School’s In

Jeff2 Comments

School’s In

I accidentally set my alarm for seven p.m. instead of seven a.m. and missed half the teacher disorientation this morning. It’s not a big deal, since I’m fairly disoriented already. I’ve decided to make some fairly big changes to my syllabi, though it goes against the opinions expressed by quite a few people I met with today. The changes are based on my experiences last semester; I’m not even going to attempt the “warm fuzzy” getting to know you essay like I did last time. Nothing against what the other people do, but it just isn’t me. I’m into research and argumentation, hardcore.

But I heard some really interesting “process oriented” approaches from other folks that I’ll be anxious to learn the results of. I love teaching in such an open department. I can do whatever works for me and my students without many worries about specifics. My evaluations have all been positive, from both faculty and students, so I think I’m just going to try to refine what I’m doing to be even more focused. Rhetoric is such a chaotic discipline, really. Most of the other teachers are more “creatively” focused than I am. I have trouble with that; I don’t think you can teach creativity. Most of the process games don’t work for me, so find it hard to recommend them to other people. But I’m the exception, and not the rule— most teachers just love free-writing and all that stuff. I’m more interested in critical thinking skills. I’d rather see evidence of that, rather than creativity. Creativity can take care of itself.

“But Jeff, you’re so creative . . .” I get so sick of hearing that. Being creative never did me much good. I don’t mean to be so bitter about it, but I am. I think of critical reading and writing as fundamental life skills. Being able to express yourself is a life skill as well, but if you can read and write critically, then being able to express yourself will naturally follow— this is an ass-backwards way of looking at it compared to most pedagogical practice. But it works better for me.

Precious few people can earn a living expressing themselves. College costs a lot of money. It seems foolhardy to me to even suggest that creative writing is a way of conquering the world, especially at these prices. However, it’s a powerful way of getting to know yourself. I believe in the utility of literature, and of composition, and in helping people understand themselves and the way the world conspires to steer them into being good little cogs. It’s important as hell. But the skills of being able to research and evaluate arguments across all disciplinary boundaries must be taught by someone, and personally I think that is the primary job of first-year composition.

Goodies

Jeff

Emerson on “Goodies”

I hate goodies. I hate goodness that preaches. Goodness that preaches undoes itself. A little electricity of virtue lurks here & there in kitchens & among the obscure— chiefly women, that flashes out occasional light & makes the existence of the thing still credible. But one had as lief curse & swear as be guilty of this odious religion that watches the beef & watches the cider in the pitcher in the table, that shuts the mouth hard at any remark it cannot twist or wrench into a sermon, &#038 preaches as long as itself & hearer is awake. Goodies make us very bad. We should, if the race should increase, be scarce restrained from calling for bowl & dagger. We almost sin to spite them. Better indulge yourself, feed fat, drink liquors, than go strait laced for such cattle as these.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal Entry, June 23 1838.

for the children

Jeff2 Comments

for the children

I was reading the most delicious allegory about the United States in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables when it reminded me of a Bill Mahr routine. I’m not judging, just reporting. The transcription I found on someone’s web page may not be accurate, but as I recall it’s true to the spirit of the routine:

Fuck the children.

Day after day it’s shoved down our throats: We have to love the children and prepare them for tomorrow. We’re supposed to prevent them from falling down wells and out of cars, and we’re supposed to keep toxic chemicals out of their reach. We’re supposed to change the babies’ diapers and call a doctor when they stop breathing. Christ almighty, when do we get a break? Do the children ever stop taking? For just once, let’s let the children fend for themselves.

They were spouting off the same crap back in the ’60s, about how
we have to take care of the children because they’re our
planet’s future. And you know what happened when we didn’t
take care of them? Nothing! They grew up and became adults, and
the planet didn’t end!

I swear, if I hear one more word about the goddamn children, I’m going
to choke somebody.

Babies are dying, children are starving, teenagers are turning to drugs
and prostitution. Blah, blah, blah. How many times can you hear
about kids living in cardboard boxes and young girls being sold
into sexual slavery before you just have to say, shut up about
the goddamn children, already?

Of course, Hawthorne’s response is a lot more subtle and nuanced, and told through an observation about chickens:

All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have been other fowls of such old appearance and deportment as these ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken succession of eggs; or else, this individual Chanticleer and his two wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained withal, on account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy with Hephzibah, their lady patroness.

Queer indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on his two stilt like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked small enough to still be in egg, and, at the same time, sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been the founder of an antiquated race.

Instead of being the youngest of the family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not only of these living specimens of the breed, but all its forefathers and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed into its little body.

Its mother evidently regarded it as the one chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world’s continuance, or at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the younger fowls importance could have justified, even in a mother’s eyes, the perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody’s face that so much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. (140-1)

I suspect the whole “for the children” thing is one of those excellences (or oddities, depending on how you look at it) that is deeply rooted in the American psyche. I’m not quite sure what that means.

Ozark Children

Jeff
Ben Shahn— “Children of Ozark Mountaineer”

Not from the brittle orchards: barren gardens:
Dog-run houses with the broken windows:
Hen-shat houseyards where the children huddle
Barefoot in winter: tiny in too big rags:
Fed on porkfat: corn meal: cheap molasses:

Fed on famine rations out of fields
Where grass grew taller than a child could touch once

Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free, 1938

More Roots

Jeff

More Roots

Received Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War today, as well as Jame’s Guimond’s American Photography and the American Dream. But the real gem was Land of the Free by Archibald Macleish— what a score! This book is incredible, and markedly different from all the others. It is a long poem, with groups of lines attached to photographs from different sources. It has a somber tone, and lacks the political fervor of Richard Wright’s book or the blatant optimism of Sherwood Anderson’s. But I’m still too involved in the nineteenth century aspects to go too far into it as yet.

