December 29

What drew me into the novel I wanted to write was a strange phenomenon called the Ghost Dance, a fanatic belief among Native people, circa 1889, that Ian Frazier calls "the first American religion." How on earth, I wondered, could an entire people--just about all Native people west of the Mississippi--be so completely deceived, if deceived is the right word?

A Paiute named Wovoka out in Utah had a vision to which hundreds of thousands eventually subscribed. Dance and the elders will return, as will titanka, the buffalo. Come together as a people, refrain from strong drink, love one another, and all those white people will disappear tomorrow beginning a glorious resurrection of the old ways and the old good times. Thousands of Native people believed and danced, all over the American west.

The Lakota added this distinction: those who dance will not be harmed by the bullets of the soldiers. In a rain of gunfire, they will ride free as the wind.

The Ghost Dance scared lots of white folks, entertained others. At Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Lakota gathered to dance and the agent, Daniel F. Royer, deathly afraid, called in hundreds of backup troops. Meanwhile, from the north, a ragged band of Minneconjou Sioux led by Big Foot was moving south towards Red Cloud's camp just over the border in Nebraska.

Out on the open land of western South Dakota, Agent Royer's request for more troops created the largest military encampment anywhere in America since the Civil War, the Seventh Calvary among them, Custer's old regiment, whose memory of Wounded Knee, 24 years earlier was still vivid.

The fact is, historians can come up with a dozen reasons why there was a massacre 119 years ago today at a place called Wounded Knee; and while all of them make sense, none of them make reliving the horror any easier. And there is a bottom line: white folks wanted land the Native people thought of as home; and they got it--my own Dutch immigrant great-grandparents among them.

Some years ago, I stumbled across a handsome reprint of an old book by James Mooney, an anthropologist, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, a 1896 study Mooney did himself in an effort to understand the phenomenon. I bought it, read it, and then set out to write a novel that used the massacre as a backdrop.

That novel--Touches the Sky--changed me, because every December 29 I see that wide land along the creek called the Wounded Knee, hundreds of blue coats surrounding an angry and hungry people, late December, and the bloody madness that followed, the deaths of hundreds.

This morning it's cold outside here. At Pine Ridge, it's 18 degrees, although the wind chill makes it feel like five. Sometimes I wish I could coax all my students out to visit Wounded Knee in late December, to stand out there in the cold and the silence.

I'm not interested in white guilt, just history, just the story. For white America, Wounded Knee makes vividly clear that our history is not blameless. No one can stand out there on a cold December afternoon and not be humbled into silence.

Today is December 29.

And this was before the storm!

Self Check Out at Walmart

I’m no fan of shopping. In fact, I think that Black Friday is diabolical and that Christmas shopping is an inevitable vortex of death. I get sucked in every year but go down kicking and screaming “bourgeois” like a mantra. It gets so bad that recently my wife bemoaned my Christmas “morals” which weren’t making shopping any easier. In other words, I can be a mean one, Mr. Grinch.

But last week, after a trip to the dentist that only cost me $114 per kid, I needed to go to Walmart to get one thing, and I have to admit, I looked forward to going in. I bypassed the KFC/A&W, looked disdainfully at the diminutive Shopko, almost crashed at the odd intersections that funneled me toward the store, and finally stood before this monolithic Agora of small town America: a big, tan rectangular box with surveillance cameras on the top—cameras that were somehow comforting. If I were to get beat on the head and kidnapped, at least the footage would show up on the six o’clock news. Still, somewhere in my being, I anticipated the electric eye triggering the mechanism and rolling the doors back and leading me first into the Walmart foyer/mudroom and then the second set of doors opening into the huge bazaar, the hall of wonders that is Walmart proper. I felt some kinship with James Joyce’s narrator of “Araby,” though he at least had a name to conjure up wonder, “Araby.” I just had “Walmart”—perhaps the ugliest word in the English language.

But I had size, and size, as they say, is everything. Acres and acres of space and stuff just to wander around and get lost in. Somewhere in me, a la the supermarket sensations in White Noise, I just wanted to stroll down aisles and let the psychic date of product labeling speak to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t come in to spend profligate amounts. This was no Christmas shopping spree. All I needed was toilet paper. That’s it. Simple butt wipe. And what better place to get TP than Walmart? I was not feeding the corporate machine—this was about needs and necessities and totally justifiable.

I indeed found the toilet paper aisle, and then that other part of the experience of Walmart, or any shopping experience, began. Consumer anxiety. Which kind of toilet paper should I get? What’s the best deal? Should I go for the White Cloud because it’s cheapest? Or the Charmin brand because of name recognition? If I bought the White Cloud, wouldn’t I get home to find out it was thinner, less tightly rolled, and therefore not as good a deal? Did I want 8 regular rolls? Or 8 double rolls of 12? Or 12 rolls of 24? Or 6 rolls of 48? Or 4 rolls of 96? What did all these numbers mean?

In the midst of panic, my head cleared for a moment—middle brand, find a middle brand! I picked up some Cottonelle, twelve rolls of I’m not sure what thickness.

Then we were out of there. Except for one thing: on the way in, at the sight of the KFC/A&W, I had said to my boys, “How about after Walmart we have root beer floats?” Now, clearer thinking set in. We had just come from the dentist and it was getting on in the afternoon—about 4:30. That meant supper was on the horizon and I didn’t want to make another stop or draw the ire of their mom.

Fortunately, one of my sons had seen the psychic data for the snack section on the way in, so I sidetracked us thusly. Then we had another consumer choice. Holiday Snack Cakes, Holiday Marshmallow Treats, Christmas Tree Cakes, Star Crunches, Cosmic Brownies, Devil Squares, Oatmeal Crème Pies. One son wanted one kind, the other another. I tried to sell them on Oatmeal Crème Pies, another household name I felt safe with. They both rejected it wholeheartedly. Then I directed them up to the Gummi Bear Fruit Snacks—small, savory, a non-appetite ruiner—and managed to strong-arm on them on that choice.

In and out of Wal-Mart with toilet paper and Gummi Bears, relatively untainted. As we headed to the checkouts, the aisles directly ahead of us were wide open but unmanned and labeled “Self Checkout.” However, I had some time, now that I’d saved myself a stop at KFC/A&W, plus “Self Checkout” scared me. What if I didn’t possess enough techno-savvy to safely navigate my way through? What if I did it wrong and got hauled in for shoplifting? What if I couldn’t figure it out and caused a traffic jam of fuming fast-laners behind me? And besides, wasn’t this so-called “self-checkout,” this elimination of the sacred human interaction between buyer and seller, exactly the evil part of Wal-Mart that I didn’t want to support?

I veered from the open self-checkouts for a line with only one patron in it, completely content to wait my turn, to wait for the human interaction with what seemed like a completely competent clerk. Plus, the woman in front of me didn’t have that much in her cart.

Or maybe she did. She had her cart about half empty when I pulled into line—and then I saw several cases of pop and assorted bargains underneath her cart. And then there was some matter about gift cards. She had grabbed some from somewhere between the gum and US Weekly but now there was some controversy about the clerk “loading them.”

“We can’t load them here because . . .” she was saying. And the woman wasn’t getting it. The unloading process had ground to a halt. Suddenly this human interaction thing seemed like not such a good idea. I had been standing here with two kids anxious for fruit snacks for all of 78 seconds but, by the looks of it, I had another 78 to go.

So I bailed. Headed for the self-checkout. How hard could it be? No harder than human communication.

I pulled into the nearest aisle where a nice gentleman, a shade older than I am, was just finishing up a purchase. I could watch him and learn and based on this knowledge I was sure I could make it through—-run the technology gauntlet so to speak.

Just as the guy was finishing, he muttered under his breath and reached back to the child seat area of the cart. “Sorry, I forgot one thing,” he sighed. He was as anxious as I was.

“No, problem, I’ve never done this before,” I confessed, I’m not sure why. What I meant was that, since it was my first time, I, too, might make a mistake, which meant I could understand his embarrassing predicament.

He went through a ritual of touching the screen, swiping a plastic card, moving his product—I didn’t see what it was, something small like a coaster or something—across the scanner, waiting, then moving on through.

“Sorry again,” he said.

“No problem,” I said magnanimously.

