Winter Break
I hope everyone’s enjoying the Texas winter. If you’ve found your way here from my UTA website and are planning to take my American literature course this spring or are a past student, feel free to say hi.
Homosexuality, Nature, and Education
An Illinois high school teacher gave his 10th grade class the optional assignment of reading an article from Seed magazine about homosexuality in the animal kingdom and was suspended for doing so. A parent complained that the website was not appropriate viewing material for her child. Many other parents and students are supporting the suspended teacher, however.
This raises a number of questions. Some relate to the news story itself: Who decides what’s appropriate for 10th graders to view? What is the place of controversial subject matter in a high school class? Does the school’s suspension of the teacher constitute censorship? Is homosexuality (especially when it is scientific research being presented and not propaganda) a taboo subject for discussion at this level? Should it be? What are the consequences of preventing such information from circulating?
Other questions have to do with the article the teacher assigned: Is the article itself offensive in the way it approaches the subject? (Or was it possibly just the subject matter being brought up at all that offended?) What kinds of evidence is presented and is it convincing? How might this article affect the way students think about the ongoing debates about homosexuality? How might it affect the way you think about homosexuality?
Dare to Suck
One of the many challenges of writing is learning to let yourself write badly. This doesn’t mean that you should write badly and leave it that way; it doesn’t mean that writing badly should be a goal in itself. It does, however, mean that there is a stage in any writing project where it is okay to just write without worrying about it being perfect or even good.
For many writers, this is really hard. You may feel like you have to start from nothing, from just the wisp of an idea in your head, and somehow leap from that to a polished essay that you can turn in (and hopefully get a good grade on). Or you may feel like you should be fixing things as you write your first draft and making sure to organize everything neatly when it first hits the page; you may be planning to turn this draft in and therefore are trying to do everything at once.
But a leap from nothing to something is not the most effective way to write. In order to wind up with the desired final product (a polished, well-written essay), you have to start with something less than polished and well-written: the rough draft.
It is at this stage that it is okay to write without worrying about how well you’re writing. It’s okay to suck. All you need to do at this stage is get your ideas down. You will have time (because you have made time by starting before the night before it’s due) to fix things. My early drafts are fragmentary and repetitive. I use words that I know won’t really work in a final draft just to fill the space so I can keep going. I’ll come back and change them out later. I insert reminders like [examples] or [transition] to tell myself that this is a place that will require a specific kind of work, but I don’t try to do that work immediately. I’ll come back and write those bits later. I ask myself questions and argue with myself. I will make decisions and smooth those inconsistencies out later. This process is vital to my writing, no matter how ugly it looks; it gives me a chance to record my ideas, to see where they already look kind of good and where they don’t, and to build a foundation for the stages that will come later (rereading, reorganizing, rewriting).
The best ideas and writing don’t just appear fully fledged, after all, but require development. And the people who are most skilled at whatever they choose to do (not just writing, but art, sports, etc.) got that way by working through not knowing what to do, not being able to do it well, and, sometimes, just generally sucking. So if your writing is great to start with (or if you think it’s great to start with), where is there to go? What is there to learn? You may find, if this is the case, that you aren’t really challenging yourself, that you aren’t really growing as a thinker and writer, and that your work will suffer as a result.
So dare to suck. Dare to write what you really think–even if it’s confusing. Dare to write badly and chaotically. The beginning is for getting ideas out of your head and down on paper in some form. It isn’t for great writing. That comes later.
Kids or no kids?
This is an extremely personal decision; but it is, as we discussed in class the other day, not one that is merely personal. I already told you guys where I stand on this issue (no kids for me, thanks) and suggested thinking more deeply about the reasoning behind the decision to have kids or not and the rational justifications available to counter the realities of population-related problems. Here are some resources to consider during that process.
I didn’t realize this until I started looking around, but Bill McKibben has actually already written a book on the subject, titled Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families. It’s part argument about the environmental impact of having children and part personal memoir about his own decisions.
This Slate article by Daniel Engber explicitly asks the same question we asked in class: “Should Americans have fewer babies to save the environment?”
I’ll point to just a couple of articles briefly making the argument that fewer children equals less environmental impact (one from the New York Times and one from a blog called The Childless by Choice Project). Both entries, though, link back to the same report and, if you’re really interested in this issue, I recommend checking it out.
And finally, this article lists some specific ways that a baby can make a huge environmental impact–as well as some tips for parents to follow to try to diminish these effects.
This is a kind of education that we didn’t get to talk about so much in class. If parents-to-be know more about the public and environmental consequences of having a child (as opposed to just knowing about the personal consequences), is it possible that that knowledge will affect how many children they choose to have?
Best Song Ever?
This really doesn’t have anything to do with class–except for the fact that Cameron asked me what I thought the best song ever was today during class and now I can’t stop trying to figure it out.
