Isak

Lone Star Progressive: Annise Parker and Brass-Tacks Urbanism

 

Houston is one of the most strange and fascinating places I've ever reported on. (That's its Art Deco city hall, above.) In Next City, I wrote about all the surprises I found there -- namely, about how practical progressivism plays out in this old-school climate, a city that basically exists through sheer force of will.

Here's a collection of a few passages from the piece:

Annise Parker, mayor of Houston, is hurt. She’s limping when we meet in her third-floor office at City Hall, wearing one black shoe and one tan leather slipper fitted around a bandage on her sprained left ankle. Another bandage circles her sprained wrist. “I tangled with a City of Houston trash can,” she says from behind her polished wood desk. “One of those big black boxes.” A staffer in the room suggests that Parker needn’t mention that it was specifically a City of Houston trashcan. But Parker does anyway. Several times.

After all, it’s not as if Parker is easily beaten. We’re speaking on a Tuesday morning at the beginning of her third term as leader of the nation’s fourth-largest city. She has tackled the most provoking and most mundane of urban challenges and now, because of term limits, she has only two more years serving Houston as an elected official. She’s already hearing from people who want her to run for state office.

Parker made headlines in 2010 by becoming the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city. Shortly after her third inauguration, she flew to California to marry her longtime partner. Parker’s ascent spurred what she described as “lots and lots of frankly unearned media attention” that had the attitude of, “How could this have happened in Houston first, and not all these other places?”

Her reply: “It’s because you don’t know Houston.”

Houston is strangely under-chronicled for a city that could fit the entirety of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore inside its 600-square-mile footprint. While the city’s sprawling reach makes Los Angeles look dense, its population of 2.1 million makes it the fourth most populous city in the nation, following New York, L.A. and Chicago.

 

Julia Ideason Building: Houston Public Library

 

Elsewhere:

Houston is a profoundly international city. Twenty percent of its residents are foreign-born, with nearly as many Asians and Africans as Latinos. It’s the fifth most popular city for American immigrants. As a result, Houston developed a reasonable immigration policy that those squabbling elsewhere might learn from. ...

The city’s dependency on oil and gas has dimmed in the last three decades, and it is investing seriously in sustainability: Transit, green space, renewable energy and a dense urban core. Parker created the position of sustainability director for the city and recruited Laura Spanjian, from San Francisco, to run the new office. Her marching orders? “Shake things up,” Parker says. In addition to investing in rail, bus and bike infrastructure, the city launched the massive Bayou Greenway Initiative, a $480 million public-private project that will transform the relationship between city residents and the bayous.

Houston is also making progress on inequality. Parker restructured the city’s Office of Affirmative Action and Contract Compliance into the newly christened Office of Business Opportunity to help minority- and women-owned small businesses compete for municipal contracts. She instituted one of the most expansive anti-discrimination ordinances in the country. And Houston was first in the nation to solve its rape kit backlog, a horrific problem plaguing most major cities. Standing next to Parker to mark the achievement was another up-and-coming Lone Star Democrat: Sen. Wendy Davis. The senator — a fellow female politician with a media-friendly personal story — helped secure $11 million in state funding for Texas’ 20,000 untested rape kits. Houston combined the state dollars with federal and city money to not only eliminate its backlog, but also improve evidence management in the long term.

Finally, there’s Parker’s stance on economic inequality. While homelessness in cities is ubiquitous to the point where it is almost accepted as a natural part of the urban fabric, Houston is working eliminate chronic homelessness. The mayor, whose son was homeless when she adopted him, dedicated her last two terms to the issue. Her inaugural reception, after all, was held at the Houston Food Bank.

None of these accomplishments were done by template, as there’s no mold fit for the city’s brass-tacks culture. In Houston, reform must happen on decidedly local terms. If visionary policies catch on, it’s because they are useful — not because they are visionary. Here, you have to make the business case for what you do.

“We’re not going to purchase renewable energy because it’s great for the planet — although it is great for the planet — but because it’s good for business,” Parker said. “Obviously, we want to save taxpayers money when we can.” Against all odds, Houston is the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the country.

Houston has become a case study for the practicality of progressivism. The city’s radical transformation over the last three decades, and its finely tuned evolution under Annise Parker, speaks to the nuts and bolts of intelligent urban policy. Ideals are not the fuel here; utilitarianism is. The main mode of reform incentivizes change rather than regulates it. (This is still small-government Texas, after all.) Yet the new Houston looks far more idyllic than the old.

 

Downtown Houston, with rail line

 

And finally:

Parker calls herself a “thoroughly conventional mayor.” By epitomizing the practicality prized by Houstonians, she is credible when she ventures into more classically progressive territory.

