Ghost Dances: A review

Hello, all. It's been fairly busy around here as the new semester approached and has now arrived and, moreover, combined with a dearth of much of anything "interesting" to pass along in this space. However, some engaging books, films and music have arrived here at the Meridian manse, and I will be posting about them in the next few days and weeks.

A word about the review below: About a month ago, a PR person at Little, Brown emailed me to ask if I would like to read and post a review of Ghost Dances on my blog. I said Sure, and not too long afterward an advance copy arrived in the mail. I'm not entirely sure how or why Little, Brown picked us for this honor, but ours is not to question why.

What follows is a tinkered-with and expanded-upon version of my review on Amazon.

Image found here.

Josh Garrett-Davis, Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains

I want to begin by saying that I really wanted to like this book. Why it never really caught on with me is something I've given a lot of thought to. All memoirs by their very nature are self-centered, so that's not the problem with this book. But most memoirs are written by people who, at least according to the texts they write, have arrived at a point in their lives from which they can survey their pasts and be able to discern a path to their respective presents. The center, whatever we may think of its particulars, is fixed. Josh Garrett-Davis' book, however, is very upfront about the fact that he so far isn't able to do this in his life and that Ghost Dances is his gathering up of autobiography and various historical and literary narratives from the Great Plains that, in their common themes of migrating to and from that place, lead him to realize that, as he puts it, "I belong to that country precisely because I don't belong there: The currents in and out, the streams and storms and contamination, define the ocean of grass" (9). Well, fine. But--for me, at least--the end result is that, with all this literal and figurative coming and going, Garrett-Davis--and, thus, his book--are not so much self-centered as de-centered. His picking and choosing of Plains narratives and his constant claiming to identify bits of his biography with those narratives, no matter how tenuous the connections, finally don't cohere for the reader, because they never seem to cohere for him. They speak to him; he wants them, in some sense, to speak for him; but finally the reader is asked to accept that all these narratives add up to a whole because Garrett-Davis says so, and not because the reader can discern that they do independent of Garrett-Davis' claim. And there are long stretches here, as when he recounts reunions with distant relatives, which he clearly finds moving and important for him and which I respect for those reasons but which I otherwise find tedious.

I confess that a large part of my frustration with this book arises from my having read this spring another, far superior book about the Great Plains area, William Least-Heat Moon's PrairyErth, a book whose method Garrett-Davis' book seems to draw on at times (both, for example, share the idea of creating a Commonplace Book for their respective subjects). While reading Ghost Dances, I often asked myself why PrairyErth is so clearly a better book. I think the answer is that Least-Heat Moon's book is so firmly rooted in its geographical location of Chase County, Kansas--which also happens to be near the geographical center of the 48 contiguous states. It thus becomes a kind of commonplace book about all of us in our commonality as Americans and not of a county of around 600 people an hour from Wichita and two hours from Kansas City. Meanwhile, though Least-Heat Moon is clearly present in his book, he is not its subject. People speak in their own voices; they tell the stories they want to tell. He is their scribe--he's in search of a sense of this place and not of himself. Garrett-Davis' book, though, never acquires a sense of center beyond that of the person writing it who is himself searching for his own center.

Ghost Dances works best for me in those moments when Garrett-Davis stays out of the way of the stories he tells. For example, he relates well the material about the titular Ghost Dances, a subversive movement among Indians in the final decades of the 19th century (of which the massacre at Wounded Knee is the best-known of those events). Also, he seems genuinely moved by the material on the buffalo that he includes in his book. In the end, though, this book doesn't read like a completed book but like a collection of notes for a book. Which, again, I understand is part of its point. But just because it succeeds on its own terms does not mean that it must perforce succeed for the reader.

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"Full of many things except boundaries": Aloneness, Transcendentalism, and PrairyErth

Room for the Sky, taken somewhere in Chase County, Kansas, by Dave Leiker. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

As mentioned in my most recent post, I've begun reading William Least-Heat Moon's PrairyErth. What follows is a particularly compelling snippet of writing from it. It'd be quite easy to create post after post consisting of such snippets--Least-Heat Moon has this way of turning on a stylistic dime from literally and figuratively pedestrian writing (he's a strong advocate, as you'll see in a bit, for spending as much time on foot in the Flint Hills as possible) to turning the landscape he sees into a metaphysical vastness that, if not the equal of Emerson, certainly is a worthy participant in the Transcendentalist tradition.

Still, PrairyErth's version of Transcendentalism has an edge to it that Emerson's doesn't. In Chapter I of Emerson's essay "Nature," Emerson describes landscapes as "charming" (in a book in which the author quotes a 19th-century pioneer woman as saying that the word "prairie" is too pretty a word to describe the Flint Hills, I'm willing to bet that "charming" will not put in an appearance in PrairyErth as part of a description of landscape) and says things like "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relationship between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them." (Cue "Zippity Doo Da.")

I find myself wondering how Emerson's "Nature" might have looked if its author had lived in the prairie.

But that same first chapter of "Nature" also finds Emerson saying, "But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars." Emerson here means "alone" in the sense of one's being at a remove from people and people's ideas ("a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society") in order to begin to perceive one's essential bond with Nature. There's plenty of aloneness in PrairyErth, too, but whatever Emersonian sensibilities Least-Heat Moon's aloneness might have are tempered by Naturalism's understanding of Nature as, at best, indifferent to human beings (Stephen Crane's "A Man Said to the Universe" is all you need to read about that). So, we end up, in the end, with a passage like this, in which Least-Heat Moon delivers a quiet but firm response to Emerson's famous "transparent eye-ball" moment in a clearing in the woods:

Hiking in the woods allows a traveler to imagine comforting enclosures, one leading to the next, and the walker can possess those little encompassed spaces, but the prairies and plains permit no such possession. Whatever else prairie is--grass, sky, wind--it is most of all a paradigm of infinity, a clearing full of many things except boundaries, and its power comes from its apparent limitlessness; there is no such thing as a small prairie and more than there is a little ocean, and the consequences of both is this challenge: try to take yourself seriously out here, you bipedal plodder, you complacent cartoon. (82)

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"Some old compass in the blood": On PrairyErth and place

Skyline of Cottonwood Falls, the county seat of Chase County, Kansas. Click on image to enlarge. The courthouse is the oldest government building in continuous use in Kansas. Image found here.

The origin myths of ancient cultures, including our own Judeo-Christian one, are as much about the land as they are about anything else. This is also true of that new-ish, caterwauling, still-naïve culture we call "American," a culture still groping for its own myth (not a history--we already have that), what Emerson called an original relationship with the universe. Thoreau says somewhere in Walden that, though nodding with Emerson when he says that no one can own the landscape, wherever he (Thoreau) might sit down the landscape would radiate from him accordingly. William Least-Heat Moon finds himself on a hill in Chase County, Kansas, and realizes he's not too far away from the geographical center of the 48 contiguous states; he looks around at the prairies and realizes that it was in just such a place, among the tall grasses on another continent, that some hominids learned to walk upright in order to survive and, in so doing, took the far more significant figurative steps toward becoming human beings.

I've just begun reading Moon's PrairyErth, his "deep map" study of Chase County, Kansas, which is located about 40 miles northeast of Wichita in the heart of the Flint Hills. It is a much longer version of what John Graves is doing for the upper reaches of the Brazos in his book Goodbye to a River (which I posted on here), and it is another in a long line of American books about specific places whose beginning is Walden but, really, could just as justifiably start with Cabeza de Vaca's Castaways, the extraordinary narrative of Cabeza de Vaca and four companions as they wandered for eight years (1528-1536) through southern Texas and northern Mexico before being rescued by fellow Spaniards. It's a line, moreover, that could easily include numerous works of fiction as well as non-fiction--Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels and short stories are as much about place ("my little postage-stamp of native soil," he famously called his fiction's subject) as they are about people. Maybe more so. Least-Heat Moon, meanwhile, notes that Chase County's north-to-south-oriented rectangle is shaped like any given page of the very book the reader holds, its major rivers and creeks running through it like the splayed fingers of the reader's hand, palm placed on the right-hand side of the page. There's something distinctly American--and, well, human--in that image of the hand on the page forming a map of the place, the (con)fusion of the artificial and the topographical, the complication of the familiar meaning of the term "man-made."

