Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Monday, December 08, 2008
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Studs Terkel and the old, old left
Studs Terkel died last night. Here's an obituary. A master of "the rich art of taking the vernacular, and making it eternal."
I (sort of) met Studs Terkel once. He was speaking at a university where I worked, and where my co-workers and I were trying to organize a union. During the question and answer period, in a shameless ploy to advertise our efforts at this (hopefully sympathetic) gathering, I essentially asked him what he thought about this. He didn't hear very well, he didn't catch any of the particulars, but he waved his arms about a bit and lectured the crowd on the great benefits of the labor movement, and made a great show of signing the authorization card I handed him and putting on one of our buttons.
* * *
My high school friend P was from England — he moved to the heart of the "red states" in junior high. The Labor Party was still marginally socialist in those days before the famous TONY BLAIR, MP = I'M TORY PLAN B anagram. The guy probably never read a word of Marx in his life, but he came with this basic, English working-class understanding — predating even the "old left" of the Communist Party and the Russian revolution — that capitalism benefits the rich, socialism benefits the workers.
I (sort of) met Studs Terkel once. He was speaking at a university where I worked, and where my co-workers and I were trying to organize a union. During the question and answer period, in a shameless ploy to advertise our efforts at this (hopefully sympathetic) gathering, I essentially asked him what he thought about this. He didn't hear very well, he didn't catch any of the particulars, but he waved his arms about a bit and lectured the crowd on the great benefits of the labor movement, and made a great show of signing the authorization card I handed him and putting on one of our buttons.
* * *
My high school friend P was from England — he moved to the heart of the "red states" in junior high. The Labor Party was still marginally socialist in those days before the famous TONY BLAIR, MP = I'M TORY PLAN B anagram. The guy probably never read a word of Marx in his life, but he came with this basic, English working-class understanding — predating even the "old left" of the Communist Party and the Russian revolution — that capitalism benefits the rich, socialism benefits the workers.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
The truly amazing thing
Last night I dreamt that I was travelling with a friend and we were staying with a rich, older woman in my home town. She owned an imposing, three-story Victorian home that looked out over the park with the old locomotive in it, a park in between the only two one-way streets in town which often in my dreamscapes turns into a grand mall. She believed approvingly that my home town was "socialist" — a belief that only rich liberals could persist in.
I was woken up in the middle of the night and looked out the third-story window to see my friend getting into the car and I thought maybe driving off, but really just bringing in some forgotten items. I got up and helped out and with my trained parent's eye for small things left behind helped make sure it all got safely into the house.
* * *
In real life I woke up after that dream and had a bit of insomnia and thought about the connection between authenticity and colonialism, the powerful searching for "authentic" experiences in the lives of the less powerful.
* * *
The truly amazing thing about us is that we can heal. I suppose we wouldn't have gotten through evolution without the ability to make new skin cells and other cells and other repairs, but still. Every scar is an act of creativity.
I was woken up in the middle of the night and looked out the third-story window to see my friend getting into the car and I thought maybe driving off, but really just bringing in some forgotten items. I got up and helped out and with my trained parent's eye for small things left behind helped make sure it all got safely into the house.
* * *
In real life I woke up after that dream and had a bit of insomnia and thought about the connection between authenticity and colonialism, the powerful searching for "authentic" experiences in the lives of the less powerful.
* * *
The truly amazing thing about us is that we can heal. I suppose we wouldn't have gotten through evolution without the ability to make new skin cells and other cells and other repairs, but still. Every scar is an act of creativity.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
What I learned in college
One of my forays into the world of higher education was at a small liberal-arts college located in a small town in the Midwest. I was there for two years.
The town had a little under ten thousand residents (I never knew whether this number including the 1200 students or not), was even more overwhelmingly white than the college (which was, um, pretty white), and was noticably divided by Sixth Street, which ran just along the south edge of campus and along the north edge of downtown. North of Sixth Street was the college campus, surrounded by leafy neighborhoods filled with the spacious victorian houses that most of the professors lived in. South of Sixth Street were smaller houses, a trailer park, the county fairgrounds, feed stores and Wal-Mart, and the five or so factories that provided what employment was to be had there in the 90s.
At one point while there, I was part of a multiracial group of students who decided to facilitate a workshop/exercise on racism and discrimination called Archie Bunker's Neighborhood. You can find a more in-depth description of the exercise here, but the basic gist is dividing the participants up into different "communities," each of which has to navigate a system of bureaucracy and law enforcement in order to build their community, and — as with real life bureaucracy and law enforcement — the facilitators playing the sherriff, mayor, permitting office etc. treat the white group more favorably and leniently. Then everyone breaks into small groups, blah blah blah.
In addition to doing this on campus, we also did it at the town's high school. I don't remember whether I got to be the sherriff, etc., but I did have to facilitate a small group discussion — not something I had a lot of practice with when I was twenty.
