beloved

Much has been written about Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and Beloved, Morrison’s novel of slavery, family, and community. Along with many others, I think and feel Beloved is among the best novels ever written; the book is hard for me to write about because I have such strong feelings about it. Moreover, I’ve realized that the difficulty is related to why the work is #2 on my most current top 100 novels list.

As I’ve described briefly elsewhere in this blog, the criteria for my top 100 novels include subject matter, emotional impact, intellectual impact, and the ability to work on many levels at the same time. Beloved has it all. It moves me emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. I am alternately and sometimes simultaneously horrified by the brutality it describes, impressed by its ability to evoke deep senses of human commonality, and stunned by its structural power. It’s a prose poetic masterpiece of rhythm, structure, theme, and symbol. It’s a ghost story cut by enigmatic motivations and profound mysteries of life, love, and death. It’s a powerful indictment of our nation’s history of slavery, of the dehumanizing effects of that institution and the on-going impact of racism and injustice. Structurally, the novel mirrors a consciousness, cycling forward and back, remembering and re-remembering in an associative, flowing logic.

All this in a mere 275 pages—the multifaceted punch and epic sweep catapult Beloved to almost the top of my list (superceded only by Garcia Marquez’s even more epic tale). It is a glorious novel, painful to read, and which, in even my third or fourth reading, continues to yield new gems of connection and understanding.

[Caveat for the first-time reader: get through the first 50 pages, just going along for the ride. You’ll probably be confused. Try to enjoy the images and prose. It gets easier and the work is more than worth your while.]

small links round up

South Africa Isn’t Post-Racial Either
In a thoughtful essay, Robert Jensen writes about his visit to South Africa, the racism he saw there, and what he learned about confronting it.

The White Supremacist in Us
Rinku Sen, Executive Director of Applied Research Center and Publisher of ColorLines, writes about the connection between recent killings and our white supremacist culture.

Inspired Bicycles – Danny MacAskill 2009
In this video, Danny MacAskill does almost unbelievable things with his bike. There’s some question why he’s still alive.

omnivore’s dilemma

When I moved to Boulder, Colorado in the late 80s, after being raised primarily in Minnesota, Boulder felt like vacation-land, an artificially “fun” place, filled with pretty people with nothing much to do except exercise, drink coffee, and pursue their inner selves; there’s plenty of money in Boulder and almost nothing old. Yet, after three or four years, though I was aware of the issues and could notice Boulder’s world-unto-itself quality, I began to feel pretty much at home.

When, in 2001, I moved to the Bay Area, I felt predictably out of place, once again; Oakland and San Francisco don’t have the same feeling of artificial newness as Boulder, but after eight years I’m still not quite comfortable identifying as a Californian. There are times when I forget and just live here unselfconsciously, but most of the time I’m very aware of the ways that California is a little bit different than other places—often for the good and sometimes not. Maybe I’m too old to fully adopt a new place. Whatever the case, I was reminded powerfully of my displacement while reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s epic of four meals and their origins, because I don’t think the book could have been written or conceived anywhere except California, and probably, more specifically, it could not have been written outside the Bay Area.

Pollan traces the four meals through their very different supply chains (industrial, industrial-organic, beyond organic, and hunter-gatherer) in a well-researched story of economics, biology, cuisine, and culture. He talks to farmers, manufacturers, industry experts, professors, cooks, food enthusiasts, and his own wife and son. He learns to fire a rifle for the first time in his life and spends time working on farms in Iowa and Virginia. He buys a steer and at least attempts to follow it from birth to death. He gets up early and stays up late, trying to learn something about his food and why he eats it. It is ultimately this focus on himself and his process that makes the book compelling; the self-focus is also part of what makes the book so uniquely a product of Berkeley, California, a center of self-involved, self-motivated culture (witness Berkeley’s neo-hippies and, need I say more, Dave Eggers).

Berkeley is arguably the birthplace of the modern organic food movement in the United States, is definitely the location of visionary Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse (which if you don’t know was one of the first, most locally-sourced restaurants in the U.S.), and is most definitely the home of the University of California, Berkeley, a prestigious, some would say pretentious, institution, at which Pollan happens to be employed. With this kind of background, one can understand why Pollan, in addition to telling a story of food and his relationship to it, is trying to teach us some things: he feels like an expert, with access to more experts, and he’s used to teaching.