As I said earlier, I'm not too far into PrairyErth; in some ways, it's a little foolish to post on it at this stage. Already, though, I wonder if the book could use a little updating: Least-Heat Moon writes of the locals' resistance to a national park that would preserve one of the last sizable stands of tallgrass; that park is now open and developing, a cooperative venture between the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy. Cottonwood Falls seems to be undergoing a bit of a renaissance in its downtown; the same Emma Chase Cafe is now open daily; every Friday night, locals gather there for an informal sing-along (the Mrs. and I were fortunate enough to have participated in this a few years back). But in another sense, these sorts of things--the way things are/were, nostalgia--aren't the book's real subject. THAT subject is impressing upon the reader that in this place, once one realizes that all that is there are the four ancient elements, then one can truly begin to see it as it is, rather than what it lacks.

As this blog's long-time friend Randall Sherman of the (for now) suspended Musings from the Hinterland once eloquently put it somewhere in one of his numerous comments at my place, "Place matters, dammit!" Yessir. The roots of the prairie grasses grow as deep as 8 feet. They would not long survive if this were not so. Too many of us these days lack that deep understanding of the idea of rootedness, or even of feeling called back to the place of our own origins, what Least-Heat Moon so eloquently calls "some old compass in the blood." Maybe, just maybe, we would do well to get those bearings.

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"I was just in the neighborhood . . . " III: The disquieting quietude of cul-de-sacs

New Year, newish-to-us neighborhood: Your correspondent and Scruffy take a brief pause from exploring the headwaters of Gypsum Creek in the wilds of east Wichita, January 1, 2012. That's the western edge of our neighborhood in the background. Image by the Mrs.

As I noted in my first post on our newish neighborhood, we now live in a neighborhood that might as well be a cul-de-sac: three streets form a loop whose midsection is traversed by three short streets; one north-south street provides direct access to Kellogg St., Wichita's major east-west artery; another street forms a T-intersection with the north-south and briefly runs east before abruptly turning north to intersect with Kellogg. Appropriately, that second street loops around a large car dealership. At any rate, a footbridge spanning the creek on the west side of our neighborhood provides the only other entrance/outlet. Significantly, though this neighborhood was built in the late '50s, the footbridge--intended to provide easy pedestrian access to the elementary school on the other side of the creek--was installed only in 2001.

As I noted in that first post, I have never lived in a quieter neighborhood before. In this post, I want to try to examine that quiet. I'm supposed to like it, and sometimes I do, but sometimes it leaves me a little disquieted.

This sort of space is a good place to try to examine the tensions between what people say they want in their living space and how much the requirements (and some of the unintended consequences) of the automobile actually dictate the shape of that space. That tension arises from our conflicting desires for removed-ness from others (limiting their access to our immediate surroundings) and for easy access to the world that others live in. The automobile makes it possible to meet both those desires, but because, in this country, most people have a car and, see the above conflicting desires, one clear result is that our typical post-WWII suburban neighborhoods are attempts to satisfy those desires: the sprawl of suburbs made possible by both the availability of outlying land no longer needed for agriculture and the automobile's ability to provide access to that land.

Enter the cul-de-sac. As it were.

Subdivisions designed around cul-de-sacs, with their vastly-reduced through traffic, certainly are effective at creating calm areas in the midst of large urban spaces while providing access to those spaces. On the surface, they would seem to be the ideal solution to meeting those conflicting desires. A closer look at some of their iterations, though, reveals something strange: The absence or near-absence of sidewalks in these places. The clear assumption on the part of these subdivisions' builders is that there's no reason to walk in these spaces, aside from going to other people's houses--and, recall, these folks are living in the 'burbs to be away from others; sidewalks would only facilitate interaction. Put another way: the absence of sidewalks mean that these houses' occupants aren't connected to each other, but (via their driveways) only to the street--only to the means of getting in and out of their neighborhood. Those few of us who actually walk or ride bikes through this neighborhood must do so in the streets, which are a bit narrower that suburban streets are nowadays and where many people park their cars (the houses' one-car garages a sign that when they were built, households tended to have fewer cars than they do now). The message is subtle but unmistakable: This space is not for people but for their cars.

Because it is the inherent nature of cars to both provide mobility for their occupants and isolate them from the space through which they move, and despite the physical closeness of these houses to each other, the absence of sidewalks feeds in me the overriding sense of the houses' existential isolation from each other.

Perhaps this is also true of at least some of their occupants. Several people who are out and about greet people who greet them; however, just about every morning for the five months that we've lived here, Scruffy and I pass a woman who walks her dog in the direction opposite that which we take. I long ago stopped greeting her; she never once has spoken to me.

I confess that I don't feel especially good about myself for having stopped greeting her.

This is, physically speaking, a cozy little neighborhood, but there's no feature here that can enhance that coziness in a more intangible way: no sidewalks, no park (the greenbelt along the creek, despite its width in places, has no tables, no benches, no playground equipment--its sole function, though an undeniably important one, is to help control erosion). I was wrong to assume in my first post that most of the people here are older; on the contrary, there seem to be lots of young families with kids here, who know and seem to like each other (back when it was warmer, they'd often be out and about in the afternoons), so it's not as though this is a neighborhood of people physically restricted to their houses. At least from this fairly-early vantage point in our stay here, it seems as though cars so define the physical form this neighborhood takes that it cannot help but affect the people who live here, too.

What does it mean to live in such a place? By which I mean, how does "I live here" get defined by these houses' occupants/dwellers/owners? I don't mean that question in an insulting way but in a genuinely interrogative way. I suspect that you'll see some occasional posts here that try to explore that question.

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Some weary, stale, flat and unprofitable words on The Pale King

(Apologies for the length of this post--the "collapse post" function isn't working, for some reason.)

A picture from the April 28th performance of The Pale King: Monologues From The Unfinished Novel, hosted by the PEN Center in Beverly Hills. Image found here; "making of" video here.

(Earlier posts here)

I liked The Pale King; I'm glad we have it. That said, though, it's not the best introduction to Wallace's work; I strongly suspect that even some of Wallace's admirers will be puzzled by or even disappointed in it. I think many of its reviews are distorting the experience of reading it: I get the feeling that much of the praise it's receiving has more to do with the meteoric rise in David Foster Wallace's reputation in the time since his death than with the work in front of the reader. (Example: As Lee Konstantinou mentions in passing in his review, linked to below, it wasn't all that long ago--i.e., when Infinite Jest first appeared--that the verdict on Wallace was decidedly more mixed.) In other words, what's being reviewed is a too-short career rather than an unfinished novel that, in its published form, is both (almost certainly) waaay shorter than it would have ended up being and whose sections, in any case, are not in the order Wallace intended (he left behind no outline of that). In my humble opinion, that lionizing should have taken place long before, but that's neither here nor there now. In any case, there's something about unfinished work that leads the reader to look over past work for clues about how the unfinished work might have proceeded. In my earlier posts on this book and Wallace more generally, I've found it both unavoidable and essential to do so--at least initially.

[UPDATE: It may also be that the recent publications of Wallace's honors thesis arguing for the existence of free will, and his commencement address at Kenyon College (both reviewed here), have also re-focused attention on Wallace's prior work--which (speaking for myself) has been all to the good. To my mind, those other pieces lead the reader to note certain preoccupations present in Wallace's work--the non-fiction as well as the fiction--that provide a thematic coherency to it.]

What follows is already shorter than I had thought it would be before getting started on it. I was going to include a fair amount on the idea that The Pale King's real theme isn't boredom but the virtue, to the point of transcendence (even, in one character's case, literal levitation), of paying close attention to the things and people of the world. But Cornel Bonca, in his half of this excellent two-person review in the Los Angeles Review of Books (hat-tip: 3 Quarks Daily), says just about everything I was going to say about that, and says it better besides. Bonca's and Lee Konstantinou's reviews are lengthy reads, but each feels right on the nose, it seems to me.

