Isak

Let Me Sing a Song of Where I Come From

 

Rural Diaspora is a new creation by Andy Kopsa, dedicated to collecting the stories of women who grew up in small towns who moved to large cities. (She herself is an Iowan now living in New York City.) More than a sort of ethnography, Rural Diaspora is interested in illustrating how, if you grow up in these small communities, "your writing comes from a different sense of place from the inside and out."

I shared a story of my own; a hymn, of sorts, to the southwest corner of Michigan where I grew up. (And there's me above, age three and growing up.) Here's how my piece begins:

There is a place in Lake Michigan: south of the St. Joseph River’s mouth, a little ways offshore. You wade into the rushing lake, burrow your toes into the sand, and you can see the fireworks of a dozen small towns alighting along the curve of the freshwater coast. A deep blowout sand dune on your left wears a crown of spindly trees, which eases down the side and thickens into old woods. Summer wind fills your lungs and ears, and it is warm and laughs at you a little. Sometimes it slows and sips your skin, careful tastes, like it’s trying to make sure you should be there. The water shivers with the wind. Whitecaps crack sharp. When I remember this place, everything is colored blue and black, except white fringe on the waves, and white sand piled in dunes. White stars, hushed and watching, like you. Then, as if there were a god to conduct them, the little towns send their first shot of fire into the sky. Curving trails of flame, sparking reds and greens and golds, over and over and over. The fireworks boom and echo. They shine at points following the ragged line of the coast, getting smaller farther north, until the fireworks from the last town are only brief blinks of shocking color. All of you, all of us from this corner of Michigan, were facing the same way, our chins tilted up.

In the full story, look for mentions of high school football, the many ways of loving Lake Michigan, a resort hotel turned retirement home, the funny uniform I wore at one of my earliest jobs, and how I see some of this small town here in Detroit.

And below the break, there are more of my photos of life on the lakeshore.

 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Detroit

It’s impossible to talk about Detroit without talking about poverty. What relevance does elegant design have in neighborhoods lined by miles of abandoned single-family bungalows? What does urban planning mean for families just trying to navigate the patchy streetlighting and bus services so they can get their kids to school?

In the November issue of Architect Magazine, I write about the unprecedented Detroit Works Project, an unprecedented effort to redesign, reimagine, and recalibrate every part of an entire city -- a city with no less than 139 square miles, and living memory of morally bankrupt "urban renewal" that decimated the thriving neighborhoods where the Detroit's twentieth-century black community lived.

Detroit Works could be a gamechanger. Or it could sit prettily on a shelf. With the final results soon to be released, we’re about to find out which. The project’s effectiveness depends on the quality of conversations about Detroit -- its poverty, its possibility -- that its champions have with city officials, as well as with business owners, nonprofit leaders, investors, activists, and, of course, the hundreds of thousands of residents who, as one east-sider put it, have “the brilliance of lived experience.”

How calibrated Detroit Works is to that brilliance will define its future as rhetoric, or reality.

Speaking: Brené Brown

"I'm really talking about that kind of warm wash that we experience of not good enough. You know, I always say that shame drives two primary tapes: not good enough, and who do you think you are? So to me, it's a very formidable emotion. Its survival is based on us not talking about it, so it's done everything it can do to make it unspeakable.

{...}

"Creativity was on the other side and I think, before this, you know, I was one of those people who, if someone said, you know, "Hey, do you want to take this painting class with me, or do you want to scrapbook or do you want to …" you know, I was like, aw, that's really cute. You know, "You do your A-R-T, I've got a J-O-B." You know, it's so funny because as a shame researcher, my lens on this was very different. My lens was not just like, oh, OK, so we should be more creative and we should incorporate more rest and play into our lives.

"My question was like, OK, so I get rest, it's important, and play and creativity and all these things that make me super uncomfortable. But what are the shame triggers that get in the way of us doing these things? Like I wasn't satisfied with just knowing what we were supposed to do. I wanted to know what is it that the wholehearted, if they were just like us, what did they have to overcome in order to soften into some of these things? So like with creativity, the primary shame trigger around that is comparison.

{...}

"To me, vulnerability is courage. It's about the willingness to show up and be seen in our lives. And in those moments when we show up, I think those are the most powerful meaning-making moments of our lives even if they don't go well. ...

