“Stories Matter. Many Stories Matter”

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Kathy

 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

While reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s epic novel Americanah, I checked out YouTube for a glimpse of her and found two TED talks. One’s on feminism, and the other is called “The Danger of a Single Story.”

In the “story” talk, Adichie explains how often we swallow a single version of a person or place and make it the whole story in our minds. As a Nigerian, she’s sensitive to the single versions of Africa—an entire continent, for God’s sake—she encounters here in the U.S. For example, her American college roommate asked how Adichie could speak such fluent English, not realizing that English is Nigeria’s official language. Then she wanted to hear Adiche’s “tribal music,” to which Adichie reponded by offering to play her Mariah Carey tape. Then she was surprised Adichie knew how to operate a stove. The roommate had arrived in college with a single story of Africa—a poor and dark place, uplifted by a rich tribal and linguistic culture. Adichie says, “So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

I soon had good reason to reflect on Adichie’s eloquent words: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

This semester, I am teaching my education seminar at what I call the MPU, the More Prestigious University. Though I usually enjoy my MPU students, I prefer my students at Cleveland State University, a more working-class and diverse workplace. I view MPU kids as affluent, privileged, and often entitled. I assume their parents have well-paying jobs and good educations. I frequently consider leaving there, because I don’t feel close to or needed by MPU students, who, I assume, will all be fine in life without me. They’re getting a fancy degree at a high-priced college and will proceed smoothly into an upper-ten-percent adult life. 

The day after I heard Adichie’s talk, our class was discussing the value of homework. One student proposed that it helps bridge the gap between home and school, because parents can help kids with their assignments. She was quick to acknowledge that many parents might be working too much, too exhausted, or not educationally prepared to help their kids, but, still, homework at least allowed for the possibility. Other students weighed in.

I then asked the students how many had received parental help on their grade-school and high-school homework, expecting that all or most of them would raise their hands. Surprisingly, only about half did. The discussion proceeded, but I circled back to the question. Why, I wondered, did some of you not raise your hands?

A high-achieving girl responded that both her parents had hated school and didn’t do well in it. They lacked both the ability and interest to help her. Another student, of Vietnamese descent, told us that her mother had attended school only through third grade. This student has helped her mother more than vice versa, by, for instance, writing all her emails for her. Another student described how earnestly her foster mother had tried to help her, but that she was ill-equipped to do so. I got stuck on “foster mother,” words I didn’t expect to hear from an MPU student.

Like Adichie, who admits to her own “single stories” about Mexicans and poor people, I had to acknowledge my own. What I’d regarded as a harmless bias was actually an inaccurate, limiting perspective. In Adichie’s words, “The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.” The distance I’d always experienced between me and these students might not be their privilege, but rather my own prejudice.

 

 

 

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A Doglike Dog in Springlike Weather

Posted on March 8, 2015 by Kathy

 

In her sad place

Today I’ve had my first daily requirement of Vitamin D in months. Since November at least. I took a half-hour walk outdoors in the sunshine. In the sunshine.

The birds were singing. The snow is melting. And did I mention the sun is shining?

I even took along our little dog Roxie. She regarded the outside world today like an indoor cat who sets one hesitant foot on the threshold and pulls back, having heard tell about coyotes. She darted along beside me, skittishly glancing over her shoulder with a worried expression, seeming to ask,  “Why are we doing this exactly?”

It’s not like she hasn’t been outdoors, or even on “walks,” during this long, cold season. Her scrawny seven-pound self has been out on the driveway several times a day, and even occasionally down the driveway to the front sidewalk. She’s climbed up on some snowdrifts—too light to break through the crust, of course—and gotten her business done. Then she’s hustled back inside, trembling with cold and sometimes pathetically holding up one foot or the other, feigning frostbite.