But neither mentions, at all, Hamlet. A quick Googling of "The Pale King Hamlet" yields, on the first page, this piece by Lea Carpenter at The Big Think (she argues for an implicit link, at the level of the relationship between Art and the world, between Hamlet's concerns and those of Wallace), some re-postings elsewhere of that piece, and, um, my own posts as the only sustained readings of the two texts together. Make of that what you will. Meanwhile, I'll do what I can to broaden my market share in what may prove to be a bust of a critical angle.

Now that I've finished The Pale King, I can't honestly say just how much harder Wallace would have pushed its resonances with Shakespeare's play. Apart from "Sickiled Ore," Illinois, and "Rotting Flesh, La.," which I had mentioned in this post, no further such explicit use of Hamlet's language occurs in what we have. There is that matter of the ghost which haunts Peoria's IRS Regional Examination Center, though, about which more later.

Hamlet found "the uses of this world" boring, but he didn't have that word; "boring," in our modern sense of tedious or uninteresting, is, appropriately enough, a late-18th-century coinage and, thus, a by-product of the Industrial Revolution's machines' reducing most people's notion of work to the activity of watching and maintaining machines as they do stuff. It's difficult not to imagine "boring" as arising from people's describing the work of running a drill press. Hamlet's word for boring was "stale," whose history (thanks, OED) shows that "stale" once referred to the organic leavings from the distilling or brewing process. So, there's also the word's association with waste, offal. But, just to be clear, finding the uses of the world to be stale is not the same thing as saying that the world itself is boring; his image of the world as an unweeded garden suggests that Hamlet believes the world deserves better: "Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,/That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/Possess it merely" (I.ii.; this and later quotes are from here). Yet at this early point in the play, his father dead two months and his mother already remarried, Hamlet despairs, wishing that he could just disappear or that it were permitted to kill himself.

I suggested provisionally in that post I just linked to that The Pale King argues for "something like the inverse of Hamlet's despair, of finding and perhaps even insisting that there be meaning within the system within which one finds oneself and--and this is crucial--which one one finds to be bigger than oneself; that is, that while within it, one feels as though one is in service to something larger and more profound than one's self-gratification." That still feels right, but in a way that I hadn't expected before that it would be.

Plot device aside, one way to think about the function of Hamlet's father's ghost's conversation with his son in I.v. is to give Hamlet a purpose which transcends Hamlet's despair over the world's staleness by placing him in service not just to the memory of his father ("Thus was I/. . . ./sent to my account [note the noun]/With all my imperfections on my head") but also to all of Denmark ("If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not;/Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/A couch for luxury and damned incest.") Hamlet is thus given the opportunity to begin to set things aright, as he understands that: to begin weeding the garden.

The rest of the play, then, becomes a matter of watching Hamlet vacillate between his pledges of fealty to these lofty causes and his self-condemnation for not yet having carried out his pledge. Stated in that way, that's nothing new; but if we say that Hamlet's famed inaction isn't due to overthinking what he has been called to do but, rather, distraction--a lack of attention to that which he's committed himself--that puts a rather different spin on things. Hamlet's tragedy is that, in losing that attention, in succumbing to fatalism, no matter how loftily characterized ("There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow" [V.ii]) lie the seeds of his damnation.

Consider: In I.v., the Ghost explicitly tells Hamlet, "[H]owsoever thou pursuest this act,/Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive/Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven/And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,/To prick and sting her." The matter of Gertrude's punishment is clearly not to be Hamlet's concern, but Heaven's. So, when does the Ghost next appear? In III.iv.--the encounter between Hamlet and Gertrude in her chamber. Hamlet sits in judgment on her actions ("Mother, you have my father much offended") and seeks to compel her to acknowledge what she has done by marrying Claudius, when the Ghost arrives to get Hamlet back on task. Hamlet knows exactly why he's there: "Do you not come your tardy son to chide,/That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by/The important acting of your dread command?" The Ghost confirms it: "Do not forget: this visitation/Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose." Hamlet speaks daggers into Gertrude's heart; but, recall, on his way to his mother's room he'd had a chance to put a real dagger into Claudius' heart; and, he's just killed Polonius, too ("I took thee for thy better").

So: Hamlet's great enemy is distraction from the task he has pledged himself to. In The Pale King, the great enemy is boredom with the task; and, sure enough, the Peoria office's Pale King puts in an appearance when one of the examiners, his methods for staving off boredom having failed, succumbs to it. In chapter 33, we meet Lane Dean, Jr., as he "bores" down on the pile of 1040 forms he's checking for errors, all the while using various relaxation techniques to ward off tedium, such as "imagin[ing] a warm pretty beach with mellow surf as instructed in orientation the previous month" (376). Alas, the beach turns, in his mind, to a winter scene, and after a while he begins to believe that Hell is "a fellow [locked] in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enoough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and [left] there to his mind's own devices" (379). When Dean reaches the point that he imagining that the clock's second hand possesses the awareness that "its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate" (381) and the face of his baby boy (it's in a picture on his desk) morphing into an old man's face and senses that he's half-asleep, that's when it happens:

Getting a little taste, I see.

It was a big older fellow with a seamed face and picket teeth. He wasn't from any Tingle [the nickname for desks at the Center] that Lane Dean had ever observed from his own. The man had on a headlamp with a tan cotton band like some dentists wore and a type of thick black marker in his breast pocket. He smelled of hair oil and some kind of food. He had part of his bottom on the edge of Lane's desk and was cleaning under his thumbnail with a straightened-out paperclip and speaking softly. You could see an undershirt under his shirt; he wore no tie. He kept moving his upper body around in a slight kind of shape or circle, and the movements left a little bit of a vapor trail. None of the wigglers [Dean's fellow workers] in either adjoining row was paying attention to him. Dean checked the face in the photo to make sure he wasn't still dreaming.

They don't ever say it, though. Have you noticed? They talk around it. It's too manifest. As if talking about the air you're breathing, yes? It would be as if saying, I see so-and-so with my eye. What would be the point? (382)

[Aside: Perhaps significant, perhaps not: In III.iv. of Hamlet, Gertrude doesn't see the Ghost; Dean's fellow workers vary between not paying attention to the visitor or pretending not to have seen him.]

"It," of course, is not that bore which begins the chapter (that's the past tense of that sense of bear that means "knuckle down") but something like its opposite: that other bore and its variants, which Dean's visitor discourses on the history of for most of the next three pages, concluding with a quote from Kierkegaard: "Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion." Dean's attention shifts, he notes that the old man's smell is Chinese food and Vitalis. It's, perhaps, hearing the Kierkegaard quote that prompts Dean to consider praying; as if in response, his visitor says, "Note too that interesting first appears just two years after bore. 1768. Mark this, two years after. Can this be so? [. . . .] Invents itself, yes? Not all it invents" (385).

Then he leaves, with no one asking the obvious question, let alone providing the answer to it. But then again, the action in this novel (not to mention the novel itself) is the beginning of that answer.

On down the road: some speculation on how thinking about Hamlet might give us some insight into The Pale King's structure.

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On flies in Casablanca

Rick and Ferrari's first scene at the Blue Parrot. Image found here; click to enlarge.

[Edited and amended to avoid implying some things I don't mean to suggest.]

In my post on Casablanca from a couple of days ago, I briefly mentioned the arrangement of the space of the Blue Parrot, the bar run by Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet). Here, following up on some leads provided by Roger Ebert's commentary (and to get this film out of my head for a little while), I want to toss out a few observations about something seen there (and not seen elsewhere).

Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet) functions as a metonymy for Casablanca's indeterminate spaces: He has an Italian surname, speaks with an English accent, uses French forms of address, and wears a fez while in the Blue Parrot and a panama hat when out and about. He is another version of the citizen of the world that Renault has declared Rick to be, someone who seems to be from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Yet, as I mentioned in the previous post, of all Casablanca's expatriates, Ferrari appears to have become fully assimilated into the Moroccan backdrop against which the film's central action plays out: When he makes his entrance at Rick's, the first people Ferrari acknowledges (with local hand gestures showing his respect) are north Africans. Moreover, we later learn that Ferrari is firmly in control of Casablanca's black market (which Rick makes clear he wants no part of) and, perhaps, even more unpleasant endeavors--when Ferrari offers to buy Sam's services from Rick, Rick tersely replies that he doesn't buy or sell human beings, to which Ferrari says that human beings are precisely Casablanca's "leading commodity."

Perhaps all this is why each of the two scenes set in the Blue Parrot conclude with Ferrari swatting at flies. Apparently in the corrupted world depicted in Casablanca, only the Blue Parrot has any trouble at all with flies. But in a place like Casablanca, corruption gets measured by kind rather than degree. The Parrot's chaotic exterior and seamy, dimly-lit interior seem intended to underscore Ferrari's full investment in Casablanca's unseemly side; compare to Rick's clean, brightly-lit, grid-like interior. In his commentary on the first scene, Ebert notes that the fly-swatting isn't in the script, that either director Michael Curtiz or Greenstreet himself added it as a bit of business. Whoever had the idea, it's a subtle touch that's no big deal in and of itself but, if we happen to notice it and think about it, at the very least enhances the film's texture. If we think about it a bit more, the flies' presence at the Blue Parrot but nowhere else serves as an implicit judgment on Ferrari.

[A later, quick comment on the empire-vs.-colony politics of this: While it's true that Ferrari is the film's firmest link to the local population and equally true that Ferrari is utterly corrupt, I don't think it follows that the film is arguing that the local population in its entirety is corrupt and to be avoided when not exoticized. There's something about Ferrari's lack of hesitation in owning up to who he is and what he does that leads me to conclude its judgment stops at Ferrari's indeterminate shores--or, more abstractly, at the shores of all those who would prey on or perpetuate human misery (which, alas, knows no political or cultural boundaries. Hence, again, why the flies are present only at the Blue Parrot.]

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"Where I'm going, you can't follow": On chess boards, Casablanca and postmodern space (updated)

A still from Humphrey Bogart's first scene in Casablanca. On the set, Bogart played chess with Claude Rains and Paul Henried; it was Bogart's idea to have the chess board be Rick's stage business as he talks with Ugarte. According to Roger Ebert's commentary in the edition of Casablanca I have, Bogart preferred chess to poker because in chess, no one can cheat. Image found here.

[UPDATE: This piece in chessville.com is something of a summation of attempts to explain Casablanca's enduring appeal. It includes a nice discussion of the details of Rick's chess board and chess's larger semiotic function in the film--in particular, for both chess and the film, the significance of Rick's playing black.]

Humphrey Bogart doesn't have a traditional entrance in Casablanca. He doesn't walk into a scene. Rather, it's more like the audience makes its entrance into Rick's scene--which is to say, his space: the camera, taking on the point of view of a customer at Rick's who moves through the bar's entrance and seating areas and observing all the bargaining and haggling for papers, for money, for favors, then moves toward a table on which we see a drink, an ashtray, a chess board with a game in progress, and the hands of someone signing someone's tab for a waiter. (Perhaps he's signing our tab--after all, the scene is shot to appear as though we're accompanying the waiter who brings it.) The camera then pulls back to show Rick contemplating the board, holding one of his opponent's already-captured pieces.

The board itself isn't the scene's focus, of course; if it were meant to be, director Michael Curtiz would have made it thus. (Ebert in his commentary notes several times on Curtiz's economy as a director; with very few exceptions, every shot we see in Casablanca functions to help move the story along.) Still, in those shots in which we see the board in this scene, there seem to be some continuity problems that are worth pondering in their own right. Each time it appears, it is as though we're seeing a different game: at least two shots show different, well-advanced games; two others show a board whose game has barely begun, if at all. I think, to be honest, that the only work the chess board is intended to do here is just be a chess board and thus serve as an outward sign of Rick's careful, strategic thinking. We're probably not supposed to notice the pieces' very different arrangements on the board; the film's continuity editor (if it had one) either missed the problem or decided (or Curtiz did) that it didn't matter. But let's imagine for a bit that these inconsistencies are in fact intentional. Then, we can read the chess board as conveying the idea of different games being played simultaneously, all of them on one board, as we stand there waiting for Rick to OK our tab. Rick is in his bar all night, every night. Each night is a new series of simultaneous games for him--in those opening scenes, Rick deals with a bewildering variety of customers and they with each other--all playing out in the space of his bar, whose very tables are laid out like squares of a grid. [Aside: compare the interior of Rick's to the chaotic interior of Ferrari's bar, the Blue Parrot.]

Perhaps that is why, in the scene(s) involving the chessboard(s), we never see who Rick's opponent(s) is/are. "Everybody comes to Rick's," Captain Renault tells Major Strasser earlier in the film. Perhaps, potentially, everyone is Rick's opponent. Even--and especially--Ilsa: the one person most capable of hurting Rick . . . because, we will learn, she already has.


Ilsa confronts Rick in his office. Note the shadow pattern on the walls behind her; click in the image to enlarge. Image found here.

More below the fold.



Again: The last thing I'm claiming here is that Curtiz intends for the chess board to work in his movie in the way I've described it above. However, I do want to claim that these apparent errors in fact end up reinforcing Casablanca's strong sense of de-centeredness, of the city's being comprised of façades behind which little if anything (and certainly nothing pleasant) withstands closer scrutiny. Better put, Casablanca shows us a constantly-shifting space with no constants ruling apart from a far-off, bureaucratic System and, within this place on the periphery of that System's domain, most everyone's acting solely out of his/her self-interest. Few if any here are traditionally Good or Bad; all have in them the potential to be either, though corruption in this place is far more likely than redemption is. We have vague allusions to shadowy pasts; multiple rumors of deaths that turn out not to have been true--or, as Laslow says of the five different rumors regarding his death, "True every single time"; language either emptied of meaning or obliquely acknowledging that its speaker cannot freely speak the truth of a matter; and, presiding over all, the rhetoric and machinery of the Surveillance State. In such a place, people alternate between wanting to believe in and mocking the old verities of love and disinterested sacrifice for others in service to a Greater Cause. The verities are no different from any other narrative whose intrinsic value (never mind their truth or the motives of those who act in accordance with them) can be scrutinized and adopted or mocked, too, because, after all, what does anything matter in the end? ("[I]t doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.")

Chess boards are stylized maps on which one can assert power over another. I suspect Rick much prefers them to real maps, which depict spaces divvied up and controlled by others. I hope no one tells him, though, that he happens to be a character in Casablanca, a movie obsessed with maps and grids--human projections of virtual boundaries onto physical space, over which the vast majority of us have little say, much less the power to control. Consider the film's opening sequence: a raised-relief globe which turns to the western end of the Mediterranean; the camera moves toward France and, at the same time, a wipe replaces the relief map with a two-dimensional paper map that shows the circuitous route people fleeing the Germans had to take to get to Lisbon and thence to the U.S.--this map functioning at the same time as a screen on which is projected newsreel footage of war refugees. The film's central plot device is the possessing of Letters of Transit. Rick Blaine's language often wryly comments on the conflicts between what people wish the world were and its stubborn physical and political realities. Rick says he had come to Casablanca "for the waters;" when Captain Renault asks what waters Rick means, that Casablanca is in the desert, Rick says, "I was misinformed." When the German Major Strasser asks what nationality Rick is, he replies, "A drunkard," which prompts Captain Renault to declare Rick "a citizen of the world"--yet Rick's Everyman's homeland--his saloon--cannot hide him from Ilsa: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she had to walk into mine." When Victor Laslow requests a table as far from Major Strasser as possible, Rick tells him, "Well, the geography may be a little difficult to arrange . . ." This world is a rootless one: with the single exception of Ferrari, the owner of the Blue Parrot, who seems to have fully assimilated into the culture of the place, it seems anyone who speaks on the matter would rather be somewhere, anywhere, besides Casablanca. Everyone here is in some sense a refugee. Moreover, the name aside, no one can really say what Casablanca is on its own terms, apart from the palimpsests the expatriates have turned it into.

