Sadako and Hopsie

One of the exercises career coaches suggest for figuring out what kind of employment to pursue is to list things that you liked doing when you were younger.  The fact that I played clarinet pretty intensely, or that I spent about twelve hours (or more) per week at the dance studio, don’t seem particularly helpful in this sort of endeavor.  However, two events recently reminded me of something I had sort of forgotten that I loved to do: tell stories.

-

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Etsy lately, hoping to find some clever feminist swag made by creative female artisans.  I came across the shop Dead Feminists, which sells letterpress prints of images inspired by quotes from feminist icons.  Among them, I saw a print with Japanese iconography and clicked through – it was a picture inspired by a quote from Sadako Sasaki: “I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world."

PEACE UNFOLDS oversized postcard from Dead Feminists on Etsy.

When I was in first grade, I had an extraordinary teacher.  I was quiet and awkward, and I didn’t like being around kids my age.  I wanted to spend my time with adults and books.  I think this teacher understood that clearly.  In her classroom, which was plastered floor to ceiling with all of our artwork and colorful bulletin boards, there was a corner in the back dedicated to story time. Almost every day, she would adjourn us to the carpeted floors of the story corner, and she would read us chapters of books—including Eleanor Coerr’s Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.  By the time she chose Sadako, I had already read it a number of times, and it had become a favorite.  I was so excited that I would get to spend part of school time listening to something that I already loved; it was a comfort among all the other trials of the first grade classroom. 

But then my teacher became sick—so sick that she couldn’t talk.  So sick that now, as an adult, I admire her more for toughing that day out, for holding on to the idea that she owed us her presence, perhaps to finish that last bit of the story.  Yet because she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t finish reading Sadako to us. Then, she asked me if I would be willing to read that day’s portion to the class.  I did.  Making sure that the other kids knew the rest of the story was more important to me than any anxiety I might have had about speaking in front of a room full of people that already made me uneasy.

-

Lately, my mom has been sorting out old papers.  This is no easy task.  Both of us keep too many things that we shouldn’t.  The last time I was home to visit, she pointed to some papers that she had left out on the table and said, “So uhh, do you want me to keep your novel?”  (Never underestimate my mother’s gift for sarcasm.)

It was hardly a novel, but was actually four or five large sheets of white paper stapled together as a book.  On the cover it said Hopsie’s Friend above an illustration of an eyeless bunny, drawn in orange crayon.  As I flipped through, I discovered that Hopsie, the rabbit, is unsure if she has any real friends or who might be available to become her friend.  As the end, the big reveal is that I am Hopsie’s real friend.  It is accompanied by a self-portrait that falls just short of Picasso-level abstraction. 

Hopsie's Friend - cover page.

Hopsie's Friend - middle pages.

Hopsie's Friend - last pages.

At five or six years old, I used to write these little books all the time.  All the time, truly.  I felt like I was a never-ending river of stories, that I could write forever and never run out of ideas to share.  I’m sure they were all relatively silly stories about bunnies and similar Disney-fied things, but I’m also sure that I was deadly serious about my craft.  And that teacher, who I adored, would let me read them out loud to the class during story time as if they were professional finished products.  That was how she knew reading Sadako out loud would be a breeze for me, and perhaps she thought that helping me share my work would make me more confident about producing it.

-

I don’t think I’ve written any fiction since another teacher in middle school forced everyone to write a short story as an assignment.  Most of the time, I don’t feel that fiction is something I want to write.  Academic (art) history was my way of being able to write and to include literary flourishes without the success of the prose depending on them.  Sometimes, I sit down and try to write, fiction or nonfiction, even silly listicles (MY top 10 Buffy episodes, etc.), and usually fail.  Maybe returning to the melancholy bunny is the answer.

Read a book.

When I get frustrated with people who fail to understand a point I'm trying to make or circumstances as I see them, the charge I am most likely to level at that person is: read a book.

