Be Like Mike (Frazier)

On Tuesday, my classmate Michael Frazier gave an excellent presentation on rap music. Even as a fan, I learned a lot of stuff I didn't know about the structure that goes into a rap song. I have run into a lot of people, primarily sheltered white folks, that think that rap isn't music, or that it takes no talent. Michael's presentation dispelled all of that, and I'm glad to see that sort of presentation welcomed in an academic setting. It reminded me of some of the hip-hop artists I love, like Kanye West.

I am nearly obsessed with Kanye West, and rarely meet anybody else that appreciates him. A lot of that probably has to do with how boastful he is, and stunts like interrupting Taylor Swift, but I don't care about all of that. In fact, all of that makes me like him more. Hip-hop is a genre of braggadocio, and on some level I feel that this is a way for black men, who have traditionally been put down in American society, to find some pride and self-esteem. I also feel like Kanye has earned it by being one of the most talented producers and rhymers around. I mean, who else comes up with stuff like, "I'm a fly Malcolm X, buy any jeans necessary" or "You got too many Urkels on your team, that's why your Winslow."? Nobody, except maybe his sensei, Jay-Z.

I also feel that Kanye sees the conflict in his wealth. He's the son of a college professor, his late mother, and feels the pull from his upbringing to be intelligent and thoughtful, while simultaneously feeling the pull from culture to be materialistic and flaunt his wealth. He seems to understand this flawed nature of his when he says, "To whom much is given, much is tested / Get arrested, guess until he gets the message / I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny / and what do I do? Act more stupidly / Bought more jewelry, more Louis V, my momma couldn't get through to me." Kanye West is like a modern day, real-life Jay Gatsby, and screw any pretentious white folks that balk at comparing him to a lofty literary character.

Sociological Dramaturgy

Our discussion on Thursday was one of my favorites from the class. Discussing how we change our language for different situations fascinates me because in this hyperindividualistic culture, people can't stand to think that they aren't themselves at all times. But we all do it.

Sociologist Erving Goffman called this "sociological dramaturgy." He proposed that we have two selfs, the front-stage self and the backstage self. Front-stage self is the "nice face" we put on for coworkers, our boss, neighbors, and the like. The backstage self is how we act at home when around only intimate friends and family. Some people call this "being fake," but with it being completely unavoidable, I'm not sure if that matters.

Spentropy

After reading Thomas Pynchon's "Entropy", it followed me around. I was walking to my math tutoring session in the Sinclair library, and passed by the reproductions of documents from the founding of the United States, primarily the Constitution. Then I passed by the African tribal art that is in the glass cases in the library. I was reminded of all the lengths curators have gone to preserve the actual physical Constitution in the National Archives in Washington D.C. It is kept out of sunlight, because UV rays will cause it to fade. It was encased in helium, and now in argon to preserve the parchment. Despite all of this, there is nothing we can do to keep it from deteriorating forever.

The famous Percy Bysshe Shelley poem "Ozymandias" talks about a statue of the Egyptian king that has crumbled and ironically says at the bottom, "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" This strong statue made of stone couldn't survive the elements, which eroded it away. The whole of art preservation seems to be a field of resisting change, of fighting against entropy. In a way it seems like a noble, though ultimately fruitless, battle.

God damn Thomas Pynchon is depressing.

A Nameless Dread

This week I finished Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. It features a rich wall street executive losing his mind and killing numerous people in vicious and sexual manners. It is not for those with weak stomachs to say the least. Some passages seriously made me feel disturbed like some sort of sympathy pain, except sympathy psychosis.

I am a bit lost after reading it. I get that it is a bit of satire about the superficial lives of the rich, with quotes like, "There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust." But on some level I still feel that Ellis has some pity for the main character, Patrick Bateman. You can't write 300 pages about the inner monologue of a character without identifying with that character on some level, which makes the satirical elements a bit problematic. There are also long passages where Bateman describes what everybody is wearing, focusing primarily on designer names, which, while incredibly tedious to read, serves to highlight how these characters only care about the surface. But, to write these passages, Ellis had to know a great deal about designer clothing, and this means he has to operate in that circle to some degree.