Casablanca, in other words, is a virtual-space rendering of a place called Casablanca--and that place's correspondence to a real place by that same name is a tenuous one at best. All we know about these places, really, are what we can say about them via the suspect medium of language.

One of this blog's very first posts asked about the source(s) of Casablanca's enormous popularity among both cinephiles and people who just love good movies. Aside from the usual responses of "good acting" and "good story, tautly told," in that earlier post I couldn't make sense of how this film, shot on a very tight 2-month schedule and "just" one of 50 that Warner Bros. made that year, "just" one of the three films Curtiz would direct that year, is #2 on the American Film Institute's Top 100 films. As I watched it yesterday for the first time in quite a while, searching for possible answers, the simplest one of all is the one that occurred to me: It retains its immediacy despite its precise placement in time (December 1941). For this film's first audiences, it must have felt like a newsreel: A reader for Warner's first read the play on which the film is based on December 8, 1941; in the very week of Casablanca's release, the Allies had begun the north Africa campaign. For us watching it today, I daresay, it feels like we are watching our own world in embryonic form--and, if we're really thinking about the particulars of the film's romantic triangle, we're seeing just how difficult it is to love authentically, balancing self-interest and sacrifice, in such a place.

Some films, their intentions aside, just get really, really lucky. Casablanca appears to be one of those films.

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The dark side of literary regionalism

David Edwin Bernard, Threshing Run # 7 (1984). Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Image found here. About a hundred years after the rise of regionalist literature, but it captures well regionalism's usually-rural setting and life therein, and the implicit tension between the old ways and the new.

I've just finished reading around in Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present by Darlene J. Sadlier, billed by its publisher (Univ. of Texas Press) as "the first comprehensive cultural history of Brazil to be written in English." It does indeed seem to be comprehensive (but then again, I don't know a heck of a lot about Brazil relative to the little I know about the rest of Spanish-speaking America, so, "grain of salt" and all that), and it's written in a very approachable manner. At the very least, it's an excellent place to start for those interested in learning a little more about how others have imagined and depicted Brazil and--the reason I'm posting this today--how Brazilians have imagined themselves to themselves.

Though politically Brazil's history in the 19th century does not parallel ours, I was intrigued to learn from Sadlier's chapter on the emergence of Brazilian literature that its literary history does. In both countries in the second half of that century, as cultural and economic power shifted to the cities, the regions of the interior became the subject of writers intent on exploring their topography and cultural and linguistic mores: the essence of literary regionalism (itself an offshoot of literary realism). In the U.S., among the more prominent regionalists and the places they wrote about are Sarah Orne Jewett (Maine), Kate Chopin (New Orleans, and Cajun and Creole country), Joel Chandler Harris (Georgia), Bret Harte (the West), and, later, Willa Cather (the Plains and New Mexico) and Charles W. Chesnutt (North Carolina; intriguingly, Chesnutt was an African-American writer whose first-person narrators often "passed" to their readership as white by not explicitly revealing their race). In the case of Brazilian literature, Sadlier notes the influence of Portuguese writers becoming more interested in the lives of people living in rural Portugal (of course, they would have been reading other European writers doing the same sort of thing, as were the U.S. writers I named above).

An obvious, and relatively benign, cultural function of regionalist writing is that at its best, its depiction of a distinctive place unfamiliar to many readers reveals the people of that place in its distinctiveness and, at the same time, to be in its essence as much a part of the wider nation as any other part. For a relatively new nation seeking to gain a sense of national identity, regionalism thus also performs important political work. Clearly some of this is at work in U.S. regionalist writing, coming as it does in the wake of the Civil War and the beginnings of the settlement of the West along with the rise of urbanization and immigration from both Europe and Asia. But in this writing there's some nostalgia-feeding as well: much regionalist writing appeared in magazines, whose readership was urban and, more often than not, had moved away from the very places that served as settings for the regionalists--and, as well, the stories themselves often recall "the way things used to be" in those now much-changed places (as just one example, Harris's Uncle Remus tales have their origins in antebellum times--though, as near as I can tell, Uncle Remus himself isn't nostalgic about slavery itself). So, then: two levels of nostalgia--the audience's for a place; that place's people for an earlier, now-lost time--are often at work in U.S. regional writing.

These aren't necessarily bad things in and of themselves. But, as per the title of this post, an endnote in Sadlier's book reminded me that they can be, and that led me to wonder a bit about our own contemporary moment.

As I mentioned earlier, though Brazilian and U.S. regionalist literature appeared at about the same time in the 19th century, our corresponding respective political and cultural moments were quite different. Though Brazil won its independence from Portugal in 1820, it was ruled by a monarchy until the 1890s; moreover, Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888. For another, Brazil's landmass is the size of all of Europe's, the result being that, whereas certain regions of the U.S. (with, probably, the exception of Creole society) never appeared exotic but, rather, quaint, for Brazilians enormous expanses of their nation seemed like other nations entirely to the Europeanized coastal areas. The people of these regions--the sertanejos (the Brazilian equivalent of the gauchos) of Brazil's semi-arid deep-northeastern interior, and the by-then-all-but-extinct Indians of the coastal regions--were the romanticized heroes of these narratives, but they were also types that the vast majority of Brazilians reading these narratives would have had no direct experience with . . . and yet, their writers were establishing these types as archetypal Brazilians, as embodiments of the nation's emerging national consciousness.

It's within this context that Sadlier paraphrases literary historian José Maurício Gomes de Almeida's discussion of regionalism (which doesn't differ in its essentials from mine above) and then goes on to speculate:

It is interesting to consider late-nineteenth-century Brazilian regionalism in light of Benedict Anderson's discussions of the nation as an imagined community. Perhaps the concept of a regional literature, which focuses on a specific area and communtiy, was a way for writers to circumvent the vastness and variety that made knowing or representing Brazil as a whole implausible. (315, n. 39)

This is an intriguing idea. I'll just say that I don't know if this is right, but it's certainly not incongruous with anything about regionalism that I've said above. All of us know the risks inherent in insisting on a single place--or, for that matter, some experience in that single place--as being a synecdoche of even that place, let alone an entire nation. Still, perhaps, also at work in the audience for those magazine stories about Home was the comfort that, as confused, confusing and alienating as life in the city could be, there was always a place where life made sense. (Just to be clear: I'm speaking here of U.S. regionalism. My sense of Brazilian regionalist fiction's audience, as I mentioned before, was that they had little if any direct knowledge of the sertão (the "backlands" of the northeast) and the jungle; to them, these places might as well have been entirely different countries.)

The "dark side" reading of this idea, though, is that regionalism can become a means of insisting on a place's distinctiveness, its misunderstood-ness, even its superiority, relative to (and, thus, to the exclusion of) the rest of the nation. In other words, regionalism becomes provincialism. Just off the top of my head, when thinking about this idea as regards U.S. regionalism I think one could make the case that this happened with the "moonlight and magnolias" turn that novels set in the South took after the end of Reconstruction and into the 20th century, culminating in the Southern Agrarian movement as articulated in the essay collection I'll Take My Stand and, much more disturbingly, in the novels of Thomas J. Dixon (whose most famous novel, The Clansman, was made into the film Birth of a Nation). I think we also can hear echoes of provincialism in the recent politics of some via the "real America" trope that seems implicitly to exclude large urban, more cosmopolitan places in favor of an older, more culturally-homogeneous America. That trope, I hasten to add, is not explicitly a racist or a xenophobic one, but it seems inherently suspicious of the Other--it is a trope as old as America itself. It is resistant to difference to the point of being unwilling even to consider that acknowledgement and acceptance of difference under the umbrella of a set of ideas to which we collectively subscribe might also be American.

