 2013

No sooner do I swear off politics (see yesterday’s post) than an item pops up in the news that is too good to pass up. With the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, there have been a number of conservative columnists looking back at Bush’s presidency and using it to bash Barack Obama’s. One line of comparison (tip to blogger Steven Benen) reminds me of my favorite passage from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which I happen to be teaching at the moment.

Here’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post:

Unlike Obama’s tenure, there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11.

And here’s Eric Bolling of Fox News:

I will tell you one thing, from 9/12/01 until the time President Obama raised his right hand January of ’09, the man kept us safe. And there — you certainly can’t say that since President Obama has taken the oath of office.

So… if you don’t count 9-11—and recall that Bush had been warned about an imminent Bin Laden attack a month before it occurred—the past president’s record against terrorism is better than Obama’s.

Actually, even this is questionable, as Benen sarcastically points out:

Other than the deadly anthrax attacks, the attack against El Al ticket counter at LAX, the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush’s inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush’s international unpopularity, the former president’s record on counter-terrorism was awesome.

But that aside, wouldn’t life be peachy if we could all ignore any inconvenient facts. Here’s the genuinely awesome Jane Austen explaining how, except for one small thing, all the bad guys in Sense and Sensibility get away with their villainy and live happily ever after:

They settled in town, received very liberal assistance from Mrs. Ferrars, were on the best terms imaginable with the Dashwoods; and setting aside the jealousies and ill-will continually subsisting between Fanny and Lucy, in which their husbands of course took a part, as well as the frequent domestic disagreements between Robert and Lucy themselves, nothing could exceed the harmony in which they all lived together.

To quote the Earl of Rochester, those leading such harmonious lives “need not fear another hell.” Unfortunately, it appears that all of us are about to suffer the hell of revisionist neo-con history.

Posted in Austen (Jane), Wilmot (John) | 3 Comments

Taking a Break from Politics

By Robin Bates | Published: April 24, 2013

18th Century London Coffee House

What with all the discouraging political news (especially the GOP filibustering gun background checks), end-of-semester craziness, and illness in my family, I find myself turning inward. I promise to start looking again at newspapers next week and finding literature that will help us guide our way through it. In the meantime, I take guidance from Mr. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer for why he has left politics:

There was a time, indeed, I fretted myself about the mistakes of government, like other people; but finding myself every day grow more angry, and the government growing no better, I left it to mend itself.

Yes, I know that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. But I’m not yet like the newspaper reader in the Henry Fielding play (I can’t remember which one) who thinks that the fate of the world depends upon his reading about it. Spending all his time in coffee houses to read the latest events, he can’t be bothered by reports that his wife has run off with another man and that his personal finances are falling apart. After all, there are momentous things going on in Parliament and on the continent that require his attention.

I have no time to be angry at the moment. I suspect the government won’t notice.

Posted in Fielding (Henry), Goldsmith (Oliver) | Tagged Henry Fielding, newspapers, Oliver Goldsmith, politics, She Stoops to Conquer | 1 Comment

A Light Exists in Spring

By Robin Bates | Published: April 23, 2013

Claude Monet, “Garden at Givenchy”

I’m a day late celebrating Earth Day but here’s a wonderful spring poem by Emily Dickinson. I love how she picks up on the magical lighting at this time of year—“It almost speaks to you”—and how she describes it passing away as horizons constrict and time moves on (“Noons report”). Perhaps the missing “Formula of sound” is bells tolling the death of the light’s passing.

In other words, she is describing an epiphanic moment, perhaps comparable to the holy moment of connection captured by Kenneth Grahame’s “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” in The Wind in the Willows (which I’ve written about here). For a short time the world is appareled in celestial light, to quote Wordsworth, and indeed the poem seems shot through with allusions to “Intimations of Immortality.” Then summer encroaches like business upon a holy sacrament. So enjoy the season while you can.

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay –

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

Follow-up note: Here’s the most relevant passage from “Intimations of Immortality”:

I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! –
But there’s a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look’d upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Posted in Dickinson (Emily) | Tagged "A Light Exists in Spring", "Spring", Emily Dickinson, Intimations of Immortality, Nature, William Wordsworth | 1 Comment

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Please feel free to e-mail me [rrbates (at) smcm (dot) edu]. I would be honored to hear your thoughts and questions about literature.
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How great literature can change your life

Everyperson’s Environmental E-Car

Oklahoma Tornado Recalls Dorothy’s

Returning Home to Aging Parents

Poems Teach Us to Be Wise

Look into Thine Heart and Write

Nostalgic for Fluid Basketball

Fantasy: A Rich Guy Gets His Comeuppance

To Know Gatsby Is to Know America

Antigone Would Bury Boston Bomber

Listen Carefully–The Books Are Whispering

Poetry in the Commencement Ceremony

Making a Fetish of Suffering

Stephen Curry Explodes on the Scene

A Poem for Commencement

V-E Day, Whitman, and My 15 Minutes

The Ballad of Bathtub Gin

Novels as Dating Manuals

Novel Readers: The Young & the Restless

Fiction Is Best Way to Tell God’s Story

Will Kevin Durant Suffer Akhilleus’s Fate?

Harper Lee’s White Liberal Fantasy

Politics and Beowulf Wish Fulfillment

Muscles and Mind, Aching to Work

Upon the Anniversary of My Son’s Death

Answer the Door, the Truth Is Knocking

Dare to Be Happy, Dare to Pray

Hope Springs Eternal in the NFL Draft

Jane Austen, Mistress of Manipulation

Bush’s Legacy: “Setting Aside 9-11…”

Taking a Break from Politics

A Light Exists in Spring

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