Comparing Parker with Wendy Davis, the mayor’s occasional partner in the statehouse, is a study of contrasts. Davis’ 11-hour filibuster in the Texas legislature won her the national spotlight, inspired a groundswell of progressive activism and propelled her gubernatorial campaign — but did not ultimately stop the abortion ban she was protesting from becoming law. Parker’s managerial brand of progressivism doesn’t incline her to take show-stopping risks, and her rhetoric often sounds decidedly straight-laced, even conservative. But, as she tells me, she has a list of things to accomplish, and one by one, she’s checking them off.

The trick, though, will be for Parker to not let the brass tacks keep her from dreaming big and taking risks — with or without a coalition. After all, the energy for progressivism that Davis catalyzed marked a turning point for state politics in Texas. And Parker is in her final term as an elected official in Houston. As her former professor, Steve Klineberg puts it, “This is her chance to be a visionary.”

 

Gordon Quan, who I interviewed for the story, with Irma of the famed Irma's Restaruant

 

You can see an excerpt of the story here. The piece happens to be the 100th Forefront feature, which is pretty great.

“A successful investigation creates its own beat.”

The investigative reporting team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is one of the best you'll find anywhere. Since it was organized in 2006, it won two Pulitzer Prizes. (The paper also won a third for explanatory reporting with a piece edited by a watchdog team member.) It regularly inspires celebratory notice from the likes of AJR, Nieman Watchdog, and Nieman Lab.  And its revolutionary reporting has helped the paper achieve one of the highest rates of market penetration in the country.

“You’ve got to do stories that matter and you’ve got to have impact," is how the mandate goes. But I got curious about the second part of that: impact. It's a slippery concept. I dug into it in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. An excerpt:

... reporters anywhere can spend weeks or months grinding out investigative stories on worthy subjects. But once published, how do you measure what influence they had—which stories are effective, which fall flat, and why? How does one of the most celebrated investigative newsrooms in the country measure impact—and how does it achieve it?

The question doesn’t have a simple answer. Ellen Gabler, an investigative reporter and assistant editor, is part of the team that spent the last five months immersed in “Deadly Delays,” the newborn screening story. To some extent, all that work is an act of faith—that the information, once public, will create change, even if she can’t see what it is. “I’m not sure there is any true test for tracing the impact,” Gabler told me via email. “There are lots of ways to effect change: raising awareness, holding people accountable, changing laws—although that’s not always the best measure of success.”

[...]

(But) accountability reporting, at its best, is pivotal.

“This is about real people. We’re not doing this for fun,” (reporter Raquel) Rutledge said. “People are struggling in the world, sometimes needlessly. If we can bring justice and make the world just a bit better, that’s important. This is the kind of work that improves people’s lives.”

That’s the optimism that the Journal Sentinel’s brand of investigative reporting hinges on: Solutions exist. To measure the impact of a story is to measure whether or not the community has moved closer to finding them.

Literary & Media Indulgences: 6/15/2013

 

-- Reading Gabriel García Márquez’s morbidity in the happiest country on earth. Proud to have edited Nina Martyris' lovely, striking essay in Guernica. (That's Gabo's childhood home in Cartegena, Colombia, pictured above. Photo by Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri.)

-- Alan Turing's reading list: here are the books he borrowed from his school library.

-- "The Dreams of Italo Calvino."

-- Love this: The Seattle Public Library launches a Books on Bikes program.

-- The fascinating friendship between Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, brought to us by Michelle Dean in The New Yorker.

-- Bulgakov's ghost and the haunting of Russia.

-- I'm rather shocked it needs to be said, but: "In Defense of Alice Munro."

-- A spectacular coup for Melville House Books.

-- What Margaret Atwood's fiction reveals about bikesharing, rape police, and the poverty trap.

-- From "Which Book at Which Age?" to "A History of Outrage" to "Title Copycats" ... The Judy Blume File.

-- In Vogue, Sheila Heti writes about what she didn't learn from reading Judy Blume.

-- Well, I've known this my whole life: why reading is like falling in love.

-- "Burn Your Letters?" See also The Millions essay on Willa Cather's bound-for-something letters.

-- Rebecca Solnit on the "faraway nearby" of writing. She's also interviewed in a nice leisurely way here.

-- "I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?' What if you were sitting here next to me and you turned into a cat? I have a story. So I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer." -- Katherine Applegate interviewed on "All Things Considered." (h/t Amy H.)

-- "What happens when the dictators are gone?" The next generation of Latin American fiction.

-- Thanks, Vela Magazine, for reading my Guernica story on Muriel Rukeyser and "literary archeology." Also, the editor of Rukeyser's once-lost novel, Savage Coast, writes about this art of recovery in The Paris Review.

-- Kathryn Schulz says that Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie is "a new kind of migration story." It is "one that reflects a political shift and suggests a literary one."

-- Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, interviewed in Bookforum.

-- An Egyptian author was sentenced to five years in prison for his collection of short stories, Where is God?.

-- Hilary Mantel, the twice Booker-winning author who I adore, is interviewed on "Fresh Air."

-- Neil Gaiman's tour of weird London.

