Taking a U-Turn on the Path Less Travelled

I loathed boarding school. It was the era of freaks and jocks and soshes, and there were only a few of us freaks at the Academy. We clung to each other like bedraggled survivors in a leaky lifeboat.

It wasn’t all bad, of course. I liked several of my teachers, and they liked me. I did have my friends for comfort and solace,  and I could always share a smoke with them at the greasy spoon across town. The place was banned by the school, which made it perfect as our getaway, our real home away from home. Straights were not welcome.

Mrs. D was straight as they came, but she was also very special. She took me as I was, bad attitude and all, and encouraged me in her art class for three whole  years.She saw something in me, I know not what, and encouraged me to apply to the Rhode Island School of Design. But a career in art was out of the question, as far as my family were concerned, and I applied to other, less artsy places instead. I was to be “well rounded.”

My friends and I had somehow eventually made our way in our precarious lifeboat to the shores of graduation, college, and real life. And I chose, or had chosen for me, the road I was supposed to follow. I wasn’t very good at following this road, and ran off it pretty often. Still, I stayed more or less intact, and finally found a little pathway off that main road, with independence and love and worthwhile work at the end of it.

Still, now that I’m growing older, I realize how finite life really is, and how one choice can change everything. I don’t wish I’d gone to art school, but I do find myself once again making art. I love the path I found after so much searching, but there are still more paths to discover.

Is there time in one life to do everything one wants to do? I don’t know, but I’m going to try to find out.

Dancing in the (Wall) Street

It’s not just New York City any more, and even the mainstream media has finally had to take notice. People are in full-on rebellion against Wall Street and the whole Corporate Empire. Little towns all over the US are getting into the act.

Yesterday I went on some errands in Northampton, a small town close to where I live in Western Massachusetts. There was a crowd of demonstrators and they were peaceful, even joyful — finally getting the chance to voice their concerns out loud. The police, though present, seemed quite sympathetic to the cause, as did most of the passersby. Cars driving past  honked their horns in solidarity.

It’s funny to me that Rush Limbaugh and his ilk are always calling liberals “angry.” This was the most liberal, least angry crowd I’ve seen in many a day. Even though they were holding a protest, it was a happy event of people coming together and having their say.

When I Paint (somebody else’s) Masterpiece

By now we’ve all heard about Bob Dylan’s show at the Gagosian Gallery and the brouhaha surrounding it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/28/bob-dylan-paintings

According to The Guardian, what was originally described as a “visual journal of [Dylan's] travels in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea”, with “first-hand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape” has now been revealed to be a collection of reproductions of other artists’ work.

In other words, Bob has once again shown his unwillingness to give credit where credit is due. We’re aware, of course, that his career has immensely benefited by his taking bits and pieces of other people’s songs and assembling them into brilliant stand-alone works of musical collage. That’s all well and good. It would, perhaps, have been kind of him to give a few shout-outs to those who needed the recognition, but Bob has never been a particularly kind person — at least not to those he views as potential rivals.

This painting controversy seems a bit different to me. It’s not so much that he’s taken photographs and used them as paint-by-number kits, it’s that he apparently attempted to take credit for these works as his own original “from life” paintings. Did he really think  no one would notice? As it is, Dylan apologists are falling all over themselves making excuses for the value of the works. But how can they make excuses for those blatant claims of sole authorship?

I’m in favor of fair use and the furthest extent of parody and even artistic appropriation when it’s honest about what it it is. But do any of these apply here? Back in the day, Bob could have done something like this and when he was found out, his shenanigans would have been greeted with whoops of smug delight by his fans, who would have considered it another of his triumphant put-ons. The straights would have been fooled and we would have snickered at their gullibility and pretension.

But haven’t we got beyond that? Why does Bob still get a free pass by die-hard defenders? I’m afraid that in the end this exhibition will serve only to diminish Bob Dylan’s legacy, a legacy that will still be considerable, just not so much as it might have been had he not decided to claim these pictures as his own original creations.

 

Kids Have Their Own Classics – So Why Shouldn’t They Be Allowed to Read Them?

I’m including a link to another article about book banning that makes a logical segue, I think, from my post of earlier today. This time around, it’s “The Hunger Games” under discussion. This is the first in a trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Although it’s marketed as a YA title and is certainly of interest to kids that fall into that category, I find that is more adult in its content than most adult bestsellers. That doesn’t mean it’s filled with sex; far from it. It’s filled with ideas — of identity, of empathy, of sacrifice, and hope — and at the same time it’s an exciting, edge-of-your-seat thriller.

http://www.care2.com/causes/banned-books-the-hunger-games.html

This is the sort of book that should be on the required reading lists of junior high and high school students. So what are the banners afraid of? That a contemporary book that kids will “get” and will love to read might actually start them thinking about their own society? That they will seek out other such books on their own?

Luckily enough  kids, as so often is the case, have turned out to be smarter than anticipated by the book banners and have indeed sought out this trilogy on their own  no matter whether it’s actually “required” or not. Smart kids. Smart books.

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An Epilogue to Banned Books Week

An epilogue of sorts to Banned Books Week: I’m including in this post a link to some books that Salon Readers voted to have banned, at least as required school reading. I must say I agree with many of their choices, not because these are bad books by any means, but because they are written for adults and may well be lost on children who will grow up hating these (and other classic) books for no good reason other than they were shoved down their throats at too early an age to be appreciated.

http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/09/30/books_you_want_banned/

The issue here is not “banning” and Salon, I’m afraid, is guilty of a misnomer. The real issue is requiring some kid to read a book that he or she regards as deadly boring and even incomprehensible, just because it has always been on the reading list. If some bright student wants to go ahead and read Crime & Punishment on her own, great! It should be available in the school library.

