Recently in class Category

Thank you for checking back!  And my apologies are in order:  though I carefully composed 8 blog-posts to be published automatically while I was gone, I learned upon my return that the automatic-publishing function had failed.  I'm sorry!  Thank you for your persistence. 

Readers, to quote a favorite poet:  I have been to Paris since we parted.  And Amsterdam, and the Cinque Terre, and Venice, Umbria, New Orleans, Austin--all spiced with heavy helpings of family, family, family.  This month of incredible, dazzling traveling (and interpersonal family dynamics in full, illuminating bloom) will keep me ruminating and writing for weeks and months to come.

But for now, I just wanted to share this happy news from David Brooks's column in today's NYTimes:

Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

I was excited, because I'd returned from Austin, where my sister-in-law Cool Julie manages a bookstore, with a totebag full of books for my "Little Sister" Amara.  Julie hand-picked several novels that her female teen customers are finding hot right now, so here's hoping Amara likes some of them.  Usually, we book-shop together.  Amara picks the novels, and then we both read and discuss them.  (Readers, it has taken me outside my usual zones of taste.  Yeah.  But it has been pretty cool, too.)

David Brooks, of course (with whom I'd say I have a love-hate relationship, except it's more tepid than that) manages to use this good news about the efficacy of reading in the service of a larger argument that privileges hierarchies, elitism, and prestige, using the language of all the Great-Books proponents who've ever made you yawn. 

But still, good news is good news.  This summer, consider treating the disadvantaged teen of your choice to a dozen books of his or hers.  Let books make a difference.  Let the beauty you love be what you do.






 

Lovely readers, right now, as I type, Lorraine López and the other PEN/Faulkner finalists, including winner Sherman Alexie, are being feted at a dinner at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC.  Congratulations, Lorraine, on the national success of the probing, funny, honest stories of Homicide Survivors Picnic.

Congratulations to poet Carrie Shipers, whose collection Ordinary Mourning is just out (as in yesterday) from ABZ Press.  To read three of her striking poems, go here. 

Also right now, in the USA, an estimated two and a half million women--most of whom are women of color from the global South--labor as domestic workers, making possible the labor and leisure of all those who choose to leave the care of "the most precious elements of [their] lives: their families and homes," to others.  Ai-jen Poo's essay looks at our interconnections, sketches out a feminist bill of rights for domestic workers, and calls for change:

The upside-down concentration of the world's resources and wealth in the hands of a small minority at the expense of the vast majority is in fact unsustainable for everyone. Domestic worker policy demands that we recognize and value the basic care that we all require to live and provides a model for reshaping our economy to serve our collective human needs.

Dearest all, I will be quick, because I'm in the thick, thick, thick of grading.  But I saw this at the gym yesterday and couldn't help laughing out loud.

Vicky Ward's forthcoming book about the fall of Lehman Brothers, the Manhattan financial firm that went bankrupt in 2008, is excerpted in the April 2010 Vanity Fair (which someone had left at the Y).  The article is specifically about "the plight" of the wives of these guys who pulled down $15 million annual salaries.

Describing the long-suffering, loyal wife of one philandering deputy to the C.E.O., it includes this immortal line:

She had stuck with him through tough times when they were so poor they couldn't afford blinds for the windows in their house.

No blinds?  Gasp.  The tragedy. 

So this is just a little shout-out to all of you who wouldn't consider the absence of window treatments to be "tough times," exactly, together with a wry little moue in the direction of Wall Street. 

First of all, many thanks to all y'all who've posted kind things about my leaving Pine Manor.  I will miss you, too.

Secondly, fans of Tayari Jones--friend of the blog and friend to my life--will be thrilled to know that her eagerly awaited third novel, THE SILVER GIRL, has found a home at Algonquin. 

Thirdly, Lorraine López's edited collection, An Angle of Vision:  Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots, is now available in paperback from University of Michigan.  Congratulations, Lorraine!  Full disclosure:  the title essay is by yours truly, and the book grew out of a raucous panel at the AWP a couple of years ago called "Trashy Women," which some of y'all kindly attended, thank you much.   (When over 400 people showed up, Lorraine knew she had a racehorse of a topic on her hands.)  The book includes work by Dorothy Allison, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Bich Minh Nguyen, Karen McElmurray, Heather Sellers, and other wonderful writers, including Lorraine herself and my own UNL colleague and friend Amelia Montes.  If you've ever been struck by the weird dissonance of class friction--even if you're not a woman or a writer, and even if you didn't end up in academia or publishing--then this book will move you and make you laugh.

