Coriolanus Corollary

So I'm reading a bit of Shakespeare's later plays: The Winter's Tale was for class, and now I've dipped into Coriolanus. It starts with a mob of angry Roman citizens who are starving because of the rich folks' greed. 


Here are some lines that should sound familiar (I've broken up Shakespeare's line breaks so that we can see the sentences):

FIRST CITIZEN:
We are accounted poor citizens. . . .
What authority surfeits on would relieve us. [Sounds familiar!]
If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely;
but they think we are too dear.
The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance;
our sufferance is a gain to them.
Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes;
for the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge. (I, i, ll.13-22).

Later, the crowd is calmed by a smooth-talking friend of the dastardly Coriolanus:

MENENIUS:
I tell you, friends, most charitable care have the patricians of you. [yeah, right!]
For your wants, your suffering in this famine, you may as well strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them against the Roman state . . . .
For the famine, the gods, not the patricians, make it, and your knees to them, not arms, must help.
Alack, you . . . slander the helms of the state, who care for you like fathers, when you curse them as enemies.

FIRST CITIZEN:
Care for us? True, indeed! [Yeah! Right!]
They never cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain;
make edicts for usury, to support usurers;
repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statues daily to chain up and restrain the poor. [sounds like Gov. Walker!]
If the war eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us. (I, i, ll. 61-82)

The Bard knew about politics - but this play is a tragedy, and Coriolanus is killed. I hope we have no tragedy on our hands in this era, but I'm not so sure . . . .

Upton Sinclair would be proud

I want to preserve this video for the next time I teach The Jungle: people don't seem to realize that we could fall back to those brutal days (they certainly exist in other parts of the world).

That's George Eliot?

When I was in grad school, I had a seminar on Victorian literature with Professor Robert Lougy. It included George Eliot, and I didn't like her novels much: too long and mannered for my taste. I don't really remember much from that seminar: we read Middlemarch, I know, and The Mill on the Floss. Did we read Silas Marner? Probably. What else? I can't remember.

But these days I assign my students an Eliot short story in our British Women Writers class: in our anthology is "The Lifted Veil," an atypical Eliot story that includes gothic elements. The supernatural isn't the only thing that's atypical, as far as I can remember from that long-ago seminar; it's the darkness of the narrator's vision.

Here's what the narrator, Latimer, says in the beginning of the story -- it's been bothering me because it seems so timely:

While the heart beats, bruise it,--it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brother recognition,--make haste,--oppress it with your ill-considered judgments, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.

Brilliant

More than two decades ago, I read Mark Johnson and George Lakoff's book Metaphors We Live By. It knocked my socks off with its brilliance. "Yes," I thought. "Our language reveals the metaphors that shape/control our thinking. I'd never thought about it like that, but he's so right!"

I thought that same thing this morning when I read this article Lakoff wrote: "What Conservatives Really Want." In it, Lakoff lays out all the moves that conservatives make in the public sphere - including shaping/controlling the language ("80% of the talking heads on TV are conservative," Lakoff reminds us - he could make the same claim about "talk radio").

By listing all the moves conservatives make, he reveals that the controlling metaphor of conservatives' worldview is the autocratic "strict father": they want the world to be structured like a head-of-household family where the strict father makes all the decisions, is not questioned, metes out the [necessarily physical] discipline.

With this kind of family, the social contract that Democracy promises (that we-the-people have a social responsibility to our fellow citizens) becomes a threat: helping others in the wider culture undermines the authority of the strict father.

Lakoff articulates SO clearly the views I've had for at least two decades but haven't been able to formulate, other than to say we're living through the last desperate gasps of the Patriarchy. To me, no one talks about the masculine violence that's behind all the criminal activity, economic greed, and gun-toting fear we see around us.

Conservatives campaign on the slogan "Take our country/state back!" (Minnesota's recent Republican candidate for governor used this phrase, even though our state had been suffering under a Republican governor for eight years. No logic there, but "strict fathers" don't work with logic; they work with fear). Back to where, is of course the question. Turning out country back in time seems to be the conservatives' goal - when men were men, women knew their place, and Dad yelling "Get off my lawn!" and following that up with a few firings of a 410 shotgun are appropriate ways to act.

Change is automatically a threat to the "strict father." And our speeded-up, technologically enhanced pace of change scares these fathers (who can also be "Mama Grizzlies"), but "strict fathers" cannot show that they're scared. So they scare everyone else instead. And then use the threat of physical violence against everyone else.

Back to Lakoff: he sees the Wisconsin protests as a hopeful sign of real citizens who want to make the world a better place (real public servants such as teachers, pipe fitters, fire fighters, rather than the fake "public servants" that politicians claim to be, in another theft of a good metaphor). I applaud his article and want to share it far and wide.