But I’ve seen too many cases where kids cease to love books when they are made to read books they can’t understand. In my case it was an abridged version of Great Expectations. I hated it; I didn’t understand Victorian England, I thought the characters totally uninteresting, and it took me decades to discover that Dickens is actually a wonderful, wonderful writer — he’s now my favorite writer of all!

When did classics get relegated to the kids’ section, anyway? It amazes me how many people come into the store asking for “school books” when what they really mean are classic writers who wrote for adults like Swift, Voltaire, Fielding, Melville, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Charles Dickens, & on & on.

Kids have a limited experience of the world and how it works, its history and the contexts in which these writers created their masterpieces. To kids it’s all words words words, meaningless and without resonance.

I say we need for our children to love literature, and we must start by providing them with literature they can relate to. Even now there are many writers for young people who are also great writers. Let the kids discover literature through them.

A Full Day’s Work

I got up this morning planning to work on a new blog entry. Something to do with the end of Banned Books Week which I, as a seller of books, have more than a little interest in. However, somehow I got sidetracked from celebrating the freedom to read to celebrating the freedom to change from one blogsite to another.

I’d been hearing many good things about wordpress, but I wasn’t really thinking of switching over today. My old blog site had served me well for many months. Still, things always seem to happen to distract me from my chosen path and this time I landed on wordpress on my way to somewhere else, decided impulsively yet unequivocally that Today Was the Day and found myself plunging into a whole new world of  themes, headers, various configurations. Flexible or inflexible? Simple or complex? What to use as an avatar? How to possibly categorize this stuff? Decisions, decisions, decisions.

I hope this works out. I’m pretty sure it will, though I don’t know yet what exactly to do with my previous efforts that are still hanging out at the same old place. I admit I feel a little guilty at abandoning the old blog spot; I’m usually such a loyal person and it seems as though I’ve committed an act of betrayal. It’s as though I’ve moved from a comfy apartment with nice neighbors to a new house complete with all mod cons in a different, unknown city. But the mod cons are very convenient, and very useful. And they’re free, too, which helps enormously.

At any rate, here I am. It’s long past morning. In fact, it’s almost time for supper and if I’ve accomplished  nothing else today I have at least finished that blog I set out to do ten hours ago, even though the route has been somewhat circuitous.

If anyone has noticed this entry amongst the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, you have my incredulous and eternal gratitude, and I hope soon to read your blog, too.

7:03 – 7:37

After I wrote this, I discovered that Troy Davis had indeed won a reprieve. I was joyous, celebratory. How could this story not have a happy ending after all? How, after all the pleas, all the recanted testimony, all the petitions, the statements, the *proof* that the State of George had not proved its case, could Troy Davis still be murdered? The Supreme Court had a week to decide.

It took them four hours. Troy Davis had an extra four hours of life on this earth. I am sad for all the families involved, sad for Georgia, sad for my country.

I’m publishing this blog post even though it doesn’t account for those four extra hours. It is, after all, about my own feelings. I cannot possibly imagine what Troy Davis must have been going through during his four hours of exhilaration, of giddy hope and final despair.

His dying statement was that he was innocent.
———————————————————————————————————–

I look at the clock. It’s three minutes after seven. This means, more likely than not, that a man named Troy Davis has just been murdered on Georgia’s Death Row. There have been many protests, many calls for clemency, but they’ve fallen on deaf ears. Once the death machine gets going, it becomes a steamroller, inexorably pushing aside everything in its path to get to its one and only destination: the death of a human being. The execution process is engineered to be a kind of sleek machine, disengaged as much as possible  from human involvement, going ahead seemingly of its own accord.

In this case, a rare thing happened. There was an attempt by prison staff to go on strike, to call in sick, to do anything they could possibly do to derail the machinery of death. I doubt that this worked; the machinery is too well oiled.

It’s now 7:11. Mr. Davis’s heart will have been checked to make sure it has stopped beating.

And the State of Georgia has now officially murdered another  human being.

This time it’s a little bit different, though. Troy Davis was almost certainly innocent of the crime he has just paid for with his life. There was no physical evidence at the scene, and he was convicted on the testimony of eyewitnesses. The peculiar thing about eyewitness testimony is that so many people think it’s the most reliable sort of evidence, when in fact it’s one of the least. 

In fact, seven of the nine eyewitnesses recanted their original testimony. Of the remaining two, one is under suspicion himself for this crime.

I will never understand the death penalty. I can only see it as state-sanctioned murder which brings no justice, no solace, no closure. The dead remain dead, and one more is added to their number. 

Troy Davis has almost certainly just been murdered in cold blood. It was an act that was premeditated and perpetrated with extreme malice, hatred, and cruelty.. Who will take responsibility? Who will admit to making sure that death machine did its horrific job? 

Until the death penalty is abolished in every state in this land, filled as it is with decent, kind, loving people, we all must take responsibility. Possibly,  just possibly, the death of Mr. Davis will start us on the road away from mechanized murder and toward a more humane justice system. 

Perhaps there was a miracle that I missed while I was writing this. Perhaps Troy Davis is alive and well and hugging his family.. If such a miracle has happened, I will make an addendum to this little essay. But I doubt I’ll have anything to add besides the fact that now the time is 7:37 and, for some of us, life goes on.