Cameron said maybe the best song was Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is definitely an excellent song, especially if you’re looking for something epic. As much as I love Queen, though, I love Radiohead more, and my pick for best epic rock song might have to be “Paranoid Android” instead.
But, really, to answer this question I have to determine what criteria to consider in evaluating what the best song ever is. Complexity? Originality? Performance?
For me, the most important criteria is none of these; the best song ever doesn’t have to be musically complex, doesn’t have to blaze new ground, and is judged separately from the performance. I’m more interested in strong lyrics that combine the particular and the universal (details + broad appeal) and a song whose lyrics are strengthened by an appropriate song structure, melody, and harmony.
My first reaction when asked this question in class was to say that the best song ever surely had to be something by The Mountain Goats. John Darnielle [seen here being interviewed on The Colbert Report and here playing a song from the band's new album on The Colbert Report], the chief member, singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the band, writes songs that tell stories of people who love and suffer–sometimes simultaneously. He deals in the particulars of these characters’ lives (some of which are based on himself but many of which are fictional), giving them a life of their own, but because the experiences he describes in his songs of falling in love, difficult childhoods, losing people, etc., are so familiar, we identify readily with his characters, no matter how odd they may be or how different the specifics of their situation might be from our lives.
One of my favorite Mountain Goats songs is “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton,” a song about two young boys named Jeff and Cyrus who, as the song title implies, start a death metal band in Denton, TX. The song is about much more than teenage rebellion and death metal, though. As a result of their dedication to their band (“in script that makes prominent use of a pentagram, they stencil their drumheads and guitars with their names”), one of the boys is sent away to a school “where they told him he’d never be famous.” The song becomes about the dreams we all have, embodied in these boys’ experiences. They have a dream, they work toward their dream, and they are judged and discouraged as a result. The song ends with the following lines:
If you punish a person for dreaming his dream,
Don’t expect him to thank or forgive you.
The best ever death metal band out of Denton
Will in time both outpace and outlive you.
Hail Satan! Hail Satan!
This song takes an experience of youth and rebellion, discouragement and punishment, and makes of it a statement about the necessity of having a dream, of having something to hope for. Live performances of this song are amazing because everyone in the audience knows the song and sings along, including the triumphant “Hail Satan!” chorus at the end, which is accompanied by a clubful of fans throwing up horns in solidarity with Jeff and Cyrus. Darnielle is not, here, endorsing actual Satan worship but taking the side of Jeff and Cyrus and their death metal band over the forces of conformity they face. And the audience takes their side, too.
This is not The Mountain Goats’ best song, though. There are stronger songs on Tallahassee, an album about a destructive and failing relationship (“No Children,” another concert favorite, stands out as a strong contender for best song ever) or The Sunset Tree, an album that deals with Darnielle’s adolescent abuse at the hands of his stepfather, but “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton” nicely illustrates some of the qualities of a good Mountain Goats song.
To be honest, I love The Mountain Goats so much (if you couldn’t tell by now) that I have a hard time narrowing favorites down to just a few songs. They are extraordinarily prolific and the quality of songwriting is fairly consistent.
Leaving The Mountain Goats behind, one last song I will mention is Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” I do not like Cohen’s recording of the song, but this is one of the most covered songs I know for a reason. It has been covered by Bob Dylan, Rufus Wainwright, Brandi Carlile, k. d. lang, John Cale, and Jeff Buckley–along with many others. The very fact that it has been covered so many times indicates its universality and its appeal to both audiences and performers. There are a few variations on the lyrics, as it has several verses, not all of which are commonly performed, but here is one common arrangement:
I heard there was a secret chord
that David played and it pleased the Lord,
but you don’t really care for music, do you?
Well it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth,
the minor fall and the major lift
the baffled king composing hallelujah.Hallelujah…
Well your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to her kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
and from your lips she drew the hallelujahHallelujah…
Baby, I’ve been here before
I’ve seen this room and I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
but love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujahHallelujah…
Well there was a time when you let me know
what’s really going on below
but now you never show that to me do you?
But remember when I moved in you
and the holy dove was moving too
and every breath we drew was hallelujahWell, maybe there’s a God above
but all I’ve ever learned from love
was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
it’s not a cry that you hear at night
it’s not somebody who’s seen the light
it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujahHallelujah…
This song appeals because of its creative use of familiar metaphors and narratives and its ability to comment simultaneously on love, faith, and sex.
I strongly recommend checking out Jeff Buckley’s version of the song. It is, as far as I’m concerned, not only the best cover of this song–the one that strikes most closely at the emotional heart of the song in its performance–but is also one of the best covers of all time.
