Arts in View

Obituary

2017-05-10T11:46:00.004-04:00

Donovan R. Walling, born January 9, 1948, in Kansas City, Missouri, died May 5, 2017. He was the son of Donovan Ernest and Dorothy (nee Goyette) Walling. A lifelong educator, Walling taught school in Wisconsin and Germany, was a curriculum administrator in Wisconsin and Indiana, and served as director of publications for the education association Phi Delta Kappa, retiring in 2006. He continued to work as a writer and editorial consultant in retirement, and was a senior consultant for the Center for Civic Education. Walling was the author or editor of numerous books in education and also wrote fiction and poetry. He was preceded in death by his wife Diana (nee Eveland) in 1991. He is survived by his husband Sam Troxal; his children, Katherine, Donovan David, and Alexander; and several grandchildren.

In light of Donovan’s lifelong commitment to education, his family requests memorial contributions be made to the Walling-Troxal Endowed Scholarship Fund at First United Church. A celebration of his life will be held Saturday, June 16 at 7pm at First United Church, 2420 E Third Street in Bloomington, Indiana.

Scholder's Expressionist Americans

2017-01-17T11:09:00.000-05:00

The American Indian
Oil on linen, 1970

A quote that I noticed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this week, juxtaposed with Inauguration Day coming at the end of the week, set me thinking about our nation’s first true citizens. King said, “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.” My train of thought barreled on, eventually arriving at a Native American artist whom I have long admired: Fritz Scholder.

Scholder (October 6, 1937 – February 10, 2005), who was one-quarter Luiseño, a California Mission tribe, was an Abstract Expressionist. The imagery in his paintings invariably drew on Native American themes and individuals. Several paintings, like the one shown above, were of native figures draped in the American flag.

King, to expand the quote, went on to say, “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.” King was speaking half a century ago, but his remarks are still pertinent.

Scholder tapped all of this history, weaving it into his extravagantly colorful paintings. I discovered Scholder’s work when I was attending college as an undergraduate art major in the late 1960s. Since that time, whenever I have visited a museum, I’ve always kept an eye peeled for a Scholder painting. Occasionally, though far too seldom, I have been rewarded. Sometime in the late 1970s, on a winter trip to Phoenix, Arizona, I wandered into a gallery that handled Scholder’s work. It was a spellbinding moment, to be surrounded, literally, by his paintings. The images ranged from fierce to whimsical. It was difficult to drag myself away.

Fritz Scholder is represented in numerous museums and galleries. Perhaps nearest my own location in southern Indiana, visitors to the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis can enjoy one of his works. Scholder’s paintings are worth contemplating, both from the standpoint of artistic expression and as a reflection of the interwoven themes of Native American history and the evolving place of Native Americans, minority individuals, and immigrants—all “othered” too often, instead of accepted as the true warp and woof of our national fabric.

With a fraught Inauguration Day approaching this week, such contemplation is timely. If you can’t find a Scholder painting in a nearby museum, google his name and explore the images online. I guarantee a rich visual experience.

Franckaphilia

2016-10-04T19:47:00.000-04:00

That was the title of a faculty recital I attended on a recent evening.

César Franck

Fully, it was “Franckaphilia: The Complete Organ Works of César Franck – Part I: From Palace to Paradise,” performed by Janette Fishell, IU Jacobs School of Music Organ Department Chair. She performed in Auer Hall on the magnificent and relatively new (dedicated in 2010) Fisk organ, named the Maidee H. and Jackson A. Seward Organ. A Part II recital has been scheduled for January 2017.

Born in Liège, in what is now Belgium, César Franck (1822 – 1890) spent his adult life in Paris working as a pianist, organist, and composer. His work is typical of late Romantic musical compositions, but very enjoyable even if one isn’t predisposed to the Romantic period. This recital was composed of two sections. The first was “Trois pièces: No. 1 Fantaisie in A Major, No. 2 Cantabile, No. 3 Pièce héroïque,” followed, after a brief pause, by “Trois chorals: No. 1 in E Major, No. 2 in B Minor, No. 3 in A Minor.” Of all of repertoire, my favorite, and generally a crowd-pleaser, was the truly heroic, even bombastic, “Pièce héroïque.”

Fisk Organ in Auer Hall
IU Jacobs School of Music

I have been told that the Auer Hall organ is particularly well suited to Romantic music. I wouldn’t know. I have enjoyed a number of recitals and concerts there, including the evening previous to this concert, when a young Mexican harpist of our acquaintance played his senior recital there. It’s a wonderful, contemporary, mid-size (400-seat) concert hall—a fine facility in a very fine school of music.

Franck himself was associated with a fine organ. In 1858 he became the organist at Sainte-Clotilde, a basilica church on the Rue Las Cases in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris, and kept that position for the rest of his life. A year later the church acquired its famous Aristide Cavaillé-Coll organ, played by Franck and a number of later well-known composers. Franck subsequently became a French national and in 1872 was appointed to a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire.

Who knows whether I’ll manage to take in Part II of Franckaphilia, but if it happens I’m sure it will be equally enjoyable.

Political Theater of the Absurd

2016-08-10T10:18:00.000-04:00

P.T. Barnum portrayed as a
"Hum-Bug": a cartoon by H. L. Stephens (1851)

Let’s be honest: Political campaigns often are as much about entertainment as serious stumping, regardless of party. At least in the beginning. At the start of the season candidate Donald Trump, now widely considered a fatal mistake for and by the Republican Party, could be compared to P.T. Barnum. Showman extraordinaire, Barnum (1810-1891) was America’s penultimate purveyor of humbug during the second half of the 19th century. “I am a showman by profession...and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me,” he said. Barnum also made a brief, unsuccessful foray into politics. He was a fitting model for Trump.

In the beginning Trump was a P.T. Barnum for our time. He might as well have adopted Barnum’s famous (though erroneously attributed) maxim: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” And the suckers flocked to him. No matter how outrageous his rhetoric, Trump’s adherents cheered.