You might have suspicioned that I don't think that trope is a good thing. To our credit, our literature largely has avoided being too provincial. That which strays too far that way tends not to survive. Sarah Orne Jewett's most famous story, "A White Heron," has survived--and flourished--not because it is about Maine but because it is about a little girl learning the cost of what it means to become a person separate and distinct from other people, something not only Mainers have experiences with. As goes our literature, so goes our nation. We are at our best when we are not insisting on authenticity or reveling in nostalgia. We'll never find the truly authentic; the nostalgic is always prettier than it really was.

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Rhymes and reasons: Some general observations on "John Henry"

Statue of John Henry, near Talcott, West Virginia. Image found here.

(Wikipedia entry; an earlier post of mine is here.)

A few weeks ago, I posted that I'd be putting together a lesson on John Henry--a selection of historical materials, images, songs and their lyrics--that would give us some practice at analyzing and synthesizing information from various sources to see what sorts of conclusions we might arrive at. Yesterday, I listened to at least part of over 80 songs either titled "John Henry" or in some way connected to the legend. Since as a result of this I have had a weird blur of different versions of the song running through my head for, oh, the past 12 hours or so, I've decided to share some of my misery with youyou might be interested in some of the general trends I noticed.

(What follows--and indeed, what my students will be hearing and seeing--would not be possible without this compendium of recordings at Old Weird America.)

First, one overarching observation: The one common thread in almost all these versions is the melodic line's general structure: a ranging down the scale; the third line of the verses slightly longer metrically; and a repeated fourth line. "Gadaya," a Frenchman from Brittany who is the writer of Old Weird America, has this to say about the song's musical template (spellings are his own):

I think the popularity of “John Henry” is not only due to the story it tells but most important how it tells it, which melody carries the tale of this heroic man. This tune is the quintessential american melody, full of pulse and rhythm, going back and forth between the high and low notes, from a scream to a whisper… Among the many different instruments used for singing “John Henry”, the guitar used with a bottleneck to slide on the strings is the most appropriate (and one of the most widespread among blues guitarist) to render the “blue” notes and the whailing quality of the melody. The root of its pentatonic scale and syncopated rhythm is obviously an african one and was carried here by the vocal and instrumental genius of the african-american slaves that built the land. An important part of the “vitality” of american vernacular music is in fact due to known and unknown african-american musicians, who influenced white folk musicians, most strongly in the South, and left their mark on all popular music ever since.

Melodically, only two versions of the "John Henry" songs that I listened to differed substantially from the rest. John Cephas and Phil Wiggins' recording (on Richmond Blues) has a gorgeous melancholic melody, more folk-y than (traditional) bluesy in its style--this despite the fact that they are African-American. Meanwhile, Johnny Cash's "The Legend of John Henry's Hammer" (on Blood, Sweat and Tears; At Folsom Prison has a shorter version of the same song) preserves the common melody but substitutes an irregularly-recurring "refrain" in place of some of the verses' third and fourth lines. I also have to say that the arrangement (spoken bits; cries from the crowd watching John Henry) feels more like something from a musical than something from American folk tradition. Far be it from me to argue with a man who pretty much embodies American popular music and married into the Carter family, but his version just doesn't work for me. On the other hand, though, lyrically Cash's version is among the more complete (not to mention chronologically coherent) versions that I listened to. Also, a few versions intended to be danced to include only the repeated fourth lines of the lyrics, which strikes me as unusual.

Such a broad consensus on the melody, independent of the region the performers come from (throughout the South, from Louisiana to the Virginias) and during an age just on the cusp of technological advancements which have made contemporary popular culture possible, attest, as Gadaya notes, to the "John Henry" melody as quintessentially American, as distinctive and thus memorable.

However, everything else about these songs, from tempos to lyrics, differs: Tempos vary from slow, worksong-appropriate rhythms to some of the fastest bluegrass you're likely to hear; no two versions (that I noticed) share exactly the same lyrics; for that matter, many of the versions don't have the verses in chronological order (one version, Memento-like, actually begins at John Henry's death and from there relates his story in reverse chronological order); though not all versions mention that John Henry was black, both black and white performers would include this detail in their versions--however, the versions of black performers would regularly include certain verses that white performers did not; though John Henry's wife, when mentioned, is called by various names in these versions, "Polly Ann" is the most common one--more about her, and other tendencies in the lyrics, below the fold.

In more or less chronological order:

Birthplace and childhood: A couple of the songs have as part of a verse "Some say he was born in Texas/Some say he was born in Maine" before asserting that he was born in North Carolina. One version substitutes "England" and "Spain" for "Texas" and "Maine." Given the stories' settings in the South and John Henry's unquestioned African-American heritage, Maine (not to mention England and Spain) feel odd here; they, like a couple of other odd lyrical features, may be formulaic borrowings from other, older folk ballads. One spoken-word intro says he was born in Newport News. Most of the versions make reference to either of two childhood episodes (and sometimes both): a) As a boy, John Henry picks up "a hammer and a little piece of steel/Said 'I'm gonna be a steel-drivin' man'"; b) While "sittin' on his mama's knee," he has the premonition that "That hammer's gonna be the death of me." Cash's version has John Henry's father advising his son to learn how to hammer, but none of the other versions has this story.

"Labor relations": Here is where we find the most variation in the John Henry songs. They range all the way from fairly detailed exchanges between John Henry and the "captain"--a couple of which include arguments over wage differences between rival railroad companies, and which range from testy to cordial yet (on John Henry's part) boastful--to no mention at all of the steam-drilling machine, much less the legendary contest. Interestingly, the versions with the more elaborate discussions tend to be performed by the African-American performers. Another interesting lyrical difference within a fairly common verse: The first three lines are: "John Henry went up on the mountain/He looked down on the other side/The mountain was so tall and John Henry was so small"; the variation occurs in the fourth line, in which some read "He laid down his hammer and he cried" and others have "died" in place of "cried." This isn't the place to account for all the differences; suffice it to say, though, that the verses that describe John Henry's work, as you'd expect, form the core of all the songs.

"Polly Ann": John Henry's wife (though in some versions they are sweethearts but not married) is occasionally known by other names (Sarah Ann, Black Sally Ann, Cora Belle, Julie Ann, Nevelleen (sp?). Something I had not really thought about before listening to all these versions is how prominent a figure Polly Ann is in these songs. Only one version that I listened to does not mention her or any other female companion. I didn't count, but the following verse (with slight variations in wording) may appear in more of the versions than any other: "John Henry had a little woman/Her name was Polly Ann/When John took sick and had to go to bed/Polly drove steel like a man." Other versions, chiefly by African-American performers, delve more deeply into their relationship: in some, Polly Ann has a rival for John Henry's affection; in a couple of versions, two verses come in tandem with each other, the first one consisting of John Henry's asking Polly Ann who will provide for her when he dies and "who'll be your lovin' man?", and the second being Polly's response that her father and brothers can provide for her material needs but that she "don't need no man." In one version, "Black Sally Ann" tells the captain, "You murdered my steel-drivin' man." Many of the versions performed by African-Americans contain a frankly sexual dimension--not just the romantic triangle, but the fact that in some (though not many) of the versions, women come to watch John Henry drive steel. In Muddy Waters' boogie-woogie version, on the occasion of John Henry's funeral the women--no men mentioned--"come from the east/And they come from the west."

Anyway, as I have thought about these songs and about Polly Ann in particular, I have found myself wondering, What if these songs had had another century or so to evolve before the arrival of recording technology? Polly Ann is such a dynamic figure--a proto-Rosie the Riveter?--that it seems possible that songs about her specifically would have emerged. Of course, there's no way to know this now. Still and all, Polly Ann, to my mind, is clearly not mere window-dressing in these songs. Pay attention to her, too, when you listen to these songs.