-- Test scores in writing are dropping for teens -- but their writing is amazing.

-- Rogue's gallery: A modest proposal for Detroit and a fire sale of art.

-- Join us at Literary Detroit this Wednesday for poetry, comedy, and writing as we throw a party for Matthew Olzmann and his bracing book of poems, Mezzanines!

-- Watch out, watchdogs: Investigative journalists are the target of Wisconsin lawmakers, who slipped in a last-minute motion in the budget bill to kick them out of their offices. I wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review.

-- Student journalists look for a scoop on school security. It took an unnerving turn. (h/t Chris M.)

-- "Fortresses of solitude." On the urgent rarity of journalist access to prison isolation units.

-- Marco Rubio's private prison connection. Via the Columbia Journalism Review.

-- A Pennsylvania judge was sentenced to 28 years in prison for selling -- literally, selling -- kids to the prison system.

-- "Little, big." Is that the way to translate the two ideas for fighting global poverty?

-- "Hot in my backyard." In case you missed this look at the fascinating storytelling about climate change from This American Life.

-- Well, here's one feisty reaction to being asked to write for free.

-- I'm so pleased about Natasha Trethewey's re-appointment as the United States Poet Laureate.

-- "Why Poetry Can't Find its Public." Maybe somebody should send a memo to Natasha. (h/t Jacob C.)

-- "We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. ... Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life." Jonathan Safran Foer writes on "How Not To Be Alone" in The New York Times.

-- Mary Roach takes a trip down our tubes.

-- "Where are the women in translation?" Alison Anderson pushes the conversation at Words Without Borders. (I wrote about the striking gap for Bookslut awhile back.)

-- "This is the first time, ever, anywhere, that colonial victims have been permitted to sue the British state." On Kenya, Empire, and the Mau Mau in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- Flip the News is an interesting experiment: the blog flips the gender or race of news stories. "The point here is to shine some light on the way news organizations write about people and strive for more balanced, respectful narratives."

-- Sally Ride received -- posthumously -- the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

-- Barbara Brenner, who did so much as a breast cancer and women's health activist, died last month. She was pivotal in pushing for greater attention and action against the environmental causes of cancer, including industrial pollution.

-- Terrific investigation by The Arizona Republic on charter schools being used for their board members' profit

-- The "transient states" of artist Mary Cassatt.

-- The comic Hyperbole and a Half has done so much to illustrate -- in every way -- the experience of depression, with humor and lightness of touch. Here, if you haven't seen it yet, is the latest.

-- Add them to your to-read list: three immersion nonfiction classics.

-- The New York Times celebrates the 100th anniversary of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time a special section.

-- Why do writers fall in love with Odessa?

40 Years Roe: True Story

Lest it is difficult to read the Guttmacher infographic, it says this: By age 45 about half of American women will have an unintended pregnancy, and nearly one in three will have an abortion. It's true: and it means that it's awfully unlikely that you don't know one or many women who have had one, or a partner who supported a woman through it. (Or you, dear reader, are one of them yourself.) It's a surprising reality, though, that we just don't hear about very often from the people we know: few women, relatively, feel like they can speak about their abortion to others. "More state-level abortion restrictions were enacted in 2011 than in any prior year; 2012 brought the second-highest number of restrictions ever." The public conversation about abortion is ... well, you know how it is. Many of us argue our abortion beliefs among friends, families, and other groups in theoretical or political terms, assuming nobody in the group has a personal abortion experience. To mention that you've had one must feel like throwing yourself to the lions.

So: nearly 1 in 3 American women. Four crucial decades of abortion affirmed under our right to privacy, even as politicians use the issue as bait, throwing up every shaming and arduous obstacle possible.

There are a lot of stories there, a great many of them untold. (UPDATE: "What keeps black women from going public with our stories?" asks Dani McClain in Ebony.) They call for listeners. Reading is, I believe, a kind of intimate listening. That's why I'm reviving something I started last year on this day: sharing the most honest, brilliant, and important stories about abortion and the full scope of reproductive justice. All have been teachers to me.

And let's pause to say a prayer of gratitude. As Guttmacher puts it:

There are no women of reproductive age in the United States today who were of reproductive age prior to Roe. U.S. women of this age have never known a nation in which abortion was illegal and unsafe.

That is remarkable. Let us keep it that way. Let us listen.

Articles/Radio:

• "Birthright." Jill Lepore, The New Yorker. (See also her dispatch on the 40th anniversary of Roe.)
• Lepore's interview on NPR's "Fresh Air": "How Birth Control and Abortion Became Politicized".
• "Teaching Good Sex." Laurie Abraham, The New York Times
• "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives." Mimi Swartz, The Texas Monthly
• "The Message and the Meaning: Is Pro-Choice Passe?" Katha Pollit, The Nation.
• "Nursing Grudges." Dahlia Lithwick, Slate.
• "'We Have No Choice.'" Carolyn Jones. The Texas Observer.
• "Lucky Girl." Bridget Potter, Guernica.
• "An Abortion Battle, Fought to the Death." David Barstow. The New York Times.
• "The New Abortion Providers." Emily Bazelon. The New York Times Magazine.
• "Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash." Linda Greenhouse & Reva B. Siegel. The Yale Law Journal.
• "Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern." Martin Luther King, Jr., 1965.