But a gradual metamorphosis took place. Trump ceased to be funny. He became vicious. He attacked persons of color, immigrants, women, military veterans, the disabled, Muslims and Mexicans, even crying babies. He displayed a shocking disregard for the Constitution, law, and basic civility. Suddenly comparing Trump to Hitler, once regarded as political hyperbole, took on an air of prescience. The Barnum for our time shed his comedic cocoon to reveal a xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, duplicitous proto-fascist, whose key supporters aligned themselves with the KKK and other white supremacist groups.

One often wonders, when watching Theater of the Absurd, where the line runs between reality and fantasy. It’s the theatrical equivalent of surrealism. Why are those clocks melting? Could clocks melt in real life?

We wait for Trump to say, “Just kidding! Surely you weren’t taking me serious.” But he does indeed seem to be serious. Thankfully many of the saner members of his own party have awakened to the imminent and very real danger of a Trump presidency and are turning against him. Sadly, even when the November election rings down the curtain on this absurd political theater, as it must, America will still have to deal with those in his audience who stayed to stand and cheer.

A Tale of Two Sidneys

2016-04-24T16:06:00.000-04:00

Sidney Bechet at Jimmy Ryan's Club
in New York City, 1947

Sidney Chambers, the troubled vicar of Grantchester in the PBS Mystery series that bears the name of this actual Cambridgeshire village, is fond of jazz music. So every now and then when Sidney is in a reflective mood, viewers are treated to a few snatches, which often happily feature the unmistakable trembling soprano sax tones of the incomparable Sidney Bechet.

I cannot recall when I discovered Bechet; it seems as though his special sound has always resided at least at the edge of memory whenever I’m not actually listening to one of his recordings.

The improbably handsome actor James Norton portrays the 30-something Anglican priest, a Cambridge graduate and former Scots Guards officer assigned to pastor Grantchester. But Sidney Chambers is hardly a simple country vicar, as the plots of these stories invariably revolve around the complex Reverend Chambers’ involvement in some crime or other. Bechet’s alternatingly poignant and playful sound complements the often fraught character of Sidney Chambers.

The series is set in the 1950s. When Sidney spins a Bechet LP on his turntable, lights up a cigarette, and leans back in his study chair with a tumbler of amber liquor, he listens to the jazz artist in his prime. New Orleans-born Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was largely self-taught and was recognized fairly early in his career as perhaps the first notable jazz saxophonist, although he played several instruments.

Bechet played mainly clarinet professionally in New Orleans and elsewhere during the Teens and then about 1920 traveled to London, where he discovered the straight soprano sax. The instrument would be used to produce his signature sound. Critics called it “emotional,” “reckless,” and “large.” His sound featured a broad vibrato, a technique common to some New Orleans clarinetists at the time.

Bechet’s reckless, erratic behavior was career limiting. For example, he was imprisoned in London for several days in 1922, having been convicted of assaulting a woman, and was subsequently deported back to the United States. Consequently Bechet did not truly rise to fame until the 1940s. After performing at the Paris Jazz Festival, he moved permanently to France in 1950, and his popularity surged there. The next year he married Elisabeth Ziegler in Antibes.

Sadly, Sidney Bechet died of lung cancer in Garches, near Paris, on May 14, 1959, his sixty-second birthday. Fortunately his recordings live on so that we, like Grantchester’s other Sidney, Reverend Chambers, can still get lost in the trembling tones of Bechet’s sax. I recommend “Petite Fleur,” Bechet’s own composition, which he recorded In 1952: http://youtu.be/wMwckuWpxDs. You will fall in love with the sound.

Small-Screen Mysteries

2016-03-26T18:15:00.000-04:00

Parker Stevenson(as Frank Hardy) and
Shaun Cassidy (as Joe Hardy) from
the Hardy Boy Mysteries of the 1970s.

Rewatching some of the early episodes of the PBS television series of Agatha Christie’s mysteries featuring Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, so aptly portrayed by the incomparable David Suchet, set me thinking about other small-screen adaptations that I have enjoyed seeing as thoroughly as I liked reading the original books and short stories.

Like many of my generation—and before and after—my love of mystery novels began during my preteen years in the 1950s, when I discovered the Hardy Boys. The books were “factory” novels, like the Nancy Drew books, written by a number of ghostwriters under the collective pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. Teenage detectives Frank and Joe Hardy enjoyed a run on television in the late 1970s, played by teen heartthrobs Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson.

The decade of the 1970s also saw a series of television programs based on the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers, a contemporary of Agatha Christie. The tongue-in-cheek aristocratic amateur detective of the title was played by Ian Carmichael, my favorite among the Lord Peter portrayers.

And, of course, the next decade bore witness to the start of a long series of television adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, with Jeremy Brett as the eccentric detective. Brett became the quintessential Holmes, just as Suchet has become the definitive Poirot, both actors filming the majority of their respective canons. At least for their—and my—generation.

Great mysteries will always find new adaptations for new generations of enthusiasts. And then there are the mystery novels being written now that will find their way to the small screen to the delight of new audiences of mystery addicts. I could certainly suggest a few characters that I’d like to see. One would be Maisie Dobbs, the World War I nurse turned 1920s private detective, from the well-crafted series by Jacqueline Winspear.

Or what about the Roman Empire era “finder” Marcus Didius Falco, who stars in the wonderfully well-researched historical mysteries by Lindsey Davis? And then there’s Diane Mott Davidson’s caterer-cum-snoop Goldie Schulz and Greg Herren’s gay New Orleans-based New Age detective Scotty Bradley. Well, the list could go on and on. I am addicted to mysteries after all. Who are your favs?

Poetry

2016-02-28T09:02:00.003-05:00

My interest in writing poetry began in high school and continued into college, although nothing I produced then was particularly worth reading. After college, in the 1970s, I wrote poems with greater intent and even published a few. But after that decade other interests, activities, and life in general made for about a thirty-year hiatus. I didn’t take up writing poems with any real passion again until after I retired in 2006.

Nowadays I write for my own pleasure, and I share my work with family and friends. My poems tend to be either autobiographical or responsive to nature—or both. I don’t consider myself a nature poet, but I have always responded to the passing seasons, flora and fauna, and weather phenomena. Perhaps because I also work in the visual arts, mainly as a painter, I try to create visual images with words. I have persisted in a lifelong fascination with impressionistic and expressionistic free verse, inspired by the likes of Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, and many, many other Modern poets. If there is one thread, however slender, that unites at least some of my poems now, it is reflection on aging, keenly felt in particular since my cancer diagnosis in April 2015.

