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Archive for the ‘Humanities’ Category

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Three Poems by Amy Susan Wilson

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Poetry, Writing on September 13, 2012 at 8:45 am

Amy Susan Wilson lives in Shawnee, Oklahoma and has recently published in Southern Women’s Review, Dead Mule, Red River Review, Cyber Soleil Journal, Red Dirt Review, Crosstimbers, Southern Literary Review,and in other similar journals. Amy is at work on a novel, The Fine Life of Mrs. Delbert L. Smith, which explores the first female attorney in Oklahoma to practice oil and gas law.  Non-fiction writing interests include Senior, over age fifty-five beauty pageants, and the pay day loan industry as it intersects with spirituality. Amy lives in Shawnee, Oklahoma with her family and three rescue dogs: Matthew, Pedro, and Snowball. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.

The following poem first appeared in Volume 11, Crosstimbers (Spring-Summer, 2011).

Doing the Hula

 

Don Ho, Hawaiian Breeze,

whisks her from this living room of green shag,

sensible sofa covers

to sandy white beaches with

girls swiveling hips, jiggling away

Just like Laki-Laki at Don Ho’s side.

 

Pall Mall clutched tight as a rosary,

sweet tea pressed into the other.

With each gulp and crank of vinyl

Eunice becomes Lead Hula Gal

her gray permed poodle hair

glossy-black; waist length.

All the men want her.

Don Ho blows a kiss

into her ear

as she hulas into the coffee table

laughs into the lamp

cry-giggles to the floor.

I will not forget the time

she brought out her ukulele

and Colt 45

held it to her left temple

then crown.

Grandma Eunice,

if you were to drive

by 3901 Windsor Way,

peek into the window at yourself

you’d see a woman

downing Diet Coke & rum

that only you call ice tea.

You’d see a woman

stumble through the fluorescent night,

your Maui Island faraway

as you dance into the dust

of volcanic ash.

 

 

The following poem first appeared in Volume 3, Red Dirt Review (Spring 2012).

Waiting in Line at the Pott. County Wal-Mart

 

 

If you live in the rural South and you are female and own a vehicle, or your cousin owns a vehicle, you can’t help but shop or just browse Wal-Mart at least once a week. In fact, Wal-Mart is not unlike attending the First Baptist Church; it is there and you must, you must participate in that weekly or more visit because it is how you were raised, and the urge to be a part of this world is coded into your Southern female DNA . If you are from the East or West coast you likely won’t understand, but anyone from here, the rural South, this South, well, ya’ll know what I mean.

                                                                        -Amy Susan Wilson

                                                                                                                                               

 

This dude runs some Morning Star corn dogs

down the conveyer,

there goes four Silk Soy Strawberry yogurts

but this guy, he’s no fruit

No Sir

tan biceps –Big–

but not too big

cute jogger’s butt

framed in Levis

he stands about 6’3–

oh, here goes some organic blueberries

wow, I am like marrying you

if you’d ever get off your phone

so I could say,

Blueberries, isn’t it nice they’re in season?

 

That’s what I’d say cuz I can’t think

of anything better;

How pathetic.

Wait, he’s going ninety an hour

on his cell:

So fight the cocks anyway

Just  fight’em ‘n place five, C.J.

 

What? He’s yacking about birds?

fighter birds?

How can you buy soy ‘n fight birds?

You know they attach razor blades to their ankles;

even Kris Steele, a Republican,

voted against cock-fighting.

 

Mmm, second thought,

Mister those Levi’s

just hang out on your bony ass

‘n your nose pug-like,

a girl nose

No a Michael Jackson nose.

Lord, now I have to get a divorce

cuz I married you

when Lynelle here rang up

teriyaki tofu, some three olive hummus–

I honeymooned with you at a green resort

in Tucson

as you sacked

with cloth reusable, recycled  bags

you brought from home.