If you are one of those large-dog snobs, a person who would never compare your dog to a cat, even as a joke, a person who brags about their Malamute bounding through the snowdrifts, impervious to cold, just stop right there.  Dogs come in different colors, sizes, and shapes, just like people, and little dogs (now that I have a little dog) should not be scorned. We celebrate differences in this enlightened age, right?

In most ways, our little dog is extremely doglike. I used to say that our old dog Shucks must have read the manual on how to be the family dog. He barked at the mailman, stuck his head out the car window, and greeted us deliriously when we came home. He checked off all the requisite dog behaviors, satisfying in his very ordinariness. All he ever had to do was act like a dog, and he did it perfectly.

So too with Roxie. My daughter says she’s like a stuffed toy robot, programmed to act like a dog. (Having just seen Blade Runner, I’d call her a replicant.) She becomes unhinged when the mailman comes, climbing on the back of the couch to watch for him and flinging herself against the front door to scare him away. She darts after squirrels. She growls maniacally when attacking her favorite toy (The Fox).

Her little chest is filled with a big-dog heart, in other words. She just doesn’t like the cold.

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Funny Spam

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Kathy

A comment about one of my posts about tutoring GED:

This leads to the energetic goal failing annd thee vision is restarted by that with all the money you used in the gunshop returned to you!

No mention in the original post, by the way, of visions or money or gunshops. I’m especially fond of the “thee.” It gives the spam an Elizabethan twist.

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A Movie out of Time

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Kathy

I leapt outside my comfort zone today and saw Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult film, at my husband’s venue, the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque. Normally this would be an easy call: I don’t see Blade Runner. I’ve never seen Blade Runner. I’m not a Blade Runner sort of person. I’m not a science fiction fan, I don’t do violence, I don’t see boys’ movies, I rarely see cult films. The dark futuristic milieu does not appeal.

But then. As the week went on, I began having second thoughts. This is an iconic film a lot of people love. My husband told me that some fans give it a spiritual interpretation I might find appealing. And then I thought about John’s guiding principle—to follow directors you find interesting. Since I loved Thelma and Louise, which Ridley Scott directed, maybe I should see another film in his oeuvre.

Oh, yes. And then there’s Harrison Ford. 1982 Harrison Ford , no less.

So I entered the strange and labyrinthine world of Blade Runner. Not only the dark futuristic city created by  Scott and special effects whiz Douglas Trumbull, but the strange and labyrinthine world of a cult film in three versions: the original Hollywood version, a second cut over which Scott had some influence (the Director’s Cut), and a third iteration over which Scott had total control, the Final Cut.  I saw the Final Cut. I like hearing about the creative process, so the complexity of the movie’s genesis provided a frisson of interest for me.

I liked the movie’s ending—one of the bones of contention among aficionados. What does the unicorn mean? Is Ford’s character a replicant or not?  It was fun hearing from the fan boys after the show debating the differences among the versions and the drastic departures from the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  I admired the immensely  imaginative special effects, and I also enjoyed the Vangelis music. Among the fine performances, Darryl Hannah’s heart-of-ice replicant was stunning.

And then there was Harrison Ford. The chiseled Rutger Hauer was a bonus.

Otherwise, I must admit a lot of the movie seemed predictable and sophomoric. For me, sci fi dealing with heavy subjects like mortality often becomes dopey in an old Star Trek kind of way. I feel bad about how snobby this sounds. Also, the movie’s violence was too much for me, and I mentally objected to having kids in the audience. I realize, though, that I have a counter-cultural mentality here; I’m a violence prude and can’t inflict my values on others. I inflicted them on my kids for as long as I could, and that’s as far as my authority goes.