Is writing poems a form of therapy? Certainly. What artistic expression is not? But writing, at least for me, is always more than that. It is the creation of art, which in itself is intensely fulfilling. I suspect it’s that way for most poets, who, when it comes down to it, seldom write poetry as their livelihood. Many, in fact, never get published or, like Emily Dickenson, are published extensively only after their death. And fame? Most find little within their lifetime, although some achieve it later. Sylvia Plath, for example, became really well known only after her death.

Thanks to the ease, convenience, and low cost of the Nook on-demand publishing platform, I’ve put together a couple of collections of poems in recent months. Published privately and never intended for sale, these volumes are gifts for family and friends. (The cover of the first one is pictured above.) Having worked in publishing and possessing an inclination for writing and design are helpful but not essential to this type of project.

In sum, the advice I’d give to anyone who is curious about writing, whether poems or some other form, is simply to do it. Ultimately, the intended beneficiary is the writer. If readers also benefit in some way, so much the better.

Note: This commentary is cross-posted on two blogs: Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com) and Living With…A Cancer Journal (http://livingwithcancerjournal.blogspot.com).

A Divine Dolly

2016-01-20T09:35:00.000-05:00

A new revival of the 1964 hit musical Hello, Dolly! is set to open on Broadway during the spring of 2017, according to TheaterMania (theatermania.com). The production will star Bette Midler as Dolly. All I have to say can be summed up in four words: It is about time!

As for many of my generation, the Divine Miss M has been a delightful fixture on the music and theater scenes over a lifetime. She captivated early on, in the days when she was delighting gay audiences, accompanied on the piano by Barry Manilow, at the Continental Baths in New York’s Ansonia Hotel, a period that produced, in 1972, her first album, The Divine Miss M. She memorialized that time in a later album, Bathhouse Betty, which was released in 1998. The Divine Miss M became a million-seller and earned her a Grammy Award as Best New Artist in 1973.

In 1979 Bette made her first movie, The Rose, and the title song will forever be associated with her. Success followed success as albums, movies, and stage performances accumulated, earning her numerous awards and a legion of devoted fans. I count myself as one of those fans, and now I’m delighted that she will be tackling the role of Dolly in a musical that I have enjoyed almost since it opened in 1964.

Hello, Dolly!, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman and a book by Michael Stewart, based on Thornton Wilder’s 1938 farce, The Merchant of Yonkers, which was retitled The Matchmaker in 1955, opened on January 16, 1964, at the St. James Theatre. It was David Merrick’s first show. Choreographed by Gower Champion, it starred Carol Channing, who would make it a vehicle for her lifetime. She revived it in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. I saw it during the latter period, when Channing performed at the Indiana University Auditorium. However, much earlier I saw another touring production that began in 1965 and ran for two years and nine months and saw two replacements for Channing over the course of the tour. Eve Arden was one, and Dorothy Lamour, who gained fame in the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope road pictures of the 1940s. It was Lamour whom I saw when I was a college student in Kansas in the late 1960s.

The Bette Midler production will be the fourth Broadway revival of this iconic musical. I can hardly wait. It certainly seems to warrant a trip the Big Apple in 2017.

Merton and Waugh

2015-11-23T20:34:00.000-05:00

Thomas Merton

Merton and Waugh, by Mary Frances Cody (Paraclete Press, 2015), recounts a relatively brief period from August 2, 1948, to February 25, 1952, during which the American author and monk Thomas Merton engaged in correspondence with the British novelist Evelyn Waugh. This slim volume, subtitled A Monk, a Crusty Old Man, and The Seven Storey Mountain, was a gift from my partner/husband Sam on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of our relationship, which coincidentally was our wedding day. I finished reading the book exactly three months later, not that it took that long to read the 155 pages but because I read it in digestible bits, allowing ample time to ponder this remarkable period of correspondence between these two interesting men whose lives were perhaps even more intriguing than their writing.

The correspondence between Merton and Waugh began when Waugh was asked by Merton’s American publisher to edit the

Evelyn Waugh

monk’s The Seven Storey Mountain manuscript for a British edition. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was approaching middle age in 1948 and had recently become known in the United States following the publication some two years earlier of Brideshead Revisited, his novel of elicit love and divine grace. The manuscript of The Seven Storey Mountain, written by a Trappist monk living in obscurity in a rural Kentucky monastery, arrived unsolicited, sent by Merton’s editor Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace, the New York publishing company.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was not a novice writer at the time, although he was still somewhat new to monastic life, having been accepted at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky, as a novice monk in the spring of 1942. Early on it was recognized that Merton’s strength lay in his abilities as a writer, and he was set to work producing texts of various sorts as a means of bringing income to the monastery. The Seven Storey Mountain, written when Merton was in his early thirties, is autobiographical and unarguably his best-known book. The title refers to the mountain of Purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Evelyn Waugh was not the only person Giroux approached to edit the work. Three others received unsolicited manuscripts: Graham Greene, Clare Booth Luce, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. But it was Waugh, who wasn’t expected to respond, who got the nod. Waugh’s endorsement was selected for the cover of the first edition: “I regard this as a book which may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience. No one can afford to neglect this clear account of a complex religious process.” And so it has proven.

Cody has done a masterful job of parsing the two writers’ thoughts and feelings over the course of their exchanges. I suspect most readers will believe, as I do, that in peering into the letters these men exchanged they have been grant privileged access to a moment in time when the lives of these two writers intersected.

Roman Empire Mysteries Delight

2015-10-19T18:47:00.002-04:00

Marcus Didius Falco—If you don’t know this first-century detective from a superb series of mystery novels set during the early years of the Roman Empire, then you have missed many hours of delightful reading. Lindsey Davis (born 1949) is the English historical novelist who launched Falco onto the literary scene in 1989 with The Silver Pigs, set during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian (lived 9-79 CE; ruled 69-79 CE).

