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A couple of more things: Books and student 'engagement'

It's worth pointing out that Sara Allan, in her presentation to the school board on high school redesign, emphasized the importance of student engagement in reducing the drop-out rate.  Allan listed "frequent low student engagement" as perhaps the most important "challenge" facing the high school system.

"We fundamentally believe that if we can increase student engagement that many of our other problems are solved, graduation rate, we could increase achievement ...we could decrease boredom of students.  We believe it's a key ingredient in the success of our high school system."

Sounds like a no-brainer, but coming from Sara Allan (I've been misspelling her name), originally a fellow from the neoliberal Broad Foundation, that's a step forward.  Business oriented outfits like Broad usually stress academic rigor over relevance.  As I've argued before, if you want to keep students in school, it's a good idea to make the school experience more "engaging" --and less boring.

One way to do that, and to improve student achievement learning, is to give students good books to read, ones they can actually relate to, books they may actually enjoy reading.

Speaking of books, that's the other thing I wanted to mention.  The Washington Monthly has an article up recommending 25 books President Obama should read. 

Most, as you would expect, are non-fiction, including one by the man my brother said nobody paid attention to anymore --Howard Zinn.  The book?  A People's History of the United States.

The fiction category includes Graham Greene's The Quiet American (about Vietnam), and, thank goodness, THE Great American Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  One would assume that Obama has already read the Twain classic, but it never hurts to re-read great novels. 

I have, probably at least four times.  Huckleberry Finn, that is.

Talking white

John McLaughlin of public TV's the McLaughlin Group  aroused liberal outrage by calling Barack Obama an "oreo" during last weekend's show. 

So did Ralph Nader for accusing Barack Obama of "talking white".  And Jesse Jackson by threatening to emasculate Obama for "talking down to black people".

McLaughlin summed up the criticism of Obama by Nader and Jackson this way:

"The point of contention is that instead of Obama solely lecturing African Americans on parental duty, particularly fathers, he should have also given equal attention to the large and many believe prejudicial incarceration rate for blacks, their lack of economic opportunity and other public policy issues that limit choices for black males."

He's right. All three are right.  Obama is trying desperately to win a majority of the "white" vote (which no Democratic presidential candidate has done since the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act) by running what some have called a "post racial" campaign, frequently using the conservative catch phrase "personal responsibility" to scold black men for shirking their familial duties. Although such talk may resonate with whites, it doesn't play well with descendants of African American slaves, especially older ones,  a distinction that Obama can't claim. His mother was white, his father a Kenyan.  His ancestors weren't American slaves.

Obama's campaign is politically astute but racially and historically insensitive.  Smart politics is why he threw over his longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright, a slave descendant who had good reason to say "goddamn America!"  And it's why John McLaughlin proclaimed on the same show:

"But then he’s exactly what Jeremiah Wright says he is. He will do whatever’s necessary to win."

Given the publication of Douglas Blackmon's new book, Slavery by Another Name, which provides documented evidence  that for tens of thousands of black Americans, slavery --involuntary and unpaid servitude-- didn't end until World War II, I don't believe we've reached the era of "post racial" politics.  And neither should Barack Obama. 

How can that be slavery didn't actually end until the 1940's?  How is it that slavery was re-established and practiced in the South for nearly 80 years after it had been officially outlawed?  I'm not talking about Jim Crow segregation or lynching.  That's well known and well documented.  I'm talking about a concerted effort to restore the system of coerced labor that the South relied on for its economic survival .  The "Slave Codes" prior to emancipation were simply replaced with what southern legislatures called "Black Codes". 

Here's an excerpt from Blackmon's interview with Bill Moyers (the incomparable and indispensable Bill Moyers):

"The results of those laws and the results of particularly enforcing them with such brutality through this forced labor system, the result of that was that African-Americans thousands and thousands of them worked for years and years of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things that made it possible for white farmers to become successful.

"And so, yes, this whole regime of the Black Codes, the way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less likely that African-Americans would emerge out of poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did at the same time."

I would add that the buying and selling of black men through much of the twentieth century allowed them scant opportunity for the learning of "personal responsibility."  That's an historical reality that can't be ignored in "post racial" America.

Bill Moyers calls Blackmon's book "stunning".  It's that, and more. 

It should be required reading for all "post racial" politicians.  In fact, it should be required reading for anyone compelled to comment on the state of race relations in this country.

And some New Year's advice...

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but I think that we all should resolve for the New Year to ...

Read more!

Read everything and anything but mainly read books, all kinds of books, but mostly fiction, good fiction like Jane Austen and Huckleberry Finn and Edith Wharton, the American Jane Austen.  Non-fiction books, histories and biographies, are good for learning the outlines of history, for acquiring information and facts, names and dates and whatnot.   But from good fiction you learn the truth of things.  I don't think anybody can truly understand the human legacy of American slavery without having read Huckleberry Finn or novels by Toni Morrison like The Bluest Eye.  Or Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and Native Son by Richard Wright.

You can learn about war by reading Steven Ambrose's books, but in order to really grasp the reality of war you're better off reading Tolstoy's War and Peace or All Quiet on the Western Front.  Or The Red Badge of Courage.  And Slaughterhouse Five.
 

I've heard people say that they read nothing but non-fiction --one guy I worked with years ago claimed novels were a waste of time because you didn't really, you know, learn anything from them of a practical nature-- and I know people now, even bloggers, who avoid fiction.  But they're wrong unless by fiction they mean only novels by James Patterson or Danielle Steele or Dean Koontz or even ...forgive me... John Grisham (and I've read several of his best sellers.)

