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Looking at Children in News Photographs

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immigrantkidstexasThe second time this news photograph appeared on my screen, I began to look at it more closely. You’ve likely seen this handout photo from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Showing a lineup of immigrant boys held in Brownsville, Texas, it has appeared on numerous news sites. This image differs from others of detained children at the U.S. southern border. Despite the camera’s proximity, the photograph appears strangely distancing. We see the boys from the back, from the shoulders down.They look jarringly incomplete, their heads and left arms outside the frame. They are boys between the ages of 10-17 casting small shadows on the ground.

Where do your eyes linger as they scan across the lineup of black socks, gray sneakers, and dark shorts? Mine gravitate toward the boy raising his right leg. In step and out of line, his calf’s tight angle is kinesis in stasis. It reminds me of the dance-like moves my son made as a child: standing in line with me, waiting for his turn. Or a solo children’s game one invents in confined spaces. French thinker Roland Barthes used the word punctum to describe the effect of such photographic details. While we consciously look for things in photographs, the punctum finds us. As Barthes put it, This time it is not I who seek it out . . .  it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. Now I notice the everyday choreography of the boy’s right hand–unlike the others in this lineup. The jarring image hits home.

The punctum is an emotional trigger. (Barthes wrote his extended meditation on photography while mourning his mother.) All viewers would find some common elements in this photograph of immigrant boys, but punctum is an individual experience. Your eye may linger on the hand that seems to flash an upside-down peace sign (a signal?), on the wristbands two boys are wearing (why?), on something else. The detail that finds you may trigger emotions, prompt memories, raise questions (how many of these boys were separated from their parents?).

I’m sure this photograph will reappear in my newsfeed, along with images of other migrant children. I will not look away. I will look again.  –MB

Sources:
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. (1979)
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/14/us/inside-immigrant-children-shelter-brownsville-texas-invs/index.html

 

Frosted Commencement Concoction

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FrostCommencementAnnounceIt’s that graduation saturation time of year again when our students, family members, and friends commence. They launch; they embark; they set forth; they begin anew. Many will receive a commencement greeting Frosted with “The Road Not Taken,” the go-to American poem for commencement cards and announcements. (Read it here.) In fact, the culminating lines are Special Message Signature 12 in this announcement sample I received. I showed it to my UF students; most had seen Frost’s poem in their high school graduation announcements or cards. It’s a well-worn poem we all know–or think we know. But shake up this commencement concoction and its forked path isn’t as fateful it seems.

For starters, the first (and longest) of Frost’s four sentences hedges its bets. The road not taken was “just as fair.” Both routes “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” The chosen road “perhaps” offers “the better claim” for a singular journey, yet the paths’ wear and tear were “really about the same.” Perhaps the forked path is more a matter of the speaker’s forked tongue?

If the poem is a dilemma of divergence, that split may indeed lie within the speaker, not in the woods. Bodily confined to being “one traveler,” Frost’s commencing character becomes figuratively divided by the poem’s form in the final stanza:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Split by the hyphen, Frost’s fictive I disrupts the rhyme scheme (ABAAB) by duplicating the A rhyme at the beginnings of two lines. To commence is not to conclude.

So how do we take that sudden elevation of “ages and ages hence”? Do we take it seriously as Sir Alan Bates intones the poem here in this monumentalizing ad for Union Bank of Switzerland (1997)? (In this performance Frost’s poem rivals Rudyard Kipling’s “If” for sheer commencement Camp.) Or is Frost winking at us in these finalizing lines? Is the route toward our futures really binary, or is it more like a rhizome? Perhaps the poem’s contingencies fracture the future like the multiple speakers reciting the poem here in Monster.com’s Superbowl commercial (2000), which renders Frost’s road more fluid than fixed. I’ll take contingency over landmark regrets any day. Frost concocted a fabulously inventive mixture in “The Road Not Taken,” a poem best served shaken and blurred. Let’s commence.  –MB

Images
– Sample 2018 commencement product from Signature Announcements
– MB commencing from U. of Tennessee with her B.A. (1982)

Casting Hearts: The Yeats Effect

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Celtic heart

If hearts are trump for German minimalist band Trio, hearts were more complicated for Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Dolores O’Riordan captured some of that complexity in her lyrics to the Cranberries’ song “Yeat’s Grave,” which riffs on one of his many poems that replayed his unrequited love for Maud Gonne: “No Second Troy” (1910). Here he renders her as the Classical figure Helen :

     Why should I blame her that she filled my days
     With misery…

Yeats wasn’t just wearing his heart on his sleeve in this poem. He’s showing how hearts can transcend their breaking when we elevate our beloveds to mythical status–and reassign agency to forces beyond our control. Yet even this rich tension does not quite capture the dynamics of hearts in Yeats’s poems.