In The Silver Pigs Falco stumbles upon a conspiracy that involves trading silver ingots, and the investigation takes him to Britain. There he meets a lady above his station, the daughter of the senator who hired him, named Helena Justina. Against all odds, Falco not only solves the case but also falls in love with the noble lady—and she with him. However, they cannot wed until Falco is raised to the upper middle-class rank of equestrian. And that will take some doing. Thus the stage is set for an unfolding romance (and eventual marriage) that provides a continuing narrative through a long and thoroughly engaging series of novels.

Lindsey Davis, by taking this approach, created both a romantic backstory with three-dimensional characters whom readers become well acquainted with over a number of years and a problem. What happens to your main character (and those around him) as he ages? Moreover, what do you do when he retires? Davis deftly handles the issues of aging as Falco grows in his profession and the relationship between Falco and Helena Justina matures into a longterm marriage, complete with the introduction of children into the family dynamic.

I fretted that Davis might decide to retire with her detective, but in fact she took a more interesting and adventurous turn by focusing on Falco and Helena Justina’s adopted daughter, Flavia Albia. This daughter picks up where her father, now comfortably living in retirement, left off, becoming herself an “informer,” the role of first-century private detective. The first of the Flavia Albia novels is The Ides of April, published in 2013. Set in the spring of 89 CE, Flavia Albia even moves into Falco’s old, seedy apartment in Fountain Court, a rundown tenement that Falco now owns. As the story opens, she is a 28-year-old widow.

Davis adeptly negotiates the potential pitfalls of creating a believable female detective working subtly within the constraints of male-dominated Roman society. I recently finished reading Deadly Election, published this year, 2015, and could not be better satisfied with the continuation of this fascinating series through Falco’s daughter. I recommend this series, particularly to readers who love a good mystery and are interested in Roman history, for Davis’s intricately plotted stories also provide a convincing window into everyday life in Ancient Rome.

Guns

2015-10-05T10:57:00.000-04:00

“Bang, bang. You’re dead,” we yelled,

Whooping and hollering, scampering

Among the trees, like cowboys on TV.

Shot dead we rolled in fallen leaves,

Arms and legs flopping, then bounced

Up to chase and shoot again and again

Till nightfall came, streetlights blinked,

And our mothers called us home.

Half a century now passed and kids

No longer play cowboys in the woods.

Dead children no longer rise up again

In classrooms, churches, and theaters,

Where real bullets fly all too often

And innocent blood stains the floor.

Toys no longer, guns are the death

Of culture, the demise of civility,

As love of power and of hate trump

Sense, and love of money, money

Negates our duty to the living

And the dead, and the dead to be.

There will be more death. We know.

We could change this future if—

If we had the will to stop pretending

Guns spell freedom with lethal rounds.

Guns write in death, and these cowboys

Cannot bounce up to yell “Bang, bang”

And hear their mothers call them in.

Guns send them home alone, forever.

I wrote this poem in response to the latest mass shooting, which occurred in Oregon. In the previous post I discussed our American obsession with guns and the gun violence that comes from our collective inability to address resulting death and injury not as a threat to a supposed constitutional right but as a threat to the common good that is foundational in our democracy. Sensible gun laws, which are not universal in the United States but could, and should, be, are merely an essential starting point. However, such laws would lay a foundation for changing our pervasive gun culture and making our nation safer for all.

Gun Violence as Entertainment

2015-08-30T17:20:00.001-04:00

The United States will not take action to curb gun violence until such violence ceases to be viewed as entertainment.

No one with any sense believes the government is out to take away guns from ordinary people, the folks who hunt, enjoy target shooting, and so on. Nor would even the most cursory reading of the Constitution lead anyone of good sense to believe that effective gun control somehow violates the Second Amendment. These are anti-gun-law arguments promulgated by the self-serving NRA and radical rightists bent on deluding the public for political gain. None of this blather would make any difference if the American public were sufficiently enraged by gun violence to take action. The sad fact is that the American public is not enraged by gun violence; it is entertained.

The term ammosexual should be a clue. Ammosexuals are those with an affection for firearms, those who see guns as sexy, those who wear guns a fashion accessories. But for every ammosexual there are ten or a hundred individuals who view, whether consciously or subconsciously, gun violence as entertainment.

Murder and mayhem as entertainment have a long history. Romans flocked to the coliseum to see prisoners torn apart by wild animals. Public executions across the centuries have drawn crowds in many nations eager to see people hanged, shot, beheaded, or worse. The lynching of black people was a popular U.S. pastime, particularly between 1880 and 1920, when nearly 3,500 African Americans were killed by mob violence.

The postmodern era has moved spectacle violence to the evening news, where it nightly entertains the population in reports mainly of gun violence. Mass shootings this year in the United States have become a near daily experience.

Digitized gun violence—television reports, newspaper stories, government statistics, and other sources of information, usually accessed by digital means—dampens the revulsion factor. Viewers are distanced from actual events. The violence becomes fictionalized, just another shoot ’em up at the OK Corral.

Twenty-seven killed in a Connecticut elementary school. Thirteen shot in a New York immigrant community center. Twelve killed in the Washington Navy Yard. Twelve killed in a Colorado movie theater. Nine killed in a South Carolina church. It’s all schadenfreude for the masses, rubbing their hands and tsk-tsking in front of screens.

Gun violence is real. When one’s children or parents or siblings or friends are injured or killed in gun violence, it is all too real. It’s not entertainment. It’s murder. When we finally come to our senses as a nation, no objections, no fake excuses, no hyperbole will be allowed to stand in the way of sensible gun laws.

But we’re not there yet. In the meantime, we will continue to allow the slaughter of the innocents—for the fun of it.

The Dalai Lama and the Future of Tibet

2015-07-08T10:13:00.000-04:00

As Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, celebrates his eightieth birthday this week, there is again speculation in the world’s press about the future of Tibet—and, more precisely, the future of the Tibetan government in exile. A portion of that speculation naturally concerns the future of the role itself. Will there be a 15th Dalai Lama?

As one commentator noted, when the Chinese government, which claims Tibet as its own and opposes the Dalai Lama, ramps up its opposition to the current Dalai Lama, his influence only grows stronger. Indeed, his holiness is the central, encompassing presence of Tibet in exile.

Tibetan history has always been fraught, no less so over the course of the 20th century and extending into the 21st. Thubten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama, was born in 1876 and suffered exile various times before issuing a declaration of independence in 1912. No other state recognized Tibetan independence, however. Consequently the status of Tibet was still in flux when he died in 1933.