{...}

"And so I think we buy into some mythology about vulnerability being weakness and being gullibility and being frailty because it gives us permission not to do it."

 

-- Brené Brown, interviewed for PRI's "On Being with Krista Tippett"

 

Brené Brown is a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Her research focuses on vulnerability, shame, courage, and empathy, which she conceptually fuses together as Wholeheartedness. Brown's TEDxHouston talk went viral a few years ago, bringing her work a swift and deep amount of public attention. She also blogs and podcasts at Ordinary Courage. Brown is the author of Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (2012), The Gifts of Imperfection   (2010), and I Thought It Was Just Me (2007). She is a sixth-generation Texan, and she lives in Houston.

 

Related: 

• "Brené Brown on Vulnerability" (On Being)
• Melissa Harris-Perry (then Harris-Lacewell) speaks brilliantly on historical shame and present-day justice
• "Book Review: Melissa Harris-Perry's Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America" (Isak)
• "Speaking of Shame" (Isak)
• "Out Loud Anna" (Isak)
  

Image Credit: The PRIME Book

Book Review: A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge

Josh Neufeld created a book meant to illustrate (literally) the luck and horror that New Orleaneans experienced in the days before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. Posited as graphic journalism, A.D.: New Orleans After The Deluge focuses on seven individuals -- real ones that Neufeld interviewed during the original making of the story as a webcomic. In archetypal fashion, they stand in for those who stayed and those who left; those who have and those who have not. There is, for example, the Arab-American shopkeeper; a black high school student; and the wealthy doctor in the French Quarter. (Either the doctor is the only wholly imagined character or Neufeld didn't like him much; he's the only featured person that Neufeld doesn't include in the book dedication.)

Neufeld's steady eye on these stories brings a compelling watchfulness to the tale, magnified by the hypnotic, gorgeous use of color. The author's passion for documenting these tales is evident, as is his honest concern for the failures that trapped citizens in a winless game of futility and danger.

But I don't really like the book he made.

Why? Something's flatlined about it. Something here never gains altitude. Neufeld seems unsteady in balancing these real-life stories as anecdote on one hand, and broadly, almost humorously, symbolic on the other. He wobbles in his effort to plainly chronicle stories of terror and, sometimes, comedy, while also overlaying the film of his point-of-view. It's not a mistake for Neufeld to have a point-of-view: he's right to be appalled by the suffering exacerbated by unequal, unfair, and incompetent services in the aftermath of Katrina. But taking these stories and inflating them to archetype ("look at the poor people! look at the rich people!") diminishes the book.

This is most evident in the dialogue, which brims with overdetermined plotting. One character evacuates with his wife and spends a long time telling her about how sorry he is to leave his 15,000-piece comics collection behind in their apartment, protected only by their cardboard boxes. Wouldn't you know it? Flooding destroys the collection. The reader is not surprised. (The epilogue of the story tells us how his collection was largely replaced by donations from good samaritans from around the world.)

This is the crux: Neufeld mistakes having a point-of-view on what's happening with the notion that only one thing is happening. 

A.D. is interesting in how it develops the nascent field of the "nonfiction graphic novel" -- it's one of the only major books of its kind that doesn't tell history through the personal story of the author, but rather, through reportage. Unfortunately, though, A.D. doesn't reveal how complex and crucial illustrated journalism can be.

Speaking of reportage: Neufeld collaborated with Brooke Gladstone of "On the Media" for the meta work of illustrated journalism, The Influencing Machine. That's a great book, but there too I felt something limited in the art: the pictures illustrated the text of each box without demonstrating a broader, more revelatory vision for the overall book. I didn't hold much against Neufeld for this: the pictures were still great, and for a book that was so expository -- not to mention a collaboration with another writer -- I figured it for a difficult project where any artist would've hit limits.

A.D. is Neufeld's own work, and it hinges on an inherently dramatic story. But I feel the same flatness here. Reading him, I was reminded of my problem with the writer Francine Prose. Here's what I wrote about Prose's work:

For the lack of anything better, I have to call it insight. Prose's book is full of fascinating information, and its stance is original, but the narrative moves laterally and feels, ultimately, like a series of compelling anecdotes. I kept wanting Prose to dig deeper ... I wanted her to wrestle with contradictions, to get her hands dirty in this messy history, to embed herself within this narrative. But she only moves partway towards that ... not much beyond summary emerges.