A few interesting anachronisms struck me during the movie, set in 2019, a mere four years in the future. Photographs serve as a significant plot device; they represent the fake memories installed in the android replicants. Who knew, in 1982, how quickly photos would migrate to, of all things, our telephones? It’s not impossible that people would be cherishing family pictures printed on photographic paper in 2019, but it seems a little dated. Which brings up the 21st century ubiquity of cell phones, where most of our photos are now stored. How could Scott and his screenwriters have predicted it? Blade Runner features technology, computers, and screens aplenty, but no hand-held devices. Finally, in a suspenseful scene when Ford is dangling from a ledge (a la Cary Grant in North by Northwest), a plain old regular watch encircles his wrist. It doesn’t even look digital.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Project of Human Freedom

Posted on January 4, 2015 by Kathy

 

Alix Kates Shulman

 

Alix and me

This evening on our drive to the airport with our 82-year-old visitor, the writer and feminist activist Alix Kates Shulman, the conversation centered on Apple computers, social media, and Spotify. Self-described as “indefatigable,” Ms. Shulman had had a busy day. After breakfasting with Cleveland friends and breezing through the Cleveland Museum of Art, she introduced the documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (in which she appears) and answered questions afterwards. Twenty years her junior, I would have needed a nap, but Ms. Shulman showed no signs of fatigue. Then her flight back to New York was delayed, a setback she accepted with unruffled good humor.

Ms. Shulman is one of about a dozen second-wave feminists interviewed in the film, exhibited in a film program my husband curates, directed by Mary Dore, which covers the years 1966-1971 of the movement in the U.S. Others include Kate Millett, Ellen Willis, Rita Mae Brown, Eleanor Holms Norton, and Susan Brownmiller. All are lively, funny, and articulate—belying the stereotype of the stodgily intense feminist. They’re vital and passionate and still hopeful.

The film reveals the immense courage of women who stood up, asked questions, wrote books, marched, and sometimes shouted. There were internal divides and occasional missteps, but the consistent message of equal pay for equal work, recognition of sexual harassment and sexual violence, equitable employment opportunities, advocacy for women’s health and for families, has largely taken hold. They imagined change, and then made it happen.

When we got home from the airport, out of nowhere I thought of a 94-year-old friend, a liberated woman in many ways, but a mom and wife who took no active part in the movements of the sixties and seventies. A few times when we’re driving somewhere, she’s made comments about men pushing strollers or carrying a baby in a back-pack. It looks funny, she says. Her husband would never have done such a thing, she says. Her husband—a dear man and a great father, by the way—would have seemed emasculated to his own wife if he made such a small gesture toward sharing childcare as pushing a stroller.

It’s a change in the world wrought by the women’s movement, with the help of open-hearted men. We’re accustomed to seeing men taking care of their kids, at least those of us younger than 90, and though there’s still a lot of work to do, we’re not going back. Women can be senators and CEO’s, and men can be caregivers. The film conveys the message articulated by Andrew O’Hehir in his Salon review:  “Whatever mistakes have been made along the path and however the movement has been stereotyped, the essential project of feminism has always been the project of human freedom.”

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Incunabulum

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Kathy

Here it is.

Tonight we’re addressing Christmas cards. After thirty-plus years, we have the routine down. John does his people, and I do mine and I can’t tell you exactly how we know whose names are whose.

I rely on my old, water-stained address book, which sits mostly neglected next to the dish drainer. Hence the water stains. Duct tape binds it together. Ordinarily, my phone provides addresses nowadays, with an occasional assist from the Internet. The faded address book dates from probably twenty-five years ago. It contains much of my life’s archeology.

As I open the book, gingerly, and begin paging through it, I can’t help noticing the deaths. Sometimes, everyone on a page is gone: cousins, elderly relatives, and friends and neighbors. Then there are the people who have moved twice, three times, or more, and their crossed-out addresses remind me of old visits and past relationships.

Without this book, I wouldn’t remember the name of the elderly sight-impaired woman who used to live across the street. I’d forget the homeschooled child who studied Latin with me. My kids’ babysitters? Their names aren’t stored in my memory, but they’re in the book.