I moved ahead to the touch screen, which started with a picture from a point of view behind an animated character—like Lara Croft but not nearly that ridiculously voluptuous, more Walmart-ish—standing in exactly the position that I was at the register. Then a voice talked to me, walking me through the process: “Scan your first item,” it began. I did, something beeped, the price appeared on the screen. Success. On the metal edge next to the glass scanner there was a note that said, “Touch your purchase here.” I was confused. Did I have to touch the metal piece so as to “demagnetize” it or something, so I would not set off bells and whistles and draw the attention of security when I exited? I touched it. Nothing happened. Oh well.

With my second item, I had a bit more trouble with the scanning, but eventually I heard the magic beep again and my mind was put at ease. I swiped my card, punched in my secret code, bagged my purchase in the millionth plastic bag, and my quest was complete. I left through the automatic doors without bells and whistles, without guard dogs or the SS.

As I walked out, I saw the troublesome woman with unloaded gift cards just leaving her checkout aisle. I had saved myself at least thirty seconds: a very wise choice.
By the time I’d left, I felt as if I’d completed a quest: I’d been purged of something and I had toilet paper.

As I left with that bittersweet sense of accomplishment and frustration, however, I knew that at some point I’d probably return to buy a present or two. The experience would be my toilet paper experience on steroids, with an especially increased sense of emotional jostling.

With the rectangular box and surveillance cameras in my mental rearview mirror, I decided that Walmart is the opposite of a stable with a manger in it. And then I realized how cliché that realization is. Most of the stories I’ve read of the first Christmas paint Bethlehem as busy as a Walmart at Christmas time. “But there was no room for them in the inn,” gets rendered into “There was so much bustle, no one would even make room for the Son of God to be born.” And so the story becomes a parable for how the busyness of shopping overwhelms the proverbial “reason for the season,” a phrase that winds up being a commercial jingle among commercial jingles.

My sense is that “there was no room for them in the inn” is more connotative of callousness than it is bustle: a young woman nine months pregnant and no one will give up a spot for her? Perhaps there is that bourgeois element to it. Mary was presumably young, and Joseph and Mary were so working class, and they were from Nazareth nonetheless. And so they end up in a stable, or at least in some place where there’s a manger. We don’t actually get the word “stable” in scripture. One place on the internet claims Jesus was probably born in the ground level of a relative’s house, a section that housed the animals and thus had a manger. As a believer in story itself, however, I cling to tradition here: born in a barn, only barn animals for witnesses, wrapped in “strips of cloth and lying in a manger.” This setting fits the pattern of human callousness in any era.

I had started this essay intending to declare at this point that Walmart is the opposite of a stable, but now that I’m here I cannot do it so easily. Supposing a dirt poor couple—out of towners or even foreigners without health insurance—showed up in a small Midwestern town, and presuming a somewhat-difficult-to-imagine callousness that excluded them from a small town hospital, wouldn’t a Walmart be a logical place for them to take refuge? “Supposed ‘Baby King’ Born in Walmart’”—who couldn’t imagine that headline? Or bourgeois readers like me looking down on the child born there? Or, even more likely, the King could be born in the place of nomads and truckdrivers: “Winter Birth in Walmart Parking Lot Dubbed ‘Miraculous.’”

But that brings me back to callousness, disregard, busyness. Maybe Walmart is akin to Bethlehem at Christmas time because of these things. Remember the annual “running of the people” on Black Friday that left one individual trampled to death and many more injured? Beyond callous.

No, for the setting of the first Christmas, I’ll take the stable because it’s so countercultural. Because it speaks so loudly to human depravity and callousness. Because it’s so out of the way, so unworthy of even horrific press. Because wherever Jesus was born, it wasn’t a place that conjured up grandeur; there were no electric eyes watching, no surveillance cameras. Rather, where the King was born was marginal, because too many people went through the self-checkout in order to speed on their selfish little ways.

This Christmas season I’m struck again by the fact that “She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

How absolutely callous of us. It’s no wonder they’ve banned nativity scenes from public places. Think of what they remind us of. Think of how absolutely countercultural a stable and a manger still are.

Avatar and Wounded Knee

I live in the middle of Sioux County, a town called Sioux Center, just a few miles east of the state line, drawn there by the Big Sioux River; but if anyone calls this place "Sioux Country," he'd be dead wrong, unless he were referring to what once was. Some folks with some Sioux blood may well be around, but the veins of most the populace run richly Dutch or Mexican. The Sioux are long gone.

My guess is few here think much about what once was--how, specifically, once upon a time, no white folks lived around here at all, and how, in fact, most of those who did roam the grasslands were red. It's true, of course. But, mostly, history is bunk.

I thought of that a great deal last night as I sat in a theater in Sioux Center and watched Avatar, the film everyone's talking about (which is why I went). For a while, I thought James Cameron had bestowed up us all a marvelous Christmas blessing, retelling a story that we need to hear, a story of land-grabbing that's as undeniable as it was inevitable, I guess, a truly American story--how this rich prairie turned abundant. Today, Sioux County feeds the world, after all. Who needs history?

But if you're Lakota, you don't tell the same story. Few of us white folk think much at all of them, even now, 119 years just about to the day from an bloody event that happened several hours west down Hwy. 18 at a place called Wounded Knee, an event that wasn't a battle at all, but a massacre.

There are times when Avatar, like a rich American parable, comes close to telling that story; there were times when I thought it a blessing.

But it's a movie, not a history lesson--entertainment, not truth. When it's all said and done, Wounded Knee is as forgotten as it ever was because even the most distinct parallels between what happened then and what never happened in the movie simply disappear amid all the marvelous spectacle. What drew me to see Avatar was what everyone is talking about--the spectacle of its phenomenal graphics; and it's incredibly impressive, even though we didn't even see it in 3-D. Often, amid the rich jungle, one almost forgets the story in the opulence of the fairyland. It is truly amazing.

But finally, what counts is the spectacle, what counts is the show; what really matters to Cameron and his audience is action/adventure. The real ticket is to a phenomenon almost toally capable of overwhelms the senses. He's creating experience, not trolling for truth.

It's a show, after all, and a marvelous one at that, a miracle in the making. It's a masterpiece of cinematic artistry, well worth seeing. That's what it is--a show. Nothing less, and, sadly enough, nothing more.

It as gaudy and excessive as, well, one might well expect. In fact, more so.

And it bears less than token resemblance to what happened just a few days short of 119 years ago just down Hwy. 18. When last night, it ended, I'm guessing no one in Sioux Center had a second thought about Wounded Knee.

Are You Smarter Than a Third Grader?

As providence would have it, I visit my daughter’s classroom during what amounts to third grade composition. “Come on in,” the teacher beckons me. “We’ll be writing a paragraph—but you won’t see much teaching,” she admits.

My daughter sits in the back row, between two boys, at the heavy desks of green metal construction, a thick particle-board top and orangeish—How do you spell “orange-ish” and why isn’t it a word?—surface. These are still the desks of the military-industrial machine, I can’t help but think, blunt, heavy, ugly and barely functional. I can scarcely remember seeing an uglier desk. My daughter’s desk happens to have her two cubbies on the right side, one on top where I see she’s got her pencil box neatly stashed and the larger one below where she’s got her books neatly ordered. Unfortunately, the desk of the boy to my daughter’s left is positioned exactly the opposite, with the cubbies on the left, meaning they are sitting directly next to each other, but really directly on top of each other, a total invasion of space. So much for a room—or even a space—of one’s own for my aspiring writer.

The teacher proceeds to explain the assignment: the students are to write a paragraph for the local newspaper that has this first line: “During the Christmas holidays, I like to . . .” The teacher writes the sentence on the board in immaculate letters. This first line will help them get going, the teacher explains, and they are to fill in half a page with whatever they would like.

“What do they mean by ‘holidays,’” one student asks, “Christmas and New Year’s?”

“Well, I might substitute ‘vacation’ for ‘holidays’” answers the teacher, suggesting they think both about the days themselves and the break from school in between.

“Make sure to write things that are interesting,” she encourages them. Do they open presents at grandma’s house? Put that in. Do they drink eggnog by an open fire—how many of them have had egg nog? A half dozen hands go up in the air; my daughter raises her hand and looks at me questioningly. There’s clearly some prestige in saying you’ve had eggnog and liked it. “We had that eggnog shake from McDonald’s,” I whisper, “I’m sure that counts.”