 

Lord, I can’t help

but linger at Coin Star

as you drain the change

from your hemp wallet—

I thought you were tan from jogging

with a big black rescue dog

 

the kind no one wants to adopt

but no, I find out you’re tan from

raising rooster bulls to cock fight.

 

Gosh dang, cock fighting.

murdering the Lord’s creatures.

Are you the one

to attach the razors?

Or does your buddy C.J.

do your dirty work?

 

How do I find men like you?

 

Now you’re climbing into a hybrid Escape,

a bumper sticker:

 “Support the N.R.A.”

Oh shit!

I need an annulment

and fast.

 

You catch my eye and grin.

Listen, this three minute marriage

it’s over

I’m glad to be single again

and whew,

start my new life over

totally without you.

 

 

Slut Butt Miller: A Barber’s Daughter

Whale-O-Suds Tunnel Wash,

Jimmy Maloney unfastens

midnight-blue push-up

one hand.

White wife beater

daisy duke shorts

litter John Deere

floor mats

along with

Jack Daniels

Pall Mall pack.

That gush

of green soap,

creamy mint frosting

you’d see on top

a cupcake.

Turtle Wax

complimentary,

3:00 in the a.m.

Tonight

Blaine Sawder

football keg

Haunted Hill.

Pink thong

unwraps

Jolly Rancher easy,

watermelon kind.

After

the after party

Slut Butt

squeals donuts alone

Shawnee Bowl.

Neon pin

oil derrick tall

winks egg-white.

All the boys

gone home

texting from bed

their real

sweethearts.

 

Keystone glued

to cup holder,

Slut Butt

circles her Father’s

‘95 beige Impala

round and round

that empty lot,

swears to FM

and humidity

her Daddy visits

like in a movie

but a dream,

Recall your tire swing

            Salt Fork River?

                        I cut from old tread

            roped to oak—

                        You was my

            Little Angel,

                        Baby-Girl.

 

Her Mama

irons shirts

seventy-five cents

a pop,

Benny Lee

            Yacking to you 4:00 a.m.—

            And I won $500 million

            Oklahoma Lottery.

Asphalt and sky

pitch-black

as the inside

of a beer can,

the backseat

of some boy’s truck

waiting.

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This Fall at the New American Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta

In Arts & Letters, Atlanta, Humanities, Literature, News and Current Events, News Release, Shakespeare on September 10, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

When my wife and I can get a babysitter, we love going to the New American Shakespeare Tavern on Peachtree Street in Atlanta.  The Tavern, as it is affectionately called by regulars, is offering the following performances this fall:

All’s Well that Ends Well

Measure for Measure

Macbeth

Titus Andronicus

All who live in and around Atlanta, and who appreciate Shakespeare, ought to visit the Tavern for a guaranteed night of fun and good acting.  Click here to support the Tavern.

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Hunting: A Poem

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Poetry, Writing on September 5, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following poem first appeared here in Arator.

Hunting

The deer, leaned over, frightens

at the sound of the crack,

the broken stick beneath his  hoofs

or the hunter’s feet.

Wagging his tongue in the  moonlight,

shaking his fist at the sky,

the hunter loses choice and  chance.

A moment later

it would have been gunfire:

the sound

either unreal or untrue

that cannot be heard

except by the living.

A crisp cool tug of air,

like the long drag of a  cigarette,

wisps across the earth,

slaps him  in his face,

reminds him

of the coming cancer.

He looks through the sights, down  the barrel,

and fires at the nothing that’s there

to kill the something that is,

the sum of his existence,

and ours:

hope and truth.

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American Literary History and Pragmatism

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Emerson, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Walt Whitman, Writing on August 29, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

American literary history, even before C.S. Peirce named “pragmatism” as a philosophy, validates much of what pragmatism has to offer.  Joan Richardson speaks of “frontier instances” whereby certain writers become aesthetic outposts from which we can trace continuities of thought and artistic representation.  She treats literature as a life form that must adapt to its environment; similarly, Richard Poirier looks to a tradition of linguistic skepticism in American literature to show the role that artistic influence and troping have had on American culture.  Long before Richardson and Poirier, George Santayana exercised his own literary flair in his celebratory, summative essays about American culture and experience.  If American literary history can undergo operations of tracing and mapping, it might be because—as Richardson, Poirier, and Santayana have suggested—the unfolding and development of an American literary canon have been processes of evolution.  Literary texts and movements have shown a tendency toward growth that is responsive to the natural and changing circumstances of the time.