{...}

And here's the thing I realized as I finished the book: this is my ongoing trouble with Francine Prose. The Anne Frank book is the fourth title by Prose that I've read; I've also read Gluttony; The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired; and Blue Angel. Again and again, I'm drawn to Francine Prose's fascinating ideas; I'm drawn into her clear way of presenting intriguing places and people and ideas. I will likely finish whatever book of hers that I pick up. But I will be somewhat disappointed that each book--at least drawing from what I've encountered so far--flirts with depth without actually diving in.

{...}

The trouble with Francine Prose is that there's no follow-through. She has the most wonderful ideas, she brings together far-reaching and thoughtful literary references, but it just doesn't go much further than "isn't it interesting." And it is interesting. Which is why I very well may read another Francine Prose book, despite what I discuss here. But if I do, I'll likely be nagged by the persistent wish that she'd push harder, that she'd analyze more, that she'd welcome more nuance head-on. I want her books to move not just laterally, but also longitudinally: multi-directional ideas rather than ones that flatline.

Prose is a very prolific woman, and an intelligent one. Maybe it is yet to be.

Retag that toward Neufeld, and that's where I'm at. Intrigued, but disappointed. Of an ilk with Neufeld's ideas, but uninspired.

There is nothing messy in A.D.. Curiousity is not the driver here. It is clear that what Neufeld believed about Hurricane Katrina when he began the comic is exactly the same thing he believed when he finished it.

The Political Novel According to E.L. Doctorow

This conversation unfolded as part of Bill Moyers' "World of Ideas" tour during the presidential election year of 1988, which elevated the voices of writers, educators, historians, poets, scientists, and many other deep thinkers in a rather remarkable interview series. I wrote about it here, with special attention to Moyers' interviewing tactics.

At the time of this interview, E.L. Doctorow was acclaimed for his novels Ragtime and Book of Daniel. Billy Bathgate was his most recently published book. He wouldn't publish another novel until 1994's The Waterworks. 

MOYERS: Do you still think, as you did a couple years ago, that our literary life is quiet compared to earlier periods in our history?

DOCTOROW:: That's my impression. I don't believe we're doing work equivalent to our nineteenth-century novelists or even to some of our early twentieth-century novelists. Beyond that, several things have happened that have constricted us as a group or "trade." One of them is the movement of the social sciences into the realm of fiction. Anthropology, psychology, and sociology are now using many of fiction's devices and forcing us to become more and more private and interior. We have given up the realm of public discourse and the political and social novel to an extent that we may not have realized. We tend to be miniaturists more than we used to be.

MOYERS: Miniaturists writing in small strokes.

DOCTOROW: We look for the major statement that comes from the metaphor rather than trying to put together the sloppy, all-encompassing novel of a Dreiser, for example. We do less reportage than we used to do in terms of the actual great social issues. Fortunately, there are exceptions. Novelists are writing about Vietnam. Black women novelists have been writing very social and political material. But, as a generalization, I think it's true that we've constricted our field of vision. We have come into the house, closed the door, and pulled the shade. We're reporting on what's going on in the bedroom and in the kitchen, but forgetting the street outside and the town and the highway.

MOYERS: The big story. You once said our writers are less and less inclined to take on the big story. What is the big story?

DOCTOROW: The big story is always the national soul -- who are we, what are we trying to be, what is our fate, where will we stand in the moral universe when these things are reckoned? That's always the big story. But all this is not to say that we're doing bad work. As a matter of fact, writers today are technically more expert than fiction writers have ever been in this country. The average first novel is far more accomplished today than it was forty or fifty years ago.

Young writers today know a lot more, too. They have a degree of self-consciousness that perhaps comes of the fact that you can now study the craft of writing in college graduate programs all over the country. This is a great thing, but it has its drawbacks. ... (The writing profession) gets very guarded, and the sensibility becomes a little precious. ...

{...}

MOYERS: The political passion in fiction today is coming from abroad, from people like Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, Günter Grass in Europe, Gabriel Marquez in Latin America. Why is that?