Then we’re back to the paragraph. “Make sure not to start each sentence the same way,” the teacher says, exemplifying with a series of rapid-fire sentences beginning with “and” that are the model of monotony. “Would that sound very interesting?” she asks. A scattering of “no’s” and head shakes are her answer. “And make sure to write just about Christmas,” she continues. “It wouldn’t make sense to say, ‘and I like turkey for Thanksgiving,’ would it?” Again, head shakes.

“When you’re finished, bring them to me and I’ll read over them to see about mistakes,” the teacher says, “because the newspaper will print them just as they are. Grandpas and grandmas like to see mistakes when they print them—they think they’re cute—but how do you feel about them?”

“Embarrassed,” someone says. Yes, this is third grade.

Finally, they’re off to writing, the teacher trouble shooting. One student asks about the spelling of a word, another is told to use a period; another girl, just two desks down from my daughter asks a question that gets the reply, “It doesn’t matter, just write.” I sneak a look at the girl’s paper. After about five minutes or so she hasn’t written anything yet. The boy next to my daughter is also stuck on zero.

My daughter starts with something about presents. Then she writes another generic memory about the Christmas tree. I know I shouldn’t taint the waters but I can’t resist. She needs her memory jarred. “What do we do Christmas Eve, Sommer?” I ask her. Ah, a question—that’s not forcing her hand. It’s leading her. The question references our family’s Christmas Eve practice of sleeping by the Christmas tree. It’s about the most distinctive thing we do. Surely, she would have remembered it on her own anyway, right? Then again, considering the time constraints—the teacher has apologized profusely for forgetting to do this assignment earlier, it’s due today—maybe not.

She writes quite a long sentence at my suggestion and then she stops again. A few students get up and approach the teacher’s desk to have their paragraphs proofread. Others still have nothing written.

“Where did we spend Christmas last year, Sommer?” I ask, again prompting here irresistibly. “Oh, Denmark.” She writes. “How do you spell that?”

“Do you remember New Year’s?” I can’t stop myself. In Copenhagen at midnight on New Year’s Eve, there are no state-sponsored fireworks. Rather, everyone—and I literally mean everyone in a city of millions—buys fireworks and shoots them off at any street corner or park they can find. And I’m not just talking bottle rockets and sparklers. I mean the really big showery flowery ones, the glittery rainy ones, and the shock-and-awe sonic boom ones. Surely, this will be memorable to Sommer—and make for memorable writing. And now I’ve tainted the piece irreparably. It’s probably a little show-offy, I think to myself: “When I was in Denmark . . .”

So I decide I better leave before I jerk the pencil from my daughter’s hand and write it the way I want it. It’s been quite a lesson. I’ve seen students with trouble getting started, students staring in horror at a blank page despite having been given a first line, students concerned about their audience. I’ve seen students challenged to stay focused, students prompted to use memorable details, students temporarily road blocked by spelling and punctuation. I’ve seen students confronted with proofreading and deadlines and the assembly line process of writing with others on top of them.

Still, I’ve witnessed the act of creation. My daughter typically has a sharp memory, coming up with things from the past that I’m surprised she remembers. Put on the spot, however, the past becomes an indistinct blob for us all. Writing cultivates the ground of the memory, brings things to mind that might otherwise slip away, crystallizes them and organizes them and concretizes them in a way that makes meaning of them. As I look around the room, these students are making the Christmas traditions of their childhoods, shaping lumps of indistinct memories into days and moments that they decide stick out, that they decide are meaningful for some interior quality inherent to the experience itself and now exposed by the power of the third grade mind.

So I go home to grade papers from college writers who face some of the same problems as third grade writers: getting started, writing varied sentences, staying focused, using memorable detail. And then I’ll sit down to compose this essay, struggling with the same things—should I really leave “orangish” in? How should I spell it?

I’m really no smarter than a third grader.

But I’ll jar my memory, spur my imagination, publish it on the blog for a couple of readers max, and it will be worth it.

Passionate purple tulips

That Ricky Ian Gordon was a songwriter should not have surprised me. I found this poem in my morning e-mail yesterday and loved it somehow, in part, I'm sure because wonderful poems that perform such delicate rhythm and rhyme games are not so easy to find, even though Frost used to say--I think!--that writing poems without rhyme was like playing tennis without a net. Most poets, or so it seems to someone who isn't one, don't imprison themselves with such formalistic silliness.

Anyway, Ricky Ian Gordon, who's a gifted songwriter, I'm told, sticks delightfully with both standard rythym and rhyme through this wonderful little saga.

The Tulips by Ricky Ian Gordon　

The tulips at that perfect place

crane their necks with liquid grace

like swans who circling, collide

within the lake this vase provides.

They stood like soldiers, stiff, before

as if they had been called to war.

In two days more, when petals fall,

I will entomb them in the hall

with trash; the morning's coffee grinds,

old newspapers, and lemon rinds.

It's bitter that such loveliness

should come to this,could come to this.

The first two lines make it clear that this piece of writing is quite self-consciously traditional. What follows immediately suggests that Mr. Gordon is conscious not only of rhyming rules but of fooling around with those rules as well: collide and provides are no perfect match, but as entertained as I am by the first four lines, I really don't care if he chooses to fudge a little. I'm in.

I don't quite see collide, however, as if a flock of swans--or is it a gaggle--run into each other mysteriously? Yet, where they are is a "perfect place?" Takes a better interpreter than I am to create the image. No matter. Like I said, I'm in.

What's clear is that he's toying with ye olde trope of ubi sunt--"where have all the flowers gone?"--because they are dying, sadly enough, those passionate purple tulips, as all tulips do, and flowers, and, well, all things.

And it is, to him, just as sad as it was to poets forever--that beauty's stay is so momentary--bitter, he calls it. And it is.

And he hammers that bitterness home with the last two lines: "should come to this/ could come to this," two lines which deliberately alter the rhythm and then, as if that weren't enough, jam the rhyme into our sadness by pointed repititition.

Okay, I admit it: I'm loving the music. On we go.

But now their purpleness ignites

the room with incandescent lights.

Their stamens reach their yellow tongues

to lick the air into their lungs

through stems attached to whitish manes.

The pistil stains.

But they're not dying yet--there's relief in that fact for all of us; so let's gather the tulips while we may and make some hay while the sun shines. Good night, they're bright, he claims, as tulips are, and hearty too. Maybe I'm wrong or shouldn't say it, but there's a little Georgia O'Keefe here. He's messing around just like she did, suggesting some swelling human passion with all those stamens and stems, all of which means he can't bring himself to quit this passionate madness in just four lines--this one has five. Maybe I'm just a dirty old man--old for sure.

And even though there are no bees

about the room for them to please,

I take them in like honey dew-and buzzing now,

I think of you...

The honey dew escapes me, but the playful suggestion that he's a honey bee is sweet and comical, and in line with just about everything anybody knows about love poetry's traditional overstatement. In love, most of us are downright fools. Why not bees? Sure.

And with the last line--"I think of you"--we know exactly where we're at--this is plain old heart-melting love poetry. Sure, now bring it on home, Mr. Gordon, I'm saying.

And then this:

I think of you who bought me these,

at least,

I wish you had,

as that might ease the ache

of passing hours.

A love is dying, like these flowers.

Aw, rats. He's woven a world that's blessedly cartoonish, only to blow it away in a single line--"I wish you had."

Just like that we're helplessly back in real time, the incandescene of those passionate purple tulips dimming by the minute, the lover somewhere gone out the door, the world in seething, solitary silence.

And yet he can't help himself, so he ends with these flowers, dying though they may be, which is to say, I think, at least we had 'em, didn't we? At least they were here for awhile. At least we got a glimpse, however fleeting, of what joy is.

There isn't a darn thing new about this poem. Some undergrad could put together a collection of great poems of all time with an identical theme. Identical.

But it is dear, as are all of its ancestors. Willa Cather used to say that there's only a couple of stories around; we just keep telling them over and over and over.

We're like children that way, I guess. And that's not all bad. And there's something to the music, too.