Visual/Multimedia:

• New Yorker slideshow: "Roe v. Wade and the Forty Years' War"
• Gorgeous art posters on reproductive rights that take a "people's history" slant
• Exhale: Pro-Voice
• The incomparable Scarleteen: an exhaustive site on "sex ed for the real world"
• Bill Moyers on Choice
• "Listening Beyond Life and Choice." Frances Kissling featured on PRI's "On Being" with Krista Tippett. Kissling is the former head of Catholics for Choice.
• MTV special: "No Easy Decision."

Supreme Court Decisions:

• Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which established the constitutional right to privacy. It struck down a Connecticut state law that prohibited birth control even for married couples.
• Roe v. Wade (1971), which was decided simultaneously with Doe v. Bolton to uphold the right to privacy under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• "Interview: Sarah Weddington." TIME interviews the 26-year-old lawyer who argued in the Roe. v. Wade case before the Supreme Court. Martha Burk also interviews Weddington for the PRX show "Equal Time with Martha Burk."

Books:

• The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World - Michelle Goldberg. See also my interview with Goldberg here.
• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty - Dorothy Roberts
• In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution - Susan Brownmiller
• S.E.X: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College - Heather Corinna
• Our Bodies, Ourselves - Boston Women's Health Book Collective

 

Related:

• 39 Years Roe: Read Up
• 37 Years of Roe v. Wade: Winter, Discontent
• 36 Years of Roe v. Wade: In Thanks
• Say You Want Revolution
• Abortion, Excommunication, and Kids

Literary & Media Indulgences - 1/6/2013

 

-- A manual on sex and pregnancy from 1680 (above) has been banned from sale for more than 200 years in the United Kingdom. But Aristotle's Compleat Master-Piece will be in bookstores this month.

-- Chris Ware and "the comic-book novel" get epic treatment in the New York Review of Books. Ware also spoke with the wonderful Michael Silverblatt of KCRW's Bookworm recently.

-- "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Read This Year." I'm not surprised. Also: thrilled. I can't wait for this.

-- Natasha Trethewey takes up residence in the nation's capital as our new poet laureate. "I like the idea that people might even get to sit down and have a conversation about poetry with me."

-- Sharon Olds: "I want a poem to be useful."

-- Writing is for mornings.

-- The American Reader, a new literary magazine, is getting a ton of top-tier buzz. I feel both intrigued and .. put-off by it. I'm skeptical about the literary interest of a magazine that seems to start, from Day 1, on an elite status that seems to already inspire pandering media attention, commenting on the editors' fashion sense. On the other hand, it does have lot that's unique and smart and beautiful going for it. For one, it's helmed by a 25-year-old African Catholic who just graduated from Princeton who speaks fluently about the view from the cultural margins on literary white privilege.

-- Zadie Smith writes about joy.

-- Edith Grossman on love and translation, via Words Without Borders.

-- Four Way Press is kicking it.

-- "The House Eudora Built." Visiting Ms. Welty's home in Jackson, Mississippi.

-- "Tolkien vs. Technology," via the New York Review of Books. Also: The economics of Middle Earth.

-- The Sorrows of Young Forster: E.M. Forster's journals and diaries are reviewed by Alan Hollinghurst.

-- "...at the hour when the parricide feels a cat purring against his feet..." Worldly Thornton Wilder, via Harper's.

-- Balancing literacy and oral traditions in academia.

-- Reader favorites: 12 incredible webcomics.

-- Zeno in court.

-- The woes of Blithering Heights.

-- In transit: people caught reading.

-- Edmund White offers sex tips for writers.

-- I constantly find myself arguing for the value of "objectivity" in journalism as a practice, rather than a state-of-being: a critical value in reporting that is not to be confused with the "he-said, she-said" journalism known as false balance. Margaret Sullivan, public editor of the New York Times, pens a column on just this issue: "When Reporters Get Personal."

-- An oral history of Newsweek magazine.

-- The perks of delusional optimism.

-- Here's why front-page obituaries more than doubled in the New York Times in 2012.

-- The amazing story of the woman who "at 22 almost single-handedly wrote women’s rights into the Constitution of modern Japan, and then kept silent about it for decades." She was one of the last living people who wrote Japan's postwar constitution.

-- Fact: For the first time since 1984, this past presidential election featured not one question on global warming. Four out of 10 people on earth have never heard of climate change, even if they've experienced its harsh consequences. Bill Moyers on "Moyers & Company" talks about ending the silence on climate change with Anthony Leiserowitz, who spends his life doing just that.