The current Dalai Lama was formally enthroned in November 1950 at the age of fifteen. Tibet at the time was engaged in a prolonged struggle with the People’s Republic of China, which then forced on Tibet an “agreement” for “liberation,” by which Tibet became essentially a Chinese province. Subsequently, in the wake of a revolt in Tibet, the Dalai Lama fled to India where he formed a government in exile that continues today.

Some years ago I wrote a brief history of Tibetan governance titled “Patrimonialist Rulership in Tibet: Four Historical Periods,” which appears in a collection edited by William H. Swatos, Jr., Time, Place, and Circumstance: Neo-Weberian Studies in Comparative Religious History, published by Greenwood Press in 1990.

I find it interesting to note that a number of today’s commentators are saying much the same thing that I posited some twenty-five years ago:

The Chinese may well choose to preserve (in appearance at least) Tibet’s traditional political-religious system by doing what the Tibetans themselves did in their dealings with the Mongols in the late sixteenth century. That is, when the exiled Dalai Lama dies, the Chinese may arrange for the discovery of his reincarnation among those more favorable to their rule.

Meanwhile, the current Dalai Lama continues to work for an autonomous Tibet and to foster peace. Tenzin Gyatso received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, a recognition that has been upheld by his continuing efforts on the world stage. Some years ago, when he visited Indiana University, where his brother was a professor for many years, I was able to attend a lecture he gave. My enduring impression is of a man devoted to peace.

Remembering Bobby Short

2015-05-31T19:40:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite channels on Pandora is “Bobby Short,” which also segues to the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and others singers drawing from the “Great American Songbook.” But it’s Bobby Short whose voice and jazz piano stylings I listen for.

Robert Waltrip “Bobby” Short, born September 15, 1924, died in 2005 at age 80. Self-taught, Short played the vaudeville circuit in the Midwest before he was a teenager. By age 12 he was headlining in Manhattan nightclubs and playing regular engagements at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

In various clubs during the 1940s he made his name as a cabaret singer and pianist and that, more than anything else, was his claim to fame. In 1968 he took a two-week gig at New York City’s Café Carlyle and remained a featured performer there until near the end of his life. He was in his element performing music by Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, and the Gershwins. In 2000 the Library of Congress named him a Living Legend.

Short embodied smooth sophistication. His suave musical performances were matched by his elegant, impeccable wardrobe. His voice had a characteristic warble reminiscent of the heartfelt tremble of Sidney Bechet’s soprano sax. He played the White House for Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton.

I never had the pleasure of seeing Bobby Short perform. But to hear him is to fall in love with the “Great American Songbook” all over again. Check out “Live from the Café Carlyle” on YouTube at https://youtu.be/PzWrXDzjA7Y.

Sitcom Marriage

2015-05-13T10:08:00.000-04:00

The so-called traditional marriage that rightwingers thump their bibles over is largely absent in biblical text. Man-woman marriage is there certainly, but so are man and brother’s widow, rapist and victim, man and multiple wives (with a few concubines thrown in), and so on. The “Christian” right traditional marriage actually is a sitcom staple from mid-20th century, the same era that gave us the corporate ad-gimmick God of “In God We Trust” (see the previous post, “God, Inc.”).

Some readers will be old enough to remember early television sitcoms that helped embed the “traditional marriage” notion in our collective consciousness: “I Love Lucy,” “Father Knows Best,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and others. The sitcom family consisted of a working father (often the comic foil), a non-working but wise mother, and usually one or two children, good kids with a streak of mischief.

The traditional family sitcoms of the Fifties and Sixties idealized a dominant, though hardly universal, reality. According to Pew Research, the percentage of children living with two married parents in their first marriage in 1960 was 73%. As of 2013, that figure had dropped to 46%. Today a majority of children live in other, “nontraditional” families: 15% live with two married parents, one or both remarried; 34% live with a single parent; and 5% have no parent at home. So-called traditional marriage has been in decline for the past half century.

In fact, the vast majority of adults simply live together before or instead of marrying. According to a 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, only 23% of “first unions” (couples sharing the same address) were marriages. “Cohabitation is a common part of family formation in the United States, and serves both as a step toward marriage and as an alternative to marriage,” the study said.

While the radical right consistently fails to deal with reality, that should be no excuse for the rest of us when it comes to validating successful family configurations—marriages—of all sorts, including non-marriages, such as single-parent families and couples living together without being legally married. The notion of marriage equality is anathema to the so-called religious right because it does not conform to the sitcom marriage ideal of the past. But it’s a mistake to cite the Bible as the source when “traditional marriage” actually comes from Fifties television.

God, Inc.

2015-03-29T13:46:00.000-04:00

It’s hard to call oneself a Christian when so many who flaunt that label behave in such unChrist-like ways. Too often Christian is synonymous today with racist and homophobe, which leaves many who actually attempt to live out the principles attributed to Christ feeling as though they are victims of identity theft. I wonder if God feels the same way.

The public context of God has been almost wholly subsumed in the identity of radical right “Christian” hegemony. Political Christianism is a rightwing gimmick. The God of “In God We Trust” is a “Christian” god for a “Christian” nation—both fictions designed to fool unthinking masses with feel-righteous rhetoric.

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“How Business Made Us Christian,” March 15, 2015), Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse traced the formulation of God as an advertising ploy. Kruse attributes the mid-20th-century adoption of a decidedly Christianist God as America’s national trademark to the influence of business interests, particularly as stimulated and articulated by a young charismatic evangelist, Billy Graham.

Kruse quotes Graham as saying in 1952, “If I would run for president of the United States today on a platform of calling people back to God, back to Christ, back to the Bible, I’d be elected.” Republican conservatives have been banking on this ploy ever since.

Imagine a decade-earlier version of AMC’s Sixties advertising agency in Mad Men and one may better understand how corporate America began its drive toward oligarchy with the collusion of rightwing politicians. God got big in the 1950s. Government agencies initiated prayer services. In 1954 Congress added “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance, and that was the year “In God We Trust” got added to postage stamps. The next year the phrase was added to U.S. currency. And in 1956 it became the official national motto.