Reading (or watching documentaries, which seems to me an analog to reading) is helpful to me when I'm trying to make sense of situations I don't understand or arguments that other people very different from me are making.  This especially occurred in the wake of the Women's March on January 21, when women of color accused white women of ignoring problems beyond those of white middle-class women.  I read a lot of think pieces in response, and they did not fall on deaf ears.  I know that my feminism is white.  It's only through luck and an eccentric (in the good way) Intro to Gender Studies professor that I was exposed to other feminisms relatively early on in my academic life - black feminism, women in Islam, queer feminism, and (ever my favorite) cyborg theory.  One of the links that I saw circulating after the Women's March was Melissa Harris-Perry's Black Feminism Syllabus, which she originally posted in response to cruel comments someone had made about Michelle Obama's persona as First Lady.  I started there, and picked the book that I could immediately load on to my Kindle through my library's services.  And then I kept going.  And it's now a month later, and twenty-two days into Black History Month - between MHP's list and the resources made available because of Black History Month, I've done something of a deep dive into the subject. I'm providing a bibliography and some annotations below because, if you are confused in these confusing times: read a book.  

Books

• Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (originally published 1983).  Davis threads the needle on a lot of issues, gracefully taking what you think you know and flipping it upside down.  She gives credit where credit is due, but also pointedly eviscerates legacies, arguments, histories, where necessary.  Her interest is in arguing how black women have been left out of discussions of both the post-slavery era and the struggle for women's rights and proving how their particular circumstances make them powerful outliers necessary for comprehensively understanding both of those histories.
• Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (originally published 1984).  Lorde was probably the black feminist writer I knew the most about and had read the most in pieces with having actually picked up the book.  I'd recommend reading a more foundational text first (i.e. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought) because this is a collection of essays and speeches that dips in and out of debates you'll appreciate more if you understand the basics.  Lorde is, however, eminently quotable, and she is a truly a poet, even in her most straightforward speeches.
• Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.  This book is pretty phenomenal.  It starts with the Rosa Parks that everyone forgets - the activist NAACP field secretary who investigated and documented rape allegations throughout the Alabama countryside long before she refused to give up her seat on a bus.  That's only the beginning of this argument, and it proceeds through the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Summer, and notable rape trials in the 1960s and 1970s to demand attention for the substantial, yet usually underrepresented role of black women in forwarding the Civil Rights Movement.
• Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016).  Not finished with this one yet!  See the movie mention below.

Documentaries and Movies

On PBS: 

• Birth of a Movement - This episode of Independent Lens discusses the origins and release of D. W. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation, a 1915 masterpiece of early cinema yet also a barely veiled narrative of white supremacy, and how William Monroe Trotter, a Harvard-educated black writer and friend of W.E.B. DuBois, mobilized protests of the movie.  This documentary makes the argument that these protests presaged tactics that would form the cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement.
• Freedom Riders and Freedom Summer - Both of these documentaries were American Experience episodes, and both use a combination of historical footage and more recent interviews.  They are both fascinating, and if you need a reminder of how bad things were then, these clear, concise films are what you need.
• Oklahoma City - I've included this here because it couches the Oklahoma City Bombing deep into the vein of anti-government white supremacy that arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I remember much of this information from the documentary on Timothy McVeigh that Rachel Maddow did a few years ago, but it has become perhaps even more compelling in today's political climate.

Streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime:

• 13th - This is Ava DuVernay's documentary on how the prison system grew out of conditions created by the 13th Amendment, which was supposed to mean liberation from slavery.  This documentary interviews a who's who of black intellectuals, and it's exceptionally well-done.  Definitely worth watching, and maybe also keep a list of the people you see so that you can then look up their books.  It should win the Best Documentary Oscar this year.
• Selma - This is Ava DuVernay's quasi-fictional account of the series of marches in Selma, Alabama that have come to define the Civil Rights era.  I missed this movie in the theaters the year that it received Oscar nominations, but I remember the outcry over the lack of honors given to David Oyelowo for playing Martin Luther King, Jr.  The strange thing about this movie, though, is how decentralized it is - King is important because he is commanding and because we know he is important, but the movie shows the breadth of debate and action that characterized this moment in the movement.  That is a necessarily broad perspective.

In Theaters:

• Hidden Figures - an absolute must-see.  This is my favorite of the Oscar nominees this year (save maybe Lion), and though it has been made sleek for movie audiences, it does not shy away from much of the harshness wrought on the black women who worked hard for the privilege of being able to do difficult and complicated work appropriate to their skill. 
• I Am Not Your Negro - This film will square off with 13th for the Best Documentary Oscar, but it really shows how broad a genre that can be.  If 13th provides an intellectual analysis, I Am Not Your Negro is more of a prose poem set to images.  Baldwin, long-dead, is given a screenwriting credit because so much of the film is in his own words.  When coupled with more recent images, his words become prophetic, and this film that is, on the face of it, a biographical documentary becomes powerful social analysis.