One of the most important things he’s trying to teach is that we don’t understand all the ways that food nourishes us; more generally, we don’t understand all the ways that ecologies work synergistically for the benefit of all the organisms in them. For example, in the 19th century, western science discovered the importance of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) for growing plants, knowledge that is the foundational concept for modern fertilizer. As science has advanced, we have begun to see that organisms and microorganisms in the soil contribute to plant growth and health in a synergistic harmony that is way beyond NPK and that we are still struggling to comprehend fully. Similarly, our understanding of the requirements of human nutrition continues to evolve: from carbs, protein, and fats to vitamins to the importance of micro-nutrients and other factors of which we are not yet aware. Our food evolved with us and supports our health in ways we don’t understand, which is why fortifying food with vitamins is not at good as eating food with those nutrients occurring naturally in them.

Another lesson Pollan wants to teach is that it’s important to examine what we eat and why. Part of his personal answers to these questions includes an interrogation of meat eating. In a thoughtful chapter on the ethics of eating meat, he argues for transparency—for knowing more about how the animals we eat are raised, killed, and prepared for our consumption. Underlying that logic, and the book’s very title, is the idea that humans are evolved to be omnivorous and that eating other animals is a part of that legacy. That is, unless I mistaking his argument, it boils down to the idea that humans are part of nature and that eating meat—albeit responsibly, respectfully, and moderately—is natural and good. This idea is the basis for most of his answers to the question of what to eat and why: we should eat natural food because we and the food evolved together for our mutual benefit.

Whether or not you buy his reasoning—and his uniquely Californian perspective may be off-putting to some—Pollan’s addition to the national food dialog is welcome. I knew a lot of what he’s sharing, but not all, and he has an undeniable ability to make potentially boring subjects come alive. The book didn’t make me more comfortable in the Bay Area, but it did help me see I’m part of its culture more than I knew: Bay Area denizens generally like to think and talk about food quite a lot and I’m no exception.

don’t think of an elephant!

George Lakoff’s near classic primer on framing, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives (2004), is a great little book for learning how to talk and think in the political world. He outlines the worldviews of both conservatives and progressives in a simply, easy to digest way that helps you keep it in mind and communicate the differences more clearly. In fact, it’s a little too simple—notwithstanding Lakoff’s minimal attempt to nuance the ideas—and probably that’s appropriate in today’s short attention span world.

That doesn’t mean Lakoff is simple. On the contrary, he is a cognitive scientist and linguist and his approach reflects that training. He looks at how people think and make decisions and vote and then at the language people use to influence each other. He tries to find the underlying themes and logic that unite what might otherwise seem like contradictory positions and behaviors. The results are powerful for understanding our society’s politics.

Because he is primarily trying to identify the themes that unite each of two opposing sides, his analysis elides many of the differences that sometimes cut across his dualistic approach. I’m thinking especially of identity issues—race, class, gender, sexuality, and others. Lakoff very briefly discusses these issues as one of the six main strains of progressive ideology, but he is self-consciously trying to bridge those differences and his treatment is probably unsatisfying to many who identify with those strains. That is, I think many people might see the intelligence of his thinking and still feel he’s missing some important issues.

Nevertheless, the book is valuable as a handbook of technique and skills—essential background for the activist, thinker, and aspiring politico.

torturing democracy

Torture is wrong. Our nation and our president should say that and act like we believe it.

Sherry Jones and Carey Murphy have created a documentary called Torturing Democracy reporting on the use of torture by the US government since 9/11. truthout.org has a good entry on the film and on what we should do to move on from the strange and very seriously messed up place the US is now in with regard to torture.

race and recession report

The Applied Research Center has put out a report entitled “Race and Recession: How Inequity Rigged the Economy and how to Change the Rules,” telling the story of the way our current recession disproportionately impacts people of color. The report uncovers root causes of long-term racial inequities that fed into the economic crisis and proposes structural solutions to change a system that threatens future generations.