The small-group discussion with my small group of all-white high school students went about as one would expect — the liberal, middle-class children of the college professors and other professionals in town knew the right lines to say, summed up appropriate moral outrage, while the working-class kids kind of stumbled over themselves, kept their mouths shut, or said mildly inappropriate things ... until the subject of Rodney King and the LA riots — which had just happened a year or two previously — came up.
All of a sudden the entire group changed. The middle-class students' moral outrage was directed at the rioters (why couldn't they just be nice non-violent Negroes like Martin Luther King?) and the working-class students began telling stories of being followed and harassed by cops whenever they went north of Sixth Street, or just for being out in a group together. "I guess I kind of felt like I knew why those people rioted in LA."
* * *
One of my best friends at this college was T, from a lower-middle-class family in rural Wisconsin. She, like me, felt a little out of place there — the vast majority of students were from the suburbs of Chicago and other large Midwestern cities. One summer she stayed in town and supported herself by lying about not being a college student and getting a job at one of the factories in town, sewing sportswear in a poorly-ventilated metal box on the south side. She was an avid gardener — I still have photos from that summer of us balancing produce on our heads for laughs.
One day in the spring she was walking with another friend — J, a counterculturalist from the suburban tracts of Ohio — by the feed store. They had extensive and well-groomed flower beds out front. T noticed one extremely tall flower in a bed where the owners were clearly aiming for a uniform height. Almost absent-mindedly, from the know-it-in-your-bones-and-muscles that comes from true craft, T reached out and pruned the errant flower.
J — against all conformism and hierarchy — was appalled.
The town had a little under ten thousand residents (I never knew whether this number including the 1200 students or not), was even more overwhelmingly white than the college (which was, um, pretty white), and was noticably divided by Sixth Street, which ran just along the south edge of campus and along the north edge of downtown. North of Sixth Street was the college campus, surrounded by leafy neighborhoods filled with the spacious victorian houses that most of the professors lived in. South of Sixth Street were smaller houses, a trailer park, the county fairgrounds, feed stores and Wal-Mart, and the five or so factories that provided what employment was to be had there in the 90s.
At one point while there, I was part of a multiracial group of students who decided to facilitate a workshop/exercise on racism and discrimination called Archie Bunker's Neighborhood. You can find a more in-depth description of the exercise here, but the basic gist is dividing the participants up into different "communities," each of which has to navigate a system of bureaucracy and law enforcement in order to build their community, and — as with real life bureaucracy and law enforcement — the facilitators playing the sherriff, mayor, permitting office etc. treat the white group more favorably and leniently. Then everyone breaks into small groups, blah blah blah.
In addition to doing this on campus, we also did it at the town's high school. I don't remember whether I got to be the sherriff, etc., but I did have to facilitate a small group discussion — not something I had a lot of practice with when I was twenty.
The small-group discussion with my small group of all-white high school students went about as one would expect — the liberal, middle-class children of the college professors and other professionals in town knew the right lines to say, summed up appropriate moral outrage, while the working-class kids kind of stumbled over themselves, kept their mouths shut, or said mildly inappropriate things ... until the subject of Rodney King and the LA riots — which had just happened a year or two previously — came up.
All of a sudden the entire group changed. The middle-class students' moral outrage was directed at the rioters (why couldn't they just be nice non-violent Negroes like Martin Luther King?) and the working-class students began telling stories of being followed and harassed by cops whenever they went north of Sixth Street, or just for being out in a group together. "I guess I kind of felt like I knew why those people rioted in LA."
* * *
One of my best friends at this college was T, from a lower-middle-class family in rural Wisconsin. She, like me, felt a little out of place there — the vast majority of students were from the suburbs of Chicago and other large Midwestern cities. One summer she stayed in town and supported herself by lying about not being a college student and getting a job at one of the factories in town, sewing sportswear in a poorly-ventilated metal box on the south side. She was an avid gardener — I still have photos from that summer of us balancing produce on our heads for laughs.
One day in the spring she was walking with another friend — J, a counterculturalist from the suburban tracts of Ohio — by the feed store. They had extensive and well-groomed flower beds out front. T noticed one extremely tall flower in a bed where the owners were clearly aiming for a uniform height. Almost absent-mindedly, from the know-it-in-your-bones-and-muscles that comes from true craft, T reached out and pruned the errant flower.
J — against all conformism and hierarchy — was appalled.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Resolutions and high-profile friends
I kinda sorta made a new year's resolution to "blog more." I'm not sure why, exactly, but it may lead to more writing on here, has already inspired a new design, and will probably mean a new direction and some attempt to attract readers.
If you just stumbled upon this, the best writing is not really what's below (which is, of course, hardly writing), but rather the writing from 2005.
Meanwhile, looks like my old Iowa friend Jamie Schweser is going to be in the New York Times Style section this Sunday. Check out his website.
If you just stumbled upon this, the best writing is not really what's below (which is, of course, hardly writing), but rather the writing from 2005.