In the current national debate about the character of the United States—a debate that affects education, the arts, the sciences, politics, global affairs, and all the rest—it is useful to remember that the public “God,” like the notion of being a “Christian nation,” is a recent invention—at root merely a crass advertising ploy and propaganda with no actual foundation in faith.

This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

Language of Bias and Privilege

2015-02-11T08:30:00.000-05:00

The headline read, “Muslim Americans Killed.” They were college students. Why not “Americans,” “students,” or simply “people”? The killer, who confessed and turned himself in, was “alleged killer,” not “Christian American” or “Christian extremist” or “Christian terrorist.” The killer was white, but readers only knew that because his photograph accompanied the article. If he were black, the article surely would have said so. It also didn’t note that he professed to be Christian, but most readers would assume that—and probably not want it mentioned. To say that the killer was Christian would be to view Christians in the same monolithic way that Muslims are too often viewed in the press.

The language we use, or choose not to use, identifies our biases. It preconditions our conclusions. The use of “Muslim” as a modifier situates these killings in the larger context of our notions about Islam and our stereotypes. Some readers will immediately see the homicides as tragic reminders of our society’s often mindless prejudice against Muslims. Other readers, who view all Muslims as evil, will automatically side with the killer. Both are biases.

If being Muslim was a factor in the victims’ murders, then should not the religious affirmation of the killer also be a factor? Imagine the reverse. Would a headline ever read, “Christian Americans Killed”? Certainly not in a domestic newspaper and certainly not without a comparable identification of the killer as some sort of religious fanatic. In the United States media language nearly universally privileges “Christian” and “white” by omission. Villains and victims alike who are not Christian or white are identified by a racial, ethnic, national, or religious adjective. The bias is clear. These modified Americans are second-class citizens at best. Their foreignness is emphasized.

It may be impossible to neutralize our language. The media may find it simply too mundane to report, “Three Students Killed,” and then delve objectively into possible religious bias as the killer’s motivation. Perhaps, as an alternative, we might strive at least for truth in labeling. If we must headline, “Muslim Americans Killed,” then we should in fairness label the killer as a “Christian fanatic.”

The Erosion of Common Ground

2015-02-09T17:59:00.001-05:00

A hive of intellectual curiosity and pursuit. That was my impression as I looked up from the new Alexander McCall Smith novel I was sampling in the New Books section of our public library. Before me, spread throughout the spacious, well-appointed library were patrons of all ages, even college students in spite of the fact that the university nearby has several extensive libraries as well. The public library is a citizens’ space: common ground for the common good. Ours is heavily patronized by readers young and old across the economic strata. Yes, a number of homeless individuals take shelter there, reading the day away or using the pubic computers, avoiding the bitter chill of the Indiana winter. Why should they not? They are as entitled to the pursuit of knowledge or the pleasure of a good read as anyone.

Although the Digital Revolution has brought about changes in how we can engage in literate pursuits, those changes—the Internet, ebooks—have provided new options, rather than substitutes for volumes on shelves. I will gladly confess that in the course of writing five or six books since 2000, I have not darkened the door of traditional library to do the research necessary for them. The Internet has provided me with access to libraries, collections, and various media worldwide. But that does not mean that I consider traditional libraries obsolete. Far from it. Public libraries offer both traditional resources and access to digital resources, especially for those who don’t have computer media ready to hand. The emerging Digital Age is enlarging the role of public libraries, not reducing it.

That is not what those heavily invested in the Industrial/Corporate Age would have us believe. Corporate oligarchs are grasping at every possible means to extend the Corporate Age past its sell-by date, which was about the turn of the century. Much of this grasping is taking the form of attacking common ground: public places, spaces, and endeavors whose democratic mission is to foster and support the common good. The graspers are largely conservative, though not exclusively, and focused on elitist privilege, often corporate. The Digital Age is increasingly about individuation and diverse community, not about corporate personhood.

Public libraries, public schools, public—read “democratic”—anything is suspect in the eyes of corporate oligarchy, in which monied elites are focused on controlled parochialism. Gerrymandering electoral districts to ensure that candidates backed by corporate money win offices and become puppet legislators; undermining public confidence in public schools by unfounded criticism, underfunding, and the shunting of public money into corporate pockets through contracts for ever more testing, vouchers, and charter schools; widening the wealth gap between rich and poor through regressive taxes and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy—all of these are the self-serving actions of those heavily invested in a dying age, the Industrial/Corporate Age.

The Digital Age, sparked by two key Digital Revolution developments, the computer and the Internet, is not an extension of the Industrial/Corporate Age. It is a revolution-worthy new era. Too many people already understand this. Maybe they read newspapers or see the information on Facebook. Maybe they come to the public library. However, they gain their understanding of the radical changes that are marking out a new cultural era, it’s scaring the bejezus out of conservatives hoping to preserve the dying Industrial/Corporate age. But beware. Those who are afraid are always dangerous. Those of us ready to embrace the Digital Age would do well to remember Gandhi’s words: “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

Je Suis Charlie

2015-01-08T09:56:00.001-05:00

The murderous terrorist attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s offices that left twelve persons dead and others injured demonstrated, again, the fragility of free expression. Observant criticism, whether sober or satirical, often provokes strong, emotional reactions. Among extremists, particularly religious and ideological radicals whose ardent fanaticism is rooted in delusional beliefs that admit no contradiction, the reaction can be far out of proportion to the perceived offense.

Most rational people shrug off criticism as insulting but not life-threatening. Criticism based on untruths is countered, sometimes with legal action claiming defamation, libel, or slander. The legal tests are rigorous, particularly in the United States because our Constitution values freedom of expression as articulated in the First Amendment. Extreme beliefs, however, can and often do lead to extreme actions. The Paris massacre is merely the latest example.

U.S. education “reform” initiatives, which have come wave after destructive wave over several decades now, have consistently neglected to emphasize civic education. Such neglect has resulted in an electorate that is ill-informed about governance matters—from what the Constitution says and means to how legislative acts actually affect people’s lives—and largely disengaged from the governance process. As witness there are the abysmally consistent low numbers of citizens who vote. Indeed, voter turnout in the 2014 U.S. general election was the lowest since World War II. Scarcely more than a third of eligible voters cast ballots.