-- And, as federal action on climate change is seriously lacking, some cities are taking real leadership. Here are 12 cities with the best workable policies on sustainability.

-- Hill Valley Telegraph: The terrible newspaper from "Back to the Future." I love it all the same. For an alternative view on the journalism in "Back to the Future," see Slate.

-- "Saving his own soul first: The redemption of a Globetrotter."

-- A gorgeous black meteorite from Mars has more water than any other we've found in Earth.

-- NASA marks fifty years of space photography.

-- One Hundred Years of Solitude persuaded Francine Prose to drop out of her PhD program.

-- Christian Wiman is leaving Poetry magazine for Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

-- Jessa Crispin on materiality and the power of religious relics.

-- "I want women’s history to be legitimate, to be part of every curriculum on every level." Gerda Lerner has died. She almost singleheandedly made women's lives a legitimate subject of study for historians.

-- One of dictator Pinochet's last acts was to ban abortion in Chile in all circumstances. It had been legal since 1931. Today, there's a nervy effort to push back with an abortion hotline that walks a heated grey area.

-- Egad: 2012's deluge of "Africa is a Country" moments.

-- Arundhati Roy speaks on the misuses of democracy.

-- "Survival of the wrongest": How personal health journalism does it all wrong.

-- On the class politics of vaccination.

-- Civil Eats: The best food and agriculture books of the last year.

-- Physicists consider the rise and fall of words.

-- Why don't more girls study physics?

-- Gender in academia: men dominate philosophy and history, but aren't much of a show in education. There's a big difference in how gender participate on campus. Diversity will lead to better science. Misconceptions of the school-to-prison pipeline.

-- Abraham Lincoln as prose poet.

-- Reading aloud, fashionably.

-- "The last word is beauty."

Literary & Media Indulgences - 12/7/2012

-- Let's listen for Madeleine L'Engle. Even more echo is heard here.

-- "The real and unreal: Ursula K. Le Guin, American novelist."

-- I'm five kinds of excited for the debut of Symbolia, a new digital magazine of comics journalism helmed by the talented Erin Polgreen. "... incendiary storytelling from around the world. We’re merging longform journalism and sequential art ..." Yes, please! See also an extensive profile of Symbolia in the Columbia Journalism Review (illustrated, naturally) and listen to Erin talk Symbolia on WBEZ.

-- "Young Latino Students Don't See Themselves in Books."

-- "We lose the subject of animals when we move out of childhood." Bookforum talks with fiction writer Lydia Millet.

-- Zoe Heller is swiftly becoming one of my favorite literary critics. Here she is on Salman Rushdie's new book about his life as Joseph Anton, in hiding after the fatwa pronounced upon him for his novel, The Satanic Verses.

-- Kwani Litfest kicks off this weekend in Nairobi, themed Conversations With The Horn: Writers, Artists In Exchange. It's bringing together Somali poet Hadraawi, Sudanese-English novelist Jamal Mahjoub, Eritrean writer/historian Alemseged Tesfai, Egyptian writer/activist Nawal El Sadaawi, Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, and Ghanian novelist Kojo Laing, among others. I utterly wish I were there. Friends in Kenya, tell me all about it.

-- Cultivating Bulgaria into a dynamic and world-renowned literary center. Novelist Elizabeth Kostova is doing some very interesting work.

-- “What happens when everyone is a poet?”

-- "I feel like I have to earn my breakfast." Jane Fine interviews A.M. Homes for BOMB Magazine.

-- Remembering the Montreal massacre: The 1989 mass killing targeting female engineering students has been memorialized in ways that have scrubbed the atrocity from its political repercussions. The 25-year-old man who shot the students screamed: "You're all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!"

-- U.S. state science standards are "mediocre to awful," according to a new report.

-- Oscar Niemeyer, the modernist architect who designed Brasilia, died at age 104.

-- "The Fracking of Rachel Carson." Via Orion Magazine.

-- What's it going to take to go home by the home through the United States, retrofitting them for energy efficiency and reducing our massive residential carbon footprint?

-- A liiterary look (sort of) at our taste for oil.

-- This exists: a Calvin & Hobbes search engine.

-- The Hawkeye Initiative pictures male comics characters in the same extraordinary positions as female comics characters. Hilarity ensues. An important point is reaffirmed. Here's the submission from Matt Bors.

-- A graphic turn for academic librarians.

-- On the hunger that young readers have for dystopian fiction.

-- High school journalists try to figure out newspaper economics.

-- The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, an excellent and important newspaper, is working very hard to prevent cuts. The Columbia Journalism looks at what "resetting" the paper for the future means.

-- Brendan Nyhan discusses the future of fact-checking in the wake of the 2012 election.

-- Chris Hughes and the transformation of The New Republic (one of the magazines that I listed as a favorite gift subscription in the Choose Books guide).