DOCTOROW: As a practicing writer, I am, of course, happy to put some of the blame on the critics. There's no critical fraternity today that has that much regard for the political novel in America. But when political novelists come along from other countries, the value of their work is recognized. It's almost as if we're too good to need political novels in this country. It's like President Reagan's feeling about trade unions. He likes them as long as they're in Poland. We like our political novels as long as they don't come out of this country. We think if you write from a political awareness, you're bound to preach. We've always had a bias against preaching in our art. We like Tolstoy, but we don't like his moralizing, his essays on history. We like the individual witness. We have a feeling that to the extent politics or political passion or social or religious passion gets into a novel, that's an impurity.

MOYERS: Aesthetic malpractice.

DOCTOROW: Yes ... I subscribe to the idea that you want your convictions to come up out of the work, not to be impressed upon it. That you have to trust the act of writing to scan your brain and to represent whatever beliefs you have, but you cannot impose those beliefs on the work, you cannot twist it and bang it and torment it into shape, because if you do, you become a propagandist, a hack, an entertainer, or a shill. All that is true. It's a valid point of view, but as piety, it restricts us.

{...}

MOYERS: ... The novelist of the thirties wrote about the failure of America to nourish life. But today that's considered in many quarters an unpatriotic theme.

DOCTOROW: Or more likely, too tiresome to be borne. There is a definite disinclination to accept writers who take on these big social, political ideas. It's the "Who do they think they are" sort of criticism. We seem to prefer the perfection of the miniaturist. That may be a reflection of the orthodoxy we live in today.

{...}

MOYERS: You say it's not the role of the writer to save society.

DOCTOROW: No, you can't have that kind of self-aggrandizing view of yourself. You like to feel that somehow, you might inch things along a little bit in a good way toward civility, toward enlightenment, and toward diminishing the suffering. But you don't want to get too pompous about that. Really what you do is to distribute the suffering to it can be borne. That's what artists do.

 

Image credit: New York Magazine

Reading, the accumulation of stories, and how I live my life

 

 

 

The Curious Case of Translation on Campus

 

The trouble with translation is getting it noticed. This seems at odds with the purpose of literary translators, whose textual invisibility is often equated with their abilities. Traditionally, as a discipline, translation has not significantly contributed to a scholar’s hiring, retention, promotion, or tenure. Thoughtful attention on campuses to the problems and marvels of translation has often been buried in comparative literature and language departments, which, with typically small enrollments, are on the defensive against university cost-cutting.

The turmoil earlier this year at the University of Virginia featured criticism of President Teresa Sullivan for “lack(ing) the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.”

That’s the old story, at least. But there’s been significant movement toward cultivating and celebrating the relationship between literary translation and academia.

I write about the curious case of translation studies on college campuses over at Publishing Perspectives, with glances at Princeton’s innovative translation program, the American Literary Translators Association at the University of Texas-Dallas, and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester.

But I pay special attention to the University of Michigan, which in the midst of an expansive and interdisciplinary translation theme semester intended to "announce the presence" of the university as one that elevates the art, making visible translations not only from text-to-text, but medium-to-medium. (Its promotional posters are featured on the right.) 

Some interesting vantages on how a campus moves translation into the spotlight from the dusty wings:

“'For a university thinking a lot about its international profile, translation is key.'”

"Michigan is one of the few universities where less commonly taught languages continue to be taught, including Dutch, ancient and modern Greek, Korean, and dozens of others. (It’s worth noting that the academic provost that supported coursework for even small languages at this public university was Teresa Sullivan herself, who left the position when she accepted the presidency of UVA.) The language resources make Michigan a natural place for translation studies to emerge in an intentional and interesting way."

"But administrative buy-in is only part of the story of translation’s emergence from the backrooms. Its emerging vibrancy at Michigan is not coming only from the top-down: students are generating momentum themselves."

"Programming and coursework this semester specializes in the multiplicities of translation. Classes connected to the theme semester study the Arab-Israeli conflict as rendered in Middle Eastern literature; persuasive politics; remix culture, literature in African history; and an astronomy mini-course on aliens."

"One challenge, though, is the multiple texts that critical translation studies requires. Merrill notes that in the last few years Ann Arbor has lost its great independent bookstore, Shaman Drum, as well as the original Borders store."