In short, I am clearly incapable of answering this question–what is the best song ever?–in any definitive way, but I can at least narrow it down somewhat. My short list (based on the way I feel today) would therefore include the following: “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen (performance by Jeff Buckley preferred); “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton,” “No Children,” “Woke Up New” (a fantastic, simple song about a breakup), or, really, pretty much anything from The Sunset Tree or Heretic Pride by The Mountain Goats; anything from OK Computer by Radiohead; or any of a number of later songs by the Beatles, including “Eleanor Rigby,” “Golden Slumbers,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.”
Is this any easier for others? What would you say is the best song ever? And how do you decide?
Vegetarianism
I was planning to write a post about vegetarianism (I am a vegetarian and have been for several years) after the issue of animal welfare came up during last week’s discussion of the chapter in Deep Economy about eating locally, but I just read Jonathan Safran Foer’s essay “Against Meat” in the New York Times and decided to pass that along instead. [You may need a NY Times account to read the article, but you can sign up quickly and for free if that's the case.]
Here’s a quick preview of some of what he has to say:
According to an analysis of U.S.D.A. data by the advocacy group Farm Forward, factory farms now produce more than 99 percent of the animals eaten in this country. And despite labels that suggest otherwise, genuine alternatives — which do exist, and make many of the ethical questions about meat moot — are very difficult for even an educated eater to find. I don’t have the ability to do so with regularity and confidence. (“Free range,” “cage free,” “natural” and “organic” are nearly meaningless when it comes to animal welfare.)
According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. and others, factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming (it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone), and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most serious environmental problems, both global and local: air and water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity. . . . Eating factory-farmed animals — which is to say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants — is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment.
One of the most interesting points he makes in the article is this one, where he writes,
This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.
There is a lot more to his essay (and he is a fine writer), so I recommend checking it out. One thing I would ask you to think about as you read, however, is the issue of social class. This has come up in our discussions already and I think it’s important to continue to keep it in mind. On this note, Kelsey Wallace, writing about Foer’s essay for Bitch Magazine‘s blog, writes,
Of course, this is a privileged person’s problem. Many people all over the world don’t have the option of becoming vegetarian, or vegan, or eating organic, or even eating at all. I, however, do. And so does Jonathan Safran Foer, and so do many others of us who read The New York Times and write blog posts and live within a mile of about six grocery stores.
Perhaps, then, if we can afford to have this problem, if we can afford to be able to make the choices that would let us eat more ethically, we can also afford to do the right thing by choosing animal welfare and sustainability over our own taste buds?
Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy
This appearance of comedian Louis CK on Conan O’Brien’s show touches in a humorous way on some of the issues raised by Bill McKibben in Deep Economy. Check it out.
Imagining Alternate Worlds
I realized during last week’s discussion of alternatives to our money system and alternatives to relying on things like bottled water that my approach to this issue has been shaped a great deal by the fiction I read. I enjoy and have read a lot of science fiction, especially post-apocalyptic and post-disaster science fiction, and those books focus on the destruction of and then (often) the rebuilding of society. Sometimes they focus on a small group of people struggling to survive; sometimes they focus on a social group attempting to redefine their roles. Regardless, use of resources and economic relationships to one another are central.
The novels I am thinking of do not provide a direct blueprint for what we should be doing now to solve the kinds of problems that McKibben lays out in Deep Economy. But they do provide a way to think about and envision alternatives. They provide a mental space in which we can imagine ourselves without money, without bottled water, without even a government, perhaps. And then we can imagine where that might take us. Even if that’s not where we are now, it is incredibly useful to be able to think through those possibilities and accept them as possibilities, even if they are far-fetched.
Just something to think about we continue to talk about alternatives. How do our reading (and viewing) choices affect the way we approach the questions raised by McKibben?
On Names
As I mentioned in my last post, I am getting married soon, and I am keeping my own last name when I do. My fiancé will be keeping his own last name, too. This was not really a difficult decision for us, but naming in marriage is a far less simple issue than it may seem at first. When it comes to names and getting married, there are more options than the traditional one. Here are four options to be considered:
1. The woman takes the man’s name.
This is by far the most common situation in the U.S.* Most of the people I know have gone this route. It has its benefits (ease of acceptance in our culture being one of them), but it also has its costs. It especially has costs for the woman. In taking her husband’s last name, she symbolically becomes a part of his family but she also symbolically severs ties with her own family and her own history. Her pre-marriage identity becomes subsumed into her husband’s family and identity. This doesn’t mean that her husband is attempting to deny her identity or that she is no longer really part of her family, but it is significant that it is only the woman who has to change her identity in these ways. The expectation of this for women and not for men seems to indicate that women’s single identities are worth less than those of men or that women are not complete on their own, with their given name, in the way that men are.