Richardson begins A Natural History of Pragmatism with 17th century Puritan ministers and then quickly moves to Jonathan Edwards.  Edwards is representative of the Calvinist notion of limited disclosure, the idea, in other words, that God reveals his divinity to us through the shapes, forms, and outlines he provides to us in the phenomenal world.  From this idea (and others like it) began the uniquely American insistence on the value of nature and the physical universe to thought and the spiritual or psychological realm.  As Americans sought to make themselves culturally and intellectually independent from Europe, both in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they used the New World landscapes and vastly unexplored (by Europeans at least) terrains as objects of their fascination and as sources of inspiration.  Even figures like Jefferson insisted upon the scientific study of the natural world in order to authorize theories about law and politics, which he wished to distinguish from European ways.  Jefferson, like William Bartram, another naturalist, lionized Natives as being more in tune with nature and hence more “lawful” in the sense that their communal governments were in keeping with the laws of nature.  However problematic we may consider these romanticized depictions today, we should at least say of them that they inspired further attention to sustained observation of nature as a critical component of what was intended to be a new way of thinking divorced from the Old World of Europe.

Santayana says that when orthodoxy recedes, speculation flourishes, and accordingly it is no surprise that as Puritanism solidified into an orthodoxy of the kind against which it once defined itself, there was a resistance among artists and writers and thinkers.  Emerson, for one, adapted the thinking of the Calvinists while maintaining their commitment to the natural world as a means for realizing higher truths.  Instead of God revealing himself to man through the forms of the natural world, God, according to Emerson, was realized within the person with a poetical sense, who was inspired by the natural world to discover the divinity within himself.  To become one and to see all—that is, to become a “transparent eyeball”—was something of a religious experience for Emerson.  Read the rest of this entry »

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“Bottle Tree,” A Poem by Amy Susan Wilson

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Poetry, Writing on August 15, 2012 at 8:45 am

Amy Susan Wilson is a writer living in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University and her work has appeared in the Southern Literary Review, Southern Women’s Review, Red River Review, and other journals.

Bottle Tree

My Nanna’s backyard elm

outfitted with blue, red

green glass bottles

tied with chicken wire the width

of a hen’s beak

to each branch.

 

            Scarin’ crows away,

Gram’s explained.

Wind chimes hung like gaudy ear bobs

from lobes of lower branches:

a lady bug with silver spoons,

that copper kettle adorned with

aqua beads, a faded red tin cup,

the kind hobos carry

while riding the rail.

 

Each sunset

those Blue Nun bottles

soft purple

like a mood ring

or Goddess moon from Jupiter.

          Mama back at Griffin,

I’d sigh,

run my palm

down the spine

of charcoal bark.

 

I never told Nanna,

kids at school

just Ruby-Lucille

me winning

a big red Escalade

Firelake Casino

someday I would—

 

Mama and me

we’d chomp green M&Ms

all the way to California,

big blue ice chest

the kind with wheels

loaded with biscuits

Pepsi, Paydays

strawberry ice cream bars galore.

 

Grams calls Griffin

          A  nerve hospital

           A mini-vacation from life.

 

Church ladies whisk

meatloaf

salisbury steak

Sunday afternoons,

          Grams too old to handle a child

          This stage of life

          All by herself.

 

Always,

Mrs. Harlan Dodge Simpson

presses a green bean casserole,

Old Testament

coloring book

to my palms—

 

lambs, cows

slaughtered on an altar,

carnation red crayon

for blood

twelve pack Crayola.

