History Lessons or Why One Hides in Books

What do you do as a year ends, having endured weeks of intense emotion - with seemingly more ahead?  How to make sense of it, can you make sense of it?  What can you compare it to - can you compare it to anything?

Reflecting back, way back, and re-reading  Solnit, my go-to person for reading and thinking about culture and history and spirit.

“On November 5, 1968 Richard Nixon was elected President,

That year Women’s Strike for Peace was founded when a hundred thousand women in a hundred communities across the country staged a simultaneous one-day strike, launching an antinuclear peace movement that also prefigured the women’s movement soon to be born. That year, Cesar Chavez was considering leaving his community organizer job to try to unionize California’s farm workers, and the science writer Rachel Carson was finishing Silent Spring, her landmark denunciation of pesticides published in 1962. Just as the civil rights movement achieved not only specific gains but a change in the imagination of race and justice, so Carson’s book was instrumental not only in getting DDT banned in the United States—which reversed the die-offs of many species of bird—but also in popularizing a worldview in which nature was made up not of inert objects but of interactive, interconnected systems, a worldview that would come to be

.... This is the way the world changes, as Dickens understood when he opened his most political novel with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” It usually is.

.....globalization has the same yin and yang that everything else has - and it is good to keep aware of this.  Corporate globalization not such a good thing....but globalization that allows us to study and learn and communicate is incredible.

What gets called “the sixties” left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems most fundamental and most pervasive about all the ensuing changes is a loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness. The answers—the alternatives—haven’t always been clear or easy, but the questions and the questioning are nevertheless significant. What’s most important here is to feel the profundity of the changes, to feel how far we have come […]”

Excerpted From: Rebecca Solnit. “Hope in the Dark.”

Taking the time to be mindful -- of time.  Here we are again.

For me, Solnit is one of those writers who is a touchstone.  One of a handful.  Not only is she a great writer, she constructs ideas in a way I LOVE to think — pulling in disparate thoughts and pieces of information and history - both personal and not - weaving them together in magically seamless paragraphs.

I wonder if she does this for all of her readers?  It must happen for some - for a good portion of her readers.  She knows the importance of books and reading - having written:

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. So she read, taking in words in huge quantities, a children’s and then an adult’s novel a day for many years, seven books a week or so, gorging on books, fasting on speech, carrying piles of books home from the library.

READING AND READERS

My Dad used to stop at the Detroit Public Library on his way home from meetings at the Engineering Society or teaching at the University of Detroit —  those were two reasons he went downtown when I was little.  He brought me books from the library and I remember laying on the couch in the family room, reading.  One night I read something to my mother and she asked me if I had memorized it, or heard someone else reading it - I just kept reading and she went to get my dad - that was high praise.   I knew that I had pleased them. The Christmas after that there was an entire set of Golden Encyclopedias underneath the tree.  The ones you could buy at the grocery store - a volume a week.  I think I already had the first two volumes, but my parents must have sprung for the entire set.  Heaven.  I devoured books, I hid inside of them.  My father did as well.

One of the things my parents would fight about was the amount of money my Dad spent on books.  Lots of IMAGE books and as his illness consumed him -  a decent man - a devout Catholic, he became more of a religious fanatic.  He loved jazz and geeky things of the late 50’s, early 60’s -  having a record player under the dashboard of your car or wiring speakers to be able to have the records you played in the basement heard throughout the house.  Cool minimalist furniture that I think my mother hated, and that his five kids destroyed with use.  Jackie Gleason and Yogi Bear cartoons.  Computers and all things digital would have blown his mind.

Time passed, more kids, more fights, mental health issues that often occupied and propelled anything else that was happening in the family.

I hid in books.  Devoured them.

The Winne the Pooh series (the ones with the E.H. Shepard illustrations) were were read to us as kids  over and over again, sitting on the couch around my mother.  I have those worn copies now and read them to the children in my life.  I would read anything about horses that I could get my hands on, the series, Misty of Chincoteague  I loved.  I read every Little House book, and the entire Nancy Drew series, begging for those instead of toys.  I remember going through a Native American phase, a civil war phase, lots of sappy schmaltzy lives of the Saints - then I got to the point where I would just pour through the library shelves for anything BIG,  The books with the most pages caught me immediately.  I would fall into those, coming up for air when they were over - looking around and feeling confused - like you do sometimes when you first wake up.

When I was in in middle school my dad brought home a list some priest had given him on a retreat:   all the books a well educated person (read: white Catholic male, better yet a Jesuit) should read.  He made sure all of them were on our bookshelves.  I read them all.  American classics like Theodore Dresser’s Sister Carrie, Steinboack’s The Grapes of Wrath - which astounded me.

To be continued.....

These days....

The news is so sad and outrageous these days.  My heart breaks.  At these times, when the bleakness of rhetoric and hatred seems impossibly overwhelming, I want to lift up the love I have been blessed with.

Sitting in the backyard tonight as the dusk turns to dark.  This is the time of day when the birds are noisy and the sounds of the neighborhood as it settles in for the night are particular to this midwestern city on the shore of a Great Lake in the summer.  The call of a child, the shutting of a backdoor, the smell of a fire pit, the rustle of the trees.

