One Book I'll Never Forget

Captain William Bligh

This semester I'm teaching two sections of Advanced Writing, a course required for Elementary Education and Middle School Education majors. Because most of the forty students taking the class will before long be teaching reading and writing to young people, I had each of them write a paragraph beginning, "One book I will never forget is ____."

Here's my own paragraph:

One book I'll never forget is MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. This novel, based on true events, tells the story of an actual mutiny against Captain Bligh, on a British ship. It was one of the first long books I read on my own when I was young, the first book that captivated me so much that I didn't want to put it down. Nor did I want it to end. I was elated to discover that the authors, Nordhoff and Hall, had written two additional books that continued the story, so I immediately checked those out of the library and read them with equal enthusiasm.

Their choices, not surprisingly, range from children's books to adolescent novels to popular novels, mostly recent ones. The only work of nonfiction on the list is The Water is Wide. We'll be reading that memoir as a text this semester; the student who chose it sat right down and read it after purchasing it and "couldn't put it down." That bodes well for our use of the book as a text. Most of the students in these classes are women; perhaps that's evident from this sampling of their selections:

The Island of the Blue Dolphin, Scott O'Dell
The Land, Mildred Taylor
The Twilight Series, Stephanie Meyer
The Kissing Hand, Audrey Penn
The Great Santini, Pat Conroy
Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Patterson

Searching for David's Heart, Cherie Bennett
Deception Point, Dan Brown

The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange
Flyy Girl, Omar Tyree
The Water is Wide, Pat Conroy
Act Like a Lady; Think Like a Man, Steve Harvey
The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss
Gone with the Wind, Margart Mitchell
Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
Someone Like You, Sarah Dessen
My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Wedding, Nicholas Sparks
Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult
Forged by Fire, Sharon Draper
If I Was Your Girl, Toi McKnight
Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
Pleasure, Eric Jerome Dickey
Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause

Matthew Crawford and Soulcraft

I've been reading Matthew B. Crawford's recently published book, Shop Craft as Soulcraft. Crawford holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and currently is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He also owns and runs Shockoe Moto, a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. His academic work (and sometimes mindless "white collar" jobs) coupled with his background as an electrician and mechanic have lead him to write this fascinating commentary on the nature of work, craft, and value in our society. Essentially, he argues that we've gone wrong in devaluing skilled manual work in favor of a "knowledge culture" in which young people are encouraged to educate themselves for jobs that will not require them to fix things or dirty their hands. Early in the book, Crawford lays out his intention:

In this book I would like to speak up for an idea that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hardheaded: the hardheaded economist will point out the "opportunity costs" of spending one's time making what can be bought, and the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades....

Crawford deplores the fact that cars we drive, the machines that sustain us, and the stuff we use is increasingly impervious to the understanding of a curious, mechanically competent ordinary person. Instead, they surpass our basic understanding and when broken must be repaired only by experts who have expensive equipment--or worse, must simply be replaced. Furthermore, as shop classes become rarer in schools, fewer and fewer people cultivate basic skills that would enable them to fix things. Crawford (like Mike Rose in The Mind at Work), argues that far from being mindless or merely mechanical, jobs requiring manual labor often require considerable intelligence, creativity, and ingenuity. There's a moral dimension to this too, which brings to mind Robert Pirsig's classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

My own ideal day consists of a balance between what I think of as "head work" and "hand work." Having spent much of the morning reading, writing, and puttering at my computer, I look forward to this afternoon when I'll start a new woodworking project, building an easel. Particularly given my amateurish approach to such projects, it will challenge me with problems that I'll have to think hard about solving. I'll cut some pieces badly and drill holes in the wrong places and miscalculate some of my measurements. Still, I look forward to the challenge. For a while, I'll gladly immerse myself in the labor and the uncertainty that comes with it, knowing I'd never be able to make my living doing such work. I'll always be an amateur (from the Latin amator for "lover") in the original sense of one who loves the work even if he's in no way an expert.
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New York Times review of Shop Class as Soulcraft
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An Appreciation of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book
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On Zora Neale Hurston

Like a Complete Unknown

Gates and Dylan

In a recent incident that swept across U.S. newspapers, media outlets, and T.V. screens, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested at his own home when a Cambridge neighbor called 911 and reported that he appeared to be breaking in. The subsequent confrontation, handcuffing, and the fallout with powerful racial overtones wound up involving President Obama, who invited Gates and Officer James Crowley to have a beer at the White House in order to smooth things out.