Reading more doesn't mean you have to give up TV or the internet or not go to movies.  I spend far more time in front of the tube than I do reading books.  And I see a lot of movies in theaters.  (Three of my favorite flicks from just the past month or so also happen to be Roger Ebert's top three of the year --Juno, No Country for Old Men, and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.) 

But I always have a book going even if I only read when I go to bed.  Always.

I got Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men as a Christmas gift just to clarify  some puzzles and ambiguities in the movie version.  Even Nora Ephron was mystified.  But a great movie, nonetheless.  Alec Baldwin called it a metaphor for Iraq which may be a stretch.  Anyway, I think THE book on Iraq has yet to be written.

The book on Afghanistan, however, has been written and it's called A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini which is better than his more ballyhooed The Kite Runner (now also a movie.)  So too the book on India, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, which is subtly but savagely critical of Indira Ghandi who has been called the political stepsister of the late Benazir Bhutto. 

Add those books to your fiction list for the New Year.

Janemania: Jane Austen and Mark Twain

I admit unabashedly to being a Janeite, the term used by admirers of Jane Austen to describe themselves. 

Recently it seems the entire world is in thrall to the woman who wrote Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensiblility, and three other novels, all generally considered  literary classics.  The fourth (I think) cinematic incarnation of Pride and Prejudice is now in Portland theaters, following closely on the heels of a "Bollywood" version, Bride and Prejudice.  And an adaptation for the stage is a hit at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts.

I haven't seen the Keira Knightly film (I probably will), but despite the favorable reviews, I doubt it will live up to the A&E/BBC dramatization with Colin Firth in the role of Darcy.  As one critic said,  "Cinematically, Firth made Darcy just as Brando made Stanley Kowalski."  Plus, although Jane Austen herself denied that she wrote romances, the A&E movie, faithful to the book, is a great love story.

There are some who don't like Jane Austen's foray into popular culture.  Noy Thrupkaew in the American Prospect opines:

"Hollywood will have just the fairy tales, please. With the crackling banter and the tidily surmountable challenges already built in, Austen’s novels provide perfect ready-made screenplays. As for her troublesome, satiric views, they are readily molded into a into a merely sassy heroine."

And some, most famously Mark Twain, claim to not like Jane Austen at all.  He wrote in a 1998 letter,

"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and   beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."

If there were such a term, I'd be a Twainite as well as a Janeite.  Mark Twain wrote the great American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  His work is best summed up by the  protagonist of that novel who said of Twain,

"There was things that he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."

And so did Jane Austen.  I prefer to believe that Twain wasn't entirely serious, that he was conflicted by his evident attraction to Austen's work.  I tend to agree with  Emily Auerbach's speculation, as quoted in Diane Johnson's essay (In Love with Jane) on six new Jane Austen books in the New York Review of Books, that Twain and Austen were in truth literary "soulmates":

"How unfortunate that Jane Austen...died two decades before the birth of Mark Twain.... What might she have said (ironically, no doubt) of him?,... perhaps winking at each other when they think no one is looking."

So I say keep the movies (and plays) coming.  I even liked Bridget Jones' Diary and Clueless, which transported Austen's Emma to Beverly Hills High School.   And a few years back I spent New Year's Eve in a theater with my family enthralled by the cinematic treatment of Persuasion.

It should have won an Oscar.

 

 

Howl

Fifty years ago Allen Ginsberg unveiled  his poem "Howl" at a reading with four other unknown poets in San Francisco.  The small gathering and the public reading of "Howl" constituted an unofficial declaration of "war on America", and on the oppressive culture of the 50's that gave rise to the Beat generation. 

Ginsberg's "howl" of despair and powerlessness generated little heat beyond a sensational obscenity trial.  Nonetheless, the epic poem has stood the test of time and deserves rereading, especially in the decade of George W. Bush who could have easily been the inspiration for the insistant Moloch repetition of the second section of "Howl":

    "Moloch  the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
                    crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
                    sorrows!  Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
                    Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
                    ned governments!
    Moloch   whose mind is pure machinery!  Moloch whose
                   blood is running money!  Moloch whose fingers
                   are ten armies!  Moloch whose breast is a cannibal
                    dynamo!  Moloch whose ear is a smoking
                    tomb!"                  

What is Moloch?  Moloch is the biblical god of the Ammonites to whom children were sacrificed.  And, according to my dictionary:

-- a tyrranical power to be propitiated by human subservience and sacrifice:  the "great Moloch of war."

Is there a more apt description of the Bush Administration? Certainly not for today's counter-culture and for all those who oppose the policies of the current government.  In that sense, they have much in common with the Beats and Allen Ginsberg.  Today's protesters appear to be as "beaten down" and as ineffective as those in the 50's.

The Beats were never taken seriously.  Or rather, they were never viewed as a serious threat to the cultural status quo.  San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen (who also coined the term "hippie" for the succceeding generation of "bohemians") called them "beatniks."  That's how we remember them today,  a kind of Maynard G. Krebs harmless caricature of the real thing.  Krebs, for those who don't remember, was the Bob "Gilligan"  Denver character in the popular 50's sitcom "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis", endearing and memorable, but no Allen Ginsberg.

Which is unfortunate, because the gray decade of the 50's was the era of McCarthyism and conformism, of Jim Crow and school segregation, of the Red scare and the massive American nuclear build-up. 

The George W. Bush decade recalls much of that.  Today's McCarthyism is the Patriot Act and an intolerance of dissent.   School segregation, especially along class lines is again becoming a reality.  Today's Red Scare is the great "terrorist" red alerts.  And  the aggressive militarism of modern American foreign policy, including renewed calls for  nuclear rearmament, poses perhaps an even greater danger to peace and stability than the rush to nuclear arms in the 50's.

So perhaps is now the time to take the Beats seriously.  And to reread Alllen Ginsberg's classic poem "Howl."