I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept thinking of Byron. Though I got sick of studying the permutations, Byron did create the popular notion of the “hero.” His works were printed in at least 100 separate editions in America when he was alive. Of course, he died in 1824 and doesn’t seem to be a profound influence on most of the American progressive thinkers of the 1830s, that is, unless you count a reaction against Byronmania. Andrew Jackson could have been a Byronic hero, perhaps, but he wasn’t really smart enough— but he certainly was flawed enough. Emerson skipped over the late romantics, diving directly into Wordsworth and Coleridge as models. But Emerson’s involvement with Swedenborg brings out yet another interesting road to chase down— apocalyptic rhetoric.

A popular cult of the 1830s was founded around William Miller, who predicted the world was going to come to an end in 1843. It lies at the roots of the modern day Seventh Day Adventists, but in the 1830s it attracted a lot of members from the Abolitionist movement. Looking at a study of Millerite rhetoric, there is a strong current of vox populi rhetoric. Swedenborg was an apocalyptic mystic type too, but his view of history is different, more positive— and was much more of a foundational figure in Emerson’s cheerleading positivist rhetoric.

What is really fascinating is the connection of Swedenborg with Mesmerism. Holgrave, the daguerreotypist in The House of the Seven Gables was a mesmerist before he became a photographer… so there are currents of Swedenborgism to go along with the Carlyle style philosophical view in Hawthorne’s depiction of the attitude of an early photographer.

Just more breadcrumbs to scatter along the path, along with the facts that Andrew Jackson was the first US president born in a log cabin, and that Martin Van Buren, his stooge who was president when photography entered the United States, was the first president to actually be born in the USA.

More Notes

Jeff

More Connective Notes

Henry Crabbe Robinson’s diary has observations on Thomas Carlyle in 1832. Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry and journeyed to Europe in 1833. He met Carlyle, Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge, and many others. According to Crabbe Robinson, Landor thought that William Blake was the greatest English poet of all time. This makes it remotely possible that Emerson was exposed to Blake’s work, though to my knowledge he never mentioned it. Emerson wrote several reminisces on Carlyle based on his own diaries in English Traits, published in 1856.

Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus was first published serially from November 1833 to August 1834, in Fraser’s Magazine, published privately for an edition of 58. An introduction to an 1899 edition of Emerson’s works noted the “Sartor” characteristics to the writing style of Emerson’s 1833 journal; obviously, Carlyle shared Sartor Resartus with Emerson before it was published. The first public edition of the book was an American one, which included an unaccredited preface by Emerson in 1836. A second American edition followed in 1837, before the first English edition in 1838.

Carlyle’s lectures on Heroes and Hero Worship occurred in 1840. They were issued in book form in 1841, 1842, and 1846. Margaret Fuller praised Carlyle in an 1841 edition of The Dial. Crabbe Robinson has reminisces of Emerson from 1848, from his second visit to Europe. In 1850, Emerson published Representative Men in 1850, coincident with Matthew Brady’s Illustrious Americans. Emerson’s work is based on a series of lectures from 1845-46; Brady began collecting portraits of celebrities in 1844.

Don’t mind me. . . . I just had to write this down before I got confused. . . . I’m reading too many things at once!

Twisted Path

Jeff1 Comment

The twisted path of research . . .

I thought it might be fun to explain how I get from A to B, because I’m sure it’s quite confusing. Researching the early genres of photography in nineteenth century photography, I noted a passing mention in Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 by Peter B. Hales that Holgrave, the daguerreotypist in Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables might have been based on Albert Sands Southworth. This of course splits me on two separate paths. I wasn’t that familiar with Southworth, so I poked around and found:

That was the first branch. Since of course I’m a literature guy too, and I like Hawthorne, I had to start reading The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Some preliminary observations: the novel is certainly indebted to both the Gothic genre and Thomas Carlyle. Holgrave the daguerreotypist’s rhetoric is straight out of Sartor Resartus, and the prominence of the house as a character of the story is the fruition of a trend that is traceable directly to Ann Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (I knew all that gothic reading would come in handy sometime). But two interesting things happen in the first part of the novel: the allegorical presence of the spectre of slavery, and the tension between the old aristocracy and commerce.

I’ll probably write about that at greater length later, but for now I wanted to note my research on the beginnings of Jim Crow in the 1830s. Jimcrowhistory.org is a great source. In the early chapters that take place inside a shop in the Pyncheon house, a vicious little boy just loves to bite the heads off Jim Crow gingerbread men. Since the novel is from 1851, it seems that Jim Crow was pretty damn popular before Jim Crow laws. I stumbled on a nice article on Minstrel shows as a result, and also want to note that Princeton seems to have a nice collection of material. I’m just trying to trace my footsteps here, in case I need to come back. Leave some breadcrumbs on the blog, so to speak.

All this makes me certain that the sort of deep context I’ve been lost in is important to the story of American photographic rhetoric. Funny, but I really didn’t want to spend more than a chapter on it. It’s a fascinating story though, and I can’t ever seem to get past the nineteenth century!