Reading Tiger Woods: the Legend, the Myth, the Man

Really. Tiger Woods has been sleeping around? Really, his relationship with his fembot wife from the Swedish Bikini team was a sham? Really, the man whose father proclaimed he was the messiah not just of golf but of the world is an egomaniac? Really? Really, the man who spends his time traveling the world and playing on the nearly ubiquitous but penultimate man-made landscapes that must add up to“the geography of nowhere” and who lives in what I can only imagine to be the ultimate gated community of Windermere, Florida, has a woman in every port? Really? Really, the man who scores of fans admire for his conquests of these landscapes is also notching his belt with female conquests? Really.

I must admit to a number of things about Tiger Woods and this incident. First, I must admit that I have been a Tiger fan. I am not a golfer but I watch golf when Tiger plays, especially when he is either “making a charge” or atop the leader board. For whatever reason, I thrill to watch Tiger destroy a course and the field of primarily pasty white golfers plus Vijay Singh and a handful of Asians. I especially like those type of runaway victories that smack of godhood, like when he destroyed the hallowed Augusta National only a few short years into his pro career, deconstructing (a non-English teacher would probably say “destroying”) a course that has since been remade and so remains the idol of the game.

I was also a sucker for Tiger’s one-legged victory in the US Open just before announcing he had a torn ACL and would undergo season-ending knee surgery. The greatest of athletes seem to have this in common: they are able to perform at championship levels when mere mortals could not. Like Jordan’s flu-performance against Utah in the NBA finals, which I remember clearly, or Willis Reed’s legendary appearance after a knee injury, which I wasn’t even alive for but can understand the legend. In this way, too, Tiger is transcendent, and I ate it all up.

I must also admit that when I heard about Tiger’s affair(s), I laughed. All the signs were in place for exactly this sort of thing—the messiah-status created by his father Earl Woods, his marriage to a bikini model, his general egomania, his occasional swearing outbursts that blatantly disregarded both social norms and role model status.

Tiger Woods’ Deconstructive Power

Despite all these despicable traits, however, I lionized Tiger in my own mind. Why? Tiger Woods is soon to be 34 years old, my own age; he’s a Gen-Xer, like me. In many ways, he is symbolic of my generation, especially as he has smashed perhaps the final high place of the white sporting world: the sacred ground of golf.

This is what I will call the deconstructive power of Tiger Woods, and some personal experience does enter into my feelings about Tiger at this point. For two summers during college, I caddied at one of Minnesota’s most prestigious golf courses, Interlachen Country Club. Interlachen is too short and too landlocked to host a modern PGA tournament, even though in 1930 Bobby Jones famously skipped a shot across the water of number nine to win the third leg of his triple crown.

Today, however, or at least when I caddied there in the Nineties, Interlachen was still a stronghold of the old boys’ club. I heard both women and minorities derided there. A woman I caddied for dubbed my Colombian-born friend, “The black,” not the worst of sins, perhaps, but symptomatic of how removed their world was from people of color.

For two summers at Interlachen, I kowtowed for tips, carrying two bags at a minimum price of $30 each, times two rounds per day for an absolute minimum earnings, assuming the weather was good, of $120 a day. (My best day was probably around $230. Yes, there’s money in golf and I have prostituted myself for it.)

The one Tiger joke I heard then, as he emerged into the professional world, came from an old woman at least in her late seventies, one of my early and poorly paying “loops.” I don’t remember how the body of the joke went except for the general question-answer format, but I clearly remember the punch-line. It went like this:

“What do you call Tiger Woods as a professional?”

And the answer: “A Thai-Coon.” Lovely, a legitimate race word coupled with a racist slur that together referenced the majority of Tiger’s ethnic makeup: his mother is Thai and his father is African-American, with some Cherokee and even Chinese blood.

“Ha, ha,” the woman laughed after she delivered the punch line and hit her crap tee shot wide right. “I love Tiger. I think he’s great.”

Yes, don’t you just love him?

I loved Tiger Woods because, if there was anything that Gen-X could offer the world, I thought, it was Tiger, a one-man wrecking ball of the vestiges of white privilege in Western culture. This was our issue; it was Cobain-esque in its own way:

With the lights out it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us,
A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido

Okay, it’s a stretch, but I guess Tiger was that racial amalgamation that seemed to defy all the social structures that seemed broken to our angst-ridden generation. After growing up with discussions of why African-Americans couldn’t play quarterback, I saw Tiger as an in-your-face answer. After one of Tiger’s early Masters’ victories, after hearing Fuzzy Zoeller joke that Tiger should serve “fried chicken” and “collard greens” at the Masters Club Champion’s Dinner, I pulled all the more for Tiger. Tiger would rule the white man’s game and prove the white man didn’t rule.

So I pulled for him. My wife pulled for him. Millions pulled for him. Even my mother-in-law—she’s Lao—pulled for him, citing his Thai blood.

A Psychological and Archetypal Reading

So, yes, I bought into the myth of Tiger Woods; I helped make the myth of Tiger Woods. An important part of the myth was the name itself: Would Tiger, named for the ultimate predator, be Tiger if he had instead remained Eldrick? This begs another question: Was Tiger born or was he made by Earl Woods’ self-fulfilling prophecy? Whatever the case, by age two, with predatory nickname in hand, Earl and Tiger had found their way onto the talk show circuit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wHkA_983_s). This was to be more than fifteen minutes of fame, however. Child prodigy was only the beginning. Tiger won an unprecedented three U.S. Amateur titles, then turned pro to more of the same. Then in 1996 came the Sports Illustrated article where Earl Woods declared Tiger a messiah to unite the races:

"Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity,” Earl Woods said. Really? And the elder Woods’ answer:

"Yes, because . . . he's playing a sport that's international. Because he's qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He's the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power" (Smith, Gary. “The Chosen One.” SI 23 December 1996. Online.)

True godhood on the golf course followed the prophecy. Then there was a queen for King Tiger. Now a harem. All of which makes complete sense.

If Tiger was to be a modern day messiah as Earl declared, then he had to be a messiah of the global capitalist dispensation. Thus Tiger achieved global celebrity on all continents, the press of crowds of men and women rising above even rock star status; thus he won championships on several continents and the path is now being cleared for him to win a gold medal in the Olympics; thus he is the face of a billion dollar economic empire; thus he married an international bikini model; thus his indiscretions included the new global technology in the form of “sexting”; thus, once again, Tiger makes his home nowhere and everywhere, on the ubiquitous golf course and in the ubiquitous gated community. I would dare to say that Tiger is rootless and identity-less.

Furthermore, Tiger is a messiah of a secular, postmodern age. This means, true to my Gen-X admiration of him, that his multiracial pedigree and global citizenship is his validation. It also means that his morality points us not to some higher moral plain but rather to the idea that man is the measure of all things: Tiger lives by his own moral code—he is above mere mortals in how he can be expected to live because of his genius. I would even venture to say that this is how we as a culture want him to be—nay, this is what we’ve groomed him to be.

Consider the television and film archetypes that modeled Tiger’s promiscuous behavior. On a lesser, comic scale there was Sam Malone from Cheers, a now laughable would-be stud but an Eighties star nonetheless. More significantly, there was Bond, James Bond, whose utter isolation as a pawn of Cold War governments leaves him nameless, placeless, loveless—and yet the ultimate lover. Bond’s character is an archetype, a character whose legacy stretches back in literature to at least George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose characters from the comic Don Juan to the serious if melodramatic Manfred were “terrifyingly attractive”--and typically as good with the ladies as Byron himself was. Biblically, of course, we can stretch back to Solomon if we’d like. In any case, Tiger Woods is a type of Byronic hero for our day and age, a Wild West gunslinger (clubslinger?) who blows into town for a time (tournament) and after a short stay rides into the sunset with another notch in his belt.

What I’m arguing is that Tiger’s actions are exactly what we as a culture expect—no, demand. He’s playing the role perfectly: he is a genius yet uncontrollable, dominant yet dangerous; he’s from nowhere and everywhere. And his modern-day harem is the ultimate status symbol, the ultimate object of conspicuous consumption reserved for the elite. His behavior, if he can emerge from this “scandal”—it’s really not a scandal, simply plot development for Entertainment Tonight—relatively unscathed, will only add to his status in our culture, not detract from it.