-- In Guernica: what does it mean when your name doesn't mean anything?

-- Rebecca Solnit essays on urban agriculture and  "revolutionary plots."

-- Herman Wouk on writing novels in his late-90s. (Via Chris M.)

-- See it here: "Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap." This is the documentary Ice-T made about the writing craft of rap, which is, amazingly, not talked about too much.

-- It's about time that this source of exploitation got more attention.

-- "Teach for America's Deep Bench." The American Prospect looks at how "the education nonprofit is also training the next generation of politicians, who have very specific ideas on school reform." Curious stuff. And did I ever tell you how I almost joined the TFA teacher corps in Las Vegas? Left a shadow life behind there...

-- "Writing is about specifying individuals, being very attentive to them and caring for them. It insists on nuances." Guernica interviews Israeli author David Grossman about war, art, Palestine, and tragedy.

-- What an American Civil War soldier has to do with Homer.

-- Irish love for Irish poetry.

-- Jeremy Bass on the forgotten dialect of poet Jack Gilbert, who died in November after a long illness. Here is the New Yorker's eulogy for him. Likewise from the Los Angeles Times.

-- Sifting through the poems of Octavio Paz over at Bookslut.

-- Roxane Gay's Year in Reading, part of the annual series at The Millions, which I always look forward to.

-- "Translating America, into Wolof."

-- Tim Parks on growing up with an artist.

Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories

 

My song to you this season is a simple one: Choose books as your gifts. The gift of a great story is at best transformative and soul-opening; at basic, it is a joy.

And it so happens that to play bookish matchmaker is a delight.

I have for you the fourth edition (revised, expanded, updated, all-around wonderful) of Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories (PDF).* Here's what you can look forward to:

• This one goes to thirteen: Thirteen more pages of bookish delight in this 82-page expanded edition. 82! 
• Many hundreds of thoughtful and original book recommendations, including those featured in expansive profiles and those recommended for particular groups of readers—including history buffs, activists, people going through hard times, mystery-lovers, politicos, children, and wannabe cooks
• New listings on the book profiles for books that are “of an ilk,” in case what you see isn’t quite what you’re looking for, or you want to make a gift of two or three books, or you’re looking for another way to get a feel for the book's style
• An updated rendering of the Top Ten Eleven Magazine Gift Subscriptions 
• A new feature on the top book—yes, book!—subscriptions from extraordinary and innovative publishers and booksellers
• A much-expanded feature on the best books to pair with a cinematic experience: that is, books that should be given along with their film adaptations (which you should watch alongside the gift recipient, of course).
• A reprise of the best literary organizations to offer your gift donations—a meaningful gift on your behalf or in someone else’s name when giving donations are for many of us are a luxury. 

As always, this is more than a mere list of personal favorites. Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of different styles for different tastes and ages. These are both contemporary titles and classics, authored by both esteemed and emerging writers, and released by both small and large publishers.

While updated for the 2012-2013 winter season, this gift guide can also help you navigate the year’s birthdays, holidays, ceremonies, and, simply, those days when the thing to do is to give another a story they just might adore.

It's worth reiterating: Your purposeful choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture at a time when the book world is struggling, and even literacy is horrifically low.

Choosing to give books translates into a choice of being an active and engaged participant in a thriving literary culture. And it's not as if this is something to be done out of charity: there are so many wonderful books out there, dynamic and strange and absorbing books, books suited to so many different personalities and tastes. A carefully-chosen book is more meaningful than giving someone, say, a necklace or another plastic toy with too much packaging.

Choose Books because your choices matter. Choose Books because it is joyful.

This 82-page gift guide is free and accessible, my gift to you. It's also 100% free of ads and sponsorships. If you find this guide worthwhile, however, I'd very much appreciate it if you'd pitch in a donation.

 

 

 

And also, I'd love to hear your recommendations. What's missing in this gift guide? What books have you given to others that they've loved? Feel free to contact me at annaleighclark-at-gmail-com.

I want to hear all your stories.

 

* UPDATE: For a few hours on 12/2, last year's version was live at this link. All fixed now. Get your clean copy today -- sans the weird 2011 references!

About the Image: I'm reading with my niece Joan on a Sunday afternoon in April. 

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. 

How Do You Teach Toni Morrison's Beloved?

Julie Koehler, a Ph.D. student at Wayne State University in Detroit (and a friend of mine), read Toni Morrison's novel Beloved in a University of Michigan seminar on Great Lakes literature. The instructor asked if students thought Sethe’s decision to kill her daughter was the right choice. “I was one of the few that said, no, I don’t think she should’ve done it,” Koehler said. “And everyone was saying, ‘Oh, she loves slavery!’ … And the teacher sided with everyone else! She said, yes, (Sethe) made the right choice. But I thought it was something we were discussing, and I felt blindsided. It got kind of weird.”