My nieces and nephews and kids went to college and moved from place to place: here’s the record. Most of all, I note the friends I no longer see and to whom I no longer send cards. So many relationships fade away. My church closed a few years ago, and though I’ve tried to stay in touch with those friends, some have dropped away. I don’t have much in common any more with parents of my kids’ friends: no more play dates to organize. This old book even contains some celebrities’ addresses and phone numbers, like the writers Annie Dillard, Jonathan Kozol, and Phillip Lopate. I never deluded myself that we were friends, but it was fun to record their contact information after I’d interviewed them.

In truth, my old address book contains a few names I no longer even recognize. Maryann and Nan and Donna, whoever they are–are not getting any Christmas cards from me.

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On Rape, Date Rape, and What Sensible, Well-Mannered Girls Do

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Kathy

 

Jonathan Kozol

In about 1995, I was writing a profile of the education writer Jonathan Kozol (Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities) for the alternative weekly Cleveland Edition. I was and am a big fan. I had read all his books and admired his firebrand, keep-the-faith advocacy for poor children in poor schools in poor neighborhoods. I was in my forties at this point, and Kozol was around sixty.

When I was making arrangements through his publisher, I was told that I should meet Kozol in his hotel room in the old Stouffers Inn on the Square in downtown Cleveland. Excited and nervous, I dropped my kids off at a friend’s and made my way downtown and up to Kozol’s room.

We sat for an hour or so at a small table in his suite and discussed education and current events. I recall Kozol’s pointedly complimenting my wardrobe selection—a blue sweater and matching blue print skirt, which, if you know me, you know my mother-in-law purchased for me. This compliment made me uncomfortable, but very, very slightly uncomfortable, mostly because he described it as the kind of outfit someone might have worn in the sixties. I had no idea what he meant, but, since Jonathan Kozol probably values most everything from the sixties, I assumed he meant it in the best way.

He offered me nothing to drink, but if he had, I would have accepted it. I could have had a glass of spiked wine or drugged cappuccino and who knows how I would have ended up. But it seems silly to me, and would have seemed silly at the time, to think that something bad could have happened to me in that room.

Reflecting on this experience, I can’t glibly say that other women shouldn’t have gone to famous men’s homes or hotel rooms.  I’m a cautious, sensible person. I’m not a gold digger, and I’m not blinded by ambition. I was trusting, and fortunately for me Jonathan Kozol either didn’t find me appealing or was not a sociopathic serial rapist.

 

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Comments on Cosby

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Kathy

 

Andrea Costand, a brave woman

Don’t read the comments. This is an important rule of modern media life. The comments following online articles, reviews, and even YouTube videos can be so hateful, so downright moronic as to obliterate not only your faith in humanity but your very will to live. So it is with the Cosby comments.

Some people—mostly men, but not exclusively—suggest that nineteen women (and counting) are lying in order to impugn the good reputation of Bill Cosby. They suggest a liberal conspiracy to bring down the guy who criticized poor black families. Ad nauseam, they chant “innocent until proven guilty,” a laudable legal principle which doesn’t necessarily apply when evidence and common sense suggest a guilty verdict outside the courtroom. Some assert that the women are uniformly man-hating feminazis.

Most of all, though, these commenters impugn the character of the accusing women. Janice Dickinson, for example, has apparently been on reality TV and is known as a publicity seeker. Others were ambitious aspiring stars. They’re not even good looking, for God’s sake. (Whereas, as I’ve commented on some sites, Bill Cosby is so very attractive.) They’re loose women, prostitutes, and gold-diggers. In bizarrely circular reasoning, commenters insist that drugged women can’t provide reliable testimony. 

Responding to these people is a waste of time and usually degenerates into name-calling. But, if I were to respond, here’s what I would say. Predators don’t usually prey on strong, independent healthy victims. They sniff out damaged people. Most of Cosby’s victims were grieving a loss, or were exceedingly young, desperate, and needy in some way. They were compromised to begin with.