Meanwhile, looks like my old Iowa friend Jamie Schweser is going to be in the New York Times Style section this Sunday. Check out his website.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Though geography conspires against us
At the memorial service for my father, held about a week and a half ago in the middle of the country, some of my parents' closest friends flew in from far afield — New England, D.C., the Bay Area, the Pacific Northwest — some of them to speak at the service and some just to attend. One of the speakers said in his remarks that whenever he and his wife met up with my parents over the more than three and a half decades they have known each other, it was like picking up a conversation that had only left off the day before, instead of the three or five or thirteen years since they had last seen each other.
Another friend, H, could not attend the service but sent a touching testimonial. H became a friend of my father's in high school, on Long Island. The last time they saw each other was when H, who struggled for years to make a living as an actor in New York, came out to the Midwest in a touring show. This was when I was in high school, and I remember having lunch with them. I don't remember much about the conversation, or even really about H himself, but I do remember the meeting as seeming to possess a gravity of emotion that somehow pulled a little on my life, the way the pull of a massive object can curve the path of a flying object or even a beam of light. I was also, being a teenager, stunned by the fact that my father had a friend with a romantic profession like being a real actor!
H remembers the visit this way:
The internet can give us a sense of being connected to people across great distances. Certainly, my father stayed in touch with his old friends, and us children as well, on a far more regular basis once email had permeated professional and academic life in the late 90s.
But the myth of the internet is the myth of weightlessness, that somehow when we get online we transcend our physical bodies, our frailties and passions and needs. The myth of internet weightlessness is what fooled so many people into thinking the late 90s were a "New Economy," where everyone would get rich from information technology because the internet economy was not subject to the physical realities of paying people to make things and move things and that "the economy" was somehow now divorced from the way we procure the physical things we need to feed and house and clothe and enjoy ourselves. Of course, the "New Economy" turned out to be just a classic speculative bubble, and under the cover of this illusion the making of things was moved from that factory north of town to southeast Asia, from paying your neighbor's mortgage to handing a few coins at the end of the day to desperate, starving young women.
It is now a truism that the internet is a crucial tool for organizing in the global economy, but we underestimate the physical at our own peril. No interactive technology can convince you of the physical repercussions of the "weightless economy" quite as well as a woman from a factory in Bangladesh describing in person the maladies wracking her body and the bodies of her children because she could afford to feed her family nothing but a scant daily portion of rice. And no emailed message of solidarity can build trust like a handshake, or face-to-face discussions awkward because of translation but ringing true in the language of bodies.
We stayed around for a couple of days after the service. The night before we left, I was talking with my mom about her and my father's relationships with the folks who had come to the service. She said, "You don't meet too many people in this world who you just click with. When you do, you've got to hold on to them."
Another friend, H, could not attend the service but sent a touching testimonial. H became a friend of my father's in high school, on Long Island. The last time they saw each other was when H, who struggled for years to make a living as an actor in New York, came out to the Midwest in a touring show. This was when I was in high school, and I remember having lunch with them. I don't remember much about the conversation, or even really about H himself, but I do remember the meeting as seeming to possess a gravity of emotion that somehow pulled a little on my life, the way the pull of a massive object can curve the path of a flying object or even a beam of light. I was also, being a teenager, stunned by the fact that my father had a friend with a romantic profession like being a real actor!
H remembers the visit this way:
We went to the Museum to see a Thomas Hart Benton retrospective, and ended up sitting the entire afternoon in the museum cafeteria, letting our conversation play over every topic from our personal lives to the events of the day. He was always a conversationalist worth a trip across the country. It remains a day that anchors my thoughts.
The internet can give us a sense of being connected to people across great distances. Certainly, my father stayed in touch with his old friends, and us children as well, on a far more regular basis once email had permeated professional and academic life in the late 90s.
But the myth of the internet is the myth of weightlessness, that somehow when we get online we transcend our physical bodies, our frailties and passions and needs. The myth of internet weightlessness is what fooled so many people into thinking the late 90s were a "New Economy," where everyone would get rich from information technology because the internet economy was not subject to the physical realities of paying people to make things and move things and that "the economy" was somehow now divorced from the way we procure the physical things we need to feed and house and clothe and enjoy ourselves. Of course, the "New Economy" turned out to be just a classic speculative bubble, and under the cover of this illusion the making of things was moved from that factory north of town to southeast Asia, from paying your neighbor's mortgage to handing a few coins at the end of the day to desperate, starving young women.
It is now a truism that the internet is a crucial tool for organizing in the global economy, but we underestimate the physical at our own peril. No interactive technology can convince you of the physical repercussions of the "weightless economy" quite as well as a woman from a factory in Bangladesh describing in person the maladies wracking her body and the bodies of her children because she could afford to feed her family nothing but a scant daily portion of rice. And no emailed message of solidarity can build trust like a handshake, or face-to-face discussions awkward because of translation but ringing true in the language of bodies.
We stayed around for a couple of days after the service. The night before we left, I was talking with my mom about her and my father's relationships with the folks who had come to the service. She said, "You don't meet too many people in this world who you just click with. When you do, you've got to hold on to them."
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