My cases in point are other athletes who’ve emerged unscathed—even triumphant—from would-be scandals. Tom Brady, before his knee injury and the decline of the Patriots, garnered cultural praise for his playboy fatherhood status: an AP article on a preseason game lauded Brady for attending the birth of his child with his ex-girlfriend, an actress, then flying to the preseason game and leading the Patriots to a victory, all the while getting more press for dating Giselle Bundchen, a supermodel.

There will be no better proof that this is the kind of behavior we want from our heroes than what it will take us to forgive him, which is simply this: more winning. Remember Kobe Bryant’s alleged rape case several years ago? Wiped clean as soon as he returned to championship form. Only if Tiger follows the formula of Mike Tyson—namely, he starts losing, tattoos his face, and bites Phil Mickelson’s ear off—will he lose face with us as a culture. This goes to prove that other corollary of global capitalist culture: no press is bad press. If Tiger Woods emerges from this and continues his run at major championships, we will chalk it up to his godhood, and this episode will in the future be noted in trivia questions that document Woods’ messiah-run: “In what year—the same year that Tiger Woods didn’t win a major—did word of Tiger Woods’ multiple affairs first break?”

Naturalism and Metanarrative

If I’m arguing that Tiger is merely the product of our age, an archetypal character in some metanarrative of human existence, then I find myself having to reconsider Tiger as a character. Perhaps Tiger can’t help it—his behavior, I mean. Perhaps, as with the characters in Naturalist fiction, Tiger is simply a victim of forces greater than himself. Perhaps Tiger is simply another Tess of the D’Urbervilles—or, more appropriately, Alec what’s-his-name, the upper class slime ball who takes advantage of Tess. If this were the case, if we consider Tiger a sort of pawn in a larger story, then the measure of Tiger’s worthiness, true to the best naturalism, is how he conducts himself in the face of these forces: if he acts with nobility and dignity, which might include anything, I suppose, (depending on one’s perspective) from a public apology to making up with his wife by giving her a lot of money to “brave” acceptance of his outcast status (very Byronic) to rehab for sex addiction to claiming he has a medical condition that’s part of his very nature to fatalistic suicide (both very naturalistic). I would be willing to bet on which path he chooses. Any of them will draw press and since no press is bad press, any of them will do.

But now I myself must face the question I’ve raised. Is Tiger a victim of forces larger than himself? If so, does this clear the way for me personally to pull for him once again? It’s an interesting question. My gut tells me I won’t, that I don’t pull for slime balls. Of course, doesn’t the fact that I won’t pull for slime balls illustrate that I myself was looking for a messiah in Tiger Woods? That my definition of messiah includes sexual morality but not swearing or egotism (very Gen-X of me) but that nonetheless I was looking for a messiah, perhaps recast in my own image? Haven’t I just argued for several pages that Tiger’s a product of his age, that he’s been manufactured by a global capitalist culture and is therefore somewhat less individually culpable than he might be? On both accounts, yes. And isn’t Tiger still able to destroy the idols of golf with a flawed character? Yes, but it would have been better for him to maintain moral superiority while doing it. That’s what Jesus would have done.

You should hear great irony in that last line.

I hate naturalism. I hate thinking that there are forces greater than ourselves that can pop us like a pimple. I hate thinking that I might be carried along by a narrative in which I play an unwitting part. This, as I understand it, is quite American of me. As an American, I want heroes who are themselves a force of nature. I want a hero of unbending will.

Wait a minute. There I go again.

Perhaps the scariest thing in all of this is how we (I) construct, deconstruct and reconstruct our (my) heroes. And how scripture and Christ deconstruct them all. Ultimately, in Tiger Woods I can see the mold for how we (I) cast my idols and how the narrative of scripture and example of Christ casts them down. There is nothing new under the sun after all.

So will I pull for Tiger Woods after this? Certainly not like I used to. Really, I won’t pull for anyone quite the same again. Until the next time someone emerges who transcends the game itself, whose sterling character is above reproach and . . .

Lord, help us (me).

Willa Cather, 1874 - 1947

I have two bricks in my office, two bricks I dug up from a desolate spot on the prairie, the homestead where Willa Cather's family first put down roots in Webster County, far south central Nebraska, just a dozen miles north of the Republican River. The town in which she grew up--her father was in insurance and real estate--was Red Cloud, a town that has little going for it these days other than its being the home of one of the nation's finest novelists.

I've been to Red Cloud often. I used to take classes every other year, in fact, a gruelling marathon of travel that started about five in the morning and didn't end, back home, until midnight. No matter how long it took, students always loved the trip.

I have Cather to thank, I believe, for my deep respect for the Great Plains. My Antonia will always be one of my favorite novels, in great part because Ms. Cather creates a character in that novel, Antonia herself, whose epic strength and courage make her one of the most memorable literary heroes--or heroines--of all time. Tony Shimerda, looms over that wide open landscape of that novel like some behomoth cottonwood.

Twenty miles north of Red Cloud, you can still walk around the deserted homestead where the prototype for Tony Shimerda lived. In a sweet moment late in the novel, when the narrator, Jim, visits, Tony's children come bounding out of a storm cellar not far from the back door of Tony's farm home. Often, my students would pose, like this, sitting on the door to that old storm cellar.

Just driving through the stark and open prairie of the Divide, where Cather both literally and figuratively grew up, is, today, still like entering her world, the place where she found the greatest inspiration of her lifetime. "It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang— and one's heart sang there too," she wrote in The Song of the Lark.

Willa Cather will never be just a novelist to me because what she did in her writing is evoke an entire world and dress it forever in the exacting livery of time and place with such accuracy that she, paradoxically, gave it away to all of us, wherever we left our own childhoods. She will always be, to me anyway, Red Cloud, the small town amid the prairie's red grass hills. Willa Cather could leave Nebraska, and did so frequently during her lifetime; but the plains she loved never left her. They not only found a place what she wrote--they were themselves her finest work. Even in Death Comes for the Archbishop, a New Mexico novel some consider her best, the Great Plains are there, outfitted in dusty, desert camouflage.

It's her birthday today, born in 1873. If I had my druthers, I'd climb into some stout winter clothes, grab a couple of students, and head west and south right now to see her world this afternoon, adorned in its first snow. But I don't; another trip will have to wait for another day.

I'll just have to dust off those old homestead bricks.

.

Ms. Emily

I spent most of yesterday with Ms. Emily Dickinson, hours and hours, in fact, but not enough. If I were simply to dedicate a week to doing nothing but reading her work, or a month, or a year, come retirement, I wonder just how long it would take me to tire of her, or her, me. I suppose I would eventually, but my guess is that, finally, frustrated, I'd simply throw in the towel. She can be so enigmatic.

On the other hand, she can be transparent as a schoolgirl.

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requirest sorest need.

There's room for just about everyone in her passionate fantasies--

Inebriate of Air--am I --
And Debauchee of Dew--
Reeling--through endless summer days--
From inns of Molten Blue --

But why the almost endless dashes and on-again, off-again capitalization? And what on earth does she mean sometimes, about death, for instance?

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through--

And why didn't she ever finish? Why is there several versions of the same poem with no clear preferences marked? And what does she want to say sometimes, when the words simply don't line up in any fashion most of us can understand? "A Bird came down the Walk" (328) ends when Ms. Speaker offers a crumb but the bird leaves. Here's how she describes it:

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home--

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam--
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.

I read yesterday somewhere that sometimes reading Ms. Emily is like being present in the mind because sometimes her poetry is really poetry in the making. Something about that description I like.

About faith, she was all over the map. Sometimes angry, sometimes accepting, always a cynic. I don't think I'll ever understand her, but there's always more than enough to keep me trying.

This morning, I'm thankful for yesterday--most of a day, once again, for the 35th time, with Ms. Emily.

New publications announced--and accepted in the English Department:

Prof. Bill Elgersma published an article in The English Record, a reflection on how reading and writing can be utilized with at-risk high school students as the hidden curriculum. “Sneaking in Reading and Writing” touches on several units from a class labeled "Lifeskills English," where a cross-disciplinary approach was utilized to develop reading and writing skills while the content of the class appeared to be completely unrelated to the students.