Looking back on his career in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939), Yeats felt that his knack for creating “masterful images” was tapped out. Here he rejects elevation for the everyday, transforming the heart into a junk shop that can restore a vital creativity:

     Now that my ladder’s gone,
     I must lie down where all the ladders start,
     In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

The poem stops here, but more poems will follow. In the alchemy of the heart, we can rebuild from remnants. We can create new things from cast-off things.

On this Valentine’s Day, I turn to the Yeats Effect to tap the heart-beats in his poems. For Yeats reminds us that what we call the heart is authentic and artificial, individual and social, vulnerable and durable. Consider “To Ireland in the Coming Times” (1892), which culminates in an expansive heart that connects readers to Celtic past and uncertain future. The speaker renders this heart with the force of a bold action (fishing), and the stasis of a monument (molding):

     I cast my heart into my rhymes,
     That you, in the dim coming times,
     May know how my heart went after them
     After the red-rose-bordered hem.

The poem does not cast off the heart, but propels it backward and forward through its durable, four-beat couplets. It places a bet, risking its heart. Do we take this heart as Yeats’s own? Casting also means assigning roles to actors. The Yeats Effect is cagey in playing its hearts.

Tracking back to another early poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1892), we find the heart in yet another closing line. This time the speaker is alone in the city while heartbeats transport him elsewhere:

     I will arise and go now, for always night and day
     I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
     While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
     I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Shifting from the personal pronoun I to the definite article, the poem sounds a collective heart through which the speaker is no longer alone. The Yeats Effect transports poetic hearts into larger dimensions than love poems. The deep heart enfolds us all.  –MB

 

On Greek Hospitality, Mythic Incarnations & Everyday Life

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GreekXmasStreamers
Ekeimeros restaurant in Neos Prodromos

It’s Christmas Eve and I’ve just returned from Greece, where I spoke at the conference Politics of Space and the Humanities in Thessaloniki. It was my first encounter with that country, its citizens, and its ancient sites. My visit brought me face-to-face with ancient customs of hospitality in everyday life. Every city and village I visited was bedecked for the Christmas season, begat by an offer of accommodation in a stable because there was no place for Mary and Joseph at the inn.

FirstKeynote
Ceremony Hall, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

In Radical Hospitality, Lonni Collins Pratt and Daniel Homan insist that Hospitality has an inescapable moral dimension to it. It is not a mere social grace; it is a spiritual and ethical issue. It is an issue involving what it means to be human. 

There is of course an older tradition of hospitality in ancient Greek culture. Early in The Odyssey, Telemachus sets sail to find news of his wandering father. Landing in Pylos with his crew, he is received warmly by King Nestor and his sons:

     Nestor’s son Pisistratus, first to reach them,
     grasped their hands and sat them down at the feast
     on fleecy throws spread out along the sandbanks . . .

Only after Telemachus and his crew have had their fill does Nestor ask: “Strangers–friends, who are you?”

MomGreekDessert
Mom’s dessert at Taverna Platanos, Ambelakia

It is through the rituals and gestures of everyday life that such mythic acts of hospitality are made manifest. Hospitality is palpable in Greece. These are only some of the acts of welcome I will carry with me:

  • * At Taverna Platanos in Ambelakia, the chef-host said the wine was on the house, knowing two of us had travelled far and seeing how we enjoyed our meal. He offered a dessert his mother had made of carrots, yogurt, and white pumpkin, telling us how it would please her if we ate it.
  • * At the conference opening, students from Aristotle University offered a musical
    MBpresentsPolicitcsSpaceHUM
    Panel 14, MB presenting

    interlude. The first keynote speaker, Yiorgos Kalogeras, told of being made welcome in my country during his Fulbright years, right after the Vietnam war. It is a manifestation of America that would be welcome at this time.

* At my panel, “Cinematic Topographies of Conflict in the Modern Imagination,” a young student approached us with water bottles: I’m your panel assistant. Is there anything else you need? 

 

PotInFireWildBoar
Ekeimeros restaurant, Neos Prodromos

* In Ekeimeros restaurant in Neos Prodromos (near Vergina), the host insisted that we move to the best room, a heated balcony overlooking the fields that produced the vegetables. Knowing we were driving back to Thessaloniki, they offered us food that was ready: fresh cabbage salad, stuffed pepper and pastry, potatoes, horta, and wild boar that had simmered in wine over the fire. The mother, who did all the cooking, came out of the kitchen to greet us. She said the family did all the holiday decorations themselves, sharing their festivities.