2. The man takes the woman’s name.
In my experience, this is very rare. Because we are raised to expect women to change their names and because we are also raised to value the paternal bloodline (as represented in the handing down of names from father to son), men who change their names are likely to be seen as betraying their families by doing so. Furthermore, the inequity of the first situation (in which one partner’s pre-marriage identity is maintained and one is given up) is not redressed; it is merely reversed.
3. Both individuals change their names.
Sometimes this means hyphenating names (e.g., Smith-Rosenberg) and sometimes this means creating an entirely new name. My fiancé did this in his first marriage, taking part of his name and part of her name and creating a hybrid name that belonged to both of them. This allows both people to have a shared identity (as represented in the last name) and puts them on an equal footing because they both change their last names. Even here, though, there are cultural imbalances. Women get a free pass to change their last names when they marry. It is, in fact, expected. Men, however, have to endure additional costs to change their names, even when they marry. (Clearly, this problem would also apply to the previous situation.)
4. Neither individual changes names.
This is what my fiancé and I are doing. I want to keep my last name. I like my last name. I have had it my whole life and, quite simply, I don’t want to change it. Furthermore, I am publishing under this last name (writing and photography) and have a life and a history under this name. And I balk at the idea of subsuming my identity under his. For me, this is both a personal and a political (feminist) issue.
However, although I am happy with this agreement, even this is not without its drawbacks. The main issue is that we will not have the same last name. We are a family, a team, but our name won’t reflect that. I guess it doesn’t need to, there are other ways to reinforce our status as a team and a family, but that is one thing I think I might miss. As my last post indicated, though, we will sidestep the other major downside to having two different last names: having to deal with naming children. We won’t be having children, but I can understand a desire to simplify by having everyone have one last name.
In the end, my fiancé and I are making the decision that makes the most sense for us and different decisions might make more sense for others. I just wish that there were more discussion of the different options and that alternatives were more easily obtainable within our legal system (instead of having the legal system remain biased toward the traditional decision).
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*I don’t know how this works worldwide; I do know, however, that there are other naming systems in other places. For instance, there are some cultures where a son would take a last name like Arnoldson if his father’s first name were Arnold and a daughter would a take similar name that would end in a form of daughter and might reflect a father’s or a mother’s name. (Björk’s full name is Björk Gudmundsdottir, reflecting the Icelandic naming tradition.)
Marriage & Me
I am getting married in November and so this topic is one I’ve been thinking about. A lot.
When I told some of my friends that I was engaged, most people knew me well enough not to look for an engagement ring or ask immediately about my last name.* But some people know me less well. One woman asked me what my last name would be when I got married. I said, “It will be Tidwell. I’m not changing it.” She looked a little surprised and then asked, “But what will the children be called?” I told her we wouldn’t be having kids. She looked downright shocked. I could practically read in her face the question, “Then why get married at all?”
This is a big question. Let me start by saying that I actually didn’t really think I’d ever get married. I couldn’t imagine getting married because in my mind as I was growing up, getting married was always followed by babies. And babies are most frequently followed by the mother’s career taking a break at the very least. But I’ve never wanted kids and I love my job, so marriage as it is traditionally conceived was clearly not for me.
However, marriage does not have to be just one way. It doesn’t have to be the fancy engagement ring and the big wedding followed by the kids and the house in the suburbs.
For me, marriage is, quite simply, a way of publicly and legally committing myself to a relationship with another person. My fiancé and I already live together and we could keep on just living together, but cohabitation doesn’t bear the same weight (either culturally or for us personally). We want to affirm our relationship through the act of marriage. That’s all marriage is–or should be. It’s not a platform for babymaking. It’s not a way to consolidate our families’ wealth and property (as it has been in the past). It’s not a way for me to make a place for myself in society (as it also has been in the past–when women couldn’t own property or vote or hold a decent job, marriage was really the only option they had). It’s just a commitment to love each other and stay together for our whole lives.
And it is in part because of this definition of marriage that I support the rights of gay and lesbian people to marry as well. After all, for me, unlike for many other people, marriage is not about having kids. That’s something that most people choose to do after they get married and that’s fine, but that is a separate decision from the one to get married. So as much as I think the question of what’s best for children is an important one, I don’t believe it’s the same question as “Who should be allowed to get married?”**
Even more fundamentally, however, if marriage is a lifelong commitment to love and support another human being, what could possibly be wrong with having more commitment, more love, and more supportive relationships in the world?
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*Maybe I’ll post about my reasoning on these issues (engagement rings and last names) later this week, but for now it’s enough to note that I have no engagement ring–didn’t want one, in fact–and that I am keeping my last name when I get married.
**And I don’t mean to imply here that gay marriage would be bad for children or that there’s any evidence to support that argument; I simply mean to separate the two issues of marriage and childrearing. They may be related for many people, but they are not identical.