Read it and pass on his clear thinking.

Learning something new

A former student (I'll call Tracy) who still keeps in touch with me via Facebook has taught me a lot about a slice of American culture I know very little about: lower-middle class rural lesbians.

Tracy and her partner "Hannah" live in the country north of the Twin Cities, in a 70s split-level house with land enough for a half-dozen horses, four dogs, many barn cats, and two children: Hannah's son Christian from one of her marriages (she's had two) and daughter "Sage" that she had via donor insemination while in the relationship with Tracy. (Sage was a bargaining chip when Hannah broke up with Tracy last year - Hannah told Tracy to move into the basement but couldn't move out of the house because she had to "babysit" Sage. Eventually, the two got "back together," and now Tracy is trying to get inseminated.

These women come from extremely damaged backgrounds: lots of sexual abuse/incest, family members in prison for drugs and sexual crimes, suicide of family members, lots of drinking/meth/drug use. Hannah turned to religion (fundamentalist Christian) as a way to make sense of her life; she'd gotten a degree from Bethel, so Christian propaganda had been taught to her. For a while, she dumped Tracy "for Jesus" and because it was a sin to be gay. She dated a series of guys she'd pick up on Craig's List; Tracy (as well as Hannah's 12-year-old son) was still living in the basement while Hannah would bring the guys home.

Neither of them can hold down jobs, and they are both enrolled as students at Capella: Hannah for a master's in counseling (!) and Tracy for a bachelor's in law enforcement. I don't know how they make their mortgage payments, feed their horses, or pay for the sperm. Tracy's getting the second insemination tomorrow (the first didn't result in conception). She shared that news, among other things, with me on FB tonight:

tommrow is the day. HOpefully it works this time!

Me: Good luck! What time should I be sending my good karma?

thanks. Its at noon. Everythign has been going much smoother this time around, and because I bough more sperm hopefully that means it will take so I can be out the money

Me: So you buy sperm in different quantities? How much is it??

I was on the wait list for a guy that was half black/half white, and he is no longer donateing so I took them when I had the chance. The one I am useing tommorow is the same donor as Sage and the only one left of him. They are $395 each

unless I want one with more options

Me: more options? What would those be? (And it makes sense to get the same as Sage, don't you think??)

if you want it so they can meet the donor when they turn 18, or if they have a Doctorate degree,

Me: it costs extra if the child wants to meet the donor??!! That sounds really weird to me: why would it cost extra?

yea. I only have one left of him, he is no longer donating either. That is why I want tommorow to work. Hannah is worried about me having 4 eggs tho

cause not all donors agree to it
Me: hmm, but I still don't get why it would cost more for you if donors don't agree: are you saying that the donors who *do* agree are the more costly sperm?

right if you want that option then its $560 a vial, and if you want doc its around $700

This morning's Writer's Almanac

In Praise of a Teacher

by Nikki Giovanni

The reason Miss Delaney was my favorite teacher, not just my
favorite English teacher, is that she would let me read any book I 
wanted and would allow me to report on it. I had the pleasure of 
reading The Scapegoat as well as We the Living as well as Silver
Spoon (which was about a whole bunch of rich folk who were 
unhappy), and Defender of the Damned, which was about 
Clarence Darrow, which led me into Native Son because the real
case was defended by Darrow though in Native Son he got the
chair despite the fact that Darrow never lost a client to the chair
including Leopold and Loeb who killed Bobby Frank. Native Son
led me to Eight Men and all the rest of Richard Wright but I 
preferred Langston Hughes at that time and Gwendolyn Brooks
and I did reports on both of them. I always loved English because
whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories
that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a 
history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we 
think we are; English is much more a story of who we really are.
It was, after all, Miss Delaney who introduced the class to My
candle burns at both ends; /It will not last the night; /But, ah, my
foes, and, oh, my friends— /It gives a lovely light. And I thought
YES. Poetry is the main line. English is the train.

"In Praise of a Teacher" by Nikki Giovanni, from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. © Harper Perennial, 2002. 

Too much good stuff

Class discussion is one of my favorite things: students coming to some realizations about the readings because they listen to what their colleagues have to say.

Tonight, lots of students changed their minds about "which genre [poem, short story, essay] is most powerful when it comes to expressing the theme[s] for tonight."

We'd read a poem, "The Cross and the Pagan," by Elaine Goodale Eastman; an essay, "The Great Mystery," by Charles Eastman; and three short stories: Steven Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "Sister Josepha," and Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Mr. Cornelius Johnson, Office Seeker."

Lots of "tensions" to talk about: between religions, between races, between cultures. Or maybe the preposition should be "across": across religions, races, cultures. Or maybe "among"!