Death and funeral: As you'd expect, the vast majority of the songs attribute John Henry's death to exhaustion from the contest with the steam-drill. In one version, mentioned above, that doesn't mention the machine, John Henry dies when he climbs to the summit of the mountain and realizes "The mountain was so tall and John Henry was so small." It's worth mentioning here, by the way, that though the songs all mention his extraordinary strength, John Henry is no superhuman being. All the versions, except for one version by Doc Watson, are clear as to his mortality. Indeed, a popular line in the songs is his telling the captain, "A man ain't nothin' but a man." (Doc Watson opens his version on Songs for Little Pickers (a children's record) by describing John Henry waking up in his boxcar coffin, going to get Polly Ann, and going to the next town to do some more steel-driving.) As for the funeral itself, two versions by black performers tell that John Henry's body is first taken to the White House. All those that describe the burial agree that he is buried by the railroad track "six feet under the sand" and that when the trains go by everyone says, "Yonder lies a steel-drivin' man."

One last thing I found myself musing on this morning. In that older post of mine on John Henry that I linked to above, I quoted Dick Spottwood as saying, "Tracking John Henry is analogous to documenting the historical Jesus." Yes: and, to continue the analogy, looking at all these different versions of the song felt a little like looking at variant readings readings for manuscripts of the synoptic gospels: they all tell pretty much the same story, though not necessarily with events in the same order or described in the same way; and different versions call attention to different aspects of John Henry the person. Several of the performers also insist on the authenticity of their respective versions, or of their performance of that version. I found myself thankful that we have all these different recorded versions of the song; they collectively serve as a reminder that that thing we call the oral tradition was alive and well up to and including the early decades of the last century, and that that tradition wasn't static or equally privileging of every version of a song or story. On the other hand, though, precisely because these versions are preserved, it's very likely that there won't be further evolving of the particulars of the song(s): another instance in which technology leads to John Henry's death. There's more to say about this, but that's for another post.

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Attention, "John Henry" fans (a bleg)

A painting by Palmer Hayden of John Henry's death. Note the positioning of his body. Image found here.

First of all, welcome to my new students. It was a pleasure meeting you and talking with you about the next eight weeks.

Second, the bleg: for this summer's class I'm working on pulling together a little unit built around the American folk song "John Henry": (some of) its many different versions; the historical case for John Henry's existence and the two places that lay claim to being the site of the confrontation between John Henry and the steam-driven machine; some speculation as to why this legend and the songs about it hold the place it does in American folk culture; some images; etc. The goal is to use these materials as a kind of laboratory for different acts of interpretation. It could be fun or disastrous--but hey! It's the summer!

Here's where the bleg comes in: I'm looking for leads on either old recordings (or recordings of old versions of) "John Henry," along with a couple of more contemporary re-writings/updatings. In addition to the four versions I listed in this old post (though the Mississippi John Hurt piece is something of a ringer since it's more like a response to the legend rather than a version of the folk song), I also have a version by country blues performers John Cephas and Phil Wiggins. I'm toying with including Johnny Cash's version on his At Folsom Prison album. Here is a list of other performances, along with some contemporary updatings. I'm looking for around six versions of the song in all.

The goal is not to overwhelm but to suggest something of the variety of these songs, a variety nevertheless contained within a fairly firm narrative framework. I have a few weeks for this; I've scheduled it for July 1. Any advice/questions any of you might have would be most welcome.

I'm in the midst of writing up a post on Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666; that should appear here either later on today or tomorrow.

(UPDATE: The truly John Henry-obsessed can thank me later for being pointed in the direction of this and this. A tip of the hat to River's Invitation for leading me to both those places.)

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A post-Inauguration remembrance of something pre-Inauguration

By Richard Crowson, just-departed editorial cartoonist of the Wichita Eagle. Image found here (via Douglas and Main).

This image makes me smile, and I would like to believe that Lincoln, who personally was not as enlightened on matters of race as his public image would suggest, would have been amenable to sharing a fist-bump with our new President. If Obama's approval ratings are any indication, many many people who didn't vote for him back in November are fist-bumping him in their own ways, too--if only because he's the President and, given what lies ahead for us as a nation, those of us who love our country should wish any President well. Heck: Despite my personal feelings about the previous administration, occasionally aired here, I certainly didn't want Bush or his administration to fail and take no personal pleasure in thinking that he did. That would be as perverse a way to think as it is for Rush Limbaugh to publicly state he wants Obama's presidency to fail (I won't link; it's easy enough to find on the 'Nets). As I understand Limbaugh's remarks, he's speaking out of the context of his being a member of the Disloyal Opposition, rather than a racist one. But still. And, to be sure, there are some (few, but still too many) who cannot abide by the White House's being occupied by this or any African-American.

The above is a sad affirmation of something I kind of sort of alluded to here: that seeing Obama become a President is, without a doubt, a tremendous moment in our long and painful history that has been so utterly shaped, at every level, by the question of race. But rather than think that our work is done as a nation, it's more accurate to think of this as a gesture in the right direction toward finishing that work . . . all the while remembering that that work, given our ideals, will never be completely done.

Over the past two days, I have been having a running conversation about all this with a friend of mine out at the Air Force base where I teach. She was a fervent Hillary supporter during the primaries who, though thrilled at Obama's victory, still would love to see a woman President (full disclosure: as would I). In the course of our talking about how, still, our nation's collective attitudes about race are, pardon the pun, not so black-and-white as some would have us believe, I was reminded of something that happened to me while I was still living in Mobile back in the '90s.

Lots of details have faded: when it was, why I happened to be looking out the front window of the house to begin with, how many people there were, etc. What matters more is what I do remember. First of all, the setting: It was early evening and cold by Mobile standards. For whatever reason, I looked out the front window, and there was an old station wagon parked in front of the house, its hood up. I could see a man standing in front of the car, and there was enough light from our porch to reveal that he was black.

I went out to offer tools, to give him a jump, to offer him the phone to call someone if things reached that point. There were at least five other people in the car--I remember two women and two small children. I greeted them as well; they smiled, cautiously, at me. I don't remember now what exactly this man, perhaps in his 50s or 60s, said he thought was the matter with his car; what I do remember is what he kept telling me as I talked with him: something to the effect that he'd be leaving soon and, even more striking, kept apologizing for his car's breaking down right there in front of my house. He was polite in his responses to me but resistant to my offers of help. That was okay of course; we Men don't want to accept help too early in the game, no matter how much it might be in our better interest to accept--I'm a skilled player of that game, too, even in the face of ample past instances of bone-headed results arising from playing the game too far past the point of no return. But what I couldn't make sense of was his apparent need to apologize for what was happening. Why apologize to a total stranger for one's car's breaking down in front of that stranger's house? It's not his fault, after all.

It wasn't until the man had made it politely clear to me that he didn't want to accept my help and I turned to go back inside to report to P., my then-wife, that it struck me: What this man was saying to me had nothing to do with the particulars of what was being said that night but with a long, long cultural memory of innumerable events much like this one that he assumed I was also remembering--black folks shouldn't be in mostly-white parts of town after dark. They run the risk of verbal and even physical hostility from the residents, spending a night in jail or, in Mobile, worse: only about 10 years before, a black man was hanged downtown by some white men as part of a Klan ritual. Never mind what I was saying; in a real sense, that man wasn't listening to me at all but to that cultural memory. The script for the evening was written before I was even aware this family's car was out there. It's a frustrating thing: on the one hand, that memory interfered with his hearing, really hearing, my offers of help; but on the other hand, who could blame him for not hearing? He was mistaken, and yet he was not.

Some time passed--I don't remember how much. I'd look out the window every once in a while to see what was happening. There the car sat, and there the man kept trying to get it to run. Finally, P. said that at the very least we could offer the use of the phone again and invite the other folks inside for coffee and hot chocolate. So she and I went out to talk with them. This time the man accepted the offer of the phone and the kids, though not the women, came inside to get warmed up. The kids had hot chocolate. The man reached a relation of his; he arrived; and they all rode home with him, leaving the station wagon there. I stopped looking out the window then. The next morning, the car was gone.