See a video about the report and down load it at: http://www.arc.org/content/view/726/136/.

a brief exam

Now that the school year is over, I find myself looking for some conclusions, or lessons learned, or at least some reflections. It’s an indulgence on some level, but I’m enough of a believer in the “examined life” to make an attempt:

I dove into a more overtly political world in the last year and, as a result, I’ve written much less here. I’m still writing—perhaps more than before—but instead of writing about what I read, I prepare for public statements and speeches. I summarize arguments and send out mass emails and construct positions. It is a very focused style, rhetorical and argumentative and to help myself I’m studying speeches by politicians like Presidents Obama and Lincoln.

Those choices are, of course, quite conscious; they are leaders I’d like to emulate in some ways. While I do not pretend to have the intellect or ability of either men, I do try to learn from them. I’m impressed, in particular, by the way Lincoln prepared and the careful way he argued. Sometimes he made fine distinctions that may not play as well in today’s faster, sound bite politics, where a subtle point is hard to make, but the power of his logic and his tendency to evoke first principles are important.

I’ve also been reading about organizing and framing and the political process more generally. There’s a whole set of skills and abilities that are unique to the political world and that I have never before worked to develop. I’m beginning to see it as a perspective, a way of seeing the moves that people make, the postures they take. I’m learning how to respond. And, fortunately, I’m comfortable disagreeing with people while still respecting them.

This process of acquiring new skills and a new lens through which to view the world is akin to going to graduate school. Also like graduate school, I’ve been conscious of a desire not to lose the person I was when I entered the process. So far, I don’t believe I have. In fact, in many ways the heat of political pressure only drives me closer to my core values: it’s always about the students for me. They are the reason I put myself through the pain of interminable meetings and other minutia of the political process. And I’m reminded of those values every time I go to the classroom. There I am part of the miracle that we call teaching and learning, through which people create new lives and begin to see themselves in new, more powerful light.

The challenges and growth I’ve experienced in the last year are part of my own process of seeing my self and my life in a new way. Where it will lead I cannot say—which of course is part of why we get up every day: to find out what will happen. My life is full and rich with learning. I can ask for little better.

john henry days

With John Henry Days (2001), Colson Whitehead continues to show the stylistic prose talent that prompted me to put his first novel, The Intuitionist, on my top 100 list. If the novel’s structure was as tight as the prose, this novel would be high on the list, as well.

Don’t get me wrong. Whitehead is clever. His protagonist, J., is a freelance journalist who mooches free meals, free drinks, and even free clothes off the various events to which he is invited, supposedly to write them up for publication. A new product is being announced; the manufacturer wants publicity and invites journalists to the event, treating them to a good time in the hopes of a good article. Similarly, a new company is launched, a politician’s campaign is begun, an unknown author publishes a book. J. and fellow “junketeers” go, get what they can out of it, and make a getaway when possible. As long as they write up a certain percentage of the events, they’ll be invited to the next one.

Does this life exist? I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. Whitehead invents a small world of junketeers who see each other at events frequently, developing a language all their own and even an “Anatomy of Puff” to describe the articles they often write (Bob’s Debut, Bob Returns, Bob’s Comeback, and the newly-created and somewhat controversial Bob is Hip). They talk a lot of smack and drink as much as possible on someone else’s dime. It’s plausible, while at the same time unbelievable enough to make you laugh at the conceit.

A bunch of these New York freeloaders end up in a small West Virginia town for the first annual John Henry Days—a weekend festival capped off with the unveiling of a new stamp celebrating John Henry, semi-mythic local figure of story and song who supposedly died after winning a steel-driving contest with the new-fangled steam steel-driving machine. The novel is populated by numerous characters related in some way to John Henry and/or his legend: a collector of John Henry memorabilia and his daughter; historians; musicians; a stamp collector; and even John Henry, himself, and fellow workers. Unfortunately, we meet these characters, sometimes only briefly, in a pastiche of chapters organized in some way that I cannot explain.

The fact that John Henry was Black, a former slave, freed by the Emancipation, is relevant throughout. Race consciousness and racism are never far away, often on the surface in both the past and the present. J., who is also African-American, is nervous walking down the road in rural West Virginia and I could only agree that caution and awareness are warranted in such a situation.