In a far less contentious but equally baffling incident, Bob Dylan was stopped by a police officer a couple days ago while the singer was wandering in a New Jersey neighborhood prior to a concert with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. Admittedly, Dylan can look pretty scruffy, but the 22-yr-old cop didn't recognize the rock icon even when he showed her his i.d., so she insisted that he return with her to his hotel, where others readily vouched for him. To his credit, Dylan seemed to take this all pretty calmly. This gives a new ironic meaning to the phrase, "like a complete unknown," from the song that many (including me) consider the greatest rock song ever written:

"Like a Rolling Stone" on YouTube

Alicia Sully, Filmmaker

Alicia Sully in Ghana

As editor of the quarterly newsletter for Friends of Ghana, The Talking Drum, I regularly interview and then write about former Peace Corps volunteers who have served in Ghana, telling about their background, volunteer experiences, and current whereabouts. I've been doing this for over ten years, and the interactions I've had with these Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, few of whom I've met personally, have invariably been interesting.

Several years ago I interviewed Stephanie Arnold, whose small eastern Ghana town was so pleased with the three-year latrine contruction project she organized that they built a statue to her and had Jerry Rawlings, then Ghana's President, visit to unveil it. I've met and talked with several members of Ghana I, the first Peace Corps group ever, including Bob Klein, whom some refer to as "the original Peace Corps Volunteer" because he was the senior member of that initial group and stays in touch with most of them, helping to organize regular group reunions. Bob has been the moving force behind the Peace Corps Archival Project, housed at the JFK Library in Boston. He has traveled the country conducting and taping interviews with many volunteers, whose recollections have been stored there for posterity.

Normally, I talk with these profile subjects by phone, and our conversations typically stretch on for over an hour, as was the case when I spoke last April with photographer Peter DiCampo, whose profile appeared in the summer issue. My most recent write-up is on Alicia Sully, whom I was unable to talk to by phone because of her travel schedule in Africa. Instead, we communicated in several extensive e-mails. She got a university degree in filmmaking and then went to Ghana as part of a Peace Corps water/sanitation group. Before long, she began making short films about health issues, including Guinea worm infestation and HIV/AIDS. Some of her Peace Corps experiences are documented in her blog.

One of her films, available on YouTube, was produced in close cooperation with citizens of the small northern Ghana town where she was posted. This two-part film in Dagbani, subtitled in English, concerns "kayayo"--young women from poverty-stricken northern Ghana who travel to cities to work and earn money to send home. In some cases, these women become prostitutes and experience the multiple health problems associated with that lifestyle. Peter DiCampo, who has himself done photography and research on this issue, will soon be working alongside Sully, doing a series of presentations in northern Ghanaian towns.

Sully Film, Part I
Sully Film, Part II

Since May, Sully has been working with What Took You So Long (WTYSL), a small multinational group of volunteers committed to publicizing the work of successful Non-Governmental Organizations in Africa. She learned of this group through Sebastian Lindstrom, one of its leaders, because of Lindstrom’s affiliation with a project in Kumasi, Ghana.

The group is now in the middle of an ambitiously long journey using local transportation which started in Morocco and will proceed down the western coast of Africa to South Africa. Thus far, the team has traveled through Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Togo and is headed south for stops in Nigeria, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sully’s responsibility along the way has been to shoot and edit video spots on the various NGOs visited. These are available on the WTYSL website.

New Words in 2009

"Frenemy," "locavore," "vlog," and other new words in the 2009 Merriam-Webster's Dictionary
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Jonathan Yardley on Austen's Pride and Prejudice
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Review of Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
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Two poems by Heaney from Poetry Ireland Review, reprinted on POETRY DAILY
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Creative Writing MFA Rankings by Seth Abramson
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Poet Craig Arnold went missing.
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Craig Arnold was never found.
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Several of Arnold's poems

Jane Jacobs

In the summer of 1965, the summer after my sophomore year in college, I worked as a community organizer and youth activity director at Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. I was one of about 15 students living at Hope House (just behind the church) and doing similar work. This was my first extended experience of life in the city. During that summer, I discovered Jane Jacobs' book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, an argument--at the time radical--for maintaining the integrity of city neighborhoods with mixed uses: housing, restaurants, stores, businesses, etc. She argued that the enemy of vital neighborhoods was specialization and pointed to certain areas, such as her own Hudson Street neighborhood in Greenwich Village, that had maintained their vitality and interest and safety.

Here's a review of two recent books on Jacobs that pit her theories against those of Robert Moses, who transformed parts of New York with his large-scale, impersonal developments--huge housing projects and highways that often destroyed the character of local neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs, who died in 2006, remains one of my urban heroes, and thanks to what I recall of her influential writing, wherever I travel (San Francisco, Rome, Berlin) I look for the sort of mixed-use city areas she lauded and celebrated. They are seldom the most glamorous neighborhoods but are the places you want to hang out in and explore, imagining yourself to be a local.