Prof. Leah Zuidema’s student, Theo Mobach, a senior biology, pre-med major from Edmonton, Alberta, created an “EMT Transition Guide” for emergency medical technicians, as an assignment in Zuidema’s Business and Technical Writing. The 31-page document trains new EMT volunteers and was presented to the local, Sioux Center squad. Mobach has been part of that organization for all of his years at Dordt. The project was so well received that it is presently being shown to EMT inspectors throughout the state as a model for local squads to imitate.

Adrianna Oudman, a junior from Wheatfield, OH, recently received word that an interview she did for Prof. James Schaap’s class has been accepted for publication in the Banner, the denominational magazine of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. In the interview, she talks with an unnamed subject about his experiences as an illegal immigrant to this country.

Dustin Biel, a senior from Lacombe, Alberta, also was contacted recently with the good news that an essay of his has been accepted for publication in the Christian Courier, an independent, cross‑Canada, Reformed‑in‑origin magazine. Dustin’s essay, a travel narrative highlighting his stay in Lebanon last year, was done as an assignment for Prof. Schaap’s writing class.

Waldo

Today, Emerson. Today, "Self-Reliance," for just about the fortieth time.

No matter. Still thrills my soul--or Oversoul, or whatever weird spiritual essence the dreamer Emerson had in his sights. I admit I'm powerless in the man's charms, even though I've been over and over and over that silly essay. I know it's crazy, just so much dreamy madness, the rantings of a parlor prophet who watched the heavens so fervently his feet only rarely touched the ground. I know it. But no matter.

Transcendentalism was among the goofiest excuses for a religion America ever birthed. Ian Frazier calls the Ghost Dance, a cultic phenomemon in Native America in the late 19th century "America's first religion," and skips thereby New England's hybrid Transcendentalism. But then, there were Europeans similarly convicted; the roots of Emerson's dreaming lay as much in Europe and the Far East as his own native soil. Even though it grew here, I suppose it wasn't born here.

In whatever soil it took root, Transcendentalism was a hazy hybrid that curled up and died in 1860, once this nation went to war. When blood flowed as deeply as did then, reality brought transcendentalism down like fire did the Hindenberg, and Emerson and his band of New Age groupies became little more than a chapter in a history book.

No matter. I love him, always have. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." Those were marching orders way back when, during the late 60s, I first read Waldo. And they still thrill me, even though when I look back it's hard to conceive of a life's path that has been more conventionally institutional than my own. Mark me among those most rarest of evangelicals--I never left the church into which I was born.

No matter. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Still thrills me, even though, after years and years and years, I still call myself a Calvinist.

No matter. "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." Still thrills me, even though I've been on boards and committees more often that I care to count, even chaired 'em. I've been a conspirator myself, for heaven's sake.

No matter. "I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim." Still thrills me, even though I came to place where I teach close to two generations ago and, like a barnacle, never left.

No matter. "Nothing is at last sacred by the integrity of your own mind." Still thrills me, even it's as heretical as it is poppycock.

No matter. "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." Still thrills me, even though, methodically and even consciously, I just about always do the opposite.


Today, in class we have Ralph Waldo Emerson--flaming heretic, peddler of grandiose illusions, pie-in-the-sky romantic, dizzy dreamer, buzz-bomb idealist, founder of the uniquely American school of positive thinking, half-whacko, three-fifths genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.


Today, Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay, "Self-Reliance." Forty times over, I'm still thrilled.

Today I'm thankful for a heretic, a lovely dreamer named Waldo. I'm no disciple, but he still gives me goose bumps.

Revenge of the New Kids

When the New Kids on the Block emerged from the pop scene of the mid ’80s, I did what any self-respecting, early teen male did: revile them. Clearly, the five boys put together to create the first of the modern boy band sensations were a media construct designed to make teenage girls scream and swoon, pieced together out of psychological profiles to match the largest possible range of archetypal young males that would appeal to the largest range of young females. They were a formula, a Pavlovian reaction, a late Twentieth-century example of social Darwinism—and as such they were truly dangerous, subversive and Satanic. Filling young heads with vacuous lyrics on love and “the right stuff”—this was a recipe for world takeover by the megalomaniacs behind their construction, by the media moguls who used them as pawns to brainwash half the population.

Okay, so when I was 14 I didn’t say this in so many words—I mainly used adolescent slurs and questioned their sexuality. But I saw through the ruse that they represented—I did.

The alternative in the mid-80s, of course, was hair bands: Motley Crue, Poison, Bon Jovi, and Guns ‘n’ Roses, just to name a few, bands that wore make up and wigs and cut a path of decadence that coincided nicely with Reaganomics and the arms race. Not much of an alternative.

Fortunately for me, also in the 80s, my sister Heidi, a bit too old and too smart to be touched by the New Kids craze, came upon an Irish band called U2. Heidi and I made our home in U2 and the Australian INXS, thus staving off the total depravity of the late 80s. Then came an actual alternative: the grunge bands that emerged from Seattle to save the world: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Sound Garden, among others.

In high school I consumed a steady diet of these alternative bands and became an alternative snob: clearly, the integrity of these bands as they questioned capitalist excess and captured the teenage angst a la The Catcher in the Rye made them transcendent beacons for civilization. Of course, I hadn’t actually read The Catcher in the Rye or really knew what Reaganomics or capitalist excess really was, but no matter. I knew authenticity when I saw it: alternative bands were the model of it; the New Kids were the antithesis of it.

And so it is with great irony that I married a huge New Kids fan. And not just a New Kids fan, a Back Street Boys fan, an NSYNC fan, an all-around pop music fan. In fact, my wife is such a big NKOTB—that’s a current nickname for the group—fan that she not only went to their concert as a teenager, she went as an adult to their reunion tour! Yes, there on the fridge is the picture of my wife with the New Kids, standing next to the one she always liked, Jonathan Knight, the one she says I remind her of.

Lucky me.

But it doesn’t end there. Currently, my children’s—my boys’—favorite CD to listen to is, you guessed it, en-kot-buh’s (that’s the best I can do to phonetically pronounce the acronym NKOTB in an attempt at mockery) greatest hits album. My four year old break dances to it. Woe is me. I am undone.

If this feels like a cry for help, gentle reader, it’s not. It’s more of a confession.

No, I’m not starting to like their music. If anything, the dated simplicity of it shows how thin it really was. Musically, it really does rank right up there with the Toddler Tunes CD my kids used to listen to.

Rather, I’m confessing to a sort of amelioration. I’m confessing to being a snob, an elitist and trying to change that. Marrying a self-proclaimed pop queen has been the best thing for me. I depend on my wife to keep me current on these things as a matter of principle. I confess to letting her open up my world a bit, to stepping down from my high and mighty throne of superiority where I ruled with my scepter of authenticity. I even confess to being a Whitney Houston fan. Honestly, I am clearly aware that “The Greatest Love of All” is sheer narcissism but it can still bring me to tears.

I confess to not being bothered that my sons sing “The Right Stuff,” but now I’m wondering why it doesn’t bother me. And I’m not sure what to say. I don’t want to say that it’s because the music is meaningless and pointless because I don’t think it is, and I don’t want to say that it doesn’t matter that they really were a media construct because I think it does. I don’t want to say anti-intellectual acceptance has taken over because I don’t think that’s it either.

Perhaps I’m just tired of big-bad-wolfing it—of finding the big bad wolf in everything. Perhaps I’m not bothered because I want to accept the no-brain part of human existence. I want to accept the odd mystery that is female adolescent sexual development—words I very well may eat as my daughter hits the “tween” years.

On the other hand, I know that I admire my wife’s ability to maturely and determinedly remain a kid at heart. I also know I’ve learned how arrogant I was—okay, "can be" or "am" would be better verbs there. Perhaps, too, I believe in the larger structures of society a bit more than I did in the past, that family and community and education and faith lasts while the New Kids just age.

Who can explain human culture? Who can explain the phases we go through? The things we cling to get us through the turmoil of adolescence? The kind of culture we’re drawn to? I can’t. Rather, I’ll have a world where the fluffiness of pop rubs the edges off the angst of grunge. Isn’t this, among other things, why we marry--to get outside ourselves? And have kids—even kids that dance to the NKOTB?

Counting Beans

Her hair was thin, streaked with a bothersome auburn rather amateurishly rinsed in. She wore more makeup, I thought, than most other 50-year-old women I knew; her cheeks seemed glazed, her lipstick a bright, cardinal red against her shiny, dark skin.