But despite the cleverness, stylistic prowess, and powerful themes, the book lacks focus and unification. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the books ending, where we are left knowing that J. must choose between professional and relationship goals, but not what that choice will be. It is not clear that either choice will yield positive results—in fact, one of them could lead to his death. An ambiguous ending is not bad, in principle, but in this case the result is unsatisfying at best. And, while I acknowledge the difficulty of creating good endings for novels, this one seems particularly unconsidered. It is as if Whitehead couldn’t decide what to do, so he just chose not to decide. In writing, as in life, such a non-decision is a decision in disguise; and in this case the disguise doesn’t hide a weak ending.

Whitehead is a gifted writer. That his second novel is not as good as his first only makes him human and I look forward to reading another of his novels soon.

the art of critical pedagogy

Let us begin by rethinking the position that urban schools are failing. . . . When one set of schools [in high-income communities] is given the resources necessary to succeed and another group of schools [in low-income communities] is not, we have predetermined the winners and losers. . . . Urban [low-income community] schools are not broken; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.

This in the second paragraph of Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell’s brilliant book, The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. It’s brilliant because it is based in the experience of actually teaching our country’s youth, on working day in and day out with high school students in Los Angeles and Oakland. Most of the book is Duncan-Andrade and Morrell detailing several educational projects on which they’ve worked, describing their experiences as they try to put their belief in critical pedagogy into practice, and explaining what they learned.

As grounded in experience and practice as they are, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell know the theory, too. In chapter two, they give the best overall summary of the work and writing of the major names in critical pedagogy—Freire, Shor, Darder, McLaren, Giroux, hooks—I’ve seen. In addition, they discuss the efforts of a few “lived examples of critical pedagogy to emphasize that critical pedagogy is more than just a teaching strategy—it is a personal, financial, political, emotional, and spiritual commitment to prioritizing the needs and liberation of people who are suffering under various forms of oppression”: Carter G. Woodson, Lolita Lebrón, Franz Fanon,Reies López Tijerina, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Subcommandante Marcos. (If this list and the words used to describe these people intimidate you, you’re a normal human being. The authors make it less intimidating as they describe how they put those words into practice in the work they have done and continue to do.)

Before they do that, they lay out their understanding of the urban public school context in which students try to learn and in which teachers try to teach. They argue that “urban school failure is tolerated because deep down our nation subscribes to the belief that someone has to fail in school,” belief supported by racist and classist ideology. Currently, the line is that “educational failure is the result of cultural deficiencies on the part of the student, the family, and the community—de facto, educational attainment is attributed to cultural superiority or assimilation into culturally superior ways.” Regardless of the reasons, the result serves the dominant culture in our country, because “some people must fill the least desirable places in society, and it is important that they feel they deserve to be in those positions or, at the very least, that there is a formal mechanism to justify their place there.” The attack on students’ esteem and confidence is self-perpetuating and circular: if you’re made to feel stupid, you do worse on tests because of your lack of belief in yourself.

But, according to Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, the equation of performance in school and intelligence is false. For, if

school achievement were an accurate measure of intellect, achievement patterns would more closely mirror the random distribution of intellect that genetic scientists report in human populations. Instead, the results of schools are quite predictable. . . . With remarkable consistency, schools serving low-income, non-white children disproportionately produce the citizens who will spend most of their adult lives in the least desirable and least mobile socioeconomic positions (prison, low-ranking military positions, and service labor).

The few urban students who do well are “asked (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) to exchange the culture of their home and community for the higher culture of the school in exchange for access to college.” Therefore,

urban education reform movements must begin to develop partnerships with communities that provide young people the opportunity to be successful while maintaining their identities as urban youth. This additive model of education focuses on the design of urban school culture, curriculum, and pedagogy that identifies the cultures and communities of urban students as assets rather than as things to be replaced.

This “approach provides pedagogy and curricula that lend immediate relevance to school in the lives of urban youth. It also works to break the cycle of disinvestment of human capital in urban communities by crating graduates who recognize their potential agency to improve urban centers, rather than seeing them as places to escape.” Duncan-Andrade and Morrell see critical pedagogy as a win-win for students, teachers, and society as a whole, because “rather than presenting the community as a place to rise above, schools must equip themselves to draw from the knowledge that students bring with them to school—knowledge that is often not in their textbooks but is acquired from the streets, family cultural traditions, youth culture, and the media.”