* On a street near my apartment in Thessaloniki (where the hosts had placed a bowl of welcome fruit), someone made a cat shelter on a window ledge–offering food in the corner.

CatBoxWindow
Cat shelter, Thessaloniki

* On my last day in Greece, my Athenian host invited me to relax at her home as much as I would like: you are not a stranger in this house. She gave me pastries from her neighborhood bakery for my journey.

Such everyday acts of mythic resonance are transformative as we await the rebirth of a more hospitable world. –MB

References:
The New Oxford Annotated Bible. (Luke)
Lonni Collins Pratt and Daniel Homan, Radical Hospitality (2011).
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles. (1996).

Sonic Southern Gothic, Ghosts & Graveyards

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MissLulaGGmomIt’s Halloween. FEST 16 just painted my downtown black with underground musicians and punk rock fans. And I’m 200 miles south of Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home. So I’m thinking about Southern Gothic, ghosts, and graveyards today. Some folks don’t believe in ghosts. Some believe the ghosts come home on All Hallows’ Eve. If you grew up in the Southeastern U.S., you know that ghosts are always with us. There are pictures of people in graveyards boxed up in your parents’ attic, or in yellowed photo albums with brittle pages. As a child you, too, may have GraveyardToddlersstiffened at the picture of a coffined forebear your cousins pulled out of grandma’s parlor cabinet. You find these family photographs–or they find you.

O’Connor tells us that ghosts can be very fierce and instructive in casting their strange shadows on us. I find that once you’ve grown accustomed to them, the ghostly images of inherited photographs aren’t so creepy after all. Why wouldn’t a great-grandmother and her friend memorialize their youthful outing to the cemetery? And why wouldn’t forebears appear as toddlers in a graveyard, holding hands amidst the funeral flowers? Rooted in customs of family grave tending, these faded images are at home in our homes, after all.

BOTHghostsOver time my family dispersed more widely, migrating across or beyond the Southeast. Family photography has become digital–migrating across cyberspace. Where do we find something akin to the rootedness of graveyard photography? I find it in roots music laden with ghosts: Celtic, Bluegrass, and Southern Gothic.

At FEST 16 this weekend, I heard Blood on the Harp again–a band that distills all three musical strains. They call their work Songs about Death performed by a mournful choir of lost souls. Like my inherited graveyard photos, their songs transmit long-ago ghosts and their everyday hauntings. They also sing of heartbreak, hard living, harrowings–as in this song “Ornaments Lost in Translation.” There’s an energetic entropy in these songs, a hard-driving darkness. Sometimes we can encounter ghosts and graveyards more easily in photography, fiction, or music than we can in conversation. Or we may cordon them off to Halloween. Yet as Southern Gothic teaches us, the grotesque and the everyday are as entangled as the strands of Spanish moss overhead. The ghosts are with us, always. –MB

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CREDITS:
Inherited photographs
Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” (1960)
Album cover to Ghost(s) Vol. 1 by Blood on the Harp
MB with Blood on the Harp at FEST 16 (courtesy of the band)

 

Clues about Dementia Fiction

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clueThis week I read a story from a last month’s New Yorker at 30,000 feet – Edwidge Danticat’s remarkable “Sunrise, Sunset.” Shuttling from one airport to another, crossing state lines, I enter the story in transition. She is there one second, then she is not. She knows exactly where she is, then she does not. I encounter the central character, Carole; I encounter turbulence. I stay in the same time zone while Carole loses track of time. I move page by page through a nonlinear narrative, looping back through fictive and family memories, through literary history. Danticat’s story uncovers new dimensions in altered states, altering them for the confines of words, sentences, the page. It assumes an emergent mode that I will call dementia fiction. 

How might we plot the contours of dementia fiction? I offer these clues:

  • If frenzy is the altered state the Muses bestow on writers, agitation is the counterpart for characters in dementia fiction. Agitation is physical, psychological, and social at once. It is less predictable than creative frenzy. Thus it is more unsettling. It repels romantic narratives.
  • The agitation in dementia fiction is not a catalyst. There is no clear tipping point, no decisive moment in what transpires. Dementia’s altered states go on and off like a switch, at random intervals.
  • Dementia fiction is not stream-of-consciousness. It expresses outbursts of consciousness, punctuated by stasis.clue2
  • Like the Pensieve in the Harry Potter stories, the altered states of dementia contain too many thoughts and memories crammed into one mind. Some of these thoughts and memories assume tangible form outside the mind. They impact others. Yet dementia fiction is not fantasy. It is not speculative fiction.
  • As with the persona in Anne Sexton’s Bedlam poems, music swims back to characters in dementia fiction. Upon hearing music, these characters sometimes pause in reverie. Sometimes they smile. Sometimes they are startled into astonished silence. The music is too little, or too much.
  • Dementia fiction is and is not a tale of  transformation. Its characters become neither animals nor monsters. They are and are not themselves. Their altered states may transpire in mere minutes, or across unbearable hours or days.
  • Dementia fiction gravitates toward a continuous present that is disjunctive, straddling the case studies of psychiatric research and the experimental writing of Gertrude Stein.
  • Dementia, like fiction, occupies a literary dimension. For in states of dementia there is word salad, there is looping, there is fabulation. Dementia is a fiction and a malady. Dementia fiction is out of time, and it is in our future.

–MB

Image credits
Page spread of Edwidge Danticat’s “Sunrise, Sunset” from The New Yorker, Sept. 18, 2017, with a pin I inherited.
Manuscript page of a fiction by a writer with dementia.

 

Playboy and Postwar Masculinities

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playWith Hugh Hefner’s passing, the sexual revolutions of the 1950s and 60s are trending again in the news. The fundamental revolution of Playboy wasn’t its nude female models, but its new model of masculinity. Following in the wake of Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 sensation, Sexuality in the Human Male, Hefner’s magazine was one of several that called out to American men who didn’t fit the standard models. In a decade of Cold Warriors, Beatniks, Suburban Dads, and Organization Men, what else could a man be? William Segal’s Gentry magazine highlighted the national crisis of masculinity in 1951 with its debut feature “What Does It Mean to Be a Man?” Pushing back against 3-M masculinity (medals, money, muscles), Gentry fashioned a Dandy identity for wealthy American men who wanted Cubism with their cravats and Goethe with their gabardine. The jet-setting Gentry man sported bold colors in his evening wear, collected art, enjoyed shopping, and thrived on cultured conversation. Like Esquire, which debuted in 1933, Gentry appealed to upscale male consumers of culture and style. Though home decor greatly interested such men, they were not ‘domestic’ when they were home–their place of leisure rather than labor. Hefner’s magazine was and was not an outlier in this wider context.

 

boyPlayboy and its revolutions in masculinity emerged in 1953, the same year The Mattachine Society’s One magazine offered imagegay men travel advice, literary reviews, social analysis, and advocacy. Hefner’s magazine assured middle-class, straight men “there was nothing queer” about artiness and “indoor pleasures,” as Barbara Ehrenreich puts it. Hefner created a new brand of American bachelors in his first editorial: “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” This fabled Playboy preamble jabs at the more refined masculinity in Segal’s publication, working in tandem with the Mattachine Society’s magazine to bring male sexuality out into the open. All of these magazines offered alternatives to mainstream masculinity. Some of them required the company of women to enact, and some did not. They all rejected suburbia. Playboy, One, and Gentry offered DIY identity kits that reclaimed indoor spaces for manly pursuits. Hefner’s passing reminds us that American masculinity never was (and never well be) a one-size-fits all identity -MB

References:
Editorial attributed to Hugh Hefner. Playboy (January 1953).
Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. 1983.
MB, “Gentry Modernism: Cultural Connoisseurship and Midcentury Masculinity, 1951-57,” forthcoming in Popular Modernism and Its Legacies, ed. Scott Ortolano.

The Power Line-Gang

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I don’t hail from Robert Frost‘s neck of the woods. But here in my North Central Florida woods after Hurricane Irma, I’m thinking about Frost’s poem “The Line-Gang” from his 1916 book Mountain Interval. It’s one of many poems the former U.S. Poet Laureate wrote about labor. In my neck of the woods, this week’s most exuberant social media posts hail the line workers who are restoring electrical power to our homes. They use words like heroic, diligent, efficient, strong. They acknowledge the workers’ danger and sacrifice.They give cheers and thanks, offering libations. Grateful citizens post pictures of the crews that restored their power, putting them back on the grid. The Power Line-Gang repairs, returns, reinstates our manner of living.

Here in my university city, crews from our local utility (GRU, Gainesville Regional Utilities) have been out day and night clearing trees, ascending utility poles, repairing and replacing power lines since Irma passed over us. Line workers from other parts of the country have joined them. Frost’s words about workers who strung telephone lines also work for the Power Line-Gangs. For they, too, perform a paradoxical labor: 

They plant dead trees for living, and the dead
They string together with a living thread.
They string an instrument against the sky…

The power running smoothly through the lines belies the workers’ labor in stringing and re-stringing them: to pull the cable taut, / To hold it hard until they make it fast. (You can read Frost’s entire poem here.)