“'What is gained through translation is not about creating equivalencies or corrections ... It’s about creating new meanings. It’s also moving and adding to the original. Translation multiplies meaning.”

Storytelling Detroit

Mark Binelli is a novelist and Rolling Stone journalist who grew up in the Detroit area. He's since brought these three prongs -- literary, reportage, experience -- into his new book, Detroit City is the Place To Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis. I talked to him about the book in Sunday's Detroit Free Press. From that:

Q: What do you think urban journalism needs, especially in Detroit?

A: The hardest thing about writing this book was settling on one book. I had this idea of a nonfiction book as basically like writing 10-12 articles. I can do that; I know how to write 10 articles. But when you're reporting, you see that there are so many stories. Every morning I would religiously read the (Detroit) News and (Detroit) Free Press and some of the blogs, and so, as you know, there's always some crazy thing. That's ultimately why I had to get away to write this. I found myself wanting to write every story about Detroit, every book about Detroit.

I spent time with John Carlisle, also known as Detroitblogger John, and he just drives around -- that's his method (for finding stories). There are so many stories that are in forgotten parts of the city. There's so much emphasis on downtown and Midtown, and that's great, but it's just a small part of the story. ...

The book I think that needs to be written is an epic biography of (former mayor) Coleman Young. I'm just shocked that hasn't been done yet. Someone should do that before the people who knew him die.

The book is getting a healthy amount of media reverb. Ben Mathis-Lilley writes about in Slate (which is where the illustration above comes from).

The story of Detroit cannot be avoided dramatically or morally, but it has no ending.

As a writer, that might’ve stopped me, but it doesn’t stop Binelli. And fortunately, Binelli is a good storyteller, an entertaining historian, and an insightful commenter who is comfortable completely failing the requirements of the genres he’s working in. His stories don’t have a lesson; his history uncovers no new themes; his analysis does not lead to a constructive conclusion. ...

Does that sound boring? It’s not. Because while Detroit may have been in unpleasant stasis for 30 years, it is a strange, compelling stasis that traditional accounts and short visits to the city—however well-intentioned—almost never crack.

My own take on Detroit City is the Place to Be? Its greatest accomplishment is that it brings a literary language and vantage to a city that is hungry for it: the book opens with a quote from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and its cohering metaphor is how people come to Detroit to see the future. Binelli is an author who is as honest as he can be, and he has a good eye for character. The book's lack, however, comes from a sometimes misplaced trust in what Binelli hears or reads -- for example, he recycles the old rumor that 47% of the city is illiterate, even though that statistic has been thoroughly debunked -- which results in some distention.

Regardless, people interested in rigorous and beautiful storytelling about the city should read Ingrid Norton's "Letter from Detroit" in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Mark Binelli is reading from the book and talking shop with Detroit Free Press editorial page editor Stephen Henderson this week: 7pm, Friday, November 16, at Pure Detroit in the Fisher Building in the New Center neighborhood.

This Just Seen: "Searching for Sugar Man"

It's true what they say: "Searching for Sugar Man" is an extraordinary story, and, in the film that I finally saw last night, it is beautifully told. How a musical talent in Detroit got found, lost, and found again in apartheid South Africa is the stuff of myth: mystery, song, luck, and an abiding sense that art moves like water -- unseen, often, but knowing its way home. 

This is also a story of intrepid journalism; the drama depends on the moment a South African journalist was ticking off article ideas years ago and added Rodriguez to the list. It depends on the patience, cleverness, and hard work of journalists who instinctively ask questions and un-bury narrative. That the film is presented in a way that invites us into the search is perfect.

But there's something else that struck me. As the dark of the theater (fashioned out of an old elementary school) rose, I turned to the person next to me, and this was the first thing that I wanted to talk about.

Watching Rodriguez in the film -- not just how he's talked about, but how he is -- I realized how often I mistake insecurity, shyness, detachment, awkwardness, and anxiety for modesty. These things are not synonyms. And I realized this by seeing the full-bodied articulation of modesty that Rodriguez possesses; all else had been mislabeling. He shows a more true shape of modesty: gentle, self-assured, present, easefully tentative, alert, honest, unafraid of quiet, and unafraid of being seen, or not.

It is a gorgeous thing. It is the material of prophets. And that I have not recognized modesty for what it is until now suggests that it is rare indeed.