Extremism is an assault on civitas, the idea that civil society is bound in law, which conveys both responsibilities and rights of citizenship. Whether in France, the United States, or elsewhere, fanaticism endangers not only the individual targets of extremism but also the society as a whole. The purpose of civic education, therefore, is not simply to help young people to understand how government functions but to understand how they as citizens can and must participate meaningfully in civil society.

In a free society freedom of expression is a value of considerable worth. Such freedom should not be merely tolerated but prized. But even criticism must be grounded in truth. Satire, such as the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, points up untruths and misinformation and pokes fun at lapses of judgment and delusions. In the United States the satirical Daily Show offers a complementary forum. Part of the charge of civic education is to teach critical discernment, which is the root of satire.

The far more insidious assault on freedom of expression is the promulgation of misinformation as truth or “news.” Effective civic education would help young people become discerning consumers of media, better able to distinguish news from propaganda. As it is, for example, a significant proportion of U.S. citizens takes at face value propaganda purveyed as truth—“news”—by organizations such as Fox News, despite fact-checking which shows that a majority of Fox’s “news” is misleading or blatantly false.

Facts do not change the minds of fanatics. Extremism is impervious to truth, which is why most extremist groups oppose education in favor of indoctrination. If the United States wants to improve education—to enact actual, forward-looking “reform”—then more effective civic education should be a high priority. Comprehensive civic education would help young people become informed citizens less likely in future to be radicalized by mistruths and more likely to be positively engaged in the maintenance of a free civil society.

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

Love at First Set

2014-12-28T04:54:00.000-05:00

As a thirteen-year-old seventh-grader in Germany, I had my first experience of live theater when a USO troupe brought Guys and Dolls to our military community. I was spellbound. The sets! The costumes! The lights! The music! Real live people performing right in front of our eyes. It was pure magic. And so it has been for the past half century.

The immediacy of live theater—or any live performance—produces, at its best, a miraculous humanity, a connection between viewer and performer that cannot be replicated with images on screens. Whether it’s comic, tragic, or something else scarcely matters. That it’s real people beneath the greasepaint is what counts. And the first time is enough to hook a person for life. At least it was in my case.

A few years ago we took my very skeptical fourteen-year-old godson and his family to the Broadway production of Billy Elliot. My godson, who had protested going, turned to me after the first dance number, eyes full of stars, and whispered, “This is great!” Yes! Exactly! Just yesterday, my partner took two of the grandchildren, ages eight and six, to a local production of Shrek, the Musical. They are likely to remember the experience for a lifetime.

Over the years I’ve seen a great deal of theater and dabbled at being more than a viewer. In high school I designed the set for our production of My Fair Lady, in which Eliza was played by future Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest; she was a senior, I was a sophomore. A decade ago I flew to Wisconsin to watch a high school performance of my own play, Writer’s Catch, that was staged by the school where I’d taught a decade before that. But I’ve always been thrilled simply to be in the audience.

The key factor has not necessarily been who was on stage. I remember vividly seeing Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, James Earl Jones in a New York production of On Golden Pond, Peter O’Toole in a London production of Man and Superman, Yul Brynner in The King and I, and Carol Channing in Hello Dolly. (Actually I first saw Hello Dolly when Dorothy Lamour played Dolly Levi in a touring version that played Emporia, Kansas, during my undergrad years.) But I have been equally thrilled by local and university productions.

All the world may well be a stage, as Shakespeare opined, but when the house lights go down and the play begins something special happens. We are transported from the ordinary to the extraordinary by that magical, very human connection between the individuals on stage and the individuals in the audience. Curtain up! And I fall in love all over again.

Veidt Dances an Expressionist Ballet

2014-10-26T17:50:00.000-04:00

My interest in Conrad Veidt was tipped by a Halloween-season showing of the 1924 silent thriller, The Hands of Orlach, for which Dennis James provided live organ accompaniment at the Indiana University Auditorium. Veidt’s career spanned a quarter century, beginning in 1917 with the silent movies and into the talkies, ending at his death in 1943 at age 50.

Hans Walter Konrad Weidt was born in Berlin, Germany, on 22 January 1893. He was drafted into the German Army during World War I and saw action in the Battle of Warsaw but contracted a serious illness that subsequently earned him a discharge in 1917. That year he returned to Berlin to pursue an acting career. He would eventually appear in more than a hundred films.

One of his earliest, most memorable performances was in the classic German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in 1920. Veidt played the sleepwalker Cesare to Werner Krauss’ Dr. Caligari. By the end of the decade, he was making movies in Hollywood as well.

Veidt was vigorously opposed to the Nazi regime. When Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels began a purge to rid the German film industry of Jews and liberals in 1933, Veidt and his third wife, Ilona, a Hungarian Jew, emigrated to England. Throughout the World War II era, he donated large amounts of his personal fortune to the British war effort.

He became a British citizen in 1938, although he and Ilona moved to Hollywood in the early 1940s. Ironically, his best-known Hollywood role was as a Nazi officer, Major Heinrich Strasser, in the 1942 Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman film, Casablanca.

Veidt suffered a massive heart attack while playing golf in Los Angeles and died on 3 April 1943.

Handsome, gaunt, and exuding an aura of anxiety, sometimes ecstatic and sometimes maniacal, Veidt was at his best in the German Expressionist films of the late Teens to early Thirties. In The Hands of Orlach, in which he plays a pianist whose injured hands are replaced with those of an executed murder, according to critic Lotte Eisner, Veidt “dances a kind of Expressionist ballet, bending and twisting extravagantly, simultaneously drawn and repelled by the murderous dagger held by hands which do not seem to belong to him.”

It was a pleasure to rediscover not only the tantalizing stylizations of the German Expressionist silent films but also to witness one of the masters of that art at work.

Professor Media*

2014-10-07T10:30:00.000-04:00

From the broadsheets and banned theater of America’s founding era to TV news, Twitter, and sitcoms today, media have been our professors, teaching us about our world and shaping how we think about and respond to important issues. Mass media are more directly educative for most adults than any type of formal schooling. Increasingly, as the current mania for standardized testing narrows the school curriculum, media also are surpassing classroom teachers as our children’s most influential educators.