She was Cuban, she told me, a refugee. She spoke with an accent, and she was unlike any other student in my college writing class. I was fifteen years her junior, and, like most of the rest of the students, I was lily white--in country of origin, like them, some flavor of European.

Writing teachers get to know students well because what we read from them comes from the insides of their minds and hearts and souls. I looked forward to reading the Cuban woman's papers because I wanted to learn what she could teach me.

When she wrote her personal narrative, I expected something as fascinating as she was. What I got was an account of the what she felt, years before, at the near-drowning of her daughter on a beach in Cuba--how breathlessly scared she was at the moment, how awful it might have been to lose that child.

I expected something exotic written by a middle-aged Cuban emigre, and what I got was the story of a mom. I expected the specific, but what I read was far, far more universal.

I like to think that beneath the colors of our skin there lies a humanity with more to share than to differentiate. The horrors of the 1862 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota began when four young Indian males got out of control, just lost it, did insanely stupid things. Does that ever happen in other cultures? Seems it does.

Honestly, I have an aversion to bean-counting, to tallying the numbers of minorities in any given situation, as if making sure we have a token person of color on our committee insures righteousness or equity or that totally blessed word these days, "diversity."

However, yesterday I sat in a lecture hall to hear yet another white male hold forth--admirably, I might add--before an assembled audience of college students, most of whom had their note pads out in front of them. Another white male. Like me. When it was over, someone announced the next speaker in this semester's special series. Yet another white male.

Twenty years ago, I taught--for the very first time--a course in "the short story." There among my more traditional students was a non-trad, the wife of a visiting professor, who took the course. After the final class period, she came up to me. I remember the room, remember it empty because she waited. She told me that she enjoyed the course. She was polite, not pushy.

And then she said the line that I'll never forget. "Do you realize that all semester long we didn't read one woman writer?"

What hurt even more than the truth of her assertion was that I honestly didn't realize what she said was true. I hadn't thought about it. Skinheads and neo-Nazis aren't the only folks guilty of racism or sexism. I was. I am.

Some of us--me, for instance--have to work at being deliberately inclusive.

Why? When I was one of those students, years ago, I read a book by a man named Frederick Manfred, who'd come from northwest Iowa, where his roots were Dutch Reformed. When I read his novel, I suddenly understood that the very life all around me, as a Dutch Reformed kid, was fair game for fiction. I didn't know anyone in my childhood who wrote books before I met Frederick Manfred between the covers of one of his own most obscure novels. But when I read him, I knew I had a place, even a calling.

And there's this. The most significant cause of the 1862 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota wasn't a bunch of testosterone-wild kids gone berserk and out of control; it was starvation, poverty, and cultural genocide created by the Great White Father and his minions, who perhaps would have been more generous and just (that's speculation, of course) if it hadn't been for the fact that in 1862, no one in Washington D. C., was thinking about the lowly Dakota out in the territories. There was, after all, this war going on, the Civil War. One story has a mix of angles.

Yesterday, an uninterrupted string of white males reminded me of all that, but most specifically of a day I stood in an emptying classroom and discovered something about myself and my course I honestly hadn't realized.

Something I haven't forgotten.

Some observations--Prince Hamlet

“Alas, poor Yorick”: Hamlet, Act 5.1

I have just finished reading Hamlet with my Shakespeare class. It’s a difficult play to teach—as well as to read—and I tried something new this year: I invited students to take on the role of an expert—on words, on psychology, on the text, on acting, on historical context—and to bring that point of view to class each day. It helped. It gave, at least to the students who took the task seriously, both a voice in the class and, what’s more important, a little wedge by which they could crack their way into the play. Good!

I was struck by a few things as I read through the last act early in the morning on my way into class. The first is this general observation, one that has been creeping up on us since Act 4, namely that we think the play is about how to live (how should Hamlet react and act?), but we discover that is a play about how to die. My reading of the last act is governed by Maynard Mack’s insight that when we see Hamlet in Act 5 (he’s been sent off to England in Act 4), we find “a different man,” a man who has come to a kind of peace with the world he has fought so hard to understand and the self he has also fought with so famously (“To be or not to be” and all that). That peace is somehow defined by words he (rather, Shakespeare) drops on us in stages: “divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10), “heaven ordinant” (48), “special providence” (217-18). It’s hard to gather these scattered leaves together (the “special providence” speech is one of the toughest in Shakespeare, also because its text is vexing), but Hamlet seems to accept that he is less an actor than an agent, and he trusts something larger than himself to bring justice and to make his life (or death!) meaningful. “Let be,” he says, which is a long way from “To be or not to be.”

To the observations. I don’t like the label comic relief, but when I check my Bedford glossary of terms to make sure I’m not abusing the phrase, I find the gravedigger scene (5.1) cited (along with Macbeth’s porter’s scene) as a classic instance. What bothers me about the label is that it can imply the word just, as in “just comic relief.” It says, “There’s nothing more going on here. It’s a break, a bit of relief, an orange thrown back at the groundlings.” But with Shakespeare, there’s always more. In fact, his minor characters often are given the most profound insights, and here’s an instance. The gravedigger, through his jokes, his song, his tossing of bones on the stage, his observations about how long a tanner’s body would be preserved in the grave, brings to the fore the central issue of the play: the common, comic, serious banality of death. This is exactly what Hamlet is coming to grips with in the scene.

I also notice that Hamlet is acutely in touch with his senses in the scene: he mentions that his bones “ache to think on’t” (92) when he contemplates the bones strewn on the stage; later he says his “gorge rises” (187) when he remembers Yorick (he means he’s feeling nauseous); and later he reacts to the smell of Yorick’s skull with “And smelt so? Pah!” (200). These reactions signal the intensity of Hamlet’s thoughts and feelings at this moment—he’s very sensitive to his surroundings—and they point to his being in better control of his emotions: the Hamlet of Act 1 could not have held a skull in his hand without complete disgust. He’s calmer. At the same time, he’s intense. Hmmmm.

His speech on Yorick gives me a hunch: I think you could find in Act 5 Hamlet talking back to each one of his earlier soliloquies—from “Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh” through “To be or not to be” to “How all occasions do inform against me.” In the last act, Hamlet reconsiders everything.

Dr. De Smith

How to write an ivy-league essay. . .

In a bit of a snooty how-to advising high school seniors how to write the perfect college admission essay, Kathleen Kingsbury, who writes for The Daily Beast and Time magazine, lists seven basic rules for getting into big-time colleges. I don't know if any of our own prospective students are thus engaged, but her guidelines for good writing shouldn't simply be written off as a how-to for snobs.

Here's what she says:

Rule #1: When Tackling a Global Issue, Make it Personal

Such advice may not make sense on a paper for poly sci or world affairs, but making things personal almost always makes writing more vivid and strong. But if you haven't been to the Sudan, don't try to fake it. When you're finished, go back over the paper, I'd say, and cut out at least half the personal pronouns. Making things personal doesn't mean crowding the real issues off the stage with your own story.

Rule #2: Show That You Have Some Perspective

I don't know a college prof who wouldn't say the same thing. "Perspective" has a specific meaning at Dordt College, but what Ms. Kingsbury is advising here is simply this: being able to see a bigger picture. Know how to do that?--get an education. Or read. Turn off the TV and the iPod. Get some ears. Know what's going on in the world, and you'll write far, far more authoritatively.

Rule #3: Essays Succeed or Fail in the Details

Couldn't agree more. I don't care what the assignment, specificity always bests generality. "After supper, we went right back at it" isn't as good as "After some greasy liver and onions, we went back at it." Generalizations are pretty much useless. Always show the reader--don't tell. The best preachers are always the ones who understand this timeless truth about writing. I'd move it up to #1, in fact.

Rule #4: Make Sure You're the Hero of the Story

My guess is Ms. Kingsbury knows what she's talking about. If you want to get into the flashy schools, show your colors. But if you're writing for any other reasons under the sun, who cares? Tell the story.