 

Related:

• Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: "Do some stories exist only because we need for them to?"
• Manohla Dargis, New York Times: "What they eventually discovered is often delightful and at times so poignant that many of the most crucial details are best left for viewers to discover for themselves."
• Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: "...a fresh and unexpected documentary that plays like a nail-biting mystery and a ticket to ride the whirlwind where art and commerce do battle." 
• David Malitz, The Washington Post: "The timing and geography of the story — pre-Internet, in a South Africa largely cut off from the rest of the world — make it unique."

Literary & Media Indulgences - 11/10/2012

-- Pulitzer-winning fiction writer Marilynne Robinson (who you know I love so much) and astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser are interviewed together about the cosmos, mystery, and the dangers of pieties.

-- And you know what? The "On Being" interview with Rilke translator and philosopher of ecology Joanna Macy is really worth another listen or three. (Its cover image is above.)

-- "The discord between a desire for stability and the very real possibility of destruction is intractable." Ingrid Norton writes of hurricanes in life and literature, and "this fragile, suspended mood," for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- The longform guide to climate change.

-- This is how Philip Pullman has reimagined the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Related: Marina Warner (wonderful) talks fairy tales and the art of "retelling" with The Rumpus.

-- A sneak preview of Symbolia, the new magazine of illustrated journalism! Hurray!

-- "I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is. What does that mean?" Poet Mary Oliver, interviewed on NPR.

-- "Evidently most English people have no idea that there are French books which are not pornographic." From the diaries of George Orwell.

-- Tim Parks, who I persist in considering must-read, on the internationalization of both sports and literature.

-- Roxane Gay edits Guernica's erotic fiction issue. She picked six stories that, Gay writes, examine "desire in an original, unexpected way. These writers rise above categories. They walk carefully along that fine line between the erotic and the explicit and do so with grace and intelligence."

-- "I have learnt to balance my own books, because the ones I write are dependent on the person I am." Jeanette Winterson on money and its lack. (via The Literary Saloon)

-- Louise Erdrich writes about "voting in Little Earth" -- that is, Election Day among Native Americans in Minnesota.

-- Why Charles Darwin got 4,000 votes in Georgia.

-- The formidable Adam Hochschild reviews Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's new memoir, Of Africa (which has been overshadowed this fall by Chinua Achebe's memoir, which Dayo Olopade writes about in The New Republic.) Hochschild's review includes lines like this: "Among the Africans who deserve some kind of secular sainthood is Wole So­yinka" and "His commitment to freedom has always been absolute." But praise for the man does not parallel praise for the book ...

-- Okey Ndibe on Achebe's "would-be critics."

-- An astonishing data visualization of women as academic authors over four centuries (1665-2010).

-- What admirers of Eleanor Roosevelt do, fifty years after her death.

-- "How Sioux Falls marked the death of George McGovern."

-- What happened when Truman Capote set out to profile Marlon Brando in 1957.

-- Matthew Specktor interviews Paris Review editor Lorin Stein in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- A brief history of sports, told through political cartoons.

-- Eight leading female photographers choose their favorite portraits of women for the Telegraph.

-- The historical fakery of photography, via the New York Review of Books.

-- The University of Michigan is now home to the world's largest Orson Welles archive.

-- Dwell has a map of independent bookstores in America -- and you can add your own favorites. Related: Melville House talks shop with Porter Square Books.

-- On the art and history of note-taking.

-- "I am perpetually reading the culture." A.M. Homes writes in the New Statesman about growing up in 1960s Washington, D.C.

-- The new Granta features Brazil's best young novelists.

-- Tanya Paperny writes on the deep loss of Micheal Henry Heim, and why we still need activists for literary translation.

-- How to translate humor.

-- What Detroit needs is more letterpress printing shops.

-- "Flint artists here want to make a living."

-- Write or Die. (via Jacob C.)

-- "It's not the load that breaks you down; it's the way you carry it."

-- My dear friend Matt Erickson has an essay in PowerPlay that is by turns hilarious and provoking on "Freedom Watchers: Schools and Literary Fetishism in the Age of the Digital Native" (PDF).

-- After all the drama this summer, the University of Virginia has voted to extend President Teresa Sullivan's contract through 2016.

-- Fact-checking at The New Yorker.