Lastly but not leastly--and this is strictly personal--my sweet husband James and I made an offer on a home here in Lincoln.  It's a small condominium downtown, near where we've been renting for the past 2 and a half years, and it's definitely a fixer-upper, which is why we could afford to spring for it.  We're very excited (or is that panic?); I'm not sure if the fluttery feeling is a product of my profound (post-Wabash) commitment-phobia, or due to the hideous old turquoise carpet and popcorn ceiling.  (Alas, the decor is neither retro chic nor dazzlingly of-the-moment, but more like a pathetic from-the-land-time-forgot melange.  But the location is killer.) 

We should be in it by Christmas--the closing is during exam week.   Help!  If you have advice about moving, renovating, contractors, or anything related, please post!

I was so touched and proud last night to receive the Above and Beyond Award from Heartland Big Brothers Big Sisters.  In the Lincoln area, 1,009 women and men serve as mentors to local children and teenagers, and 5 of us were honored at a lovely dinner. 

It did feel a little weird.  As I stood there, having words read aloud about the mentoring relationship I've had with Amara for these past couple of years, I thought, Amara's the one who should be here.  She should be receiving this award, just for surviving her life.  Only the cash bar helped to ease this ontological angst. 

A lot of corporate donors were there, and I hadn't realized how expensive a program BBBS is:  it costs approximately $1,000 a year to support each mentoring match (in terms of paying office staff to run background checks, handle paperwork, and do monthly check-ins with each member of every pair).  But considering the payoff, it's not such a high price to pay.  It's a program that changes kids' lives, and it's a worthy cause.  If you have time (and patience, and you genuinely like kids), consider being a mentor.  If you're short on time but have some cash and want to change a child's life, consider making a donation; BBBS has been thoroughly vetted as a sound charity.

In totally unrelated news, writer Charles Baxter was here on Monday to give a lecture and a reading.  His lecture was on "lush style," and here are some quotable quotes (or rough paraphrases) for all you craft-talk gluttons out there:

In our own postmodern era, an era of irony, skepticism, and understatement, we live with an "aesthetics of suspicion."  Only established writers like Angela Carter or Toni Morrison can get away with a lush style; in workshops, lushness is "vetoed" or "sneered at."

"If you want to be cool, you can't be lush.  You can be one or the other, but not both."

Lushness is "undefended, naked, vulnerable, embarrassing."  It is a "hot style" that "works out of a fever" and is given to "unstable self-dramatization."

It often "refuses to give up the past," and instead "superimposes the past on the present through lyric expansion."

Whenever two time frames are superimposed, there's the possibility of lushness.  The lush style is nostalgic, backward-looking; Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, Garcia Márquez, and Nabokov, especially in Lolita, are all practitioners of the lush style.

"When the claim is being made that everyone should believe in an emotion and agree with it, lushness veers into the overripe, the coercive, the fraudulent, the manipulative.  It stops being poetry and becomes rhetoric."

"Lush styles are about fullness."  They are about being open and unprotected.  They believe in the possibility of transformational love.  Irony, by contrast, is a form of protection, and it is possible that we are all, now, over-protected.

"In a trashy, duplicitous culture" (like our own current culture, apparently), "irony, a cold style," is the default.  Since we are always being lied to, we are always skeptical.

Those were the highlights of his lecture on style, as predigested for you by Joy.  It was an unusual presentation; we were given a handout that began with 4 pages of sheet music by Rachmaninoff and instructed to follow along as the piece was played for us, which quickly separated the musical wheat from the chaff.  (I'm definitely chaff on that score.) 

I'm still thinking through the things Baxter said.

Well, it's another bad day for the University of Nebraska and financial scandal.  The Lincoln Journal-Star is on the job again, this time with a headline that reads

Academics aren't immune to economic downturns.  In my English department, we were asked to consider giving up our individual office phones to save the university money.  Fine; I turned mine in.  We were asked to keep some of the lights off in the interior hallways in our building, which get no natural light.  We did.  Up on my floor, we walk in gloom.  We were told to turn off printers when we're not actually printing something.  Fine.  Makes sense.  The university is trying to cut the (nominal) stipends given to Ethnic Studies professors who administer programs like Latina/o and Latin American Studies for their 8 weekly hours of administrative labor and student advising; there were hearings; the stipends are currently in limbo.