So that's what I've been up to lately.  Do you have anything I should add to my list?  If the answer is Moonlight... I am working on it.

2016 Round-Up: Quote Notes

2017 is almost here!  I've seen a lot of writer friends recently posting lists of their favorite articles they wrote,  and I've personally fallen victim to a number of recent primo year-end Amazon Kindle deals.  So I was thinking about how to wrap up 2016 for myself - the year has been terrible for so many, and except for a couple notable parts of my life, the jury is still mostly out on how 2016 has treated me.  

However, today, as I clean and putter around my apartment, I've decided to try bullet journaling once again, or at least a minimal, deeply modified version of bullet-journaling (just give it a Google, if you don't know what I mean).  One of my favorite things about this format is that it encourages me to write down quotes that strike me at the very moment that I find them, even if I'm not sure what they mean at the time.  Even as I count four aborted attempts to bullet journal between August 2015 and now, each attempt has at least one quote noted in it.  I'm sharing them here as my version of a yearly wrap-up, since there's probably no more accurate encapsulation of my year.

"The planet does not need more successful people.  The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds."  - The Dalai Lama (found in a daily Zen calendar)

"Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating."  - Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird)

"She had been comfortable, and comfort is the death of the soul, which is by nature searching, insistent, unsatisfied.  This dissatisfaction drives the soul to leave, to get lost, to be lost, to struggle and adapt.  And adaptation is growth, and growth is life."  - Dave Eggers (Heroes of the Frontier)

"I started, instead of trying to act like I knew what was going on, to write like I was a mess."  - Mary Karr (on an On Being podcast episode)

Here's to 2017!  May it be full of great reading, good writing, and much inspiration.

Art for Everyone? Not Without Explanatory Labels

I can’t stand art exhibitions that do not use explanatory wall labels.

There’s no point in mincing my words on this topic.  I spend most of my time these days at a history museum that does not have label texts because they have guided tours, but for the most part, there is little in the rooms of a historic house museum that would seem inscrutable to the average visitor.  The guide of that tour, then, embroiders stories over what the visitors see, adding color and making connections that can shape a museum experience into something memorable.  In this case, labels are not really necessary because the experience aims throughout to be immersive and participatory.

And yet, for all the talk in professional communities about museums needing to focus on providing participatory experiences, art museums still frequently put up exhibitions without label texts that include no more than the identifying information for the work. For contemporary art, where the works are often, officially, “Untitled,” this identifying information alone can be next to meaningless.  Without available programming that engages the themes of the exhibition, there is little to provide explanation of the messages of the works on display. When the works being exhibited draw on complex social histories, theories, and politics, which the viewer may or may not be familiar with prior to their visit, how can a person participate in the dialogues the works are meant to invoke? 

If there is no audio tour, handout, or extra program, an art exhibition without explanatory labels asks for viewers to be already “in the know” about the issues the works address, like walking through the door of an art museum certifies entry into a privileged community.  This is the very opposite of a participatory museum experience, and it undermines the role that art museums should play in our society.  This oversight is the kind of thing that enables the belief that Art History, as a discipline, is the province of the rich and entitled, a discipline superfluous to regular life. 

I have been guilty myself of thinking that providing further explanation of Art History and also specific artworks seemed like an unnecessary concession—that people should understand the necessity of studying Art History without me explaining to them why I believe in its importance.  I realize now that this reflexive reaction of mine functioned more like a defense mechanism against forcing myself to confront the question.  Why do I believe in the importance of studying Art History? 

Good artists do more than make pictures.  They take entire worldviews and funnel them into visual work that tells a story, makes a protest, experiments with media, or takes any one of many, many other actions.  Their work is often complicated, whether or not the assemblage of paint and materials in the museum seems complicated.  And sometimes, a viewer needs a few clues to guess what message the artist was trying to send.  When work concerns issues of race, class, or gender, a viewer may need much more than a few clues to avoid relying on stereotypes for understanding and growth.

I’m lucky to live somewhere where the art museum has immense community support and colossal amounts of funding to put behind its outreach programs.  Maybe my art museum can get away with not using explanatory labels in special exhibitions, but it still shouldn’t.  Getting people through the door can’t be enough when art museums and, yes, Art History are two of the greatest tools we have to convince people why they should trust in empathy, creativity, and education.