-- "In 1967, an ambitious young reporter broke a promise to a troubled source and inadvertently made her famous. Forty-three years later, he set out to find her and apologize." The tagline on the original 1967 Newsweek cover story was "Trouble in Hippieland."

-- Dave Hickey is really, really angry about modern art. And he has good reason to be.

-- The Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam makes its entire 125,000-piece collection digitally available to all of us.

-- Problems with the phrase "corrective rape."

-- Somali poet and comic playwright Warsame Shire Awale has been murdered.

-- When the couplet caught fire: Eavan Boland reviews the new book of Adrienne Rich's new and selected poems.

-- Walt Whitman, Soren Kierkegaard,  and Johnny Rotten are all mentioned in a single sentence here in Justin Bigos' interview with poet Matt Hart for the American Literary Review. 

-- Sonia Manzano -- you likely remember as Maria on "Sesame Street" -- writes about revolution for children. (Related, from The Millions: "Big Bird in History: Why We Fund PBS.")

-- In defense of literary excess.

-- On the animal appeal of the human voice.

Voting Day, 2012

An exceptionally long ballot in Detroit is causing long lines (or as I like to think of it, reading time). It took 1.5 hours to vote at the Second Avenue Firehouse ... but voters' spirits were high. Lots of laughter, conversation, teasing among neighbors. This seems to be about par: John Gallagher of the Detroit Free Press said on Twitter that it took two hours to vote at his eastside precinct. Poll workers served coffee to those waiting in line outside. (Here's a CJR piece I wrote on some of the proposals crowding up our ballot.)

And I love this. While the wait's a drag, it's inspiring seeing so many people care so much to vote, they'll sit tight -- even though they need to work, or their meter expired, or they have to bring their kids, or whatever. Now that I'm on the other side of the booth, I could look at gorgeous photos online of people voting all day. This is a rare and good thing: to live in a place where our vote matters, and in a time where the vote of most of us is counted. My appreciation for this deepened after spending some time in East Africa, where so many people are simply used to campaigns and elections being a front based on bribery and corruption. (Quite a lot of them are doing extraordinary work to change this.) I remember the sly smile of a Kampala woman named Prossy, who took a bus to Nairobi for our women-and-the-media conference. She was talking about journalism in Uganda, and made just a quiet laughing aside about Yoweri Mouseveni, who had, it seemed, won yet another term for president, extending his reign from 1986 for at least another five years. Who would've guessed! But it is her bemused look that stays with me.

These last few days, I've been thinking in particular about women who fought fiercely for the right to vote, convinced their ideas mattered when everyone told them otherwise. American women couldn't vote until 1920. Canada, 1917. White women in South Africa could vote by 1930, but women of any other color couldn't vote until 1994. It took France until 1944 (in the midst of World War II!) to grant suffrage. Italy, Mexico and Vietnam, 1946. Peru's women joined the civic world in 1955. Afghanistan, 1965. Switzerland held out until 1971, amazingly. Angola, 1975. Saudi Arabian women are promised that they will be able to vote in 2015.

New Zealand was first: 1893.

In the U.S., it happened piecemeal. Anti-suffragists won the 1915 New York State referendum by a landslide, arguing that women voters would close the saloons. But by the time the nineteenth amendment passed, Wyoming women had been voting for 50 years. In 1869, not long after African Americans were (nominally) granted the constitutional right to vote, Wyoming passed this resolution: "That every woman of the age of twenty-one years, residing in this Territory, may at every election to be holden under the law thereof, cast her vote."

Women started sitting on juries and holding office a year later. Susan B. Anthony called for women to move en masse to Wyoming (a call that went unheeded, I presume; Wyoming ranks ninth in land area, but fiftieth in population). When Wyoming was up for statehood in 1890, despite threats from the federal government, it said it wouldn't become a state without bringing suffrage along with it. In 1924, Wyoming voters elected the first female governor in the nation.

Other Western states followed a similar path: Colorado (men) voted in 1893 to acknowledge women's right to vote. Idaho passed a constitutional suffrage amendment in 1896. But the path to enlightenment was hardly universal, or simple, or easy. It was brutal, in fact, as Jessica Bennett details.