           

Ruby Lucille always waits,

backyard,

those bottles

clink like diamond bracelets

TV stars load their arms with.

          “Well Lady Bug,

          A fine plan

          You and your Mama,

          Heading to L.A.

          Someday,”     

Ruby Lucille whispers

in her bottle tree language,

Ruby Lucille

never laughing

never  letting on.

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Kenneth Burke’s Constitution: In Brief

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Humanities, Information Design, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics, Western Philosophy on August 8, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Kenneth Burke treats the constitution—or, in some cases, constitutions—as a dialectic, symbolic act that is representative of the tendencies and preferences of communities.  Burke applies the elements of the pentad—act, agency, agent, scene, and purpose—to form what he calls paradigmatic anecdotes for understanding how constitutions apply to and interact with communities.  The pentad, for Burke, is equipment for simplifying complex ideas into understandable categories or anecdotes.  It provides, in that sense, what he calls an “idiom of reduction” for understanding human motives.

Humans are sign-using creatures motivated by different “grammars,” and it is a grammatical move to interpret human action in terms of the pentad.   A constitution is not simply a tangible document—indeed, as Burke points out, there is no written constitution in Britain—but instead represents a symbol of the coordination of individuals that provides them with a calculus for determining not only how to act, but also how to know what motivates action.

Constitutions put forth general types, or principles, that can be considered ideals, and these types, principles, or ideals provide standards or criteria by which individuals in a community aspire to act.  A constitution is therefore more of a symbol of that which coordinates human behavior within a given community than it is a top-down imposition of legislative fiat.  A constitution, in short, is a communicative sign validated and made useful by its ability to induce cooperation among people.

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Rugged Individualism in Slave Narratives

In American History, Arts & Letters, Emerson, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Slavery on August 1, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The transcendental idealism of Emerson and Thoreau found its most illuminating expression and drew its most ardent followers before the Civil War would temper the spirits of many Americans.  Emerson and Thoreau both advocated for removing oneself from the constraints of society and for realizing an inner drive and power for epistemological, spiritual, and political purposes.  This individualism had more credence in New England than it did in the Southern states, and it is therefore not surprising that 19th century slave narratives would seek to appropriate that discourse of individualism in order to explain and condemn the realities of slavery.  Slavery could be cast as a symptom of the collective mindset, an evil that clearly could be seen as such if only individuals would separate themselves from conformity with the social unit and prevailing ideology.

Frederick Douglass, in both Narrative of the Life and his later work My Bondage and My Freedom, reveals that his childhood in slavery was relatively relaxed compared to that of other slaves, yet as he moved from master to master and was denied education—that is, as he grew into a man—the regulation of his body became harsher and more violent.  Douglass, who, as a lecturer, impressed upon his listeners a sense of rugged masculinity, uses his narratives to show how an individual can stand up to an entire institution.  In both narratives he vividly depicts his battle with Mr. Covey, a vicious overseer who was determined to train Douglass into docile submission by means of overwhelming violence.  It is an inner will as much as brute strength that brings about Douglass’s triumph over Covey, and it is Douglass’s determination to read and to learn that allows him to circumvent white law to achieve the literacy that made both of these works possible.

As an anti-slavery advocate in the North, having attained his freedom, Douglass expressed his individualism in a variety of ways, not least of which in his insistence to remain independent of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists with whom Douglass had, as it were, a falling out.  Douglass also articulated a desire for blacks to embrace the ideal of personal responsibility and to look to their own personhood as a means for pulling themselves out of their unfortunate condition.  His enabling rhetoric was intended to be inspirational and to imitate the rhetoric and values of New England whites, without whose support neither he nor other slaves could mobilize political action.  Other authors of slave narratives such as William Wells Brown (who, it should be mentioned, had a falling out with Douglass) employ similar tactics and strategies regarding the appeal to individualism.  Brown also promoted himself as a masculine figure who realized his autonomy and drew strength from his own will to deliver himself from bondage.