Another issue with the book is that there is a lot of homophobia and misogyny. This is further puzzling since Ellis himself is bisexual, and leans mostly towards homosexuality from what I've read about him. And one might argue that this is a continuation of the satire, mocking the hypermasculinity of these wall street types. But at some point you cannot hide behind satire anymore. At some point, you're producing so much homophobia and misogyny, that it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that you don't harbor some of those sentiments yourself.

My name is Nathaniel, and I have read Sparknotes

Sparknotes is a website where sports medicine majors go to read short summaries of literature and character analyses so they can plagiarize the site in hopes of getting a C from a lazy teacher's assistant or something of the sort. All of my academia friends speak of websites like sparknotes with vile hatred, and I can understand since their whole purpose is to make it possible for lazy students to not have to dig on their own through stories.

However, I read it frequently for a lot of my readings in many classes. Not as a replacement for reading the actual work, but as kindling to start my criticism. The problem for me is I don't really know how to do criticism. I am a kid hammering on a piano with no training. I'm no dummy, so I can sometimes find something melodic and go with it, but it's amateur at best. So sparknotes is like Fisher Price my-first-literary-criticism.

I bring this up because, after reading Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," I was madly in love with the story, but wasn't able to articulate exactly what was going on under the surface of the story. I sensed religious tones, regionalism, and characters that were more complex than "hero" and "villain," but I just couldn't figure it out. The Misfit and the grandmother's dialogue with each other at the end intrigued me, but I didn't know why.

So I went to sparknotes, and read up on it. And what I read about The Misfit was the most interesting because I completely disagreed with sparknotes.

"He has carefully considered his actions in life and examined his experiences to find lessons within them. He has even renamed himself because of one of these lessons, believing that his punishment didn’t fit his crime. Because the Misfit has questioned himself and his life so closely, he reveals a self-awareness that the grandmother lacks...The Misfit’s philosophies may be depraved, but they are consistent. Unlike the grandmother, whose moral code falls apart the moment it’s challenged, the Misfit has a steady view of life and acts according to what he believes is right."

I think they miss the mark saying that The Misfit is consistent. While he is more analytical than the grandmother and her family, there is something within him that isn't satisfied with his philosophy. His cool amoral attitude is challenged by the grandmother, and he cracks. When she talks to him about Jesus, The Misfit, who establishes himself as not one of the faithful, becomes upset about his lack of certainty.

"I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack...

The Misfit obviously isn't so sure about his philosophy of "no pleasure but meanness." When he kills the grandmother immediately after, it seems like a different sort of murder for him. It isn't part of his iconoclastic revenge against society, killing these people that he felt were part of the system that punished him unfairly. He killed the grandmother because she recognized him. She knew who he was, not just him being The Misfit, but who he was to the core of his being, and it scared him.

So, I highly recommend visiting Sparknotes. And then tearing their crappy criticism apart with your own observations about the text.

An Adonis is Upon Us

A lot of focus in not only my literature classes, but in many of my humanities classes, is put on how women and femininity are treated in society, and with good reason. Still, I feel compelled to talk about how masculinity gets portrayed. Not because I want to steal the spotlight away from women, but because I think that patriarchy hurts men too by defining what it means to be a man. Then men go chasing this unrealistic ideal and all sorts of misery comes out of this pointless pursuit.

I feel that Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" is ripe for this sort of analysis. Willy Loman is obsessed with performative masculinity. He lies about his reputation, his commission, and his own stature. He mocks his neighbor and his neighbor's son, saying "Between him and his son Bernard they can't hammer a nail!" and "A man who can't handle tools is not a man. You're disgusting."

Willy is old and tired and has never been all that successful. By America's standard of masculinity, he isn't much, which is one of the great tragedies about Willy Loman, he has bought into the lie that is unattainable to all despite being the sort of person that should criticize the mold that patriarchy wants its men to fit into. He calls his sons "Adonises," and attributes business savvy to them that they cannot live up to either.

In the end, the irony is that for all Willy's male posturing, he's just pathetic.