It wasn’t until 1920 that women were granted suffrage, but it was 1917 when members of the National Women’s Party — Alice Paul, Lucy Burns and others — picketed outside the White House, burning copies of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches and demanding the right to vote. What resulted — mass arrests (most for “obstructing traffic”), unlawful imprisonment and bloody beatings — became known as the Night of Terror, though it’s fair to say most among my generation don’t know it.

The Night of Terror took place on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Workhouse Prison, in Occoquan, Virginia, ordered his guards to teach the suffragists a lesson. For weeks, the women’s only water had come from an open pail. Their food had been infested with worms. But on this night, some 40 prison guards wielding clubs beat the women senseless — grabbing, dragging, choking, kicking and pinching them, according to affidavits recounting the attacks.

 

Let's turn to fragments from the newspaper archives to tell more of the story:

1860 New York Times: "First, they complained that the wife, as a wife, had no equality before the law as a husband. Even before the last Legislature was a petition for the rights of the wives of New-York. The wife might have assumed her position for the better or for the worse. In either case she lost her legal position; her right to dispose of her property, of her children, the right to sue or be sued. She was suspended. She had no legal existence."

1860 New York Times: "It was left to Mr. BEECHER to say whatever there is to be said in vindication of woman's right to vote... Manhood suffrage is established by law in this State, not because every man is believed to have a right to vote, but because every man's voting, or being allowed to vote, is considered the best means of securing tranquillity, order and good government. This is the only theory upon which the exclusion of negroes, resident aliens, and persons under twenty-one years of age, is for a moment justifiable. We deny them the suffrage, simply because we think, whether rightly or wrongly, that the rest of the community will be benefited by their privation.

... But we must remind (Mr. BEECHER) and all others who think with him, that most of the evils from which we now suffer are due not to the paucity-but to the multiplicity of our voters. If all the good, respectable, pure-mined, upright people, such as we are told female voters would invariably be, who now possess the franchise, made use of their privilege, all would go right. The trouble is that these people will not exercise it, except at rare intervals and under great excitement. The bad people, on the contrary, vote as often as they possibly can, and reap their reward.

1919 New York Times: "Today's victory for suffrage ends a fight that really dates from the American Revolution. Women voted under several of the Colonial Governments. During the Revolution women demanded to be included in the Government. Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John Adams, 'If women are not represented in this new republic there will be another revolution.'"

1920 New York Times: "It is almost cruel to recall the nineteenth century wit who offered to solve the suffrage question. It would suffice, he said, to permit all women to vote after thirty - the sly inference being that none would qualify. If the author of this merry jest is still alive, even he must find his taunt somewhat faded. Women in fighting for the vote have shown a passion of earnestness, a persistence, and above all a command of both tactics and strategy, which have amazed our master politicians. ... A world that has hitherto recognized only the power of feminine youth and beauty is on its knees - no less - before the woman of thirty. What is to be the upshot?

... Unlike suffrage, questions of human welfare can seldom be answered by a categorical yes or no. .... Women are beginning to have a sense of this, and they are developing a flexibility of mind and a capacity for compromise that make political discussion a thing very different from what it has been. ... Once more there is need of openness of mind and accurate foresight - the exercise of which is adding a new talent to the woman of thirty. ...

Truly, we live in a new day and are blessed with new manners. Time was when it seemed a baffling fact that the decade of the feminine struggle for freedom was the decade when hobbles became tightest and heels most toppling. Now we know: it was necessary to convince men that even in politics women can still be feminine. With victory assured, the woman of thirty is already dressing more sedately."

UPDATE: New York Magazine has a slideshow: "Ninety-Two Years of Women Voting." My favorites are numbers four (notice her middle finger), eight, twenty-one, and twenty-five.

 

About the Images:

Detroit Free Press photo of the polling station at a Woodbridge senior center in Detroit.

The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was founded in 1911; the photo here is from about 1915. It catalyzed spin-off groups, like the Nebraska Men's Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, that followed its advocacy model. According to NebraskaStudies.org, "Their association focused on two key major arguments — woman suffrage would force women to serve on juries, and granting women suffrage was merely 'the first step for women who demanded FREEDOM and POWER in their attempts to change HOME and MARRIAGE.' NAOWS disbanded after the nineteenth amendment passed, though its newsletter lasted longer, generally opposing feminist organizations.