Harriet Jacobs’s narrative couches individualism in more ambiguous terms.  She gives herself the name Linda Brent in the narrative, which is addressed explicitly to the “women of the North.”  Her narrative is replete with apostrophes to these women readers and, therefore, with signals and coded references meant to gain sympathy and provoke anger at the institution of slavery.  When Linda’s master attempts to take her in as his sex slave, she goes so far as to have an affair with a white man, Mr. Sands, as a form of resistance.  Knowing the decorum of her audience and the precariousness of her status as a freed slave, Linda repeatedly acknowledges the sinfulness of her act but stresses, too, that she cannot be held to the same standards as white women, who enjoy the freedom to make moral choices.  In a system of slavery, Linda suggests, there are no moral choices because one is reduced to selecting between one bad act or another.  Like Douglass, Linda finds freedom in the North, and, like Douglass, she spends time in England, where, she indicates, freedom flourishes, at least in relation to the United States.  Jacobs’s narrative can be taken as an urgent statement on the agency of slaves in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and the image of the strong woman that she cultivates (not just in herself but in the person of her grandmother) resonates as a powerful trope that others would pick up on. Read the rest of this entry »

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Joyce Corrington Publishes You Trust Your Mother

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, News and Current Events, News Release, Novels, Writing on July 23, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Joyce Corrington, a friend and supporter of this site (see here, here, and here), has just released the final installment of the New Orleans mystery series begun by her and her late husband John William Corrington.  Learn more about this book, You Trust Your Mother, at Joyce’s website.

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Abolish the Bar Exam

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, History, Humanities, Law, Libertarianism, Nineteenth-Century America on July 20, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following piece first appeared here at LewRockwell.com.

Every year in July, thousands of anxious men and women, in different states across America, take a bar exam in hopes that they will become licensed attorneys. Having memorized hundreds if not thousands of rules and counter-rules – also known as black letter law – these men and women come to the exam equipped with their pens, laptops, and government-issued forms of identification. Nothing is more remote from their minds than that the ideological currents that brought about this horrifying ritual were fundamentally statist and unquestionably bad for the American economy.

The bar exam is a barrier to entry, as are all forms of professional licensure. Today the federal government regulates thousands of occupations and excludes millions of capable workers from the workforce by means of expensive tests and certifications; likewise various state governments restrict upward mobility and economic progress by mandating that workers obtain costly degrees and undergo routinized assessments that have little to do with the practical, everyday dealings of the professional world.

As a practicing attorney, I can say with confidence that many paralegals I know can do the job of an attorney better than some attorneys, and that is because the practice of law is perfected not by abstract education but lived experience.

So why does our society require bar exams that bear little relation to the ability of a person to understand legal technicalities, manage case loads, and satisfy clients? The answer harkens back to the Progressive Era when elites used government strings and influence to prevent hardworking and entrepreneurial individuals from climbing the social ladder.

Lawyers were part of two important groups that Murray Rothbard blamed for spreading statism during the Progressive Era: the first was “a growing legion of educated (and often overeducated) intellectuals, technocrats, and the ‘helping professions’ who sought power, prestige, subsidies, contracts, cushy jobs from the welfare state, and restrictions of entry into their field via forms of licensing,” and the second was “groups of businessmen who, after failing to achieve monopoly power on the free market, turned to government – local, state, and federal – to gain it for them.”

The bar exam was merely one aspect of the growth of the legal system and its concomitant centralization in the early twentieth century. Bar associations began cropping up in the 1870s, but they were, at first, more like professional societies than state-sponsored machines. By 1900, all of that changed, and bar associations became a fraternity of elites opposed to any economic development that might threaten their social status.

The elites who formed the American Bar Association (ABA), concerned that smart and savvy yet poor and entrepreneurial men might gain control of the legal system, sought to establish a monopoly on the field by forbidding advertising, regulating the “unauthorized” practice of law, restricting legal fees to a designated minimum or maximum, and scaling back contingency fees. The elitist progressives pushing these reforms also forbade qualified women from joining their ranks.