Looking around this small green space and reflecting on earlier in the day.  A seemingly spontaneous brunch this morning ….originally we planned a small gathering to celebrate grand daughter Muriel’s 2nd birthday.   MiNei and I had talked brunch so she could be here without having to rush off to work.  Joe would be home for the weekend - bonus.  Elijah of course.  MiNei’s mom - Helen, or Tutu to the kids.  She brought them both ukuleles.  Then it turned out that Annie and Audrey would be here - and Teresa came over…Luke is staying with Johnny for a week - so he was here.  Elijah brought a friend - Rohan.  Granny came. We were now nearing 20.   John baked a cherry and apple pie.  Tuna salad, meatballs and fruit.  Lot’s of coffee.  Flowers from the garden - the last of the yellow iris, daisies, peonies - and a couple big striped hosta leaves.

See how easily these familial names are written, the simplicity of a vase of flowers and pie, the casual planning - always able to be flexed to accommodate change?  Could this be your family, just by changing the names and tweaking the menu, the flowers, the place?

And this just speaks to those of us who were physically there.  It doesn’t include everyone else who joined us - either through the objects around us, or the conversations that raised them up, their pictures (readily shared) on our cellphones, or the children they live on in.   

Only a home that has been lived for a long time in can conjure up all the children who have run through its rooms and yard, or yelled about a toy, or wanted a ride in a wagon. Those things still happen, but now it is other children - the children (or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of some of that first group).

The fathers who raised these children…the ones who originally roofed the house and built the studio.  They live on as well.  Luke moves certain ways and Annie and I turn to each other and say “TODD.”  We are all draped in chairs underneath the shade of an apple tree that was planted ten years ago when John R passed and a “weed-tree” that John L brought back from Le-Cache.  The cycle of planting continues as John F digs up plants to take to his yard.  Otis joyously runs bases around the yard in the midst of all of us.  Four generations right there.

And those flowers?  The peonies remind me of my grandmother Marie’s backyard…planted all along the back fence.  The yellow Iris are from that same yard.  Dug up in Royal Oak, planted on 44th street at the house of blue steps.  Dug up again and brought to Bay View.  How many times they have been split and shared - I can't remember.  Same with the hosta from my Mom.  And the daisies?  How many times have I heard my mother in law sing, “I’ll give you a daisy a day dear…” this woman who now struggles to remember each of our names.

....We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they're finished songs and start to play.

When senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised. Not one day.

This show is proof that history remembers

we live through times when hate and fear seem stronger.

We rise and fall and light from dying embers.

Remembrances that hope and love last longer.

And love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.

from Lin-Manuel Miranda's acceptance speech at the 2016 Tony Awards.

Hope and Action

For a long time, I've thought that the purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and writing this book I now see how this is connected to the politics of hope and to those revolutionary days that are the days of the creation of the world.  Decentralization and direct democracy could, in one definition, be this politic in which people are producers, possessed of power and vision, in an unfinished world.  

Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit

If there is anything that gives me hope it is teaching.  I've been thinking about what a gift it is these days.  Coming back into the classroom after a year away it is even more evident.  This term I am teaching a section of the courses called RPM's (or Research, Practice and Methods).

(From the course description) In these courses students investigate strategies for effective communication.  Each section emphasizes process and creative problem solving - appropriately using subject matter and a variety of media as a means of examining conceptual goals.  Students engage in critical inquiry and conduct in-depth research to promote the development of their own studio practice within a historical, cultural, and personal context. 

Students in the course recently turned in a project (a small book in an edition of ten, with a dos-a-dos binding) based on the writing and concerns of Kendrick Lamar and Lupe Fiasco.  The work was gritty and tough and the research was, in general, spot on.  It's not an easy class.  They are challenged each week with a new binding, a new writer, a new topic.  The turn around time is fast.  They have to work quickly without over-thinking decisions.  Practicing this is an important part of the course - again, not easy.

I have long been a fan of the writing of James Elkins.  His books, such as Why Art Cannot Be Taught and Art Critiques:  A Guide  are interesting, if only for the questions they raise.  They don't always come to definitive conclusions - but in their defense, how could they?  The topics are huge and the fact that he tackles them at all garners huge kudos from me.  I bring them up here because they have helped me formulate my own thinking about critiques - which is going to bring me back to the RPM students I'm working with in a minute....

In Art Critiques: A Guide, Elkins writes:

...an art critique is an entirely different sort of experience. Art classes maybe the only time in your life that people really focus on your work, and try to say all the things it might mean.  Meaning, interpretation, evaluation.  Ambiguity, complexity, difficulty.  Intensity, confusion, exhaustion.  Inspiration, doubt, revision.  These are the things that happen in critiques.

In your first semester of a dive into college, to study art and design - what you learn about critiques and how they are practiced has a great effect on the way you look at work - your own and others. More about the content of that critique in another post.

On the other end of the spectrum a group of seniors - working to craft a professional digital presence. What social media tools are best used, how to write strong content - how to pull it all together.  Over the summer - I sent out a survey asking former students and colleagues to talk to me about how they did this.  Many of them generously offered to speak to this group - and I try each week to invite one - in person or via Skype.

Full circle this past Monday for me. A student asked the speaker, "How do you annihilate your competition?"  He had a goofy smile on his face - but there was a part of him that was serious.
Our guest didn't miss a beat.  She said, "I don't, I try to become friends with them and ask them to teach me everything they know."

Now that, for me, is hope in the dark.