Booker T. Washington Was an Uncle Tom

Last quarter we read an excerpt of W.E.B. DuBois' book "The Souls of Black Folk." We read some of his sharp criticism of Booker T. Washington, specifically Washington's "Atlanta Compromise." This quarter Booker T. makes another appearance in the first chapter of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." The narrator says in the second paragraph, "they were told they were free...in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand." That last part is a direct quote of Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech where he essentially told his fellow southern african-americans to stay in the south and help white people rebuild it. He advocated separate but equal segregationist policy, and white southerners loved him for it. This is why I call Booker T. Washington an Uncle Tom, he was an assimilationist that capitulated to the racist demands of the southern whites of his time.

Ralph Ellison's protagonist is raised in a family that upholds Washington's values, though the protagonist's grandfather seems to realize on his deathbed that this lifestyle is harmful to him and his people. Despite the grandfather's warnings, the protagonist lives the life of submission that whites demand blacks live in a white society. He is commended for his behavior, because his behavior maintains the inequity of power in the times of Jim Crow. The protagonist seems to go so far as to experience Stockholm Syndrome when he says, "I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks..." He feels guilt when a naked white woman is revealed at the Battle Royal because in the time of Emmett Till, even looking the wrong way at a white woman can be a death sentence.

This is the life of a black person in Jim Crow south. It is one of internalized racism, de facto and de jure societal racism, and constant fear. When the protagonist simply implies that "social equality" is a worthy goal as an abstract concept, the crowd of white men clamps down on him. "We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times" one of them tells him.

But perhaps the most troubling part of our reading was when the protagonist is involved in the boxing match, and is the last of two men standing. When he asks the other man to take the fall, even promising him all of the pay, so that they can get this stupid brutal skeptical over with, the other guy refuses. "For them?" he asks. "For me, sonofabitch!"

I may have been reading too much into this, but it seemed like a metaphor for the internalized conflict within the black community. The ways that America's power brokers have fomented strife within the lower classes so that they don't realize that their true enemy is the bourgeois and the capitalists. The white folks force these black men to fight one another for their amusement. And while some participate out of fear, and some have bought into the pride and machismo of winning, even though you never really win anything. The game is rigged.

Render Muttons

Non-representational art is a conundrum for me. On one hand I would like to dismiss it because I'm a philosophy major and it is my job to seek out the rational and logical purpose of a thing. However, I also like my red plaid shirt, and the cover of Joy Division's album "Unknown Pleasures," and I hate houndstooth jackets on women. All of these are non-representational patterns and images, there is no narrative or character or moral, they just are abstract shapes for the most part. So I cannot say that non-representational art doesn't have validity and doesn't illicit an emotional response.

And after ending my blog for the last literature class with an exploration of the death of the author, it wouldn't be intellectually honest to say that my inability to discern Stein's authorial intent with Tender Buttons means it has no value. I shouldn't even allow my grudge against her for being a fascist color my opinion of her writing since authors don't matter.

But man, I just can't get into Tender Buttons. For a split second I thought I was going to like her, when I heard the title. I thought of a mother buttoning her child's jacket on a cold day. It gave me this nice comforting feeling of maternal bonds and I thought that I might be able to get other such interesting images out of her work.

I'm reminded of the movie Donnie Darko, when Drew Barrymore's character tells her class about a linguist that said that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in the english language. The point being that the aesthetic sound is pleasing despite the semantic meaning being dull or even possibly negative if you think of musky basements. That scene was always perplexing to me because I could not figure out why "cellar door" was all that pleasant a sound. I also cannot figure out why Gertrude Stein's poetry is arranged in aesthetic terms instead of semantically.

And here is the paradox because I enjoy the idea of the death of the author. Screw all your context, the text is all that matters. However, when it comes to "cellar door" and "The time to show a message is when too late..." they are meaningless to me without context. I do not give a damn about "cellar door" as a phrase in and of itself. But throw some Polish Jews in 1939, hiding in the cellar, and they can see the uniform of a Nazi through a hole in the cellar door, well now I care quite a bit about a cellar door.

Death of The Author 2: Death Harder

"For Reuben and Charles have married two girls,
But Billy has married a boy.
The girls he had tried on every side,
But none he could get to agree;
All was in vain, he went home again,
And since that he's married to Natty."