The American Bar Association was far from the only body of elites generating this trend. State bars began to rise and spread, but only small percentages of lawyers in any given state were members. The elites were reaching to squeeze some justification out of their blatant discrimination and to strike a delicate balance between exclusivity on the one hand, and an appearance of propriety on the other. They made short shrift of the American Dream and began to require expensive degrees and education as a prerequisite for bar admission. It was at this time that American law schools proliferated and the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) was created to evaluate the quality of new law schools as well as to hold them to uniform standards.

At one time lawyers learned on the job; now law schools were tasked with training new lawyers, but the result was that lawyers’ real training was merely delayed until the date they could practice, and aspiring attorneys had to be wealthy enough to afford this delay if they wanted to practice at all.

Entrepreneurial forces attempted to fight back by establishing night schools to ensure a more competitive market, but the various bar associations, backed by the power of the government, simply dictated that law school was not enough: one had to first earn a college degree before entering law school if one were to be admitted to practice. Then two degrees were not enough: one had to pass a restructured, formalized bar exam as well. Read the rest of this entry »

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Law in Melville and Hawthorne

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Historicism, History, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Writing on July 11, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Law was a common trope in the writing of nineteenth century American authors.  The jurist Roscoe Pound referred to nineteenth century America as a “frontier society” that was struggling to define what law was.  Justice John Marshall was carving out the jurisdiction of the nation’s high court, even as Andrew Jackson challenged Marshall’s authority to do so.  (Jackson supposedly said, in regard to Worcester v. Georgia, that Marshall had made his decision, “now let him enforce it.”)  American jurisprudents were seeking to reconcile the contradictions between liberty and equality on the one hand—the ideals of the revolutionary generation—with the peculiar institution of slavery on the other.  The ethos of republicanism and the ideal of open discourse clashed with the legislative attempts among the Southern states to resurrect Roman code to validate slave laws, even as the judiciary, on all levels and in all states, attempted to incorporate British common law into a new setting with unique problems.  In short, law was in flux during the nineteenth century in America, and writers like Melville and Hawthorne picked up on this problem and gave it unique and sometimes troubling articulation in their literature.

The “facts” in Benito Cereno are strikingly similar to the facts in one of America’s most memorable cases: U.S. v. The Amistad, in which John Quincy Adams, among others, served as an attorney.  In both “cases,” slaves took over a slave ship, killed some of their white captives, and demanded that the remaining white shipmen return the boat to Africa.  Rather than doing that, however, the white shipmen steered a path toward America, where the unsuspecting crew of another ship, sensing something wrong, came to assist.  These fact patterns raise sensitive and disturbing questions about the law.  What is justice?  How should it be determined?  Which party is right, and what does it mean to be right or to have rights?  For that matter, what is the law to begin with?

In Benito Cereno, Cereno is the captain of the ship bearing slaves, and it is from Delano’s perspective that we learn, gradually, that a slave revolt has occurred and that Cereno is being held captive by Africans.  Delano is the captain of a different ship who has come aboard Cereno’s ship to assist Cereno’s apparently distressed crew.  The leader of the slave revolt, Babo, himself a slave, is always by Cereno’s side, thereby giving Delano the impression that Cereno has a loyal servant.  What Delano eventually discovers is that the slaves have spared the lives of only Cereno and a few other whites in order that these whites return the ship to Africa.

In Amistad as in Benito Cereno, the African slaves had been removed from their homeland, without their consent, and taken to a foreign land among alien peoples for the sole purpose of perpetual enslavement.  On the other hand, the white shipmen had, it could be argued, complied with the law of the sea in conducting these actions, and they were murdered by mutinying slaves.  The problem here is that neither side seems to represent an unquestionably moral or obviously right position.  Slavery is evil, but so is murder.  Melville, perhaps realizing the literary possibilities created by this tension, subjects this challenging set of circumstances to rigorous interrogation by way of a captivating narrative. Read the rest of this entry »