This media-education interconnection is complex and often problematic. While media have helped to shape progress on some issues of importance to American democracy, they also have contributed to ignorance and misunderstanding. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression, but it does not ensure truth. Societally reflective sitcoms, for example, have paved the way for progress on social issues, from civil rights to marriage equality. But biased political advertising and propagandistic “news” have contributed to political stagnation and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Media are seductive. We spend hours on “screen time.” Those who control the media well understand that what is portrayed and how it is framed shapes socially shared knowledge. The rise of corporate oligarchy in the United States has been achieved, in part, through concerted propaganda passed off as truth. What this means is that, if we are to reclaim American democracy, greater attention needs to be paid to the educative power of media—and not merely to the traditional forms (movies, radio, television) but to new media that we carry with us in our mobile phones and tablet computers. According to a Pew study last year, one in three Americans gets news through Facebook.** And two-thirds of adult Americans use Facebook.

For media consumers—which means everyone, children and adults—it has never been more important to exercise effective credibility strategies, such as critically examining claims of “truth.” A quote attributed to American economist Thomas Sowell is apt: “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.” However, such understanding must be taught, not just in schools but through the media themselves.

Principles of journalism must cross all platforms, from sitcoms to news reports. Are “facts” accurate, credible, verifiable, contextually appropriate, and unbiased? Whether the purveyor is a talking head or a comic character, how is “truth” situated? If we subscribe to the biblical admonition that the “truth will set you free,” then we also must invoke the first part of that quotation about “knowing the truth,” which is the real challenge, regardless of the context.

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

** http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/

Three Takes on 20th Century Art

2014-08-11T11:40:00.000-04:00

A recent vacation swing through Wisconsin and back by way of Chicago offered an opportunity to visit three art institutions, each with a focused exhibit worth seeing.

In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, I encountered a retrospective titled “Arts/Industry: Collaboration and Revelation,” highlighting the 40th anniversary of a program involving mainly ceramic artists and the large Kohler Company, known for its innovative kitchen and bathroom fittings and fixtures. Having lived in Sheboygan from 1970 to 1991, I recognized a few of the early works on view. The program has produced an astonishing variety of ceramic arts, through artists in residence at the factory.

In Milwaukee, the featured exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum was “Kandinsky: A Retrospective,” featuring paintings and other works by Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) from the large collection at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The works on view span 1900 to 1944, from Kandinsky’s experimentation with Art Nouveau through the Bauhaus years and culminating with his flirtations with Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. (Fragment I for Composition VII from 1913 is shown above.)

Finally, at the Chicago Art Institute, I was happy to visit “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938,” billed as the “first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on the breakthrough years of René Magritte” (1898-1967), a Surrealist responsible for some of the 20th Century’s most engaging images. From works on paper that first gained him recognition in Brussels, the exhibit moves forward through the Paris years when he was in contact with fellow Surrealists, such as André Breton, Salvador Dali, and Joan Miró. The exhibit concludes with works made in London and Brussels between 1937 and 1938, including the iconic Time Transfixed, in which a train engine emerges from a fireplace.

All three exhibits showcase aspects of 20th Century Modernism, from the eclectic mix of artists’ ceramic works in a 40-year show spanning late Modernism to Postmodernism, to Kandinsky’s experiments in Art Nouveau and Abstract Expressionism, and finally to Magritte’s emergence from early Impressionistic works to his solid place in Surrealism. A vacation that includes such an abundance of visual images is truly a marvel of coincidence.

Have You Ever?

2014-06-30T19:54:00.000-04:00

Much of my poetry draws on life experiences, which is doubtless true for most poets (a distinction to which I have only a passing, rather dubious claim). The following poem, however, is starkly autobiographical and intended, I suppose, as a morsel of "tough love" or "straight talk" to someone who is going through a hard time of some sort.

Have You Ever?

Have you ever followed the ambulance

And waited for the doctor, who shook his head

And said,

Your wife is dead?

Your love, your light, your reason for life

Is dead?

I have.

Have you ever gone home at dawn to tell

Your three-year-old son and his fifteen-year-old brother,

Mom is dead?

Do you hear what I said?

Then called your daughter, your dad, your loved one’s parents

With the sad news?

I have.

Have you ever waited in an exam room

Waited for the doctor, who shook his head

And said,

You have cancer?

Have you felt the jolt of fear for yourself, for your kids

Course through?

I have,

Not one time but two.

So, yes, by all means, tell me about your terrors,

Your fears and misgivings, the sharp teeth that gnaw

At your mind.

Tell me.

I know where you’re at, where you’re going.

I’ve been there.

I have.

But don’t tell me you cannot survive,

That it’s all too much, that you can’t stand the pain.

You can.

You know why?

Because I’ve been through your hell and I’m still alive.

I have survived.

I have.

You will, too.

Remembering Maya Angelou

2014-05-28T14:28:00.000-04:00

I heard the sad news about Maya Angelou’s death at age 86 the day after I took a German friend (who’d been a high school exchange student with us about a decade ago) to Cincinnati, Ohio, to visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. In the gift shop there, I bought the Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. I had other books by her but not that one. It seems extraordinary that she was much on my mind at just this time.

A few years ago I worked with a co-editor on an anthology project titled Why Civic Education Matters, published by the Center for Civic Education (http://new.civiced.org/). To include an essay by Maya Angelou in the book, my co-editor Greg Bernstein conducted an interview with the busy author and sent me the transcript. My task was to take the raw material and craft an essay. The challenge, which I quite enjoyed, was to capture the essence of Maya Angelou’s responses and transform them into a coherent narrative, all the while being sensitive to her unique voice. I have to assume that when she was shown the edited work, she was satisfied.

Prior to developing the anthology, of course, I had gained an advantage by having seen Maya Angelou in films and on television. I had heard that wonderful, distinctive voice many times. Best of all, I had the pleasure of seeing her in person when she spoke at the Indiana University Auditorium. That particular evening was nothing short of magical. Maya Angelou at 80-plus years of age held a standing-room-only audience of more than 3,000 totally enthralled for an hour and a half. She talked, read, recited, sang, and even danced her way into the hearts of everyone present. It was an evening I’ll never forget.