-Excerpt of poem authored by Abraham Lincoln

Our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln, had a friend named Joshua Fry Speed. The two were very close friends, even sharing a bed for four years, though this wasn't a social taboo like it might be today. There are many historians that point to evidence that Abraham Lincoln was actually homosexual. The Log-Cabin Republicans, a group of gay republicans, take their name from the belief that Lincoln was gay. There are many historians that disagree though. They point to the obvious fact that Lincoln had children with wife Mary Todd Lincoln, though Lincoln certainly wouldn't be the first gay man to reproduce with a woman. Additionally, the poem quoted above has allusions to a man marrying another man instead of a woman.

What could this possibly have to do with disregarding authorial intent? When we discuss historical context and the life of the author, we pretend that we are quite sure of what actually occurred and what was actually meant by the piece. However, we have a historical figure in Lincoln that has likely been examined by scholars far more than any of the authors we come across in an American literature class, and there is still much we aren't sure about. If we can't figure out things about a famous President, what makes us so sure that Dunbar didn't recognize that women also wear masks, and wrote his poem to befit women and african-americans?

Even if we could resurrect one of these authors and ask them very specific questions about their work, that doesn't mean we have the final answer on that work. We learned about psychoanalytic critical theory in Professor Cassel's class, a critical lens where we consider the effect sub-conscious thoughts have on a piece of literature. The fact remains that these authors themselves might not even know what the piece is about!

Batman, of all things, is a great example of this. When Bob Kane created Batman in the late 1930s, did he realize the psychologically disturbed themes present in Bruce Wayne/The Batman? The Jungian duality (Hey, Batman Wears The Mask!) of a leisure class slacker by day, and a serious "Dark Knight" by evening? Likely not. We can now look at Batman and see that he is a bit of a fascist. He is a vigilante that takes the justice system out of the people's hands and places it in his own. He, being a wealthy billionaire, uses his wealth to enforce justice as he sees fit. He's a plutocrat. This is very much like Plato's ideal Republic, which is hierarchial, and very much not a democracy. Bob Kane wasn't thinking that deeply when he put the cowl and cape on Master Bruce, but these themes of vigilantism and corrupt bureaucracy existed in the sub-conscious of society, and I believe Bob Kane tapped into it unbeknownst to himself.

The beauty of this lens to me is that it can turn almost anything into something exciting. Keeping with Batman, when I was a young boy I found the movies and cartoon and comics to be wonderful. I just liked the action and the courageous hero fighting evil. Then, when I grew up a bit and discovered that life is far more complicated than good versus evil and heroes swooping in to save the day, I dismissed Batman as childish and boring. Now, I can reexamine it in the context of not just Bob Kane's desire for an action hero with a limitless bank account, but in the context of culture and society and politics and psychology. It breathes new life into spent pages.

Death of the Author (Part 1)

"One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"

-W.E.B. DuBois "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903)

It is totally not cheating to break this up into multiple parts. It's going to be a long examination of an esoteric concept that I'm admittedly not extremely familiar with and am only beginning to explore. Plus if anybody is masochistic enough to read my pretentious ramblings, it would be kind of me to alleviate their misery by serializing it.

I was reminded of this topic in class on Thursday when we read and analyzed Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear The Mask." Most of the class, including myself, concluded that the poem was about the duality of the African-American experience. Having their own culture, but assimilating to white culture when around white people in public. I believe it was Martin that put forth the suggestion that this poem could be about women. Professor Cassel didn't seem all that convinced and we moved on.

However, I feel that Martin had a great point. It could be about women. In fact, the that is why the DuBois quote above, which is very much like the Dunbar poem, has always appealed to me: It is a universal experience. DuBois has zero ambiguity in his writings, making it clear that he is speaking of the African-American experience, but it still works for all sorts of experiences.

As an example, when I was writing a paper on Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel "Persepolis" for my Women in Religion class last fall, I began noticing how DuBois' quote applied to this story of a Persian woman living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Other side of the world, around seven decades after DuBois wrote "The Souls of Black Folk", but it still applied. Satrapi loves her home country of Iran, but could not reconcile this love with the oppressive religious regime, especially the misogyny of that regime. Satrapi knew her twoness. Not African and American, but Iranian and liberated woman. It turns out that this concept is within all of us. If you don't think so, next time you see your grandmother, tell her in detail how you feel about your first sexual experience.