They are critical of the results we’ve seen so far from multicultural education because it has “failed to deal with the conditions of modern urban life.” They argue persuasively “for pedagogical practices situated in critical analyses of the role of urban schools in social inequality.” We should “shift the rhetoric of failure from young people and caring teachers onto an inequitable system designed to concretize failure in poor communities.”

Finally, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell “believe that urban students should go to college at rates equal to their more affluent counterparts” and that a

schooling environment that foregrounds the relationship between education and the most pressing conditions in the community, an education with relevance, is most likely to produce notable increases in college eligibility. . . . [T]he desired outcome in critical pedagogies in urban education is multiple and . . . it must impact academic achievement, identity development, and civic engagement. . . . To often, we believe, critical pedagogies focus on the rhetoric of social critique to the exclusion of the development of sophisticated literacy and numeracy skills.

These academic skills frequently come “at great personal and social costs that include alienation from family, language, community, and progressive social values.” Therefore, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s work focuses maintaining a sense of community and culture for students, while still promoting rigorous academic skills, by setting those skills in the community and cultural context. Literally, they ask the students what problems or questions are important to them and then develop the curriculum around those issues.

All this made connections for me with the writing of bell hooks, especially in Where We Stand: Class Matters in which she talks about her experience of going to college and being alienated from her home culture by the college culture and the resulting disorientation of being caught between two the two. (For more, see my entry on hooks’ book.) The connection is expected, since Duncan-Andrade and Morrell begin their work with hooks and other related writers as the foundation upon which they build. Indeed, they are trying to do the work that such writers recommend.

As I mentioned above, after contextualizing their work, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell spend the bulk of the book describing their work with students in urban schools. In the final chapter, “Toward a Grounded Theory of Praxis,” they try to draw conclusions from their experiences, point to areas that need more research and exploration, and make suggestions about teacher education. Importantly, they also talk about love. In a section called “Pedagogy, Love, and Revolution” they write about “revolutionary love” and its potential to change both students’ lives and the larger world. From my perspective, real love—that includes celebrating successes and correcting errors and facilitating the development of the person each student wants to be—for your students is the foundation of good teaching. It doesn’t mean that you like every student the same or that every student likes you. It means that you love them and treat them with the respect and compassion you treat all your loved ones. It means that you treat your students the same way you treat your own children. This is a beautiful, dangerous, and somewhat radical stance—and that is right where I want to be.

the high window

Picture a white man in his late 30s, early 40s on the outside, in Los Angeles. He lives alone and drinks alone—pretty regularly—and has no women permanently in his life. He has a small spare apartment and an even smaller and sparer office from which he runs a private detective business. He is generally disaffected, acts like he knows what he’s doing, and talks mostly in smart-ass one-liners. When he has a chance at human intimacy, he passes. He’s a hard man with nothing better to do and no desire to do it.

By today’s standards, this man is a borderline drunk, semi-depressive, relationship avoider. When Raymond Chandler places the same man in the 1930s, he’s Philip Marlowe, a very cool, very smart borderline drunk, semi-depressive, relationship avoider—that is, he’s basically a regular guy. Chandler, one of the masters of the hard-boiled detective novel, knows the ropes and how to work them. In The High Window (1942), the third of seven novels Chandler wrote using the Marlowe character (he died in the middle of an eighth), Chandler uses all his tricks and even a wonderful, pre-postmodern self-reflexive moment, making fun of the genre’s conventions:

“Alright,” he said wearily. “Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.”
“Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody—or myself for that matter—thought them to be up to this golden moment—and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect.”

Chandler’s descriptions of rooms and people are almost tediously detailed, his similes (“I chewed my lip. It felt as stiff as a piece of glass.”) campy. The dialog, often in less than full sentences, is short, snappy, and hard to follow if you’re not paying attention. It’s a fun novel when you look past the whacked out gender assumptions rife throughout and the rampant self-destructive behavior. But this is all part of the book’s and Chandler’s appeal and why Bogart played Marlowe in the movie version of The Big Sleep. Many have loved the blasé, explicitly non-pc, anti-hero. Because I reject the premise of a man who has made choices about his life that he cannot undo is not a reason to reject the books. I read them as part of their era and as an important part of the noir tradition.