Koehler said her instructor set up the discussion toward the “right” conclusion. The novel is so good, it led the teacher to think everything that happens in the novel is also good—that is, morally acceptable. This showed up, hilariously, when a student protested the mention of male characters having sex with cows. “(The student) said something about it being against animal rights,” Koehler said, “and the teacher just said, ‘They’re men! They have urges!’”

So, that's one way that Beloved shows up in classrooms these days: badly.

Twenty-five years after the publication of the Pulitzer-winning novel by America's last Nobel laureate, what are other ways Beloved is talked about among students and teachers? And -- given that it's Banned Books Week -- what about when it doesn't make it into classrooms at all?

I wrote about this in an article for The Daily Beast. It opens like this:

It’s hard to talk about Beloved.

Toni Morrison’s novel, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, comes weighed with a reputation as a great American classic. It wasn’t long after the Pulitzer-winning book’s publication that Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Beloved is difficult, complex in language and narrative, and it casts a forceful look at the bloodiest impossibilities of slavery’s legacy in America. The novel opens outside Cincinnati in 1873, where Sethe and her kin are meeting life as free and haunted people. But their house is occupied by the child Sethe killed years before, under threat of their return to slavery. The house “was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom.” It is “suspended from the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead.” It crackles with outrage for the family inside it. Some creep away, and do not ever return.

Uncomfortable as the story is, teachers talk about it with young people every day. The classroom brings Beloved to what may be its primary readership today, a quarter-century later. But the ground is fraught: it is one of the most challenged books of the last 20 years.

 

Related:

• Speaking: Toni Morrison
• Book Review: Sula by Toni Morrison
• The Best Writing Group Ever Met in 1977
• Toni Morrison Beats Down Censorship With a Stick
• Mercy, Mercy Morrison
• The Great American Novel -- Authored by a Woman?
• Book Banning in Michigan School Ignites Community

Constructing Somalia: Nuruddin Farah Will "Keep My Country Alive By Writing About It"

Somalia's state of tectonic shifts is at a particularly pivotal point right now, with a new president and constitution standing on shaky ground, and author Nuruddin Farah has only his stories to offer. This is both powerful and -- not. The Somali author, compelled into exile years ago and now living in Cape Town, told the Guardian: "No matter how the characters struggle, how can you reconstruct a country that's self-destructing continuously?"

Farah is a prolific chronicler of the Horn of Africa, hinging his fiction at the point where power shapes relationships. The 66-year-old man is also a winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and he is frequently cited as a Nobel contender. Crossbones is the recent novel that completes his Past Imperfect trilogy. (Here's news on its release in South Africa.) Secrets opens in Mogadishu just before Somalia's civil war breaks open like a wound, while Gifts scours a wounded family history while taking its title from developed nations' aid to Somalia. Farah hasn't lived in Somalia in decades, though he traveled there often to serve as a sort of mediator between the transitional government and Islamists. But, according to the Guardian profile, "The country died inside me, and I carried it, for a long time, like a woman with a dead baby. It became the neurosis from which I write."

Somalia, he says, is "full of stories. We say, 'one sick person; a hundred doctors'. Somalia is a sick country and everyone has an opinion. Mine is one version; in a civil war, there are millions."

Kwame Anthony Appiah interviewed Farah in 2004 for Bomb Magazine. Appiah writes, by way of introduction:

He published his first novel From a Crooked Rib in London in 1970, at the age of 25, becoming, with that work, Somalia’s first novelist (though of course by no means her first great literary figure, since he was raised within a tradition of brilliant oral literature that can now circulate as audio recordings). Farah speaks not only Somali but also Italian, Arabic, Amharic, and, of course, the wonderful English of his nine novels.

Farah laughs a great deal in his conversation with Appiah. And it is with good humor that he discusses why, for all his agility with language, he has written in English for  nearly all of his career. (Paragraph break added by me.)

I chose to write in English because Somali, my mother tongue, had no orthography in those days. Now why did I not write in Arabic, Amharic, or Italian? The way it happened, a good, solid American typewriter decided that I would write in English. It was a Royal, and I adored it. I liked hearing the sound of it when I typed. And I couldn’t find a good enough typewriter in any of the other languages that I might have written in. There is another important factor: I’ve received much of my intellectual makeup in English.

Also, being a very practical person, I was aware that Amharic has far too many letters for a typewriter—it’s too complicated. Arabic was out of the question because Arabic typewriters weren’t common in our peninsula—and anyhow, Arabic was foreign to me too. Somali had no script until the fall of 1972. And soon enough, I started to write a novel in Somali, which was published serially, a chapter a week, in the only Mogadishu daily. The publication was discontinued because the censorship board people didn’t like a couple of chapters, and, silly as I am, I insisted, when asked to explain, that I would not allow the text to be cut. Fancy that! “This is art,” I argued. “You don’t explain art; you take it or leave it." So not only was the publication of my novel in Somali discontinued, but the censorship board also banned From a Crooked Rib, at that time my only published novel.