Sociologists even have terms for this. "Front-stage self" and "Backstage self." We act differently in public as we do at home. We talk differently to our sweet Aunt Betty than we do when we've had a few drinks with our friends. We all wear masks.

So, what does all of this have to do with "Death of the Author"? Well, all of this begins to illustrate why we don't have to take into consideration authorial intent. We can ignore it completely. We can put our fingers in our ears at the moment that somebody starts discussing "historical context." Or as the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text."

I'll explain this all in more depth in my next thrilling installment. I'm being facetious because only the biggest philosophy/literature nerds on earth could possibly care about this sort of crap, but hey...I promise that my next post will feature a gay Abraham Lincoln. That's fun, right?

Happy Valentine's Day (Every day the 14th)

It's two weeks from Valentine's Day, a holiday created by chocolate companies and card companies and antidepressant manufacturers. It is appropriate that the past two weeks in Literature class, two stories about relationships have been assigned.

Both Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Theodore Dreiser's "Free" are anti-love stories in their own way. Really, other than Chopin's mastery of brevity, (Get to the point Dreiser!) and the differing gender of the protagonists, the two stories have much in common. They both involve married individuals, that when faced with the death of their spouses, privately revel in the freedom that this will allow.

At first this seems quite cynical, and, well, it is, but is that really all that bad? This fairy tale belief our culture has about two souls united as one is, in my experience, largely bullshit. It also leads to unrealistic expectations. This perfect image of a romanticized spouse is built in our imaginations, and we become sorely disappointed at these mere humans we meet that don't fulfill all of these ideals.

Mr. Haymaker in "Free" suffers for decades with the knowledge that Mrs. Haymaker is not his ideal mate. He can't leave her because of social and religious pressures. Chopin's Mrs. Mallard is even worse off, living in a time where a middle-class woman had no autonomy. But in a time when most marriages end in divorce, maybe we should see something noble in Mr. Haymaker's commitment no matter what. I think maybe marriage is the problem, and our society is moving beyond it.

Now, anybody reading this might think that I'm a cynic, and, well, you would absolutely be correct, but I'm not a love-hater...hater of love. I simply think that it can be fleeting, and we should accept that and not see it as a failure. I very much love my partner, and we might not be together forever, but if it ends I won't be bitter. I will appreciate the time we spent together and know that this was a valuable part of my life. I will recognize that the two of us grew apart and that this is natural and okay.

Actually, I will probably cry while watching stupid movies that we watched together, but still...I will definitely look back fondly instead of dismally.

This ideal that was encouraged in the time period of these two stories was incredibly harmful to people. Poor Mrs. Haymaker, who knows how much happier she could have been if she could have been with somebody that truly and passionately loved her. Who knows what wonderful experiences Mrs. Mallard could have had if she had been able to be independent.

Creepy Crape

The best horror stories have no supernatural monsters in them. Jason could never scare me more than Silence of the Lamb's Buffalo Bill. The Creature From The Black Lagoon could never send shivers down my spine like Black Swan. This is why The Yellow Wallpaper is such a great piece of horror fiction. And speaking of Black Swan, The Yellow Wallpaper is a commentary on how society's strict gender roles frequently shatter the sanity of women.

In Black Swan the insanity came out of the Jungian Madonna/whore duality that Nina is pushed into by the (both figurative and literal) roles she must play. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator isn't given the same exact pressures, but she is given directions that drive her insane all the same. The narrator, suffering from postpartum depression is relegated to the bedroom for rest by her physician husband. Isolated, she loses her mind and starts seeing herself trapped in the wallpaper in the room. While this certainly seems like an insane woman's ramblings, there's almost a weird rationale to it. Wallpaper is merely decorative, and the narrator, being disallowed from working, is merely decorative as well.

It's funny that this patronizing effect still lives on today. In 2005, Tom Cruise expressed his disappointment in an interview about the fact that Brooke Shields used antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression. He suggested she use vitamins. I say, if it worked for Brooke Shields, then Tom Cruise should probably shut the hell up and keep making crappy action movies.