What to say about all this, really? The existence of that cultural memory and the fact that, despite our post-Emancipation, post Brown v. Board of Education, post-Civil Rights Acts and, later, a post-Obama Administration-future world that we live in, that memory will be with us for a while yet--that's an inarguable Fact. I'd like to think that our gestures toward that family that night participated in a tiny way toward helping ease that memory on its way out the door, as do I hope that my two daughters' strong friendships with African-American kids will do the same. But it's going to take a while: this year marks the 390th anniversary of the arrival of 20 Africans to the English colony at Jamestown; if you grant that "America" includes the Spanish and Portuguese colonies as well, tack on about 100 more years: Bartolomé de las Casas is rightly lauded throughout Latin America for winning for indigenous populations legal protection from enslavement; however, it was also he who proposed the importation of Africans as a solution for the colonies' labor needs. And does it need to be said? Perhaps so: Some whites feel the need to cling to this very same memory.

That's a lot of memory to overcome, on both sides. But in the long list of Good Fights, this one is up near the top. Obama's victory is an important part of that Good Fight but not by any means the final one.

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Some thousand-words are more boring than others

A pile of bison skulls, c. 1870. Click to enlarge. Image found here.

(Greetings and welcome to visitors from The Valve--and thanks to Aaron for the plug there.)

Reading Zunguzungu's reading of a picture of Teddy and Kermit Roosevelt posing with a just-shot buffalo in Africa reminded me for some reason of the picture you see above, or one very similar to it, which the Mrs. and I saw in an exhibit in a museum on our trip to Dodge City two summers ago. Z. titles his post "Just a couple of dudes" and, as he makes quite clear, it's no strain from a psychoanalytic perspective to read the TR and Kermit pic as a celebration of the phallus. Even though I'm not a hunter, I am a guy, and I'd be in more than a little denial if I said that that picture didn't hold some small, primal appeal to me: even with rifles, killing a charging buffalo requires intestinal fortitude that, I'll admit, I don't have and wouldn't care to act upon even if I did but still and all can't help admiring even as I nod in agreement with Z.'s reading of the picture.

But as I say, that picture made me think of the one you see here--chiefly, how boring this one is by comparison. You'd think, if a picture of one dead buffalo gets the old masculine juices flowing, wouldn't a pile of a few thousand bison skulls cause them to flow exponentially? Well, no.

Some comments below the fold.

The commonplace way of talking about what happened to the bison during the latter decades of the 19th century was that it was slaughter, and pictures like this one do nothing to mitigate the use of such language. Indeed, this picture serves as a useful reminder that The West Was Won not by men per se but whole gangs of men: these bison skulls are the handiwork of far more men than that of the couple of dudes (who, interestingly, do not have rifles with them) you see in this picture. Indeed, the only machine visible in this picture is the large, now-empty cart in the lower-right of the picture that, I assume, was used to carry the skulls to this place. Moreover, it could be that the two men you see here aren't hunters at all. The top-hatted fellow at the base of the pile, seated and gesturing rather inadequately with his right arm (why not outspread arms?) may be, perhaps, an agent for one of the rail companies who paid the buffalo hunters for their work. Meanwhile, the man at the summit of the pile (a hunter, or one of the carters who has just emptied the cart in the picture?) holds up a single skull to drive home to the viewer just what it is that this pile is constructed of--for, truth be told, it's difficult to tell just by looking at the pile itself.

Those of us horrified and dismayed by the destruction and loss of this planet's wild places and the creatures in them will, with good reason, read this picture as both evidence and an indictment of that destruction. But that's too easy an observation. In fact, I'd argue that that's our reading of this picture but not the one intended by its maker. I'd like to suggest that its real subject--and its real horror for us--is not the killing of the thousands of animals whose skulls you see here but the work of bringing the skulls to this one place, both the actual labor and the reason for that labor. In that labor lies slaughter's banality, its pre- and post-slaughter logistics that render incidental the actual killing. What matters here is the market for which the heads of these animals--not the animals themselves, mind--serve as units of exchange, and the mechanisms, literal and figurative, that make possible this market, as represented by the empty cart and the (presumed) moneyman. Perhaps somewhere these men's names are recorded, but it would be very much in keeping with this theme of banality if those names were lost. Just a couple (more) dudes.

Work, friends, is boring, and this picture is a proof of that. Some narratives of the winning of the West have flashes of romance, to be sure, but there's no romance here. What's shown here is not the triumph of the phallus but a kind of bean-counting.

Funny how the thread that is the bean-counting narrative doesn't often get talked about as part of the larger tapestry of the West's winning. But then again, this pile of skulls, not to mention the apparent difficulties in getting this other version of the bean-counting narrative turned into this, suggest that there's a horror lurking beneath the surface of the bean-counting narrative that we're not quite ready to see pictured for us . . . and may never be.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates and the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twenty-first Century

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.--W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, "I: Of Our Spiritual Strivings"

To call Ta-Nehisi Coates the Second Coming of DuBois is perhaps a bit much; I think it's nevertheless true, though, that Coates at his best is doing what DuBois is doing in Souls: taking stock of How Things Stand; acknowledging that, yes, the past sucked for black people but it also sucked in very different ways for whites as well; and so now, what can we all do about the Here and Now and beyond to make it less sucky for everyone? [Edit: and pointing needed fingers at those (black as well as white) who are less than helpful in this project.] That's both ambitious and, as Coates works these themes, a whole lot of intellectual and even smile-inducing fun.

Coates is a relatively-new African-American blogger not afraid to speak a bit of truth (as he sees it) to both white and black folks. His is a thinking-outside-the-box take on black politics and culture that, as I'm bumping around his blog's archives, I'm finding enervating and thought-provoking. To be sure, Barack Obama figures prominently among his posts, but have a look as well at this Village Voice piece on Condoleeza Rice--that, in its own way, serves as an interesting chiasmus of the interesting discussion going on among black conservatives about how to respond, as members of the electorate, to Obama.

A couple of examples below the fold.

Here, for example, is the concluding paragraph to a brief take-down of conservative civil-rights icon Shelby Steele (spellings here and below are Coates'):

When I watched Steele talk [at the recent Aspen Ideas Conference], I didn't feele bad for black America, I felt bad for the white people who were there drinking it up. (In fairness, many were not.) It really saddens me to write that. I actually agree with Steele on one thing---the end of the Civil Rights Industrial Complex is great thing for black people everywhere. But Steele is tied to that complex, and his ideas are just as bereft. Like the men he derides as extortionists (which they are) Steel is running a hustle--Sharpton and Jackson traffic in white guilt. Steele traffics in white ignorance. And they keep all the profits. I've never seen "white guilt" or "white ignorance" do a damn thing for black folks.

There's also this discussion of some of the discussion of this recent Emily Bazelon article on class-based integration of schools. Coates signs on, but with a compelling observation about the similarities in how government at whatever level goes about addressing racial and economic inequalities:

Matt, Kevin and Richard Kahlenberg are debating over whether a solution like this could be applied nationally. The consensus being basically, no, because we aren't going to blow up the system of school districts in this country. But to my mind, the piece helps us get out from under the cloud of pessimism that follows any conversation about the gap in test-scores.

But there is something else at work here. [Bazelon's] research on class and achievement is helpful because it really shows (to me) that the real problem of America's racist past is that it basically affected a massive wealth-transfer out of black communities. More than that, I like Emily's piece because it exposes the lie that racial inequality is completely intractable. But that's never really been true. There are two questions here--how are we going to fix the race chasm, and how far are we really willing to go to do it? People like to focus on the former, because the truly frightening one is the latter. We're forever trying to achieve equality by not negatively impacting white people. You can look back at the War on Poverty and see how desperate folks were to make it look color-blind. How'd that work out? I think one of the reasons Affirmative Action was extended to basically everyone by white males, was likely, so it wouldn't be reparations. Ironically, class-based integration uses the same logic. I'm a fan because I believe in it on principle. But the politics of it seem to be captive to ancient formulations: Despite the fact that slavery and Jim Crow crippled black folks, we want to heal those wounds by inconviencing white people as little as possible. It's been this way since Reconstruction. If I'm pessimistic about anything it's not knowing the right thing to do, it's the will to get it done.

I hope you'll go and have a look at more of his work. He's worth your time.

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