 

Image Credit: The Guardian

Ralph Waldo Emerson on John Brown's Holy War To End Slavery

On November 18, 1859, John Brown was living under a death sentence for the raid he led on a military arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, an act intended to arm slaves and help them escape the most brutal and bloody of American monstrosities. That night in late autumn, at the Tremont Temple in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke passionately about Brown's case at a meeting of those who wanting to provide relief aid for Brown's family. (His remarks are collected in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.) The two men had been friends. Brown was a dinner guest at Emerson's Concord home when the abolitionist was in town for meetings.

In the heat of the political moment, Emerson spoke of public hunger for every detail about Brown's life, which Emerson tidily connected to the many ways we can all relate to "the hero of Harpers Ferry." Emerson told those gathered about Brown's life as a farmer, a legacy in his family that stretched back to his ancestor on the Mayflower. Emerson named the places of birth of Brown and his family, knowing location is yet another way that people can feel a personal connection to him. As he orates, he frequently titles his friend: "Captain John Brown." And he speaks of the man who would be dead by execution in two weeks as an American ideal.

For himself, (Captain John Brown) is so transparent that all men see him through. He is a man to make friends wherever on earth courage and integrity are esteemed, the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own.

{...]

He believes in the United States, and he conceives the only obstruction to the Union is Slavery, and for that reason, as a patriot, he works for abolition. The governor of Virginia has pronounced his eulogy in a manner that discredits the moderation of our two parties. His own speeches to the court have interested the nation in him. What magnanimity, and what innocent pleading, as of childhood! You remember his words: "If I had interfered on behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or any of their friends, parents, wives, or children, it would all have been right. But I believe that to have interfered as I have done for the despised poor, was not wrong, but right."

It is easy to see what a favorite he will be with history, which plays such pranks with temporary reputations.

Quite prescient indeed. Consider, for example, artist Jacob Lawrence's "Legend of John Brown" series, or the John Brown Museum in Kansas, or the John Brown Wax Museum in West Virginia, or the John Brown House Museum in Rhode Island, or Pennsylvania's John Brown Farm, Tannery, & Museum, which you will find on John Brown Road. The Harpers Ferry raid also figures into Marilynne Robinson's novel, Gilead. His is a story, it seems, that we love to tell.

Emerson goes on, speaking of the mismatch between bureaucracy and idealism.

Nothing can resist the sympathy which all elevated minds must feel with Brown, and through them the whole civilized world: and if he must suffer, he must drag official gentlemen into an immortality most undesirable, of which they have already some disagreeable forebodings. Indeed, it is the reductio ad absurdum of Slavery, when the governor of Virginia is forced to hang a man whom he declares to be a man of the most integrity, truthfulness and courage he has ever met. Is that the kind of man the gallows is built for?

{...}

I said John Brown was an idealist. He believed in his ideas to that extent that he existed to put them all into action; he said 'he did not believe in moral suasion, he believed in putting the thing through.' He saw how deceptive the forms are. We fancy, in Massachusetts, that we are free; yet it seems the government is quite unreliable. Great wealth, great population, men of talent in the executive, on the bench -- all the forms right -- and yet, life and freedom are not safe. Why? Because the judges rely on the forms, and do not, like John Brown, use their eyes to see the facts behind the forms. They assume that the United States can protect its witness or its prisoner.

The great transcendentalist works up some bile, speaking of the differing applications of justice in Massachusetts and in Utah and in Kansas, and he excoriates the uselessness of honoring judges as "venerable and learned" if they cannot ultimately protect the life and freedom of citizens -- to the point where Emerson suggests that "at a pinch, they are no more use than idiots. After a mischance they wring their hands, but they had better never been born." These seem awfully brutal words for a man of the nonviolent persuasion, and I believe it relays the emotion Emerson felt about Brown's case.

A Vermont judge, Hutchinson, who has the Declaration of Independence in his heart; a Wisconsin judge, who knows the laws are for the protection of citizens against kidnappers, is worth a court-house full of lawyers so idolatrous of forms as to let go the substance.

And then, moments later, Emerson cuts off the fire. He walks off the stage with a gracious gesture at the work to be done.

But I am detaining the meeting on matters which others understand better. I hope, then, that in administering relief to John Brown's family, we shall remember all those whom his fate concerns, all who are in sympathy with him, and not forget to aid him in the best way, by securing freedom and independence in Massachusetts.

John Brown hanged on December 2, 1858. Emerson would speak about him again, this time in a speech in Salem in January. But he purposefully didn't speak long. Better, he indicated, "to cling to (John Brown's) history ... or let him speak for himself."

 

Related:

• PBS American Experience: "John Brown's Holy War"
• "The Life and Trial of John Brown"
• Harpers Ferry National Historical Park
• "The Portent: John Brown's Raid in American Memory"
• Bob Dylan's take on the old John Brown song