We should also, as a society, examine how our expectations create mental illness in women. Going back to The Black Swan, that pressure we put women on to simultaneously be virginal and sexy is schizophrenic in and of itself. The background of this blog is a portrait of W.E.B. DuBois, because his famous quote of "One ever knows their twoness" resonates with me and I see it being applicable to so much more than the african-american context in which he meant it originally. Women also know this twoness, this pull from two opposite directions at once by one society. And it drives them fucking crazy, so maybe we should stop?

Purity, Patriarchy, and Plumage

In Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron", a young girl named Sylvia is minding her business when a brutish man comes along (after shooting a bunch of birds that were also minding their business) and asks her if he can crash at her place for the night. At first she's kind of creeped out by the guy, but she relents because she's a polite young lady and a bit of a pushover. But that's what society expects little girls to be. Quiet, reserved, capitulating to the demands of men.

The Ornithologist is a total patriarchal asshole who is in search of a rare white heron, so he can shoot it, stuff it, and put it on a mantle to drunkenly tell uninterested guests the story of his heroic capture of a bird that stood little chance against a freaking rifle. He wants poor Sylvia, who hangs out in the woods a lot, like many emo girls do, to help him find this white heron. The Ornithologist is this throwback to the enlightenment era, when technology was going to save the world and help man control and dominate nature and make nature its little bitch. If this mentality sounds familiar, it's because everybody in contemporary times is tweeting these very same thoughts into their iPhones. While obviously The Ornithologist exists well after the enlightenment era, many of the ideas seem to have remained with people for a long time. And, as we see in the case of our current messianic worship of technology, these ideas have a way of cropping back up.

After a while, this lonely little girl warms up to the Ornithologist, gets a little schoolgirl crush on him, but still wonders why he kills the things that he searches for. Seems a little counterintuitive, doesn't it? If you love birds so much that you fancy yourself an ornithologist, maybe you shouldn't kill every feathered animal that you see to the point that your game-bag can be described as "lumpy." So Sylvia decides she's going to climb this enormous old pine tree, so she can see the entire forest and locate the heron's nest. The reason that this pine is so tall is because it is so old, and the reason it is so old is because an "arborist" didn't come by and chop it down. I don't know if Jewett meant for this tree to serve as an example of what happens when we don't destroy nature, but it serves that purpose all the same. Funny what conservation does!

So Sylvia stays up all night, filled with excitement by her adventurous plan. Early in the morning, before any of the lame older people wake up, she sneaks off to climb this old pine tree. It is arduous and dangerous, but she succeeds, and sees the white heron crying out for its mate. Then something happens: Sylvia realizes that the stupid ornithologist should go screw himself. She, Sylvia, is lonely like this heron, and finds this heron as a compatriot, and doesn't want it to be killed. So she climbs down, and doesn't tell the asshole ornithologist.

So there you have it, an antisocial girl finds that she relates more with a bird than with a hunter. But that isn't it! I believe that not only does The Hunter (Ornithologist? Please.) symbolize manifest destiny, but also this story is a virginity tale. Sylvia is an innocent girl of nine years, and the white heron symbolizes her purity/virginity. The thing is white after all, which is a common color to symbolize purity and chastity. So along comes this strong dominating man, and she becomes a little enamored with him. He asks her to give up the white heron, and she contemplates doing just this at first because in patriarchal society, women are taught to just do as men tell them to do. She even takes on this difficult task of climbing this tree, which could be seen as symbolizing the lengths some women will go to impress a man. But in the climb, in the difficult task, she realizes that she is strong, and has no need to give up her white heron to a man.

This virginity symbolism actually fits nicely with The Hunter's desire to dominate nature. Nature is frequently associated with the feminine. In Pagan traditions, the earth is typically a Goddess, while the ethereal God of the cosmos/heavens is given male attributes and pronouns.

In so many coming of age stories, something is sacrificed to show that the person "puts childish things away" like the biblical passage says. In A White Heron, something is preserved. This makes sense in light of Jewett herself never getting married. She never had to give anything up to a man to feel complete, she was whole on her own.

Does a Marginalized Character by Any Other Name Still Smell as Discreet?

In my Literature class on Thursday, we discussed the removal of the n-word from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and its replacement with the word "slave." I was sharply in the minority for not having a problem with this singular printing of the book.