Last week, we received an email from the administration prepping us to expect further cuts--to hiring, to travel, etc.  These follow the job searches that were frozen last year.  There's going to be a special session of the Nebraska legislature due to a dive in state tax revenues, said the email, so we should prepare to think creatively about ways to tighten our belts further.  

Okay, fine.  We know the unemployment situation; we've commiserated with our colleagues in California and elsewhere; we know things are tough all over.  Hey, if they're cutting back even at Harvard, surely we can do without luxuries.  Right?

But not everyone at the University of Nebraska system is feeling the pinch.  Harold Maurer, chancellor of the medical center, "gets a 2009 Porsche Cayenne and membership to two Omaha golf clubs," while UNL chancellor gets a Lexus and  a country-club membership.  Athletic director Tom Osborne gets a 2009 Chevy Tahoe.  Bo Pelini, the football coach, gets not only a 2008 Nissan Armada and a country-club membership but also a 2008 Nissan Quest for his wife.  Over 50 administrators and athletic staff receive private country-club and athletic-club memberships, and over 80 get vehicles as perks, from 2009 Honda Pilots to BMW X5s to Saabs to Lexuses to Porsches.  The Lincoln Journal-Star broke the story last week.

"It is higher education upside down," responded Georgetown University's Pablo Eisenberg.  "The money ought to be going to academics, to those teaching." 

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  As scholars and artists, we've been schooled for so long in the hard truth of our own devaluation that Eisenberg sounds sweetly naïve.  Correct, perhaps, but naïve.  We all know what's most highly valued at academic institutions:  suits and coaches.  This new revelation--they get Porsches, we give up our office phones--is just the latest slap in a long, long series.

But how about this:  the money ought to be going toward reducing class size.  I have 20 students in graduate classes.  I have 30 in undergraduate classes--classes that are supposed to be discussion-based and writing-intensive.  How the hell is that supposed to work?  What does that say about the University of Nebraska's commitment to the quality of education? 

Get this: 

UNL Chancellor Perlman had lunch with a prospective donor and breakfast with another at The Country Club of Lincoln in recent weeks and often uses the club for UNL-related events, he said in an e-mail response to Journal Star questions.

How about this for a creative budget-trimming idea?  How about Perlman meets with prospective donors in his office?  (Where, presumably, he still has a phone.)  How about they have lunch at Panera? 

Oh, is that not how business gets done?  Oh, are golf courses the places where important deals get made?  Excuse me, but if the times they are a-changin' in light of the global financial fiasco (caused precisely by the greed and gambling of the golf-playing, Porsche-driving rich), then maybe the business practices of bureaucrats and coaches need to take the hit that everyone else is taking, because last time I checked, teaching and research don't get done by jacking up class-enrollment caps and cutting back on compensation for labor, either.

Next time someone asks me to pinch pennies, you'll hear me laughing all the way down my dark hallway.

"California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger line-item vetoed $20 million from the state budget which would have funded 94 domestic violence shelters and centers," according to a recent press release from the National Organization for Women.

Yet domestic violence increases by a factor of five when families slip below the poverty line.  With the recession's massive job loss, especially male job loss, more women and children will be at risk for physical and emotional trauma in the home. 

This is not the time to cut the safety net for vulnerable people.  If we can bail out bankers, surely we can provide safe haven for battered women and children.

Congratulations to the Rachel Maddow Show and to Indigo Bridge Books for great first years!  Congratulations to UNL for opening a childcare center on campus!  Congratulations to Obama for another great, important speech!

Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry.  I have been going through it.  But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.

Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross.  Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years. 

What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning.  Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty.  At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie.  They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.

Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths.  We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film.  Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.

When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire.   I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with.  Livingston didn't say.

Gentle Readers, good news!  More magazine has just published this moving piece by the wonderful journalist Beatriz Terrazas.  It's about making peace with wrenching childhood trauma and with the imperfect, inadequate actions of the adults most responsible for protecting us.

It was my privilege to meet Beatriz when she took a memoir-writing workshop with Lorraine López and me at Macondo in 2008.  Our week together was so intense and sparked so much good work.  I loved getting to know Beatriz there in San Antonio and have since taught one of her other essays in the Chicana/Chicano lit classroom.

I love the bravery and strength of this new memoir piece and am so glad that More is sharing it with a broad readership.  Congratulations, Beatriz!