Amanda Hess wrote about this, way back in February, on a website called XX Factor: “When the victims of rape are adult women, we focus on their behavior and mistrust their testimonies, softening our incrimination of their attackers. When I asked Newsweek’s [Katie J.M.] Baker why she felt that the victims she spoke with [about Bill Cosby] had been ignored, she told me: ‘I think it’s because they were imperfect victims, as victims so often are,’ Baker told me. The two women Baker interviewed were young at the time of the assaults, but over the age of 18. More importantly, ‘they were ambitious aspiring actresses and models who were hanging out with an older man who said he’d make them famous.’ Maybe we take their age and ambition–their self-determination, really–as an excuse to withhold our support.” They were not ideal witnesses, even before Cosby got to them. That’s part of the deal.

Years ago, a Catholic-school principal in our neighborhood got into trouble for sexually abusing a male student at his school. An acquaintance of mine attended the church and had her kids enrolled at the school. She liked and admired the principal and for a long time didn’t believe the accusations. I distinctly recall her saying, “You should see this kid! You should see his mom!” They were, I gleaned, unkempt and unattractive. She’d go on, “That kid was always getting into trouble, and his mom never did anything about it. Nobody should believe anything they say!” The principal eventually confessed and resigned his job.

I generalized from that experience that predators don’t usually choose top student athletes with healthy self-images and involved families. They pick the outliers. They pick people who can’t fight back.

Bill Cosby’s mistake (one of them) was to target Andrea Constand, director of operations for Temple University’s women’s basketball team in 2004.He invited her to his home, drugged her, and molested her. She was shocked and confused enough to wait for a year before accusing him, but only a year. Her suit brought forth thirteen other women with similar stories. Ten years later, this brave woman’s actions have finally received the attention they deserve.

The doubters and misogynists will never be convinced, I know. In the meantime, I’ve got to stop reading their comments, lest I lose the will to live.

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Bill Cosby: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed

Posted on November 23, 2014 by Kathy

A couple of months ago, my sisters and I cleaned out the attic of my mom’s old house, unearthing precious mementos amidst the junk. My treasures included my old Bill Cosby records, which I had thought lost. There they were, invaluable to me and maybe even valuable to collectors. I imagined putting them on our old turntable sometime soon for a nostalgic listen.

I have loved Bill Cosby since his early appearances on the Tonight Show beginning in 1963. I still recall his virtuosic miming of Revolutionary War soldiers frantically loading and reloading muskets while well-armed British solders relentlessly approached (at the end of this long routine). I noted both him and his name: he was black, the first black comic I ever saw, and his name was oddly like Bing Crosby, my mom’s favorite performer. I stayed on the lookout for that name in the TV Guide.  I saw his first Noah performance on the Tonight Show.

I didn’t collect many records, but I collected Bill Cosby’s. My junior-high friends and I memorized his routines and recited them to each other. I saw him perform in concert at least once.  I never much watched his sitcom The Cosby Show and never regarded him as America’s Dad. I was never smitten with his sweaters. I never watched Fat Albert. But I continued to try to catch him on late-night talk shows.

 I loved “I Spy,” his early TV show, which began in 1965, staying up late to watch it. In my 10th grade Latin class, I rehashed the previous night’s episode every Tuesday morning with a kid named Doug who sat in front of me. When I taught high-school English, I always showed my students the 1968 Cosby-narrated film “Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed,” which belies the accusation that Cosby remained uncommitted regarding racial issues. I understood he wasn’t as cool or cutting-edge as Richard Pryor, but I believed he had prepared the ground.

Now, in November of 2014, I am reading obsessively about Bill Cosby online. This is a waste of time, and I’m hoping my writing about it will help exorcise my obsession with this now-painful topic.

About ten years ago, I was vaguely aware that Bill Cosby was in some kind of trouble and that he publicly admitted being unfaithful to his long-suffering and beautiful wife Camille. I thought this was too bad but could easily accept that he was a flawed person. I’d never been into the Cliff Huxtable/All-American Father thing, anyway.