Four main reasons were given:

1. It is inaccurate as not all of the african-american characters in the book were slaves.

2. It is wrong to change a book, especially a canonical great work of literature like Huck Finn.

3. It amounts to censorship.

4. The book, with the n-word in place, serves as an opportunity for classrooms to discuss race. The alteration lessens the impact of these discussions.

As far as number one is concerned, there is no rebuttal. If the characters were not slaves, then "slave" is an inaccurate description. It is a completely valid point. However, it only argues that the replacement word is inaccurate, and doesn't address that the very replacement of words is wrong to do.

In regards to not touching great literature, we do it all the time. There are numerous translations of Dostoyevsky's work. Hell, there are numerous translations of Dostoevsky's name. Which one is superior? The things that Nietzsche's sister did to his work after his death, all in favor of promoting her Nazi agenda hardly get any press. If people truly feel that altering a great piece of literature is verboten, then where was the outrage at the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? A remixing of Jane Austen's novel with zombies interspersed into the plot. Or its companion book, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters?

Did these people write strongly worded letters to Baz Luhrmann when he gave Romeo and Juliet an MTV quick-edit facelift, adding guns, Radiohead, and lowriders? Do they curse Leonard Bernstein's name for sullying Shakespeare's work by resetting it in New York's lower east-side, and giving it showtunes? The Bible, which even in my atheist mind is a great work of literature, has been revised numerous times itself, including giving it a hippie/anti-Vietnam style in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar. How very much more than a single word being replaced!

I'm not a fan of censorship. In my political-science class I took during the mini-term, I was the only student that supported Wikileaks, comparing it to The Pentagon Papers during Vietnam. But this is simply not censorship. The government is not taking the original Twain text out of libraries, and pulling it from shelves in the way that Stalin disappeared records of dissidents. It isn't even like Wikileaks, where politicians are calling for the assassination of Julian Assange, and criminal charges for those that reproduce the leaks. It is a single run of the book by a single publisher. The book is still available with the original text on Amazon. I can even get it on my Kindle, replete with the n-word. To compare this to censorship is to undermine actual censorship.

The most difficult of all these points is number four: dialogue about race in the classroom. This is something I think is incredibly vital, especially in the times in which we live. A bad economy makes people look for easy scapegoats, and all too often that has meant ethnic partisanship. Antisemitism was rampant during The Great Depression, and in the single year I've lived in Dayton, Ohio, I have had multiple instances of people thinking that they could talk to me about their racist beliefs. I've had people explain to me that Dayton is economically depressed because of "lazy black people", to which I respond, it was lazy black people that made all the factories shut down and leave you with rampant unemployment? Not to say that my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky didn't have its own severe racism issues, but a number of factors, including a thriving local economy, meant that it wasn't used as a scapegoat to pin the city's issues on as casually.

So, this is a conversation that this city, and every other American city is desperately in need of. But is Huck Finn the best device we have to start that conversation? I don't know, it seems a bit irrelevant to the discussion. I can see how it can be used as a tool to put things into historical context, but this book is being taught in grade schools. How many children are able to put anything into historical context? They don't understand that the socioeconomics at play since slavery, remained thanks to Jim Crow, and that many of those factors carry on to the present day as can be evidenced by the overrepresentation of African-Americans in the prison system, which is the nouveau slavery in America.

That sort of thing flies over their heads. Hell, it flies over most grown people's heads. What they do know is that "I hate niggers" is carved into the bathroom stall of the men's restroom at their school. At least I would assume it is, since I've seen it carved into a bathroom stall at Sinclair Community College. And for all a black student knows, it was carved by John Smithers, the kid that bullies them in between classes. So now John Smithers is reading Huck Finn aloud in class and ever so subtly emphasizing the n-word and stealing glances at the one black kid in this suburban classroom because grade school students are the most evil bastards on the planet other than Dick Cheney.

So no, I don't think that taking the word out will ruin race discussions in classrooms. I think if teachers want to confront racism, homophobia, classism, sexism, and ableism in their classrooms, then they should confront it as it exists in the culture today. Don't skirt around it, don't use some century old text to give kids the opportunity to say, "See, everything is better now because we don't act like that anymore!" Just talk about the damn thing.