Review: Inferno

The world has lately seemed a sad and contentious place, one where risks and consequences have grown larger and more negative in response to a new world order.  Immersed in that feeling, I went to see Inferno, the latest film adaptation of one of Dan Brown’s less-than-literary art historical novels.  Yet because Inferno’s use of its historical material differs so substantially from the other book-to-movie entries in the series, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, this new movie holds up better and seems more grounded in contemporary social issues in a productive way.

First of all: yes, I did pay actual money to see Inferno, and yes, I did enjoy it.  I also saw The Da Vinci Code (a little dull) in the theater in 2006 and Angels and Demons (generally more engrossing) in 2009—if nothing else, I am a Tom Hanks completist, and all three of these movies star Hanks as Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor and renowned symbologist.  People with ties to academia often scoff at these movies and the books from which they’ve been adapted because, among other reasons, symbology is not an actual academic discipline.  Using a fake word over its closest real analogs, like semiotics or iconography, seems like a lazy cop-out.  Even reading The Da Vinci Code as a 17-year-old, at the height of its popularity, I found the prose unskilled, at best, and was annoyed by Brown’s willingness to fabricate history to serve his cause.  So… why did I enjoy Inferno?

Inferno draws its inspiration partially from the fourteenth-century masterwork the Divine Comedy, in which the Italian poet Dante describes a vision of Hell, or the Inferno, with nine circles.  Langdon, though he does not speak fluent or even passable Italian, is a renowned expert on Italian art and literature and their symbols, and so outside forces summon him to Italy to investigate a trail of clues based on elements of Dante’s description of the Inferno and the actual known facts of Dante’s life.  The piece of art that holds those clues, left deliberately for Langdon and his assistant to interpret, is a ca. 1480-95 map of Hell created by Sandro Botticelli, better known for his Primavera and The Birth of Venus.  And beyond that, the clues are left in a reproduction of the original image, not in the image by Botticelli himself.  This starkly contrasts The Da Vinci Code, where Langdon and his assistant discover symbols that have supposedly been hidden for thousands of years by secret societies with dubious motives.  The elements of Dante and his writings that Langdon and his helpers discuss in Inferno might not hold up to expert scrutiny, but these bits of “factual” knowledge form the basis of a code rendered by a person in the present-day in order to pass a time-sensitive message.  Unlike in Brown’s previous efforts, Langdon's work does not depend on a centuries-old conspiracy coming to fruition.

Furthermore, the plot of Inferno does not dwell solely in the realm of academic consequences.  Sure, if Jesus had had a wife, as The Da Vinci Code posits, many factors that make up the Judeo-Christian worldview would be deeply altered.  Yet parsing the consequences of that shift would mean understanding its rippling, incremental effects.  Inferno operates as a more traditional thriller with real world consequences—someone is seeking to unleash a version of the Inferno, of Judgment Day, upon the earth.  Consequently, there is, first, the moral question of whether or not that person’s plan has merit and, second, how to stop him once the determination is made that it does not.  Both of these questions operate only tangentially in relation to the histories of Dante and his work; parallels and affinities appear, but they are not tasked with the heavy lifting of the story.  For this reason, Inferno is more compelling and, ultimately, more successful than the other entries in his series.

I recently saw another Inferno review that snarked: “But if Langdon is distinguished from the other globe-trotting saviors by his PhD, why aren’t his movies smarter?”  Those other globe-trotting saviors include, of course, James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Indiana Jones, all charismatic adventurers crafted from more urbane source material.  If Brown’s writing leaves something to be desired where sophistication is concerned, his main detective certainly does not benefit from how Hanks plays Robert Langdon.  His Langdon is something of a modest fuddy-duddy, an anti-adventurer.  Indeed, the moments of Inferno that provoke the most emotion are not ones where he demonstrates his mastery of the subject or his adaptability in a fight.  Struggling with amnesia for much of the movie, Langdon cannot manage to sort out his personal memories from his academic knowledge in a manner befitting a celebrated scholar.  Though intellectual power has drawn him into his globe-trotting mysteries, it is no more reliable than anything else.  He is fallible, but he follows the clues when the potential discoveries are too juicy for him to ignore.  Robert Langdon has the heart of an academic, and Tom Hanks has the humanity to play him in action.