Hurricane outages restore Frost’s sense of wonderment at technology. He wrote “The Line-Gang” to celebrate the workers who connected citizens through his era’s modern technologies: the telephone and telegraph. Our power line crews connect us to television and the internet as well as to electricity. Yet these workers also connect us to the past. We still hail them when they arrive: Here come the line-gang pioneering by. We are restored.  –MB

 

Photo Credit:
GRU

Kooped Up with Flannery O’Connor

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imgFlannery O’Connor departed from this earthly life 92 years ago today. I find myself far more interested in her arrivals. FOC is arriving in my inbox an awful lot these days as I review syllabi for the upcoming Fall semester. There she is again in the course texts list for Introduction Literature, Beginning Fiction Writing, Survey of American Literature. To encounter Flannery O’Connor on the page is to begin again.

I recently visited the site of FOC’s beginnings: her childhood home in Savannah, Georgia. It’s a narrow building on East Charlton Street with narrow, high-ceilinged rooms. Walking in, I was immediately drawn to the wicker perambulator that bore her initials. This domestic artifact offers mute testimony to infant confinement. Upstairs in the master bedroom I found something I’d never seen before: a Kiddie-Koop. Patented in the early 20th century, this domestic wonder promised fretting mothers a safe, sanitary, versatile container for wee ones. It was a combination bassinet, crib, and playpen. A Tardis for tots, the Kiddie-Koop traveled from nursery to backyard as the child moved forward in time.img2

For me, the Kiddie Koop explained a lot about Flannery O’Connor’s beginnings. What must it have been like to be confined in such a ridiculous contraption? The wire mesh and wooden frame seemed more suitable for the chicken yard–it had a lid, for goodness’ sake. (Parents could lower the floor and flip the lid as baby grew.) Indoors or out, the child was on display like the freak show characters in FOC’s stories. The wheels could just as easily move a carnival wagon. FOC’s Kiddie Koop reveals the sheer strangeness of American childhood without leaving the premises.

The New Yorker critic who reviewed O’Connor’s debut story collection found that her characters are “fluttering feebly first around the trap that is to break and kill them, and then into the trap” (1955). But O’Connor herself flew the Koop. Lit from above by the window, it seemed a fitting incubator for the twisted plots and warped characters lurking within: waiting to begin. –MB

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Kit, Tom and Jerry: The Poet Who Foretold Cartoons

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English Poet Christopher SmartFor the Mouse is a creature of great personal valour.
For this is a true case–Cat takes female mouse, male mouse will not depart, but stands threatening and daring.

Plot summary for an episode of Tom and Jerry? A promo for Mighty Mouse? Actually, these lines come from a visionary poem that Christopher “Kit” Smart wrote in England between 1758-1763, Jubilate Agno. A translator and London wit as well as a poet, Smart became possessed with a religious fervor that landed him in St. Luke’s Hospital and Mr. Potter’s Madhouse. Later on, his profligate ways landed him in debtor’s prison. Kit Smart penned Jubilate Agno during his long confinement in the mental asylums. But there is nothing confining about his unprecented poem. It broke free from all kinds of constraints: no consistent voice, no rhyme scheme, no set rhythm. It summons prophets, creatures, musical instruments, and alphabet letters with unpredictable incantations. It is Biblical and bestial, reverent and riotous. A cat displays divine dexterity, and a mouse becomes heroic and hospitable.

I couldn’t help but think of cartoons when I reencountered the parts of Jubilate Agno that feature TomandJerryTitleCardcthe nimble cat, Jeoffry, and the unnamed valorous mouse. (You can read Smart’s widely-anthologized cat section here, and watch a clip from Tom and Jerry here.) Fittingly, Smart’s outlier poem wasn’t published until 1939–one year before Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon Tom and Jerry debuted, and three years before the birth of Terrytoon’s Mighty Mouse. Jubilate Agno was not otherworldly. It was ahead of its time.

In 1943 British composer Benjamin Britten set parts of Smart’s poem in his innovative piece Rejoice in the Lamb, written after he lived briefly in the United States. (I’m rehearsing the choral parts for an upcoming performance.) Its nimblest, most frenetic section is the Alto solo about Kit Smart’s mouse:

Like the corresponding section of Jubilate Agno, the music here is cartoonishly clever. It captures the spirit of Smart’s cat-and-mouse game with our expectations.–MB