As we all know now, of course, the accusations are way, way worse than a little adultery, or even a lot of adultery: drugging and raping women, sex with teenagers, sordid pay-offs.  I believe that the revelations fit a pattern we’re now familiar with from other badly behaved men in the news. Bill Cosby, it seems, is a controlling, violent person.

A smallish story amid the horrendous revelations helps confirm this description. The female staff of the Letterman show has revealed they’re relieved not to have Coz as a guest again. Seems he demanded the youngest and prettiest staffers gather around him before his appearances to silently watch him eat curry. They hated it, but they did it, and the show’s producers enforced the demand. Narcissism, anyone?

I’ve made the mistake, in my reading, of perusing the comments after online articles. People’s disbelief and vitriolic misogyny boggles the mind. They ask why the women went to his room, why they took the pills, why they waited so long to report the abuse.  Too often, they never bother to ask why this rich, famous man drugged and raped young, vulnerable women.

So now, what do I do with my records? Don’t tell me to separate the artist’s work from the artist’s life. This compartmentalization is impossible for me. I’m not celebrating rapists like film director Roman Polanski and singer R Kelly and Bill Cosby. The talented Bill Cosby is mentally ill, damaged, and dangerous. Not so funny anymore.

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“Pride” in Noble Acts

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Kathy

 

Paddy Considine and Bill Nighy in “Pride”

The new movie Pride is what my husband calls, with a hint of irony, a crowd-pleaser. A crowd-pleaser usually contrives not to challenge or surprise the audience but to make them smile and even pander to their world view. A crowd-pleaser can be well-made and fun, but usually contains predictable, almost stylized elements, such as lovable characters, an emotional climax, and clearly recognizable villains. With those caveats, I can recommend Pride. I’d recommend any movie in which the remarkable English actor Bill Nighy appears. An unlikely real-life story, the movie recounts the alliance of a London gay-rights group with striking Welsh miners in 1984. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was determined to close dozens of mines, not only depriving miners of their jobs but effectively destroying the villages around the mines. Thousands of miners went on strike in response, and violent attacks by police ensued. In the end, the government won, the strike was broken, and the mines eventually shut down.

In the meantime, however, an obscure group of gay activists decided to raise money for the striking miners. With mutual suspicion, the groups came together and eventually formed political alliances and lasting personal friendships. With no irony intended, I would call the story heart-warming. I cried at the end, as I was clearly intended to do.

Throughout the film, I kept thinking how particularly inspiring it is when one group takes on the cause of another. The 1964 murders, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, of civil-rights activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner are no more tragic than that of their black CORE colleague James Earl Chaney, but there’s a special poignancy in two white boys sacrificing their lives for the sake of people unlike themselves. The imprisonment and execution of the Christian Dietrich Bonoeffer on behalf of his Jewish brothers and sisters in Nazi Germany prick the conscience. We ourselves may not be oppressed, but what can we do for those who are?

Frederick Douglass

 

 

The film reminded me of one of my favorite stories from American history. In 1848, the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass attended the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, in solidarity with the many early feminists who had spoken out, with him, against slavery.

Firebrand Elizabeth Cady Stanton resolved to introduce a motion at the Convention calling for suffrage for women. The men in attendance, all otherwise in sympathy with women’s causes, balked at this radical move. Even Mr. Stanton walked out in protest.

Frederick Douglass, in contrast, spoke passionately in favor of the women’s right to vote, saying, “We hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. We go farther, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for women.” Deprived of basic human rights himself, he recognized the consistency of supporting basic human rights for everyone.

Later, he wrote, “The case is too plain for argument. Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence.”

In later life, summing up the theme of this post more eloquently than I can, he expressed a special pride in his enlightened (and unpopular) position. “When I ran away from slavery,” he wrote, “it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.”

So the crowd-pleaser Pride made me reflect on these noble actions. It reminded me of my friend Tricia, a middle-aged white woman spending the week in Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrating on behalf of a young black man killed by police.

 

 

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