Rule #5: Make Your Intellectual Curiosity Clear

Absolutely on the money. Every teacher worth her salt wants, more than anything, a class full of bright eyes. Accomplishment, intelligence--sure, that's good too. But what profs want more is curiosity, an insatiable hunger to learn. I could teach forever with hungry kids. In many places, that kind of intellectual curiosity is scorned outright by the dominant youth culture. Don't be a victim. Get hungry. God's world is incredibly complex, powerfully beautiful, endlessly fascinating. See for yourself.

Rule #6: Know your audience.

I've been teaching writing for almost 40 years and writing for almost as long. If there's one skill that I see sadly lacking in college students it's consideration of the reader. My students always write primarily for their own ears, not for someone else's. When it comes to our own scribbles, we're often--at least initially--nearly tone deaf. Think about your roommate, your little sister, your grandpa--how would they read what you're writing? Listen with their ears. Good writers are immensely attentive to their audience. If they aren't, they're going to miss.

Rule #7: Don't Be Afraid to Show You're Not Perfect

What made Charlie Chaplain a comic genius?--a lot of gifts, but a healthy dose of self-depricating humor. Pride is the first the seven deadly sins, and even though we all have to fight it, we pick it up in a flash in others. And dislike it. Who wants to hang out with a know-it-all? Humility may well be the most precious of virtues.

Interesting stuff. Basic really, but worth repeating, methinks.

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You can read the article--and winning essays, by the way--at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-25/7-perfect-college-essays/2/

Landscape Writing from the Margins

Everything, I thought to myself yesterday, is landscape writing. This, after finishing Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in Ethnic Lit, where the main character, Milkman, discovers his identity in the landscape of his ancestors; after encouraging Core 120 writers to take me through “the landscape of their particular issue” in writing literature reviews; after considering the paths cut and re-cut by parents and children over three generations in the fiction of Alice Munro. All writing is landscape writing.

Last weekend was pheasant opener in Minnesota. Since both my hunting buddies had deserted me (I have two friends), we loaded up the entire family and drove out to Grandpa’s old farm for the 9:00 start to the season. On a corner adjacent to our farm, a quarter section my dad used to rent, there’s a small piece of CRP that always holds birds. As a one man show, I figured it was the perfect piece to walk. It turned out the piece was flanked by corn this year. Even better, I thought to myself, the birds will have moved out from the corn to bed down in the grasses and the blanket of snow we’d received overnight would keep them locked in—they would sit tight in order to avoid contact with the snow, offering me good shots once I’d flushed them.

Leaving the wife and kids in the idling van, I donned my orange vest, loaded a shell in my pea-shooter single shot, and blew in my hands, which weren’t cold yet but were bound to be on this thirty-degree morning. I waded through the thickest cover of canary reed grass, high-stepping through it to flush the tightest sitting birds. Then I moved up to the thinner if taller switch grass, raising my gun slightly in case a bird would flush in grass that was high as my head. Since I don’t have a dog to do the work for me, I paused every so often in order to unnerve some skittish hen—if I could just get one bird to flush it might cause a maelstrom of flushing birds this early in the season. I traipsed around every corner of the five or so acres of grass for at least a half hour. Nothing. No birds, no shots, no tracks in the snow. Turns out the birds must have stayed in the corn.

No matter. Just over the hill from this corner was another one-man piece to hunt: two waterways, one of them bordered by gnarled trees craving alms of the sun, that bend around a three-acre hump of land and meet to form one larger waterway thick with canary grass and cattails and a few clumps of sorghum-like grasses higher than your head and thick like young bamboo. After the snow, this thicker cover would be a better refuge from the snow. Surely, I could jump a rooster or two from there, providing other hunters hadn’t gotten to it first. It’s a favorite spot to hunt among the locals.

Cresting the hill, however, I saw a vision quite different than what I’d expected.

The waterways have been decimated. The trees have been dug out. The pile of rubbish left from what was a farm place, the one where my dad was born, has been buried or carted off somewhere. Both arms of the waterway have been neatly tiled out and tilled flat. I am breathless at the change.

There will be no birds here this year.

I’m trying to figure out what they’ve gained, the two brothers who farm thousands of acres and rent this land from my dad. I suppose they’ve gained a couple of acres. No doubt they’ll be able to farm what were the edges of this waterway next year. In fact, they may be able to farm right through the waterways. It’s so nice not to have to turn your large equipment around more than you have to. Turning is so inconveniencing. As Paul Gruchow has written satirically, it’s so too bad we can’t just have one huge tractor with one huge implement that could farm an entire section in one pass.

But then we’re getting close.

Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself. Yes, grass will grow here again. Probably some nice tame brome grass that might hold one pheasant. But I still wonder why. Do farmers think about the inches that they can "put into production"? Because these particular farmers don’t have livestock, aren’t diversified at all except for corn and soybeans, do they get bored during certain seasons of the year and think up how they can wreck hunting ground—or, more the point, how they can wreck my hunting ground? Do they fantasize about a completely flat and featureless landscape?

However, it’s not just about me, this ire I feel at more land being put into “production,” narrowly defined.

Several years ago already, just up the road, on the border of this same quarter section, our neighbor took out the fencerow that marked where our neighbor's land ended and ours began. I remember that fence: rotted fence posts like old bones, broken down barb wire and one ridge of built up dirt and grasses, a last refuge for wildlife. It’s one of the great ironies of the prairie: the hated barbwire that broke up this ocean of space had become one of the last refuges—albeit marginal—for wildlife. Now that’s gone.

Where the fencerow used to be.

(I’m not sure we’ve seen the last of those hated fences. Like Robert Frost, I know that “good fences make good neighbors.” If inches of land are worth the effort of radically altering the landscape, then it’s only a matter of time before farmers come to blows over whose is whose.)

The point, beyond my selfish concerns, is margins. Wendell Berry wrote about the importance of margins more than twenty-five years ago. In eliminating the margins—of a field, of society—we remove integral elements from creation, elements we may need to survive, elements as stewards of creation that we must remember the Creator cares about.

Farm policy in the 1970s famously encouraged farmers to farm “fencerow to fencerow.” Now, we’ve moved beyond even that. The fencerows are disappearing. Even ditches are under attack: I’ve seen ditches in South Dakota fenced up to the very shoulder of the road for grazing.

At a literature conference I recently attended, I heard Dan O’Brien, a South Dakota author and rancher, read an essay about his search for a rare butterfly, the Dakota skipper. He’d been asked to write a series of essays on the Great Plains and had been hesitant to do so: He was comfortable writing about the western plains, he’d said, but Minnesota—that was hopeless. It’s too late there, he said. The prairie’s gone there.

Still, he took on the task and the essay he composed was about his search for the Dakota skipper in Minnesota and Iowa, an essay that’s pure horror. O’Brien couldn’t find any Dakota skippers, try as he might, but his nightmares were filled with the unremarkable butterfly trying to get in his window. The Dakota skipper, he said, was probably responsible for pollinating a few rare prairie plants. Both of them may be gone forever.

Marginal creatures. Marginal creations. Is that what we’ll tell the Creator when he asks us about their disappearance?

Last night, after I drove home with landscape on my mind, I decided I had to photograph this decimated landscape under the heavy gray rain clouds of a soggy October, my marginal camera and photography skills notwithstanding. I decided I had to write about it. No, I don’t make my living directly off the land. No, I don’t have to think of it in financial terms, and especially during this wet fall, I’m glad I don’t have to.

But my marginal perspective on the land still counts, and I can still write about it and so I am. All writing is landscape writing. It’s of the utmost importance to consider the landscapes we inhabit: the economic, the psychological, the familial, and the actual landscape. That’s why writing is so important. It shows us the landscapes we inhabit which we shape and which shape us and which we sometimes deform and which in turn sometimes deform us.

And yet I’m not convinced that the pen is mightier than the plow. Much writing is marginal writing in that it comes from the margins in a voice that has been marginalized. Ultimately, all I can do is write what I see, call for action, write from the margins. I can continue the marginal voice of Henry David Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Paul Gruchow and others on how we should deal with landscape.

The tallgrass prairie of Minnesota and Iowa is one of the most deformed landscapes in the world. We’ve lost so much of it that I’m afraid it’s permanently deformed. But here I stand, on the margins of the land, describing the landscape I see. As Christians, as thinkers, as writers this is what we must continue to do: describe the landscape we see from the margins, calling for preserving and even expanding those margins, lest more margins are lost to our Creator’s masterpiece.